I think a lot of people don't realize

how massive the positive impact AI is

going to have on their life. Well, I

would argue that the idea that this AI

disruption doesn't lead us to human

catastrophe is optimistic. For example,

people are going to be unemployed in

huge numbers. You agree with that, don't

you? Yes. If your job is as routine as

it comes, it's gone in the next couple

years. But it's going to create new

opportunities for wealth creation. Let

me put it to you this way. We have

created a new species and nobody on

earth can predict what's going to

happen. We are joined by three leading

voices to debate the most disruptive

shift in human history, the rise of AI.

And they're answering the questions

you're most scared about. This

technology is going to get so much more

powerful. And yes, we're going to go

through a period of disruption. But at

the other end, we're going to create a

fair world. It's enabling people to run

their businesses, make a lot of money,

and you can solve meaningful problems

such as the breakthroughs in global

healthcare and education will be

phenomenal. and you can live an

incredibly fulfilling existence. Well, I

would just say on that front, this has

always been the fantasy of technologists

to do marvelous things with our spare

time, but we end up doom scrolling,

loneliness epidemic, right? Falling

birth rates. So, the potential for good

here is infinite and the potential for

bad is 10 times. For example, there's

war, undetectable beat fakes and scams.

So, people don't understand how many

different ways they are going to be

robbed. Look, I don't think blaming

technology for all of it is the right

thing. all these issues, they're already

here. You're all fathers here. So, what

are you saying to your children? Well,

first of all, this has always blown my

mind a little bit. 53% of you that

listen to this show regularly haven't

yet subscribed to the show. So, could I

ask you for a favor before we start? If

you like the show and you like what we

do here and you want to support us, the

free simple way that you can do just

that is by hitting the subscribe button.

And my commitment to you is if you do

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power, me and my team, to make sure that

this show is better for you every single

week. We'll listen to your feedback.

We'll find the guest that you want me to

speak to and we'll continue to do what

we do. Thank you so

[Music]

much. The reason why I wanted to have

this conversation with all of you is

because the subject matter of AI, but

more specifically AI agents, has

occupied my free time for several weeks

in a row. And actually amad when I

started using replet for me it was a

paradigm shift. There was two paradigm

shifts in a row that happened about a

week apart. Chat GPT released their

image generation model where you could

create any image. It was incredibly

detailed with text and all those things.

That was a huge paradigm shift. And then

in the same week I finally gave in to

try and figure out what this term AI

agent was that I was hearing all over

the internet. I heard vibe coding. I

heard AI agent. I was like I will give

it a shot. Mhm. And when I used Replet,

20 minutes in to using Replet, my mind

was blown. And I think that night I

stayed up till 3 or 4 a.m. in the

morning. For anyone that doesn't know,

Replet is a piece of software that

allows you to create software. Mhm. And

pretty much any software you you want.

So someone like me with absolutely no

coding skills was able to build a

website, build in Stripe, take payment,

integrate AI into my website, add Google

login to the front of my website and do

it within minutes. I then got the piece

of software that I had built with no

coding skills, sent it to my friends,

and one of my friends put his credit

card in and paid. Amazing. So I just

launched a SAS company with no coding

skills.

to demonstrate an AI agent in a very

simple way. I used an online AI agent

called operator to order us all some

water from a CVS around the corner. The

AI agent did everything end to end and

people will be watching on the screen.

It put my credit card details and it

picked the water for me. It gave the

person a tip. It put some delivery notes

in at some point a guy is going to walk

in. He has not interacted with a human.

He's interacted with my AI agent. And I

just the reason I use this as an example

is again it was a paradigm shift moment

for me when I heard about agents. Mhm.

about a month ago and I went on and I

ordered a bottle of electrolytes and

when it when my doorbell rang I freaked

out. I freaked out. But am who are you

and what are you doing? So uh I started

programming at a very young age. You

know I I built my first business when I

was a teenager. I used to go to uh

internet cafes and program there. And I

realized that they don't have software

to manage the business. I was like oh

why don't you create accounts? I don't

have a server. It took me two years to

build that piece of software. And that's

sort of embedded in my mind this idea

that hey like you know there there's a

lot of people in the world with really

amazing ideas especially in the context

where they live in that allows them to

build uh businesses. However, the main

source of uh friction between an idea

and software or call it an idea and

wealth creation is u infrastructure is

physical infrastructure is a meaning a

computer in front of you. It is um an

internet connection. It is the set of

tools and skills that you need to build

that. If we make it so that anyone who

has ideas who who wants to solve

problems will be able to do it. I mean

imagine the kind of world that we we

could live in where no one can be anyone

who has merit anyone who can think

clearly anyone who can generate a lot of

ideas can generate wealth. I mean that's

an amazing world to live in right

anywhere in the world. So with with

Replet the company that I started in

2016 the the idea was like okay coding

is difficult how do we solve coding and

um we built every part of the process

the hosting the code editor the only

missing thing was the you know the AI

agent and so over the past two years

we've been working on this AI agent that

you can just you know similar since chat

GPT you know this revolution with Genai

and you can just uh speak your ideas

into existence. I mean this starts you

know sounding religious like this is

like the you know the gods you know that

the myths that that um that humans have

created they used to imagine a world

where you can you can be everywhere and

anywhere at once that's sort of the

internet and you can also speak your

ideas into into existence and um you

know it's it's still early I think uh

replet agent is is a fantastic tool and

I think this technology is going to get

so much more powerful

specifically what is an AI agent. I've

got this um graph actually here which I

don't need to pass to any of you for you

to be able to see the growth of AI

agents. But this graph is Google search

trend data. This also resembles our

revenue too.

Oh, okay. Right. The the water has

arrived. Hello. Thank you. You can come

on in. Can I have a go, please? Yes.

It's

3951. Great. Thank you so much. Thank

you. Thank you. I mean this is this is

like a supernatural kind of power. You

conjured water. I conjured water from my

mind. Yeah. And it's shown up here with

us and it clearly thinks we need a lot.

But but just to define the term AI agent

for someone that's never heard the term

before. Yeah. Yeah. So uh I assume most

of the audience now are familiar with

chat, right? You can go in and you can

talk to an AI. It can search the web for

you. It has a limited amount of tools.

Uh maybe it can call a calculator to do

some addition subtraction for you, but

that's about it. It's a request response

style. Agents are when you give it a

request and they can work indefinitely

until they achieve a goal or they run

into an error and they need your help.

It's an AI bot that has access to tools.

Those tools are access to the to a web

browser like operator, access to a

programming environment say like replet,

access to um you know credit cards. The

more tools you give the agent, the more

powerful it is. Of course there's all

these consideration around security and

safety and all of that stuff. But uh the

the most important thing is the AI agent

will determine when it finished

executing. Uh today AI agents can run

for anywhere between you know 30 seconds

to 30 minutes. Uh there's a recent paper

that came out that's showing that every

7 months the number of minutes that the

agent can run for is doubling. So we're

at like 30 minutes now. In seven months

we're going to be at an hour then you

know 2 hours. Pretty soon we're going to

be at days. And at that point, you know,

AI agent is doing labor is doing kind of

humanlike labor and actually uh OpenAI's

new model 03 beat the expectation. So it

it sort of doubled coherence over long

horizon tasks in just three or four

months. So we're in this massive and I

mean this looks this exponential graph,

you know, that shows you the massive

trend we're on.

