Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host ed
Speaker 2: ze tron. Not really going to dawdle too much on
Speaker 2: the intro today, I'm too excited about the interview you're
Speaker 2: about to hear. Today's guest. There's a globally known economist,
Speaker 2: the author of wy Nations, Fall and Power and Progress.
Speaker 2: Am I tas the rhone as sema glue. Okay, So
Speaker 2: a term that you've popularized, not necessarily invented, is creative destruction.
Speaker 2: Do you mind explaining it for the listeners?
Speaker 3: Oh? Yeah, I mean I definitely did not invent it,
Speaker 3: and I think many other people deserve much more credit
Speaker 3: for inventing it and making it work. It's this idea
Speaker 3: that goes back to Joseph Schumpeter, famous Austrian economist who
Speaker 3: spent most of his career or the most important part
Speaker 3: of his career, at Harvard, who emphasized that in capitalist growth,
Speaker 3: you will have new firms taking market away and destroying
Speaker 3: old firms, and as a corollary of that, new technologies
Speaker 3: taking market share away and driving out old technologies. And
Speaker 3: he understood this was a difficult and tumultuous process, but
Speaker 3: also believe that that was the essence of sort of
Speaker 3: capitalist growth. So it's one of these things that is
Speaker 3: a fact of life in a market process, but different
Speaker 3: types of social, economic, and political reactions to it are natural,
Speaker 3: and how you react to it is going to have
Speaker 3: various effects both on growth, what type of growth, and
Speaker 3: its distributional effects.
Speaker 2: Right, So something I've read about and spoken about a
Speaker 2: lot as well as like this idea of the rot economy,
Speaker 2: which is the kind of growth has overtaken most of
Speaker 2: the modern markets. And I'd argue, at least in the
Speaker 2: creative destruction field, tech has stopped really innovative. It doesn't
Speaker 2: feel like they're creating things to create new jobs, to
Speaker 2: create new markets. I'm wondering how you feel about looking
Speaker 2: at the general tech industry.
Speaker 3: I am a critic of the tech industry, and I
Speaker 3: have become so over the last decade or so. And
Speaker 3: my problem with the tech industry is not its dynamism.
Speaker 3: I applaud that. It's not its risk taking. I applaud that,
Speaker 3: And it's not the drive towards economic growth, which I
Speaker 3: think is also generally desirable. But it is the direction
Speaker 3: of research and technologies that the tech industry has focused on.
Speaker 3: Both because of idea logical reasons and because of a
Speaker 3: particular business model that they developed, and I think both
Speaker 3: of those have pushed us towards technologies that I see
Speaker 3: as socially less desirable in some cases actually undesirable, and
Speaker 3: as a result, we're actually getting growth without as much
Speaker 3: social benefits. And let me try to just make one
Speaker 3: very simple point, which everybody nods when you say that,
Speaker 3: but it's still as important to put in the conversation.
Speaker 3: Economic output, as measured by statistical agencies such as gross
Speaker 3: domestic product, does not have any welfare element in it.
Speaker 3: So if I find a way of hacking into your
Speaker 3: computer spending one thousand dollars, and you find a way
Speaker 3: of defending against me spending two thousand dollars, that will
Speaker 3: increase GDP by three thousand dollars. And I think even
Speaker 3: the most demented person wouldn't say that that's a social improvement.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think you made a point like this the
Speaker 2: Golden Zachs, where it's about like you could make a
Speaker 2: trillion dollars if you did deep fakes in a certain
Speaker 2: manner exactly.
Speaker 3: So, therefore, new products that increase GDP may have socially
Speaker 3: undesirable consequences. That wasn't part of the original Schumpeter point,
Speaker 3: and it's not something that I would worry about when
Speaker 3: I'm talking to people in Mexico who are trying to
Speaker 3: get the economy going, But it is a very important
Speaker 3: concern when it comes to new tech.
Speaker 2: When do you think this shift happened? You say, the
Speaker 2: last decade? What was it that kind of changed for you?
