0:00:23.538,0:00:27.292 Labor is the direct contribution to the monetary system, 0:00:27.414,0:00:29.261 to the circulation of money, 0:00:29.384,0:00:31.984 but is also the only way to acquire money, 0:00:32.107,0:00:35.121 which leads directly to the obligation of work. 0:00:36.106,0:00:40.137 Most jobs only focus on the ultimate prize, money, 0:00:40.291,0:00:42.968 with little regard for the human condition. 0:00:43.445,0:00:47.107 Labor, in this way, is another form of slavery. 0:00:49.615,0:00:53.123 Automation can replace most repetitive jobs today 0:00:53.245,0:00:56.522 perfecting the quality of work, but let's concentrate on 0:00:56.661,0:01:00.153 something much more important: motivation. 0:01:05.659,0:01:08.861 Our motivations are unbelievable interesting, I mean, 0:01:09.000,0:01:10.876 I find, I have been working on this for a few years 0:01:11.000,0:01:15.030 and I just find this topic still so amazingly engaging and interesting. 0:01:15.169,0:01:16.923 So I want to tell you about that. 0:01:17.046,0:01:18.876 The science is really surprising. 0:01:19.000,0:01:21.968 The science is a little bit freaky, ok? 0:01:22.092,0:01:27.061 We are not as endlessly manipulable, and as predictable as you would think! 0:01:27.169,0:01:31.014 There's a whole set of unbelievably interesting studies. I want to give you two. 0:01:31.137,0:01:35.953 They call in to question this idea that if you reward something you get more of the behavior that you want, 0:01:36.061,0:01:37.800 if you punish something, you get less of it. 0:01:37.923,0:01:43.276 So let's talk..let's go from London to the main streets of Cambridge Massachusetts, 0:01:43.369,0:01:45.290 to The NE part of the United States. 0:01:45.367,0:01:48.984 And I wanna talk about a study done at MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 0:01:49.092,0:01:52.892 Here's what they did: They took a whole group of students, and they gave them a set of challenges, 0:01:53.000,0:02:00.876 things like: memorizing strings of digits, solving word puzzle, other kind of special puzzle, even physical tasks 0:02:01.000,0:02:02.569 like throwing a ball through a hoop. 0:02:02.661,0:02:04.414 Ok? They gave them those challenges and they said 0:02:04.537,0:02:09.060 to incentive their performance, they gave them 3 levels of reward, ok? 0:02:09.184,0:02:12.567 So, if you did pretty well you´ve got a small monetary reward, 0:02:12.692,0:02:15.876 if you did medium well you get a medium monetary reward, 0:02:16.000,0:02:21.876 and if you did really well, you are one of the top performers you´ve got a large cash prize, ok? 0:02:22.000,0:02:27.153 We´ve seen this movie before, this is essentially a typical motivation scheme within the organizations, right? 0:02:27.276,0:02:35.353 We reward the very top performers, we ignore the low performers, and the other folks kind in the middle ... ok, we give a little bit. 0:02:35.460,0:02:40.230 So what´s happens? They do the test, they have these incentives, and here´s what they found out: 0:02:40.353,0:02:47.368 one: as long as the task involve only mechanical skill bonuses worked as they would be expected, 0:02:47.491,0:02:52.382 the higher they pay the better the performance, ok? That makes sense, but here´s what happened: 0:02:52.815,0:03:01.508 but once the task call for even rudimentary cognitive skill, a larger reward lead to a poorer performance. 0:03:02.431,0:03:08.953 And this is strange right? A larger reward lead to a poorer performance, how can that possibly be? And the interesting thing about this 0:03:09.045,0:03:16.229 is that these folks here who did it , are all economists, two from MIT, other from the university of Chicago, one at Cargenie meilon, ok? 0:03:16.383,0:03:23.230 Top tiers of the economics professions, and they reach to this conclusion that seems contrary to what a lot of us learn in economics 0:03:23.353,0:03:26.630 which is, which is the, the higher the reward, the better the performance 0:03:26.753,0:03:32.767 and they are saying that once you get above rudimentary cognitive skill, it's the other way around. 0:03:33.630,0:03:37.137 Which seems to this kind of the idea that the rewards don´t work that way 0:03:37.292,0:03:44.061 seems bleakly left wing in socialist, doesn't it? It's kind of, it's kind of weird socialist conspiracy. 