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Are you uncomfortable talking about this?
>> Yeah, I mean it's pretty wild, right? Major companies like Microsoft are laying off employees amid the rise of artificial intelligence in the workplace. The CEO of Salesforce recently said AI helped cut his staff nearly in half.
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Roughly 40% of companies from around the world expect to reduce their workforce in roles where AI can do the job.
>> If you're not using AI, you're going to lose your job to somebody who uses AI. That I think we know for certain. The International Monetary Fund has expressed profound concerns that generative AI could
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cause massive labor disruptions and rising inequality.
>> It's it's not a bad thing. The question is, is it come so fast that you don't have time to adjust
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to it?
>> As this develops, as we get to, you know, peer over the edge of this cliff that we're headed to, I think we're going to discover that we can't yet detect the nature of the alteration that's coming. There's a great quote by a woman named Kelly Hayes where she says,
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"Everything feels unprecedented when you haven't engaged with history." If you don't have a good sense of where you've been, a good memory of where you've been and where history has taken us before, it's easy to read the news or think about your own life and think like we've never
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dealt with this before. This is a new problem. This is a new thing. Where so often if you have a good sense of history personally and throughout the rest of the world, it's easier to read the news and the devastating headlines and say, "Yes, that's bad." And we've done this before. It's the same psychology. It's the same movie even though if it's a different cast of characters.
So, so the definition of AGI is artificial general intelligence, meaning that AI can acquire new skills in efficiently in the same way that a humans can acquire skills. Right now AIS don't acquire skills efficiently. You know, they they require massive amount of energy and compute, entire data set of compute to acquire these these skills and I think there's a again a limit on how general intelligence can get. I think for most of the time it will be lagging in terms of what humans are are capable of doing.
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>> In the past, new technologies have come in which didn't lead to joblessness. New jobs were created. So the classic example people use is automatic teller machines. When automatic teller machines came in, a lot of bank tellers didn't lose their jobs.
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They just got to do more interesting things. But here I think this is more like when they got machines in the industrial revolution and you can't have a job digging ditches now because a machine can dig ditches much better than you can. And I think for mundane intellectual labor, AI is just going to replace everybody. Now, it will may well be in the form of you have fewer people using AI assistants. So, it's a combination of a person and an AI assistant are now doing the work that 10 people could do previously.
>> People say that it will create new jobs though, so we'll be fine.
>> Yes. And that's been the case for other technologies, but this is a very different kind of technology. People use this phrase. They say AI won't take your job. A human using AI will take your job.
>> Yes, I think that's true. But for many jobs, that'll mean you need far fewer people. There are jobs where you can make a person with an AI assistant
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much more efficient and you won't lead to less people because you'll just have much more of that being done. But most jobs, I think, are not like that. We have to confront the probability of seriously dark outcomes. And we have to spend time really thinking about those consequences because the competitive nature of companies and of nation states is going to mean that every organization is going to race to get their hands on intelligence. Intelligence is going to be a new form of of capital, right? We are at the dawn of this radical transformation of humans that by its very nature as a truly complex and emergent innovation nobody on earth can predict.
A poll of a thousand college students showed that almost 90% of them use the chatbot to help with homework.
More and more vulnerable people are turning to AI chatbots for support. Entry-level jobs are vanishing at an alarming rate.
Half of entry-level white collar jobs disappearing
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and 10 to 20% unemployment in the next 1 to 5 years.
First of all, they underestimate the magnitude of the AI revolution. AI is nothing like print. It's nothing like uh the industrial revolution of the 19th century. It's far far bigger. It's the first technology in history that can make decisions by itself and that can create new ideas by itself.
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>> I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.
>> The idea that this AI disruption doesn't lead us to some very human catastrophe,
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I think, is overly optimistic.
>> My worst fears are that we cause significant
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we the field, the technology, the industry cause significant harm to the world. If that really happened, like if we really did just discover that there were a billion extra people on the planet who all had PhDs and were happy to work for almost for free, that would have a massive disruptive impact on society.
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>> What jobs are going to be made redundant in a world where I am sat here as a CEO with a thousand AI agents?
