ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
We have a chance of fulfilling our potential as whole human beings: the caring beings, the connected beings, as well as the competitive, more self-interested beings. As I look at sort of humankind since The Enlightenment, I see enormous development on that one side — that rational, calculating side that brings us all this technology. But I think that technology can get us to that, that being whole, those whole human beings.
REID:
Hi, I’m Reid Hoffman.
ARIA:
And I’m Aria Finger.
REID:
We want to know what happens if in the future everything breaks humanity’s way.
ARIA:
We’re speaking with visionaries in many fields, from art to geopolitics and from healthcare to education.
REID:
These conversations showcase another kind of guest — whether it’s Inflection’s Pi or OpenAi’s GPT-4, each episode we use AI to enhance and advance our discussion.
ARIA:
In each episode, we seek out the brightest version of the future and learn what it’ll take to get there.
REID:
This is Possible.
Over the summer, Aria and I spoke to Maja Matarić, a USC computer scientist who pioneered the field of socially assistive robotics. That’s about developing robot companions to help people with social aspects of care — whether that’s building social behavior skills, assisting with mental health needs, such as reducing a sense of loneliness. It was a riveting conversation, and it got us thinking more about the caregiving of the future. How to bring about a broader social and societal good. That is to say this idea of public interest technology.
ARIA:
Today, we want to explore how public interest technology can relate to and support the care economy because one thing is so clear: our care economy — meaning the ways we support our mental and emotional health, and the ways that we support our children and loved ones — those systems need a lot of improvement. It is no surprise that over 50% of the roughly 42 million Americans who are providing care to an adult in their life report symptoms of burnout. And 42% of workers around the world also struggle with the same burnout. This area is ripe for both policy and technological intervention.
REID:
This topic is of particular interest to me since I co-founded Inflection AI, which has a chatbot called Pi. It’s a personal AI designed to support users with emotionally intelligent conversation. While it isn’t a replacement for mental health professionals or caregivers, it is one tool in the toolbox of the care economy to make self-care that much more accessible.
ARIA:
And Pi might actually show up to help us out with this conversation. Today, we want to expand our idea of what’s possible in care: self care, childcare, elder care, and much more. How can technology help those burned out caregivers and workers? How can we bring together policy and people to support these goals?
REID:
As we move into the future our relationship with care is going to change. Imagine a world where you have easy access to therapy or social support — a thermostat for work-life balance. Imagine all the technical aspects of the elder care being completely automated so you can focus on spending quality time with your loved one. Today we’re diving into what our care economy and work-life balance could look like in an ideal future with someone who knows this topic best.
ARIA:
Anne-Marie Slaughter is a scholar, public intellectual, and CEO of New America, a think tank that focuses on a wide range of public policy issues. She was formerly Dean of the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, and the first woman director of policy planning in the US State Department. She’s a prolific speaker and the author or editor of nine books. And when I was a young woman in my twenties, she was an inspiration to me in the workforce.
REID:
We sat down and talked with Anne-Marie, about a wide range of critical societal and human topics. It included the care economy, included reorganization of government, it included, you know, kind of how to do smart policy and what are the kinds of ways that we should reimagine life and economics and work in the future. And she is great on all of these topics, so this was an amazing conversation.
ARIA:
What I loved about talking with Anne-Marie, that everyone will soon hear, is that she is such a cross-sector thinker… And I feel like when I moved from DoSomething to, Reid, working with you, everyone said, “Oh, how was it moving from squarely the nonprofit sector to moving to the tech sector?” And the way Anne-Marie talks about it, we need integration here. We need integration across disciplines. We need public/private partnerships. We need people who are humanists being the same people who are being technologists. And so it’s just so clear that we need people with different backgrounds at the table to solve all these problems. And Anne-Marie is one of the leading thinkers and speakers on this topic. So here is our conversation with Anne-Marie Slaughter.
ARIA:
Anne-Marie, I was lucky enough to have lunch with you just this week, and we were talking about the rise of public interest lawyers over the past few decades — people who were using the law to fight for justice and equality, and better laws and regulation for everyone. And so now we have public interest technologists, and I would love to hear from you — how do you understand and define public interest technologists, you know, who are they and what do they do?