0:03:44.184,0:03:51.183 But those of you who have those conspiracy theories, I want to point out this sort of notoriously left wing in socialist groups that finances the research, 0:03:51.306,0:03:58.030 the Federal Reserve Bank, this is the mainstream of the mainstream coming to a conclusion that it´s quite surprising, 0:03:58.138,0:04:03.030 that seems to defies a lot of behavioural physics, so this is strange, the strange is fun , so what did they do? 0:04:03.169,0:04:11.429 they say this is freaky, let´s go test it somewhere else, maybe that 50 dollars, 60 dollars prize is insufficiently motivating for an M.I.T.'s... right? 0:04:11.553,0:04:19.692 so let´s go to a place where 50 dollars is actually more significant relatively, so we take this experiment we gonna go to Madurai India, Rural India 0:04:19.830,0:04:23.892 where 50 dollars, 60 dollars, whatever the number was is actually a significative amount of money 0:04:24.000,0:04:32.675 so they replicated the experiment in India, roughly as follow: small rewards, the equivalent of two weeks salary... I mean, sorry, so: 0:04:32.828,0:04:37.951 small performance, low performance: two weeks salary, medium performance: about a month salary 0:04:39.783,0:04:46.338 high performance about 2 months salary, ok? So this is real good incentive, and you are gonna get a different result here. 0:04:46.445,0:04:53.996 Well what happened though, was that, the people offered the medium reward, did no better than the people offered the small reward, but this time around, 0:04:54.150,0:04:59.015 the people offered the top reward, they did worst of all. Higher incentives led to worst performance. 0:04:59.169,0:05:04.738 What´s interesting about this is that it actually isn´t that anomalous, this has been replicated over and over and over again 0:05:04.876,0:05:14.661 by psychologist, by sociologist, and by economists, over and over and over again. For simple straight forward tasks, those kind of incentives 0:05:14.784,0:05:23.384 if you do this then you get that... they are great. For tasks that are algorithmics, set of rules, we have this follow along and get a right answer 0:05:23.537,0:05:27.661 if then a reward caracteristics oustanding! 0:05:28.414,0:05:33.353 but when the task gets more complicated, when it requires some conceptual, creative thinking 0:05:33.476,0:05:37.676 those kind of motivators mostly don't work... 0:05:37.784,0:05:45.030 fact: money is a motivator at work, but in a sightly strange way: if you don't pay people enough: they won't be motivated 0:05:45.184,0:05:49.505 what's curious about this is that there´s another paradox here: which is that the best use of money is as a motivator 0:05:49.659,0:05:56.969 is to pay people enough, to take the issue of money off the table. Pay people enough so they are not thinking about money and they are thinking about the work 0:05:57.107,0:06:03.246 now once you do that it turns at the 3 factors that science shows that lead to a better performance 0:06:03.384,0:06:07.846 not to mention personal satisfaction. Autonomy, mastery and purpose 0:06:08.000,0:06:15.276 Autonomy is our desire to be self directed, to direct our own lifes. Now in many ways traditional notions of management run and fall out of that 0:06:15.400,0:06:19.876 Management is great if you want compliance, but if you want engagement, which is what we want 0:06:20.000,0:06:25.627 in the workforces today, as people are doing more complicated things... self direction is better. 0:06:26.087,0:06:31.796 Let me give you some examples of this almost radical form of self direction in the workplace that leads to good result. 0:06:31.951,0:06:36.336 Let´s start with this company right here: Atlassian, an australian company, a software company, 0:06:36.475,0:06:42.399 and they do something really cool, once a quarter at thursday afternoon they say to their developers: 0:06:42.492,0:06:48.460 for the next 24 hours, you can work on anything you want, you can work on it the way you want, you can work on with whomever you want, 0:06:48.614,0:06:52.676 all we ask is that you should show the results to the company at the end of those 24 hours, 0:06:52.784,0:06:59.892 and this fun kind of meeting, not a start chamber session, but this fun meeting with beer and cake and fun and other things like that, 0:07:00.000,0:07:07.676 it turns out that that one day of pure and alluded autonomy has led to a whole array of fixes for existing software, 0:07:07.815,0:07:12.815 a whole array of ideas for new products, that otherwise would never emerge, one day! 0:07:12.938,0:07:18.307 This is not a "if then" incentive, this is not the sort of thing that i would have done 3 years ago before I knew this research. 0:07:18.426,0:07:26.134 I would have said you want people to be creative and innovative? Give 'em a fricken innovation bonus. If you do something cool I give you 2,500 dollars. 