I was thinking of all the names of my of the people in my company who are currently doing those jobs. I was thinking about my CFO when you talked about processing business data, my graphic designers, my video editors, etc. So, what what jobs are going to be impacted?
>> Yeah, all of those. You maybe this is useful for for the audience. I think if your job is as routine
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as it comes, your job is gone in the next uh couple years. So meaning in those jobs that for example, quality assurance jobs,
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data entry jobs, you're sitting in front of a computer and you're supposed to click uh and and type things in a certain order. Operator and those technologies are coming on the market really quickly and those are going to displace a lot of accountants.
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>> Accountants.
>> Lawyers.
>> Yes.
>> I mean, I've just pulled a ligament in my in my foot and they did an MRI scan and I had to wait a couple of days for someone to look at the MRI scan and tell me what it meant.
>> Yeah. Yeah.
>> I'm guessing that that's gone. Yeah, I think I think the healthcare ecosystem is hard to predict because of regulation and and again, there there's so many limiting factors on how this technology can permeates the economy because of regulations and and people's willingness to to take it. But, you know, things
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unregulated jobs that are purely text
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in, text out. If your job, you know, you get a you get a message and you produce some kind of artifact that's like probably text or images, that that job is is at risk.
People use this phrase. They say AI won't take your job. A human using AI will take your job.
>> Yes, I think that's true. But for many jobs, that'll mean you need far fewer people. My niece answers letters of complaint to a health service. It used to take her 25 minutes. She'd read the complaint and she'd think had
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to reply and she'd write a letter. And now she just scans it into um a chatbot and it writes the letter. She just checks a letter. Occasionally she tells it to revise it in some ways. The whole process takes her 5 minutes.
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That means she can answer five times as many letters. And that means they need five times fewer of her so she can do the job that five of her used to do. Now, that will
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mean they need less people. In other jobs, like in health care, they're much more elastic. So, if you could make doctors five times as efficient, we could all have five times as much healthcare for the same price. And that would
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be great. There's there's almost no limit to how much healthcare people can absorb.
>> They always want more healthcare [laughter] if there's no cost to it. There are jobs where you can make a person with an AI assistant much more efficient and you won't lead to less people because you'll just have much more of that being done. But most jobs I think are not like that. So that's the question I often ask people in the world with AGI and I think almost immediately we'll get super intelligence as a side
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effect. So the question really is in a world of super intelligence which is defined
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as better than all humans in all domains, what can you contribute? And so, you know, better than anyone what it's like to be, you know,
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what ice cream tastes to you. Can you get paid for that knowledge? Is someone interested in
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that? Maybe not. Not a big market. There are jobs where you want a human. Maybe
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you're rich and you want a human accountant for whatever historic reasons. Old
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people like traditional ways of doing things. Warren Buffett would not switch to AI.
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He would use his human accountant. But it's a tiny subset of a market. Today we have products which are man-made in US
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as opposed to mass-produced in China. And some people pay more to have those. But it's a
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small subset. It's a almost a fetish. There is [clears throat] no practical reason for it. And I think anything you can do on a computer could be automated using that technology.
>> People in this country want to
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do certain types of jobs, not other types of jobs. And I'm not saying that that's good or bad. It's just the reality. Mhm.
>> So, you know, I I I joke like like, you know, my kids
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are 15 and they don't want to work for 40 years in a uh manufacturing
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job and I don't want them to because I don't want them to have the bad back that I have right
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now. Like, no, no. I mean, this
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this is real. Like, you work in one of these jobs for 40 years and you're messed up by the time you hit your age 60. So, they don't want to do that. They don't want to work in a repetitive
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physical labor job for their life. And I hate to say like almost no young kids in
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this country do.
>> They won't have to in 10 years with robots taking over all of that.
>> They they they won't have to. And like the one knock that this whole robot revolution
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people have with it is it will displace human labor.
