Masad & Weinstein: AI agents and the jobs vanishing fast

1. 0:00 – 7:03

   Intro

   1. AMAmjad Masad0:00

      I think a lot of people don't realize how massive the positive impact AI is gonna have on their life.

   2. BWBret Weinstein0:05

      Well, I would argue that the idea that this AI disruption doesn't lead us to human catastrophe is optimistic. For example, people are gonna be unemployed in huge numbers.

   3. SBSteven Bartlett0:15

      You agree with that, don't you?

   4. DPDaniel Priestley0:16

      Yes. If your job is as routine as it comes, it's gone in the next couple years. But it's gonna create new opportunities for wealth creation.

   5. BWBret Weinstein0:25

      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.

   6. SBSteven Bartlett0:32

      We are joined by three leading voices to debate the most disruptive shift in human history, the rise of AI.

   7. NANarrator0:38

      And they're answering the questions you're most scared about.

   8. DPDaniel Priestley0:41

      This technology is gonna get so much more powerful. And yes, we're gonna go through a period of disruption, but at the other end, we're gonna create a fairer world. It's enabling people to run their businesses, make a lot of money.

   9. AMAmjad Masad0:51

      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.

   10. BWBret Weinstein0:59

       Well, I would just say on that front, this has always been a fantasy of technologists, to do marvelous things with our spare time but we end up doomscrolling.

   11. SBSteven Bartlett1:06

       Loneliness epidemic.

   12. BWBret Weinstein1:07

       Right, falling birth rates. So the potential for good here is infinite and the potential for bad is ten times. For example, there's war, undetectable deepfakes, and scams, so people don't understand how many different ways they are going to be robbed.

   13. DPDaniel Priestley1:20

       Look, I don't think blaming technology for all of it is the right thing. All these issues, they're already here.

   14. SBSteven Bartlett1:26

       We're all fathers here, so what are you saying to your children?

   15. DPDaniel Priestley1:29

       Well, first of all...

   16. SBSteven Bartlett1:31

       This has always blown my mind a little bit: 53% of you that listen to this show regularly haven't yet subscribed to this show. So could I ask you for a favor before we start? If you like this show and you like what we do here and you wanna 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 that, then I'll do everything in my 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 guests that you want me to speak to, and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so 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, Amjad, when I started using Replit, for me, it was a paradigm shift.

   17. DPDaniel Priestley2:25

       Mm-hmm.

   18. SBSteven Bartlett2:25

       There was two paradigm shifts in a row that happened about a week apart.

   19. DPDaniel Priestley2:29

       Mm-hmm.

   20. SBSteven Bartlett2:29

       ChatGPT released their image generation model where you could create any image and 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 vibercoding, I heard AI agent, I was like, "I will give it a shot."

   21. DPDaniel Priestley2:46

       Mm-hmm.

   22. SBSteven Bartlett2:47

       And when I used Replit, 20 minutes in to using Replit, my mind was blown, and I think that night I stayed up 'til 3:00 or 4:00 AM in the morning. For anyone that doesn't know, Replit is, uh, a piece of software that allows you to create software.

   23. DPDaniel Priestley3:03

       Mm-hmm.

   24. SBSteven Bartlett3:04

       And pretty much any software you, you want.

   25. DPDaniel Priestley3:06

       Mm-hmm.

   26. SBSteven Bartlett3:06

       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.

   27. DPDaniel Priestley3:19

       Mm-hmm.

   28. SBSteven Bartlett3:20

       I then s- g- 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.

   29. DPDaniel Priestley3:25

       Amazing.

   30. SBSteven Bartlett3:26

       So I just launched a SaaS 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-
2. 7:03 – 9:00

   What Is an AI Agent?

   1. DPDaniel Priestley7:03

      You conjured water. (laughs)

   2. SBSteven Bartlett7:04

      I conjured water from my mind.

   3. DPDaniel Priestley7:06

      Yeah.

   4. SBSteven Bartlett7:06

      And it's shown up here with us.

   5. AMAmjad Masad7:08

      And it clearly thinks we need a lot.

   6. SBSteven Bartlett7:09

      (laughs)

   7. DPDaniel Priestley7:10

      (laughs)

   8. SBSteven Bartlett7:11

      But, but just to define the term-

   9. DPDaniel Priestley7:13

      Yeah.

   10. SBSteven Bartlett7:13

       ... AI agent for someone that's never heard the term before.

   11. DPDaniel Priestley7:16

       Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, I, I assume most of the audience now are familiar with ChatGPT, 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 requests 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 Replit, access to, um, you know, credit cards. You know, 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's finished executing. Uh, today, AI agents can run for anywhere between, (clears throat) you know, 30 seconds to 30 minutes. Uh, there's a recent paper that came out that's showing that every seven 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 gonna be at an hour, then, you know, two hours. Pretty soon, we're gonna be at days. And at, at that point, you know, an AI agent is doing labor, is doing kind of human-like labor. And actually, uh, OpenAI's new model, O3, 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

3. 9:00 – 12:48

   Who Is Bret and What Are His Views on AI?

   1. DPDaniel Priestley9:00

      massive, and I mean, this looks, this exponential graph, you know, that, that shows you the massive trend we're on.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett9:08

      Bret, 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.

   3. BWBret Weinstein9:22

      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-

   4. SBSteven Bartlett9:58

      Mm-hmm.

