WEBVTT - Ep132 "What will AI mean for the economy?" with Andrew Mayne 0:00:05.080 --> 0:00:09.040 If AI can do everything from writing novels to designing proteins, 0:00:09.480 --> 0:00:13.440 what exactly is left that only humans can do? Do 0:00:13.480 --> 0:00:16.160 we care about the story behind a piece of art, 0:00:16.400 --> 0:00:19.360 who made it, who suffered for it? When AI can 0:00:19.400 --> 0:00:23.680 produce the same words or images, which jobs are really 0:00:23.800 --> 0:00:27.040 at risk? Is there any such thing as a human 0:00:27.160 --> 0:00:30.640 advantage in a world where machines can outperform us at 0:00:30.680 --> 0:00:33.920 almost any measurable task. What does any of this have 0:00:34.000 --> 0:00:38.280 to do with the plow or Stephen King's nightmares, or 0:00:38.320 --> 0:00:43.240 the first shoeshine caught on camera, or Tom Cruise's stunts, 0:00:43.680 --> 0:00:47.400 or the shortage of air conditioner repair men, and why 0:00:47.640 --> 0:00:53.239 hyper capable AI might actually increase the demand for unexpected jobs. 0:00:53.680 --> 0:01:00.360 Today we'll speak with author and technologist Andrew Mayne. Welcome 0:01:00.360 --> 0:01:03.880 to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist 0:01:03.880 --> 0:01:06.760 and author at Stanford, and in these episodes we sail 0:01:06.959 --> 0:01:10.720 deeply into our three pound universe to understand how we 0:01:10.800 --> 0:01:14.399 see the world and what our world might come to 0:01:14.480 --> 0:01:30.920 look like very soon. When you look around a subway 0:01:30.920 --> 0:01:34.080 car or a coffee shop, you see people scrolling on 0:01:34.120 --> 0:01:37.360 their phones with essentially no movement of their bodies except 0:01:37.400 --> 0:01:41.360 for their thumbs, but inside their skulls, eighty six billion 0:01:41.440 --> 0:01:45.560 neurons are firing away. Each neuron as complex as a city, 0:01:45.920 --> 0:01:50.640 each one alive with electrical storms flickering tens or hundreds 0:01:50.680 --> 0:01:54.680 of times every second. These vast inner cosmoses are running 0:01:55.040 --> 0:01:59.160 constant simulations of the world around us, of the future 0:01:59.440 --> 0:02:01.800 of each other. And one of the things that makes 0:02:01.800 --> 0:02:04.560 our species unusual is that our brains are not simply 0:02:04.560 --> 0:02:09.040 built for getting food or escaping predators. They are finely 0:02:09.120 --> 0:02:13.520 tuned social prediction engines. A huge amount of the cortex 0:02:13.639 --> 0:02:19.360 is devoted to thinking about other people, their motives, their reliability, 0:02:19.400 --> 0:02:24.960 their intentions, their reputations. We carry around mental models of 0:02:25.320 --> 0:02:31.080 thousands of individuals and organizations, and we constantly simulate possibilities 0:02:31.720 --> 0:02:34.800 like how would she react if I sent this message? 0:02:34.960 --> 0:02:38.399 Can I trust this contractor is this person over here 0:02:38.520 --> 0:02:42.880 aligned with my values? And so on. This social simulation 0:02:43.080 --> 0:02:46.960 machinery is so ancient and so deeply wired that it 0:02:47.080 --> 0:02:52.040 has shaped everything that we call an economy. I think 0:02:52.080 --> 0:02:56.200 this goes underappreciated that markets are so much more than 0:02:56.240 --> 0:03:02.400 just spreadsheets and supply chains. They are agreement between nervous systems. 0:03:02.720 --> 0:03:09.080 Economies are built from trust, from storytelling, from reputation, from 0:03:09.200 --> 0:03:13.160 shared values, and from our search for meaning. Okay, Now, 0:03:13.200 --> 0:03:19.840 suddenly into this long human drama steps a new cognitive species, AI. 0:03:19.960 --> 0:03:23.600 And this is weird because AI doesn't have emotions, it 0:03:23.639 --> 0:03:26.240 doesn't have a body, it doesn't have a childhood, but 0:03:26.480 --> 0:03:31.040 it can process information at extraordinary scale, and its busy 0:03:31.400 --> 0:03:36.080 automating tasks that once required human thought. So the question 0:03:36.200 --> 0:03:40.600 on everyone's mind is what does this mean for the economy? 