CO-HOST JAMIE RICHARDSON: The JFK 35 podcast is made possible through generous support from the Blanch and Irving Laurie Foundation.
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JOHN F KENNEDY: I think machines can make life easier for men if men do not let the machines dominate them. And it's our intention to try to see that life is easier. The fact is life is easy because of machines.
CO-HOST MATT PORTER: More than half a century after John F Kennedy's presidency, we have seen a technological and digital revolution that has reshaped almost every aspect of our society. Today, we'll look back on what President Kennedy had to say about how innovations could change American life, and then speak with Congressman Ro Khanna, who represents a California district that includes Silicon Valley, about how that future has played out so far across the country. Next on JFK 35.
PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY: And so my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. [CHEERING AND APPLAUSE]
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MATT PORTER: Hello, I'm Matt Porter. Welcome to JFK 35. In 1960, our digital future and how technology could change the American economy still seem distant. In the early 60s, technological advancements brought televisions into almost every home, satellites into orbit, and airplanes that could travel at the speed of sound. But in our age of high speed internet, smartphones, tablets, and other devices we almost take technology for granted. But even in Kennedy's time, he was concerned about how these new technologies would affect the nation. In particular, as more complex machines were developed and began replacing human workers in places like factories and farms, Kennedy was asked about the concern over automation multiple times during his presidency, including this press conference on October 31st 1963.
REPORTER: Mr. President, thousands of jobs are lost every week to automation. The federal government is one of the leaders in automation. Do you think it is good for us as human beings to dehumanize work and sacrifice people to machines and money?
JOHN F KENNEDY: Well, I think it's all a question of degree and how it's done. Obviously, most of the comforts we now enjoy are the result of automation technology over a period of 100, 150 years. And there was, historically, efforts at various times to stop the introduction of machines which made the labor of men easier. So automation does not need to be, we hope, our enemy. Now, what is of concern now is this the combination of a rather intensive period of automation plus the fact that our educational system is not keeping up so that we have a-- we're graduating or dropping out of high school so many millions of young men and women who aren't able to operate in this new society, who have only physical labor to perform and they can't find enough jobs. And so that's what concerns us.
Now, as you know, we're retraining, job retraining is important in that area, vocational training, trying to combat school dropouts, trying to urge families to keep their children in school, all the rest of these efforts with which you are familiar. We have a proposal before the Congress for a new analysis of automation. And in answer to your question, I think machines can make life easier for men if men do not let the machines dominate them. And it's our intention to try to see that life is easier. The fact is life is easy because of machines. And I think it can provide new jobs, but I think it's going to take a good deal of wisdom by those of us in the government, as well as labor and management.
MATT PORTER: In another speech to members of the AFL-CIO in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Kennedy again spoke to the fears about machines replacing people in their jobs. President Kennedy told the group of union workers it was up to the country as a whole to determine if new innovations would result in disaster or a new better way to live for all Americans. He said, if the advancement of automation and New technologies is to be the key to quote, "a brighter future rather than the forerunner of economic distress" end quote, it will take the leadership of business, unions, and the government together to ensure the benefits of any new advancements are shared and don't leave millions of American workers behind.
Fast forward to today, the question now is, did we as a country live up to President Kennedy's challenge? Has the country showed the right leadership to ensure advancing technologies have helped everyone prosper, or have only some benefited from the technological revolutions while others have been left in the dust or abandoned? My colleague Jamie Richardson and I spoke with Congressman Ro Khanna last month, who has a new book about this exact question. And we'll take you to that interview now.
Well, we're joined here by Congressman Ro Khanna of California's 17th district. Representative Khanna's district includes the headquarters of major tech giants like Apple, Google, and Tesla. And he's published a new book called, Dignity in the Digital Age- Making Tech Work for All of Us. Representative Khanna, thank you for joining us.
RO KHANNA: Thank you for having me on.
