AI Will Create New Wealth, But Not Where You Think | Carnegie Mellon University, Po-Shen Loh

1. 0:00 – 2:04

   Intro

   1. PLPo-Shen Loh0:00

      The AI today can do those problems like this. Actually, at this point, even a very sophisticated math coach can be replaced by the AI tool if you decide you want to do it. As I started running around rural areas where I walked into the elementary school, I walked into the fourth-grade classroom, and I was just gonna do my usual thing, Mr. Po, the substitute teacher. So I wrote on the blackboard, "What is one plus three plus five plus seven plus nine equals?" As soon as I wrote equals, behind me I heard a bunch of kids yelling, "Twenty-five." I've actually never experienced before a classroom. This was one of the best classrooms I have ever taught, and I just told you the profile of the area was high poverty. I asked the person who took me around afterwards, "These kids are amazing. Do they play games on their phones?" And the lady told me, "They don't have phones. It's because of the money. In fact, they might not even have the internet access." Then I said, "What do they do for fun?" And she said, "Well, they just figure out how to make their own games." The problem was these people who I met, people outside in the rest of the world didn't know about these particular great people. So then I realized, actually, that huge pool of authentically interested and curious kids throughout rural America, this could be an enormous untapped potential across not only the US but the, the entire world. This could potentially create a totally new economic flow system. This might just be what we need for the twenty-first century after AI. I will also say for everyone who wanted a stable life, good luck, 'cause AI is gonna take that. Hi, I'm Po-Shen Loh. I'm a mathematician who has gotten very distracted by the real world, and now my main focus is on trying to build a more thoughtful world to help humanity survive after AI.

2. 2:04 – 7:42

   Lesson 1 - Lessons from rural classrooms

   1. PLPo-Shen Loh2:09

      These days, my biggest focus is on how to bring opportunities to places where there might not have been as many opportunities before. The latest direction that I've been pushing in has actually been rural communities throughout the United States. I went to South Carolina last year in December. I went into a classroom of fourth graders. As we were driving down the road, it was very clear from the stores and the buildings that this was an area that was quite impoverished. So I walked into the fourth-grade classroom, and I was just gonna do my usual thing, Mr. Po, the substitute teacher, so I wrote on the blackboard, "What is one plus three plus five plus seven plus nine equals?" As soon as I wrote equals, behind me I heard a bunch of kids yelling, "Twenty-five." And we talked for about twenty minutes, and through the whole thing, the kids were all suggesting ideas. They were also very respectful of each other's ideas. If someone was giving an answer, I said, "Oh, let's, let's all listen to that person." Everyone did. It was a marvelous class. It was one of the best fourth-grade classes I've ever taught, and I just told you the profile of the area was high poverty. Uh, I'll also say the ethnic makeup of the, of the classroom, it was ninety-five percent African American. I asked the person who took me around afterwards, "These kids are amazing. Do they play games on their phones?" And the lady told me, "They don't have phones. It's because of the money. They don't have the phones. In fact, they might not even have the internet access." Then I said, "What do they do for fun?" And she said, "Well, they just figure out how to make their own games." And I found out that throughout all of rural America, which is where I've been running, wow, there are so many kids who are actually really, really interested in challenging themselves. It's just that because of the way the curriculum is designed, they haven't been. Actually, standard curriculum is designed just to make sure that you know how to do a standard problem. In this future world, we need people who can do non-standard problems. Well, it turns out that there's plenty of kids who are really poised to do that. Actually, it even felt more authentic than what I found in cities. In December, I went to Africa because I was particularly interested in Africa because the population is getting bigger and bigger, and as a fraction of the world's population, it's gonna become more and more significant. When I went there, I wasn't going to propose particular solutions. I was going there to learn and try to see what was going on, and immediately I saw lots of very capable people. Then I started to think, "Why is the economic development not as strong given that there are all these great people?" The problem was these people who I met, people outside in the rest of the world didn't know about these particular great people. From their outside world, it was just, "I guess there is a place called Africa. How do you send resources? Okay, if you send it this way, somebody is professional at receiving resources." That's not as good as knowing this person can really use the resources. So with the whole system we do, we have high schoolers who coach middle schoolers. The high schoolers can be from anywhere in the world, and they are selected through our, our method where we try to find who really cares about people and who is also very good at thinking about ideas on the spot to solve questions. They always teach in pairs. By having the two of them teach in pairs, they get to know each other. If anyone in, say, United States or Korea or, or China or Canada or Europe, if they partner with one of these people from Rwanda or Ethiopia, any other country which we might start to have a relationship with, well, then they would very quickly realize, "Oh, each of us are good." My prediction is that five to ten years down the line, they'll be looking for jobs. It turns out that you can have remote work. Remote work does work well. The only issue is: Who would you hire? Hmm. If the person who was living in the, in the developed country was starting a company or if they were looking for partners or people to work or even looking for employees to help work I anticipate that they might call up the person that they know. There's even an economic arbitrage. The amount of money that people are used to earning in different countries is very different. In fact, if you split the difference, both sides win massively. One side will save a lot, the other side will get to live really, really, really well. So there was just the observation I made of, hmm, given that there's this huge economic difference in how much $1 can buy in each country, if people who are really, really, really good are detected by other people, well then, they could get, they could get a really good remote work job. Then they might be in a situation where they can start their own thing. Sometimes to start your own company or start your own initiative, you need to first be safe. You might also have a whole bunch of friends you know from doing all of this co-teaching. At that stage, those friends in the United States or in the rest of the world, the only difficulty is can it get through a network of trust? And if there's a direct trust where people know that person really can do stuff, well then, that person could start to get resources coming in through this network from developed countries to developing countries, which are shortcutting. They're going directly to people who can use it. So this could potentially create a totally new economic flow system. This could also work in developed countries. In general, to me, this is the value of a huge network. I'm a network theorist. So when I thought of this whole thing, I said, "Ultimately, building a high-trust network among lots of people who love helping other people and love thinking hard, this might just be what we need for the 21st century