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
It’s such a great subject and one that I’m always happy to talk about. You know, when I was in law school in the 1980s, you had things like public defenders or legal aid, but public interest law didn’t exist. I mean, you… Now, we look at Thurgood Marshall or Ruth Bader Ginsburg, or any number of people who have really made change through a series of lawsuits, and we say, “oh yeah, that’s public interest law.” But that field was actually constructed. It was built by the Ford Foundation, by a number of law firms that supported it, and by law schools — like NYU, which was way out ahead with public interest law clinics. And over decades, that became just an element of what it meant to be a top law school. And young people could say, “I’m going to go to law school and, yes, I’m going to earn a good living and work for a firm, but I’m really passionate about the environment, or I’m really passionate about civil.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
I’m going to become a public interest lawyer.” So public interest technology is the equivalent in technology. Technology is a much broader field than law. I mean, that includes engineers, obviously and computer scientists, but also designers and project managers — all the people in technology. But the basic idea is the same, that you should be able to grow up and say, “I want to be a technologist. I want to go work for some big company, or I want to create a startup, or I want to improve access to housing in my community. I want to be able to provide finance to vulnerable communities. I want to think about how we develop technology that will allow us to monitor all sorts of environmental issues.” I mean, the, the, the uses are as broad as technology itself. And so public interest technology now is a recognized field at 56 universities ranging from MIT to Miami Dade College — where we’re teaching technologists how to navigate the world of politics and policy that is generally the public interest. And we’re mapping careers where you can become a member of the US Digital Service, for instance — which Obama created and, Reid, I know you had a lot to do with — so you can work in government and help improve how it works. I hope in this century there will be as many people thinking about how to be public interest technologists as there are lawyers, economists, all the other people we need.
REID:
One of the things that’s really important on the public interest technology, but it’s kind of getting people to kinda realize that, you know, somewhere between 30 and 80 percent of this scale solution to a scale problem is technology. But there’s key parts of technology that need to be built that aren’t naturally built by the commercial sphere. So what’s kind of some of the work that you’ve been doing — you, New America — to try to amplify this kind of public interest technology. And obviously USDS is one, you know, key thing, but it kind of goes across, you know, like it’s all the way down to like state and city level — which is like Code for America and other kinds of things. What’s some of the stuff you guys have been doing?
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
Yeah and I’m so glad you mentioned Code for America. ‘Cause I was going to bring that in. I mean, really Jen Pahlka, Code for America — that was the, that was the first real organization to say, “You can be a coder and just like you can be a teacher and teach for America, you can code for America.” So, absolutely. So I’ll give you a very granular example and I’ll build it out. So, New America has something called the New Practice Lab, where effectively what we’ve done is to apply techniques of software design to public problems. So here’s an example: New Jersey passed a law that says there’s, that there’s family leave — which is something many people have been pushing across states, across the, across the country. New Jersey has paid family leave, but only 40% of people in New Jersey were taking it up.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
So you’ve got, you know, everybody who has a child gets paid family leave only 40%. So we send in a sprint team, and this is very much like software design. You send in a sprint team — has a designer, has a technologist, has a policy expert, a bureaucracy wrangler — and they sit down not only with the New Jersey State government, but more importantly with parents who have not gotten paid family leave, and some who have. What are the problems? Well, some of them are just straight politics. Employers don’t particularly want you to know that you have paid family leave ’cause they have to pay for it. So there are all sorts of informational issues. Some are bureaucratic. There are two separate programs, and it’s very complicated to figure out which one you fit into. Some of them are technological, but at a level that just makes you want to cry.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
So in New Jersey, if you have a two letter last name like “Lee” or “Wu”, you can’t fill out a form because the forms are made for “Hoffman,” “Finger,” “Slaughter.” So that’s a case where it’s a very you know, a small example, but obviously it cuts a lot of people out. You can easily develop the technology to improve the form. And indeed, you want to go beyond that. You develop the technology to create a portal — and this is where AI can come in, where you just click on it. Ideally you’ve got a wonderful AI where you can just ask it questions. “I am six months pregnant. What am I eligible for? What do I have to do?” And ideally, you’d have something that then helps fill out those forms and have them pre, you know, preloaded to make government benefits work. To deliver them to the people who need it. So that’s paid family leave, but you can do that with absolutely any government benefit. It’s a mix of human-centered design, tech expertise, understanding bureaucracy. And frankly, this is not rocket science tech, but any tech is better than no tech in local, state, and federal government.
