♪ next on "kqed newsroom" the future of work, from the factory floor to your office. and tunneling through the bay area to protect the water supply. plus, a fair to remember. the jewel city created just for san francisco. ♪ good evening, and welcome to "kqed newsroom." i'm thuy vu. >> and i'm scott shafer. on tonight's show, a look back at the bay area's past, present and a glimpse of its future. we begin with an event that happened 100 years ago, the 1915 world's fair. as joshua johnson shows us, it helped transform san francisco into the kozcosmopolitan center

that it is today. >> they called it the jewel city. it rose from the mud flats of san francisco's waterfront. a cosmopolitan wonderland built to last just ten months. one of the only vestiges of this lost city is this building, the palace of fine arts. but in 1915 this was just one of many grand palaces that lined the avenues of a 635-acre mini metropolis constructed to host the world's fair in the area known today as the marina district. the fair drew some 19 million people, mostly for the thrill of exploring displays and demonstrations that highlighted the progress of industry, technology, and culture over the centuries. >> if you pushed through the turnstiles, you'd find yourself directly in front of a

435-foot-tall stepped tower. 43 stories tall. adorned with more than 100,000 colored jewels hung in such a way that they could move in the breezes, so the entire building sparkled day and night. >> the fair also called the panama-pacific international exposition to celebrate the completion of the panama canal was an opportunity for san franciscans to show the world that they had risen from the ashes of the earthquake and fires that demolished the city in 1906. the fair's aura of opulence was intended to set the stage for san francisco's rise as a cultural and economic powerhouse establishing it as america's gateway to trade with the pacific. to make the fair a success the city's diverse communities had to come to the table and put

aside polarizing social and political tensions, some of which persist today. >> we had the unions and the commercial organizations and the city itself. and many of these people really didn't like each other very much. and yet they banded together and really worked in concert towards this goal of creating the jewel city. >> the fairgrounds featured exhibition halls dedicated to everything from machinery to horticulture within which were some 80,000 displays. there was also an area called the joy zone, with amusement park-style rides and concessions. visitors could marvel at daredevils like art smith looping his flaming plane through the sky. foreign and state pavilions displayed their own attractions, including the liberty bell transported all the way from philadelphia.

fine art sculptures appeared around every bend, and revolutionary lighting techniques bathed the fairgrounds in a swirl of color. luminaries like henry ford, thomas edison and luther burbank were on hand to showcase the inner workings of modern industry, technology, and science. model ts and levi jeans rolled off assembly lines in mini factories. and visitors could see life-saving infant ink batore incubators, the latest typewriters, and a working replica of the panama canal. although a world apart from the carnage of world war i, under way across the atlantic, the fair was no escape from many of the social struggles unfolding on the home front. class tensions and prejudices that divided san francisco and much of america were on full display here, including derogatory depictions of different ethnic groups and the barring of african-americans from being hired for certain

jobs at the fair. >> but the fair was meant to be sort of inclusive to gain the broad public support that the fair officials needed to make this happen they billed it as something that was going to create jobs and bring the city together. and for some groups that was really true, and for other groups it wasn't. >> but there were also displays conventions, and other opportunities within the fair for social debate. >> some of the foreign delegations actually protested against some of the more racist concessions and got them changed. >> in an era without the internet or other wide-reaching forms of communication, this world's fair was a place where diverse groups could voice their concerns and try to reshape perceptions. it also provided a lens through which to observe the shaping of san francisco's future as an epicenter of economic and cultural innovation.

although the entire fair complex was dismantled 100 years ago today in 2015 the public is being invited to step inside the restored walls of the only remaining building, the palace of fine arts, into a space now known as the innovation hangar, where people can observe and interact with artists, makers, and others as they develop ideas that could shape our future. >> i think one of the most important things about 1915 was that you could really bring together millions, in this case 19 million people, to have a shared observation on some of the most important innovations of our time. so many times right now in our world we interact virtually. and it's important. but there's still something to be said for the idea of people coming together to experience something together. >> the fair centennial will also be marked by the opening of an extensive exhibit by the california historical society year-long music and arts

festivals, and other celebrations around the city that invite us to reflect on the continuing legacy of the jewel city. >> san francisco remained such a center of technology and innovation, and i really believe that the seed of that can be seen within the exhibit palaces of the 1915 exposition. it also succeeded in attracting tourists and investment in the entire state and immigrants, and these were all goals that went on for years afterwards. it was really a turning point in san francisco's history. >> around the same time as the world's fair, work was beginning on another endeavor to push the bay area into the modern age. a water supply system known as hetch hetchy. >> now crews are trying to bring this system into the 21st century before the next earthquake. >> the water comes from yosemite