0:03:40.640 --> 0:03:44.440 What happens to our jobs? Will the economy bend or 0:03:44.440 --> 0:03:47.560 will it break? Will we be replaced or will our 0:03:47.640 --> 0:03:51.400 skills evolve into something new? Now, the first thing to 0:03:51.400 --> 0:03:54.120 note is that we have been here before, many times, 0:03:54.320 --> 0:03:58.080 thousands of years ago, when agriculture was nearly everybody's job. 0:03:58.560 --> 0:04:02.920 The plow presumably seemed like an existential threat, but as 0:04:02.960 --> 0:04:07.080 we know, it didn't eliminate human purpose. It expanded it 0:04:07.360 --> 0:04:14.400 because the plow freed brains to invent teaching, governance, philosophy, math, art, 0:04:14.520 --> 0:04:18.920 and so on. And this pattern kept repeating. Industrial machinery 0:04:19.320 --> 0:04:24.760 opened up more human creativity that electricity than the microprocessor. 0:04:25.120 --> 0:04:29.640 Every time the old jobs vanished and new ones emerged 0:04:29.880 --> 0:04:32.200 that no one could have predicted. I think about this 0:04:32.240 --> 0:04:33.800 all the time. If you were one of the men 0:04:33.800 --> 0:04:37.359 who landed on the moon in nineteen sixty nine, you 0:04:37.400 --> 0:04:40.520 couldn't even have imagined that your kids would graduate with 0:04:40.680 --> 0:04:44.760 majors in computer science. Or you couldn't even imagine the 0:04:44.880 --> 0:04:47.840 concept of the Internet, and that a kid might grow 0:04:47.960 --> 0:04:52.240 up to become a web developer or an app developer, 0:04:52.680 --> 0:04:57.080 or a mobile UX designer, or a data scientist or 0:04:57.160 --> 0:05:01.640 a cloud infrastructure engineer, or go into cyber security, or 0:05:01.680 --> 0:05:06.840 become a PROMPT engineer, or a drone cinematographer, or an 0:05:06.880 --> 0:05:11.799 e sports athlete, or a VR designer or a social 0:05:11.920 --> 0:05:15.440 media influencer. Today, of course, we are catching the wave 0:05:15.520 --> 0:05:20.800 of another transformation faster than anyone imagined. AI is writing code, 0:05:20.839 --> 0:05:25.160 it's designing proteins, it's responding to customer inquiries, it's drafting 0:05:25.279 --> 0:05:31.159 legal language, it's tutoring students, it's accelerating science. Some jobs 0:05:31.240 --> 0:05:34.400 are going to be automated quickly. These are called the 0:05:34.480 --> 0:05:37.800 black box jobs by today's guest, where someone receives a 0:05:37.839 --> 0:05:42.480 signal and sends a standardized output. But new professions will appear, 0:05:42.640 --> 0:05:46.200 most of which we can't yet name or even conceive of. 0:05:46.720 --> 0:05:50.520 And the deeper questions reach beyond economics into our psychology, 0:05:50.600 --> 0:05:54.599 because we need to assess what humans actually want from 0:05:54.640 --> 0:05:58.560 other humans, what are we willing to outsource, and what 0:05:58.600 --> 0:06:02.200 are we going to fiercely protect? For example, why does 0:06:02.240 --> 0:06:07.719 a concert matter more when the guitarists spend decades building callouses? 0:06:08.240 --> 0:06:10.479 Why do we trust a teacher more when they have 0:06:10.720 --> 0:06:13.760 lived the very mistakes that we are trying to avoid. 0:06:14.400 --> 0:06:16.920 I've argued here before that the answer lies in the 0:06:16.960 --> 0:06:21.880 circuitry of the social brain. We value the story behind 0:06:21.960 --> 0:06:27.360 a creation. We value the years of effort, the biological limitations, 0:06:27.440 --> 0:06:32.680 the courage, the vulnerability. AI can mimic outputs, but it 0:06:32.720 --> 0:06:36.400 can't yet mimic stakes, It can't yet mimic what it 0:06:36.440 --> 0:06:41.159 means to be a fragile biological creature trying to create 0:06:41.240 --> 0:06:45.160 something meaningful in a short life, and so on the surface, 0:06:45.200 --> 0:06:49.160 the question is will AI destroy jobs? But the deeper 0:06:49.279 --> 0:06:54.440 version is