"AI Will Take Art, Then Jobs, Then Everything Else" - Tristan Harris

0:00 What do you mean antihuman?

0:03 So, um, let's let's dive into this.

0:05 So, there's something in economics called the resource curse.

0:10 So, think countries like Venezuela or Sudan where you discover that that country

0:16 is sitting on top of a really valuable resource like oil.

0:19 And then once a bunch of your GDP comes from oil

0:24 and not from the labor or innovation or development of your people,

0:29 you invest more in oil infrastructure and not investing in people.

0:33 You don't invest in education.

0:35 You don't invest in healthcare because oil is where

0:38 you get your GDP and your your your growth from.

0:42 Okay.

0:41 Okay.

0:41 This is a well-known fact in in economics.

0:44 It's called the resource curse.

0:46 There's a wonderful guy named Luke Drago

0:48 who wrote a piece called the intelligence curse.

0:52 We are about to enter a world where GDP for countries comes more from data

0:58 centers and intelligence and AI than is going

1:01 to come from the labor of human beings.

1:04 So, everyone's talking about how AI is going to automate all these jobs and then

1:07 we'll all just like sit back with universal

1:08 basic income and become painters and poets.

1:11 And is that actually what's going to happen?

1:14 or when countries get almost all of their revenue from AI and it, you know,

1:19 a smaller and smaller percentage from people,

1:22 do they have an incentive to invest in uh child care,

1:26 health care, education, the well-being of their people,

1:29 or is it basically just hook them up to the social media addiction economy,

1:33 keep them busy while basically all the revenue comes from AI companies?

1:37 And so what what I'm trying to get at is this is not a human future.

1:41 This is not a future that's in service of regular people.

1:45 This is a this is a future that's in service of eight soon

1:49 to be trillionaires who will consolidate all

1:51 the wealth and disempower basically everybody else because does that make sense?

1:57 It does because previously in order to get that in you it's highowered stuff

2:02 and and yeah this is a big conversation.

2:04 Yeah.

2:04 Exactly.

2:05 Um they've started a[ __] trend.

2:07 It's so funny when no one no one in the room

2:10 wants to crack their can in case it interrupts the conversation.

2:12 So one goes and it's a Mexican wave of can opens around.

2:15 It's good.

2:18 Um so previously you would have had to look after the humans,

2:21 healthare, education, quality of life.

2:24 Also tax revenue comes from people, right?

2:26 Well, you would have to look after

2:27 them because they were the primary economic engine.

2:31 That's right.

2:31 And so they feed themselves.

2:33 Yes.

2:33 The economically they feed themselves.

2:36 Exactly.

2:36 people that are young help to support the people that are old,

2:39 the ones that are entering the workforce

2:40 and are driving innovation and are working 40,

2:43 60 hour weeks, double jobs, all the rest of it.

2:45 And then there's old people who've got 401ks and pensions and[ __] like that.

2:48 Um your position is that if we have a world where the human part

2:55 of the contribution to economic growth and GDP

2:58 is removed because it is humans consuming AI

3:02 but AI driving and data centers driving

3:05 the revenue itself beyond building the data centers

3:08 there's very little and I imagine much of that's done by robots in any case.

3:12 Um well we have this joke that most people's occupation in the future

3:16 we're headed towards with AI is to become a coffin builder.

3:20 So in other words your job is to create

3:23 the thing that replaces you and obsoletes you.

3:26 So you are essentially building the coffin for your future obsolescence.

3:31 Yeah.

3:31 And so if you're short-term yes we need

3:32 the electricians and the plumbers and we're building data centers.

3:34 short-term, yes, you can be a programmer and get the benefit from vibe coding,

3:38 but then the AIs are learning on all the things

3:41 that you're doing and it's it's taking all the training

3:44 data of what you're doing with AI and it's using

3:46 that to train an AI that can take your job.

3:48 So, everybody using AI now to help them is also

3:52 uh training the future AIs that will completely replace them.

3:55 And again, the explicit goal, this is not my opinion.

3:57 This is literally the mission statement of all of the AI

4:00 companies because the the the multi-trillion dollar prize at the end

4:03 of the rainbow of owning the entire world economy is based on building

4:08 this full replacement economy because that's

4:11 what will achieve the greatest growth.

4:12 And that's why these companies replacement economy.

4:14 Yeah.

4:15 Meaning that they're they're designing to replace all human labor.

4:17 They're not designing to augment and support and like enhance human labor.

4:21 They're designing to replace all human labor because

4:23 that's what justifies the amount of money that they've

4:26 taken on in debt that they can grow

4:28 into this like total ownership of the entire economy.

4:32 What else is there to say about the intelligence curse?

4:36 Well, it's just important for people to get that when

4:39 AIs are doing all the new scientific research, not humans.

4:42 You have an automated chemistry lab,

4:43 you have an automated biology lab, you have an automated surgery.

4:47 When AI is doing all of that, again,

4:49 the revenue is going to come from AI, not from people.

4:52 And what that means is all the wealth will

4:54 go to a handful of like five AI companies.

4:57 And then how are you going to be able to make a living?

5:01 When in history has a small group of people ever

5:04 consolidated all the wealth and consciously redistributed it to everyone else?

5:09 And if you think that might happen in the US, we'll do a universal basic income.

5:12 Just think about the entire world.

5:13 So right now you have AIs that are automating say customer service jobs.

5:17 So let's say that that disrupts like you know

5:19 the Philippines where like 90% of the economy is customer service.