3. 7:42 – 11:11

   Lesson 2 - The Paradox of AI: Why humans matter more as AI replace skills

   1. PLPo-Shen Loh7:42

      after AI." I think that what we're observing is whatever people are good at, all these skills, the AIs are getting better at them, and eventually getting better than them as well. For a while, people were saying that the safe job will be plumber, like a blue collar job. But if you look at how many humanoid robots there are, there are a lot of them. Oh, actually, one of the very famous US companies was Boston Dynamics. As soon as I saw that Hyundai had bought them, I know what Hyundai wants to use those robots for. Not for dancing. Hyundai manufactures large amounts of stuff. Hyundai probably would be very happy to be able to have tons of robot workers. Hyundai also has money, so it's not gonna be very long before you get these humanoid robots that can make all kinds of stuff that are working in all the Hyundai plants. That's going to, that's gonna wreak havoc across the blue collar as well. So then I started to think, "What is special about people?" One of the things I think is quite special about people is that hopefully they care that humanity still exists, and the best part is the ones who do, if you talk to them, you can read it from their eyes. Beautiful thing about humans is that you can tell when you talk to someone, this person cares about the big picture more than just about themself. You will never be able to get that confidence looking at a robot's eyes. I see a lot of electric vehicles on the road today, a lot of EV, EVs. An EV is basically a computer with four wheels. Why I say this is because I'm emphasizing one of the most important parts of the electric vehicle is the computer. Many of the electric vehicles get constant software updates. What would happen if somebody hacked into the software update system? Next week, one particular brand of EVs, at 5:30 PM, they all accelerate to full 100%. The more interconnected our world is, the easier it is for one move to cause very bad things to happen. And if you ever tried editing code, you know that it's actually possible to make weird things happen without even fully understanding, especially if the code was written with AI. So the car which was supposed to help you can change into the car that was supposed to hurt you. You have absolutely no way of knowing, because it has no eyes. Uh, it has, it has no eyes you can see that don't change. That will also give a job opportunity, because there will need to be people who you can trust to take care of things and to make sure things are safe. You want to know that the people you put into these positions care about things that are bigger than themself, and they aren't easily bought off by someone bribing them for a million dollars or something like that. So my prediction is that the kinds of people that are going to have a lot of job opportunities are the ones where you can tell that you can really, really count on this person, and that person is very flexible. Generally speaking, when I hire people, if I meet someone like that, I just try to think, "Can I just find a place for you in my organization?" 'Cause this kind of person, you can plug into anything. Great intention and great learning capacity. They're gonna work hard towards a goal that's meaningful. Okay, let's figure it out. I don't wanna hire someone who has been trained to do one particular task, because now I've discovered, wait one or two more years, I can use the AI to do that task and it'll be way cheaper. People who, for whom you can see that they just want to do good stuff, we don't have enough of them. The more automation there is, the more things that can go wrong. We don't even have enough good people to watch out for all this stuff. The... I think that's one of the major future