how will humans redefine meaning and connection and 0:06:54.560 --> 0:06:59.040 value in an age when machines can do almost everything else? 0:07:00.040 --> 0:07:02.440 You explore this. I sat down with my friend and 0:07:02.520 --> 0:07:06.440 colleague Andrew Mayne, who is an extremely interesting person. He 0:07:06.560 --> 0:07:11.240 is a novelist and inventor, a very accomplished magician with 0:07:11.320 --> 0:07:14.600 books and television shows on the subject and most relevant 0:07:14.600 --> 0:07:19.000 for today's conversation. He is the original prompt engineer for 0:07:19.040 --> 0:07:23.160 Open AI and their first science communicator. He lives right 0:07:23.200 --> 0:07:27.000 at the intersection of creativity and innovation and AI. So 0:07:27.080 --> 0:07:29.280 I invited him to the studio to get his take 0:07:29.560 --> 0:07:37.880 on the future relationship of humans and AI. So, Andrew, 0:07:37.880 --> 0:07:40.000 a lot of people are worried that AI is going 0:07:40.080 --> 0:07:42.800 to take over all the jobs of humans, So what's 0:07:42.800 --> 0:07:43.680 your take on this. 0:07:44.160 --> 0:07:45.880 I think that we have to think about what we 0:07:45.960 --> 0:07:49.200 mean by jobs and historically what's happened. If we were 0:07:49.240 --> 0:07:52.000 in Mesopotamia several thousand years ago and somebody showed you 0:07:52.040 --> 0:07:54.760 a plow, and at that time, like ninety nine percent 0:07:54.800 --> 0:07:57.800 of everybody was involved in agriculture, a plow would seem 0:07:57.800 --> 0:08:01.280 like a very scary thing. Because of the plow, we 0:08:01.320 --> 0:08:05.160 were able to invent things like teaching as a profession, governance, 0:08:05.680 --> 0:08:07.280 and a lot of the other things that we now 0:08:07.280 --> 0:08:10.320 consider essential culture. They didn't exist then because we didn't 0:08:10.360 --> 0:08:12.440 have the time to do that, and they weren't like 0:08:12.480 --> 0:08:15.240 superfluous things like poetry or art, which have value, but 0:08:15.280 --> 0:08:17.560 these were things to help build our economy. And I 0:08:17.640 --> 0:08:21.000 think that we get that every major technological change. If 0:08:21.000 --> 0:08:23.000 we went back just you know, two hundred years ago 0:08:23.200 --> 0:08:27.880 to you know, within the great great grandparents time, like 0:08:27.880 --> 0:08:30.520 there's actually I think Zachary Taylor has a grandson that's 0:08:30.520 --> 0:08:33.400 still alive today, which is like crazy. I mean he 0:08:33.840 --> 0:08:35.960 had children late and his son had children late. But 0:08:36.320 --> 0:08:38.600 in that time of somebody's living to the other grandparent, 0:08:38.640 --> 0:08:41.199 when ninety five percent everybody's going in volt in agriculture 0:08:41.200 --> 0:08:44.560 if you talk about the industrialization of agriculture, and that 0:08:44.600 --> 0:08:48.800 would seem like that would be almost apocalyptic in the change, 0:08:49.240 --> 0:08:51.520 But that's when things started to happen and shift. It 0:08:51.559 --> 0:08:53.079 was part of the reason we got rid of slavery. 0:08:53.120 --> 0:08:54.640 It's part of the reason that we started to think 0:08:54.640 --> 0:08:56.599 about how everybody sort of has a vital part of 0:08:56.600 --> 0:08:57.160 our economy. 0:08:57.600 --> 0:09:01.000 So if we were just blue skying about the kinds 0:09:01.040 --> 0:09:03.560 of jobs that will exist one hundred years or not, 0:09:03.640 --> 0:09:08.160 things in analogy to governance and teaching, what could we 0:09:08.200 --> 0:09:08.679 come up with. 0:09:09.080 --> 0:09:11.280 Well, you know, part of it is is people often ask, like, 0:09:11.320 --> 0:09:14.520 what's the job of the future, And if we look 0:09:14.559 --> 0:09:17.120 at how much jobs have changed in our own lifetime. 0:09:17.400 --> 0:09:19.880 Subtly that we don't realize that if we went back 0:09:19.920 --> 0:09:21.960 in time to like the nineteen eighties and we talked 0:09:21.960 --> 0:09:23.760 to a teacher, then we talked to a teacher today, 0:09:23.760 --> 0:09:25.880 and we told a teacher back then, Well, in the future, 0:09:25.960 --> 0:09:27.920 you're going to spend part of your time in Google Calendar. 