   5. BWBret Weinstein9:58

      ... because it 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, it damn well better understand what the goal really is and how to, how to pull back the reins in the event 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, 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-

   6. SBSteven Bartlett11:56

      (laughs)

   7. DPDaniel Priestley11:57

      (laughs)

   8. BWBret Weinstein11:57

      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 remains so for thousands of years. This is changing things weekly, and that's an awful lot of power to just simply have dumped on a system that wasn't well-regulated to begin with.

4. 12:48 – 14:31

   Who Is Dan?

   1. BWBret Weinstein12:48

   2. SBSteven Bartlett12:48

      Dan?

   3. AMAmjad Masad12:49

      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, uh, 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've 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've said, "Well, we've been part of, uh, humanity for, you know, horse and hoof, uh, hand and hoof for many, many years. Uh, 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. We'll always be part of society." Um, and little did the horses realize that that was not the case, that the horses were gonna 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 gonna have as an impact. You know, one minute we're ordering 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.

5. 14:31 – 15:46

   Where Are the Boundaries?

   1. AMAmjad Masad14:31

   2. SBSteven Bartlett14:31

      I'm thinking a lot, Amjed, as Daniel's speaking, about the vast application-

   3. DPDaniel Priestley14:35

      Mm-hmm.

   4. SBSteven Bartlett14:36

      ... of AI agents and where are the bounds?

   5. DPDaniel Priestley14:38

      Mm-hmm.

   6. SBSteven Bartlett14:38

      Because if it, if this thing is gonna get incrementally smarter, well, incrementally might be an understatement, it's gonna 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 gonna be smarter than me.

   7. DPDaniel Priestley15:05

      Mm-hmm.

   8. SBSteven Bartlett15:06

      No, no doubt. It already is. And it's gonna be able to take actions across the internet, which is pretty much where most of my professional life operates.

   9. DPDaniel Priestley15:13

      Yeah.

   10. SBSteven Bartlett15:13

       It's like how I build my businesses. Even this podcast is an internet product at the end of the day.

   11. DPDaniel Priestley15:18

       Yep.

   12. SBSteven Bartlett15:18

       'Cause you can create... I've, we've done experiments now and I can show you 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 Diary of a CEO. Now with the image generation model-

   13. DPDaniel Priestley15:30

       Retention as in viewer retention?

   14. SBSteven Bartlett15:31

       The percentage of people that get to one hour-

   15. DPDaniel Priestley15:34

       Wow.

   16. SBSteven Bartlett15:34

       ... is the same now. So we can make the video, we can publish it, we can script it-

   17. DPDaniel Priestley15:38

       (?) Yeah.

   18. SBSteven Bartlett15:38

       You can synthesize my voice, sounds like me. So what, what is it gonna be able to do?

   19. DPDaniel Priestley15:44

       Mm-hmm.

6. 15:46 – 16:50

   What Could AI Potentially Do?

   1. DPDaniel Priestley15:46

   2. SBSteven Bartlett15:46

      And can you give me the variety of use cases that the average person might not have intuitively conceived?

   3. DPDaniel Priestley15:51

      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 tr- 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, uh, run through massive amount of computation that, you know, your brain, you know, 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, the water there is because it was trained on SF data. That includes clicking on DoorDash and ordering water.

7. 16:50 – 19:22

   Bret's Concerns: AI and a New Species

   1. DPDaniel Priestley16:50

   2. BWBret Weinstein16:50

      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 commonplace. 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.

   3. DPDaniel Priestley17:12

      Mm-hmm.

   4. BWBret Weinstein17:13

      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.

   5. DPDaniel Priestley17:34

      Mm-hmm.

   6. BWBret Weinstein17:34

      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 wanna 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.

   7. DPDaniel Priestley18:44

      Mm-hmm.

   8. BWBret Weinstein18:45

      Your AIs are gonna 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.

   9. DPDaniel Priestley19:02

      Mm-hmm.

   10. BWBret Weinstein19:02

       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.

8. 19:22 – 20:22

   The Disruptive Potential of AI in Its Current Form

   1. BWBret Weinstein19:22

   2. DPDaniel Priestley19:22

      Mm-hmm.

   3. AMAmjad Masad19:22

      Even if it didn't do that, even if it just stayed within the boundaries that you're talking about, uh, 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.

   4. DPDaniel Priestley19:43

      Mm-hmm.

   5. AMAmjad Masad19:43

      Um, there's billions of them. They've all got a master's or a PhD. They all speak all the languages. Anything that you could call someone or ask someone o- 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 for almost 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.

9. 20:22 – 21:27

   Is AI Just a Tool?

   1. DPDaniel Priestley20:22

      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 the, the world is gonna get disrupted, right?

   2. AMAmjad Masad20:32

      Mm-hmm.

   3. DPDaniel Priestley20:32

      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.

   4. AMAmjad Masad20:48

      Mm-hmm.

   5. DPDaniel Priestley20:48

      That it, it is n- uh, you know, this American dream is perhaps no longer there. And so I think the world has already changed. And so but, but, like, what are the opportunities? Obviously, they are downsized. The opportunities is for the first time, access to opportunity is, is equal. And I, I do think there's gonna be more inequality.

   6. AMAmjad Masad21:06

      Mm-hmm.

   7. DPDaniel Priestley21:07

      And the reason, uh, for this inequality is because actually Steve Jobs, uh, you know, ma- made this analogy is 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-

   8. AMAmjad Masad21:25

      Mm-hmm.