Brett, give us a little bit of of your

background, but also I saw you writing

some notes there. There was a couple of

words used there that I thought were

quite interesting, especially

considering what I know about you. The

word God was used a few times.

Well, uh, let me just say I'm an

evolutionary biologist, and probably for

the purposes of this conversation, it

would be best to think of me as a

complex systems theorist. One of the

things that I believe is true about AI

is that this is the first time that we

have built machines that have crossed

the threshold from the highly

complicated into the truly complex.

And I will say I'm listening to this

conversation with a um a a mixture of

profound hope and dread

because seems to me that it is obvious

that the potential good that can come

from this technology is effectively

infinite. But I would say that the harm

is probably 10 times. It's a bigger

infinity. And the question of how we are

going to get to a place where we can

leverage the obvious power that is here

to do good and dodge the worst harms. I

have no idea. I I know we're not

prepared. So I hear you talking about

agents and I think um that's marvelous.

We can all use such a thing right away

and the more powerful it is, the better.

The idea of something that can solve

problems on your behalf while you're

doing something else is marvelous. But

of course, that is the precondition for

absolute devastation to arise out of a

miscommunication, right? to have

something acting autonomously to

accomplish a goal, you damn well better

understand what the goal really is and

how to how to pull back the reins that

it starts accomplishing something that

wasn't the goal. The potential for abuse

is also utterly profound. You know, you

can imagine, just pick your your dark

mirror

uh fantasy dystopia where something has

been told to hunt you down until you're

dead and it sees that as a, you know, a

technical challenge.

So, I don't know quite how

to balance a discussion about all of the

things that can clearly come from this

that are utterly transcendent. I mean, I

do think it is not inappropriate to be

invoking God or biblical metaphors here.

You know, you're uh producing water

seemingly from thin air. I believe that

does have an exact biblical parallel.

Uh so, uh any case, the the power is

here, but so so too is the need for

cautionary tales, which we don't have.

That's the problem is that there's no

body of myth that will warn us properly

of this tool because we've just crossed

a threshold that is similar in its

capacity to alter the world as the

invention of writing. I really think

that's that's where we are. We're

talking about something that is going to

fundamentally alter what humans are with

no plan. You know, writing alters the

world slowly because the number of

people who can do it is tiny at first

and remain so for thousands of years.

This is changing things weakly and

that's an awful lot of power to just

simply have dumped on a system that

wasn't well regulated to begin with.

Dan, yeah. So, I'm an I'm an

entrepreneur. Um, I've been building

businesses for the last 20 plus years.

I'm completely well positioned between

the two of you here. the excitement of

the opportunity and the terror uh of

what could go on. There's this image

that I saw of New York City in 1900 and

every single vehicle on the street is a

horse and cart and then 13 years later

the same photo from the same vantage

point and every single vehicle on the

street is a car. And in 13 years all the

horses had been removed and cars had

been put in place. And um if you had

have interviewed the horses in 1900 and

said uh how do you feel about your level

of confidence uh in in the world? The

horses would have said well we've been

part of uh humanity for you know horse

and hoof hand and hoof for for many many

years for for thousands of years.

There's one horse for every three

humans. Like how bad could it be? You

know we'll always have a special place.

will always be part of society. Um, and

little did the horses realize that that

was not the case. That the horses were

going to be put out of of uh business

very very rapidly. And to reason through

analogy, you know, there's a lot of us

who are now sitting there going, "Hey,

wait a second. Does this make me a horse

in 1900?" I think a lot of people don't

realize how massive these kind of

technologies are going to have as an

impact.

You know, one minute we're ordering a

water and that's cute and the next

minute it can run for days and in your

words uh it doesn't stop until it

achieves its goal and it comes up with

as many different ways as it could

possibly come up with to achieve its

goal and in your words it better know

what that goal is. I'm thinking a lot as

Daniel's speaking about the vast

application of AI agents and where are

the bounds because if if this thing is

going to get incrementally smarter well

incrementally might be an understatement

it's going to get incredibly smart

incredibly quick and we're seeing this

AI race where all of these large

language models are competing for

intelligence with one another and if

it's able to traverse the internet and

click things and order things and write

things and create things and all of our

lives run off the internet today. What

can't it do? It's going to be smarter

than me.

No doubt it already is. And it's going

to be able to take actions across the

internet, which is pretty much where

most of my professional life operates.

It's like how I build my businesses.

Even this podcast is an internet product

at the end of the day because you can

create we've done experiments now and I

can show the graphs on my phone to make

AI podcasts and they have we've just

managed to get it to have the same

retention as the dire CEO. Now with the

image generation model retention as in

viewer retention the percentage of

people that get to one hour wow is the

same now. So we can make the video, we

can publish it, we can script it, you

can synthesize my voice sounds like me.

So what what is it going to be able to

do? Mhm. And can you give me the variety

of use cases that the average person

might not have intuitively conceived?

Yeah. So I I tend to be an an optimist

and and part of the reason is because I

try to understand the limits of the of

the technology. What can it do is

anything that we can any sort of set of

human data that we can train it on. What

can it not do is anything that uh humans

don't know what to do because we don't

have the training data. Of course, it's

super smart because it integrates

massive amount of knowledge that you

wouldn't be able to read, right? It also

much faster. It can run through massive

amount of computation that you know your

brain you can't even comprehend because

all of that they're smart. They can take

actions but we know the limits of what

they can do because we trained them.

They're able to simulate what a human

can do. So the reason you were able to

order the water there is because it was

trained NSF data that includes clicking

on Door Dash and ordering water. I

applaud your optimism and I like the way

you think about these puzzles, but I

think I see you making a mistake that we

are about to discover is very common

place. So we have several different

categories of systems. We have simple

systems, we have complicated systems, we

have complex systems and then we have

complex adaptive systems.

And to most of us, a highly complicated

system appears like a complex system. We

don't understand the distinction.

Technologists often master highly

complicated systems and they know, you

know, for example, a computer is a

perfectly predictable system inside.

There's it's deterministic. Mhm. But to

most of us, it functions, it's it is

mysterious enough that it feels like a

complex

system. And if you're in the position of

having mastered highly complicated

systems and you look at complex systems

and you think it's a natural extension,

you fail to

anticipate just how unpredictable they

are. So even if it is true that today

there are limits to what these machines

can do based on their training data, I

think the problem

is 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, the

direction we lead it, and it will

partially be shaped by things we don't

understand. So, how does this computer

that that we have work? Well, one of the

things that it does is we plug them into

each other using language. It's almost

as if you've plugged an Ethernet cable

in between human minds. And that means

that the cognitive potential exceeds the

sum of the individual minds in question.

Your AIS are going to do that. And that

means that our ability to say what they

are capable of does not come down to

well we didn't train it on that data. As

they begin to interact that feedback is

going to take them to capabilities we

don't anticipate and may not even

recognize once they become present.