MATT PORTER: Well, Representative Khanna, as I just said, your district is home to some of the world's biggest tech companies, but it's also a diverse district of almost 800,000 people. Why did you decide to write about this topic and what makes it important to discuss right now?
RO KHANNA: Well, my district has been a source of perhaps the greatest wealth generation seen in human history. And in the pandemic, the profits have increased 40%, $11 trillion of market cap. Apple has gone from $1 trillion to $3 trillion, largely because of the digitization of the economy. And young kids in Cupertino still believe in the promise of America. They're very optimistic. But the reality is that the economy hasn't been working for so many working families in so many places around this country who have seen jobs off-shored, who've seen their towns shuttered, who've seen kids having to leave. And I wrote this book to say, we need to have a much better plan of how we get economic opportunity to places left out in a modern economy, as opposed to telling people they should move and somehow they're just going to magically benefit from globalization.
MATT PORTER: Yeah. And even in the 1960s, President Kennedy and his administration saw the future of technology becoming more important in our lives. Now, they may not have predicted the iPhones, Facebook, and the world wide web, but Kennedy did speak about the sort of omnipresent presence that technology would have in our future generations. In the 1960s, there was a lot of hope and optimism regarding the future. People hoped that it would make lives easier, maybe result in shorter work weeks through the increased productivity. But Kennedy had the healthy fear, as well, of too much automation too fast and displacing workers. How do you feel this country has fared? Who of the winners and losers been in the technological evolution so far?
RO KHANNA: Well, there's no doubt technology can still have extraordinary impacts. I mean, we've seen this, of course, with the vaccines. We've seen this with the use of iPhones and Zooms that we're doing now, the information that we have on our fingertips with the ability to remain connected with our family and friends. But the reality is that the winners have been concentrated geographically. So there are five or six regions that have really had all of the wealth gains. They have been concentrated in terms of race. I mean, a lot of the wealth generation has excluded Black and Brown communities. They have been concentrated in terms of gender. A lot of the tech leaders have excluded women and have not been places where women have found it able to work or get funded. And so the challenge is that you have all of this economic opportunity and success producing products, in many ways, that have a lot of good benefits, some we can discuss that are negative. But the stakeholders, or the architects, of this technology are very exclusive.
MATT PORTER: You just described the people and places that have sort of been left behind in this digital revolution. You discuss empty storefronts, failing small towns, and rural cities overlooked by tech growth. How do you propose being able to reverse that trend and make the digital divide better between the tech towns like Boston and Seattle compared to the Springfields, Chillicothes, and other cities across America struggling to compete?
RO KHANNA: Well, it's in both of those places' interest. In places like Boston and Silicon Valley, you have huge cost of living, land is scarce, rents are very high. So to decentralize and to move away and creating opportunities is something that people in those communities would welcome. On the other hand, in a lot of these other places, you've had brain drain. You've had people having to leave even if they don't want to leave. And you haven't had economic vitality. And many of these places were very proud of their economic contributions.
One of the things I say is you can't replicate Boston and Silicon Valley everywhere, nor does every place want to be Boston or Silicon Valley. But you can create the middle class digital jobs, 25 million of them, across this country. When I think of that I think of Intel going to Ohio, to New Albany, Ohio-- 3,000 manufacturing jobs, 7,000 construction jobs, renovating that region with new economic activity. I think of people getting nine month courses at land-grant universities with digital proficiency and being able to be data management for retail, or be able to do a job in robotics, or to be able to do a job in smart appliances for refrigerators, examples I give in the book. Things that aren't saying, go become a coder, but be in the industry that you're in, but have these digital skills and competencies and not have to move. One last point on this, I mean, GM is hiring 3,000 people, which they need tech skills to make their cars. Those jobs shouldn't all be in Silicon Valley. We should have those jobs in Michigan. And we can do that with the right public-private partnerships and the right programs that get people these credentials.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: And you mentioned earlier about big tech historically not being a super equitable place, with tech companies across the board being very white, very male, and being hard for women to get traction at the upper level. Can you tell us more about the depth of this problem and what can be done to address it?
