Uber cofounder and former CEO Travis Kalanick has a counter-intuitive argument for AI and jobs â he believes automation can actually increase the value of human work.
Speaking on the TBPN podcast, Kalanick said that when machines automate most tasks, the remaining human roles could become the bottleneck for progress, dramatically increasing their value.
He illustrated this using a hypothetical example of a world where nearly everything is automated, buildings are constructed by machines, manufacturing is handled by robots, and logistics systems run autonomously, except for plumbing.
In such a scenario, he argued, plumbers would then become the critical constraint in the system.
âYou had machines making buildings (and everything else)⦠except plumbers. You would basically have, like, a thousand buildings a day, (but) how valuable would those plumbers be? Every plumber would be like LeBron. Because plumbing is (then) the long pole in the tent (constraint) to progress⦠you can't get those thousand buildings unless you have a plumber for sure. And by the way, you've got so much efficiency everywhere else that you need millions of plumbers,â Kalanick explained.
According to Kalanick, the same dynamic could apply across multiple sectors in an AI-driven economy. As automation dramatically increases productivity and lowers costs, demand for complementary human roles could expand.
He pointed to autonomous mobility as an example. Companies such as Waymo already rely on human operators to supervise fleets of self-driving vehicles. While the ratio of vehicles per supervisor may increase over time, from five cars per person to potentially hundreds or thousands, the overall scale of autonomous fleets could still require millions of human oversight roles.
There is, however, a caveat to the argument. Kalanick noted that this dynamic would likely hold only until artificial intelligence (AI) reaches a stage where it can fully replace humans across tasks. Until AI advances to that level, what he described as super artificial general intelligence (AGI), he argued that humans will continue to play a central role in economic progress. In the interim, he suggested, human workers could become increasingly valuable precisely because they fill the gaps that automation is unable to address.
âUntil we get super AGI, humans are valuable and they are going to become more and more valuable because they will be the long pole in the tent to progress and that progress is going to accelerate and get faster and more robust,â Kalanick added.
Kalanick has recently rebranded his startup City Storage Systems, the parent of CloudKitchens, to Atoms, adding a new focus on robotics, mining, and transportation.
Speaking on the TBPN podcast, Kalanick said that when machines automate most tasks, the remaining human roles could become the bottleneck for progress, dramatically increasing their value.
He illustrated this using a hypothetical example of a world where nearly everything is automated, buildings are constructed by machines, manufacturing is handled by robots, and logistics systems run autonomously, except for plumbing.
In such a scenario, he argued, plumbers would then become the critical constraint in the system.
âYou had machines making buildings (and everything else)⦠except plumbers. You would basically have, like, a thousand buildings a day, (but) how valuable would those plumbers be? Every plumber would be like LeBron. Because plumbing is (then) the long pole in the tent (constraint) to progress⦠you can't get those thousand buildings unless you have a plumber for sure. And by the way, you've got so much efficiency everywhere else that you need millions of plumbers,â Kalanick explained.
According to Kalanick, the same dynamic could apply across multiple sectors in an AI-driven economy. As automation dramatically increases productivity and lowers costs, demand for complementary human roles could expand.
He pointed to autonomous mobility as an example. Companies such as Waymo already rely on human operators to supervise fleets of self-driving vehicles. While the ratio of vehicles per supervisor may increase over time, from five cars per person to potentially hundreds or thousands, the overall scale of autonomous fleets could still require millions of human oversight roles.
There is, however, a caveat to the argument. Kalanick noted that this dynamic would likely hold only until artificial intelligence (AI) reaches a stage where it can fully replace humans across tasks. Until AI advances to that level, what he described as super artificial general intelligence (AGI), he argued that humans will continue to play a central role in economic progress. In the interim, he suggested, human workers could become increasingly valuable precisely because they fill the gaps that automation is unable to address.
âUntil we get super AGI, humans are valuable and they are going to become more and more valuable because they will be the long pole in the tent to progress and that progress is going to accelerate and get faster and more robust,â Kalanick added.
Kalanick has recently rebranded his startup City Storage Systems, the parent of CloudKitchens, to Atoms, adding a new focus on robotics, mining, and transportation.
Meridiano
