The Innovation Civilization Podcast
00:13:59 · Waheed Nabeel, George Sivulka
[00:13:59] S0: Yeah. [00:14:00] S1: By giving people democratizing access to location and communication across jobs. [00:14:05] S0: It's like we're doing these podcasts, basically. Yeah. [00:14:07] S1: Exactly. I think AI will do the same for work. So it'll democratize access to intelligence, and it will basically remove barriers based on only needing humans to complete tasks. And you'll have some organizations that are 100% people driven organizations, so human only. You'll have some hybrid AI agents and humans, and then some organizations that will be completely agentic. And I think that's one of the most interesting possible futures and outcomes is exploring, like, how we'll build things for the hybrid and agentic futures. In order to get there, I actually think the majority of companies will move, as they are hybrid today, hybrid AI tomorrow. And a lot of my obsession with interface design, a lot of what we work on for, you collaborating multi agent frameworks with humans Yeah. Are all just different interfaces of managing AI agent employees.
00:14:59 · Waheed Nabeel, George Sivulka
[00:14:59] S0: Yeah. Yeah. One of... On that thread, just pulling out on that thread a little bit more. So one of the things basically that folks talk about right now when it comes to the knowledge worker economy and you're building heavier with the wedge of the knowledge worker space like finance, law and consulting, so to speak. People talk about job losses, like AI is going to replace your jobs. And specifically, there's even this new notion right now that it might replace white collar jobs first versus blue collar jobs and so on and so forth. It's going to take us a lot more time for robotics to move one thing from point a to point b or do sophisticated stuff in a kind of knitting factory versus just analyzing papers and doing investment research. So where do you stand? A person who's actually building a product in this field and you're talking to customers all the time versus the economic theorists or or just saying, oh, AI is gonna take experts on jobs, whatever. So where do you stand on this? Is AI gonna replace white collar jobs in the short term? Is it gonna be short term pain? Or... Yeah. Like, where do you think this is going, basically? [00:16:12] S1: I I think there's two questions. So the first is, are white collar or blue collar jobs going to be replaced first? But... And maybe there's a second larger question of, are jobs going to be replaced? It seems like, for better or worse, AI is better at doing knowledge work than it is doing at labor work. Yeah. So it's better at doing the things that the office workers, white collar workers do. [00:16:36] S0: Yeah.
00:16:36 · Waheed Nabeel, George Sivulka
[00:16:36] S0: Yeah. [00:16:37] S1: I would say that it's not... We're not too far off from creating meta learners that will generalize over the physical world, where you'll have AI that's also really quite good at doing labor work, although it has an added hard work component. But I wouldn't be surprised if, you know, the delineation between, okay, AI is better at knowledge work than labor work begins to fade into the future. So I'm not sure we'll all become plumbers and chefs. So though everyone becoming a chef and realizing their childhood dreams of being a fireman and etcetera actually could be a good thing for humanity's net happiness score. [00:17:10] S0: Yeah. [00:17:11] S1: On the side of will it take too many jobs? [00:17:14] S0: Yeah.
00:17:15 · George Sivulka
[00:17:15] S1: That's something that's relatively interesting. And and I'm probably more on the optimistic end there, where every time there's a new technology that's released, that technology ends up actually going out and, in a very big way, increasing the amount of jobs that are around. So a really good example would be Morgan Stan... I talked to someone at Morgan Stanley who claims that they invented The Analyst. Okay. And the story of that was in the nineteen eighties or nineteen sixties or... I don't even know when Morgan Stanley first got their computers. They had a bunch of computers and a whole room of computers, and no one, none of the partners knew how to use them. And they said, oh, we should go and grab some of those new grads from Columbia and bring them down here, and we'll create a program where they could come and they can use the computers for us. And a analyst was born, apparently. And years later, that person came back to Morgan Stanley and said, hey. You guys are still using analysts? You still have analysts? And by now, the analyst program at all major investment banks is hundreds of thousands of kids. And the Morgan Stanley partners are like, yeah. Of course. And the quote unquote investor... Inventor of the analyst said, you still haven't figured out how to use computers. And the story there just highlights that the more opportunity there is, the jobs change, but that opportunity doesn't always take away jobs. Doesn't mean that, okay, we're not gonna have remote organizations, And you can make the argument the Internet took away jobs from Americans because now we can go and hire people across the world, and global companies can use global resources even if they're at startup scale. But I think it'll change the nature of work. And there will be entire jobs that are created for working with AI, prompt engineer, and eventually agent orchestrator, or agent human interaction. Like, there there will be opportunities for people to full time use technology to their advantage.
00:19:19 · Waheed Nabeel
[00:19:19] S0: Yeah. Yeah. The only argument... So it's interesting you mentioned about the previous technologies and how they created jobs. Right? The only sort of argument made on the flip side is that all the other technologies and stuff like that, they were not intelligent, so to speak, where it beats humans as well, basically, and what they do and more general intelligence or general intelligence qualities, whatever that means. Right. Whereas this A. I. Revolution is like that, where in a lot of cases it's generally more intelligent or can do multiple things. Right. There is a class of doomers who basically say that, oh, it's different this time because the nature of the technology is different this time. So I don't know what you make of that.
00:20:05 · George Sivulka, Waheed Nabeel
[00:20:05] S1: Yeah. Learners, meta learners, computers that can learn how to learn and generalize well are definitely maybe more dangerous or economically disruptive perhaps than humans using computers or computers by themselves. I can see that argument. At the same time, I think that there's fundamental laws to the human psyche. We have craving, and we have aversion. We want. We desire. And even if we were in a a utopia, which 2025 looks like a utopia compared to 1925 and definitely 1825, we still will be entrepreneurs. We'll still be going out and creating or discovering or wanting to find something new. And so I think that we'll keep ourselves busy. And I think the economy and human suffering as part of the economy, if you really don't like your job or if you do like your job, but the idea of wanting and building is very core to the human experience. I don't think it's going away. I just think it'll form different different types of companies, different types of industries. Yeah. But I don't think it's changing the human psyche. Yeah. [00:21:02] S0: So you don't think we need UBI anytime soon? [00:21:05] S1: I... I'm not a proponent of UBI. No. I think that's I think that's a weak argument. And and if everyone becomes a chef or a plumber, everyone becomes an artist or whatever the economy looks like, I think that it's all about capturing value, and value is actually less concrete than people would like to imagine. It's way more perceived than actual.