   9. DPDaniel Priestley21:25

      We say the 10X engineer.

10. 21:27 – 25:04

    Those Who Leverage AI Will Be the Winners

    1. DPDaniel Priestley21:27

       Now the variance will be in the 1,000X.

    2. AMAmjad Masad21:31

       Mm-hmm.

    3. DPDaniel Priestley21:32

       Right? Like the best, uh, the best entrepreneur that can leverage those agents could be better, uh, could be 1,000 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, you know-

    4. AMAmjad Masad21:54

       Sees it and then they'll-

    5. DPDaniel Priestley21:55

       Sees it, yes.

    6. AMAmjad Masad21:56

       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-

    7. DPDaniel Priestley22:04

       Mm-hmm.

    8. AMAmjad Masad22:05

       ... um, such as TikTok algorithm.

    9. DPDaniel Priestley22:07

       That's right.

    10. AMAmjad Masad22:07

        And the other superpower is to make you hyper creative, so you become a hyper consumer or hyper creator. And in this marathon race, the vast majority of people have got their shoes tied together 'cause AI is distracting them. Some people are running traditional race. Some people have got a bicycle, and some people have got a Formula One-

    11. DPDaniel Priestley22:26

        Mm-hmm.

    12. AMAmjad Masad22:26

        ... vehicle. And it's gonna 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 'cause 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, you know, and do you... You know, I'm using an analogy, but this idea that, you know, someone, like a lot of people are gonna start earning a million dollars a month, and a lot of people are gonna say, "Hey, I can't even get a job for $15 an hour." There's gonna be this kind of interesting (laughs) wedge.

    13. BWBret Weinstein23:04

        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 wanna 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, just-

    14. DPDaniel Priestley24:30

        Can I, can I give you a quick, uh, like introduction here, like the optimistic view? OpenAI invented, uh, G... the first version of GPT came out in 2019. 2020 was GPT-2. And so OpenAI, you know, now they get a lot of criticism and lawsuit from Elon Musk that they're no longer open source, right?

    15. BWBret Weinstein24:50

        Right.

    16. DPDaniel Priestley24:50

        They used to be. The reason is, in GPT-2, they said, "We are, we are no longer gonna, uh, open source this technology because it's gonna create, um, uh, opportunities for abuse such as, you know, influencing

11. 25:04 – 30:46

    What Abuse Are We Currently Seeing?

    1. DPDaniel Priestley25:04

       elections, um, you know, s- stealing, you know, grandma's credit card and so on and so forth." Wouldn't you say, Bret, that it is kind of surprising how little abuse we've seen so far?

    2. BWBret Weinstein25:17

       W- 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 ChatGPT is no longer open source to prevent abuse, I'm taking their word for it that that's the motivation. Whereas a systems theorist, I would say, well, if you had a technology that was excellent at enhan- at, uh, 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 wanna 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... W- 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 gonna be massive. And does that lead some group of elites to decide, "Oh, well suddenly we have a lot of use- useless eaters and what are we gonna 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.

    3. DPDaniel Priestley27:17

       Yeah. S- so 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've 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 LLMs, large language models, the technology that's powering ChatGPT, has been huge headliners on, like New York Times-

    4. BWBret Weinstein27:50

       Mm-hmm.

    5. DPDaniel Priestley27:50

       ... talked about this kid that was, you know, perhaps goaded 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 wanna, we wanna 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.

    6. BWBret Weinstein28:29

       Mm-hmm.

    7. DPDaniel Priestley28:29

       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's another AI similar to ChatGPT. The reasoning they're open sourcing of LLaMA, and Zuckerberg just says that, uh, out loud, is basically they don't wanna be beholden to OpenAI. 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 a technology to run your service, the best strategy to do is to open source it. So these market forces are gonna create conditions that I think are actually, uh, beneficial. So I- I'll give you a few, a 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 'em to protect from the sort of malicious, uh, acting-

    8. BWBret Weinstein29:27

       Mm-hmm.

    9. DPDaniel Priestley29:27

       ... 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, sort of the abuse.

    10. BWBret Weinstein29:40

        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 collec- collective action problem.

    11. DPDaniel Priestley30:02

        Mm-hmm.

    12. BWBret Weinstein30:03

        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's 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

12. 30:46 – 38:57

    The Collateral Damage of AI

    1. BWBret Weinstein30:47

       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 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 happened. 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.

    2. AMAmjad Masad31:55

       Well, 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- um, 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... (laughs)

    3. BWBret Weinstein33:13

       Well, what I want to know-

    4. AMAmjad Masad33:14

       That's- that's okay. (laughs)

    5. BWBret Weinstein33:15

       Yeah.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett33:16

       (laughs)

    7. AMAmjad Masad33:16

       There's a lot of people upset about that.

    8. BWBret Weinstein33:17

       And I'll agree that that's all right. But if we look back at the invention of the cellphone-

    9. AMAmjad Masad33:24

       Mm-hmm.

    10. BWBret Weinstein33:24

        ... 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-

    11. AMAmjad Masad33:33

        Mm-hmm.

    12. BWBret Weinstein33:33

        ... 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.

    13. AMAmjad Masad33:44

        Mm-hmm.

    14. BWBret Weinstein33:44

        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-

    15. AMAmjad Masad34:03

        Mm-hmm.

