Is AI really causing mass layoffs or are CEOs just using AI as a convenient excuse? Both are pretty easy to imagine as true.
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, I talk with longtime tech journalist, columnist, author, and podcaster Mike Elgan about why the “AI is killing jobs” narrative may be overblown. Elgan argues that many companies are engaging in AI washing: blaming layoffs on AI to make cost-cutting look like innovation.
Our conversation goes deep into the future of work, why every major technology shift creates fear before new opportunities emerge, how AI will change education and human skills, and why humanoid robots may be more hype than practical reality.
We also explore Elgan’s concept of the attachment economy: a future where AI products don’t just compete for our attention, but for our emotional bonds.
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Watch our conversation here:
Transcript: Is AI killing jobs or are CEOs using it as an excuse?
John Koetsier: So I had to do an episode about AI and layoffs. It’s kind of all we see these days. So-and-so company is laying off 10,000, 2,000, 300, and AI is the reason. AI is the cause. AI gets blamed. Is that really true? The worst thing about so many of these situations is that it comes right after a company announces amazing quarterly results, record quarterly results, billions of dollars in profit.
Super annoying that they take that opportunity to lay off people. Each and every one of those layoffs is an actual person, probably with dependents, maybe kids, maybe a spouse, maybe others who depend on him or her. Really, really annoying. But is AI really at fault here? I’ve been chatting with somebody who says, “Maybe not, actually.”
His name is Mike Elgan. He’s a longtime tech journalist, columnist, author, editor, podcaster. He was the editor-in-chief of Windows Magazine, longtime columnist for Computerworld, Forbes, PCWorld, eWeek, Datamation. His name is Mike Elgan, and we’re going to have a pretty wide-ranging conversation that’s pretty fun, but centered around AI, jobs, and careers.
Enjoy.
So we’re going to get into all the stuff. AI, is it causing job loss? Is it going to cause overall job loss, or will sections of the economy have job loss? All that stuff. Maybe let’s start with: who the heck are you?
Mike Elgan: My name’s Mike Elgan. I’m a tech writer, and I’ve been in the technology journalism space since the ’90s.
John Koetsier: That’s a while.
Mike Elgan: Yeah, it’s a while. And so I write opinion columns about technology, and the higher the better in terms of the high-tech stuff. So right now I’m focusing on AI, robots, AR, VR, spatial computing, and then I get into all kinds of obscure high-tech stuff like brain implants, all that.
Everything that was the tropes of late 20th-century cyberpunk fiction, that’s coming real now. I’m into it.
John Koetsier: Very cool. So we’ll see you as part of the Borg soon, I guess, maybe in 10 years from now.
Mike Elgan: Absolutely. Resistance is futile.
John Koetsier: Exactly. I know. I know. So the reason I wanted to have a chat with you is I saw one of your opinion columns, and you were saying, “Hey, AI is not going to cause mass job loss.”
And I want you to explain that the way that you explained that and the way that you see that because, of course, there are lots of instances where we see companies saying, “Hey, we’re laying off this many thousand people, this many hundred people, and it’s because of AI.” I just happened to see one. I’m in the layoffs subreddit. Yeah. I don’t know why. Yeah. But I just happened to see it. It’s big these days. Right. And there’s this one company in digital tech for medical and dental stuff, and they say, “We’re laying off 500 people. Our AI systems have fundamentally changed how work gets done at Innovaccer to the point where entire workflows that once required teams now run autonomously.
We have built systems that automate complex end-to-end processes,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So give me your perspective that you shared in your column.
Mike Elgan: Okay. So basically, the reason we believe that AI will cause mass layoffs is because people say that out loud. I mean, who says this?
Basically, it’s the people trying to sell you AI mostly. And what they’re really saying, the subtext is that, “We’re going to make your company way more efficient, and all those pesky employees that are so problematic and expensive, you can have fewer of those and get even more done with AI.”
And so that’s one set. The other set are the people, like you mentioned, who literally announce layoffs and say that the reason they’re laying people off is because they’re so much more efficient with AI. There’s a phenomenon that I believe is mostly something they call AI washing.