0:07:26.303,0:07:30.536 They're not doing this at all, they're essentially saying: you probably want to do something interesting, 0:07:30.628,0:07:35.461 let me just get outta your way... one day of autonomy produces things that never emerge. 0:07:35.600,0:07:43.752 And let´s talk about mastery, mastery is the urge to get better at stuff, we like to get better at stuff, this is why people play musical instruments on the weekend, 0:07:43.892,0:07:48.044 you´ve got always people who are acting in ways that seems irrational acknowledgedly... 0:07:48.182,0:07:53.692 They play musical instruments on weekends? Why? It's not gonna get them a mate, it's not gonna make them any money, why are they doing it? 0:07:54.260,0:07:57.845 Because it's fun, because you get better at it and that´s satisfying. 0:07:58.000,0:08:04.768 Go back in time a little bit, imagine, I imagine this, if i went to my first economics professor: a woman named Mary Allen Schulman, 0:08:04.907,0:08:11.215 and I went to her in 1983 and said: professor Schulman can I talk after class for a moment? 0:08:12.491,0:08:16.661 I´ve got this incline, I´ve got this idea for a business model I just wanna pass you, 0:08:16.800,0:08:24.292 here´s how it would work: you get a bunch of people around the world who are doing highly skilled work, 0:08:24.460,0:08:30.353 but they're willing to do it for free and volunteer their time 20 sometimes 30 hours a week. 0:08:31.538,0:08:39.661 Then she´s looking at me somehow skeptically... hold on, I'm not done... and then what they create... they give it away rather than sell it! 0:08:40.523,0:08:41.892 It´s gonna be huge! 0:08:43.000,0:08:47.351 I'm sure she truly would have tought I was insane. It seems to fly in the face of so many things, 0:08:47.476,0:08:52.721 but what do you have? You have linux powering 1 out of 4 corporate servers and 45 hundred companies... 0:08:52.861,0:08:57.692 Apache powering more than the majority of web servers... 0:08:57.800,0:09:04.552 Wikipedia... what´s going on? Why are people doing this? Why are they, why are these people, many of them are technically sophisticated, highly skilled people, 0:09:04.676,0:09:13.876 who have jobs! Ok? They have jobs! They're working at jobs for pay, doing challenging, doing sophisticated technological work 0:09:14.000,0:09:21.000 and yet, during their limited discretionary time, they do equally if not more technically sophisticated work 0:09:21.153,0:09:27.861 not for their employer, but for someone else, for free! That´s a strange economic behaviour. 0:09:28.000,0:09:33.323 Economists would look into it: why are they doing this? It´s overwhelmingly clear: challenge and mastery 0:09:33.461,0:09:38.383 allong with making contribution. That´s it. Would you see more and more of rise of what you might call 0:09:38.537,0:09:44.307 a purpose motive. Is it more and more organizations want to have some kind of transcendent purpose 0:09:44.461,0:09:49.000 partly because it makes coming to work better, partly because that's the way to get better talent. 0:09:49.983,0:09:56.092 And what we're seeing now is in some ways, when the profit motive become unmoored from the purpose motive, 0:09:56.230,0:10:02.568 a bad thing happen, bad things, ethically sometimes, but also bad things just, like: not good stuff, 0:10:02.692,0:10:08.907 like: crappy products, like: lean services, like: uninspiring places to work. 0:10:09.000,0:10:17.460 When the profit motive is ??? or when it becomes completely unhitch on the purpose motive, it's just, people don't do great things 0:10:17.598,0:10:23.675 More and more organizations are realizing this and it's sort of disturbing the categories between what's profit and what's purpose. 0:10:23.799,0:10:29.536 and I think that actually heralds something interesting, and I think that the companies and organizations that are flourishing, 0:10:29.613,0:10:35.445 wether they're profit, poor profit or somewhere in between, are animated by this purpose, i'll only give you a couple of examples. 0:10:35.553,0:10:42.522 Here's the founder of skype. He says: our goal is to be disruptive but in the cause of making the world a better place. 0:10:43.645,0:10:49.306 Pretty good purpose. Here's Steve Jobs, I wanna put a ding in the universe, alright? 0:10:49.415,0:10:52.460 That's the kind of things that might get Jobs in the morning racing to go to work. 0:10:52.537,0:10:58.645 So I think that we are purpose maximizers, not only profit maximizers. 