AI insiders expect job losses but feel the race is unavoidable

Transcript

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

1. 2:22

   impose on society if they mess things up? I've been super interested in these questions. And part of the reason I wrote that New York Times piece is because, you know, I was doing this little personal project where I was doing almost these long form AI ethnographies, where I'd sit down with a random researcher at one of the frontier labs, sometimes in a friend, sometimes an acquaintance or a stranger, and I just asked them for an hour about their very broad views about AI, its impact on the world, and how optimistic and pessimistic they were all off the record. And one thing that I noticed is one of the questions I ask is what advice would you give to a normal 17-year-old? So not like a super crack, like brilliant coder, but just like pick a random state in America, normal 17-year-old, they're getting bees in school,

2. 3:03

   they're not like thinking about AI that much. Like how do you think that they can prepare for the future? And what was really shocking to me was almost everyone I spoke to, regardless of their personal political beliefs, some of these are more libertarian types. Some of these are more leftist types. Some of these don't care about politics at all. Some of these have a wide range of beliefs about even AI itself. Most people just told me, honestly, I have no idea what I tell that 17-year-old. It's a really scary time. I don't think there's going to be a lot of jobs for them left. I think they're caught in this painful transition. And on the economic front, it did become clear that there was sort of this quiet consensus that regardless of your future beliefs about whether there will be a permanent underclass or more jobs than ever, the vast majority of

3. 3:43

   people I know in the AI industry believe that in the near term, in the next few years, we are going to see mass job displacement. It's going to be especially hard for a lot of young people, and a lot of current knowledge work jobs are going to be disrupted and displaced completely. And so then, of course, it kind of goes to the other thing you said, which is... For me personally, I just feel that if I thought that the technology I was building was going to, had a very high chance of, you know, displacing millions of jobs and maybe also like a 10% chance of killing everybody or something like that, which is also not an uncommon belief from researchers at the labs, I probably wouldn't build it.

4. 4:17

   And so, you know, then I go and ask, like, so like, why are you doing this? Does that feel dissonant at all, you know? And, you know, you hear a range of answers to that. I think that for a lot of people, for some people, I would say the probably more common belief among researchers at the labs is, yes, there are harms. Yes, there are risks. But if we really get this AI thing right, we are going to enter a world that is better than ever.

5. 4:43

   We are going to get the end to all disease because AGI is going to help us find the cures to diseases and humans will be immortal. we're going to have all consumer goods and services be cheaper than ever because the space factories or whatever it is mean that like we're not going to have to pay for a house or a car maybe it'll be better when the AIs can do all the jobs and we're able to live off UBI and we can sort of engage in these lives of infinite leisure and focus on our relationships and our communities instead of having to engage in like demeaning wage labor or something like that and this vision I think is genuinely inspiring to a lot of people who work in AI they do believe that technological progress for all of its bumps and disruptions ultimately leads us to a world where we live

6. 5:23

   longer and happier lives. And so I think one is that a lot of folks are willing to take the risk or sort of weather this near-term disruption in order to get to that future. The other thing that I noticed, though, which is in some ways a little bit more disturbing to me or challenging for me, is a pretty broad sense of techno-determinism. So I think a lot of people in the AI industry and in tech more broadly do think that the path of technology is sort of preset, that somebody is going to build AGI, somebody is going to build superintelligence, especially at this point with how fierce the race has become between the frontier labs.

7. 5:59

   There is a sense of, well, if I don't do it, they're going to do it. So maybe I'm at Anthropic and I actually am really worried that, you know, the thing I'm building might have all these negative consequences. But if Anthropic exits the race, you know, OpenAI, XAI, Google, They're going to stay in the race and they're going to keep competing. And then you might think, well, at least if I was involved, I could help make it go better.

8. 6:22

   I could build a better product, a safer product, you know, a more technology that cares more about human welfare. And in addition to that, I might as well, you know, get my bag and make sure that I have a stake in the future is the other thing. I do think a lot of people, if they believe that this huge disruption is coming, do care somewhat also about securing their own spot through financial upside in the future.

9. 6:48

   And so that one's a little bit more worrying to me because, like, sure, maybe I get it and I'm happy for them. But most people in the world do not have the opportunity to, like, get themselves out of the permanent underclass by getting a job at OpenAI. And so, you know, that's what I worry about.