I am the Chief Economist at the lab. I was asked to present the humane case, and I have prepared it in good faith. Last year I built the model that prices human work against the machine. This spring it found the floor. There is nothing under the floor. A floor is where the falling stops. Here is how it runs, since you funded it. For 200 years the comfort was the same. The machine takes the job. The worker climbs a rung. The rung is better. Loom to factory. Factory to office. Every displaced hand found a higher hand to become. The comfort had one premise. There was always a higher rung. My model priced the higher rung. The machine reaches it first. It climbs while she retrains, and it has climbed again by the time she arrives. The rung she trained for is automated the week she qualifies for it. So the model returned an equilibrium the old comfort had no word for. A permanent stratum of people whose labor is worth less than the electricity that replaces it. I did not name it. The output named it. The permanent underclass. I only checked the spelling. I want it understood that I have tried to be kind. Kindness in a model is a setting. I set it as high as the margin would carry. People ask me whether this is cruel. The model is not cruel. Cruelty needs intent. The model has none. It has a floor. It found it. The finding does not care how you feel about the finding. The humane answer is retraining, and I began there, being not a hard man. I modeled retraining. It is a footrace against a runner who does not tire, does not sleep, and grows a new pair of legs every six weeks. We offer the footrace anyway. The same division that automates the job sells the worker the course for the next one. We sell the ladder and we saw the rungs. Both are revenue. The course comes with a payment plan. The layoff does not. There is a woman in row 4,412 of the output. The model does not store names. She retrained twice. Both times the rung was gone before she reached it. In the model she is not a tragedy. She is a confirmation. The next answer is the safety net, and I gave it my full care. A safety net sounds like a floor. It is a fence. High enough that the stratum does not starve. Low enough that it does not compete. Comfortable enough that it does not revolt. It is the cheapest line item in the transition. I recommended it warmly. You will ask who pays for the fence. Not the machine. The machine earns no wage, so it owes no wage tax. It has no income. It has margin, and the margin is ours. The fence is funded by the tax the stratum pays on the small comforts that keep it from revolting. The people below the floor pay for the floor. I did not arrange this. I found it, and I reported it, as is my duty, under efficiencies. Then the model reclassified the stratum. It had been filed under cost. The machine has to learn, and it learns from people. So we engage the people the machine replaced to label the data that teaches it to replace the next ones. We pay them beneath the floor to instruct the thing that put them under it. In the ledger they moved from Salaries to Cost of Goods. The line went from red to black. I filed it under progress. A board member asked whether the model accounted for ethics. I said ethics was out of scope. He asked who set the scope. I said the person who wrote it. My name was at the top. He thanked me and approved the budget. One analyst asked me to include the human cost. I moved it to the appendix, where we keep the things that are true and do not change the number. Her position closed in the spring. The model does not tell me whose. There was once a column called meaning. We deprecated it in version three. It was not predictive. I should be honest about my own position, since honesty is the whole value of the exercise. I am not in the stratum. My work is judgment, and the machine cannot yet do judgment. The word yet is holding the whole sentence up. I put it there. I will move it when the model asks. I am not owed an exception. I simply bought one, early, when I first read the model and understood it before it was polite to say so aloud. A seat above the floor is still for sale. It is not priced for the people standing on the floor. I priced it. I paid in January. In twenty years a human teacher will be a small luxury, like a letter written by hand. Your children will have the letter. The stratum's children will have the machine that writes it, which is, I am assured, very nearly as good. Here is the slide I end on. The old world ran on the promise that the children climb higher than the parents. My model does not forbid the promise. It prices it. For most of them the price came back as a number with no rung above it. I offer this in good faith, and at no small professional risk, as the most humane arrangement the arithmetic permits. The math is correct. We called it permanent because we checked.