0:10:58.753,0:11:04.861 Think that science shows that we care about mastery very very deeply, and the science shows that we want to be self directed 0:11:04.953,0:11:12.661 and I think that the big take away here is that, if we start treating people like people, and not assuming that they are simply horses, 0:11:12.769,0:11:19.892 you know slower, smaller better smelling horses. If we get pass this kind of ideology of caracteristics and look at the science 0:11:20.000,0:11:24.461 I think we can actually build organisations and work lives that make us better off, 0:11:24.584,0:11:28.353 but i also think they have the promise to make our world, just a little bit better. 0:11:39.429,0:11:42.214 So work is mandatory in the monetary system, 0:11:42.322,0:11:46.876 and this system makes money the primary motivation for work, 0:11:47.000,0:11:51.476 which leads, scientifically, to a very low efficiency of the workers 0:11:51.599,0:11:56.645 because autonomy, mastery and purpose are what motivate humans. 0:11:57.261,0:12:00.291 Millions of people have already been replaced by machinery 0:12:00.414,0:12:02.105 and this will continue. 0:12:02.692,0:12:05.800 In fact it's even cheaper to invest in machinery 0:12:05.892,0:12:09.568 because they do not need salaries, medical insurance, 0:12:09.676,0:12:12.953 air conditioning, holidays or breaks. 0:12:13.030,0:12:19.030 Remember that any repetitive work can be automated, as for the other jobs... 0:12:20.722,0:12:27.999 Many have a very difficult time seeing how automation can be applied to complex jobs such as doctors, architects, etc 0:12:28.153,0:12:35.000 In order to consider this, we first need to ask ourselves, what the true nature of our occupational roles really are 0:12:35.092,0:12:42.091 What exactly is a doctor, a carpenter, a plumber or an architect... what are they actually doing? 0:12:42.584,0:12:45.490 They recognize and react to observed patterns. 0:12:46.214,0:12:51.338 When a doctor examines you, all he's doing is mentally referencing what has been learned. 0:12:52.015,0:12:55.876 If you go to other methologists because you think you might have cancer on your arm, 0:12:56.000,0:13:01.307 the doctor is going to examine the skin and mentally reference the patterns he or she has been taught. 0:13:01.800,0:13:05.507 Then he will take a sample of the skin to be tested by machine analysis. 0:13:06.399,0:13:12.999 It is a technical process, there's no reason to say, that an optical scanner connected to a computer database 0:13:13.092,0:13:17.184 cannot scan your arm and immediatly understand what problem exists. 0:13:17.752,0:13:23.046 Even surgery, as sensitive as it may seem, is a purely technical process. 0:13:23.200,0:13:28.030 It is only a matter of time before extremely advanced machines replace surgeons. 0:13:28.799,0:13:32.876 The same goes for every other utilitarian occupation in existence. 0:13:33.538,0:13:39.138 The utilitarian roles that humans assume in society today are fundamentally technical by nature. 0:13:39.815,0:13:46.830 Once that seems obvious in regard to physical labor, and mental labor can now be delegated to computers as well. 0:13:46.938,0:13:53.984 If this sounds foreign to you, please note that if you have ever used a calculator you have delegated your decision making to a machine. 0:13:54.138,0:14:02.199 When you divide 19,500 by 30 with the calculator, this machine is to decide the result, not you. 0:14:03.000,0:14:09.538 We must remember that logical reasoning is the cognitive ability to find solutions from a cause and effect standpoint, 0:14:09.692,0:14:12.600 following the rules and laws of a given system, 0:14:12.723,0:14:19.230 is entirely a technical process. There's nothing magical or esoteric involved in an addition, 0:14:19.369,0:14:22.738 or the identification of a molecule in a component. 0:14:24.000,0:14:31.707 If you are going to decide between using metal A or metal B for producing an airplane, it's not done by you being seated and thinking, 0:14:31.861,0:14:38.368 but doing the strength resistence experiment with the metals and if they pass those tests, they are selected or discarded. 0:14:39.000,0:14:42.875 It is not a hidden process that happens in some area of the brain, 0:14:43.000,0:14:49.415 it is informations obtained by doing precise and defined testing, that can beyond as being automated. 0:14:49.537,0:14:53.353 There isn't a capitalist or a communist way of building an airplane. 0:14:53.476,0:14:59.015 If the airplane doesn't satisfy the physical requirements to be able to fly, it won't fly. 0:14:59.769,0:15:03.676 A person can not invent something that has no correlation with reality, 0:15:03.769,0:15:05.892 it doesn't matter how imaginative you are, 0:15:06.000,0:15:11.769 if what you imagine can not be obtained by rearranging and manipulating existing physical stuff in reality, 0:15:11.861,0:15:13.953 it will not materialize. 