That's one of my fears. This is an

evolving creature and it's not even an

animal. If it were an animal, you could

say something about what the limits of

that capability are. But this is a new

type of biological creature and it will

become capable of things that we don't

even have names for. Even if it didn't

do that, even if it just stayed within

the boundaries that you're talking

about, you mentioned about it having

median level intelligence. Well, that by

definition means 50% of the people on

the planet are less intelligent than uh

AI. uh you know to a degree it's almost

as if we've just invented a new

continent of remote workers. Um there's

billions of them. They've all got a

masters or a PhD. They all speak all the

languages. Anything that you could call

someone or ask someone over the internet

to do, they're there 24/7 and they're 25

cents an hour. Uh if that um so like 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

almost for free that would have a

massive disruptive impact on society.

Like society would have to rethink how

everyone lives and works and gets

meaning. Um so like and that's that's if

it just stays at a median level of

intelligence. Like it's it's pretty

profound. I still think it's it's a

tool. this is power that is there to be

harnessed by entrepreneurs. You know, I

I think that the world is gonna get

disrupted, right? Um and the the you

know, the this you know post-war world

that we created where you go through

life, you go through 12 years of

education, you get to college and you

just check the boxes, you get a job. We

can already see the fractures of that

that it is, you know, this American

dream is perhaps no longer there. And so

I think the world has already changed.

So but but like what are the

opportunities? Obviously there are

downsides. The opportunities is for the

first time access to opportunity is is

equal. And I I do think there's going to

be more inequality. And the reason for

this inequality is because actually

Steve Jobs uh you know made this

analogy. It's like the the best taxi

driver in New York is like 20% better

than the you know the you know average

taxi driver. the best programmer uh can

be 10x better. You know, we call we say

the 10x engineer. Now, the variance will

be in the thousandx, right? Like the

best the best entrepreneur that can

leverage those agents could be better uh

could be a thousand times better than

than someone who doesn't have the grit,

doesn't have the skill, doesn't have the

ambition. Right? So, so that that will

create a world. Yes, there's massive

access to opportunity, but there are

people who will take seize it and then

they'll seize it and then there'll be

people who don't. I imagine it almost

like a um a marathon race and AI has two

superpowers. One superpower is to

distract people um such as Tik Tok

algorithm. That's right. And the other

superpower is to make you hyper

creative. So you become a hyper consumer

or a hyper creator. And in this marathon

race, the vast majority of people have

got their shoes tied together cuz AI is

distracting them. Some people are

running traditional race. Some people

have got a bicycle and some people have

got a Formula 1 vehicle. And it's going

to be very confronting when the results

go on the scoreboard and you see, oh,

wait a second. There's a few people who

finished this marathon in about 30

minutes. And there's a lot of us who

finished in like 18 hours because we had

our shoes tied together. And I can't

understand if we've got equal

opportunity why there's so much

disparity between how fast it you know

and do, you know, I'm using an analogy,

but this idea that, you know, someone

like a lot of people are going to start

earning a million dollars a month and a

lot of people are going to say, "Hey, I

can't even get a job for $15 an hour."

there's going to be this kind of

interesting wedge. Well, but I I hear in

what both of you are saying

a kind of assumption that this will all

be done on the up and up. And I do want

to just I am not a doomer. I agree that

the doomers are likely incorrect that

their fears are misplaced. But I do

think we have a question of a related

rates problem.

You know I said the potential for good

here is infinite and the potential for

bad is 10 times.

Right? What I mean is there are lots of

ways in which this obviously empowers

people to do things that they were going

to be otherwise stuck in the mundane

process of learning to code and then

figuring out how to make the code work

and bring it to market and all of that.

And this solves a lot of those problems

and that's obviously a good thing.

really the what we should want is the

wealth creation object as quickly as we

can get there. But the problem is you

know as much as it that hyper creative

individual is empowered to make wealth

the person who is interested in stealing

may be even more empowered. And I'm

concerned about that at at a pretty high

level. the the abuse cases may outnumber

the use cases and we don't have a plan

for what to do about that. Um to can I

can I give you a quick uh like

introduction here like the optimistic

view? OpenAI invented uh GP the first

version GPT came out in 2019. 2020 was

GPT2 and so OpenAI you know now they get

a lot of criticism and lawsuit from IL

Musk that they're no longer open source

right they used to be. The reason is in

GPT2 they said we are we are no longer

gonna uh open source this technology

because it's going to create um

opportunities for abuse such as you know

influencing elections um you know

stealing you know grandma's credit card

and so on so forth. Wouldn't you say

Brett that it is kind of surprising how

little abuse we've seen so far?

I don't know how much abuse we've seen

so far. I don't know how any of us do.

And I also even the example that you

suggest where chat GPT is no longer open

source to prevent abuse. I'm taking

their word for it that that's the

motivation. Where as a systems theorist,

I would say, well, if you had a

technology that was excellent at

enhancing your capacity to wield power,

then open sourcing it is a failure to

capitalize on that. and that the most

remunerative use is to keep it private

and then either sell the ability to

manipulate elections to people who want

to do so or sell the ability to have it

kept off the table for people who don't.

And I would expect that that's probably

what's going on. There's no if you have

a technology as transformative as this,

giving it away for free is

counterintuitive, which leaves those of

us in the public more or less at the

mercy of the people who have it.

So I I don't see the reason for comfort

there. 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 what's going to happen. We can

we're on the event horizon of something.

And the problem is you know we can talk

about the obvious disruptions the job

disruption and that's going to be

massive. And does that lead some group

of elites to decide, oh well, suddenly

we have a lot of useless eaters and what

are we going to do about that? Because

that conversation tends to lead

somewhere very dark very quickly. Um,

but I think that's just the beginning of

the the various ways in which this could

go wrong without the doomer scenarios

coming into play. This is an

uncontrolled experiment in which all of

humanity is downstream. Yeah. So I I was

trying to make the point that OpenAI has

been sort of wrong about the uh the sort

of uh how big of a potential for harm it

is like you know I think we would have

heard about it in the news like uh the

sort of how much harm it's done and

maybe you know some of it is working in

the shadows but like the few incidents

that we've heard about where you know

the cause of LLM's large language models

the technology that's powering chat has

been a huge headliners uh like New York

Times talked about this kid that was,

you know, perhaps goated by some kind of

chat software that, you know, helps

teenagers to be less lonely into into

suicide, which is which is tragic. And

obviously, these are the kind of safety

and and abuse uh issues that we want to

we want to worry about. But these are

kind of these isolated uh incidents and

we do have open- source large language

models. Obviously, the thing that

everyone talks about is DeepSeek.

Deepseek is uh coming from China. So

what is Deepseek's incentive? You know

perhaps the incentive is to destroy the

AI industry in the US. Uh you know when

they released Deepseek, you know the

market tanked the market for Nvidia, the

market for AI and all of that. But there

is an incentive to open source. Meta is

open sourcing Llama. Llama is another AI

similar to Chat GPT. The reason they're

open sourcing Llama and Zuckerberg just

says that out loud is basically they

don't want to be beholden to open AI.