and feeds portions of the east bay, south bay, and peninsula. in october a tunnel that runs underneath san francisco bay was completed. by the end of this month crews will finish another tunnel from the sunol valley to fremont. after that they'll complete the cal veras dam. here's kqed senior science editor andrea kissic. >> less than a mile from mission boulevard in fremont engineers with the san francisco public utilities commission are descend descending deep underground to inspect the progress on a new tunnel. >> this piece right here, weld this in place concrete it, and then we'll be ready -- >> this nine-foot diameter tunnel will soon carry more than 62000 gallons a minute on average each day to four bay area counties. it's a key step in upgrading and replacing parts of a system that has served the bay area for 80 years. >> we're here at the new

rivington tunnel. this is one of the most critical pieces of our system. because when we're done in february and we put this tunnel into service it's going to carry water to serve 2.6 million people in the bay area. >> dan wade is the director of the hetch hetchy water system improvement program. at a cost of nearly $5 billion it's one of the largest engineering projects in the nation. >> the new irvington tunnel is steel lined and it has a concrete reinforcement. and that ensures that we have a reliable earthquake-resistant tunnel well into the future. >> the san francisco public utilities commission is in charge of making sure the taps keep flowing with this water. it originates 167 miles away at hetch hetchy reservoir in yosemite. but much of the system was built in the 1920s and '30s. today a major earthquake could leave parts of the bay area without water for a month. >> one of the primary goals of the water system improvement program is to ensure that within

24 hours after a major earthquake we will be able to deliver water to the customers. >> and to pay for it water rates have been going up. way up. for the system's customers who live in san francisco san mateo alameda, and santa clara counties. >> 1/3 of the customers live in san francisco, and so they're going to pay 1/3 of the bill. and the other 2/3 will be paid by our customers outside of san francisco. san francisco residents will see their water rates approximately triple by the time the program is done. >> the voter-approved program began in 2004 and is scheduled to end in 2018. but there's a rumbling urgency to get it done. >> we have the calaveras fault, the hayward fault in the east bay, and then of course the san andreas fault on the peninsula, and our water system crosses all three of those major faults. the u.s. geological survey a few years ago predicted that by 2035 there's more than a 63% chance

that there will be a major earthquake here in the bay area. so we're truly in a race against time. >> the work is on track and occasionally even ahead of schedule. >> one of our most impressive projects is the new bay tunnel which is a five-mile pipeline underneath the san francisco bay and it's the first true tunnel that's been constructed underneath the bay. >> to help shield it from the shaking during an earthquake the team built this new tunnel in a bed of thick clay, 100 feet beneath san francisco bay. finished in october, it replaces two pipelines built in 1925 and 1936 and carries water from the east bay to san francisco and the peninsula. >> the hetch hetchy water system has been serving us very well throughout the 20th century and into the 21st. however, the infrastructure is old. it's aging. it's in need of repair or replacement or upgrades.

>> with most of the roughly 80 upgrades and replacements done the construction crews are hard at work on the toughest and biggest project of them all. >> calaveras dam was built in 1925, and it forms calaveras reservoir which is the largest local reservoir that's part of our system. because of the recognition that this dam was vulnerable to a large earthquake here on the calaveras fault we needed to permanently restrict the reservoir level to about 40% of capacity. >> this new dam is being built near the alameda-santa clara county line out of earth and rock like the old dam. the new dam, however will be seismically stronger, which will allow the calaveras reservoir to fill to capacity. 31 billion gallons. >> california's in a severe drought. we need this reservoir for drought carry-over storage. in fact, the program has a goal of meeting a drought period of 7 1/2 years tone sure that we

can continue to supply water to our customers in that length of drought. >> as construction crews scour the valley walls and erect a watertight foundation, a reminder will remain of what was once the world's largest earth and rock dam. >> when this new dam is complete in 2018 we will actually cut a notch and remove about 1/3 of the existing dam so that the reservoir can come up against the face of the new dam. >> dan wade and his team are more than halfway done replacing the dam. a critical step in protecting hetch hetchy's water from a big quake that could strike at any moment. >> water's a precious resource. we cannot live without it. we're doing something that's going to have a lasting effect to ensure the long-term health and safety and economic viability of the san francisco bay area. >> the digging at the calaveras dam has uncovered hundreds of fossils. paleontologist jim walker showed us a few of his finds.