REID:
That’s a very natural transition to another major threat. But another thing that you’re very well known for is the kind of the humanist approach to the care economy. And how do we redefine you know, what are we, what are our goal of government, goal of society? How do we include the care economy? You know, how is this an essential part of the human condition? So say a little bit about it for what, you know, the kind of the, the focus of care economy is, and then some of the work that you’re doing there.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
Well, I have to start by saying, you know, back in 2012, I wrote this article in The Atlantic called “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” where I was trying to say, you know, we’ve come a long way how I grew up without knowing a single woman doctor, or engineer, or professor. So we’ve come a long way, but we’ve still got a long way to go. And at that point, I was looking at just how the workplace really wasn’t set up for caregivers. That it was still set up for people who had full-time caregivers at home, mostly men with wives, but it could be, could be anybody who doesn’t have a full-time caregiver at home. If you push further, you realize actually the problem goes deeper than that. And it’s that we don’t value care as a society. Partly that was women’s work, and it was done out of sight, and it was private, it was family.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
But partly we focus on career and competition and growth and markets. So pushing the importance of care is to me, essential to gender equality, but also just to the health of our societies and our flourishing. It’s about human connection. It’s about the ways in which we invest in other people and are just as excited when they succeed as when we succeed. So that could be your child, but it also could be your mentee, your student, your sibling, your, you know, nephew, or any number of people who you care for. So then you think, well, wait a minute, care economy? What I just described is clearly that sphere of things that should not be commodified. Those are things that should be kept far from an economy. Well, yes, there are elements of care a hundred percent that can never be commodified, but there is an entire set of things that we need to enable better caregiving.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
And those things are becoming ever more important. I mean, we’re, for one thing, we’re an aging society. 10,000 Americans turn 65 every day, so we’ve got a huge baby boom that is aging. We’ve got, you know, lots of kids, lots of others who need care, and we have two-career couples. So the care economy, which is a huge economy includes elder care, childcare; but it also includes things like, household management software. You know, Aria, you have children — trying to manage all those lessons, all [laugh] the sort of central brain that has to manage a complex family life and a whole host of consumer products that enable care. And so as we look at the care economy, The Holding Company — which is a company that’s funded by Melinda Gates and Pivotal — has estimated that the care economy is bigger than the pharmaceutical economy plus car manufacturing and social networking all put together.
ARIA:
I have to jump in here, Anne-Marie. I think I said this to you the first time we met, but I distinctly remember that article in 2012. I was like a super ambitious, you know, young woman who didn’t have kids, but was trying to use technology to change the world to do something and really cared about my career. And I feel like you were the first person who told me, “Yeah, actually, it sort of sucks out there. And like, I’m going to give you a little bit of a reality check.” And I, and I really appreciated sort of that sober look, not because it was negative, because it was actually a spur on to like, “Folks, let’s, let’s fight for more.” And I love what you were saying because I think when so many people think about sort of the care economy in general, or even quote unquote “woman’s work,” they don’t think of money and they don’t think of the economy. They think of like a care sector. And what you’re saying is there is money to be made here, and like, we should be having companies, we should be having unicorns, we should be having billion dollar companies that are helping solve this problem. And we need NGOs and companies and governments to come together to do it. And so I just sort of love hearing that, that it doesn’t just have to be the NGO sector that’s taking care of it. Let’s actually look at how the market economy can do it.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
Absolutely. And, and really the paradox of care was the idea that it was a labor of love. And so you shouldn’t pay for it. Well, it is a labor of love. But, but I do lots of things that I love doing, like all sorts of sports, but nobody says, you know, that you don’t pay people for doing things that they, they love. And again, I think you can, you certainly could make this all about a market in a way that would be at variance with the essence of the human connection that is care. But I think of it as — it’s a relationship. It’s a, it’s a relationship central to our survival. Human beings do not survive unless we’re connected to others. But just like any of the other things we do, of course there’s a market and that market can make care easier and better, and actually technology can make care easier and better.
REID:
What do you think that business leaders should be doing, kind of wholesale across all the thing to say, here is where, you know, like, how to think about the care economy. Here’s how to bring it in, how you’re thinking about your company. Here’s how you bring it in, how you’re thinking about your employees. Here’s how you bring it in, how you’re thinking about your customers and society. What, what’s some of the kind of things to business leaders that you would most say about that?
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
Well, the first thing I would tell them is that they should think of every single employee and customer as a caregiver, right? If we just did that, as opposed to thinking, “Oh yeah, those women between 20 and 60, they’re the caregivers.” No, no, everybody is a caregiver. And certainly in my workplace the, I’ve got a number of women who are primary breadwinners. And so their husbands are taking a really big role in care. We often talk about people who are lead parents. Again, it’s not just about kids. So often you see men suddenly having to care for their parents. I mean, at least in many households, it’s like, I’ll take care of my parents. You take care of your parents. Whereas once it was the woman, the wife who was, who was supposed to do all of that. So, to just, to start with, let’s assume that all human beings will have caregiving obligations to someone at some point in their lives. That would suddenly think, “Oh, wait a minute.”