Speaker 3: Well, I think it was probably a gradual process. But
Speaker 3: the tech sector initially was very heavy on hardware with
Speaker 3: some software elements, right, And when that started changing and
Speaker 3: the entire field became software, I think the possibilities for
Speaker 3: different diferent types of technologies to go in very different
Speaker 3: social directions also multiplied. Right. So money today in Vidia
Speaker 3: being an exception, is not made by hardware, And even
Speaker 3: in Nvidia, I think a lot of the innovation is with.
Speaker 2: Software, particularly with Kuda being able to do stuff with
Speaker 2: GPS exactly.
Speaker 3: Yeah. But when you are also doing software, you have
Speaker 3: ways in which that software becomes an information control tool,
Speaker 3: a monitoring tool, or surveillance tool. It becomes a way
Speaker 3: of automating work in various different ways. It can become
Speaker 3: a manipulative tool, and it can also create lots of
Speaker 3: new products, some of them very beneficial, but some of
Speaker 3: them very addictive and conducive to mental health problems. So
Speaker 3: I think software sort of expands the capabilities, but together
Speaker 3: with the capabilities, you also have expanded set of distortionary
Speaker 3: or manipulative things that you can do.
Speaker 2: Right, you mentioned what kind of dynamism element of how
Speaker 2: tech is working in the growth? How if I agree
Speaker 2: that tech is in a dynistic state, it almost feels
Speaker 2: like it's been spinning its wheels for the last few years. Crypto, metaverse,
Speaker 2: all of this stuff. It doesn't feel like new things
Speaker 2: are happening.
Speaker 3: Well, they are new things, it's just that I think
Speaker 3: you are saying what I just said in a different way,
Speaker 3: and it might be that your way is better. They're
Speaker 3: not super socially valued, but they are new products. So
Speaker 3: you would say that metaverse or virtual worlds are a
Speaker 3: new product by any category. It's not just not something
Speaker 3: that's going to make humanity better if it might make
Speaker 3: humanity worse by alienating them more or isolating them more
Speaker 3: from their social milieu. You know. And there is another
Speaker 3: element of what's going on here, which I'll comment on
Speaker 3: but again it doesn't contradict that they are generating new products.
Speaker 3: A lot of new technologies and new ideas that are
Speaker 3: being invented in tech are not being implemented, and part
Speaker 3: of the reason for that is the competitive environment. Google, Facebook, Microsoft,
Speaker 3: Amazon are all buying up on Facebook, are all buying
Speaker 3: up a lot of competitors and not even sometimes using
Speaker 3: their technology. So that's the consolidated structure. So the invention
Speaker 3: is there, but the invention is not translating into implementation. Now,
Speaker 3: don't get me wrong, some of that invention may also
Speaker 3: go in the wrong way, so a better version of
Speaker 3: you know, TikTok may not be a great thing either,
Speaker 3: But there is that consolidated, concentrated market structure that is
Speaker 3: also changing what gets implemented.
Speaker 2: The thing I'll push back on is they are making
Speaker 2: new things, but it feels like the ones I mentioned Crypto,
Speaker 2: Metaverse and now Generative AI. They're not producing actual products
Speaker 2: at the end. It's not so much that we couldn't
Speaker 2: live in a virtual world or that digital money wonn't
Speaker 2: be usedful, but it's more that the actual output from
Speaker 2: the companies is not translating into meaningful products.
Speaker 3: Well, again, this is a question of what we are measuring,
Speaker 3: and whether what we're measuring is the right thing, and
Speaker 3: whether it's really welfare relevant. But if I create a
Speaker 3: metaverse and you're willing to pay a million dollars for it,
Speaker 3: that will increase GDP by a million dollars. So that's
Speaker 3: a new service, right. So a lot of things we
Speaker 3: consume today are services. It's not something produced like a
Speaker 3: T shirt or a car. They are based on digital services. Now,
Speaker 3: of course, to produce those digital services, we're actually using
Speaker 3: real resources such as energy. But what I actually buy
Speaker 3: from you maybe, or what you buy from you maybe
Speaker 3: just a digital service. Now, some digital services are extremely useful,
Speaker 3: and some of them are useless. Some of them may
Speaker 3: be bad for.