    16. BWBret Weinstein34:04

        ... about the cellphones and the dopamine traps-

    17. AMAmjad Masad34:06

        Mm-hmm.

    18. BWBret Weinstein34:06

        ... 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.

    19. AMAmjad Masad34:20

        Mm-hmm.

    20. BWBret Weinstein34:20

        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- 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 gonna discover that we can't yet detect the nature of the alteration that's coming.

    21. SBSteven Bartlett34:50

        So- so I just wanted to add some context to that, 'cause Amjed, 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- 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.

    22. AMAmjad Masad35:34

        You- you- you, so you also used AGI-

    23. SBSteven Bartlett35:36

        Yeah.

    24. AMAmjad Masad35:36

        ... artificial general intelligence. It'd be interesting to know what your definition-

    25. SBSteven Bartlett35:40

        Yeah.

    26. AMAmjad Masad35:40

        ... of AGI is so that-

    27. SBSteven Bartlett35:41

        Yeah.

    28. DPDaniel Priestley35:41

        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't 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, e- efficiently in the same way that humans can acquire skills. Right now, AIs don't acquire skills efficiently. You know, they, they require a massive amount of energy and compute, entire data center of compute to acquire these, these skills. And I think there's, 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, of doing. The singularity is based on this concept of intellag- intelligence explosion. So 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?

    29. SBSteven Bartlett37:08

        Mm-hmm. Within a week.

    30. DPDaniel Priestley37:09

        Within a week. Perhaps within milliseconds at some point.
13. 38:57 – 42:05

    What Will Happen to Humans?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett38:57

       Elon Musk predicts that by 2029, we will have AI with us, AGI, that surpasses the combined intelligence of all humans. And Sam Altman actually wrote a blog three months ago that I read where he said, "We are confident now..." Sam Altman being the founder of OpenAI, which created ChatGPT. "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 this sort of professional output and 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?

    2. DPDaniel Priestley39:47

       Yeah. I mean, I mean, in my vision of the world, we are in the creative seats. We are sitting there, we're, um, we- 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.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett40:05

       Yeah.

    4. DPDaniel Priestley40:05

       And you're gonna 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 replant 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 coordinated together. And I am trying to privilege the human. Like, this is my, my mission is to 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 p- p- position in the, in the world and in the universe, we don't know where conscious, uh, consciousness, uh, 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-

    5. SBSteven Bartlett41:15

       Yeah.

    6. DPDaniel Priestley41:15

       ... is going to be a function of us training data. So there, there was this whole idea of like, what if ChatGPT generates pathogens? Well, have you trained it on pathogens?

    7. SBSteven Bartlett41:26

       They were doing that kind of stuff in Wuhan, no?

    8. DPDaniel Priestley41:28

       (laughs)

    9. SBSteven Bartlett41:29

       I mean, a lot of the biotech companies are essentially using artificial intelligence. Like I can think of AbCellera. I think it's AbCellera in Canada. Their whole business is using AI to create new vaccines-

    10. DPDaniel Priestley41:41

        Mm-hmm.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett41:41

        ... using artificial intelligence and bigger datasets than we've never have, had before.

    12. DPDaniel Priestley41:45

        Mm-hmm.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett41:45

        And I know because I was, I was very close to one of the founders of, people involved in AbCellera. So that, that work is going on anyway.

    14. DPDaniel Priestley41:51

        Yeah.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett41:51

        And if you think about Wuhan, that's, I mean, 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, the room

14. 42:05 – 45:23

    Which Jobs Will Be Replaced by AI?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett42:05

       is what jobs, 'cause I know that you have this perspective, what jobs are gonna be made redundant in a world where I am sat here as a CEO-

    2. DPDaniel Priestley42:13

       Yeah.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett42:13

       ... with 1,000 AI agents?

    4. DPDaniel Priestley42:15

       Right.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett42:15

       I was thinking of all the names on my, of the people in my company-

    6. DPDaniel Priestley42:17

       Yeah.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett42:18

       ... who are currently doing those jobs. I was thinking about my CFO when he talked about processing business data-

    8. DPDaniel Priestley42:22

       Yeah.

    9. SBSteven Bartlett42:22

       ... my graphic designers, my video editors, etc. So what, what jobs are gonna be impacted?

    10. DPDaniel Priestley42:27

        Yeah. All of those. Uh, so I, I think, uh-

    11. SBSteven Bartlett42:30

        And what do they do?

    12. DPDaniel Priestley42:31

        You know, 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, uh, couple years. So meaning if you, if, if, in, in those jobs, for example, uh, quality assurance jobs, data entry jobs, you're, 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 gonna displace a lot of, a lot of, uh, labor.

    13. SBSteven Bartlett43:01

        Accountants?

    14. DPDaniel Priestley43:02

        Accountants.

    15. SBSteven Bartlett43:03

        Lawyers?

    16. DPDaniel Priestley43:04

        Yes.

    17. SBSteven Bartlett43:05

        I, I, 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.

    18. DPDaniel Priestley43:12

        Yeah, yeah, yeah.

    19. SBSteven Bartlett43:13

        I'm guessing that, that's gone.

    20. DPDaniel Priestley43:15

        Yeah. Uh, 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 permeate 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.

    21. SBSteven Bartlett43:45

        So just to give you some stats here as well, about 50% of Americans who have a college degree currently use AI.

    22. DPDaniel Priestley43:51

        Mm-hmm.

