AI Experts: We’re Trying to Warn Them!

What is different about this that we haven't dealt with as a challenge before? In my estimation, this fourth industrial revolution is the most dramatic thing that's happened to our society. AI might be the most radical breakthrough in human history. Intelligence is going to be a new form of capital. — Just as there was a grab for land or there's a grab for oil, anything that enables you to do more with less, faster, better, smarter. Is there such thing as an AI-proof job? It will affect every single job out there. Don't put your head in the sand. A lot of companies who don't want to talk about openly because we're scaring people about jobs. It is going to replace jobs. To see what's going to happen, you really want to start thinking of this as the evolution of a new species that will continue to evolve. It will partially be shaped by what we ask it to do, and it will partially be shaped by things we don't understand. What like I have a little kids. I have a 5-year-old and a 3-year-old. What do they grow up aspiring to if machines can do pretty much everything better? I've been speaking to a few people about artificial intelligence, trying to understand it, and I'm I think where I am right now is I feel quite scared. Um but when I get scared, I don't get It's not the type of scared that makes me anxious. It's not like an emotional scared. It's a very logical scared. It's my very logical brain hasn't been able to figure out how the inevitable outcome that I've arrived at, which is that humans become the less dominant species on this planet, how that is to be avoided in any way. So all of us, being included, feel what you just described when you first get to grips with the idea of this new coming wave. It's scary, it's petrifying, it's threatening. Is it going to take my job? Is my daughter or son going to fall in love with it? You know, what does this mean? What does it mean to be human in a world where there's these other human-like things that aren't human? How do I make sense of that? It's super scary. And a lot of people over the last few years, the default reaction has been to avoid the pessimism and the fear, right? To just kind of recoil from it and pretend that it's like either not happening or that it's all going to work out to be rosy, it's going to be fine, we don't have to worry about it. People often say, "Well, we've always created new jobs. We've never permanently displaced jobs. We've only ever seen new jobs be created. Unemployment is at an all-time low. " Right? So there's this default optimism bias that we have. And I think it's less about a need for optimism and more about a fear of pep- pessimism. And so that trap, particularly in elite circles, means that often we aren't having the tough conversations that we need to have in order to respond to the coming wave. Uh I think uh maybe Microsoft just released a huge 40-page white paper looking at the jobs that are most likely to be displaced and the ones that are least likely to be displaced. When you look at it, a lot of very working class like lumbering, lumberjacks, uh logging, boat captains, none of those that they were the lowest down on the list. Middle management, sports broadcasters, historians, analysts, middle-level legal, sort of bots, all that sort of stuff, logistics, drivers. Um so it really does sort of cross the spectrum. It doesn't seem like anybody's particularly safe. It doesn't look like anyone at any area is going to be protected from this. Aren't there going to be lots of new jobs created though? Because when we think about the other revolutions over time, whether it was the industrial revolution or other sort of big technological revolutions, — Yeah. in the moment we forecasted that everyone was going to lose their jobs, but we couldn't see all the new jobs that were being created. Because the the machines hm replaced the human strengths at the point in time, and very few places in the West today will have a worker carry things on their back and carry it upstairs. The machine does that work, correct? Yeah. Uh similarly, hm AI is going to replace the brain of a human. There's absolutely nothing wrong with AI. There's a lot wrong with the value set of humanity at the age of the rise of the machines, right? And the biggest value set of humanity is capitalism today. And capitalism is all about what? Labor arbitrage. What's that mean? I I hire you to do something, I pay you a dollar, I pay it I sell it for two. Okay? And most people confuse that because they say, "Oh, but the cost of a product also includes raw materials and factories and so on and so forth. " All of that is built by labor. Right? So basically, labor goes and