0:09:27.960 --> 0:09:31.080 What's that, Well, it's an electronic spreadsheet for managing time 0:09:31.400 --> 0:09:34.120 sort of. You're going to be doing video calls, you're 0:09:34.160 --> 0:09:36.520 going to be using electronic documents. It would sound like 0:09:36.559 --> 0:09:40.400 an IT job, it would sound extremely technical, but that's normal. 0:09:40.720 --> 0:09:43.400 And yeah, and you think about that too, is we 0:09:43.520 --> 0:09:45.760 use these tools all the time. So you and I 0:09:45.800 --> 0:09:48.280 are on our phones, we're checking messaging, we're checking these stuff. 0:09:48.320 --> 0:09:51.280 So I think one hundred years from now, the value 0:09:51.320 --> 0:09:52.840 is going to still come in from things where we 0:09:52.880 --> 0:09:55.199 want people. We like people to teach us, we like 0:09:55.280 --> 0:09:57.880 people to manage things for us. I still trust I 0:09:57.920 --> 0:10:00.000 trust you. I trust you to manage a thing. Maybe 0:10:00.000 --> 0:10:01.720 you're going to use in a bunch of electronic systems, 0:10:01.720 --> 0:10:03.120 but I want you to make sure they're working. 0:10:03.320 --> 0:10:05.200 That makes sense. One of the things that I've been 0:10:05.280 --> 0:10:07.800 very interested in is what AI is going to mean 0:10:07.880 --> 0:10:11.600 for creatives, For example, writers, You and I are both 0:10:11.640 --> 0:10:15.760 writers of books, and something that I've been happy to 0:10:15.800 --> 0:10:18.920 see is that people really care about the heartbeat behind 0:10:18.960 --> 0:10:22.000 the page. So they care that it's a real author 0:10:22.040 --> 0:10:25.680 who's slaved over a keyboard for months or years, rather 0:10:25.800 --> 0:10:27.600 than oh, I wrote this book with AI in five 0:10:27.640 --> 0:10:30.640 hundred milliseconds. No one wants to read that, even if 0:10:30.640 --> 0:10:33.000 the book is identical word for word to your book. 0:10:33.400 --> 0:10:36.160 And I think that's nice that people care about the heartbeat. Yeah, 0:10:36.200 --> 0:10:38.600 I think there's going to be a place for certain kinds. 0:10:38.640 --> 0:10:41.960 I might be happy with AI textbooks and stuff, but 0:10:42.120 --> 0:10:44.360 you know, reading about the experience of somebody like you 0:10:44.520 --> 0:10:46.840 who's actually gone into a lab, gone into the rold 0:10:46.840 --> 0:10:49.040 and tested, thinks that's way more valuable to me. An 0:10:49.200 --> 0:10:51.560 example that I use a lot is, you know, one 0:10:51.640 --> 0:10:53.400 is like I love the fact that Stephen King's is 0:10:53.480 --> 0:10:55.640 kind of crazy guy that lives in Maine that makes 0:10:55.640 --> 0:10:57.679 his stories because like this might be a nightmare. That 0:10:57.760 --> 0:11:00.240 kind of gives up more value. I mean, maybe it's 0:11:00.240 --> 0:11:03.320 sad that somebody else's terror is my enjoyment, but you know, 0:11:03.480 --> 0:11:06.720 beaus of may but also like you know Brandon Sanderson. 0:11:06.760 --> 0:11:11.160 He's a prolific science fiction fantasy author. Brandon is a 0:11:11.320 --> 0:11:13.840 guy that's very active in the convention circuit. He's got 0:11:13.840 --> 0:11:16.680 a really wonderful engagement with this fan. Basically talks about writing. 0:11:16.720 --> 0:11:18.800 He shares about writing all the time. He's a very 0:11:18.800 --> 0:11:20.679 real person. I don't know if you know this, but 0:11:20.720 --> 0:11:23.880 he did a Kickstarter and he had four books he 0:11:23.920 --> 0:11:27.319 wrote during the pandemic. It was the most successful kickstart 0:11:27.360 --> 0:11:30.320 of all time, forty million dollars. Forty million dollars. 0:11:31.240 --> 0:11:32.120 Incredible. 0:11:32.200 --> 0:11:34.520 The market cap of Barnes and Noble is only like 0:11:34.559 --> 0:11:37.160 four hundred million, so basically ten percent of the market 0:11:37.160 --> 0:11:40.000 cap of America's largest book retail bookseller. 