Speaker 2: You, right. I think my point is more they're not
Speaker 2: making particularly useful Selvis. They're doing well monetizing the things
Speaker 2: they've had for years. But it kind of reminds me
Speaker 2: of something he wrote in twenty nineteen where you were
Speaker 2: talking about automation and effect on growth, but also we
Speaker 2: may have run out of ideas for generating new high productivity,
Speaker 2: labor intensive tasks. Do you think we're approaching that point?
Speaker 3: Thank you for raising that, ed So. I think that
Speaker 3: is a very very important part of my thinking. I
Speaker 3: would say that the tech sector is not producing sufficient
Speaker 3: new tasks for workers to use their skills and to
Speaker 3: expand their capabilities, and firms perhaps are not demanding and
Speaker 3: implementing enough of them. But it is not, according to me,
Speaker 3: because we're running out of possibilities. It's just that we
Speaker 3: haven't focused on those. And that's where the ideology reference
Speaker 3: earlier on that I made comes in. You know, I
Speaker 3: think the software industry would have done somewhat more productive
Speaker 3: things if it did not become too focused on replacing
Speaker 3: humans having machines as humans overlords, which today has of
Speaker 3: course reached its apex with the craze on AGI.
Speaker 2: But here's the thing. I get that that might be
Speaker 2: what they're pushing toward, But generative AI isn't even automation
Speaker 2: at this point. A lot of what you've written about
Speaker 2: AI is correctly like the effects of if we all
Speaker 2: make these tasks, but it feels that they aren't even
Speaker 2: successful automating anything.
Speaker 3: Absolutely one percent. Thank you for saying that. My take
Speaker 3: is that generative AI is actually an informational tool, right,
Speaker 3: so you should use generative AI as a way of generating, filtering, summarizing, finding,
Speaker 3: checking information. That's actually what it's good at. If you
Speaker 3: try to use it for other purposes, sometimes you can
Speaker 3: get away with it, but it won't be very good
Speaker 3: at that. So you can try to automate a lot
Speaker 3: of warehouse tasks today by using the current crop of robots.
Speaker 3: People don't do that because they are not good at it.
Speaker 3: If you did it, costs would go up, people would
Speaker 3: lose their jobs, Delays would pile up. But you can
Speaker 3: do it. It's the same thing with generative AI. Even
Speaker 3: though it's not an automation tool. Automation wouldn't be its
Speaker 3: best use, especially given the current unreliability, even though there
Speaker 3: is something else that we could do better with it.
Speaker 3: I think many people are going to use it for
Speaker 3: automation because that's the vibe. That's what companies are being told.
Speaker 3: You know, if you talk to business leaders today, everybody's
Speaker 3: asking them, financial journalists, their shareholders, and their friends, where
Speaker 3: are you with the AI investment? So that's the hype,
Speaker 3: and then people are going to rush into use AI
Speaker 3: to implement AI even when they don't know what to
Speaker 3: do with it, and automation will often appeal to them.
Speaker 3: Because it's like the easiest thing to do. It's the
Speaker 3: thing that they may have experienced from other technologies, and
Speaker 3: it's the thing that some people are telling them that
Speaker 3: that's what they should do. There are companies, integrators' websites
Speaker 3: devoted to automation AI, even though it wouldn't be very
Speaker 3: good at it. I mean again, it could automate some tasks.
Speaker 3: You could have more of your customer service done without people.
Speaker 2: Right, even then, that feels like a stretch of what
Speaker 2: automation means because sure, the customer service example, and I
Speaker 2: think you may have raised this point as well, how
Speaker 2: does it get better? How do you measure better in
Speaker 2: the case of customer service? But even then, it's automation
Speaker 2: only in so much as you can trust it, And
Speaker 2: it feels like these core issues of hallucination almost kill
Speaker 2: the concept of automation with generative AI.