>> every day i come out here i'm very excited. i get to look for fossils from creatures that lived 20 million years ago. today we found two vertebrae from a whale. this is a creature that was probably between the size of a large dolphin and a killer whale. in the past we've found sharks' teeth. this is a tooth of a megalodon. it's a prehistoric shark that lived 20 million years ago. this individual based on the tooth side would have been about 25 to 30 feet long. to date we have over 650 fossils. >> from fossils to the future. >> automation is revolutionizing work and the workplace. we see it at companies like amazon, where robots fill orders in the warehouse, and also at tesla, where they help build cars, and here in our own television studios we have robotic cameras. joining us now to discuss this revolution are john markoff, "new york times" reporter and

author of the forthcoming book "machines of loving grace: the quest for common ground between humans and robots." and technology forecaster and stanford professor paul saffo. welcome to you both. paul let's begin with you. what do you see as the next phase of automation? >> well, the next phase is clearly the impact of robots and the impact of robots on our jobs. we've been losing jobs to automation for a very long time over 100 years. the difference is in the past machines destroyed jobs but they also created more jobs than they destroyed. and something has happened in the recent past, the last ten years where in fact we seem to be destroying more jobs than we're creating. that's the big issue. >> and as you see -- if you think of this as a baseball game what inning are we in? in terms of the percentage of jobs that are ultimately going to be filled by automation, by robots. >> i would think of decades instead of innings. we're at the start of a multidecade process. it's already affecting people

today. but this is going to be a 30-year transition to a very different world and lots of turbulence in the meantime. >> and john, you know paul touched on how we're not creating as many jobs as we've seen in the past with other technological revolutions. as you researched your book what did you learn about the benefits of having robots in the workplace aside from the cost savings? >> well, there are obvious and just dramatic benefits. i mean, things are more efficient. you save labor costs. and oftentimes the quality of the jobs can actually be better, or jobs that are bad go away. but i'm a little bit of a skeptic on the question of whether we have a clear answer of whether technology just kills jobs. if you look at what's going on right now in our country, there's this remarkable debate about jobs and automation that's sprung up again for the first time in a long time. and it's kind of like rashomon. everybody's looking at what's

going on and everybody has a different opinion. and i don't think -- >> different opinion about? >> about whether technology this time around is killing more jobs than it's creating. i think it's still an open question. >> what's the equation? how does a company decide when it's worthwhile to go to automation? >> it depends on the company. >> it's sort of two parts. first one is cost savings. so we saw the wave of offshoring after 2000, jobs going to china for manufacturing. but as the labor costs in china rose, that became less appealing. more importantly you had companies like i know of one solar company that reshored its jobs to arizona because what they looked at and said wait a second, the labor cost is only a fraction of our manufacturing cost and what we really need is to have the designers and engineers next to the manufacturing floor so they can look at it more closely. but beyond that the other piece on manufacturing is it isn't just robots replacing human

assemblers. we're designing systems that could not possibly be assembled by humans, that can only be assembled by machines. >> that begs the question, then. looking to the future. because some people are scared of this. they feel like their livelihoods are on the line. so what types of jobs will automation create? and then what types of jobs will it kill? >> there's a new category of job that didn't exist ten years ago and no one thought it would. the job of search engine optimization. there are probably tens of thousands of people around the world doing that work. on the other side of the coin what's different about this wave of automation is it's affecting white-collar workers as much as blue-collar workers. >> not just physical labor. >> intellectual labor. >> but this is a key part of why this is a story now. that automation has been taking away blue-collar jobs forever. but a bunch of very smug white-collar workers, lawyers, for example said well, no robot could possibly replace my job.

guess what? you know bots. a difference between a sxroebt a bot. a bot is a piece of software. a robot is something that looks scary and moves around. bots are replacing lawyers today. >> they're replacing reporters in some cases. >> a.p. announced they're going to announce -- a lot of their cub reporter stories are going away. >> so in general, though, is it going to be initially in this initial phase is it going to be more likely physical jobs that get replaced or -- >> physical jobs have been replaced for decades and decades and decades. what's happening now is that the top of the workforce is starting to be eliminated as well. quite new. >> the way to think about it is any job that has any element of repetition is at risk. >> but let me make an important point here because against that background of worry and doubt three recent books have pointed to a particular kind of

automation event, and that is instagram with its 13 employees they say in these books has displaced 140,000 workers at kodak. >> yeah, that's dead wrong. >> and it's absolutely dead wrong. instagram could not have come into existence before the mature internet. and the mature internet probably created, what, 2 to 5 million jobs? a tremendous number. many of them quite good jobs. so it's a much more nuanced situation. >> i'm wondering if there's a -- go ahead. >> just to say on that, yes, it creates jobs. but the jobs are less stable. seo is hot at moment. >> seo. >> sorry. search engine optimization. this is like if you could code in html, which is the language of the world wide web in 1997 you could get a great job. today you know, if you don't know html by the time you're a sophomore at stanford you're going to be taking a remedial class. >> is there a risk of overreliance on automation? and i'm thinking, for example