    23. SBSteven Bartlett43:51

        The stats are significantly lower for Americans without a college degree. So you can see how a splinter might emerge there and that c- crack will ri- widen because people like us at this table are all messing around with it. But my mum 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 and my agents, that gap is gonna widen. Women are disproportionately affected by au- au- automation, which is what you're talking about there, with about 80% of working women a- 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-

    24. DPDaniel Priestley44:34

        Mm-hmm.

    25. SBSteven Bartlett44:34

        ... have an automation risk of just 20%. So we can see again how, how this will cause a sort of a, sort of inequality-

    26. AMAmjad Masad44:40

        It's also a huge risk, um, with business process out-, uh, 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 po- poverty through the ability to do those kind of business process auto- uh, outsourcing jobs. And those are all gonna go.

    27. SBSteven Bartlett44:59

        But these, they're gonna have a thousand employees.

    28. DPDaniel Priestley45:01

        But, but, but, uh, also, uh, th- these people are actually already transitioning to training AIs.

    29. SBSteven Bartlett45:06

        Mm-hmm.

    30. AMAmjad Masad45:07

        Mm-hmm.
15. 45:23 – 48:49

    Could AI Development Affect Western Economies?

    1. DPDaniel Priestley45:23

    2. SBSteven Bartlett45:23

       I was actually thinking, interestingly, that this might not be great for the United States or the UK, the Western world, because it is gonna be a leveler-

    3. AMAmjad Masad45:29

       Yeah.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett45:29

       ... where now a kid in India doesn't need a Silicon Valley office and s- $7 million in investment to throw up a s- a sof- software company basically.

    5. AMAmjad Masad45:37

       Well, 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.

    6. DPDaniel Priestley45:54

       Mm-hmm.

    7. AMAmjad Masad45:54

       We have this general intelligence that we can now all access. And 800 million people a week are now using, uh, ChatGPT. It's, it's exploded in the last three 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 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.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett46:25

       We also always underestimate a technology if it does go on to change history. When you look back through cars, horses, planes-

    9. DPDaniel Priestley46:32

       Mm-hmm.

    10. SBSteven Bartlett46:32

        ... the Wright brothers just thought of a plane as being something the, the Army could use.

    11. DPDaniel Priestley46:36

        Mm-hmm.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett46:36

        They had no idea of the application. So someone said to me recently, they said, "When it does change the world, we underestimate the impact"-

    13. AMAmjad Masad46:43

        Hmm.

    14. SBSteven Bartlett46:43

        ... "that it will change the world." And I see people now with their estimations of AI and AI agents already incredibly optimistic.

    15. AMAmjad Masad46:51

        Yeah.

    16. SBSteven Bartlett46:51

        And so if history holds here, we are undershooting the impact it's gonna have. And I think this is the first time in my life where the industrial revolution analogies seem to fall a little bit short.

    17. AMAmjad Masad47:01

        Yeah.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett47:02

        Because we've never seen intelligent... That's like, you could, I could think of this as a, um, not an intelligent person on this, but I could see that as, like, the disruption of muscles-

    19. AMAmjad Masad47:10

        Mm-hmm.

    20. SBSteven Bartlett47:11

        (laughs) Whereas this is the disruption of intelligence.

    21. AMAmjad Masad47:13

        Intelligence.

    22. DPDaniel Priestley47:13

        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, 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-

    23. AMAmjad Masad47:56

        Mm-hmm.

    24. DPDaniel Priestley47:56

        ... and surpassing ourselves with the product of our, of our labor. I think your question is a good one. Then, then what does become of us?

    25. AMAmjad Masad48:04

        Well, 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 gonna 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-

    26. SBSteven Bartlett48:48

        Really interesting.

16. 48:49 – 57:28

    Is AI Removing Our Agency?

    1. SBSteven Bartlett48:49

       When you said agency is gonna 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 SaaS company that spots a market opportunity throughout the website, post it on my social media channel, I'll be in Hawaii." And this new agentic world is stealing that too 'cause 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 Altman said that they've expanded the memory feature.

    2. AMAmjad Masad49:29

       Mm-hmm.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett49:29

       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 S- Steve's calendar, he's arriving at the studio, make sure his c- 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.

    4. AMAmjad Masad49:45

       Mm-hmm.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett49:45

       So it, it will remember Brett's birthday, so when Br- I arrive, there'll be something... Uh, in fact, it's removing my need for any agency.

    6. BWBret Weinstein49:51

       Yes. And you know, again, I, 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.

    7. AMAmjad Masad50:52

       (laughs)

    8. BWBret Weinstein50:52

       And the answer is, those aren't different.

    9. AMAmjad Masad50:54

       Doesn't matter. (laughs)

    10. BWBret Weinstein50:54

        Um, 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.

    11. SBSteven Bartlett51:12

        Mm-hmm.

    12. BWBret Weinstein51:13

        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-

    13. DPDaniel Priestley51:32

        By, by the way, he's the optimist here, right? (laughs)

    14. BWBret Weinstein51:35

        (laughs)

    15. AMAmjad Masad51:35

        (laughs)

    16. SBSteven Bartlett51:35

        (laughs)

    17. DPDaniel Priestley51:35

        Like, he's so optimistic about LLMs and how, how they're gonna, they're gonna 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 rubbed p- people the, the, the wrong way. They, they would say things in not so polite way, and then, uh, suddenly they started (laughs) putting their, the, uh, you know, what they're saying through ChatGPT 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, I... You know, the... I would want less agency in certain places.