Speaker 3: So here's a good use case for automation of customer service,
Speaker 3: which is you call your bank and you enter some
Speaker 3: password and they tell you your balance. That's perfect. You
Speaker 3: don't need a person there to tell you the balance, right,
Speaker 3: because the current technologies can faithfully take those numbers and
Speaker 3: communicate them to you. After the right security steps.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's not a generative answer because it's a
Speaker 2: number in a day abase.
Speaker 3: It's not a generative answer. So now put generitive A
Speaker 3: and there you're probably gonna get lots of incorrect answers. Yes,
Speaker 3: but some companies might still do it.
Speaker 2: Which is it just feels like a crazy time that
Speaker 2: you have companies shoving this through almost like the very
Speaker 2: much like a post Jack Welch situation where.
Speaker 3: Yes, exactly the Jack Welsh mindset.
Speaker 2: Do you think about the problem is that the people
Speaker 2: running these companies aren't really technologists.
Speaker 3: I don't know. Look, I think this is another branch
Speaker 3: of my work. But US businesses are often led by
Speaker 3: people who have been trained into thinking that their only
Speaker 3: priority should be increasing short term shareholder value, right, and
Speaker 3: a very effective way of doing that is cut labor costs.
Speaker 3: But a that's not the right social objective. Even maximizing
Speaker 3: long term shareholder value is not the right objective. But
Speaker 3: even more fundamentally, cutting short run labor costs maybe an
Speaker 3: illusion and be associated with longer term problems. So if
Speaker 3: you have a company where your workers are skilled, talented,
Speaker 3: they are very useful for liaising with customers. Creating new services, products, innovation.
Speaker 3: You can in the short run cut your labor costs,
Speaker 3: but it would destroy you in the long run. I
Speaker 3: think many more companies are in this bucket than American
Speaker 3: business leaders realize.
Speaker 2: And it's funny you mentioned that. I've heard a lot
Speaker 2: from Google people. In particular. I get emails from Google
Speaker 2: people all the time because it did an episode about
Speaker 2: a particular guy, and it's funny. They all talk about
Speaker 2: the kind of brain drain of layoffs that you don't realize.
Speaker 2: It's not just the output you're losing, it's the person
Speaker 2: who knew how the staff worked and where the stuff was,
Speaker 2: and who built the staff and why the stuff is
Speaker 2: good or back. And it almost feels like American capitalism
Speaker 2: is dramatically disconnected from labor in general.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Absolutely so. Look, I mean, I think there is
Speaker 3: a tremendous amount of tacit knowledge that workers have which
Speaker 3: often gets unrecognized, and even bosses sometimes don't recognize that.
Speaker 3: So both French and British trade unions in the history
Speaker 3: experimented with these types of strikes where workers just follow
Speaker 3: the rules. They do exactly what the rule book says
Speaker 3: their responsibilities are, and it turns out to be quite
Speaker 3: disastrous for the company because most of what actually workers
Speaker 3: do is much more adaptive than just following the rule.
Speaker 2: Like kind of outsourcing risk. Almost.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's just like, you know, the rule book says,
Speaker 3: you know, operate the machinery, but you know when to
Speaker 3: actually operate the machinery, not just operate the machinery. The
Speaker 3: sound yeah exactly. Yeah. So that's the kind of tacit
Speaker 3: knowledge that people acquire via training, why experienced by their
Speaker 3: social network, talking to friends. And if we don't value that,
Speaker 3: will lose that and it's going to be very difficult
Speaker 3: to replace it with what machines or information technologies do.
Speaker 2: Do you think we're in a bubble right now?
Speaker 3: Define a bubble?
Speaker 2: Actually, let me reframe the question. Do you think generative
Speaker 2: AI is a trillion dollar industry? Do you actually think
Speaker 2: it is the next hype of growth market?
Speaker 3: Let me answer that question slightly indirectly.
Speaker 2: Sounds good.
Speaker 3: I believe that generative AI has the capacity to add
Speaker 3: a trillion dollar or more over time if we use
Speaker 3: it correctly, because as an information technology it has great capabilities.
