AI and the Future of Work: Artificial Intelligence in the Workplace, Business, Ethics, HR, and IT for AI Enthusiasts, Leaders and Academics
00:33:12 · Rahul Vohra
[00:33:12] S0: AI is going to deliver so much improvements to our quality of lives and the economy and our national security and America, as as well as the world in general, we are only beginning to scratch the surface with what we're seeing today. At the same time, we're also... And this is me as as a person and also us as a company, where I am very aware and we are very aware of of the anxiety and the fear and the real impact in some cases that it's having, on people's lives. And we think that what we can do is is build AI in the most responsible fashion, and I I can talk about what that means, to us if that's interesting. But I'll I'll say at a high level just for the moment in terms of the the the overall impact and and and why I'm excited. So maybe starting with the name, Superhuman. Like, why did we rename the whole company to be from Grammarly to Superhuman? And as you can imagine, that's a complicated choice. It's difficult. Like, we have to change websites. Superhuman is known for being an email app, not not the whole suite. So there's a lot of work. In some cases, it's an uphill battle to make that work. But the reason we did it is not only does Superhuman stand for what we're trying to do, which is to give you superpowers everywhere you work, but it also has human right there in the name, front and center. The way that we wanna build AI is by allowing you and me and humans to do what we uniquely can do, be our most creative, our most strategic, and our most impactful. And as amazing as AI gets, there's something special when you and I get in a room together or we get on a call and my unique lived experience combines with your unique lived experience, and there's a certain frisson there, coming together of, decades of of somebody's, in this case, two lives. And, obviously the combinatorial explosion when you have a third person or a fourth person is is kind of mind boggling, that AI simply will never be able to do, or at least not in the foreseeable future. Like, theoretically, if it recorded everything that happened in my life and everything that happened in your life, maybe. But that that is that is not gonna be a problem for many decades. So there is something still very special and very unique about teams of people coming together to combine their lived experiences, and that's Superhuman.
00:35:47 · Rahul Vohra
And that's one of the things that that we're excited to to deliver. Then as I think more broadly about the overall economy and and the impact on on jobs and and so forth, I'm sure that other guests have have spoken about Jevons paradox, but but, I'll I'll redo it if if they haven't. I I think it's very germane, and more more people need to understand this. So Jevons paradox came from the industrial revolution in The United Kingdom way back when. And, of course, back then, all power was, derived from burning coal. We'd we'd burn coal to create heat, to heat up water, to create steam, to move engines, and and that... That's how power used to be generated. Right? And then James Watt came up with a much more improved steam engine that made the unit... The the energy extraction from coal way more efficient. And there's a lot of analogies between then and now in AI. Back then, there was this widespread panic that the demand for coal would go down because we need far less of it, and therefore, the coal industry would fall apart. And the coal industry was was all of everything back then. Everything kind of rode upon it, and that therefore the whole economy would fall apart, there'd be widespread unemployment, and and everything would be terrible. But it turns out the exact opposite happened. Total coal consumption surged as engines became cheaper to run and were adopted much more widely for a greater set of use cases before as new things became profitable that previously could not have been imagined. Let's do a more recent example. So computers and digital tools, if you go back to, like, nineteen sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety, There was actually a panic at that time from paper companies and lumber companies saying, oh, as we digitize everything, like, the the the paper industry is gonna gonna fall over, or it's gonna die. But actually, turned out that global paper consumption tripled during that period because printers and printing became easier and cheaper. When spreadsheets, when Lotus one two three and and Excel started to become really popular, people were really worried that, the accounting industry would go away. And actually, the opposite happened. It it led to a whole new line of work, which is FP and A. Now as we catch up to today, a lot of people have said, well, with coding agents and software factories, does that mean we need...