So somebody like Jack Dorsey, right, who’s the CEO of Block, formerly of Twitter, laid off a ton of people, right? It was like the third massive layoff that he’s done at that company. But the first two happened before the LLM revolution was really going. And the most recent one, he chimed in and said the same thing that many of them say, which is this time it’s because of AI efficiencies.
And basically, what are CEOs’ challenges? Who are their constituencies? Their constituencies are investors, the board of directors mainly.
John Koetsier: Mm-hmm.
Mike Elgan: And to a certain extent, their ego is at play, their peers in the industry. Companies do layoffs all the time, and it’s terrible to say. Basically, when you announce huge layoffs as a CEO, you’re announcing your failure, right? Your failure to grow. True. You hired people with intentions to use those people and not lay them off, and then you have to lay them off to save money.
And so AI has offered this wonderful fig leaf. Basically, you can say, “We’re not laying people off because I failed. We’re laying people off because I’m a genius and have figured out how to use AI to get the same amount of work done with fewer people.”
John Koetsier: Mm-hmm.
Mike Elgan: Okay? And this is a great story because you get to cut all these people and look like a hero instead of a failure. So that’s the second part of it. The third one is sort of the techno-utopians who say that, and sometimes they’re in the industry, sometimes they’re science fiction writers, sometimes they’re other people, who say that in the future, AI is going to be so good at replacing the jobs that people do that people won’t have to work.
We’ll all get, like, universal basic income, and we’ll just sit back and go to the beach, and AI will do all the work. Okay, so all these people seem to agree on this basic idea. The problem with it is that there are many problems with it. So one of them is that there’s no evidence for this.
People say, “Wow, we’ve been using ChatGPT and it’s super amazing, and it can do all this stuff. Therefore, we’ll be able to build entire companies based on agentic AI.” In the cases where people have tried to do this, it hasn’t worked out well. Companies that have done big layoffs and tried in earnest to replace people with AI, what they found, and there’s actually been a lot of research published since I wrote that column that you mentioned, basically pointed out that it went really badly.
You need people to run AI. The second problem is a problem of logic. So when people like Jack Dorsey and Meta and all the people who say that they’re going to cut people because they’re more efficient with AI, this doesn’t pass the test of reasonableness. Because what companies are trying to do, if you’re Mark Zuckerberg, his entire career since he was at Harvard was to take a small company and make it a big company.
John Koetsier: Mm-hmm.
Mike Elgan: And take a big company and make it a gigantic company, right? In terms of what you can accomplish, how dominant you are in the industry, and all that sort of thing. They’re all trying to grow and become more dominant in the industry. If you have a technology that, let’s say, doubles the productivity of every employee, okay, you use that technology to double the productivity of the company.
You don’t say, “Yeah, we’re just going to keep doing the same amount of productivity. We like where we’re at. We don’t want to grow. We just want to stay where we’re at and save a lot of money on employees.” Okay? Suddenly they have an entirely different program, entirely different goal in life, which is not to grow as fast as they can, right?
John Koetsier: Yes.
Mike Elgan: So that makes no sense. And then one of the biggest reasons of all is that we’ve been here a million times. When cars were replacing horses, when electricity electrified all the things that used to be manual, when farm equipment meant we needed fewer farmers, when the computer revolution happened, when the mobile revolution happened, every single time there’s a huge leap in technology where we can’t, it’s so new and moving so fast, we can’t tell where it’s going, we say, “Well, everybody’s going to lose their jobs.”
And usually the opposite happens. There are a lot more jobs, better-paying jobs associated with the new technology, right? The buggy whip manufacturers went out of business when cars came in, but man, were there a lot of new jobs in the car industry.
John Koetsier: Cool. On your second point there, on the failure and not admitting failure, there’s a big proof point for what you said in Jack Dorsey’s own company, Block, that five months before he did the layoffs, he held a single party, one party for the entire company, that cost $68 million. September 2025, $68 million party. They had stars out. It was insane. Five months later, they laid off four thousand people, 40% of their workforce.
Another point I’ll say is nothing burns me more than something that’s pretty common these days, where you see a company announce great financials. They grew, profit grew. It was some enormous number, some multiple billions, and they laid off, right? And they’re just pandering to shareholders, stock market, whatever it might be. That annoys me.
