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A California County Just Made Counting the Jobs a Robot Takes a Condition of Its Permit · Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts

• 0:00
  [Host] This is Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts, the show where a county government got to the robots before Congress did. The San Mateo Daily Journal reported that on August eleventh, the county's Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to write the first local rulebook in America for putting a humanoid robot to work.
• 0:19
  [Guest] A resolution from Supervisor Ray Mueller, directing staff to draft an ordinance requiring a permit before a humanoid works a commercial shift.
• 0:27
  [Host] A permit. Like a liquor license, but for a machine?
• 0:31
  [Guest] Four conditions so far. A kill switch, lithium-ion fire gear for first responders, a trained human supervising on site, and systematic tracking of job displacement.
• 0:41
  [Host] The county wants companies to report how many people the robot replaced?
• 0:45
  [Guest] That's the condition nobody in America has written down before. Kill switches and fire codes already exist. Counting the humans is new.
• 0:54
  [Host] Why fire gear?
• 0:55
  [Guest] Permit fees buy it. Mueller told NBC Bay Area they want the equipment for lithium-ion fires before the robots arrive. We see this coming at us now, he said.
• 1:06
  [Host] Which jobs?
• 1:07
  [Guest] Hospitality, logistics, customer service, emergency services. Work a warehouse or a hotel desk there, and your employer files paperwork before a machine takes part of your shift.
• 1:17
  [Host] And if I work a warehouse in Ohio?
• 1:20
  [Guest] Nothing. There's no state or federal framework for commercial humanoids in the United States. One California county is the entire American rulebook.
• 1:28
  [Host] Is this real, or a press release with a vote attached?
• 1:33
  [Guest] It's a resolution, not an ordinance. Staff still have to draft it, and public hearings come first.
• 1:39
  [Host] Test it against a robot working today.
• 1:42
  [Guest] Tau Robotics began offering humanoid home cleaning in San Francisco last month. Thirty dollars an hour, invitation only, waitlist.
• 1:49
  [Host] Is the robot actually doing the work, or is somebody flying it?
• 1:54
  [Guest] Somebody's flying it. A person drives that robot remotely from a central office, with AI assisting. CEO Alex Koch told ABC7 many of his early customers didn't have a cleaner before, or didn't hire one often.
• 2:07
  [Host] So what San Mateo is preparing to permit is, today, a human being with a remote control.
• 2:14
  [Guest] For that service, yes. If someone in another city drives the robot, was a job replaced, or moved somewhere the county can't see?
• 2:23
  [Host] Does anyone know how to count that?
• 2:25
  [Guest] Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo tried, in Robots and Jobs: Evidence from US Labor Markets, in the Journal of Political Economy. One more robot per thousand workers cut the employment to population ratio about two tenths of a point, and wages about four tenths of a percent.
• 2:43
  [Host] That sounds small enough to ignore.
• 2:45
  [Guest] Small, but concentrated, and measured by commuting zone. They counted industrial arms bolted to a floor, in the same place as the jobs they took.
• 2:55
  [Host] And San Mateo is trying to count something that isn't bolted anywhere.
• 3:00
  [Guest] Now count a machine whose driver could sit three time zones away. Its displacement column reads zero while the work leaves anyway.
• 3:08
  [Host] Then what does a permit buy? A kill switch saves one worker in one bad moment.
• 3:14
  [Guest] A license never sold competence. It sold you a named party with insurance standing behind the work. A terms of service page names nobody. The county is manufacturing somebody to hold responsible.
• 3:26
  [Host] Then the dodge is obvious. Work in a county that won't ask.
• 3:31
  [Guest] Local permitting is the oldest veto in American government, but it only holds where a community can afford to use it. Make San Mateo expensive, and the machines move to a county with a thinner budget and a quieter board.
• 3:46
  [Host] Patrick Deglon calls the moment the cheapest reliable provider of a service stops being human the Substitution Threshold, in his book Unscarcity. San Mateo is licensing that moment while there's still a person on the other end.
• 4:00
  [Guest] For more on liability, licensing, and who gets to veto the machines, head to unscarcity dot ai. The book is on Amazon, the audiobook on Spotify. This has been Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts.