BIG IDEAS BY NEW ECONOMIES
00:21:48 · Richard Socher
[00:21:48] S0: Yeah, there's a lot to unpack there and trying to define sort of timelines and what kinds of timelines and for which kinds of industries and so on. I think in many ways, you know, the future is already here, but it's not equally distributed. As a famous saying and that is true for a lot of things in automation and intelligence like there are already people who run their companies with just a ton of agents, and there are also still people sending fax machines and sending actual faxes to each other. There are also people who still do manual labor on the planet and work with cows, pulling And so I think when people have this sort of hard takeoff scenario in mind, they're often a little too optimistic. And then sometimes that optimism can also switch over to extreme pessimism. If you think next year you need no more radiologists, no one should study radiology anymore, and AI will do every single job, then maybe from that, it's kind of the horseshoe theory of politics. But maybe apply it to AI. Maybe someone should come up with the horseshoe theory of AI optimism and Doomerism. It's maybe closer to one another. Then you're also very worried all of a sudden that maybe AI could kill us all the next day after it took all our jobs. Even as an extremely optimistic AI researcher and an entrepreneur, you have to be realistic about not every industry will massively benefit from 1000x cheaper intelligence. People will still want to travel. And sure, travel will be more efficient in terms of organizing your trips and finding interesting locations and finding cheaper flights and having a personal assistant, which I predicted over the last few years. And now I think with news and others, that is coming more and more to fruition. But people still want to see the pyramids in person, whether AI could generate an image of the pyramids or not. It doesn't fundamentally change. Travel is not going to 1000x because of cheaper intelligence. A cow isn't going to magically make 1000x more milk because of more intelligence. You're not going to grow wheat 1000x faster in fields. You're not going to change the luxury handbag status symbol of luxury goods. People, whether AI is amazing or not, want to show that I can afford this expensive handbag, even though an AI could maybe 3D print a similar kind of object better and better.
00:24:18 · Richard Socher
They want the original, they want a status symbol. So there are lots of different industries inside the GDP that will, to the most bullish AI people, be surprisingly unchanged or just changed in the periphery. And so then, of course, there are major industries and the industries that do require more and more intelligence. Those will massively flourish or in some, depending on who you ask, like change or get disrupted or be destroyed. But I would argue that like, you know, Computing or math is just going to sit at a much higher level of abstraction and people will be able to ultimately get more done. And then you ask again, coming to your first question, like which industry do people love getting the most done? And it's research because it's not zero sum. It's not about replacing jobs, but creating new inventions, finding new explanations for different phenomena. And that has progressed humanity forward more than anything else we've done.
00:25:20 · Ollie Forsyth
[00:25:20] S1: When we do look at this like superintelligence, I agree, you know, you're still going to want your luxury handbag. You're still going to want to go on nice holidays and buy your house and so on. But you want to become a lot more productive. And I think if you look at just like the timeline, what we have had in the last few years on just how more productive we are and the opportunity for us to become wealthier, I think is huge. When we do look at that timeline from a productivity standpoint, all of us want to become wealthier, right? What are some of those huge unlocking opportunities that you think superintelligence will have for us to become part of our ecosystem? I think in the best scenario for
00:26:02 · Richard Socher
[00:26:02] S0: the future, AI can become a strong... Because if you care about just producing more outputs per unit of time that you work, you love AI. And if you own some equity in that increased output, you also love AI. And so every entrepreneur who just cares about making their company successful loves AI because it's just more likely you can get more done. You are, like you said, much more productive. If you're just getting paid by the hour and you have no equity in making things faster, better, cheaper, then AI is just eventually probably going to come after whatever data you're producing and your job. And so I think we need to teach people more entrepreneurship and we need to enable them to participate in this new kind of market and these new kinds of think there are maybe two industries I can think of where most people agree that the output of that industry is what matters. No one wants to go into a hospital and say, oh, you know, it'd be great if there are 10 more administrative assistants in this hospital so I can pay 10x more on my medical bill and we can't We have more jobs in medicine. Most people will just be like, actually, I just want to be in the hospital for as short as possible and be as healthy as possible afterwards and pay as little as possible. And the vast majority of people agree that that is the goal for medicine. And hence, sort of the upstream tasks of biological research, which leads me to another industry, which is general sort of research and development of new technologies. Most people don't say, you know, it'd be great if we had thousands more of PhD students and even more professors I think that would be amazing. But most normal people would just be like, but they do love a good innovation. They love that they have electricity now and they love to have ACs and heaters and the internet and all the things that came out of research. People do appreciate all their new abilities and luxuries that technology could afford them. And so that to me... It makes those two industries particularly well suited for everyone to be able to get behind AI. And it also, again, is up to us to actually work on those two industries so that people can see the benefits.
00:28:26 · Ollie Forsyth
[00:28:26] S1: If you're enjoying today's episode, hit subscribe at the bottom of your screen. The guests on this show are getting bigger and bigger and we need your help to grow this channel. So if you're enjoying today's guests or any previous episodes, hit subscribe and I promise you it'll be worth it. Now back to today's episode. There is still quite a large amount of people who still either don't just use AI, like the paid per hour workers. They're all amazing. They all want to just earn a living and do what they like. But if AI does ultimately come after what they are good at, what advice would you have for those people who get paid by the hour? I mean, obviously hourly jobs are bad.
00:29:14 · Richard Socher
[00:29:14] S0: Very broad, right? Like there are a lot of different jobs and some require you to be in school for eight years. And if you want to be like a brain surgeon, right? And others don't require any degree. And some countries Also have different standards for them. Like in Germany, becoming a construction worker does require a degree and becoming an electrician and a plumber and so on. They have, you know, different mindset. Japanese are even further on that where if you're in construction worker or in pottery or whatever, it might be a handicraft. People have a very strong sense of perfecting their craft. Even though some people might think of this as like a boring medial job, they still take pride in craftsmanship. In Japan, it seems like across many different industries, that might be a good The Japanese are more pro robots. There's a lot of complexity, I guess, with immigration and so on and an aging society. But they are generally pro robots, but they still love craftsmanship and they still love handmade things. And I think handmade will continue to be a thing. Sure, we already see this, right? You could have a sweater that's just made automatically with weaving machines and you can have pottery that is just automatically made. People love handmade pottery. And so there's all these things that will stay. I think in terms of general advice is think about your industry. Think about what are the bottlenecks that your industry faces that are... Due to intelligence being extremely expensive and knowing that intelligence will get cheaper, how could you then unlock those bottlenecks in your industry and find clever ways of building products that people ultimately want to buy? I think depending on the age, I understand that that's harder and harder. If you're just before retirement by a few years, you might not have the energy or desire or so on to learn a job. Depending on the industry and the country and their ability to have a surplus and to build social systems, I think it's up to countries to some degree to help their population in learning new skills. And in Germany, there's a thing called Volkshochschule, like the people's higher ed. Like sort of a university where you can, even after you had a job for many years, you can still learn new kinds of skills there. I think that will be a thing.