Speaker 3: We live in an age in which useful information is
Speaker 3: scarce all sorts of chunk you don't want is on
Speaker 3: the internet. But when you actually need to solve a problem,
Speaker 3: get better at what you're doing, get more background information,
Speaker 3: those things are very difficult to find, and generitive AI
Speaker 3: could be a tool for providing that sort of information
Speaker 3: to all all sorts of decision makers and workers blue
Speaker 3: collar workers, office workers and so on. But that's not
Speaker 3: the direction we're going in which case, I don't think
Speaker 3: it's going to add trillions of dollars of true value.
Speaker 3: But that also doesn't mean that generative AAI companies are
Speaker 3: going to go bust, right, because they're going to be
Speaker 3: able to monetize this in other ways. So if generative
Speaker 3: AI enables you to take over the search market from Google,
Speaker 3: that's a huge amount of money. It may take over
Speaker 3: the search market from Google without providing much better service
Speaker 3: to consumers, but it might still be hugely profitable. If
Speaker 3: GENITTIVAI companies convince businesses to invest in generative AI, that's
Speaker 3: going to be very profitable for them, but not so
Speaker 3: good for the businesses that misimplement it. Right.
Speaker 2: So the thing is, and I understand why you're making
Speaker 2: these assumptions, but what if it doesn't get cheaper because
Speaker 2: right now, the thing I've been on about with generative
Speaker 2: AI is, on top of not being super useful, it's
Speaker 2: so unprofitable and every report seems to be suggesting it
Speaker 2: isn't making people money. What if it stays where it
Speaker 2: is because in the last eighteen months, GPT four row
Speaker 2: is not significantly different. What if they've stalled. What if
Speaker 2: this is all we've got.
Speaker 3: Yeah, my guess is that it will get somewhat cheaper
Speaker 3: because right now it's very costly to even answer queries,
Speaker 3: and with more GPU capacity it will get somewhat cheaper.
Speaker 3: With better designs, it will get somewhat cheaper. But I
Speaker 3: do not believe that there is a scaling law in there.
Speaker 3: So many people in the industry believe in this mysterious
Speaker 3: scaling law, which is that you double the GPU capacity
Speaker 3: or comput capacity, you double the data, and you get
Speaker 3: twice the performance.
Speaker 2: Just an aberration of Moore's law by people who don't
Speaker 2: necessarily understand it.
Speaker 3: But first of all, what does it mean to say
Speaker 3: double the data? We're going to throw more Reddit at it.
Speaker 3: So even if there were such a scaling law, you
Speaker 3: would require high quality data, which we're not producing. Is
Speaker 3: run out. We're not paying for it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's something just very nihilistic about the whole thing
Speaker 2: as it stands. There's not really much of a social output.
Speaker 2: It's helping automate away jobs prolominantly held by contractors, which
Speaker 2: is already a problem onto itself. But also it doesn't
Speaker 2: seem to be making the money. I don't think I've
Speaker 2: ever seen anything like this in tech, and I'm just wondering. Indeed,
Speaker 2: maybe this is the question what happens if this is
Speaker 2: not it? But also TICK doesn't have a next step.
Speaker 2: Do you think one of these big companies could die?
Speaker 2: Do you think that there is actually an existential risk
Speaker 2: if generative AI and all this force apart.
Speaker 3: No, I don't think so. I think none of these companies,
Speaker 3: you know, are just committed to generative AI. They have
Speaker 3: other businesses that are making money, and even Nvidia can
Speaker 3: make still a lot of money with the GPUs.
Speaker 2: Let me rephrase it then, So right now, all of
Speaker 2: these tech companies, they do very well in their multiples
Speaker 2: in the markets because they have a relatively low cost
Speaker 2: of goods, like their actual costs are pretty great, but
Speaker 2: they're predicated on this ongoing growth. They must always grow.
Speaker 2: But what happens if they don't have a new growth
Speaker 2: thing because they haven't for a while, and what if
Speaker 2: they turn on generative AI? Like this feels like this
Speaker 2: could be an economic panic onto itself.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it could be. It could be some drops in valuation.
