00:55:15 · Daniel Palmer, Michelle Gilmore, Georgie Healy
[00:55:15] S3: Totally agree. I think what scares me though is that I mostly see two types of people that I interact with, which are either folks that are outside of the tech world and they're completely against AI or like reductive to the impact that AI will make for understandable reasons. And then you have folks who are maybe too deep in the tech world and think like the way we solve this problem is we create some $400 a month app that integrates our kids. And so I think I'm really seeing a dearth of the middle ground conversation on these topics. It scares me, because I have... Maybe I just ignore both sides of tech. It's super fair. But I have one of my best mates, not to call him out, but he's a public school teacher and I think he would sooner sacrifice a limb than install ChatGPT because it's just so like, it's so counter to who he is. I think that, like, he's probably representative of a lot of folks who are outside of the tech space. It's like, rather than accept that, okay, this is gonna fundamentally change things, it's like, just turn it off essentially. And I think that's just as detrimental and dangerous as the other side of things. [00:56:31] S1: Yeah. But I was having a conversation over the weekend with an incredibly intelligent 21 year old who has decided to go back to a... Just a basic feature phone. [00:56:42] S4: Oh, have we got those friends? Dumb phones. Your phone. I want one.
00:56:42 · Georgie Healy, Michelle Gilmore
[00:56:42] S4: Oh, have we got those friends? Dumb phones. Your phone. I want one. [00:56:45] S1: So... Yeah. And her justification, I thought was really sound in that she... She's studying marine biology. She wants to focus on her study. She doesn't want the pollution in her head that is social media, that is sort of creating a negative energy in her world, and she's deep in study and deepening relationships, and she value... That's what she values. And so she's kind of taking herself very deliberately out of this, and she's sort of the fourth young adult that I've spoken to in the last week that's done this. That could be coincidence. That's a very small sample. But I think that's a very interesting marker. Right? That there is the pushing it away and then the bringing it where completely immersed. Yep. We are not representative of general population at all, but I think that there is something to be said for... Well, I'm I'm scared of that. And humans have done that when any revolution has happened.
00:57:51 · Xharmagne Carandang, Adam Miller
[00:57:51] S0: The funny thing is I've got a middle ground between your two types of people. Someone who works in tech uses AI because he knows it makes him more efficient, but he's like, no. I don't like this feature. It's taken the joy of programming away from me. Because now, I... You know, the whole thing about it's there, you don't have to think kind of thing. But he wants to, so what do you do? But you need AI now to be more efficient. And was talking to him about some more old school programmers who... They have more fun these days with programming because they know the foundations, and now they don't have to keep up with the latest tech which keeps changing, and they just get to play. And he said to me, it's because it's their hobby now. It's not their job. They don't have that sense of their work being devalued kind of thing. So... [00:58:42] S5: I think bringing up another risk, so there's education risk, but then we mentioned it before, just job displacement risk. So over the next five to ten years, we chat to a lot of AI and agent founders. A lot of people like to say, Oh, there won't be that many jobs lost. There's going to be new jobs. I've really struggled to see that, especially in white collar work and it's already happening. Like Canva's announced job losses. What are we going to do here when the next five to ten years is so much rote work that we can see AI is going be able to execute against? Do we need UBR in the next five to ten years? What will the government do those people that are listening? Need more plumbers in Australia.
00:58:42 · Adam Miller, Sachin, Daniel Palmer, Michelle Gilmore
[00:58:42] S5: I think bringing up another risk, so there's education risk, but then we mentioned it before, just job displacement risk. So over the next five to ten years, we chat to a lot of AI and agent founders. A lot of people like to say, Oh, there won't be that many jobs lost. There's going to be new jobs. I've really struggled to see that, especially in white collar work and it's already happening. Like Canva's announced job losses. What are we going to do here when the next five to ten years is so much rote work that we can see AI is going be able to execute against? Do we need UBR in the next five to ten years? What will the government do those people that are listening? Need more plumbers in Australia. [00:59:21] S2: Maybe we should become tradies, generally. [00:59:23] S3: Well, this is the thing about it. A lot of it does go back to education. It sounds overly theoretical, like we distribute folks into a better industry, But I [00:59:37] S1: think
00:59:37 · Daniel Palmer
[00:59:37] S3: anyone who says, oh, it's just going to create more work without any caveats is being dishonest or overly brief. I don't think that's intellectually honest at all. I think there is a chance, creates a lot more work, I think we've seen previous similar, like I mean the whole Jevons paradox piece, far new technologies, new automation technologies have led to more total work to do, and bigger markets, and so I think there's a chance that happens, and it's worth recognising that chance, and certainly I think when we try to battle the question of okay, what like, you know what will work look like in ten years, like will my job exist? I think one of the flaws we make logically when considering that is, in ten years when we're answering that question we won't be answering it from our position now, where it's like, in ten years, things will have changed gradually over that ten years, asking the question of do the jobs that existed in 2025 still exist, is kind of a non sensical question to ask. So I think part of it is progress will happen in that kind of nuanced slow way where it will never just be a black and white question of okay, jobs have stopped existing or not. Some will evolve, some will become two other jobs, some will become half another job. Yes, I do think probably what will happen is there will be a lot less white collar work in some timeframe, and a lot of my thesis and what motivates me is that I think that can be awesome for society. I think that could be an amazing outcome if we have to do, and I use the word have, less work. I think that's great. It's great if we're supported by the right social economic systems. UBI. You look kind of blurry. UBI potentially a great solution there, I would dive into it, I'm not probably educated enough to discuss that theoretically, but systems like that, welfare and safety nets I think would be really important. I think in a world where there's less work we have to do, we can be happier, we can have more prosperity, and we can focus on doing more creative pursuits. I think these are all really awesome goals for automation and for society. But a lot of things have to happen right for us to achieve that outcome.
01:02:01 · Daniel Palmer, Adam Miller
And so not only do we have to build a technology that enables that, we have to make sure that governments and society and all of the moving pieces are able to coalesce in a way that enables that. [01:02:14] S5: I've got a challenge there. I think theoretically a lot of that is down, but from an employer perspective, don't you always want people to work like a decent amount of hours? Like you're, if you're hiring people, want them to work eight, nine, ten hours a day. Like the idea of people working like this sort of smaller reduced work for the same pay, do you think employees will adjust to that or do you think there would just be less work going around so everyone will work less units of time per day? [01:02:40] S3: Look, don't think the way it will work is we'll just like average out all the work over the workforce, and so we all still have jobs, and then we maybe only work for like 5% of our time. I think what will happen is the jobs that do still need to be done will have people doing them probably full time, then there'll just be jobs that don't have to be done. Of course there'll be a transitionary period where yeah, there'll be, I mean David Graeber is, there's a really good book by someone, I think it's called David Graeber called Bullshit Jobs and Sorry for Swearing Again, I think it's a really good read, this has been a problem in the white collar workplace for well before AI. But yeah, don't think necessarily we'll just end up in this situation where we're at, or just forced to go to work and do nothing.