>> So if you have this concept of a drop in employee,
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you have free labor, physical and cognitive, trillions of dollars of it. It makes no sense to hire humans for most
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jobs. If I can just get, you know, a $20 subscription or a free model to do what an employee does, first anything on a computer will be automated. And next,
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I think humanoid robots are maybe 5 years behind. So in 5 years, all the physical labor can also be automated. So one of the things that I study as well
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is besides AI and longevity is the embodiment of AI which is going to be in humanoid robots, autonomous cars, flying cars and the like. You know, I've interviewed Elon, who I've known for 26 years, another company here in the US
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called uh called Figure AI that Brett Adcock runs. And both of them have made
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the prediction that they expect by 2040 to have as many
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as 10 billion humanoid robots walking on the streets,
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right? Uh, and so I asked my friend, "What's it going to what's it going to feel like when you're seeing a humanoid robot delivering your packages or walking down the street or coming over to ask you if there's something
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else you want done?" You say, "It's going to feel normal." You know, in the beginning it feels weird. Uh, it's a spectacle. We take photographs, but after a little bit we fully adapt.
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And that's the brilliance of human mind and society. and it becomes normal.
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It's part of our lives.
>> Now, I think it goes so far beyond human intelligence. It's my assumption that most of the work that we do is based on intelligence. So, even like me doing this podcast now,
>> this is me asking questions based on information that I've gathered, based on
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what I think I'm interested in, but also based on what I think the audience will be interested in. And
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if if an AI has an IQ that is a hundred times mine and an source of information that is a fat million times bigger than mine, there's no need for me to do this podcast. I can get an AI to do it. And in fact, an AI can talk to an AI and deliver that information to a human. But then if we look at most industries like being a lawyer,
>> um, accountancy, I mean a lot of med profession is based on information. um, driving, think that's the biggest employer in the world is the profession of driving whether it's delivery or Uber or whatever it is
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um, where where do humans belong in this complex anything which is just information in, information out is ripe for automation. These are the easiest jobs to
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automate.
>> like being a coder.
>> like being a coder or again, like being an accountant, at least certain types of accountants, lawyers, ers, doctors, they are the easiest to automate. If a doctor, the only thing they do is just take information in, all the results of blood tests and whatever, and they information out, they diagnose the disease and they write a prescription. This will be easy to automate in the coming
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years and decades. But a lot of jobs they require also social skills and motor skills. If your job requires a combination of skills from several different fields, it's it's not impossible, but it's much more difficult to automate it. So, if you think about a nurse that needs to replace a bandage to a crying child, this is much much harder to automate than just a doctor that writes a prescription. Because this is not just data. the nurse needs uh uh good social skills to interact with the child and motor skills to just replace the bandage.
>> So what are those skills?
>> I think it's all human skills. I think there needs so I think where the world is going to go and at least this is where I'm taking a bet is that as the end product becomes easier to produce, it's the humanity that's going to suffer. And unless we take personal accountability both as individuals and organizations to teach and
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learn human skills, they will disappear for all the reasons we're talking about. So,
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how do I listen? How do I hold space? How do I resolve conflict peacefully?
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How do I give and how do I receive feedback? Those are two different skills. And sure, you can have an AI friend
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and that AI friend has been trained like the best best psychologist to affirm you, the best listening skills that exist. Tell me about your day. M, that sounds difficult. Boy, it's hard being you. Oh my god, it's so great being you. Have you you know, like it's it's an affirmation machine
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built by a for-profit company that wants you to stay on. Can't neglect that. but for the fact that nobody's learning how to be a friend. It'll feel good. You'll feel like you have a friend,
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but you're not learning to be a friend. They promised us social connection when social media came about. When we got Wi-Fi connections, the promise was that we would become more connected. But it's so clear that because we spend so long alone, isolated, having our needs met by Uber
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Eats drivers and social media and TikTok and the internet that we're investing less in the very difficult thing of like going and making a friend and like going and
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finding a girlfriend. Young people are having sex less than ever before. Everything that is associated with the difficult job of making in real life connection seems to be um falling away. I think the the skill of being a storyteller and a communicator is critically important
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for any entrepreneur. Right? At the end of the day, if you think about what
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an entrepreneur is doing, uh, part of what they're doing is creating a vision of the future that they
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think is possible. Getting other people to believe in their future
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uh and thereby join them as a co-founder or employee or join them as an investor or join them as a customer. And
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that's the process of communicating this product, this service,
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this future you want and getting people excited about it, wanting to join you and being able to tell the difference between what is a fiction in our own mind and what is the reality. This is a a crucial skill and we are not getting better at finding this difference as time go time time goes on and also with new technologies which I write about a lot like artificial intelligence the fantasy that AI will answer our questions will find the truth for us will tell us the difference between fiction and reality this is this is just another fiction I mean AI can do many things better than humans, but for reasons that we can discuss, I don't think that it will necessarily be better than humans at finding the truth or uncovering reality.