They don't sell AI as a service. They

use it to build products. And there's

this concept in business called

commoditize your compliment because you

need AI as technology to run your

service. The best strategy to do is to

open source it. So these market forces

are going to create conditions that I

think are actually beneficial. So I'll

give you a few few examples. One is

first of all the AI companies are

motivated to create AI that is safe so

that they can sell it. Second there are

security companies investing in AIs that

allows them to protect from the sort of

malicious uh acting of of AI. And so you

have the free market and we've always

had that you know but generally as

humanity we've been able to leverage uh

the same technology to protect against

the abuse. So I I don't really

understand this and maybe this is

actually this is the exact discussion

that you would expect between somebody

at the frontier of the highly

complicated staring at a complex system

and a biologist who comes from the land

of the complex and is looking back at

highly complicated

systems. In game theory we have

something called a colle collective

action problem. And in the market that

you're

describing, an individual company has no

capacity to hold back the abuses of AI.

The most you can do is not participate

in them. You can't stop other people

from programming LLMs in some dangerous

way. And you can limit your own ability

to earn based on your own limitations of

what you're willing to do. And then

effectively what happens is the

technology gets invented anyway. It just

that the dollars end up in somebody

else's pocket. So the incentive is not

to restrain yourself so that you can at

least compete and participate in the

market that's going to be opened. And

so the number of ways in which you can

abuse this technology. Let's take a

couple.

What is to stop somebody from training

LLMs

on an

individual's creative output and then

creating an LLM that can out compete

that individual can effectively not only

produce what they would naturally

produce over the course of a lifetime

but can extrapolate from it and can even

hybridize it with the insights of other

people so that effectively those who

have the LLM can train it on the

creativity ity of others, not cut them

in on the use of that insight. You can

effectively end up putting yourself out

of business by putting your creative

ideas in the world where they get sucked

up as training data for future LLMs.

That is unscrupulous, but it's

effectively guaranteed. In fact, it's

already happening. So, that's a problem.

And likewise, what what would stop

somebody from interacting with an

individual and training an LLM to become

like a personalized con artist?

Something that would play exactly to

your blind spot. That does happen. That

that is starting to happen. Um people

get phone calls and it sounds like their

daughter and I've I've lost my phone and

I'm borrowing a friend's phone and all

of that sort of stuff. What's what's

interesting is that I I think you make a

a really good point.

I worry about the impact on society. And

yet when I look at every single

individual who uses AI regularly, it

almost has nothing but profoundly

positive impact on their life. I look at

people like um I was just spending some

time with my parents-in-law um who are

in their 70s and early 80s and they use

AI regularly for all sorts of things

that they find incredibly valuable and

that improves the quality of their life.

I personally did a an M&A a mergers and

acquisitions deal where I bought a

company last year and the AI was so

powerful at helping that process. The

conversations were transcribed and they

were turned into letters of intent and

then press releases and uh legal

documents and we probably shaved

$100,000 worth of uh costs and and we

sped up the whole process and it was

pretty magical to see how how it could

happen. With that said, you know,

there's there's all of these like, well,

$100,000 worth of lawyers didn't get

paid, right? So, well, what I want to

know, yeah,

people upset about, but if we look back

at the invention of the cell phone or

the invention of the social media

platforms, there would be every reason

to have the exactly the same

perspective, right? I remember the

beginning of Facebook and I remember the

idea that suddenly the process that used

to afflict people where you would just

lose touch with most of the people who

had been important to you, that was not

something that needed to happen anymore.

You could just retain them permanently

as a part of a diffuse

uh social grouping that just simply grew

and value was added. There's no end to

how much good that did, but what it did

to us was profound and not evident in

the first chapter. Say the same thing

about the cell phones and the dopamine

traps and the way this has disconnected

us from each other, the way it has

disconnected us from nature, the way it

has altered the very patterns with which

we think. It has altered every

classroom. Mhm. So, and those things I

think are going to turn out to have been

sort of minor foreshadowings of the

disruption that AI will produce. So, I

agree with you today. The amount you can

do with AI, there's a tremendous amount

of good. There's a little bit of harm.

Maybe that's something we need to worry

about. But as this develops, as we get

to, you know, to 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. So, I just wanted to add

some context to that cuz Amjad, I I saw

the interview you did in a newsletter in

2023 where you said, "I wouldn't prepare

for AGI in the same way that I wouldn't

prepare for the end of days." It's

effectively the end of days if the

vision of AGI that some of these

companies have comes to bear because

it's called the singularity moment

because you can't really predict what

happens after that. And so like how

would you even prepare for that and you

want to prepare for the more likely

world and that world that you can

actually predict is a world where yes

there's like a massive improvements of

technology and there's like insane

compounding effects of technology and

it's pretty hard to keep up. From that

it appeared that in 2023 you were saying

a similar thing to Brett in terms of we

can't see around the corner here because

it is a singularity.

Sorry you also used AGI artificial

general intelligence. It'd be

interesting to know what your definition

of AGI is. say that. Yeah. So, so what

what I was saying there is even if I'm

wrong that you can actually create a

unbounded seemingly conscious artificial

intelligence that can entirely replace

humans and can act autonomously in a way

that even humans can't act and can

coordinate across different AIs,

different data centers to take over the

world. Even if if that's 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 we're lagging in terms of what

humans are are capable of doing the

singularity is based on this concept of

intellig intelligence explosion so once

Once you create an AGI, once you create

an artificial general

intelligence, that intelligence will be

able to modify its own source code and

create the next version that is much

more intelligent. And the next version

creates the next version and the next,

you know, for infinity, right? Within a

week, within a week, perhaps within

milliseconds at some point. Yeah. Right.

Uh because it might invent new computing

substrate and and and all of that.

perhaps they'll use quantum computing

and and so then you have this

intelligence

explosion in a way that it is impossible

to predict how the world is going to be

and what I'm saying is this is sort of

like an end of time story like how would

you even prepare for that so if if

that's coming like why would I spend my

time preparing for I think it's unlikely

to happen can't see around the corner

yeah but I'd rather prepare

what I was saying there. I'd rather

prepare for the more likely world in

which we have access to tremendous

power, but the world's not ending and

humans are still uh important.

I don't I don't know why you say more

likely. I mean, I I think the structure

of your argument is is sound. You would

prepare for the world that might happen

for which you can prepare. There's

literally no point in trying to prepare

for a world You can't predict it all.

