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The value of your humanity in an automated future | Kevin Roose

Visit to get our entire library of TED Talks, transcripts, translations, personalized talk recommendations and more. To futureproof your job against robots and AI, you should learn how to code, brush up on your math skills and crack open an engineering textbook, right? Wrong. In this surprisingly comforting talk, tech journalist Kevin Roose makes the…

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Visit to get our entire library of TED Talks, transcripts, translations, personalized talk recommendations and more.

To futureproof your job against robots and AI, you should learn how to code, brush up on your math skills and crack open an engineering textbook, right? Wrong. In this surprisingly comforting talk, tech journalist Kevin Roose makes the case that rather than trying to compete with the machines, we should instead focus on what makes us uniquely human.

The TED Talks channel features the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world’s leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design — plus science, business, global issues, the arts and more. You’re welcome to link to or embed these videos, forward them to others and share these ideas with people you know.

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55 Comments

55 Comments

  1. GuitarZombie

    March 24, 2021 at 7:18 pm

    Why do we HAVE to let robots do things for us? We are not obligated to subjugate ourselves to machines.

  2. Iaman Empoweredone

    March 24, 2021 at 7:18 pm

    Let’s automate humanity

  3. Allen Markham

    March 24, 2021 at 7:25 pm

    Haven’t the things humans have exploited (animal, vegetable, robot) been seen by humans as our end. As long as the exploited are needed they will never replace us. Once the exploited don’t need humans, we are done.

  4. I3 O R D O

    March 24, 2021 at 7:26 pm

    The problem was not “what smart People will do when automation arrives”. Either people will have to become “smart” or “violent” cause that hunger turns People into

  5. Tyrankoos of the deep

    March 24, 2021 at 7:26 pm

    Compassion critical thinking moral courage., three things the bourgeoisie are absolutely against. 😇.We must push for a Constitutional direct liquid democracy.
    End private property and copyrights.
    End passive income.
    Push for personal property and open source
    Push for planned economy with ai and online sensors and automation and shared work. Aka 4hour work days or 3 days a week with same pay level and more employees. And push for automation as fast as possible
    Aka a new version of socialism . And we must end capitalism .

  6. Jorge Hernan Jimenez

    March 24, 2021 at 7:33 pm

    I like your talk is important to say it

  7. Ca

    March 24, 2021 at 7:48 pm

    Your just saying. Well if you loose to the machines just do something robots are bad in right now. This isnt future proof at all. This is just playing the next card of your finite card deck.

  8. Christophe Amrein-Marie

    March 24, 2021 at 7:55 pm

    Matrix incoming (or already there).

  9. Ricardo Gomez Vanegas

    March 24, 2021 at 8:04 pm

    Imagine when robots can actually perceive/express human emotions.

  10. CMDR After Hours

    March 24, 2021 at 8:06 pm

    Shots were not made for the plandemic, the plandemic was made for the shots.

  11. ManiacallyYours

    March 24, 2021 at 8:19 pm

    Kevin Roose, NYT clown regressive.

  12. N I

    March 24, 2021 at 8:41 pm

    That’s exactly the point missed, there’s nothing machines can’t do better than us, including compassion and critical thinking……that’s one hard pill to swallow. The real question is how much extra would you pay for an accountant?

  13. Shawn Ravenfire

    March 24, 2021 at 8:42 pm

    This all sounds nice, but we obviously can’t ALL be friendly neighborhood shopkeepers or customer service comedians. We’re still going to have a large segment of the population without employment.

  14. Antoine Trépanier

    March 24, 2021 at 8:59 pm

    Yes, I’m already an expert in what machines will likely never do: procrastination.

  15. bj0rn

    March 24, 2021 at 9:32 pm

    My time is over.

  16. Jack Sparrow

    March 24, 2021 at 9:47 pm

    Humanity valued over production and efficiency? Utter nonsense; people are expandable; that’s why we have wars.

    This whole conversation reeks of corporate agenda trying to sell us the idea that; “technology good”.

    Here’s a question for you:
    *If you take away a human beings privacy; how much of their dignity, pride and “humanity” do you take with it?*

    The answer is; ALL OF IT.

  17. Sarnia Fazlali

    March 24, 2021 at 9:50 pm

    Humanity is a different thing than human skills. But that’s right! At schools and universities what should be tought is human skills.

  18. Back Down The Hill - The Midlife Channel

    March 24, 2021 at 10:34 pm

    Focus on your feelings and the feelings of others seems to be the underlying message here. Pass that millennial a beanbag and a pretzel someone!

  19. JustAnother IrishMan

    March 24, 2021 at 10:42 pm

    Politicians in Ireland and the EU are trying to push a regulation to restrict freedom of movement based upon citizens receiving a passport saying they’ve received vaccine. Why should we be held hostage in the name of career climbing politicians? Please see this link and see what Ireland has done to its citizens. We are living under eternal house arrest.