00:38:25 · Rahul Vohra
Doesn't that mean we need fewer software engineers? And and hopefully, you can see the pattern here. This is exactly the same pattern of argument. Actually, it turns out you need way more software engineers because way more kinds of software are now more profitable. I had a really great conversation with a a not for profit founder the other day who is, building technology for for certain parts of Africa, and she was unable to do so profitably. Profit's the wrong word. She was unable to do so in a way that was sustainable before coding agents because it was just too expensive to afford to pay, everyone to do all the things. Whereas now she can create the software and hire the software engineers, and deliver it to market much more cheaply, thus enabling a whole new category of industry that didn't exist before. And in in this case, it's it's a really great not for profit story. So it turns out there's way more demand now for software engineers than there ever was before because there's so much more software to be written. And and by the way, when you have more software to be written, you have more security risks, more complexity. So there's more roles in cybersecurity and compliance and governance. I'm hearing the same thing in legal work, by the way. Folks have said, oh, aren't we gonna need far fewer lawyers now that you have Harvey and the Gora and and so many other of these these legal companies that are automating so much legal work? Well, turns out that when legal work becomes really easy, the demand for legal work increases. Like, a lot more cases, get brought. There's there's a lot more demand just to to do things, and so, case volume has massively exploded. I was talking to a lawyer whose firm has now like 10 x the case volume they used to have. And when you have 10 x the case volume, sure, AI is gonna do a whole bunch of that. But it turns out the set of stuff that you need humans to do also 10 x's. And so they're actually hiring more lawyers than ever before. And most surprising example of this that I came across was customer support hiring, which you you would have thought of all the things, surely that's where AI is gonna have the biggest impact on jobs. Well, it turns out customer support hiring has recently rebounded and is now growing 10 to 15% faster than other sectors, which I I think is is remarkable.
00:41:02 · Rahul Vohra, Dan Turchin
And it's it's exactly the the same phenomenon as as as everything I just described. Maybe I'll spell that one out just to make it more obvious. So it... What do companies do when when AI can handle, a lot of customer support? Well, one choice is you eliminate a lot of those roles, but you keep on delivering crappy customer support. Turns out that's not what most companies are choosing. What most companies are choosing is to invest in their customer support and making it amazing. And so you end up taking those people and asking them to do more complicated things, high level tasks, more difficult cases, and let's try and compete on the quality of support that we're delivering. So that's a that's a lot. But hopefully, explains why I am personally so bullish on the the magic of AI as a new technology for changing every aspect of how we work and who we are and and what the economy is and what America is and what it means to be a human. I'm not gonna pretend it's not gonna be without its challenges. And I I think that whenever there's any kind of transformative technology like this, there's a lot that that we need to work through as as a society, and and we wanna do our part to be responsible parts of that conversation. But I'm very excited about what's to come. [00:42:27] S1: Rahul, that is the most dense and articulate description of Jevons paradox that I have heard yet. So you get the gold medal. Nice... Nicely done. [00:42:38] S0: I think more people need to understand it. So so thank you for the the soapbox.
00:42:38 · Rahul Vohra, Dan Turchin
[00:42:38] S0: I think more people need to understand it. So so thank you for the the soapbox. [00:42:41] S1: Very well done. Very well done. You know, unbelievably, we're about out of time. I told you I'd get you out of here efficiently. But you're not going anywhere without answering one last important question for me. We're talking about AI and humanity and beyond email, beyond the inbox. One of the things I'd love to know from you is when Rahul and Dan are back here in a decade, it's 2036, and we're having a version of this conversation, what's one thing that you believe will be commonplace then that most people would disagree with sitting where we are today in 2026? [00:43:20] S0: Okay. To make sure I understand the question, what what will be... What do I think will be commonplace in ten years that most people would disagree with now? [00:43:27] S1: Yeah. Something contrarian Trarian. About what you think will be commonplace in 2036.
00:43:27 · Dan Turchin, Rahul Vohra
[00:43:27] S1: Yeah. Something contrarian Trarian. About what you think will be commonplace in 2036. [00:43:32] S0: Oh, boy. That's a really tough one. I think by definition, we are ill equipped to... Not by definition, but, like, it it... It's well observed that we are ill equipped to predict on the ten year time scale as opposed to the one or the two year time scale. I don't know. I think I just gave you a speech that is is basically so super hard to predict. Right? Like the, I I... Okay. Here's what I can predict. I think in many ways, the world that we will be living in will be unrecognizable compared to now for the better. That maybe I sound like a a techno optimist or or I I I sound almost utopian when I say that. But I I really do believe it, that, from advances in drug discovery through biotechnology, through productivity, to every aspect of knowledge work that you can imagine, to manufacturing and industrialization, the supply chain, food, drink, like, it... It's just all going to get so much better over a ten year period in a way that we can't imagine. That's... Maybe that's not contrarian. Maybe that's obvious. But that's certainly something I believe is true.