The only thing you can do is just sort

of upgrade your own skills and pay

attention. But if I have one message for

the technologists, it's that your

confidence about what this can and

cannot do is misplaced because you have

without noticing stepped into the realm

of the truly complex. In the truly

complex, your confidence should drop to

near zero. that you know what's going

on. Are these things conscious? I don't

know. But will they be highly likely

they will become conscious and that we

will not have a test to tell us whether

that has happened. Elon Musk predicts

that by

2029 we will have AI with us AGI that

surpasses the combined intelligence of

all

humans. And Sam Alman actually wrote a

blog three months ago that I read where

he said we are confident now Sam Alman

being the founder of open arrow which um

created chatbt we are confident now that

we know how to build AGI as we have

traditionally understood it. When I put

these things together, I go back to the

central question of what role do humans

have in in this in the sort of

professional output in GDP creation. If

it's smarter than all humans combined,

if Elon Musk is correct there, and it's

able to take actions across the internet

and continue to learn. This is like a

central question that I'm hoping I can

answer today, which is like where do we

go? Yeah. I I mean in my vision of the

world we are in the creative seat. We're

sitting there where um we we are

controlling swarms of intelligent being

to do our job. You know the way you run

your business for example you're sitting

at a computer you have an hour to work.

Yeah. and you're going to launch like a

thousand SDR you know sales uh you know

representative to go like grab as as

many leads as possible and you're

generating new update on replet for for

your website here and then uh on this

side you you you're actually you you

have an AI that's crunching data about

your uh your existing business to to

figure out how to improve it and these

AIs are kind of somehow all coordinating

together and I am trying to privilege

the human like this is my my mission is

to uh build tools for people. I'm not

building tools for agents and agents are

a tool and so ultimately not only do I

think that humans have a privileged

position in the in the world and in the

universe. We don't know where conscious

consciousness is coming from. We don't

really have the science to explain it.

Um I think humans are special. That's

one side is is my belief that humans are

are special in the world and another

side which I understand that the

technology today and I think for the

foreseeable future y is going to be a

function of us training data. So there

was this whole idea like what if chat

GPT generates uh pathogens. Well have

you trained it on pathogens? They were

doing that kind of stuff in Wuhan. know

I mean I mean a lot of the biotech

companies are essentially using

artificial intelligence like I can think

of Abselera I think it's Abselera in

Canada their whole business is using AI

to create new vaccines using artificial

intelligence and bigger data sets than

we've never have had before and I know

cuz I was I was very close to one of the

founders of people involved in Absela so

that that work is going on anyway and if

we think about Wuhan that's it's quite

probably well known now that it came out

of a lab and people working in a lab and

in that scenario that had a huge impact

and shut down the world. What I'm the

central question I'd love to answer

before I throw it back open to the the

room is what jobs because I know that

you have this perspective. What jobs are

going to be made redundant in a world

where I am sat here as a CEO with a

thousand AI agents, right? 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. Uh so I I

think and what do they do? You maybe

this is useful for for the audience. I

think if your job is as routine as it

comes, your job is gone in the next

couple years. So meaning if you if in in

those jobs for example uh quality

assurance jobs 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 a lot of uh

labor accountants accountants noise 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, 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

unregulated jobs uh that are

purely text 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. So, just to give

you some stats here as well, about 50%

of Americans who have a college degree

currently use AI. The stats are

significantly lower for Americans

without a college degree. So, you can

see how a splinter might emerge there

and that crack will write widen because

people like us at this table are all

messing around with it. But my mom and

dad in Plymouth in the southwest, rural

England, haven't got like they just

figured out iPhones. So like I got them

an iPhone and now they're like texting

me back. AI is a million miles away. And

if I start running off with my AGI, my

agents, that gap is going to widen.

Women are disproportionately affected by

automation, which is what you were

talking about there. with about 80% of

working women in an at risk job compared

to just over 50% of men according to the

Harvard Business Review and jobs

requiring only a high school diploma

have an automation risk of 80% while

those requiring a bachelor's degree have

an automation risk of just 20%. So we

can see again how how this will cause a

sort of a it's also a huge risk um with

business processor out outsourcing which

is essentially western countries sending

jobs to India to the Philippines like at

the moment millions of people have been

lifted out of poverty through the

ability to do those kind of business

process auto outsourcing jobs and those

are all going to go but these they're

going to have a thousand employees but

but but uh also uh these people are

actually already transitioning to

training AI eyes. Mhm. You know, so so

there's going to be a massive industry

around training AI until they're

trained. Well, no, you you have to

continuously acquire new skills and this

is what I'm talking about. I mean, this

is again if AI is a function of its

data, then you need increasingly more

data. And by the way, we ran out of

internet data. I was actually thinking

interestingly that this might not be

great for the United States or the UK,

the Western world because it is going to

be a leveler where now a kid in India

doesn't need a Silicon Valley office and

$7 million in investment to throw up a a

software company basically. My yeah my

belief is that so I have a I have a more

broad definition of AGI and the

singularity and for me AGI is do we have

artificial general intelligence in terms

of generally speaking can AI just do

stuff that humans used to be able to do

and we've already crossed that point we

have this general intelligence that we

can now all access and 800 million

people a week are now using uh chat GBT

it's it's exploded in the last 3 months

and then to me a

singularity Uh when the first tractor

went out onto a farm, for me that was a

singularity moment. Uh because everyone

who worked in farming, it used to take a

100 people to plow a field and now a

tractor comes along and two guys with

the tractor can now plow the field in

just as much time and now 98 people out

of 100 are completely out of a job. We

also always underestimate a technology

if it does go on to change history. When

you look back through cars, horses,

planes, the Wright brothers just thought

of a plane as being something that that

army could use, we had no idea of the

application. So someone said to me

recently, they said, "When it does

change the world, we underestimate the

impact that it will change the world."

And I see people now with their

estimations of AI and AI agents already

incredibly optimistic. And so if history

holds here, we're undershooting the

impact it's going to have. And I think

this is the first time in my life where

the industrial revolution analogies seem

to fall a little bit short. Yeah.

Because we've never seen intelligent

that's like you could I could think of

this as a I'm not an intelligent person

on this, but I could see that as like

the disruption of muscles, whereas this

is the disruption of intelligence. That

that's that's exactly the thing is that

what makes human beings special is our

cognitive capacity and very specifically

our ability to plug our minds into each

other. So that the sum is is uh or the

whole is greater than the sum of the

parts. That's what makes human cognition

special. And what we are doing is we are

creating a something that can

technologically surpass it without any

of the preconditions that make that a

safe process. So yes, we've

revolutionized the world how many

different times? It's innumerable. But

you know, we've we've made farming

vastly more efficient. That's different

than taking our core competency as a

species and surpassing ourselves with

the product of our of our labor. I think

your question is a good one. Then then

what does become? We only have one thing

left. Um we have our muscles which we

got rid of in the industrial revolution

and then we have our intellect which is

this digital revolution. Now we're left

with emotions and agency. So we

essentially the the the agency idea I

think we used to judge people on IQ and

now IQ is the big leveler and now going

forward for the next 10 years we're

going to look at are you a high agency

person or a low agency person. Do you

have the ability to get things done and

coordinate agents? Do you have the

ability to start businesses or give

orders to digital armies? uh you know

and and essentially these high agency

people are going to thrive in this new

world because they have this other thing

that's been bubbling under the service

surface which is really interesting when

you said agency is going to remain as an

important thing we're sat here talking

about AI agents and the crazy thing in a

world of AI agents that have super

intelligence is I can just tell my agent

listen I'm going on holiday please build

me a SAS company that spots a market

opportunity throw up the website post it

on my social media channel I'll be in

Hawaii I and this new agentic world is

stealing that too cuz now it can take

action in the same way that I can browse

the internet. I can call Domino's Pizza,

speak to their agentic agent, organize

my pizza to be there before I even wake

up. And in fact, predictability, you

know, OpenAI now learns and Sam Alman

said that they've expanded the memory

feature. So, it knows every it's knowing

more and more and more and more about

me. It'll almost be able to predict what

I want when I want it. It'll know

Steve's calendar. He's arriving at the

studio. Make sure his cadence is on the

side. Make sure his iPad has the brief

on it. Do the brief. Do the research for

me. And everything else say remember

Brett's birthday so when I arrive

there'll be something. In fact, it's

removing my need for any agency. Yes.