of the asiana airlines crash, where the pilot was so used to flying on automated flights that he couldn't really do -- >> actually, a better example is air france 447. >> the one that crashed -- >> in the middle of the atlantic. that went from level flight to hitting the water in 37 seconds. and what people don't realize, they say to themselves gee, i wouldn't want a robot to fly my plane. guess what? if you fly in planes today, it is being flown by a robot. >> sure. >> a pilot is incapable, a human is incapable of flying an a-340 or a 7 -- >> but that's what i mean. isn't that a risk? >> there are risks, but look at the risk of human driving, for example. there is a debate now going on about the notion of self-driving cars and what kinds of accidents they'll have. but i would argue that humans are such bad drivers that however bad or however many accidents we have from robot drivers they will pale compared to the carnage that's created every year by human drivers.

>> let me ask you about the broader economic picture here. you know, much of our economy is based on people, you know buying things. robots don't buy things. they don't pay into social security. they don't pay taxes. what does this mean for us down the line in the broader market in terms of the economic impact? >> so you know, robots themselves don't buy things. but robots -- the deployment of robots can actually create as well as destroy jobs. i mean, this debate that i'm seeing, on one hand you have computer scientists like moshe vardi a well-known computer scientist at rice university who argues that no jobs at all by 2035 -- 2045. all jobs gone. and on the other side you have the international federation of robotics that argues that robots, the deployment of robots is going to create a job renaissance. >> who's right? >> stay tuned. >> i don't really know. >> in many ways it's an echo of what happened. this whole idea of robots stealing jobs is like a comet on

a loopy orbit that shows up about every 20 years. and my favorite episode of this was in the mid '60s when sociologist daniel bell and others said robots are going to take all of our jobs by 1985 and the result is the great social challenge of 1985 would be trying to figure out what to do with all of our spare time. >> john your book of course talks about finding common ground between people and robots. what would that look like? >> well, i think it has to do with how we design these systems. for example siri is a bot. right? and it's designed to let us interact with it. and it's designed in a sense to be a partner, not to be a master, not to be a slave. and i think we have to actually think about that carefully. we have an opportunity to design these machines with which we're going to be interacting not only like siri but they're starting to move around and you know, we're going to be interacting with them as they walk around our environment. >> but do we want that necessarily? like for example, ucsf hospital

now there are robots going up and down the halls. i don't know what they're doing. delivering pills or sheets. >> all of the above. >> tell him the example of what you saw at the stanford golf course. >> this is -- so i parked at the stanford golf course a morning probably seven months ago and a woman pulled up next to me in a tesla. and she pulled her golf cart out and set it up. and then she walked away and the golf cart followed her. and my jaw hit the ground. but then of course i googled it. and you can have a robotic golf cart for 1,795. i mean, it's an early example. but you know google had andy ruben set up a robotics division. and his whole intent is building a class of machines that can move around autonomously. not just cars but things that walk or roll. >> and google bought a bunch of robotics companies recently. >> that's right. >> in the future do you see a phase where we -- where the way we communicate with devices and with robots will be very much like the way we communicate with

humans? will they evolve to that point? and how do you prepare for that? especially with the next generation coming into the workplace. what kind of training do we have to do with them? >> well, you know, we'll talk to our robots. but more importantly, think about a future where your robot communicates with you the way your dog communicates with you. that it very carefully observes you. you're not paying any attention. and this device is quietly in your life anticipating your mood or what your needs are and responding. >> and i think that happens first in the world of elder care. >> yeah. >> we don't have the people power to take care of an aging population, and robots potentially are a way that we can do that. >> what do we lose by not having that interaction, though? >> it depends on how we design the machines. we're basically -- we're imbuing those machines with our qualities. and it's a design question. and we can make them as science fiction, horrible -- >> an example of that is a

design question. the problem with automation on airplanes is things go right so much of the time that when things go wrong there's not enough time for the pilot to intervene. so at nasa they did a research project where the plane asks for advice and help even when it doesn't need it so it keeps the human in the mode of responding to the machine. that's the sort of stuff we're going to see, as these devices come in our lives. >> on that note we'll leave it there. this has been a fascinating discussion. we could have gone on for another, i don't know four hours here. thank you both. paul saffo with stanford and john markoff with the "new york times." >> thank you. >> and for more of our coverage please go to kqednews.org. >> thanks for joining us. i'm scott shafer. >> and i'm thuy vu. thanks for joining us. have a good night. ♪

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