RO KHANNA: It's a very difficult situation. I mean, less than 1% of women of color get the venture capital funding. Think about that. Of the $120 billion, less than 1% is going to women of color. A lot of women get recruited at the companies, but then they leave because they don't feel like they're being promoted. They don't think they're having fair pay. There's still a lot of sexual harassment and sexism. I mean, it's gotten better, but-- and that's, by the way, not just in the workplace. But even if the workplace is technically fine and then you're having these parties, as Emily Chang documents in Brotopia, another book worth reading. It can really be a very negative environment for women to work. And the irony of that is women in the early part of the computer age led a lot of the technological advances. So it wasn't the case that they were excluded in the beginning. It's become a culture that has emerged that's been exclusive.
So we need legal changes. I called for changes and celebrate the diversification of boards that California has required. I think that has made a difference. I would have incentives, tax incentives to fund funds that are focused on women, that are focused on rural communities, that are focused on people of color. But then we also need cultural changes to realize that the diversity actually is good for innovation and it's good for democracy.
MATT PORTER: In January, we recently saw New York Mayor, Eric Adams, call workers and sort of low wage jobs quote, "low skill". Today, with the pandemic, many of those workers would be classified as essential. And you mentioned this idea that some call low-skilled workers in tech is prevalent with sort of the prestige and pay going to the software engineers and the executives. Well, many of those low wage workers would be delivery drivers, warehouse workers, would be deemed low-skill, even though they are also providing the heavy labor to make these companies succeed. How do you think these attitudes about the different workers need to change? And how can that happen?
RO KHANNA: Well, first of all, 2/3 of the jobs in this country don't require a computer or a laptop. That's hard for people to imagine who may be listening to the podcast. When most jobs are still jobs where you have to work manually on things or work with your hands or be present physically, and you can't just do them remote, most of these jobs as you pointed out are the essential jobs. And they certainly are not low-skilled jobs. Try doing it. Try being someone who is working at an Amazon warehouse, or try being someone who's a bus driver, or try being someone, as I had to do a number of times, serving people in a restaurant. These are very, very difficult jobs that most people wouldn't either have the resilience or the perseverance or the proper temperament-- to be abused by customers that you're serving-- to do. And we ought to treat them with respect.
We also ought to think about the perspective of someone who gets a job at a place like Amazon. In some sense, they've hit the lottery, right. You're working for one of the wealthiest companies ever created in the history of humankind. And you still can't support your family? And you're still going to work and being treated as, in some cases, an appendage to a robot? I mean think how frustrating that is that. You know that you're at a company that's worth trillions of dollars. You know you're at a company that's producing packages that land on my doorstep two to three times a week. And yet, you're not benefiting in any way from that digital wealth generation. And this is what the book's essence is talking about. There's a disconnect between all of the people who are participating in the economy in some way and those who are benefiting from the economic wealth generation and the opportunity of the digital economy. And I don't think we can start to stitch the country back together until we address those structural economic divides.
MATT PORTER: You know, I'm glad you mentioned Amazon just there. The pandemic has been pretty good for the Jeff Bezos and the Elon Musks of the world. How can these essential workers find their voice when speaking to those CEOs who hold billions of dollars in influence in their companies and in their lobbying efforts on the hill?
RO KHANNA: Well, I say they ought to be on the boards. They ought to have some perspective on the boards, like in Germany. But think about freedom because that's an underlying theme of the book. I very much believe in freedom. We obviously want our freedoms in terms of citizenship, but we want to make sure we're free in terms of who we vote for, what we espouse, but so much of our day is at work. And if at work you feel totally powerless, if you feel that you are being subject to the whims of your boss and your boss maybe an algorithm and you have no say, that is not a truly free life in the American sense of the word. So what I say is that the workers themselves ought to be able to participate in understanding the technology, in understanding and crafting their roles, in sharing in the prosperity.