0:11:40.520 --> 0:11:44.200 And why I think it's people like him. They like 0:11:44.320 --> 0:11:44.720 the guy. 0:11:45.000 --> 0:11:47.360 I mean, like part of what makes you know we 0:11:47.440 --> 0:11:50.880 might get an AI to generate an entire mythology like 0:11:50.960 --> 0:11:52.800 Lord of the Rings, but the fact that J. R. 0:11:52.920 --> 0:11:56.000 Tolkien was a guy that spent all this time studying 0:11:56.480 --> 0:11:59.880 trying to create an English mythology gives it value. 0:12:00.400 --> 0:12:04.840 Yeah, exactly. So if an AI wrote exactly Brandon Sanderson's books, 0:12:05.200 --> 0:12:07.600 we wouldn't care about as much. So that's the good news. 0:12:07.640 --> 0:12:08.080 Some people might. 0:12:08.120 --> 0:12:09.480 I think there will be a mixed ground, but I 0:12:09.480 --> 0:12:11.560 think a lot of us who care more who flipped 0:12:11.559 --> 0:12:13.200 to the backjacket to go who wrote this? 0:12:13.320 --> 0:12:15.760 There's a reason we put that on there. Yeah. What's 0:12:15.760 --> 0:12:18.240 interesting is that it won't be too long before AI 0:12:18.640 --> 0:12:22.160 starts writing books and faking the author by an author picture. 0:12:22.480 --> 0:12:25.160 So we'll have to have other ways of verification, like 0:12:25.440 --> 0:12:26.200 in person tours. 0:12:26.400 --> 0:12:29.280 We've dealt with, like there are publishers that have house authors. 0:12:29.320 --> 0:12:32.160 There are some I know of some authors that are 0:12:32.160 --> 0:12:34.840 famous authors that are no longer writing their books and 0:12:34.880 --> 0:12:37.559 they have other ghostwriters doing that. So I'd say we've 0:12:37.600 --> 0:12:40.040 been doing that for a while. But you know, I 0:12:40.040 --> 0:12:41.520 think you're right. You know there's going to be people 0:12:41.520 --> 0:12:43.080 whoren't going to care. I think that's fine. 0:12:43.400 --> 0:12:45.880 One of the things that's a really cool question is 0:12:47.040 --> 0:12:50.880 what will authors do to distinguish themselves from AI. So 0:12:51.040 --> 0:12:56.120 by analogy, when the camera got invented, visual painters panicked, 0:12:56.679 --> 0:13:01.160 but what they ended up doing was moving into areas 0:13:01.200 --> 0:13:04.679 that the photograph could not do, light Impressionism and Cubism 0:13:04.720 --> 0:13:08.480 and so on, and they ended up, you know, surviving 0:13:08.600 --> 0:13:11.360 and making new kinds of art that no visual painter 0:13:11.440 --> 0:13:14.760 would have predicted at the time when the camera debuted. 0:13:14.840 --> 0:13:18.800 So the question is what kind of books will we write. 0:13:19.840 --> 0:13:22.480 I use when I give talks. One of the examples 0:13:22.480 --> 0:13:26.079 I give is the gours first photograph of people, right, 0:13:26.200 --> 0:13:29.000 the first photograph of people's like eighteen thirty seven, eighteen 0:13:29.080 --> 0:13:31.719 thirty eight, and what happened was accidental. Back then, you 0:13:31.760 --> 0:13:34.120 had to leave a camera aimed to the sidewalk. He 0:13:34.200 --> 0:13:35.559 left a camera. You have to leave the camera the 0:13:35.559 --> 0:13:37.920 shutter open long enough. Because it took so long from 0:13:37.920 --> 0:13:40.000 a photons to register on the film. The idea of 0:13:40.000 --> 0:13:42.679 capturing people seemed crazy because nobody would stand that long enough. 0:13:42.880 --> 0:13:45.439 But a guy got a shoe shined, so the shoeshiner 0:13:45.480 --> 0:13:47.959 and he got captured in the photograph. 0:13:48.320 --> 0:13:50.400 And you think about what that would mean. 0:13:50.440 --> 0:13:51.960 At the time, you saw you know one, You saw 0:13:52.040 --> 0:13:54.280 how painters realized they could go in different directions. Their 0:13:54.360 --> 0:13:56.280 job wasn't just to try to recreate reality, it was 0:13:56.280 --> 0:13:59.240 interpret it. But imagine going back in time and saying, hey, listen, 0:13:59.360 --> 0:14:02.120 not only that, but you know, by the in a 0:14:02.120 --> 0:14:04.960 few decades, we're going to have motion pictures. 