    18. SBSteven Bartlett52:30

        Mm-hmm.

    19. DPDaniel Priestley52:30

        Like, I would want something to help me not, you know, open up a peanut butter jar at night, right? (laughs) You know, there, there are places in my life where I need more control and I would rather cede it to some kind of entity that could help me make better choices.

    20. BWBret Weinstein52:51

        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 gonna 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-

    21. AMAmjad Masad53:39

        Hmm.

    22. BWBret Weinstein53:39

        ... 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, 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?

    23. DPDaniel Priestley54:20

        Mm-hmm.

    24. BWBret Weinstein54:20

        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.

    25. DPDaniel Priestley54:27

        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, the, the result of then the- and the Luddite sort of revolution. Uh, h- how is it, how is it different than any time in history when, uh, technology, uh, automated, uh, a lot of people out of- out of jobs?

    26. BWBret Weinstein54:46

        I would say scale and speed, that's how it's different.

    27. DPDaniel Priestley54:49

        Mm-hmm.

    28. NANarrator54:49

        It is though.

    29. BWBret Weinstein54:49

        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, new.

    30. NANarrator55:03

        And it also did actually happen. There was a, there was a n- 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 were displaced, arriving in cities, k- kids living on the streets. Uh, the British decided to pick everyone up and send them over to the- uh, over to Australia, which is where I came from. Um, and, uh, you know, there- there were this- there- there was this massive issue of displacement. I think we're gonna go into a high-velocity economy, where rather than this long arc of career that lasts 45 years, we're gonna have these very fast careers that last 10 months to 36 months.
17. 57:28 – 59:05

    Will Authenticity Be More Valued in the AI Era?

    1. BWBret Weinstein57:28

       them.

    2. DPDaniel Priestley57:28

       Mm-hmm.

    3. NANarrator57:28

       I think that we... With this in- introduction of AI and AI agents, old value has moved, and now it's not gonna be the case that the idea itself is the moat. And it's not gonna 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 podcast 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 in-built 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 moat is distribution.

    4. DPDaniel Priestley58:09

       Yeah. A- 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.

    5. BWBret Weinstein58:20

       Oh, I agree that, uh, authenticity is gonna 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-

    6. DPDaniel Priestley58:43

       That's great.

    7. BWBret Weinstein58:44

       ... speeches.

    8. DPDaniel Priestley58:44

       Oh, it answers-

    9. NANarrator58:45

       I agree, by the way.

    10. DPDaniel Priestley58:45

        It answers some of your questions, I think.

    11. NANarrator58:46

        That makes sense.

    12. BWBret Weinstein58:47

        No, it answers, it answers my question for the tiny number of people who are in a position to do those things.

    13. NANarrator58:54

        Stephen, you used the moat- word moat, um, which I think is a really important word for entrepreneurs. We, like, we, like, have to have a moat. We th- think a lot about moats, and it's an industrial age. A lot of people don't even know what a moat, what you mean by

18. 59:05 – 1:03:34

    Will Markets Become Fairer or More Unbalanced?

    1. NANarrator59:05

       moat. I often think about this idea of what are the moats that are left. Uh- So, to define how I define a moat, you've g- 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. Mm-hmm. And you can pull up the drawbridge, so nobody can 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-

    2. DPDaniel Priestley59:29

       Mm-hmm.

    3. NANarrator59:29

       ... called ThirdWeb. And we raised al- almost $30 million. We have a team of 50 great developers, and much of our moat was, "You can't compete with us-" You can't compet- "... because you don't have the 50 developers and the $30 million in the bank." Now- How much of that $30 million went to coding?

    4. BWBret Weinstein59:44

       The vast majority of it. I mean, what else are we gonna do? (laughs)

    5. NANarrator59:46

       (laughs)

    6. BWBret Weinstein59:46

       What else would we do? What else would we do? (laughs)

    7. DPDaniel Priestley59:47

       So this is a good thing. M- I think moats are a bad thing. (laughs)

    8. NANarrator59:51

       Yeah. (laughs)

    9. DPDaniel Priestley59:51

       Okay. L- let me make the argument there. Uh, so everyone is looking for moats. You know, for example, like, one of the more, uh, significant moats is network effects.

    10. NANarrator1:00:00

        Yeah.

    11. DPDaniel Priestley1:00:00

        You know, so you can't compete with Facebook or Twitter because...... it to move people from Facebook or Twitter, you need to, it's the collective action problem. You need to move them all at once-

    12. BWBret Weinstein1:00:12

        Mm-hmm.

    13. DPDaniel Priestley1:00:12

        ... because if one of them moves, then it's, the, the network is not valuable, they'll go back.

    14. BWBret Weinstein1:00:18

        Mm-hmm.

    15. DPDaniel Priestley1:00:18

        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. You know, there, there are obvious problems with, with free markets that, that we can discuss. But take, um, health, you know? There is obesity, uh, epidemic. The, this, uh, 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. (laughs) That's how you go find a date. You go to running clubs. And so the- there was a shift that happened because there was a reaction. Obviously cigarettes is ano- 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 wanna hang out with you because you're, you're constantly staring at, at your phone. So the- there's always these reactions and, and-

    16. BWBret Weinstein1:01:49

        But the problem is, you, you reference self-correction. 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 reined 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, parasitism and... The problem is these things are destructive of wealth. And so you allude to the superior fact of an open market without moats. 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 prov- 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. It also... those are also on the table.