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
Certainly it would make you think of a big market. But here’s the other thing, then you would immediately start thinking — if you want to be an employer, who attracts the very best, what care benefits can I offer? I mean, I remember when I first started teaching at Harvard. Harvard had this wonderful kind of emergency care. So the day that, you know, you could, daycare shut down or whatever care arrangement you had didn’t work, or your child of course got sick — which happened every time you had a really important meeting — you could call this agency and they would send a really highly trained person. Now, that was 30 years ago, and it was obviously a very elite workplace. But they were thinking about what do, what do people need? Now, we need to think about everything from long-term care, insurance, possibly for aging relatives, disability care, all sorts of childcare.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
So I would say think about everyone as a caregiver, then think about what that means for your employees and how you want to retain, attract, and retain the best. And again, in, you know, in customers… I’ll give you an example with Instacart — which I think is just genius. You know, many of us discovered Instacart during the pandemic. Well, now Instacart is at — has an AI that you can say, “Okay, I’ve got, you know, a package of green beans, three eggs and some cheese in my refrigerator. I’ve got to get dinner on the table for my kids. What healthy meal can I make and what else do I need?” And Instacart will come up with the recipe, tell you what you need, and then deliver it to you. Now that, you know, that’s a grocery store. They’re not, they don’t think of themselves as part of the care economy. And yet when you put care foremost, it’s just amazing how many things you can suddenly realize there’s a market for.
ARIA:
And so when people think about care, of course, they think about teachers and they think about doctors. They think of all these people who are doing things. But as you mentioned, you know, technology can be so important here. Would love to hear about that. How can AI shift our current care systems and actually make them better and more personal, sort of not more robotic or more distant?
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
So I talk often about the care plus economy — which includes all teaching, all coaching, all guiding, mentoring, navigating. These are fast growing areas of the economy, and they are all human to human. That’s what makes them so important. I mean, obviously a mentor, a teacher; it’s the knowledge is being transferred, but there are many, many, many ways we can do that. It’s more that relationship that sort of tuning yourself to the very specific needs of a mentee, of a supervisee, of a somebody you’re coaching, somebody you’re guiding. And in that part of the care economy, tech is hugely important. Even pre AI. I’ll again, another example. At Georgia State University, they dramatically improved the number of first-generation college students who graduated. And they did it by collecting data on when students were most likely to drop out. They figured out where were the stress points, particularly in the first year.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
And then college advisors — which I was a professor for 20 years I have to confess, college advising is often signing that course card. It’s not the most engaged relationship in the world, but they took it very seriously. And they would, using data, they would then have advisors reach out to these students and say, “Hey, you know, you want to go get coffee?” Or really, “I noticed that this happened in this course. Maybe we should talk to the professor about it.” And they dramatically increased their graduation rate. Now you can imagine being a childcare giver and saying, “Hey,” and here’s where AI would come in, “Give me a number of age appropriate activities to engage in.” I know when I was a mother, you know, you’re reading Goodnight Moon for the fifty millionth time.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
And you know, in theory, when your child’s brain is developed, but — it is developing — but you are not a, you know, a neurologist or a pediatrician. So in so many areas, data can help by just finding the patterns that then help us know when to intervene, when our, what we’re doing is maximally effective. But also now you can, you just have that knowledge at your fingertips that will make you better. The last part, and this is what I think most people think of and are afraid of, is robots, right? They’re like, oh my God, you know, now I’m going to have a carebot that is going to come and take care of me instead of another human. Well, the first thing I’d point out and, and working with a lot of older people and my father’s over 90, you know, think about those ages, and one of the first things you think of is dignity and privacy.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
I can tell you I’d rather have a carebot for a whole host of things than another human being, no matter whether that’s a family member or not. And a number of the robotics efforts are exactly to have robots that will help with lifting, with toileting, with dressing. All of those things. Japan’s way ahead here because of, they have a very older population. But then there are also lots of ways where, again, a robot is not going to substitute for a human. That would not be a great trade-off, but a robot can do a lot of things that then leave the human to human part — leaves the caregiver much more time for that. Much more time to really focus on the other person. But also I think enhances the dignity, and in many cases, the strength of the person being cared for.
ARIA:
We actually asked Inflection’s AI chatbot, Pi, which countries use robots in care institutions and how they use them? And so Pi said to us:
Pi:
So there are a few countries that are using robots in care institutions. Japan is probably the most well-known example. They’ve been experimenting with using robots to assist with elder care for a while now. In Japan, robots are used to help with things like monitoring patients, delivering food and medication, and providing companionship. They’re also being used to help with tasks, like cleaning and laundry. China is another country that’s been exploring the use of robots in care institutions, and they’re using them for similar tasks. Spain, Great Britain, and South Korea have also experimented with using robots in care settings.
