AI could shrink necessary work and expand creative pursuits

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 2:08:15

   I think this year, probably in 2025, we at Meta, as well as the other companies that are basically working on this are going to have an AI that can effectively be a sort of mid-level engineer that you have at your company that can write code. And once you have that, then in the beginning, it'll be really expensive to run. Then you can get it to be more efficient. And then over time, we'll get to the point where a lot of the code in our apps and including the AI that we generate is actually going to be built by ai engineers instead of people engineers but but i don't know i think that that'll augment the people working on it so i mean my view on this is like the future people are just going to be so much more creative and they're going to be freed up to do kind of crazy things goes back to you know my daughter was like playing with legos

2. 2:09:06

   before and i kind of ran out of legos and then now she can have minecraft and can build whatever she wants and it's so much better just like i think it's the future versions of this stuff are just going to be wild but unquestionably yeah another concern that people have is that it's going to eliminate a lot of jobs yeah you know what do you think about that well i think it's too it's too early to know exactly how it plays out but my guess is that it'll probably create more creative jobs than it well i guess if you look at the history of all this stuff my understanding is like 100 years ago um i don't know if this is 100 or 150 years ago but it was like at some point not too far along in the grand scheme of things like the vast majority of people in society were farmers right because they kind of needed to be in order to create enough food for

3. 2:10:01

   for everyone to survive and then we turned that into a like an industrial process and now it's like 2% of society are farmers and we get all the food that we need. So what did that free up everyone else to do? Well, some of them went on to do other things that are sort of like creative pursuits or cultural pursuits or other jobs. And then some percent of it just went towards recreation. So I think generally people just don't work as many hours today as they did back when everyone needed to farm in order to have enough food for everyone to survive so i think that trend is sort of played out as technology has grown and so my guess is that like the percent of people who will be doing stuff that's like physically required for humanity to survive will get to be smaller and smaller as it has more people will dedicate themselves to kind of creative

4. 2:10:59

   and artistic and cultural pursuits um i think that's generally good i think the number of hours in a week that someone will have to work in order to be able to get by will probably continue to shrink um yet i think people who are super engaged in what they do are going to be able to work really hard and accomplish way more than they ever could before because they have like this unimaginable leverage from from having a lot more technology so i think that that if you just like fast forwarded or extrapolated out the the historical technological trend is what you'd get i think the question is what you raised which is is this qualitatively a different type of thing that somehow um obsoletes people but i i just think when you're asking that it's just important to remind ourselves that like at every step along the way of human progress and

5. 2:11:53

   technology people thought that the technology that we were developing was going to obsolete people so maybe this time it's really different but I would guess that what will happen is that the technology will get integrated into like everything that we do, which again is why I think it's really important that it's open source and that it's widely available. So that way it's not just like one company or one government kind of monopolizing the whole thing.

6. 2:12:16

   And I'd guess that if we do it in that way, we'll all just kind of have superpowers, is my guess. rather than it sort of creating some kind of a runaway thing. I mean, one of the things that I think has been interesting,