I will say this, however, actually one more point in your favor. I was talking to a CEO probably about two months ago, and I was talking about this topic, and he’s saying, “Companies that lay off people because of AI lack imagination.”
That resonates with your third point, which was, “You know what? We can be more productive. We can do more things. We can do better things.” If you look at software, there’s a lot of shitty software out there, and there’s no excuse for it anymore. With AI helping you to code stuff way quicker and way better and test it and all that stuff, there’s no excuse for that.
So there’s a lack of imagination about more to do, being more productive, getting more done, adjacent markets, whatever it might be if you have this talent and you have new resources from AI. Okay, all points in your favor.
A counterpoint: there just are cases where there are inefficiencies, where paper was pushed around, and we digitized companies 20, 30 years ago, and that changed things. I don’t think that affected employment that much, but it affected certain types of employment. Maybe that’s a point in your favor.
There are cases today where we’re using AI, and that enables some workflows, and that probably changes, if not eliminates, some people’s jobs. And that might be the case in this medical dental one, right? Where they’re just automatically ingesting forms and other things like that. So I’m sure you probably can see there are places where we’ll lose jobs, and I think your overall point is overall we’re going to grow the pie. Is that correct?
Mike Elgan: Yeah, and specifically the industries that do the replacing tend to be much more job-intensive than the thing they’re replacing.
So for example, I grew up in the state of California. California is a financial powerhouse globally. It just passed Japan. If it was a country, it would be richer than Japan. Japan has a population of 100-something million people.
John Koetsier: 140, I believe.
Mike Elgan: 140, that sounds about right. And California has a population of under 40 million, and yet California is richer than Japan, richer than Italy, richer than France, richer than every country except the U.S., China, and Germany, I think, or Britain. I don’t know, one of them.
And why is that? Well, one of the reasons is some of it is inflated net worth from the AI startups, okay? But a lot of it is technology.
John Koetsier: Mm-hmm.
Mike Elgan: And things related to computer technology, including aerospace and a bunch of other things. A lot of it’s agriculture and other things as well. But my point is that when the computer revolution, because I’m, the computer revolution, the PC revolution, let’s call it the PC revolution, right, when we went from only specialists using computers to everybody using computers, that was a big transition in human culture, and that was one that everybody’s afraid, okay, everybody’s going to lose their jobs because a fewer number of people can do more work with these computers.
John Koetsier: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Mike Elgan: Well, it’s actually the computer industry that’s driving, everybody wants their own Silicon Valley. Everybody in the world would kill to have Silicon Valley. Why? Because this industry that replaced the analog way of doing things in business is the most lucrative thing on the planet.
John Koetsier: Mm-hmm.
Mike Elgan: And that was true of the automobile industry. Less so today, but when the automobile, when Henry Ford and all that stuff in the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, the auto industry was a major, major industry, okay? And way bigger than the horse and buggy industry and the horse and carriage industry, and all the other things that—
John Koetsier: Yeah.
Mike Elgan: And the pedestrian industry, whatever that is. And so these new industries that threaten to take away all the jobs actually end up creating massive amounts of jobs. And by the way, this is true of energy as well. If you, the transition from fossil fuel energy to clean energy involves an energy where there’s a lot of people employed to an energy type that—
John Koetsier: Installers, maintainers.
Mike Elgan: Where there’s a ton of people employed. Yes. And so, you talked about a lack of imagination. Nobody can see the future of where it’s going in terms of where technology will lead us. It always leads us in strange places, and I’ll give you an example.
I mentioned that I started in technology in the ’90s. Well, cell phones were like a brand-new thing back then. Nobody imagined when we had these Nokia phones and when we went from pagers to cell phones, nobody imagined the live streaming industry, the influencer industry.
John Koetsier: No.
Mike Elgan: OnlyFans.
John Koetsier: No.
Mike Elgan: All these gazillions of things that result. We never realized that militaries would use cell phones for communication.
John Koetsier: Mm-hmm.
Mike Elgan: A thousand things nobody even thought of, not even science fiction writers. And so when you talk about AI, AI is a particularly colossal event in the history of human technology. 90% of what happens, that’s not a real number based on anything, but I would guess that more than 90% of the things that will happen as a result of AI, nobody has ever predicted.
And so it’s one thing to say, or for somebody to claim, that AI won’t increase unemployment, let’s say.
