Perspective with Ryan Bridge: Does JP Morgan's Jamie Dimon have a point about AI?

If you don't know him, Jamie Dimon is the boss of JP Morgan and quite a smart guy, obviously.

I've mentioned him a few times on this show because he's a good thinker - and says some pretty reasonable and practical things about big issues.

He's spoken about AI and reckons we need to slow down. If we don't slow down, society, he reckons, could tear itself apart. And he's not talking about in ten years. He's talking about soon.

In the US, there are 2 million truck drivers who could soon be out of a job when driverless trucks hit the road. That's 2 million men and women going from a pay packet of up to $150k a year to unemployed. And the skills are not transferable.

His answer is to slow it down. Phase the technology in rather than hit society all at once, and then you'll probably have to get some Government payouts to compensate workers. Otherwise you'll get civil unrest and chaos in the streets.

In New Zealand we have Ubers and taxis ripe for an AI takeover. The same goes for public transport.

Robots will drive probably buses before long, which will certainly stop the violence they face in the driver's seat from nutty passengers - but it leaves them out of work without a meaningful alternative or transferable skills.

Driverless Waymo taxis in the US are taking off and the serious crash rate is 90 percent better than humans. Go figure.

The problem with phasing things in slowly and pumping the breaks, is that you miss out on the productivity gains. And just because you pump the breaks, it doesn't mean your competitors, and other countries, will do the same.

So nobody's going to get in the way of progress. Which leaves us with the social problem that Jamie Dimon was getting at.

How do we make sure the world doesn't go to hell in a hand-basket when the robots come for our jobs and livelihoods?

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