0:14:05.040 --> 0:14:05.920 What's a motion picture? 0:14:05.960 --> 0:14:08.320 That's hard to explain and explain that you know, one 0:14:08.360 --> 0:14:10.839 hundred years later we were going to have these productions 0:14:10.840 --> 0:14:13.080 that we're dwarfed in size. Thing you have or today 0:14:13.120 --> 0:14:17.960 where you get the end credits for Avengers. Endgame is 0:14:18.040 --> 0:14:20.720 like longer than like the number of people who are 0:14:20.720 --> 0:14:22.960 in like the United States Navy, and like eighteen thirty seven, 0:14:23.000 --> 0:14:25.320 the budget not adjusted dollars, but the act of the 0:14:25.360 --> 0:14:28.240 budget and just dollar for dollar was like greater than 0:14:28.240 --> 0:14:31.040 the US Treasury, and the scale of art got so 0:14:31.240 --> 0:14:33.680 much bigger. So for writers, I think the part of 0:14:33.720 --> 0:14:36.400 what comes into is that that you get to your 0:14:36.440 --> 0:14:38.720 your it's not just the tech space between the pages 0:14:38.760 --> 0:14:41.280 of the book. I think it becomes bigger, like what 0:14:41.720 --> 0:14:44.880 we're doing a podcast. Okay, right, this is part of 0:14:44.920 --> 0:14:47.280 what is the Eagleman Legendarium, you know, part of it's this, 0:14:47.480 --> 0:14:49.040 part of it's this part of it's that I think 0:14:49.040 --> 0:14:51.200 that we start looking at that how much time do 0:14:51.240 --> 0:14:52.760 you have to spend on the things you don't like 0:14:52.800 --> 0:14:56.360 doing as an author, like revisions, little notes, things like this? 0:14:56.520 --> 0:14:58.840 How much would happen if you had AI to free 0:14:58.880 --> 0:15:00.560 you up from that to spend more time I'm creating 0:15:00.640 --> 0:15:01.760 engaging with people. 0:15:01.800 --> 0:15:03.440 So let me just make sure I got I got 0:15:03.480 --> 0:15:06.120 the analogy though, So with bands, the release of the 0:15:06.120 --> 0:15:07.960 album that was the big thing, and then they'd make 0:15:08.000 --> 0:15:10.160 their money still on the album. Then that changed with 0:15:10.280 --> 0:15:13.000 Napster and so on. We're going on the road was 0:15:13.040 --> 0:15:15.400 the thing, and the album was just the calling card 0:15:15.800 --> 0:15:18.960 so that people would show up. The economics of it change. 0:15:18.720 --> 0:15:21.040 Well sort of, but it also it changed for some 0:15:21.120 --> 0:15:23.160 of the people the top. For other bands, they'd go 0:15:23.160 --> 0:15:24.800 on the road and never actually was a payoff because 0:15:24.800 --> 0:15:26.880 the record labels would still hold on to it. And 0:15:26.920 --> 0:15:28.840 now you're in this weird phase where like with with 0:15:28.920 --> 0:15:31.440 Spotify and with streaming, where you have some people making 0:15:31.480 --> 0:15:33.000 a lot of money on streaming and some people not. 0:15:33.480 --> 0:15:37.640 I would say record company economics are always sort of weird, so. 0:15:38.120 --> 0:15:40.600 Right, but it's the going on the road that mattered. 0:15:40.640 --> 0:15:46.200 It's the show exactly, and that's the part that for 0:15:46.240 --> 0:15:48.920 a while was not a big deal in music and 0:15:48.960 --> 0:15:51.560 then became a big deal. I suspect that it's going 0:15:51.600 --> 0:15:54.480 to be the same. And let's say writing where it's 0:15:54.480 --> 0:15:57.480 not just sitting and tapping out the book in solitude, 0:15:57.520 --> 0:15:59.600 but it's going and doing the talks and the tours 0:15:59.680 --> 0:16:01.400 and in the podcast I do. 0:16:01.520 --> 0:16:04.040 Every time I launch a book, I'll go I'll do 0:16:04.120 --> 0:16:06.360 a live sessions, I'll go hop on video and talk 0:16:06.400 --> 0:16:09.720 to people about that I used to do, like go 0:16:09.760 --> 0:16:11.760 to bookshops and stuff. But I said, I can reach 0:16:11.800 --> 0:16:14.560 more people if I just hop on a video stream 0:16:14.640 --> 0:16:17.680 and talk to people and be accessible and so and again. 