And I'm not against Jeff Bezos being a billionaire. I recognize, actually, some of his genius for business. I just think that the workers can also be treated with dignity and prosper. And that is in the interest, actually, of the technology entrepreneurs long term.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: And related to that, you also say in your book that there's room for both these markets and the workers. And you call this a progressive capitalism. What does that mean and look like?
RO KHANNA: Oh it's heavily derivative, the idea of progressive capitalism, just in full candor. As I go through in the book though, Amartya Sen was a Nobel laureate and whose book, Development as Freedom, is 5 times as deep as mine. But Sen really articulates why markets matter. And markets matter in Sen's view because it's freedom to transact. You want to invent something, you shouldn't have to have the collective body give you permission. But to participate in these markets, what do you need? You need an education, you need health care, you need basic nutrition, you need to have grown up in a safe place. All of these people in Silicon Valley who are quote unquote, "self-made", they're more self-made than Donald Trump. They didn't get millions of dollars as inheritances. But they are often the kids of upper middle class professionals who many times went to private school, who certainly didn't have to worry about health, who had the luxury to take risks. And my point with progressive capitalism is I believe in markets, I believe in innovation, I believe in entrepreneurship. I just believe every person ought to have the basics, the basic capabilities as Send would put it, to participate in the market.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: And then going to thinking about the budget, the Kennedy era is kind of the heyday of the space race. And there was tons of investment in technology and science by the government. At the peak of the Apollo program, it was investing more than 4% of the National budget. Whereas there's less than 1% today. And in your book you call for a new Apollo movement to invest in technologies, a whole variety of technologies. How do you think that type of public investment could change the country and trajectory for the digital economy?
RO KHANNA: Well, President Kennedy was a visionary. And he was a visionary about the investment in the space race. He was a visionary about the investment in science and technology. And he understood some of those policies, by the way, when he proposed them, were not popular. People said, Oh, they're wasting money. Why are they doing that? Look at the Gallup polling. But it turned out that those investments actually spawned the GPS. They spawned the internet, which was a product of DARPA and Vint Cerf and DARPA. They spawned so much of the industry that we see in the United States. And similarly, we need to have the boldness to make those technology investments for our time in AI, in synthetic biology, in quantum computing, in clean energy, in electronics manufacturing, in semiconductors.
We want to lead the world. If you want to make sure America leads the 21st century, we need to have that technology excellence. And I think the technology speaks to something deeper than just the technology itself. It speaks to a belief in the future. In my view, that's one of the reasons President Kennedy still captures the imagination, because he had technology married to sort of a belief in human progress-- human progress for peace, human progress for better understanding, human progress for technology. And I still think America is an aspirational nation. And we want to have that technological progress to produce things in America while being inclusive.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: And do you think there is that political will that could get this marshaled in to do this? And if so, how do you do this in a divided Congress when you can't lose one single vote in the Senate?
RO KHANNA: Well, the good news is just this week, we introduced the Innovation Competition Act in the House. It's already passed the Senate. It would be the biggest investment in science and technology since President Kennedy's time in the Cold War. It will invest in all the critical technologies I said. Senator McConnell voted for it in the Senate. I expect it to pass the House and get to President Biden's desk. And I know he will sign it. He campaigned on it. And that will be a huge achievement. It doesn't get all the headlines, but it will be a massive investment in the science and technology future of this country. And it's going to create those tech hubs across America.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: That's excellent. That's great news. Thinking about our day-to-day lives with technology, most of us are on social media in some form or do our online shopping. And as the US has become more divided, part of this can be attributed to kind of this darker side of these algorithms that are aimed to be profitable, kind of regardless of intent, and rewarding content that trends in conspiracies or racism or other forms of hate that can easily get audiences and spread really easily. How can we deal with this racism, sexism, and overall hatred of others emboldened and exacerbated by technology?