John Koetsier: Mm-hmm.
Mike Elgan: So that’s an unreliable statement. But it’s a very reliable statement to say there’s no reason to believe that’s going to happen, right? There’s no good reason to believe that’s going to happen, and the people who have made that claim don’t have anything to stand on because basically they’re talking about the future.
Where AI will take us in three years, right? Where has it taken us in the last three years? How much has it changed things, right?
John Koetsier: Mm-hmm.
Mike Elgan: In the next three years, 10 years, 30 years? This is impossible to predict. And to predict that the result will be nobody will have jobs, you just don’t have the data on that. And so that’s a stronger claim. I think that’s a more solid claim to make, to say that the people who are predicting this stuff don’t have, it’s not based on good evidence.
John Koetsier: The interesting thing about the change that you’re talking about here is the speed, right? You talked about a number of different revolutions, right? The car revolution, well, that was 50, 60 years in the making, right? The PC revolution, 20 years in the making, right? As the first micro PCs came out and they started, it wasn’t this big thing in a machine, in a room; it was a thing you carry around, right?
And then the mobile revolution was just maybe a decade, maybe a little bit longer than that, right? Maybe two decades if you really want to stretch it to the Nokias and everything, the contractor bricks. But the AI revolution, albeit there’s been energy directed toward AI since the 1950s, right? Theoretical largely, but there’s some work that’s been done there.
But then the massive cultural shift and change, like you said, last three years, right? It’s insanely fast. That’s probably adding to the angst, the generalized angst, right? We’re not in control. We don’t know what’s going to happen, and it’s happening so quickly. It’s very worrisome.
You mentioned as well, right off the top, things that you’re interested in, something that I’m interested in, I’m writing about a lot, is robotics as well, and that’s tied into AI, physical AI. And you have the sense that AI is coming for the white-collar work, and the robots are coming for the blue-collar work, and what will be left for the humans? It’s an uncertain future, so you can understand fear and doubt.
Mike Elgan: For sure. And people don’t like change. It’s very culturally upsetting because, like you say, this is the technology that’s changing culture much faster than anything that’s previously come around. And you and I cover change, really, is what we’re talking about. When you talk about technology, you’re talking about tools that change the way everything works. Which means we’re—
John Koetsier: Super annoying people because we like change.
Mike Elgan: Yes. We like change, and we expect it. People don’t like change, and it’s especially problematic generationally.
I remember my grandmother lived to be 100, and I think she died probably about 12 years ago, 13, 14 years ago, at the age of 100. And that was in the aughts, and she still thought her AOL dial-up connection was like science fiction.
John Koetsier: Magic.
Mike Elgan: Magic. She was alive before there was television. And so she saw airplanes, you name it. She saw so much change in her life, and she just was like, “I can’t even deal with the stuff you’re talking about,” even back then.
So then you have the kids who basically have AI. There’s a generation of kids. If you’re 15 years old, okay? Or let’s say 10, 11, 12. It’s 2010, so that’s 20, that’s 16 years since the Amazon Echo came out, okay?
John Koetsier: That’s true.
Mike Elgan: So if you’re 16 years old, if you’re 18 years old today, you don’t remember a time when there wasn’t a voice in your house that would give you information when you asked for it. Okay, so not everybody had Amazon Echos and so on, but my point is that everybody was aware that they existed and stuff like that.
John Koetsier: Yes.
Mike Elgan: It was a normal thing to have this Star Trek voice.
John Koetsier: My mom still asks me when the map talks in the car, “Who’s talking?”
Mike Elgan: Yeah, exactly. Where’s that coming from? And so you’ll see the AI natives. Most big culture change happens by people dying and new people being born into a world where their baseline assumptions, there are kids who don’t understand the concept of a magazine. They think it’s a touchscreen. They’re completely readjusted to it, and they’ll come up with ways of using it that are very different.
But yeah, the change is really fast, and it’s really upsetting, and there are going to be many, many, many problems with AI culturally for sure.
John Koetsier: Mm-hmm.
Mike Elgan: Because we’re not designed, a human being’s brain is hardwired to understand the truth that if something is talking to you, it’s another person. Like, there is nothing else that talks to you. And so when AI talks to us, there is a huge percentage, and that percentage will increase greatly, who believe it’s really a person with a mind, with thoughts, with feelings, and so on. It’s an incredible illusion, and it works because we are hardwired to expect that anything that talks is a person.