>> And what made you a great entrepreneur is not that the company exists, is that you built it with your hands
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and you've got the scars to show for it.
>> Yeah. It was when things went wrong and you were forced to fix them
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and think that now when problems show up, you're quick. You're smarter. You're a much smarter businessman now
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than you were 5 years ago, 6 years ago.
>> Yeah.
>> Because you did it. And I think what we're forgetting is that there's something to be said for, and by the way, I'm a fan of AI. I want AI to make things, but I would hate to lose out on becoming a better version of me. So, I think there's something to be said for writing your own symphony, painting your own painting,
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building your own business, you know, writing your own book. Not for them, not for the output, not for the
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outfit, for your personal growth.
>> What is different about this that we haven't dealt with as a challenge before?
>> And 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 of capital. Just as there was a grab for land or there's a grab for oil, there's a grab for anything that enables you to do more with less, faster, better, smarter.
>> Is there a such thing as an AI proof job?
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>> It will affect every single job out there. Don't put your head in the sand. There are 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,
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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
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what we ask it to do and it will partially be shaped by things we don't understand. What like I have little kids. I have a 5-year-old and a three-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 to try and 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, me included, feel what you just described when you first get to grips with the idea of this new coming
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wave. It's scary. It's petrifying. It's threatening. Is it going to take my job? Is my daughter or son gonna 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 humanlike things that aren't
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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
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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
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have. And I think it's less about a need for optimism and more about a fear of 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
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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, they they were the lowest down on the list. Middle management, sports broadcasters, historians, analysts, middle level, legal sort of bods, all that sort of stuff, logistics, drivers.
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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 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
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over time, whether it was the industrial revolution or other sort of big technological revolutions
>> 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 the machines replaced
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the human strength at a 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 AI is going
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to replace the brain of a human. There's absolutely nothing wrong with AI. There's a lot wrong
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with the value set of humanity at the age of the rise of the machines. Right? And the biggest value set of
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humanity is capitalism today. And capitalism is all about what? Labor arbitrage. What's that mean?
>> I I I hire you to do something. I pay you a dollar. I pay it I sell it for two. Okay. And 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
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so forth." All of that is buil is built by labor, right? So so basically labor goes and mines for the material and then the material is sold for a little bit of margin.
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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
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are being replaced by by AIs, virtual AIs, okay?
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And humanity's power strength within 3 to 5 years
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time can be replaced by a robot. You really have to question how this world looks like.
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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,
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you know, occupy 20 hours of our day with work, right? We're not made for that. But we've fit into that uh 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? Is this So >> we can never predict what what this uh 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 learning approach. The department of education needs to be seeing people as lifelong learners who are constantly disrupted and need re-education.
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>> 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 if you're trying to teach kids 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, it's their ability to interrogate their own failures and learn from them in this really organic way. And
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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.
>> Um, and so it's a frustrating experience where you can try to get them to do a task. Uh,
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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,
>> it's like 50 first dates over and over. Every time that you do it, you've got to you've got to reintroduce yourself and explain what's going on.
>> Yeah. Groundhog Day. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. So I'm con 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 genu 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 uh interesting time in human history. So 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
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business um by you quit your job and go create a business. So I really want people to break away from
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this concept of entrepreneurship being this is your podcast, a diary of a CEO. You started this podcast by talking to CEOs, I assume, right? And over time, uh, changed to everyone can be a CEO. Everyone is 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
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just about everything. Maybe we have finally arrived at the place where mundane work doesn't
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need to exist anymore and the pursuit of meaning can replace it. But that's not going to happen automatically if
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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
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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.
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>> Have they given any of 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 doing many, many people's work, it's not obvious what to do about it.
>> It's universal basic income. Give everybody money.
>> Yeah, I 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." Everywhere 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 hole. 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
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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.
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