AI may compress a century of change into a decade

Transcript

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

1. 1:42:24

   So on the practical or pragmatic sense, if we zoom in on jobs, we can look at programmers because it seems like AI systems are currently doing incredibly well at programming and increasingly so. So a lot of people that program for a living, love programming, are worried they will lose their jobs. how worried should they be do you think and what's the right way to sort of adjust to the new reality and ensure that you survive and thrive as a human in the programming world well it's interesting that programming and it's again counterintuitive to what we thought years ago maybe that some of the skills that we think of as harder skills are turned out maybe to be the easier ones for various reasons but you know coding and math because you can create a lot of synthetic data and verify if that data is correct so because of that nature

2. 1:43:13

   of that it's easier to make things like synthetic data to train from um it's also an area of course we're all interested in because as programmers right to help us and get faster at it and more productive so i think the for the next era like the next five ten years i think what we're going to find is people who are kind of embrace these technologies become almost at one with them whether that's in the creative industries or the technical industries will become sort of superhumanly productive i think so the great programs will be even better but there'll be even 10x even what they are today and because there you'll be able to use their skills to utilize the tools to the maximum uh exploit them to the maximum and um so i think that's what we're going to see in the next domain um so that's going to cause quite a lot of change right and so that's

3. 1:44:00

   coming a lot of people benefit from that so i think one example of that is if coding becomes easier um it becomes available to many more creatives to do more uh and uh but i think the top programmers will still have huge advantages in terms of specifying, going back to specifying what the architecture should be, the question should be how to guide these coding assistants in a way that's useful, you know, check whether the code they produce is good.

4. 1:44:27

   So I think there's plenty of headroom there for the foreseeable, you know, next few years. So I think there's several interesting things there. One is there's a lot of imperative to just get better and better consistently of using these tools. So they are, they're riding the wave of the improvement, improving models versus like competing against them. But sadly, but that's the, the nature of, of life on earth. Um, there could be a huge amount of value to certain kinds of programming at the cutting edge and less value to other kinds. For example, it could be like, you know, front end web design might, uh, be more amenable to, as you mentioned, to generation by AI systems, and maybe, for example, game engine design or something like this, or back-end design, or guiding systems in high-performance

5. 1:45:23

   situations, high performance programming type of design decisions, that might be extremely valuable, but it will shift where the humans are needed most. And that's scary for people. Yeah, I think that's right. Anytime where there's a lot of disruption and change, you know, and we've had this, it's not just this time, we've had this in many times in human history with the internet, mobile, but before that was the industrial revolution. And it's going to be one of those eras where there will be a lot of change. I think there'll be new jobs we can't even imagine today, just like the internet created. And then those people with the right skill sets to ride that wave will become incredibly valuable, right, those skills.

6. 1:46:03

   But maybe people will have to relearn or adapt a bit their current skills. And it's the thing that's going to be harder to deal with this time around is that I think what we're going to see is something like probably 10 times the impact the industrial revolution had, but 10 times faster as well right so instead of a hundred years it takes 10 years and so that's going to make you know it's like a hundred x uh the impact and the speed combined so that's what's i think going to make it more difficult for society to to to deal with and it's good there's a lot to think through and i think we need to be discussing that right now and i i you know encourage top economists in the world and philosophers to start thinking about um how is society going to be affected by this and what should we do, including things like, you know, universal basic provision or something

7. 1:46:54

   like that, where a lot of the increased productivity gets shared out and distributed to society, and maybe in the form of services and other things, where if you want more than that, you still go and get some incredibly rare skills and things like that, and make yourself unique. But there's a basic provision that is provided. And if you think of government as a technology, there's also interesting questions, not just in economics, but just politics. How do you design a system that's responding to the rapidly changing times such that you can represent the different pain that people feel from the different groups? And how do you reallocate resources in a way that addresses that pain and represents the hope and the pain and the fears of different people in a way that doesn't lead to division because politicians are often really

8. 1:47:49

   good at sort of fueling the division and using that to get elected, defining the other and then saying that's bad. And so based on that, I think that's often counterproductive to leveraging a rapidly changing technology, how to help the world flourish. So we almost need to improve our political systems as well rapidly if you think of them as a technology definitely and i think i think we'll need new governance structures institutions probably to help with this transition so i think political philosophy and political science is going to be key uh to that but i think the number one thing first of all is to create more abundance of resources right then there's the so that's the number one thing increase productivity get more resources maybe eventually get out of the zero-sum situation, then the second question is how to use those

9. 1:48:45

   resources and distribute those resources. But yeah, you can't do that without having that abundance