Speaker 3: The general pattern we have seen with many other products
Speaker 3: and technologies is that it looks a little bit like
Speaker 3: an S curve. Right, you're an acceleration and then you plateau,
Speaker 3: and that's when new products are invented, new investors move
Speaker 3: on to other things. And that hasn't happened with tech.
Speaker 3: You know, Microsoft is living its fourth life or whatever
Speaker 3: since a mestos, partly because they have acquired new businesses,
Speaker 3: some competitors, some competing technologies, and sometimes some tech companies
Speaker 3: have invested in the wrong things. I mean, cryptocurrency was
Speaker 3: more crazy than AI. There. I really didn't see the
Speaker 3: use case.
Speaker 2: The question I keep and have asked a lot of people,
Speaker 2: this is just what happens if there's nothing though, because
Speaker 2: growth is slowing. There is a pattern of slowing growth
Speaker 2: within these companies and there isn't a new thing that
Speaker 2: they can pick up and acquire. I don't know whether
Speaker 2: tech has ever had this happen is the problem.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a good point, but it's even deeper than that.
Speaker 3: Growth has slowed in the industrialized world, and it's not
Speaker 3: a new phenomenon. Since one of these paradoxes, which needs
Speaker 3: to be repeated more and more, the tech age has
Speaker 3: also coincided with a slow down of aggregate growth and
Speaker 3: every indicator of aggregate growth. So we are growing much
Speaker 3: less today than we did in the seventies or sixties.
Speaker 3: Productivity is growing less, and I think this is also
Speaker 3: related to the fact that we're not getting enough out
Speaker 3: of the new technologies and the new ideas and the
Speaker 3: new scientific discoveries that we are making. And part of
Speaker 3: the reason why there is so much hunger for AI
Speaker 3: hype is that many people, including policymakers by the way,
Speaker 3: are wishfully thinking, oh, well, this could be a solution
Speaker 3: to our productivity slow down. So perhaps in the next
Speaker 3: decade we can have a much faster productivity growth thanks
Speaker 3: to generative AI or thanks to.
Speaker 2: AI right, new jobs and such.
Speaker 3: Yeah, new jobs, sudden discoveries.
Speaker 2: So almost history is kind of slowing down. I've not
Speaker 2: really heard anyone really discuss it in these terms, but
Speaker 2: it's interesting. So you've seen that this is the growth
Speaker 2: of all costs is everywhere, and growth is slowing. But
Speaker 2: it sounds like growth isn't just about a money thing though.
Speaker 3: No, no, growth is not just about money thing, and
Speaker 3: I think if you do look at other indicators, we're
Speaker 3: doing worse. One of the regularities of the twentieth century
Speaker 3: across the world is that health and life expectancy have
Speaker 3: improved every today. People in Sub Saharan Africa have twice
Speaker 3: the life expectancy at birth as people who lived in
Speaker 3: London or Manchester in the eighteen hundreds, and Americans have
Speaker 3: had tremendous improvements in life expectancy and health until the
Speaker 3: last decade when it's slow. Then it started getting reversed.
Speaker 3: So on many indicators were actually doing even worse than
Speaker 3: GDP suggests.
Speaker 2: So what's contributing to it? Is it a welfare issue,
Speaker 2: is a societal one?
Speaker 3: Is it? Well? I don't think there is a clear answer.
Speaker 3: Some people think it's because of you know, the life
Speaker 3: expectancy part is because of early deaths due to alcoholism,
Speaker 3: opioids and drugs, But there is a more general deterioration
Speaker 3: mental health. There's a mental health crisis, So if you
Speaker 3: look at health of surviving people, it's much worse if
Speaker 3: you're factoring that mental health issue.
Speaker 2: I wonder if it's also where tech falls into this,
Speaker 2: as well as the exposure to social media. I've had
Speaker 2: this overall, which is one of my Flimsiert theories. I
Speaker 2: don't think people should be thinking about politics as much
Speaker 2: as they do. Not saying people shouldn't be political, but
Speaker 2: just the immediacy of political discussion has been irrosive to
Speaker 2: people's mental health.