4. 11:11 – 17:30

   Lesson 3 - The New Rules for Running a Society

   1. PLPo-Shen Loh11:11

      needs for humans. AI definitely creates a way for more people to access education. Actually, I get to learn all kinds of things right now. My ChatGPT history currently has questions about what's in the Quran. Okay, so the best thing is today, if you wanna learn something, oh, you really can learn it. You can, you can ask these AIs. In fact, this morning I came in here on an overnight bus and I was busy, uh, updating a particular website. It's a, it's an online video game we're about to put out. Video game meaning it's a math game. It's for people to do math. But, uh, there are all these math problems. In the old days, I had to actually do the math problems myself. I have all these old math problems from other math contests. The AI today can do those problems like this. Well, I was using Claude's Opus 4.5, which is the very advanced version, and I was having it solve all these advanced math problems and give hints. So I'm explaining like, "Actually, at this point, even a very sophisticated math coach Can be replaced by the AI tool if you decide you want to do it. So the big question becomes for the student, "Do I want to do this?" Right? Because there are... Any... All you need actually is just to open up your favorite AI and start asking it all kinds of questions. I was actually just in China, uh, last week, and I was at one school, and that one school was showing me how they had some AI-powered app. So that app was designed to let you do the kinds of problems that will appear on the exams so that you could rank higher, so to speak. So it was, it was an AI-powered performance improver for standard exams in China. One of the curriculum people asked me, "What do you think?" And I said, "You know, actually, if I was using AI to do education, I don't think I would do it that way." Because I think that that's just creating people who are human versions of AI. You're just making human robots. The most important thing today is that you want to learn something, and then you're curious enough to go and engage with it. Ah, but you also need to be able to think. So that's the other piece. It's very dangerous today for people just to ask AI stuff because the AI can tell you something, and it sounds authoritative, but it could be bogus. So the bottom line is that the playing field for learning stuff at this point, if you just want to go and interact with the AI, you can. Everyone can have it. Then the deep question becomes, why would anyone do it? So that's why the way I work now is on, on the philosophy. In the old days, people would do it because then you can get a higher rank, and then you can get into a better university. But today, even if you do that, you still can't get a job. It's actually quite sad. A lot of people who are running along this pathway, they're gonna work very hard for about 20 years of their life, being told by their parents, "You do this so that you have a better job at the end." Finally, they graduate, and they still have no job. That's gonna be a, that's going to be a major mental health crisis. So instead, the mo- the way I think is more healthy is if people have a real intention to do something that is bigger than themself, that involves other people. That's why what I love is when I see a kid whose eyes are saying, "I want to help you." It's so interesting. You can see this from human eyes. They're gonna be very curious. They're gonna keep learning stuff, and the interesting thing is then they can, they can become arbitrarily good. So when I was thinking about how do you motivate people to want to be thoughtful, it occurred to me, thoughtful people like being around other thoughtful people. It's fun. If you, if you're a person who likes to help other people and thinks about stuff and likes to think about stuff, the moment you meet anyone else with these two characteristics, you very quickly become friends, and you become trusted friends. Well, then these thoughtful networks become very, very strong. So then I realized there's another way to motivate people. Find thoughtful people, connect them to each other, then they naturally will start to try to find ways to create value. Some of these people will also be entrepreneurs. The heart of entrepreneurship is finding pain points in other people and solving them. And by the way, you'll get money out of that because you have solved a problem, right? That's how I realized networking together thoughtful people provides a 21st-century way to provide ongoing opportunity, which is actually even better than the central authority way of everyone take a test, go and see who ranks the highest. The ones who rank the highest, give them something that they all can do independently, right? There's, there's different ways that you can run a society. Different countries do have different systems, though. So I, I, I actually see this in some of the other countries that I go to, where due to the way the system is, everyone is just struggling along, competing to get these high scores on exams because that's what's going to determine, uh, their future. Then, of course, the question is, how can we help them? Very strong practical advice would be to learn English. Learn English to a very high level of fluency because that gives you access to almost... Well, not almost, but it gives you access to a huge world of opportunities. If the only language you know is your native language, you only get opportunities in systems which use your native language. And if the system is designed in a way where most of the people will not have opportunity, it could be beneficial to be able to play in all the other systems. Next thing is to pick up this, this, this thoughtful thing, where when anyone meets you, they see, oh, you really do care about other people. That is actually what's gonna make people want to pull you out of those systems. Because, for example, if anyone has fluent English, and if you live in another country, Korea, for example, "Oh, we'd love to have you in our program." We're not designed to only take the top 10%. We're designed to take all the great people, where great just means that you actually like other people, and you actually want to do things for other people, and if we give you weird math problems that you've never seen before, you can think about them. It's very useful for people to take a step back and think, "Why is the system built this way anyway? What was the intention?" And then you might need to break out of the system. You might need to find your own other way to do things. That's entrepreneurship. I will also say for everyone who wanted a stable life, good luck, 'cause AI is gonna take that. So unfortunately, anyway, people need to move to this direction.

5. 17:30 – 18:43

   Next Episode - How to be a AI-Native Engineer

   1. SPSpeaker17:31

      I'm Mihail. Uh, the title of the class is The Modern Software Developer. It's definitely the first class in where the focus is AI across the SDLC. It's the first of its kind at Stanford. Within, like, a few hours of the class being announced, and it kind of opened up for enrollment, filled up over 100 students. Something kind of crazy is happening. Software development and AI is really starting to make its way into every single part of, of how software is being done, and, and clearly something was changing. What is interesting is that there is this emergence of kind of like a new, I would say, class of, like, engineer, which is, like, the AI-native engineer, and AI is that language. AI is that new language. This particular generation of junior developers, of junior engineers, the people that are now entering the workforce, will, I think, be the first kind of generation of that new shift. A single developer become a manager of agents, so really knowing how to, like, properly handle multiple agents is, like, the last boss in a game. Like, if you can do that really, really well, then you are, like, literally, like, the top, top .1% of, of users even today. [outro music]

Episode duration: 18:43