0:16:17.960 --> 0:16:19.680 I think there's gonna be different things for different people. 0:16:20.160 --> 0:16:23.520 I think that, you know, not some people can be reclusive. 0:16:23.560 --> 0:16:25.960 I think sometimes if their work just creates its own 0:16:26.000 --> 0:16:27.760 community around it, that can work. 0:16:28.040 --> 0:16:30.760 Yeah. Okay, so let's get back to the big picture then, 0:16:30.920 --> 0:16:34.800 So what is going to be the influence of AI 0:16:35.560 --> 0:16:39.760 on the economy in terms of jobs? What jobs are 0:16:39.760 --> 0:16:43.359 going to disappear first? Which ones are going to be unaffected? 0:16:44.000 --> 0:16:47.720 I think the highly network jobs or where people are 0:16:47.720 --> 0:16:49.400 happy to have a person in there or need a 0:16:49.400 --> 0:16:52.240 person to be in it, are always going to be 0:16:52.320 --> 0:16:53.160 highly valuable. 0:16:53.280 --> 0:16:54.200 Give what's an example. 0:16:55.240 --> 0:16:59.000 You know, if you are a person who is makes 0:16:59.000 --> 0:17:01.040 a perching decision for a company and you have to 0:17:01.080 --> 0:17:02.720 decide who to work with, and you need to look 0:17:02.720 --> 0:17:05.479 at contractors to somebody with a really good reputation, and 0:17:05.520 --> 0:17:07.240 that really comes to talking to Let's say you're a 0:17:07.320 --> 0:17:08.920 contractor and you have to figure out who are you 0:17:08.920 --> 0:17:09.439 going to get. 0:17:09.280 --> 0:17:10.200 Your building supplies from. 0:17:10.240 --> 0:17:11.600 You know, you're going to want to talk to somebody 0:17:11.640 --> 0:17:14.399 and find out the reliability because that information is not 0:17:14.480 --> 0:17:16.400 just available out there. That's something you have to sort 0:17:16.400 --> 0:17:18.600 of figure out like a little more deeper sort of 0:17:18.640 --> 0:17:19.320 connection to that. 0:17:19.680 --> 0:17:22.320 Although we can certainly imagine a time when my AI 0:17:22.400 --> 0:17:24.600 agent talks to this company's AI agent and all the 0:17:24.680 --> 0:17:27.760 data but WI reliable. Well that's right, but all the 0:17:27.840 --> 0:17:30.280 data is out there about the reliability. 0:17:29.720 --> 0:17:31.840 Of that company, you assume, but we make We make 0:17:31.840 --> 0:17:34.400 that assumption though that that we put everything out there. 0:17:34.440 --> 0:17:36.280 So you know a lot of stuff about other people 0:17:36.960 --> 0:17:40.520 that you won't share, both via social media or whatever. 0:17:40.600 --> 0:17:43.000 That's insight you share with your friends, you share with 0:17:43.080 --> 0:17:45.240 high trust people, but you don't actually make because that 0:17:45.280 --> 0:17:47.639 has value. And so I think that's part of like 0:17:47.760 --> 0:17:50.479 you look at certain things that continue on, like you know, 0:17:50.800 --> 0:17:52.960 I have you we both have like litter agents, right, 0:17:53.000 --> 0:17:55.199 and they have a better understanding of you know, you 0:17:55.200 --> 0:17:58.320 could theoretically I could have a chat GPT negotiate a contract, 0:17:58.680 --> 0:17:59.960 but it's going to tell me like, well, this is 0:18:00.200 --> 0:18:02.280 really what happened at this publishing house, or this what's 0:18:02.359 --> 0:18:04.560 really happened there. So I think there's a lot of 0:18:04.600 --> 0:18:07.399 places where we forget how much information is locked up 0:18:07.400 --> 0:18:09.760 in our heads and how much us based upon trust. 0:18:10.200 --> 0:18:13.120 Yeah, yeah, that's right. One of the things that fascinates 0:18:13.160 --> 0:18:16.119 me is social neuroscience, which is a new sub field 0:18:16.320 --> 0:18:20.399 which really concentrates on trust and integrity and reputation of 0:18:20.520 --> 0:18:23.439 other people. It turns out the way we've traditionally studied 0:18:23.480 --> 0:18:24.880 the brain, as we say, look, this is how the 0:18:25.000 --> 0:18:27.560 visual system works, is how audition works, this is how 0:18:27.680 --> 0:18:32.160 movement works. But what that overlooks is that a massive 0:18:32.200 --> 0:18:35.080 amount of the circuitry of the brain is about other people. 