And you know again I don't know how to

make this point so that it occurs to

people what I'm really suggesting

but today maybe it's not conscious but

well let me put it to you this way.

If you're

conscious, you started out as a child

that wasn't. And although this may not

fully encapsulate it, you are

effectively an LLM, right? You go from

an unconscious infant to a highly

conscious adult. And the process by

which you do that has a lot to do with

being trained effectively on words and

other things in an environment in

exactly the way that we now train these

AIs. So the idea that we can take

consciousness off the table, it won't be

there till we figure out how to program

it in and we're safe because we don't

know how consciousness works. I take the

opposite lesson. We've created the exact

thing that will produce that phenomenon

and then we can have philosophers debate

whether it's real consciousness or it

just behaves exactly as if it were. And

the answer is those aren't different.

Doesn't matter. And the same thing is

true for agency. you know, especially if

you've created an environment in which

these AIs are de facto competitors, what

you're effectively doing is creating an

evolutionary environment in which they

will evolve to fill whatever niches are

there. And we didn't spell out the

niches. So, I have the sense we have um

we have invited we have we have created

something that truly is going to

function like a new kind of life and

it's especially troubling because it

speaks our language. So that leads us to

believe it's more like us than it is and

it's actually potentially quite

different. So but by the way, he's the

optimist here, right? Like he's so

optimistic about LMS and how how they're

going to they're going to evolve. Yes.

It's amazing. It's amazing technology.

Like I think it raised global IQ, right?

Like 800 million people like 800 million

people are that much more intelligent

and emotionally intelligent as well.

Like I know people who previously were

very coarse and they kind of robbed

people the the the wrong way. They they

would say things in not so polite way

and then suddenly they started putting

their the you know what they're saying

through chat in order to kind of make it

kinder and nicer and they're more liked

now. And so not only is it uh making us

more intelligent but also it allows us

to be the best version of ourselves. And

the the scenario that you're talking

about, I don't think I don't know what's

wrong with that. Like, you know, you

know, the I would want less agency in

certain places. Like, I would want

something to help me not, you know, open

up a peanut butter jar at night, right?

You know, there are places in my life

where I need more control and I would

rather seed it to some kind of entity

that could help me make better choices.

I mean unfortunately even if there is

some small group of elites that are able

to go to Hawaii while something else

does the mundane details of their

business

building. We are rather soon going to be

faced with a world that has billions of

people who do not have the skills to

leverage AI. Some of them will be

necessary for a time. you're going to

need plumbers. But this is

also not a long-term solution because

not only are there not enough of those

jobs,

um, but of course we have humanoid

robots that once imbued with AI capacity

will also be able to take, you know,

they'll be able to crawl under your

house into the crawl space and fix your

plumbing.

So what typically happens when you have

a massive economic contraction that

arises from the fact that a huge number

of people are out of work is that the

elites start looking at those people and

thinking well we don't really need them

anyway. And so the idea that this AI

disruption doesn't lead us to some very

human catastrophe I think is overly

optimistic and that we need to start

preparing right now. What are the rights

of a person who has had whatever it is

that they've invested in completely

erased from the list of needs? Is that

person responsible for not having

anticipated AI coming? And is it their

problem that that they are now starving

and they're being eyed by others as you

know a useless eater? I don't think so.

How is it different than uh when the uh

uh what's it called the the looming

machine came and the textile workers you

know that the result of the in the lad

sort of revolution? uh h how is it how

is it different than any time in history

when uh technology uh automated a a lot

of people out of out of jobs? I would

say scale and speed that's how it's

different and the scale and speed is

going to result in a an unprecedented

catastrophe because the rate at which

people are going to be simultaneously

sidelined not just in one industry but

across every industry is just simply uh

and it also did actually happen. There

was a there was an uh for the first 50

years of industrialization from like

late 1700s to early 1800s, you actually

the Charles Dickens novels are

essentially people coming from the farms

who are displaced arriving in cities,

kids living on the streets. Uh the

British decided to pick everyone up and

send them over to the over to Australia,

which is where I came from. um and uh

you know there there were this there was

this massive issue of displacement. I

think we're going to go into a high

velocity economy where rather than this

long arc of career that lasts 45 years,

we're going to have these very fast

careers that last 10 months to 36

months. and you invent something, you

take it to market, you put together a

team of five to 10 people who work

together, you then get disrupted, you

come Can I mention a story here? Uh

there's an entrepreneur that used Replet

in a similar way. Uh his name is Billy

Howell. You can find him on YouTube on

the internet. He would go to Upwork and

he would find what people are asking for

different requests for certain apps,

technologies. Then he would take the

what they're asking for, put it into

replet, make it an application, call

them, tell them, "I already have your

application. Would you pay $10,000 for

it?" And so, so that's sort of an

arbitrage opportunity that's that's

there right now. That's not arbitrage.

That's theft. How is no what is it? How

is that theft? You have somebody who has

an idea that can be brought to market

and somebody else is cryptically

detecting it and then selling back their

own idea to them. Well, they're paying

them to do that. They're saying, "I will

give you $500 if you if someone makes

this for me." Right? But this is what I

more or less think is going to happen

across the whole economy is that yes,

from this perspective, we can see that

everybody is suddenly empowered to build

a great business. Well, what do we think

about the folks who are going to be

displaced from the top? What are they

going to think about all these people

building all of these highly competitive

businesses? And are they going to find a

way to do, you know, what venture

capital has done or what record

producers have done? What they're going

to do is they're going to take their

superior position at the top and they

are going to take most of the wealth

that is produced by all of these people

who have these ideas that in a proper

market would actually create businesses

for them and they're going to parasitize

them. I think that we with this in

introduction of AI and AI

agents old value has moved and now it's

not going to be the case that the idea

itself is the moat and it's not going to

be the case that resources are the moat.