ARIA:
And so you just, you mentioned Japan, you mentioned human dignity — which again, like if AI can help us increase human dignity, like what a, what a dream, what a perfect thing to do. Is there anything you would correct in that answer? Add to that answer? Anything else that we should be talking about here as it, as it relates to robots and helping?
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
Well, I actually think we need to think about how robots can change architecture. My brother’s an architect and an investment banker, and he’s imagined what kind of home you would need. If you had, let’s say, a bed that can turn into a chair, right? That can roll into the kitchen, that can roll into a vehicle. You know, and then of course there’s a self-driving element. So that there are entire adjacent sectors, that if you really could use a combination of robots and AI, and again — then there would be an entire set of jobs for people who are there part of the time, kind of keeping an eye, making sure that, that the person is as autonomous as possible and helping when necessary. We’d want to really change the design of our houses, not just all on one floor, but thinking about how you integrate this technology.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
The other thing I’d say — and it’s not a robot, but it’s very simple — if we just had a good iPad that had, you know, large letters to begin with for visually impaired, but that was just a basic ChatGPT. I look at somebody like my father — and so many people I know, older people — who are so frustrated by technology. I mean, we all have children so that they can navigate technology for us. But this is a huge jump. You know, if you were born in the 1930s, and now you have to deal with technology just to be able to say, “Hey, could you get me that book that I wanted to read? And could you make sure that I can now listen to it? And could you then, you know, turn it off when I’ve stopped listening to it? Or could you read me today’s headlines? And when I tell you, you know, tell me what article.” The New York Times is trying to offer that, but it’s extremely complicated. So there again, just making technology as friendly and accessible as a human being would go so far for a lot of elder care. And also there’s also sorts of experiments with kids who have special needs and how they can use that technology.
REID:
Let’s kind of move a little bit philosophically — how do you think this kind of technological revolution we’re in is going to kind of evolve the concept of us as human beings in society?
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
So I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I think I come at it from an unexpected angle. In a nutshell, I think there is a possibility [laugh] that this latest age of technology will focus us on the relational dimension of human beings rather than the calculation part of human beings. So part of this — I think, of all human beings as both caring and competitive. We have a part of us that wants to achieve, that wants to be recognized individuals. It’s that part, for me, is a feminist. It’s that part of me that was the woman growing up in the South, where I’m supposed to be seen but not heard, and God knows, not too smart. Who said, “forget it,” [laugh] you know, “I want to be a lawyer that ends up a professor.” All of that, the ambition. But you don’t have to be hugely ambitious to want to be recognized as an individual.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
There’s that part. And then there’s that part of us that cannot survive unless we’re connected to others. And, from everything from, you know, people whose spouse dies, their health outcomes plummet, typically solitary confinement is the worst kind of punishment. We really know more and more that our relationships are the key to our wellbeing and flourishing. But if you look at what technology replaces the most, or at least the technology we have to date, it’s much more the computational side, the rational side, the, you know, the — indeed, you know, AI is going to get rid of a lot of coding. And we’ve known for some time that actually there would be a declining demand for coders, which is not what you would expect. And so I think increasingly what we will value humans for are those things that are much harder to replace.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
You can amplify them, but as you said, you can’t replace them. But that caring, that connecting, that emotional intelligence as opposed to the straight, rational intelligence — and the two really are intertwined in lots of ways. I think we’re going to come to see human beings as whole human beings, much more than as the rational calculators our abstract economic models pretend they are. And we know it’s a pretense, but we still use it to underpin a lot of policy and decisions. I think paradoxically, the tech is going to push us much more in that direction that says, you know, what makes humans is all that other softer relational side that for so long has actually been downplayed.
REID:
I actually, by the way, completely agree with your prediction that the part of it is that there’s a wealth of what matters in human meaning, human existence, human action that isn’t just the homo sapiens. Like it’s the, “Oh, it’s our ability to do math!” And it’s like, well [laugh] actually it’s a lot of other things. And one of them is kind of how we relate together. So what do you think with this kind of picture of how, of how humanity is changing, what do you think that’ll mean for some predictions on kind of industries and society and so forth? Like some things to watch for, some things to steer towards, some things to steer against, you know, as we’re, as we’re kind of navigating forward.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
Well, I would start, of course, by telling people to look for the care economy. But more importantly… ’cause that you can sort of see in that care plus economy. I would say anything that enhances human potential and performance is going to grow. And again, it’s going to grow and be enhanced by technology. So here again, look at a top athlete. That athlete has a coach for the length of their athletic career. Or frankly, a top singer. Certainly opera singers, I don’t know about rock singers, but they have vocal coaches. Always. A coach is not somebody you just go to when you have a problem. A coach is somebody who makes you better all the way through your life. And that person doesn’t have to be better than you are. What’s important is they can see how to make you better. And again, what else is teaching that?