John Koetsier: That’s going to be a big problem. And that’s going to get more and more. Yeah, it’s going to get more and more. We see that already with chatbots. We see that with relationship bots that are explicitly designed for that. And that’s going to get better and better and more and more believable, the Her reality, right? All that stuff.
It kind of blows my mind a little bit what you just mentioned, that there are people growing up today, young people, for whom it’s utterly normal that if they have a question, they can ask some electronic genie in the cloud, and they can get an answer. And it’s fairly reliable. We know it’s not perfect. We know it’s getting better, all those things. It’s the Star Trek reality. 1970s, right? Computer, calculate, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
We have that, and that’s just baseline normal. For you and I growing up, if you needed truth, wow, you could ask a few people. You could check an encyclopedia, right? Maybe you could go to a CD-ROM encyclopedia. Right. It had all the knowledge of the world on this little disc, and it’s a different place.
Mike Elgan: Yeah. I mean, if you were a farmer in the year 1900, and one of your kids wanted to go to college or wanted to be educated or whatever, there’s no other concept about what education is than there is all this knowledge out there, and it’s contained within books, and you need to memorize all this knowledge.
And once you have the knowledge from those books transferred into your brain, okay, now you’re educated. Okay? That’s not really what education is, but that’s what it seems like it is to an outside observer. We’re in a world now where knowledge, facts are just always there. They’re easy to get. It’s of no monetary value, the facts.
The ability to know what to do with facts, the ability to discern good facts from bad facts, good information from bad information, all that stuff is super valuable, and the ability to be creative is super valuable, and the ability to set priorities and bring ethics and bring sensibilities that only humans have to your work, whatever that work is—
John Koetsier: Mm-hmm.
Mike Elgan: That’s super valuable. The idea that you don’t need to know anything anymore, you don’t need to know how to write. There’s the other thing that’s happening right now as we speak, which is that we’ve, I mean, I don’t know if you’re capable of writing cursive anymore.
John Koetsier: I haven’t been for, like, two decades. I always print.
Mike Elgan: Yeah. Yeah, okay. Yeah, me too.
John Koetsier: But I learned it in elementary school.
Mike Elgan: That’s right, and many kids nowadays don’t learn it, and not only can’t they write it, they can’t read it. So they get a birthday card from Grandma, and they’re like, “I don’t know what this is. Looks like Arabic.”
And so just as we’ve allowed that to atrophy, the skill of typing is about to atrophy very, very quickly because AI speech-to-text is so good, and there are so many applications for it that all of a sudden everybody’s talking instead. Where they used to tap on their phone, they just talk into their phone. Instead of typing on their laptop—
John Koetsier: Yeah, yeah.
Mike Elgan: They just talk at their laptop.
John Koetsier: Yeah.
Mike Elgan: And so now you, a lot of reports coming out, like in—
John Koetsier: And you get better results because you give AI longer prompts, and it has more context to give you the right information.
Mike Elgan: Yes, and also turns out, I mean, that is what language is originally. It wasn’t this abstract coding system that we developed, and then later in the Industrial Revolution came up with these contraptions, typewriters, to encode it with a machine, and then we came up with computers to mimic the process of a typewriter, and now we’re going back to Paleolithic humankind, where we’re talking around a campfire.
And so I don’t think that’s actually coming, bringing us around to a more natural state. However, that typing skill will atrophy, and people will say, “Why do I have to learn this?”
John Koetsier: Yeah. Yeah.
Mike Elgan: And it’s a good question. I believe it. Right? But there are certain critical skills that are going to be more valuable in the age of AI, and those have to be taught in the education system.
John Koetsier: So as I look to the future, I was just interviewed yesterday by Gadi Schwartz for NBC News Now, and we’re talking about humanoid robots in the home, and there are some in homes right now. There are some challenges and some problems with them, but they’re doing some things.
In three to five years, in my opinion, they’re going to be good enough—
Mike Elgan: Mm-hmm.
John Koetsier: In most scenarios to do most of what you want, and that is a game changer.
