Travis Kalanick, founder of Uber and CEO of his new company Adams, sat down with TBPN for his first major public interview in years. During the conversation, he had a lot to say about the future of human work in an AI-driven world.
His argument, built around a surprisingly simple analogy, is that workers who can do things machines cannot will become extraordinarily valuable.
“Let’s just talk about plumbers,” Kalanick said. “Let’s say the entire world, everything in our world, was automated except for plumbers. You had machines making buildings. You would basically have like a thousand buildings a day. A thousand buildings being built at a single time in Los Angeles alone. Just machines doing it. Except plumbers. How valuable would those plumbers be?”
His answer was direct. “Those guys, each and every plumber, would be like LeBron.”
The reasoning, he explained, comes down to what he calls the “long pole in the tent.”
He stated: “Plumbing is the long pole in the tent to progress. You can’t get those thousand buildings unless you have a plumber. And by the way, you got so much efficiency everywhere else that you need millions of plumbers. And then plumbing is like, yeah, what’s up.”
For Kalanick, this scenario plays out far beyond the trades. He pointed to the autonomous vehicle industry as another example. “Look at autonomous cars. Waymo has people that oversee the rides. It starts with like five rides for every person, then it goes to 20, then it goes to 100. But if we get to this place where autonomous cars are everywhere, and let’s just say it’s one in a thousand, and nobody owns cars, there’s just ride sharing everywhere. If it was a thousand to one, you still probably have 20 million jobs, 50 million jobs.”
His point is that human labor does not disappear in an automated world, it becomes concentrated and far more valuable wherever automation cannot yet reach. “Until humans are fully replaced, we become the long pole in the tent to progress. And that progress, by the way, is to serve us.”
He also offered what he called his “white pill” on the subject. “Until 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. Except if you’re a plumber, you’re crushing.”
He closed the thought with a line that drew laughter in the studio. “Robots don’t yet have bank accounts. So that plumber gets paid.”
