This is a transcript excerpt from an April 25, 2020 podcast conversation (Lex Fridman interviewing Jack Dorsey) clipped for YouTube. The speakers discuss Andrew Yang and his Universal Basic Income proposal, the risk of AI and automation displacing large numbers of workers (examples: truck drivers, retail cashiers, kiosks, Amazon Go), and the need for societal responses such as UBI and better rules about data ownership and sharing. Jack Dorsey endorses Yang’s framing, cites Square-related trends (mobile point-of-sale, order-ahead, kiosks) as evidence, calls $1,000/month a meaningful survival floor, and flags centralization of data and algorithm ownership as a key regulatory concern.
Chapters
What are your thoughts, sticking on artificial intelligence, a little bit about the displacement of jobs. That's another perspective that candidates like Andrew Yang talk about.
Yang Gang forever.
Yang Gang. So he, unfortunately, speaking of Yang Gang has recently dropped out.
I know it was very disappointing and depressing.
Yeah. But on the positive side, he's, I think, launching a podcast, so really cool. Yeah, he just announced that. I'm sure he'll try to talk you into trying to come onto the podcast Ratatouille. Yeah, maybe he'll be more welcoming of the Ratatouille argument. What are your thoughts on his concerns of the displacement of jobs, of automation? Of course there's positive impacts that could come from automation and AI, but there could also be negative impacts. And within that framework, what are your thoughts about Universal Basic Income? So these interesting new ideas of how we can empower people in the economy.
I think he was 100% right on almost every dimension. We see this in Square's business. I mean, he identified truck drivers. I'm from Missouri, and he certainly pointed to the concern and the issue that people from where I'm from feel every single day. That is often invisible and not talked about enough. The next big one is cashiers. This is where it pertains to Square's business. We are seeing more and more of the point of sale move to the individual customer's hand in the form of their phone and apps, and pre order and order ahead. We're seeing more kiosks, we're seeing more things like Amazon go. And the number of workers as a cashier in retail is immense. And there's no real answers on how they transform their skills and work into something else. And I think that does lead to a lot of really negative ramifications. And the important point that he brought up around Universal Basic Income is given that the shift is going to come and given it's going to take time to set people up with new skills and new careers, they need to have a floor to be able to survive. And this $1,000 a month is such a floor. It's not going to incentivize you to quit your job because it's not enough. But it will enable you to not have to worry as much about just getting on day to day so that you can focus on what I'm, what am I going to do now and what am I going to. What skills do I need to acquire? And I think, I think a lot of people point to the fact that during the industrial age, we had the same concerns around automation, factory lines and everything worked out okay. But the biggest change is just the velocity and the centralization of a lot of the things that make this work, which is the data and the algorithms that work on this data. I think the, the second biggest scary thing is just how around AI is just who actually owns the data and who can operate on it. And are we able to share the insights from the data so that we can also build algorithms that help our needs or help our business or whatnot. So that's where I think regulation could play a strong and positive part. First, looking at the primitives of AI and the tools we use to build these services that will ultimately touch every single aspect of the human experience. And then how data, where data is owned and how it's, how it's shared. So those are the answers that as a society, as a world, we need to have better answers around which we're currently not. They're just way too centralized into a few very, very large companies. But I think it was spot on with identifying the problem and proposing solutions that would actually work. At least that we'd learned from, that you could expand or evolve. But I mean, I think UBI is well past its due. I mean it was certainly trumpeted by Martin Luther King and even before him as well.
And like you said, the exact thousand dollar mark might not be the correct one, but you should take the steps to try to implement these solutions and see what works.