    “Sure it will be grand. We can walk within 5km of our front door. It’s no bother. Sure we have everything we need from Amazon and the supermarket. It’s great, we get the weekly welfare… why should we complain”

  20. Yintong Chen

    March 24, 2021 at 10:57 pm

    I reckon that humans kills make us human irreplaceable in the future, but how fast the society will evolve with all the technology, and how soon human skills will be appreciated may not happen in a similar pace. It is very likely that it took a lot longer for human skills to be valued and before that, if you are not equipped with technology skills you are still in the zone of not so valuable entity, so sad if that’s the case, but this might be a real problem we have to face in the near future.

  21. JustAnother IrishMan

    March 24, 2021 at 11:04 pm

    Politicians in Ireland and the EU are trying to push a regulation to restrict freedom of movement based upon citizens receiving a passport saying they’ve received vaccine. Why should we be held hostage in the name of career climbing politicians? Please see this link and see what Ireland has done to its citizens. We are living under eternal house arrest.

    “Sure it will be grand. We can walk within 5km of our front door. It’s no bother. Sure we have everything we need from Amazon and the supermarket. It’s great, we get the weekly welfare… why should we complain”

  22. Moss M

    March 24, 2021 at 11:18 pm

    This humanity and community is even more necessary now, with all these traditional places where people interact are being automated

  23. Nemesis Brzeczyszczykiewicz

    March 24, 2021 at 11:26 pm

    I’m not paying for this bullshit. Just say it how it is. We’re living in a slave world and most of us don’t even know it because we think it is normal as the propaganda lays it out.

  24. DK Kim

    March 24, 2021 at 11:43 pm

    I think there are three areas that will remain for human for ever: Politics, Religion, and Art. They are not logical, not reasonable nor predictable.

  25. Dustin Morrison

    March 25, 2021 at 7:01 am

    AI can write jokes, paint, and compose music better than a lot of humans already. “Just go do what humans are better at.” is like telling a depressed person to “just think happy thoughts”.

  26. Will Cowan

    March 25, 2021 at 7:39 am

    Optimistic

  27. gb1515

    March 25, 2021 at 8:01 am

    How freaky would it feel if in the last seconds of this video the image distorts a little bit showing the speaker to be a talking AI

  28. Samtagri

    March 25, 2021 at 8:12 am

    “Black owned” book store is such a disgusting description. Americans need to bleach racism off their brains.

    And BTW, all the things that you were talking about humans can do, machine learning will soon do 100 times better. That Toyota guy is just 10 years ahead of the curve. The difference is that when the AI learns how to do these things it can teach other robots as simply as copy/paste.

    So go learn some Data Science skills so at least you are marginally useful to maintain these machines.

  29. Ekaterina Maslikova

    March 25, 2021 at 8:23 am

    Why did this video make me cry? Brilliant!

  30. Moataz Harb

    March 25, 2021 at 11:01 am

    Any skill that can be turned into data and can be processed and taught through instructions is automatable!!, this is inevitable!. Pilots, drivers, programmers, designers, even poets, etc.
    We are all disposable and will become more and more slaves to the machines, or Aliens that Joe Rogan called it “our space daddies!” 🙂
    We are coming to the point were AI will look at us as we used to, and some still are, looking at animals, serving a specific purpose such as producing milk or meat or laboring for us!.
    F*** humans!. We have brought nothing but misery and destruction to this planet and the animals living on it!

  31. Patralgan

    March 25, 2021 at 11:24 am

    I’m salivating for the possibility of the FALC, Fully automated luxury communism. I’m not a communist, but the idea of most jobs being automated and humans given freedom to use their time the way that’s the most meaningful for them without having to be do a job they won’t necessarily enjoy just to survive. Perhaps eventually money loses its meaning and it becomes obsolete since anyone would be able to get anything they need because of abundance produced by automation.

  32. Bella the Wonder Dog

    March 25, 2021 at 3:47 pm

    yeah, you’re stupid. you cost $$$ but the robot don’t. There’s nothing we can do. We’re doomed anyway, global warming, choking to death on our plastic garbage, to undrinkable water, unbreatheable air, or maybe we’ll elect another trump who’ll launch the nukes. You should have all listened to the hippies, but it’s too late now. All of your examples are anomalies anyway. None of the people you cite as triumphant are everyday people,none.

  33. A Lone Spirit

    March 25, 2021 at 5:37 pm

    “An Experience, not a Transaction”

  34. Alianger

    March 25, 2021 at 5:54 pm

    I don’t see why AI can’t just become better than us at empathy as well, we’re not that good at it.

  35. MrFrostpower

    March 25, 2021 at 6:21 pm

    Guy, you’re simply amazing and ur video also is! Made me smile all the way through)

  36. MrFrostpower

    March 25, 2021 at 6:39 pm

    Probably the best TED talk I’ve seen.