Mike Elgan: Mm-hmm.
John Koetsier: My kind of vision as we see AI develop, as we see robotics develop in tandem, is that we will have more jobs for the kinds of things that you just mentioned are valuable. Creativity, what facts matter, what facts are relevant, which are good facts versus bad facts, where should I go, what should… More human things.
We waste so much human potential by putting people in boxes and forcing them to do things that machines ought to do. The big question, the big question is whether we can build the societal and economic and financial changes that will reward the kinds of work that will be human work and enable people to enjoy and make a living there.
That’s an open question, and it’s the future, and we don’t know. I have concerns. I’m glad to hear that there are some reasons to be optimistic, and I hope that that actually transpires.
Mike Elgan: Yeah. I have a bunch to say about all of that, but there are so many changes that happen with the evolution of culture, and technology goes along with that, that you can’t really predict. And you talk about jobs—
John Koetsier: Talk about it.
Mike Elgan: Right? So think of how many jobs exist now that didn’t exist before and seem to have nothing to do with technology. I’ll give you an example. People used to make their own coffee, and now it’s a norm for people to go to Starbucks or something like that globally, basically.
And now there are like a million people employed in the making-coffee industry. That didn’t exist, right? And where did that come from? Well, somebody innovated, and it was a thing people wanted, and it turns out it was a culture-changing thing. It really didn’t have that much to do with technology.
Yoga instructors didn’t exist in 1950. You go on and on. There are a million of these things.
John Koetsier: Yeah.
Mike Elgan: So people, and new ways of doing things often require humans. And there’s always a backlash from things. Whenever something happens, that’s not the end of it. There’s always a reaction to what happens.
And so the more we interact with machines, the more high demand and monetarily valuable human contact will be. The more people like you and me are challenged by avatars and AI podcasters, the more people will crave—
John Koetsier: Right.
Mike Elgan: Podcasters who keep it real, who are really real—
John Koetsier: Yes. Yes.
Mike Elgan: And who are flawed. And so this is what I’m doing as a podcaster. I have a podcast called Superintelligent. My co-hosts and I, we just have a conversation. It’s a lot like this, but we don’t have a rundown. We barely have a topic, and we let ourselves just wander into things, and it’s just two people having a conversation.
And then my wife and I have a podcast that we just rebooted, and we make sure that you can hear the place where we are. So we did one that was—
John Koetsier: Nice.
Mike Elgan: In a pub in Stratford-upon-Avon. You can hear people chattering in the background.
John Koetsier: Nice.
Mike Elgan: And that used to be unprofessional.
John Koetsier: Yes.
Mike Elgan: And now the unprofessionality of that is what’s so appealing about it because people are engaging with chatbots all day.
So anyway, there’s always a reaction. But let me go back to the humanoid robot thing. There’s an assumption that humanoid robots are this desirable thing, and they’re an inevitability in the home and so on. And I think there will be, obviously there are and will be humanoid robots in the home, but it’s a dumb idea. It’s like a parlor trick.
There’s no reason to base this functional tool on the physiology of a Paleolithic primate. There’s no advantage of that. And what people will tell you is that our homes and cars and stuff are designed for our bodies, and so a robot—
John Koetsier: Uh-huh.
Mike Elgan: Can sit and stand and do this, can function. That’s mostly BS. Humanoid robots and chatbots designed to sound human are there to trick us into—
John Koetsier: Yes.
Mike Elgan: Believing and caring more about the product. Because if we—
John Koetsier: We’ll make it look like a spider.
Mike Elgan: Exactly.
John Koetsier: We’ll make it look like a spider with eight legs and huge.
Mike Elgan: Exactly. I mean, that’s fine. But Elon Musk said, “Oh, there’s going to be more Optimus robots than there are people, and they’re going to do everything. They’re going to babysit your kids. They’re going to mow your lawn.”
So he envisions a future where a ridiculous humanoid robot is in your front yard pushing a mower instead of what has existed for 20 years, which is a Toro lawn-mowing robot. It’s like a Roomba—
John Koetsier: Yeah, yeah.
Mike Elgan: That mows the lawn. They’re, I’m in Italy right now. Toro’s an Italian company. They’re everywhere in Italy. Like, the contraption that’s vaguely shaped like a person pushing a mower is more efficient than an automated thing that charges itself and just mows the lawn?