    17. SBSteven Bartlett1:03:24

        It's like a mousetrap. It reminds me of a mousetrap where you see the cheese and we're going, "Oh my god, my grandmother's gonna be able to-"

    18. BWBret Weinstein1:03:28

        Mm-hmm.

    19. SBSteven Bartlett1:03:28

        "... do some research and oh my god, my life's gonna get easier." So you head closer and closer to the cheese.

19. 1:03:34 – 1:05:34

    The Economic Displacement

    1. BWBret Weinstein1:03:34

       And then snap.

    2. AMAmjad Masad1:03:34

       And his- 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 serfs and peasants who have a subsistence living.

    3. BWBret Weinstein1:03:47

       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 in order-

    4. AMAmjad Masad1:03:53

       Pitchforks.

    5. BWBret Weinstein1:03:54

       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 than it empowers those who are wealth creating and pro-social, we may be in for a massive regression in how fair the, the market of the West is.

    6. DPDaniel Priestley1:04:35

       Is, is, is that your top concern versus, uh, economic displacement and...

    7. BWBret Weinstein1:04:39

       I think they're the same thing.

    8. DPDaniel Priestley1:04:41

       How are they the same thing?

    9. BWBret Weinstein1:04:42

       Because the economic displacement is going to start. Uh, I don't know how many million people are going to be displaced from their jobs in the US. Suddenly we're gonna have a question about whether or not we have obligations to them and-

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:04:57

        You agree with that, don't you?

    11. DPDaniel Priestley1:04:59

        Yes. But, but, but I, again, it's, it's the no pain, no gain. I mean, we're gonna 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 gonna create perhaps a fair world, but it's gonna have its own, its own problems.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:05:16

        And what's the scale of that disruption in your estimation?

    13. DPDaniel Priestley1:05:19

        It's hard to say because, uh, you know, there's this concept of limiting factors like, you know, there is, um, uh, regulation, there's the appetite of people to, today... And for, for example, the healthcare system is very resistant

20. 1:05:34 – 1:11:36

    Worldcoin and the Case for Universal Basic Income

    1. DPDaniel Priestley1:05:34

       to innovation because of regulation, you know? And that's a, that's a bad thing.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:05:38

       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.

    3. DPDaniel Priestley1:05:51

       Mm-hmm.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:05:51

       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, the vast majority of investment. So with those two in competition, any regulation that restricts AI in any way is actually self-sabotage.

    5. DPDaniel Priestley1:06:04

       Mm-hmm.

    6. SBSteven Bartlett1:06:05

       And this is, you know... I, I live in Europe-

    7. DPDaniel Priestley1:06:08

       Mm-hmm.

    8. SBSteven Bartlett1:06:08

       ... some of the time.And it's already annoying to me that when Sam Altman and OpenAI released the O3 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 Altman's spoken about. And more broadly on this point of disruption, it was, I was quite unnerved when I heard that Sam Altman's other startup was called Worldcoin. (laughs) 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 AI company in the world can see something that a lot of us can't see, which is there's going to be-

    9. DPDaniel Priestley1:06:57

       The poison and the cure. (laughs)

    10. SBSteven Bartlett1:06:57

        Yeah, there's gonna need to be a system to just hand out money to people because they're not gonna be able to survive otherwise.

    11. DPDaniel Priestley1:07:02

        I disagree. I fundamentally disagree with that.

    12. SBSteven Bartlett1:07:04

        Which part do you disagree with?

    13. DPDaniel Priestley1:07:05

        I disagree that, first of all, that humans would be happy with UBI. I, I think that, you know, uh, a, you know, a core value of humans, and be curious about the evolutionary reasons, is we wanna be useful.

    14. AMAmjad Masad1:07:19

        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 mo-

    15. BWBret Weinstein1:07:34

        Highest-paid salaried job.

    16. AMAmjad Masad1:07:34

        Salaried 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.

    17. DPDaniel Priestley1:08:12

        Wh- what's wrong with that? I mean, if, if, if the precision is better with AI, yeah.

    18. AMAmjad Masad1:08:15

        Oh, no, there's, 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. It's-

    19. DPDaniel Priestley1:08:34

        Well, if it's highest paid jobs, maybe you should start saving.

    20. SBSteven Bartlett1:08:37

        (laughs)

    21. AMAmjad Masad1:08:38

        Yeah, well...

    22. BWBret Weinstein1:08:40

        Well, I mean, but...

    23. DPDaniel Priestley1:08:41

        (laughs)

    24. BWBret Weinstein1:08:42

        I, I hear, I hear you.

    25. SBSteven Bartlett1:08:43

        Oh, yes. (laughs)

    26. BWBret Weinstein1:08:43

        But you're talking about people who have done vital work-

    27. AMAmjad Masad1:08:48

        Mm-hmm.

    28. BWBret Weinstein1:08:50

        ... highly specialized work, and are therefore not in a great position to pivet- 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.

    29. AMAmjad Masad1:09:09

        Yeah, of course.

    30. BWBret Weinstein1:09:09

        It's, it's not their fault that they've suddenly become obsolete, and it's inconceivable that people will accept this.
21. 1:11:36 – 1:14:34

    Are We Losing Meaning and Purpose?

    1. DPDaniel Priestley1:11:36

       HR team.