So in such a scenario you still have to

figure out distribution. You still have

to have for example like an audience. So

if you're a podcaster now you have a

million followers on Twitter. you're in

a prime position because you now have

something that the the great guy with a

great idea with no audience has you have

inbuilt distribution. So I now think

actually much of the game might be

moving to like yeah still about taste

and idea but also the the mo is

distribution. Yeah. And speaking of

adaptive systems um the one of the

adaptation that will happen is people

will seek uh humans and will seek proof

of humanity. Oh, I agree that uh

authenticity is going to become the coin

of the realm and anything that can be

faked or cheated is going to be devalued

and things you know spontaneous jazz or

you know comedy that is interactive

enough that it couldn't possibly have

been generated with the aid of AI those

things are going to become prioritized

you know spontaneous oratory rather than

speeches answers some of your questions

no it answers it answers my question for

the tiny number of people who are in a

position to do those things. Stephen,

you use the mo word moat. Um, which I

think is a really important word for

entrepreneurs. We like we like have to

have a moat. We think a lot about moes

and it's an industrial age. A lot of

people don't even know what a moat what

you mean by moat. It's just I often

think about this idea of what are the

moes that are left. So to define how I

define a mo, you've got a castle and

it's got a like a small circle of water

around it. And once upon a time that

circle of water defended the castle from

attack and you can pull up the

drawbridge so nobody could attack you

very easily. It's a de defense from

something. So it's your it's your

shield. It's your your defense. And once

upon a time as an entrepreneur, you

know, I've got a software company in San

Francisco called Third Webb and we

raised almost $30 million. We have a

team of 50 great developers. And much of

our moat was you can't compete with us

if you don't have the 50 developers and

the $30 million in the bank. How much of

that 30 million went to coding? The vast

majority of it. I mean what else are we

going to do? What else we do? So this is

a good thing. I think modes are a bad

thing. Okay, let me make the argument

there. Uh so everyone is looking for

modes you know for example like one of

the more uh significant modes is network

effects. Yeah, you know, so you can't

compete with Facebook or Twitter

because to move people from Facebook or

Twitter, you need to it's the collective

action problem. You need to move them

all at once because if one of them

moves, then it's the network is not

valuable, they'll go back. So you have

this chicken and egg problem. Let's say

that we have a more decentralized way of

doing social networks that will remove

the power of Twitter to kind of censor

and I I think you're at the other end of

of censorship, right? And so part of my

optimism about humanity is that um

generally there's self-correction.

Democracy is a self-correcting system.

Uh free markets are largely

self-correcting systems. There are

obvious problems with with free markets

that that we can discuss. But take um

health, you know, there is obesity uh

epidemic. This period of time when uh

companies, you know, ran loose kind of

making this sugary, salty, fatty kind of

snacks and everyone gorged on them and

everyone got very uh you know,

unhealthy. And now you have Whole Foods

everywhere. Today, people in Silicon

Valley, they don't go to bars at all.

They go to running clubs. That's how you

meet. That's how you go find a date. You

go to running clubs. And so, there was a

shift that happened because there was a

reaction. Obviously, cigarettes is

another example. You know, you were

talking about phones and our addiction

to phones. And I see a shift right now

like in my uh friend circle like people

who are constantly kind of on their

phones is already kind of frowned upon

and they don't want to hang out with you

because you're you're constantly staring

on on your phone. So there's always

these reactions and and but the problem

is you you reference selfcorrection and

I agree that there's actually an

automatic feature of the universe in

which the self-correction happens. You

can't have a positive feedback that

isn't reigned in by some outer negative

feedback. But the corrections, the list

of corrections involves things like you

point to where people become enlightened

and they realize that they're doing

themselves harm with either the sugar

that they're consuming or the dopamine

traps on their phone and they get

better. But also on the list of

corrective patterns are genocide and war

and you know parasetism. And the problem

is these things are destructive of

wealth. And so you allude to

the superior fact of an open market

without moes. Presumably the benefit of

that is that more wealth gets created

because people aren't kept from doing

things that are productive. I see that.

But then what is the product of all of

this new wealth that is going to be

generated by a world empowered by AI?

Does it end up so highly concentrated

that you have a tiny number of ultra

elites and a huge number of people who

are utterly dependent on them? What

becomes of those people? The learning

process, the self-correction pro process

goes through harm in order to get to

that more enlightened solution. There's

nothing that protects us from the harm

phase being so apocalyptically terrible

that, you know, we get to the other side

of it and we say, "Well, that was a hell

of a correction." Or maybe there's

nobody there to even say that. Those are

also on the table. It reminds me of a

mouse trap where you see the cheese and

we're going, "Oh my god, my

grandmother's going to be able to do

some research and oh my god, my life's

going to get easier." So you head closer

and closer to the cheese.

And historically, if we look at all of

the last 10,000 years, it's a very small

number of elites who own absolutely

everything and a very large number of

surfs and peasants who have a

subsistence living. You know, if the

elites are too greedy and they freeze

out the peasants at too high a level and

they try to use brutality or Yeah.

eventually it comes back to haunt them.

And so what you get is a recognition

that you you need a system that does

balance these things and you know the

west has the best system that we've ever

seen. It's one in which we agree on a

level playing field. We never achieve it

but we agree that it's a desirable thing

and the closer we get to it the more

wealth we create. But again,

if AI empowers those with ill

intent at a higher rate that it empowers

those who are wealth creating and

pro-social, we may be in for a massive

regression in how fair the the market

that the West is. Is that your top

concern versus economic displacement?

And I think they're the same thing. How

are they the same thing?

because the economic displacement is

going to start. I don't know how

many million people are going to be

displaced from their jobs in the US.

Suddenly, we're going to have a question

about whether or not we have obligations

to them. And you agree with that, don't

you? Yes. But but but again, it's it's

the no pain, no gain. I mean, we're

going to go through a period of of

disruption. And I think at the other

end, the old, you know, sort of

oppressive systems will be broken and

we're going to create perhaps a fair

world, but it's going to have its own

its own problems. And what's the scale

of that disruption in your estimation?

It's hard to say because uh you know

there's this concept of limiting factors

like you know there is um regulation

there's the appetite of people to today

for example the health care system is

very resistant to innovation because of

regulation you know and that's a that's

a bad thing on the regulation point it's

worth saying that when Trump came into

power he signed in a new law which is

called removing barriers to American

leadership in AI which revokes previous

AI policies that were deemed to be

restrictive. And obviously when you

think about where the funding is going

in AI, it's going to two places. It's

going to America and it's basically

going to China. That's the the vast

majority of investment. So with those

two in competition, any regulation that

restricts air in any way is actually

self-sabotage. Mh. And this is, you

know, I live in Europe some of the time

and it's already annoying to me that

when Sam Alman and OpenAI released the

03 model, this new incredible model,

it's not in Europe because Europe has a

regulation which prevents it from coming

to Europe. So, we're now at a

competitive disadvantage

um which Sam Alman spoken about. And

more broadly on this point of

disruption, it was I was quite unnerved

when I heard that Sam Wolman's other

startup was called

Worldcoin. And Worldcoin was conceived

with the goal of facilitating universal

basic income,

i.e. helping to create a system where

people who don't have money are given

money by the government just for being

alive to help them cover their basic

food and housing needs. Which suggests

to me that the guy that has built the

biggest air company in the world can see

something that a lot of us can't see

which is there. Yeah. There's gonna need

to be a system to just hand out money to

people because they're not going to be

able to survive otherwise. I

fundamentally disagree with that. Which

part do you disagree with? I disagree

that first of all that humans would be

happy with UBI. I I think that you know

uh you know core value of humans and be

curious about the evolutionary reasons

is we want to be useful. It's really

important to know that a lot of the jobs

that are in at risk are the most high

status, highly paid jobs in the world.