It’s like everything will be robotic, right? That’s a good thing. They always say, “Oh, the robot can fold your laundry.” And then you see the video and it takes them, like, two minutes to fold one pair of underwear.
John Koetsier: Yeah, not very well either.
Mike Elgan: Yeah. And of course, that’ll get faster and better and more—
John Koetsier: Accurate and so on. It will. It gets faster and better.
Mike Elgan: But what’s much more likely is Westinghouse will come out with a washing machine and a dryer thing that will fold your laundry internally and just spit out folded laundry. That makes a lot of sense.
This thing walking around, and you have to get out of its way when it’s walking down the kitchen or whatever, it’s just this kind of person that talks in your house. I would want one right now. That would be so cool. My friends would want to see it. It’s a parlor trick.
John Koetsier: Yeah, yeah. It’s a parlor trick. Yeah.
Mike Elgan: But I don’t think this is a great idea at all, other than just the novelty. And of course geeks like it, and of course science fiction fans like it—
John Koetsier: Sure, sure.
Mike Elgan: Because all the science fiction has these robots. But it’s just really a dumb idea ultimately.
John Koetsier: I’m sympathetic to what you’re saying, I really am, because it’s true. You can have a lawn-mowing robot. You can have a Roomba that vacuums your floor. You can have all these different things. Absolutely 100% true. The flip side of that equation is I need 15 robots, or I need one robot.
Mike Elgan: Mm-hmm.
John Koetsier: That said—
Mike Elgan: Yeah.
John Koetsier: The truth is somewhere in between. The vacuum cleaners and the lawn mowers of the future are going to be robotic. They just are, right?
Mike Elgan: Absolutely. Yeah.
John Koetsier: But—
Mike Elgan: It’s going to be great.
John Koetsier: If you’re going to get a cooking robot, that’s probably almost the same expense as having a humanoid that does fewer things. So I think I see things both ways there.
Mike Elgan: Yeah.
John Koetsier: Funny enough, I just interviewed the former CEO of Roomba, Colin Angle, and he’s started a new company.
Mike Elgan: Yeah.
John Koetsier: And it’s not a humanoid robot. It is a home robot.
Mike Elgan: Well, but it’s a pet.
John Koetsier: Exactly. Basically. And he’s the only person who’s made a billion-dollar company in sales for home robots, so he probably knows a few things.
Mike Elgan: Yeah, absolutely. So I’m writing a book called The Attachment Economy.
John Koetsier: Great.
Mike Elgan: And I have an associated Substack, so I’m basically writing the book as a series of Substack posts.
John Koetsier: Like it, like it. Smart way.
Mike Elgan: Yeah. And the attachment economy is the thing that comes after the attention economy. The attention economy is where, you see it most, it actually goes back to mid-20th-century advertising and found its ultimate expression in social media algorithms that are optimized for attention.
So when Facebook talks about the progress they’ve made, they talk about the percentage of the person’s day that they’ve taken away from other activities.
John Koetsier: Yes. Yep. Yep.
Mike Elgan: Netflix says that their biggest competitor for customers is sleep.
John Koetsier: Yeah. I’ve heard that.
Mike Elgan: So if they can get people to sleep less and watch TV more, then their shareholders reward them with more investment and so on. And so that’s the attention economy. We understand it.
That’s why there’s outrage politics. That’s why our politics is so miserable, because attention economy metrics has divided societies, has destroyed democracies, and made a few people extremely rich.
John Koetsier: Mm-hmm.
Mike Elgan: The attachment economy is that times 10. What the attachment economy is, is to get hyper-attention from people by using AI to trick people into actually having emotions and feelings and like and love for these AI-based products.
John Koetsier: Ouch.
Mike Elgan: And so the only reason to make a humanoid chatbot or a humanoid robot or a pet-like robot that, Casio, I’m less familiar with the Roomba guy’s robot. More, I’ve written about the Casio robot. It’s like a Tribble. It’s like a hedgehog-sized thing that purrs—
John Koetsier: Mm-hmm.
Mike Elgan: And has 1,000-something personality traits, and it evolves as you take care of it, and it makes hurt body language when you don’t feed it and give it attention.
