Raw Transcript
I know we keep talking about AI, but it seems like the timelines keep moving up daily. I want you to watch this clip from the CEO of Microsoft AI. In a recent interview with the Financial Times, let's play that clip for Sam. >> You talk about super intelligence. Most of your rivals talk about AGI, artificial general intelligence. Explain the difference between AGI and super intelligence. I prefer the definition that focuses first on what would it take to build a system that could achieve most of the tasks that a regular professional in a workplace goes about on a daily basis. Think of it as a professionalgrade AGI. >> How close are we? >> I I think that we're going to have a human level performance on most if not all professional tasks. So white collar work where you're sitting down at a computer either being you know a lawyer or an accountant or a project manager or a marketing person most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months and we can see this in software engineering. Um many software engineers report that they are now using AI assisted coding for the vast majority of their code production which means that their role shifted now to this meta function of debugging scrutinizing of doing the strategic stuff like architecting of you know etc etc putting things into production so it's a quite different relationship to the technology and that's happened in the last six months. >> What do you make of that? Um well so so I know Mustafa a little bit very nice guy and obviously he's he's very close to this work. I mean he he came from Deep Mind. He was one of the founders of Deep Mind uh and uh moved over to to Microsoft. Um so I you know I think his prognostications are probably as credible as anybody's at this point. Um that's you know that's pretty alarming when you when you think of the the societal implications if you you in a year we have um the complete cancellation of uh the need for human cognition of the white collar type uh you know that's that's I don't know how many people that is but it's a lot of people and it's it's it's basically um certainly most of the high status jobs, right? I mean, the one of the um ironies and and surprises here is that that the robots are coming for the the lawyers and doctors and and software engineers before they're coming for the janitors and and uh massage therapists and nurses and >> plumbers and um so it's um if you went to college and and incurred $200,000 in debt and that that degree enabled you to get to the rung on the ladder that where you're currently standing. Um it's very likely that that part of the ladder is um in the process of of disappearing, right? and the in the entire ladder. I mean, Mustafa is saying that the latter itself is is uh evaporating and and there's no question that that already what what he's saying now is in principle already true of the the bottom rung of most of many of these ladders, right? So like everyone in in a hiring position, you know, is at at virtually any company, uh, you know, media company, tech company, uh, whatever, marketing, etc. Um, everyone's when they're thinking about new hires, the prospect of having to hire a 21-year-old coming out of college, the first question they're asking themselves is, is this even a job? Do we can't we use AI for this thing? Right? can't can't somebody I who's already working for us figure out how to use AI to do this thing? Do we really need this guy coming out of college? Um so that that's already happening. You you have to think and I I don't know when that's going to show up in the labor statistics, but >> Well, if he's saying 12 to 18 months, I mean, you seem entirely too calm about this. I mean, I I I I can't maybe we just can't get our head around just looking around and seeing at least 50% of the people that we know have no jobs. No, I mean I'm not I'm not calm about it. I just I just see it's um clearly we're going to have you know I I don't know if it's UBI or some other remedy but we are going to have to figure out how to share the wealth right it's just it's totally untenable to live in a world where um you get you know a few a few founders or a dozen founders or 20 founders or you know a hundred founders who become stratospherically wealthy and then a a a cohort below them who also get absurdly wealthy. Uh and then you've got this sort of ra it's almost like this fall of Saigon moment where the kind of the last person who can grasp the you know the foot rails of a helicopter uh gets out. So like what you're going to have are some of the people who jump on the last they get the last job right you know it's like the the last hire at all these companies uh before the the robots you know fully take over. Um and then there's going to kind of a be a winnowing of of ex existing jobs from there uh is totally untenable. We need to we need to anticipate this. You know if it's if it's only 18 months from now or a year from now we should be anticipating it right now. How do we absorb this? Like what so if you if you're founding a company that's going to become a multi-billion dollar company and it's going to have one employee, right? What should be happening there? like like like shouldn't the should does the does the public get equity in in any of these companies right I mean like if if if you if you've created a company that obiates the need for human labor not just in your company but across dozens of other companies what uh you know this gonna we we need to create some mechanism by which the the wealth gets shared >> right >> well speaking of that is um are you familiar with California's wealth tax proposal and do you think that's the way to address it or do we need something more on a national level? I would think >> well that well that's clearly not a way to address it because there you have the perverse incentives of you know just people leaving the state right you know you're going to drive the tech industry to Texas or Florida or some some other place that would wouldn't pass a law like that um and that's so you need to get the incentives right. I mean here what we need if if the punchline is we will one day be in a world where where human labor is is optional at at best I mean and not and just fundamentally not necessary right if that's what success looks like you know we build machines that can do everything better than we can it all becomes like chess all the way down to the plumbers and the janitors and the and you know mechanics and people who work with their hands right I the robots will come eventually, but before that, you know, we'll have the the agents that can do everything that you can do sitting at a desk. We have to anticipate that, right? Like, so on that should be good news, right? It should be just it should usher in abundance and wealth and and leisure and and we should be able to to to make the most of that situation. But we have to anticipate the transition from where we are now to that. I mean, this again, this this leaves aside all the other ways AI could harm us. This is all just the good stuff. This is just this these are just we're just talking about productivity gains. Talking about one person who can suddenly do the work of a thousand because they can spin up a thousand agents and all of a sudden one person is a you know can start multiple companies in in an hour. You know, you while still running their law firm, right? you know, and they and they they fired all their associates and all their parillegals because they didn't need them anymore because the robots do all that stuff better. Okay, if that's if Mustafa is right and that's the world we're we'll be in very soon, we have to figure out politically, we have to figure out how to share that success. I mean, again, that that's s that's what success looks like. That's not one of the failure modes that we also have to worry about. That's not having our robot arsenal hacked by by China and turned against us, right? That's not, you know, cyber terrorism that shuts out the lights on on entire societies. That's not the, you know, a a an AI engineered virus that, you know, makes the stock market disappear for two weeks and nobody knows how much money they have, right? Like it's none of the it's none of the bad stuff. This is all good stuff which we which is also an emergency.