Speaker 3: Well, I'll give you two factois that might perhaps support
Speaker 3: your ideal, although I'm not sure whether I completely agree
Speaker 3: with it. But one is that if you look at
Speaker 3: when the mental health crisis seems to start, it coincides
Speaker 3: with smartphones. Ah, so people accessing social media and other
Speaker 3: things on their smart forms twenty four hours a day
Speaker 3: might have something to do with it. Another one is
Speaker 3: due to economists Alcott and Matthew Genskau. They did this
Speaker 3: experiment where they incentivized Facebook users to stop using the platform.
Speaker 3: So when people stop using the platform, their mental health improvement,
Speaker 3: but they can answer questions about what's going on in
Speaker 3: current politics much less well. So there at least immediate
Speaker 3: superficial knowledge of what's going on in politics also declines.
Speaker 2: Interesting, Yeah, it does feel like there is a wider discussion.
Speaker 2: Discussion perhaps is the wrong word. Within the tech industry,
Speaker 2: there is almost no consideration of the social aspects, of
Speaker 2: the welfare aspects of any technology being buil the metaphus,
Speaker 2: for example. As ridiculous as that was, I can understand
Speaker 2: an executive being like, yeah, we use the internet, now
Speaker 2: what if we use more Internet? But just no consideration
Speaker 2: to whether people wanted to. It feels like there's just
Speaker 2: a disconnection between capitalism and people.
Speaker 3: I mean, I think tech is much more complicated. Oftentimes
Speaker 3: it's multi use, so something that may appear to have
Speaker 3: good users also has bad users. But I do think
Speaker 3: that tech workers also need to own up to greater
Speaker 3: social reds responsibility. Right, So, if you are a physicist
Speaker 3: nuclear physicist today, it's unthinkable that you do not have
Speaker 3: some social responsibility related knowledge as well as training about,
Speaker 3: you know, nuclear weapons.
Speaker 2: My best mate is a nuclear health and safety person,
Speaker 2: so I feel will appreciate that.
Speaker 3: But the same degree of thinking about ethical implications, social implications.
Speaker 3: What happens if I unleash this on humanity doesn't quite
Speaker 3: exist to the same extent in the tech industry, and
Speaker 3: I think it's going to develop. There are many people
Speaker 3: who are very socially minded in the tech sector, but
Speaker 3: I think we may need something more systemic.
Speaker 2: And what would regulation look like? On a better note,
Speaker 2: I suppose what can we do to kind of reverse
Speaker 2: this disconnected trend? Is it regulation? Is it better safety culture?
Speaker 3: Well, all of the above. But here's a problem I
Speaker 3: have with both regulation and the discussion that we have
Speaker 3: about regulation. It is very reactive, right. Something happens and
Speaker 3: we react to it by thinking of how can we
Speaker 3: regulate so that we reduce the harms. But the problem,
Speaker 3: as I try to articulate, including in the earlier parts
Speaker 3: of this conversation, is about what types of technologies we
Speaker 3: are developing, where we're putting our efforts. Expost regulation that's
Speaker 3: reactive is not going to achieve that. So I think
Speaker 3: we need a new tech culture and as well as
Speaker 3: societal norms and priorities that says there is an alternative
Speaker 3: that is technically feasible and socially desirable for technology, especially
Speaker 3: for AI. Articulate what this is. Let's have a conversation
Speaker 3: about how we can get there. What we can do
Speaker 3: to encourage researchers, what we can do to encourage engineers,
Speaker 3: what we can do to encourage businesses to actually go
Speaker 3: in that direction. What does the government need to do,
Speaker 3: What does civil society need to do? What does the
Speaker 3: media need? By the way, I think media is a
Speaker 3: big part of the problem. Media often sort of increases
Speaker 3: the appeal of the tech industry. It sort of paints
Speaker 3: a picture of tech leaders as these geniuses who are
Speaker 3: revolutionizing things, and it personalizes that their power, and it
Speaker 3: makes it harder for the public right to keep the
Speaker 3: tech sector accountable. Also, on the AI field, I think
Speaker 3: the media is part of the reason why there is
Speaker 3: so much hype. Many of the leading publications, such as
Speaker 3: the Economists or the New York Times, every week prints
Speaker 3: something about AI will solve this problem or that problem.