So the idea is that you give it a lot of attention and feed it. Basically, what they’re doing there is that humans have this wonderful capacity to form loving, bonding—
John Koetsier: Mm. Mm-hmm.
Mike Elgan: Attachment relationships to other people and also pets. So when you have a dog and you pet your dog and you take care of it and make sure it isn’t harmed and you’re not abusive toward that dog, and you feed it and make sure it has clean water and a clean place, and you wash it every once in a while, and you’re taking care of this pet, okay, that’s a two-way relationship.
You are feeling very gratified that you’re taking care of this being.
John Koetsier: Mm-hmm.
Mike Elgan: And there’s a being who’s very happy that it’s being taken care of. It’s two-way. What attention economy hardware is trying to do is intervene into that relationship. Forget the dog. You can have this Casio Tribble thing, and you can have the gratification of taking care of something, but there’s nothing being taken care of.
You’re by yourself—
John Koetsier: Yeah.
Mike Elgan: And it’s not a relationship. Same thing with relationship AI. It’s the same thing.
John Koetsier: Yeah.
Mike Elgan: You have all the gratification of having a loving relationship with somebody—
John Koetsier: But it’s an illusion.
Mike Elgan: But there’s nobody there. Yeah. You’re by yourself. But it’s a business model. The attachment economy is a business model like the attention economy.
Before I sound too negative on this thing, let me just give this caveat. I believe in human freedom. I think adults should be able to do anything they want, and if people want to have a relationship with a chatbot or have a robot pet or a humanoid robot in their house and have a fantasy life with it and pretend like it’s a real person and all that stuff, I think it’s fantastic and I encourage people to do it.
I think it’s really cool, actually. Like, it’s really cool. As soon as they step over the line and start to believe that these things have an inner world, an inner life, thoughts, feelings, and stuff, okay, now I cannot condone that kind of delusion, and I feel like I’m in a position to warn people to avoid that.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to be deluded about it. And there’s another thing that’s interesting about this whole phenomenon. So people think that LLM-based chatbots, which are designed to have personalities, to make jokes sometimes, and to do surprising things that make you think it’s kind of like a person or like a thinking organism.
And there are actual computer scientists and others who think, “Well, I think it has consciousness. I think it’s actually…”
John Koetsier: Richard Feynman.
Mike Elgan: Yeah, exactly. But nobody ever thinks that about equally sophisticated AI things that fold proteins or do certain types of research that don’t have an interface that is chit-chatty. It’s the chattiness that has been programmed—
John Koetsier: Yeah.
Mike Elgan: Into these things that give us the delusion that it’s thinking. We don’t think that about other things. We don’t think that about the chess robots that just tell you what the move is.
John Koetsier: Yeah.
Mike Elgan: And so this is a little objective glimpse into, have you ever seen that optical illusion where the person has two sets of eyes here and two sets of eyes here—
John Koetsier: Yes.
Mike Elgan: And a mouth here and a mouth here?
John Koetsier: Yes.
Mike Elgan: Your brain cannot focus on it. It’s—
John Koetsier: No.
Mike Elgan: Upsetting to look at. This is a similar glimpse into how the human mind is constructed. We cannot accept that a human face would have four eyes and two mouths. Our brains will not accept it.
In the same, by the same token, our brains cannot accept the thing that we’re having a conversation with isn’t an entity with inner thoughts and feelings. We cannot accept it, and we should be aware of that and sort of be cautious as we go forward into this weird future that we’re facing.
John Koetsier: It’s the ultimate addiction, right? I mean, it’s digital addiction, and there’s immense power in what you just talked about, the attachment economy. Have to dive into that later on another time.
This has been fascinating and fun. Thank you so much for taking time. I’m pretty sure it’s late. You’re in Venice, Italy, and—
Mike Elgan: Oh, it’s not too late. It’s almost 6:00 PM.
John Koetsier: Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah, no big deal. Dinner’s at 9:00, and you’re in Italy, so—
Mike Elgan: That’s right. That’s right.
John Koetsier: Well, Mike, this has been such a pleasure. You have a wealth of knowledge and experience, and I appreciate you sharing it here.
Mike Elgan: Thank you, John. Thank you for having me on.
John Koetsier: Have a great day.