0:18:35.840 --> 0:18:40.800 And we have thousands of models in our heads of 0:18:40.840 --> 0:18:42.600 other people. I mean, and I know a bunch of 0:18:42.600 --> 0:18:44.080 people in common, and for each of us, we've got 0:18:44.119 --> 0:18:47.560 a little model. That person's like a little you know, mannequin, 0:18:47.680 --> 0:18:49.600 and oh, how would that person spotify I say this 0:18:49.720 --> 0:18:51.960 or that or I call them? And it's weird how 0:18:51.960 --> 0:18:54.800 many people we can simulate pretty well. So we're living 0:18:54.880 --> 0:18:57.520 in this world where we care so much about other people. 0:18:57.960 --> 0:19:01.119 And I agree with you that a lot of that 0:19:01.240 --> 0:19:04.280 information is not the type of thing that AI can 0:19:04.320 --> 0:19:07.800 pick up on, because it's very subtle how humans interact 0:19:07.840 --> 0:19:10.800 with other humans as opposed to just data that can 0:19:10.800 --> 0:19:11.360 be gathered. 0:19:11.800 --> 0:19:13.879 Yeah, when I lived in Japan and one of the 0:19:13.880 --> 0:19:15.600 things I saw there up close was a lot of 0:19:15.600 --> 0:19:18.280 like how Asian business culture works. And you have two 0:19:18.280 --> 0:19:20.960 companies that seem that they're going to do a partnership 0:19:20.960 --> 0:19:22.639 that are very much the same on paper, but then 0:19:22.680 --> 0:19:24.920 they want to hang out socially. And that happens here too, 0:19:25.040 --> 0:19:28.560 is that I have an investment fund and we get 0:19:28.920 --> 0:19:31.639 some of our partnerships come from they look at the paper, 0:19:31.680 --> 0:19:33.160 look at the data room. We go, this is great, 0:19:33.200 --> 0:19:35.840 but let's hang out and let's talk to each other 0:19:35.840 --> 0:19:37.800 and see if our values aligned. I think we forget 0:19:37.800 --> 0:19:41.040 too that our economy is not really the exchange of dollars, 0:19:41.080 --> 0:19:44.320 is the exchange of values, and not every value is 0:19:44.480 --> 0:19:48.320 easily converted into a dollar point. And there are people 0:19:48.320 --> 0:19:50.240 that you have a lot of ways in which you 0:19:50.280 --> 0:19:53.959 can spend your time, and there are probably more efficient ways, 0:19:54.040 --> 0:19:56.520 ways that could be more financially profitable towards you, but 0:19:56.600 --> 0:19:58.680 you choose not to because you say, I get more 0:19:58.760 --> 0:20:01.439 value out of this than he and we're all like that, 0:20:01.480 --> 0:20:02.960 and I think we forget that, and we think about 0:20:02.960 --> 0:20:05.600 automating the economy, and I think that there are going 0:20:05.640 --> 0:20:08.080 to be parts of what we do. But an example 0:20:08.119 --> 0:20:11.160 give you is that I did an interview with Yaka Potsky, 0:20:11.200 --> 0:20:14.480 who is the head scientist at Openingie and Yaka is brilliant, 0:20:14.600 --> 0:20:16.480 absolutely brilliant, one of the smartest people in the world 0:20:16.480 --> 0:20:19.560 in my opinion, and we were talking about a teacher 0:20:19.560 --> 0:20:21.159 he had. He went to a magnet cool school for 0:20:21.240 --> 0:20:23.760 computer science, and I said, you know, we're seeing AI 0:20:23.840 --> 0:20:25.800 as this wonderful tutor. Do you see this point where 0:20:25.840 --> 0:20:29.119 AI replaces teachers? And yakub understand whose job is to 0:20:29.800 --> 0:20:32.800 get AI to be as useful and as widely deployed 0:20:32.800 --> 0:20:35.680 as possible, laughed at that idea because he pointed out 0:20:36.119 --> 0:20:39.959 his favorite teacher inspired him and it inspired him because 0:20:39.960 --> 0:20:43.480 that person had a real experience. And it's one thing 0:20:43.560 --> 0:20:46.520 chat GPT can be, as you know, sycophantic or whatever 0:20:46.520 --> 0:20:48.800