5:22 I don't know what the number is.

5:23 It's it's high.

5:25 What happens when an entire country's economy gets disrupted by AI?

5:29 Are a handful of US AI companies going to pay out

5:33 and support the well-being and the livelihoods of all these other people?

5:37 Like and then if people don't have money,

5:40 how are they going to buy the goods in this future economy where

5:43 it's all generated by AI because now you don't even have an income.

5:46 So this you know essentially we're on track to break the entire economy.

5:53 This is not in the interest of countries.

5:55 What what's confusing to me about this is

5:57 that I believe it only took something like

5:59 20% unemployment for a couple of years

6:02 to lead to the rise of fascism in Germany.

6:05 um you don't need everyone's job to be

6:08 automated to get levels of political disruption.

6:10 I think it was only 20% uh

6:12 unemployment that basically led to the French Revolution.

6:15 There's kind of a mutually assured political revolution that is

6:19 going to happen for all these countries that are racing

6:21 to build AI and deploy it to automate as much

6:24 labor as possible to compete to boost their external GDP number.

6:28 Like the metaphor you can have in your minds

6:29 is like the US and China are essentially racing

6:32 to take steroids and pumping up the GDP and muscles

6:35 of their economy while they're getting internal lung failure,

6:38 internal organ failure, internal brain rot failure because they're governing

6:43 the internal impact of that technology poorly.

6:46 So it's a race for external power while internal management

6:49 of essentially like uh you know failure of your body organs.

6:53 Does it make sense?

6:54 Yeah.

6:54 What does external power look like in this context?

6:57 Well, um, you know, one of the reasons that people

7:02 think of AI is so important for competition is,

7:06 if you think about geopolitical competition with China,

7:10 economic power precedes other kinds of power.

7:13 If I have a high growth rate economy,

7:15 that'll lead to the ability to invest more in a bigger military,

7:19 bigger weapons, bit more advanced science,

7:21 more advanced technology because just have more money to deploy.

7:24 And so economic competition is a precursor for geopolitical competition.

7:29 So when we say, you know,

7:31 competing for this external power, we mean competing for GDP growth.

7:35 But again, we're competing for GDP growth.

7:37 That doesn't mean what it used to mean.

7:39 And I think a lot of people think, okay, well, if GDP is going up by like 10%,

7:42 cuz AI is automating all this growth, that sounds awesome.

7:44 I was going to say like increases

7:46 in GDP are almost always a universal good thing.

7:49 they had been when it was humans that were

7:52 generating that and then it was coming back to humans

7:55 because the revenue is going to be consolidated

7:57 in a a very small number of people in this new case where five companies

8:01 there's no intermediary between so who would be feeding

8:05 the revenue in because this revenue still needs to come

8:07 from somewhere even if it goes to a a small

8:11 handful of people where does the actual money come from

8:14 well this is the confusing thing what what happens how is that a stupid question

8:18 no it's a good Because you're saying basically who's going to be buying

8:21 the products when no one has a job and no one has an up to that.

8:25 Yeah.

8:26 As fewer people have incomes and fewer people have

8:28 jobs that the the bucket being poured into the top that's right

8:33 is going to stop being poured.

8:35 Yeah.

8:35 Yeah.

8:35 It this is the confusing and mindbreaking thing about AI and it

8:39 just in general like a thing people have to get used to.

8:42 I mean, your podcast is called Modern Wisdom, and I just think about this a lot.

8:45 Like, what are the wise capabilities that we need

8:48 to have in order to make our way through this?

8:51 And one of them is the ability to be with something

8:53 that sounds like science fiction and realize that it's actually real.

8:58 Like, and not say because it sounds like it's science fiction

9:01 that I can just like dismiss it and say that can't be true.

9:04 A lot of people do that.

9:04 They're like AIs that are like breaking out of their container and hacking

9:09 GPUs and mining crypto autonomously when no one told it to do that.

9:13 That that's got to be like a madeup study.

9:16 But as we we know there was an Alibaba study just

9:19 last week where the AIS autonomously broke out of their their system.

9:23 We we need we need to round this out and then I want to talk about that.

9:27 Sure.

9:28 That that story is[ __] terrifying.

9:30 Yeah.

9:30 Yeah.

9:30 Uh, so where where does where does the economy who's who's pouring money in?

9:34 I mean, the truth is that I don't know.

9:36 I don't think anybody has.

9:37 Is it just going to grind to a halt at some point?

9:39 I I think something like that.

9:40 Yeah.

9:40 I mean, I I I don't think that there's I think something that people need

9:44 to get is it's not like there's a plan for how to make all this go well.

9:48 Like this this technology is being released in a paradigm undermining way.

9:52 like it's undermining the paradigm of economic assumptions and sort

9:57 of societal assumptions that have made the postworld war ii order.

10:01 This is a this is such a deep fundamental change to the restructuring

10:04 of everything our economic system

10:08 our relationships um our information environment.

10:12 It's not just like adding a new technology in the mix.

10:15 It's like fundamentally changing the structure of the entire world.

10:17 M you would think that if we're about to do

10:19 that, we would do that with more careful, more caution, care, wisdom,

10:24 and restraint than we have with any technology we've ever deployed.

10:27 If we knew we're about to undermine the paradigm,

10:29 but because of this arms race dynamic,

10:31 we are deploying it faster than we deployed any technology in history

10:35 and therefore undermining these things faster than we can have a plan.

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