  37. Superslashproduction

    March 25, 2021 at 8:52 pm

    Oliver Queen quits his job as green arrow and becomes a motivation speaker

  38. Hamid Mahdi

    March 26, 2021 at 12:46 am

    It was really great

  39. P Lefther

    March 26, 2021 at 1:38 am

    love this video <3

  40. Cesar Hugs C

    March 26, 2021 at 2:31 am

    This video made me cry! ah!! such a great message of hope.

  41. Dongju Heo

    March 26, 2021 at 3:09 am

    Is this guy rich? He sounds like a rich person with little sense of reality. Maybe focusing on now than 50years in the future would help people like me sympathize more.

  42. Benita Botha

    March 26, 2021 at 6:36 am

    Great points, but we also need more humane business practices; it’s not smart to make our own species valueless. It’s also completely avoidable.

  43. John Bray

    March 26, 2021 at 8:56 am

    Zoom IN out IN out IN …. give up

  44. LTVoyager

    March 26, 2021 at 11:37 am

    This assumes that AI will not develop “human” skills. That is a dangerous assumption.

    • Madars Rikards

      March 29, 2021 at 3:04 pm

      Even before AI, the more there are robots doing what humans used to do, the less there is demand for humans, there might be barely any demand for humans way before AI. And there gotta be a limit how many artists there can be unlike doctors or engineers or even robots.

  45. Science Ki दुनिया

    March 26, 2021 at 2:37 pm

    Pilot twist : This video generated by AI.

  46. Mariam Kochlamazashvili

    March 26, 2021 at 6:17 pm

  47. Frances Bernard

    March 26, 2021 at 8:44 pm

    Yes. Humanity as opposed to competing with others while having no moral compass at all. Like one or more persons trying to altogether discredit someone from being able to function well enough to work for pay only because their scientific theory or whatever is different than theirs. Or to accuse people of being a liar after they go into remission from a life threatening chronic condition complication they were suffering from after a serious injury to their brain or whatever when no one believed that brain tissue could heal in what seems like ancient history now to a lot of people in the know today.

  48. MM G

    March 26, 2021 at 11:51 pm

    Loved this. And the insight that we should not compete with technology but play to our strengths.

  49. Mariska D

    March 27, 2021 at 1:23 pm

    Humanities should be promoted more amongst today generation. Thank you for giving us beneficial insights.

  50. demon groove

    March 27, 2021 at 9:58 pm

    Computers will never replace compassion, lots of cheap shrinks in the future, and prostitutes, pretty much the same deal as shrinks but for crazy stupid people.

  51. Harrier Haulage

    March 28, 2021 at 12:47 pm

    It makes me laugh.We’re in a global pandemic bemoaning the mental health impact of the lack of social contact while Amazon launches a shop without any human contact and posts appear wondering if robots can mitigate the loneliness epidemic of the elderly.Unless a robot becomes sentient automation is nothing more than another tool.A tool that seems to fail a lot and if it becomes sentient then by definition we should set it free or you’re endorsing slavery.

  52. Iain Meyrick

    March 28, 2021 at 12:47 pm

    It makes me laugh.We’re in a global pandemic bemoaning the mental health impact of the lack of social contact while Amazon launches a shop without any human contact and posts appear wondering if robots can mitigate the loneliness epidemic of the elderly.Unless a robot becomes sentient automation is nothing more than another tool.A tool that seems to fail a lot and if it becomes sentient then by definition we should set it free or you’re endorsing slavery.

  53. Rust Belt Progressive

    March 30, 2021 at 5:56 pm

    It isn’t just easy to imagine people perfering the personality of their AI accountant, or AI psychologist, it is already happening. People would do taxes online even if it cost more than meeting an accountant in person. The obvious human biases of shrinks will easily be subverted by an AI trusted to make a neutral evaluation without the in person discomfort.

    “Sell your humanity” assumes that you have something worth “selling” and that has never been true. Not everyone is an artist, or good at social interaction and they shouldn’t need to be to survive. The AI takeover requires radical societal change, not platitudes. Only the elite few who could have done anything to begin with can survive by the method described here. People of normal intelligence and modest backgrounds are not going to be the “kooky accoutant”. Let alone those with below average abilities.

    People have traditionally traded activity of some kind for the means to sustain themselves. The ability of most people to provide an activity someone is willing to pay for is ending. Redistribution is the humanitarian answer.

  54. Rust Belt Progressive

    March 31, 2021 at 4:51 am

    The 40 year old cashier at your grocery store would have been a paralegal or run payroll for a small business 40 years ago. People are capable of much more than what they do already and the robots are coming for menial work first. There aren’t enough elite jobs for people capable of them, we need to find humanity outside of work..

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