Let's take the highest paid job in

America um which is an

anesthesiologist. Uh this is the highest

paid job and highest paid salary job.

Salari job. Yeah. And the majority of

that job is observing a patient, knowing

which type of medication would work best

with their body. um giving them the

exact right amount, monitoring the

impact of that uh on the on the body and

then making slight adjustments, the

right technology and any nurse will be

able to do that job. And you might have

one

anesthesiologist on on

site supervising 10, 20, 30, 40 wards

and the technology is, you know, doing

the job, but that one person is there

just to kind of supervise if something

went wrong or if there was an ethical

dilemma. What's wrong with that? I mean,

if if if the precision is better where

they are. No, there's nothing wrong with

that except for the fact that a lot of

people, hundreds of thousands of people

have spent their entire life training to

be that, they get an enormous amount of

purpose and satisfaction about the fact

that that's their career, that's their

job. They have mortgages, they have

houses, they have status, and that's

about to go away. Well, if it's highest

paid jobs, maybe you should start

saving.

Yeah. Well, I mean, but yeah, I I hear I

hear you, but you're talking about

people who have done vital work. Mhm.

Highly specialized work and are

therefore not in a great position to

pivot pivot based on the invention of a

technology that they didn't see coming

because frankly, I mean, in the

abstract, maybe we all saw AI coming

somewhere down the road, but we did not

know that it was going to suddenly dawn.

And we do have to figure out what to do

with those people. It's not their fault

that they've suddenly become obsolete

and it's inconceivable that people will

accept this. It is not. It is

fundamentally incompatible with our

nature. We have to have things to strive

for and you know you can sustain life

that way but you cannot um sustain a

meaningful existence and so it's a

short-term plan at best. Let's talk

about meaning. Um on that point of job

displacement this is already happening.

Cler CEO who has been on this podcast

before, a great guy, um said to on a

blog post that they published on Cler's

website saying that they now have AI

customer service agents handling 2.3

million chats per month, which is equal

to having to hire 700 full-time people

to do that. So, they've already been

able to save on 700 customer service

people by having air agents to do that.

And they actually they actually got rid

of those 700 jobs, right? I don't have

that information in front of me, but

I'll have a look. Um, I'll throw it up

on screen for anyone that wants context

on that. But that's already happening.

This isn't some antologist or something.

And these aren't high paid people in

every case. We've done something

similar, by the way. We've we internally

we've

we've replaced that function for 70%.

Yeah. I mean, our company, we're 65

people and, you know, we um, you know,

we make, you know, millions per per

head, you know. So, it's a Are you going

to need to hire more people to get up to

I think so, but we're we're hiring

slowly, like, you know, we're we're

using uh customer support, AI, and that

meant that we we need less uh customer

support, and we're trying to leverage AI

as much as possible. the the person in

HR at Replet writes software using

Replet. So, I'll give you an example.

She needed um Orc charts uh software and

she looked at a bunch of them, got a lot

of demos and they're all very expensive

and they they're missing the kind of

features that she want. For example, she

wanted like version control. She wanted

to know when when something changed and

to go back in history. She went into

replet in 3 days she got exactly the

kind of software that she wanted and

what was the cost you know perhaps $20

you know something like that $ 20 $30

once right and um how many employees in

HR do we need right now we have two uh

if if they're highly levered like that

maybe we do not need a 20 HR team on

this point of

meaning I've heard so many billionaires

in AI describe this as the age of

abundance and I'm not necessarily sure

If abundance is always a great thing

because you know when we look at mental

health and we look at why how people

derive their meaning and their purpose

in life much of it is having something

to strive towards and some struggle in a

meaningful direction to you and this is

maybe adjacent but when there was a

study done I think it was in Australia

where they looked at suicide letters and

in the suicide letters the sentiment of

men in those suicide letters was they

didn't

feel worthy they didn't feel like they

were worth it. They didn't feel like

they were needed by their families. And

this is much of what caused their

psychological state. And I wonder in a

world of abundance where we, you know, a

lot of these AI billionaires are telling

us that we're going to have so much free

time and we're not going to need to

work. If there is at all going to be a

crisis of meaning, a mental health

problem. I mean, there already is. And

it doesn't require AI and it's going to

get worse. I don't know what to do about

it because essentially as human beings

we are built like all organisms to find

opportunity and figure out how to

exploit it. That's what we do. And the

world you're describing is really the

opposite of that. It's one where you're

effectively having your biological needs

at the physiological level satisfied and

there isn't an obvious place for your

spare time if that's what you end up

with to be utilized in something that

you know there's no place to strive and

I do imagine almost at best what would

happen is you have people who are being

sustained by a universal basic income

come and then parasetized

uh you know whatever currency they have

to spend somebody will be targeting it

and they will be targeting it with a an

AI augmented system that spots their

defects of character. I mean, again,

we're already living in this world, but

it will be that much worse when the AI

is figuring out, you know, what kind of

porn to target you with specifically.

That's uh it's a nightmare scenario. And

I do think it would be worth our time as

a species to start considering if we are

about to find ourselves in this

situation and we find some way of

dealing with the basic needs of the

large number of people who are going to

be

sidelined. What would a world have to

look like in order for them to have real

meaning? Not pseudo meaning, not

something that you know superficially,

you know, a video game is not meaning

even if it feels very meaningful in the

moment. I I think that would be a a

worthy investment for us to figure out

how to produce it. But frankly, I'm not

expecting us to either have that

conversation or get very far down that

road. I think it's much more likely that

we will squander the wealth dividend

that will be produced by by AI.

Interestingly, you also see in Western

countries that when we get more

abundance, we start having less kids.

And we're already seeing this sort of

population decline in the Western world,

which is was kind of scary. I think it's

often associated with affluence like the

more money someone makes the less likely

they are to want to want to have

children the more they try and protect

their freedoms. But also on this point

of

AI relationships are hard you know my

girlfriend is happy sometimes and not

happy other times and I have to like you

know go through that struggle with her

of like working on the relationship.

Children are hard and if we are

optimizing ourselves and you know much

of the reason that I sustain the

struggle with my girlfriend is I'm sure

from some evolutionary reason because I

want to reproduce and I want to have kin

but if I didn't have to deal with the

struggle that comes with human

relationships romantic or platonic

there's going to be a proportion of

people that actually choose that outcome

and I wonder what's going to happen to

birth rates in such a scenario because

we're already struggling. We're already

in a situation where we used to be

having five children per woman in the

1950s to about two in

2021. And we're seeing a decline. If you

look at South Korea, their fertility

rate has fallen to 72, the lowest

recorded globally. And if this trend

continues, the country's population

could half by 20, 100.

So yeah, relationships, connections, and

and also I guess I guess we've got to

overlay that with the loneliness

epidemic, which

is 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 Eats drivers and social

media and Tik Tok and the internet, that

we're investing less in the very

difficult thing of like going and making

a friend and like going and 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.