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
Or at least good teaching, is lighting up minds and showing them how to absorb the knowledge and give them the skills that will, you know, set them on their path. That entire domain — and I think of it as this vast field — of enabling others to reach their potential, their potential for good. If you imagine everybody having a coach for everything, which we’re not going to get to, but it’s a, it’s a good thought experiment. Just imagine the ways in which people can make careers, and again, those careers will be enhanced by technology. So that’s the first area that I think of. And then, I’ve been thinking a lot about the kind of crises that we’re, that we’re in, globally. I do a lot of global work for everything from pandemics to climate change to migration — and this need to figure out from the community level to the global level how we imagine ourselves as one part of a collective hive mind or a collective planet or whatever.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
But one of this much bigger whole and how do we — but we’re still one at the same time that we’re part of that whole — and what are, what are going to be the ways that we can act both collectively and then still individually? That’s much further away in the sense that I can’t even articulate the specific tools, but I know people who are working on that. And we know a number of people who are working on collective intelligence. But I think it’s going to be more than just, you know, vote together. I think it’s going to be, here’s when I turn to being part of a collective organism and can make change at scale that way. And then here’s where I’m back to being Anne-Marie with my family and my particular concerns.
REID:
To kind of go back to kind of a, the grand history of humanity, but in a different arc than human nature and philosophy. You know, you’ve kind of said before that the digital revolution is just as big as the Indu industrial Revolution. We’re obviously having an amplification of the digital revolution. And one of the things that you and I’ve also talked about is, you know, how little of the discourse is understanding how big swaths these ideas are and these transformations. What do you see as this kind of, this wave of this new revolution? Obviously some of it will be kind of work and life, and how to balance a merger. Some of this will be digital care, you know, like care economy. What are some of the things that, in this kind of like, how would you characterize the, this new — not industrial revolution — but this new revolution? And — digital revolution or cognitive revolution or however, care revolution — and then what are some of the what’s this epoch of history that we’re in?
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
[Laugh] I’m laughing because I’ve been just wracking my brain with what to call this next phase, right? We went through such a long time where we are going to call it the information age or the digital age. We finally decided on the digital age. And then digital is just the electricity, right? It’s just the sort of starting point that or not even probably the steam engine. I know you, you’ve talked about that. So now — but we can’t call this the intelligent age. I mean, that won’t work. So I don’t know what to call it. I do think this is a, just an enormous, enormous leap. And one of the things I think about is that it will give us much more time. Now, we’ve all quoted Keynes and the 15 hours of work a week, and I don’t buy that.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
But I also know, and we also know, that people in the late 19th century work seven days a week, 14 to 16 hours a day. And so first you get one day off, and of course, the Sabbath, then two — I think we’re going to three. I cannot imagine that in 10 or 20 years, the average work week won’t be 32 hours. Now, does that mean we’ll only be working? I mean, we’ll be doing all these other things, and one of the things we will be doing is care. And we know this — that, again, if you could just give people an extra eight hours or more a week to do those other things they do after their paid income is done. So one, I really do think we’re going to see lots of changes in time. How much time we have. When we have time, because that might be a, you know, a third weekday. That could be, we could have six hour workdays.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
You could have people who work really intensively for three days a week. I mean, but time — and time and work, and time and life I really do believe are going to change. And then just the things we will be able to do with that time. And that, here again, I would come back to enhancing human potential. You know, the privileged people have lessons for all sorts of things. From piano lessons to skydiving, to you name it [laugh]. If I suddenly started thinking — and it’ll be a combination, AI and human being — anything I want to learn, I’ve got an individualized teacher. Which my son already thinks that’s what YouTube is, and has learned everything from YouTube. But now imagine all that content personalized for you, then I, again, think more time and we will be spending it very differently. And the last thing I’ll say is, I think a lot of people’s sources of income will come from multiple sources as opposed to one. It’s not just going to be the job and the side hustle. It’s really going to be people figuring out, here’s how I’m going to earn a living from multiple activities that I do.
ARIA:
I think it was interesting when you were talking about, you know, sort of the, the real sort of majority of Americans right now have this sort of more sense of family. And in my mind, there’s no more sort of quintessential American dream than when you think of like, the Obamas who came from middle class, ascended to the White House — but both Michelle Obama and Barack Obama have said they, they only could have done it because of Michelle’s mom. Because she was in that White House with them —
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
A hundred percent.