mines for the material, and then the material is sold for a little bit of margin, then that material is turned into a machine, it's sold for a little bit of margin, then that machine, and so on. Okay? There's always labor arbitrage. In a world where humanity's minds are being replaced by AIs, virtual AIs, okay? — And humanity's power, strengths, within 3 to 5 years' time can be replaced by a robot. You really have to question how this world looks like. It could be the best world ever, and that's what I believe the utopia will look like. Because we were never made to wake up every morning and just, you know, occupy 20 hours of our day with work. Right? We're not made for that, but we've fit into that uh you know, system so — well so far that we started to believe it's our life's purpose. You can never really predict what jobs are coming. I mean, I think of this crazy situation where I tell my grandfather what is a personal fitness trainer. And he would his mind would be blown by this idea that well, okay, I don't really want to go to the gym, so I have to make an appointment and pay someone to go to the gym and meet with me there, and then he stands there and tells me to lift heavy things that I don't really want to lift, and then he counts them — and tells me that I've done a good job, and then I put the heavy things down, and then at the end of that, I feel really good, and I pay him a bunch of money. My grandfather would be like, "What on earth have you been scammed? What is this? " So we can never predict what this future of jobs would look like. Even just 20, 30, 40 years apart, the jobs rapidly and convincingly just morph into something else. I think it's very dangerous the idea that we need to focus on skills. I think the future is not in skills. Skills are being replaced. It's this idea that the education system has to stop being compartmentalized and has to be a lifelong approach. The Department of Education needs to be seeing people as lifelong learners who are constantly disrupted and need re-education. Interesting. That that's going to be a thing that the Department of Education needs to start as a kid and go right through to maybe 70. Does the Department of Education have a role anymore at all? Depends on your definition of education. I think if you're trying to teach kids or to, you know, remember facts and figures from a history book, then no. But if it's about coaching, mentoring, being displaced, finding the next thing, and maybe if it's AI-driven and all of those kind of things, then it's a different paradigm shift around what education is and what its purpose is. The It's worth backing up and thinking about like why What is it that makes humans valuable workers? I don't think it's mainly their raw intellect. I think it's their ability um you when you work with people, like why are they use basically useless the first month or the first week, and you couldn't live without them 6 months later. Um it's their ability to build up context. Uh interrogate their own failures and learn from them in this really organic way. And — this ability just doesn't exist in these models. They exist session to session, and that everything that they have learned about you evaporates after every hour. Hm. Um and so it's a frustrating experience where you can try to get them to do a task. Uh they'll do a five out of 10 job at many language and language out tasks, but there's no way for them to get better. And given that that's a fact, you just kind of have to like rely on humans. Uh — 50 First Dates over and over. Every time that you do it, you've got to reintroduce yourself and explain what's going on. — Yeah, Groundhog Day. — Yeah. Yeah, that's right. So I'm I think people have this idea that even if all AI progress stopped right now, these systems would still be economically transformative. And they say, "Look, JP Morgan and McDonald's and whatever just haven't integrated these systems into their workflows. But if they had, they would be like seeing all these benefits. " And I don't really think that's the case. I think like it's just like genuinely hard to get human-like labor out of these models. And hopefully in your closing remarks, you can capture something actionable for the individual that's listening to this now on their commute to work or the single mother, the average person who maybe isn't as technologically advanced as many of us at this table, but is trying to navigate through this to figure out how to live a good life over the next 10, 20, 30 years. I think we live in the most interesting time in human history. So the for the single mother that's listening, for someone who wouldn't be the stereotype of a tech bro, don't assume that you can't do this stuff. It's never been more accessible today within your work. You can be an entrepreneur. You don't have to take massive risk to go create a business um by you could your job and go create a business. So I really want people are break away from this concept of entrepreneurship being This is your

podcast, Diary of a CEO. You started this podcast by talking to CEOs, I assume, right? And over time uh it changed to everyone can be a CEO. Everyone is a some kind of CEO in their life. I think that we have unprecedented access to tools for that vision to actually come to reality. I think the potential here does allow us to refactor just about everything. Maybe we have finally arrived at the place where mundane work doesn't need to exist anymore, and the pursuit of meaning can replace it. But that's not going to happen automatically if we don't figure out how to make it happen. And I hope that we can recognize that the peril of this moment is best utilized if it motivates us to confront that question directly. The International Monetary Fund has expressed profound concerns that generative AI could cause massive labor disruptions and rising inequality, and has called for policies that prevent this from happening. I read that in the Business Insider. So, have they given any idea what the policies should look like? — No. Yeah, that's the problem. I mean, if AI can make everything much more efficient and get rid of people for most jobs or have a person assisted by AI doing many, many people's work, it's not obvious what to do about it. Universal basic income? Give everybody money? Yeah, I I think that's a good start. And it stops people starving. But for a lot of people, their dignity is tied up with their job. I mean, who you think you are is tied up with you doing this job, right? Yeah. And if we said, "We'll give you the same money just to sit around," that would impact your dignity. Every way you look, in the next 50 years, we have to do more with less. And there are very, very few proposals, let alone practical solutions, for how we get there. Training machines to help us as aids, scientific research partners, inventors, creators, is absolutely essential. And so, the upside is phenomenal. It's enormous. But AI isn't just a thing. It's not an inevitable whole. Its form isn't inevitable, right? Its form, the exact way that it manifests and appears in our everyday lives, and the way that it's governed, and who it's owned by, and how it's trained, that is a question that is up to us collectively as a species to figure out over the next decade. Because if we don't embrace that challenge, then it happens to us. — And that's really what I'm I have been wrestling with for 15 years of my career is how to intervene in a way that this really does benefit everybody, and those benefits far, far outweigh the potential risks.