RO KHANNA: It's a big challenge. Technology has a dual edged purpose here. On the one hand, it has given voice to language of protest, the language of anger. Sometimes anger is justified-- anger of the Black Lives Matter movement, anger of the MeToo movement, anger of movements against dictatorships. And social media platforms have enabled that. On the other hand, they gave rise to QAnon. They helped facilitate January 6th. So these are very difficult questions. First, I think we need legal reform. If you have the incitement of violence, as was evident on Facebook where people were literally calling for assassinations on January 6th with specific time and place, that content needs to be removed. That content needs to be reported. We don't have that yet. If you have massive human rights violations going on these platforms as you had in Myanmar, as you had in some places in India, people should have access to US courts to stop that.
Beyond that though, social media companies need to think of themselves as media companies with some obligation beyond profit maximization. And they ought to think about how they can create forums for the exchange of ideas, for exposure to a diversity of perspectives, given a role an obligation of more than profit maximization. I've also proposed that we have sort of public social media forums like we have public television, just to add more plurality to the discursive spaces. If we do that, if we have podcasts like this and more places to engage, that would help.
One final thought, we need to give people agency. One of the reasons I think people are on social media and like and share and tweet and retweet is they feel that's how they can make a difference in a democracy. But maybe we can empower them in more ways, having town halls where their input actually could be taken seriously by Congress and they feel like they're actually having impact. And then they may feel other ways of engaging is worth their time, as opposed to thinking that this was the only avenue for self-expression.
MATT PORTER: The end of your book, you end with a vision from Frederick Douglass' essay on Composite Nation. Can you tell us a little bit about that vision he had and why you think it resonates for you, and why it would resonate for all of us 150 years later?
RO KHANNA: So I think Composite Nation by Frederick Douglass is arguably the second or third greatest speech in American history, after Lincoln's second inaugural and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Here is Douglass, a free man who had been a slave almost all his life and who chooses, in 1869, to defend the right of Chinese immigrants to come to the United States. And he says, don't worry if you don't agree with all of the Chinese conceptions and attitudes. They have been a civilization for thousands of years. There's probably something to it. And when they come to the free air of America, we will take the best of that and they will shed the parts that don't fit in to the American ethos. But from all of these diverse heritages, we will become one nation-- a composite nation of a unique American culture, thicker in concept than what the great philosopher Rawls or other philosophers have called for, which is that we're great because of our commitment to procedural justice-- our commitment to liberty, equality, constitution. Douglass says, No. We have an American culture. That American culture is a culture where we're all co-equal workers in creating it. And that it is through the exchange of all of these different cultures that it emerges. And it emerges with some legitimacy if we all have equality in creating it.
And by the way, it can be changed. It can be changed over time. And its dynamism is what makes that so unique. And I still believe that. I believe that we're on the quest of becoming the first major multiracial, multi-ethnic democracy in the world. And if we can have greater economic empowerment so that people have this equal voice in creating American culture and if we can have these exchanges with other cultures to help build an American composite nation, then that would be our greatest contribution to human civilization. I still believe very much in that promise.
MATT PORTER: Well, thank you for joining us, Congressman, from the road in Washington, and for giving us a look at how we can build that bridge across the digital divide.
RO KHANNA: Thank you. I appreciate very much your reading the book in such detail.
MATT PORTER: Appreciate it.
JAMIE RICHARDSON: Thank you.
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MATT PORTER: If you are interested in learning more on this topic, you can visit our podcast page at jfklibrary.org/jfk35. On the page, we include more links to our archives related to President Kennedy and his concerns about advancing technology. And you can also watch our recent Kennedy Library forum with Congressman Ro Khanna on YouTube. If you have questions or story ideas, always email us at jfk35pod@jfklfoundation.org or tweet at us at JFK Library, using the hashtag #JFK35. If you liked what you heard today, please consider subscribing to our podcast or leaving us a review wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening and have a great day.
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