ARIA:
helping take care of kids while mom and dad were working. And, you know, you mentioned strengthening the family, and I think sometimes sort of the liberal side of folks don’t like that rhetoric. You know, because they don’t “strengthen the family.” What is that talking about? And sort of, how can we strengthen a family in a way that’s not, you know, patriarchal or that’s oppressive, but is a way that people want? And it sort of leads, you know, right directly into one of the crises that our country is facing, which is the childcare crisis.
ARIA:
You know, I think the US government spends — you know, compared to our peer countries — I think a factor of 10x less than France and Spain and Italy, et cetera, on helping parents afford childcare. And so, you know, some people estimate that we have, you know, $122 billion in lost wages. So this is both hard for parents, bad for the economy, bad for kids. Like what, where do you see sort of the next paradigm shipped on that? Is it that the four day work week will help save that? Is it that AI can help with childcare? Like how do you see that changing as we go forward?
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
Yeah, I was looking at the estimates for the different sectors of the care economy that The Holding Company has put out. They look at 136 billion is childcare now, but childcare is horrifically in short supply, right? We could double, triple, quadruple the amount of childcare we have and still have waiting lists. And childcare for two children is more than the cost of rent in all 50 states, which is just staggering when you, when you think about it. I really think this is where I would say childcare, education more generally, and healthcare — those three. So all of education, and then childcare is probably the first step of education, and healthcare — AI has got to be able to help us dramatically lower those costs.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
I mean, I can’t imagine the world that we’re going into in terms of just the world of work if we don’t detach healthcare from work. And we’ve known that for 20 years, but now [laugh] it’s, it’s really going to be a huge drag on our economy if we can’t do that. But at the same time, lowering the cost of healthcare and then of course, lowering the cost of education so people aren’t graduating with so much student debt. If you take those things away — if you enable people to have a family to get the education they need and the healthcare they need — suddenly their life opportunities will dramatically improve, and the amount they will need to earn will drop. Which is also important when we think about the economic shifts that are going to happen with AI. So you, yeah, and it’s of course, you can’t just say, “Okay, you know, AI will replace all these jobs and we’ll take all that money and we’ll redistribute it.”
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
It doesn’t work that way. But we do have to be thinking really hard about where can we reduce the cost of living? Just as hard as we’re thinking about how do we increase the amount of wages? ‘Cause It’s the only way we’ll get to a better, newer equilibrium. The other thing I would say though is this is just — it’s not even common sense, it’s national security. We have to invest in our children. You know, we all read these articles, but China is an aging society and it only has one child. And I look at that and I think, yes, I get that. But that child has got six adults all trying to do their very best by that child. We, on the other hand, you know, have lots of children who are not getting basic prenatal and early care and forming their brains — because that’s, we know that those early years, you’re literally, both, developing the number of synapses and then pruning them in ways that enable that child to be able to learn for life. So I’m also hoping that just our leaders, women and men can just understand the investment that we need to make in our economic and security and social future.
REID:
It’s crazy that we don’t reinvent, like we do this in businesses. We reorg the business and redo it in order to meet the modern needs. And like, we don’t do that within the government thing. What new departments would you create? Women, youth, [laugh] right? What are the other ones that, that you would, that you would go, okay, if we’re really thinking sufficiently future and bold and carefully — pun intended — what would we do?
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
I would actually start by dismantling a lot of the departments we have, and I mean this very physically. Because I often walk down Constitutional Avenue and I look at all these buildings, and each one is an entire block in size so that these massive concrete or marble or limestone, whatever the building material is, hierarchies that are literally set in stone. And when I would sit in the State Department, I would think, “If I only had a Google for government,” if I could only say, ‘Secretary Clinton wants me to work on cook stoves, and air quality, and women’s security in Africa. I need to know who in the agriculture department, who in the health department, who in the military knows something about this.’” And if I could just Google it or now I would ask GovernmentGPT and say, “Okay, tell me who in these departments knows about this, create the task force, work on the problem, solve the problem, and then disperse back to our nominal departments.” I agree. You have to have some kind of org chart, but I would effectively render all those buildings transparent and their walls very flexible.
REID:
Obviously. I think that’s an awesome, bold idea. It reminds me of one of the things that I told the Stanford Long [Range] Planning Commission, which is get rid of departments in universities, right? Is another instance of this kind of thing.
ARIA:
I’d never thought about the company reorg before. Yeah. If you’re not realigning your, your personnel to your business needs every five to 10 years, like, what are you doing? And we, we haven’t done that. And I think the future for AI, everyone talks about internal company chatbots so that people can learn what’s going on in the company and who to talk to and how to end up with what the latest strategy is. And to your point, Anne-Marie, like that’s what absolutely we need for government.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
The state, the foreign service was created in 1925 when the consular service and the diplomatic service were merged. And it has not been seriously changed since then. And the result is that you cannot go in mid-career, right? So just imagine all those awesome people who have served in some private or civic capacity all over the world and speak multiple languages. Nope, if you don’t go in at the bottom and stamped visas for two years, you can’t go in. And I’ve written about this, but it is just such a great example of — it’s a hundred years old. The United States could have the best diplomatic service in the world, bar none, if we could just change that.