0:15:16.462,0:15:21.952 And do not forget that repetitive work does not help the human brain develop, 0:15:22.076,0:15:26.061 it is an embarrassment for an intelligent species. 0:15:29.239,0:15:33.413 It's very easy to repeat and to replicate any profession, 0:15:33.537,0:15:39.368 but in time people will not work. They go to work, they think well that's the way you earn a living. 0:15:39.460,0:15:45.320 No it's not, it's the only way we use today, but in the future, work will be considered to be needless. 0:15:45.443,0:15:52.259 Because men have a brain, when you put a girl behind a cash in a department store for 15 years... What can I do for you man? 0:15:52.365,0:15:57.711 We have pencils, lipsticks .... (incomprehensible) 0:15:57.881,0:16:01.228 all that is crap. That's not using her brain. 0:16:01.367,0:16:04.955 All that will be automatically dispensed, very easy to do. 0:16:05.079,0:16:09.038 Work is needless. It serves no useful purpose. 0:16:27.259,0:16:30.860 [ Alternative Solutions ] 0:16:41.380,0:16:43.983 [ 1) Automation ] 0:16:44.461,0:16:47.460 The solution will be automating as much as possible, 0:16:47.567,0:16:50.521 and the remaining jobs, which would be only a few, 0:16:50.613,0:16:55.168 will be done by people because science has shown that a man's work is better 0:16:55.276,0:16:58.907 when it is motivated by purpose, and not by money. 0:17:00.013,0:17:06.322 Those being proven, man can be free of work, meaning free of slavery in most cases, 0:17:06.492,0:17:10.568 which represents a giant step forward in the evolution of humans. 0:17:10.723,0:17:14.090 While work is largely done by machines, and man is motivated 0:17:14.260,0:17:18.783 by purpose, the access to goods and services will be free of charge. 0:17:19.430,0:17:22.784 If automation would lead directly to a lack of jobs, 0:17:22.923,0:17:28.230 the remaining jobs would be done because of their purpose, to improve society, 0:17:28.369,0:17:33.000 then such a development would not require a monetary system to function. 0:17:35.522,0:17:42.225 So if the only reward you get is seeing less poverty and hunger, starvation and deprivation, 0:17:42.409,0:17:47.868 kids with swollen bellies, all gone, and that doesn't give you incentive, 0:17:48.022,0:17:54.055 if your only incentive is money system, then you don't understand human beings. 0:17:54.194,0:18:02.194 Because you all own your own live to the advances made by Edison, Louis Pasteur, and all the other people, 0:18:02.302,0:18:08.901 you're alive because of them. So if you don't feel you want to put anything back into the earth to make it a better place, 0:18:09.024,0:18:13.119 i would say you're harmful, to yourself and society. 0:18:14.965,0:18:18.151 Most of the development we have in our society today, the technology, 0:18:18.305,0:18:26.289 the airplanes, TV, radio, moderns production technology, they're really done by very few people. 0:18:26.442,0:18:31.811 I would say several hundred people comprise the modern technological civilization. 0:18:31.965,0:18:36.428 But you don't need millions of technicians and millions of scientists, 0:18:36.535,0:18:42.272 how many people do you know of today, sitting in their home and playing their phonograph and radio and TV, 0:18:42.396,0:18:45.272 have any idea of how this works? 0:19:06.584,0:19:11.230 The main purpose of technology is to make the individuals' life easier, 0:19:11.368,0:19:15.615 and now technology is so advanced that the individuals' life may be 0:19:15.723,0:19:19.738 exempt from any involvement in finding food, information, 0:19:19.861,0:19:21.968 comfort or any aid. 0:19:22.076,0:19:25.892 Only the influence of an extremely harmful system can enforce 0:19:26.000,0:19:29.830 a negative situation like the one currently on Earth. 0:19:29.984,0:19:33.953 A situation where ordinary individuals know just a fraction 0:19:34.061,0:19:37.014 of the available information and where technology 0:19:37.137,0:19:40.291 is capable of improvements, but not used. 0:19:41.060,0:19:45.030 To compel other individuals of your species to work when work 0:19:45.169,0:19:49.768 can be automated, or to ask for obedience in exchange for food, 0:19:49.876,0:19:53.660 leads to psychopathic behavior of individuals that create 0:19:53.783,0:19:56.521 or perpetuate such situations. 0:19:56.660,0:19:59.430 A situation like this can only be the result 0:19:59.569,0:20:04.215 of a psychosis of individuals with power in society.