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:11:37

       On this point of meaning, wh- uh, 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...... w- 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 gonna have so much free time and we're not gonna need to work, if there is at all gonna be a crisis of meaning, a mental health problem.

    3. BWBret Weinstein1:12:34

       I mean, there already is, and it doesn't require AI, and it's gonna 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 the ... almost at best what would happen is you have people who are being sustained by a universal basic income and then parasitized. 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.

22. 1:14:34 – 1:18:47

    AI's Impact on Loneliness, Relationships, and Connection

    1. BWBret Weinstein1:14:34

    2. SBSteven Bartlett1:14:34

       Interestingly, you also see in Western countries that when we get more abundance, we start having less kids.

    3. BWBret Weinstein1:14:40

       Mm-hmm.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:14:40

       And we're already seeing this sort of population decline in the Western world, which is k- was k- kind of scary and th- I think it's often associated with affluence. Like, the more money someone makes, the less likely they are to wanna, to wanna have children so 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 (laughs) and I wanna have kin. But if I didn't have to (laughs) deal with the struggle that comes with human relationships, romantic or platonic, there's gonna be a proportion of people that actually choose that outcome, and I wonder what's gonna 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 c- 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 re- recorded globally. And if this trend continues, the c- country's population could half by 2100. So yeah, relationships, connections, and what ... And also, I gue- I guess we've gotta overlay that with the loneliness epidemic, which is they promised us social connection when social media came about, when we got WiFi 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 TikTok, and the internet that we're investing less in the very difficult thing of, like, going and making a friend, and, like, going and 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 connections seems to be, um, falling away.

    5. DPDaniel Priestley1:16:41

       I, I'll make the case that everything that we've discussed here, all the negative things around loneliness, um, around meaning, i- i- they're already here. And I don't think blaming technology for all of it is, is the right thing. Like, I think there are a lot of things that happened because of existing human, uh, you know, impulses and, and motivations. Um-

    6. BWBret Weinstein1:17:08

       Well, I, I wanted to go back to where you started because I do think that this maybe is the, the fundamental question. Why is it that we are already living in a world that is not making us happy and is that the responsibility of technology? And I don't think it's, it's exactly technology. Human beings, uh, among our gifts, are fundamentally technological, whether we're talking about quantum computing or flint knapping a, a, a, an arrowhead. What has happened to us that has created the growing, spreading, morphing dystopia is a process that Heather and I in our book, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, call hyper-novelty. Hyper-novelty is the fact of the rate of change outpacing our capacity to adapt to change, and we are already well past the threshold here where the world that we are young in is not the world that we are adults in. And that mismatch is making us sick across multiple different domains. So the f- the question that I ask is, is the change that you're talking about going to reduce-... the rate of change, in which case we could build a world that would start meeting human needs better, open opportunities for pursuing meaningful work, or is it gonna accelerate the rate of change, which is, in my opinion, guaranteed to make us worse off. So if it was a one-time shift, right, AI is gonna dawn, it's gonna open all sorts of new opportunities, there's going to be a tremendous amount of disruption, but from that we'll be able to build a world. Is that world gonna be stable or

23. 1:18:47 – 1:25:57

    Can Education Adapt to the AI Era?

    1. BWBret Weinstein1:18:47

       is it gonna be just, you know, one event horizon after the next? If it's the latter, then it effectively says what it does to the humans, which is it- it's going to dismantle us.

    2. AMAmjad Masad1:18:59

       When I look out at society, I go, I go, okay, it's having a negative impact. When I look at, um, individual use cases, it's having a profoundly positive im- impact, including for me, it's having a very positive impact. So I- I- I, it's one of these things where I wonder what is the, what is it that we need to teach people at school so that they understand the world that we're going into? 'Cause one of the biggest issues that we're having is that we're sending kids to school with this blueprint, this template that they're gonna have this long arc career that no- no longer exists, that essentially we're treating them like learning, uh, LLMs and we're saying, "Okay, we are gonna prompt you. You're gonna give us the right answer. You're gonna hallucinate it if possible." And, you know, and- and then we go, "Okay, now go off into the world." And they go, "Oh, but wait a second, I don't know how money works. I don't know how society works. I don't know how my brain works. I don't know how I'm meant to handle this novelty problem. I'm not sure how to approach someone in a, in a social situation and ask if they wanna go on a date." Um, so all the important things that actually are the important milestones that people want to be able to hit and that technology can actually have an impact on, we get no user man- manual. So I think one of the biggest things that has to happen is we have to equip, uh, young people all through school that, to actually prepare them for the world that's coming or the, the world that's here.

    3. BWBret Weinstein1:20:22

       Well, on the one hand, I think you, you outlined the problem very well. Effectively, we have a, a model of what school is supposed to do that, you know, at best was sort of a match for the '50s or something like that, and it woefully misses the mark with respect to preparing people for the world they actually face. If we were going to prepare them, I would argue that the only toolkit worth having at the moment is a highly general toolkit.

    4. SBSteven Bartlett1:20:51

       Mm-hmm.

    5. BWBret Weinstein1:20:51

       The capacity to think on your feet and pivot as things change is the only game in town with respect to our ability to prepare you in advance, right? Maybe the- the other auxiliary component to that would be teaching you what we know, which is frankly not enough, about how to live a healthy life, right? If we could, if we could induce people into the kinds of habits of behavior and, uh-

Episode duration: 2:32:09