REID:
So let’s move to rapid fire. Is there a movie, song or book that fills you with optimism for the future?
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
Yes, and it’s a book I just finished, which of course, because it’s the availability heuristic [laugh]. It’s the one that comes to mind. But it really is, I just finished reading How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan, which is about the use of psychedelic assisted therapy. It’s about the rediscovery of psychedelics, LSD, mescaline, mushrooms, various other chemicals to expand our consciousness and the ways in which that can dramatically help addiction, depression sort of end of life existential fear — and so much actually of the kind of stress that becomes pathological. And so much of what we suffer from is really stress that is so great that it becomes pathological, whether that’s depression or addiction. But there was something even deeper. I mean, he just, he’s a skeptic. I mean, Michael Pollan wrote The Omnivore’s Dilemma and changed the way we eat. This was a book I thought, “I’m not, I’m not that interested in psychedelics, I’m not going to read this.” But really what it’s about is essentially giving space to other parts of our brain than the ego. So it’s just universal and across cultures.
ARIA:
So what is a question that you wish people would ask you more often?
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
I wish that instead of saying, what do you do, somebody would say, what is your passion? Now, that’d be easy — that we talk about birding for a long time, but we talk about the latest book, as you all could tell, I have many passions — but I just think we just change that so that every time you go to say, “What do you do?” Or the various locutions we have for that, say, “What are your interests? What are your passions?” Even better than what’s the latest book you’ve read because you’re inviting people to tell you what lights them up.
ARIA:
I was about to say, for me, it would be, “What are you ranting about these days?” [Laugh]
REID:
Or this day.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
Or this day. [Laugh] It would still be more interesting than an endless comparison of careers in schools.
REID:
So where do you see progress or momentum outside of your industry that inspires you?
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
So I was just looking at the New York Times article, I think it was a couple months ago, that said, “Arizona is contemplating getting water from the Gulf of Mexico desalinated there.” And I think desalination is one of the absolute game changers for humanity. Particularly of course, as we’re going to have much more sea water and not enough fresh water. We’ll have too much fresh water in some places. But for so many places, when you look at climate change, it’s desertification. And I actually see this around the Mediterranean. Israel gets 60% of its drinking water from desalination. And if you look at the American West, you look at California, this is an area where I look at it, and I think if the technology becomes cheaper and more accessible — even on the track of renewables, even on wind and sun — that is just an enormous game changer.
ARIA:
Alright. Final, the final easy question of any Possible podcast. Can you leave us with a final thought on what you think is possible to achieve if everything goes humanity’s way in the next 15 years, and what’s the first step to get there?
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
So I do think that if everything breaks our way, we have a chance of becoming or fulfilling our potential as whole human beings. So again, the caring beings, the connected beings, as well as the competitive, more self-interested beings. And that will mean we use our time differently. We pursue a much wider range of interests, and those interests and activities are taken [into] account of when we think about human activity — whether you’re in a government department or you’re a CEO or you’re a school teacher. So that, I really, as I look at sort of humankind since the enlightenment, I see enormous development on that one side — that rational, calculating side that brings us all this technology. But I think that technology can get us to that, that being whole, those whole human beings. And I do think that the first step is to integrate that caring, connected side of human nature into everything we do.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
As Reid said, when he thinks about an investment or if you’re a CEO thinking about your workforce, or if you are just thinking about the people, you know, see them whole. Think about who they are professionally and, in their career side, but think about what do, what do they care about, and who do they care about, and who do they care for? If we start there, I think that will start to infuse our sense of human nature. And we now have technologies that are going to enable us to replace a lot of the stuff that human beings have had to do on that calculating competitive side and make it easier for us and give us more time to that care — to devote to that caring side.
ARIA:
Anne-Marie, thank you so much. Really appreciate it.
REID:
Always a delight and a pleasure.
ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER:
Thank you. Such a pleasure to have this conversation.
REID:
Possible is produced by Wonder Media Network, hosted by Aria Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Shaun Young. Possible is produced by Edie Allard, Sara Schleede and Paloma Moreno Jiménez. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor.
ARIA:
Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Saida Sapieva, Ian Alas, Greg Beato, and Ben Relles. We’d also like to thank G. Denise Barksdale at New America and Little Monster Media Company.