Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:50:46 · Benedict Evans
Or consultancies and marketing agencies like spending a whole bunch of money to survey 20,000 people and saying, "What are you doing with this stuff?" We don't have good data on what's going on and how many people are really using this, but to the employment question, hence there's a lot of people looking through all the stuff that the US census collects and trying to work out, "Well, where can we see this? Can we see productivity? What could we see?" And the answer right now I think is there's no clear consensus that we're seeing an impact on jobs, but of course, politically that doesn't matter. If you're a student and you can't get a job, and that clearly is an issue, whether it's because of AI or whether it's because of Trump and tariffs is a different question. Then you get niche things like people who draw book covers for young adult romance novels are very upset that now you can get a picture of a naked woman on back of a dragon flying through a volcano without paying them. I'm sorry, I'm being deliberately unkind, but there's a little... And particularly novelists, people who write eBooks, there's a huge culture war over whether it's okay to use AI. There's this whole sort of AI slop question, and obviously you show the number that like 30, 40% of your podcasts are generated by AI. There's a big fuzzy massive questions. Some of this, I think it's a little bit like the backlash we had around social, but much more compressed. And like social, some of the backlash around social was true, and some of it was sort of true, and some of it wasn't. Always like exemplified in the whole Facebook sells your data thing, which is just, A, not true, and B, the people who believe it are absolutely adamant that of course it's true, and you're obviously a lunatic for suggesting otherwise. It's like the line from Jonathan Swift that you can't reason somebody out of an idea that went reasonably to. So you get this kind of wide, it was a long answer question, but you've got this wide spread of ideas just as you kind of did with social. There's like 20 different things, some of which are really real, and some of which are really not real. And a lot of which are kind of a fuzzy mess in the middle. All of which means that meanwhile, you've got Trump saying he wants a new executive order on dangerous models, which I actually don't think is the thing that drives the backlash.
00:53:02 · Benedict Evans, Lenny Rachitsky
The worrying about myth or cyber, I don't feel like that's a main street America conversation, but that's the thing that got Trump interested in this stuff again. [00:53:12] S1: Let me go kind of in a tangential direction. Something that I like to ask folks that have kids that come on the podcast, especially people that are thinking so deeply about where things are going, knowing what you know about just where the world is heading, what AI is going to do to the future, how are you changing the way you raise your kids? Just what are you teaching them differently potentially that might help them in the future?
00:53:33 · Benedict Evans, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:53:33] S0: I don't know. I think there's a curve here in that if you've got kids who are going onto the job market in the next year or two, then everything is up in the air and no one knows how this is going to work. If you've got kids who are going onto the job market in like five years, then who knows? But staff will have settled down a lot by then in probably unpredictable ways. So, I could be a lot more worried if I had a 21-year-old. I don't, I've got a kid in his sort of early teens. Those questions vary. Then you've got a lot of the questions that were the same before ChatGPT around the collapse of gatekeepers, "Should you really believe what that influence on TikTok says?" "And where exactly you're getting your understanding of what's going on in Israel?" And all of those kinds of social media, internety, media consumption kinds of questions. I don't know. There are people who are super, super intentional about every minute of their child's life. I'm not. I kind of recall the George Carlin line that anyone who drives faster than you is a maniac and anyone who drives slower is an idiot, and that certainly applies to parenting. And everybody thinks they're somewhere in the middle, but I don't have a deeply systematic and widespread and coherent plan for, "This is what my child is going to be doing in three, six, 12, 18 months time." I'd settle for him not breaking his Chromebook again. [00:55:09] S1: I like that you're just general vibe is, "It's going to be okay, guys. It's going to be okay."
00:55:09 · Lenny Rachitsky, Benedict Evans
[00:55:09] S1: I like that you're just general vibe is, "It's going to be okay, guys. It's going to be okay." [00:55:15] S0: Yeah. I don't know, maybe this is because I'm British and we haven't had political violence in 500 years, and I think maybe if I came from Iran, I'd have a different attitude to being calm about the future. I think there's a layer of like, yes, this will change a bunch of stuff and we'll need to worry about it, but that's kind of a constant, we've always had that. I remember in the whole wave of panic around social media, I dug up, so were a whole bunch of books in the late '70s about databases. There was a whole panic about databases. And again, half of it was true. If everybody's police records, and if all police records and all government records are online, then that's different. If you think about, for example, the deep fake needs issue, for example, there's like a dumb reaction to this, which is to say, "Haven't you heard of Photoshop?" Which is true, but a 15-year-old kid couldn't use Photoshop to make hardcore pornographic news of every girl in their high school and send them to the whole school in one afternoon. [00:56:29] S1: And tournament the video.
00:56:29 · Lenny Rachitsky, Benedict Evans
[00:56:29] S1: And tournament the video. [00:56:30] S0: Exactly. Even more. Yeah, even more. And now they can. So, that is different. It's kind of like the challenge of social. The thing people would say in the '90s is it's great. You can read the only gay kid in your village, and you can find other gay people, and you can find your tribe. And guess what? It turned out you could also be the only Nazi in your village, or the only pedophile in your village, or somebody wanted to look at child porn. Yeah, now you can find the other people who like looking at child porn and they'll tell you it's great. So oops, we connected everybody. And unfortunately, that meant we connected all the bad people, and all of our own worst instincts, and every problem in society. And so that will happen again with AI. Deep fake news are like the obvious thing we can see now. There will be a whole bunch more of this stuff. But there's also, and something a kind of technical audience should know about, do you know about the post office scandal in the UK? [00:57:17] S1: Nope.
00:57:17 · Lenny Rachitsky, Benedict Evans
[00:57:17] S1: Nope. [00:57:17] S0: Okay. So sidebar here. So in the UK, post offices are mostly franchises run by small business people. So they're run by pharmacies classically, very often Indian, Indian immigrants, second generation Indian people. And the post office 15 years ago rolled out a new point to sell computer system. So they have a separate counter in the back that's a post office. And so the post office rolled out this new computer system built by them by Fujitsu that had a bunch of bugs in it that showed shortfalls in cash. And the post office looks at this and says, "Aha, we knew these people were stealing from us." Hundreds of people get prison, bunch of suicides, bunch of bankruptcies, people lose their homes. Meanwhile, people from the post office and people from Fujitsu are going to court and swearing there's no bugs in the system and nobody else has had this problem. This is 1970s technology. That's really the point, that every wave of technology comes with ways that you can ruin people's lives either deliberately or by accident. The whole thing of Chinese mass surveillance is deliberate. Maybe people should go to prison, maybe not, but we have this with every technology. We have a bunch of ways that you can ruin people's lives, and you have to be conscious of that and also kind of not panic about it. [00:58:28] S1: So maybe following that the right and coming back to the kids thing and the jobs thing, is there a job you are steering your kid away from? And is there a job you kind of think you want to steer them towards?