Speaker 3: AI is going to revolutionize.
Speaker 2: It's always will solve it, Yes.
Speaker 3: Will solve it. Yet it hasn't solved anything yet yet.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And that's I mean, part of the reason the
Speaker 2: show exists. And I think it comes down to I
Speaker 2: do blame a lot of this on the growth of
Speaker 2: all coast economy, but it's also it's almost like there
Speaker 2: is no long termism anymore in a lot of the
Speaker 2: tech economy, it's all this will happen. Just trust us
Speaker 2: and give us as much time and money as possible.
Speaker 2: But we're not going to invest in R and D.
Speaker 2: It's just a bizarre.
Speaker 3: Well, look, let's also think about the world at large.
Speaker 3: There are six billion people who live outside of Europe, US,
Speaker 3: Canada and China. That includes the weakest, the poorest people
Speaker 3: in the world. How can we improve their lives? Nothing
Speaker 3: we're talking about AI here is going to do that.
Speaker 2: And that's actually the thing. It's connecting back to what
Speaker 2: you were saying earlier. The problems being solved don't feel
Speaker 2: like they're solving for everyone. It's solving what's very much
Speaker 2: in front of us, the latest iPhone, latest computer. What
Speaker 2: problems can that solve? And thus generative AI kind of
Speaker 2: makes sense because it's like, oh, more computer, but more
Speaker 2: computer isn't fixing.
Speaker 3: Anything metaverse as a solution to you know, people who
Speaker 3: are starving.
Speaker 2: Actually, this leads me to a question, what did you
Speaker 2: think of cryptocurrency? I wish I would have had this
Speaker 2: podcast asked you about this at the time.
Speaker 3: Well, I said that I see the positive for jener
Speaker 3: to AI. I think it's actually a promising technology. I
Speaker 3: do not see any positive for cryptocurrency. I never did.
Speaker 3: When I read the manifesto first about bitcoin, it was interesting,
Speaker 3: it was thought provoking, But two days later I was
Speaker 3: inoculated against it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well you kind of remembered real money exists, and
Speaker 2: at that.
Speaker 3: Point we cannot trust the government. Yes, we cannot trust politicians. Yes,
Speaker 3: but as long as we keep politicians and the government
Speaker 3: under some sort of check with true democratic means, you know,
Speaker 3: the money is not the most important problem. So that's
Speaker 3: not the biggest issue that we have to worry about.
Speaker 2: So a wrap up question, I really appreciate your time,
Speaker 2: of course, Ed. Are you optimistic about the future for
Speaker 2: the tech industry.
Speaker 3: No, I am not a techno optimist, and I'm not
Speaker 3: a market optimist, meaning that if I define optimism as
Speaker 3: things are gonna work out there is an arc of progress.
Speaker 3: I am not an optimist. I think we have serious
Speaker 3: problems with the tech industry. We have serious problems with
Speaker 3: the market process in the United States right now, with
Speaker 3: social processes. But I'm hopeful. I believe that there is
Speaker 3: a direction in which we could use technology that would
Speaker 3: make things better. And there is a way in which
Speaker 3: we can introduce better regulation, better worker organizations, better training
Speaker 3: that would make the market system work better. But that's
Speaker 3: the hope that we could achieve that if we did
Speaker 3: the right things. But I don't think that we are
Speaker 3: heading there. Left to our own devices.
Speaker 2: So where does it head if we're heading in that direction?
Speaker 3: Oh, I prefer not to answer that question.
Speaker 2: That's a perfectly fine way to end it.
Speaker 3: Darn.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for joining me today.
Speaker 3: Thank you, ed. This was really excellent conversation. I really
Speaker 3: enjoyed it, and I'm sorry that my voice was a
Speaker 3: bit of a downer.
Speaker 2: Oh, don't worry. The listeners have just be glad to
Speaker 2: hear someone else have than me talking. You've been listening
Speaker 2: to Better Offlines. Thank you for listening, everyone, Thank you
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