Peter Thiel: we should be more worried about the lack of automation than excess automation

From an interview with Erik Weinstein on The Portal podcast, episode 1:

If we have runaway automation, and if we’re building robots that are smarter humans and can do everything humans can do, then we probably have to have a conversation about a universal basic income or something like that. And you’re going to end up with a very weird society. I don’t see the automation happening at all.

When one actually concretizes it, it’s not quite clear how disruptive the automation that’s happening really is. It’s a version of the tech stagnation thing. It’s always: the last 40 or 50 years things have been slow, we’re always told it’s about to accelerate like crazy. That may be true. In some ways I hope that’s true. But if one was simply extrapolating from the last 40 to 50 years perhaps the default is that we should be more worried about the lack of automation than excess automation.