How to Spend Your 20s in the AI Era

Think about the area under the curve of utility that you could contribute to society, and everything else is simulacrum. It is not real. When you think about SBF, when you think about Theranos, when you think about the things that truly disgrace us as people who create technology, when you peel back a little bit, you realize there's nothing. It was a fucking lie. I don't want that for us. People outside of this room, the world at large looks at tech, and they hate us sometimes because those are the people who represent us. And I say, "Not for me." They don't represent us. Welcome to another episode of The Light Cone. This time we're doing it live. We're not used to doing it in front of a studio audience. So, we thought we would, uh, start off with a controversial topic. This is something that, uh, a bunch of people who are at this conference, uh, have been, I don't know, just talking about, coming to us to talk about. Uh, is this the last window to get rich? Are you worried about this? Are you guys worried about this?

Um...

Is this the end of capitalism? What's- what's happening?

(laughs) We're like, no, yeah. No.

Is money gonna stop to exist without AGI?

They- they won't, they won't, uh, admit to it, but in private conversations, this is one of the topics that certainly we've been debating.

Yeah.

What, you know, why is this coming up actually?

Seems like at least when we speak to people who are applying to YC or kind of like members of the audience, there's a real sense of uncertainty created by AI right now, right? Like, the thing is like the sense of will the jobs that we thought would be there be available? And if we're not, um, if they're not, like, kind of what do we do? And if we're not sort of, if we don't o- have real ownership in something that's, like, valuable and growing, like, what will we be left with? But that seems to be the thing that comes up a lot.

I had dinner with some undergrads who were here last night, and they were saying that this is one of the things that people are talking about a lot on college campuses is just like, "Hey, the AI's gotten really good at programming now."

Mm-hmm.

"Um, (laughs) what's gonna happen to all the programming jobs?" Like, it used to be the case that if you were a CS major, there was a very clear path to, like, a very stable, like, upper middle class background where you get, like, a good stable job as a, as a programmer. Um, but, like, are those jobs still gonna be here in 10 years? Like, yeah. It's like-

Yeah, like my- my parents were really proud when I, uh, you know, graduating, I, you know, got my degree, and then I got my job at Microsoft, and I was a level 59 PM. Uh, you know, lowest of the low, but I had health insurance, and my parents were really, really proud of me. And, you know, one of the fears frankly, like, that we're hearing, uh, and it's sort of, you know, coming out in the numbers is that will there actually be jobs? It's, you know, I- I think it's a tricky thing right now. With the advent of intelligence, you know, some of the simplest things that people rely on entry-level people right out of college for, uh, they're not hiring as many of them anymore. And, you know, the craziest stat, I think this came out of, uh, uh, the New York Fed in February of this year. Um, computer science majors, uh, you know, obviously this is not the people in this room. This is just, like, o- out of, like, you know, a normal distribution of all computer science majors, 6.1% in unemployment in February of this year. Art history in contrast was only 3.0%.