Forecasting the Job Market: AI's Potential to Replace 80% of Roles

0:00Today, I wanted to start the podcast out by reading one of my reviews I have on Apple Podcast. So usually my reviews are five stars. Of course, not all of them. Everyone's got a bone to pick with everything. I recently got one that is a three-star review, and I thought it was very interesting, so I'm going to go ahead and read it for you. It says, informative, but I like this podcast with its very informative bite-sized episodes, but almost nothing about legitimate concerns around privacy, potential spread of misinformation, and inaccurate results that tie people to scandals and criminal activity, and no current method for correction or deletion.

0:40The ChatGPT cheerleaders say that it's on the user to be wary of ChatGPT results, but we've seen over and over again that the public is not good at vetting information, and it leads to suicides, murders, doxing, etc. Yes, there's a lot of good, but there's also a lot of stuff to worry about. Now, of course, there's a couple good points in here. definitely very important to be wary of chat gpt and a lot of the downsides ai in general and not just all of the upsides that being said um i'm not a hundred percent sure that uh i agree with everything in there the fact they say that um the the false information coming out of chat gpt is going to lead to suicides murders doxing etc i think of course bad things come out of all technology but like bad things are coming out of the internet and we're not going to go shut down the internet.

1:30That being said, it's important to talk about the negatives as well as the positives. I'm a pretty positive guy. So that's usually where I focus just on my personality. But that being said, I'm happy to talk about the negatives. So on today's podcast, by popular request, I guess not really popular request, minority squeaky wheel request, I am going to talk about some of the negatives of AI what is happening right now. And perhaps some of the perceived negatives AI. But with that being said, of course, I'm going to talk about some of the potential opportunities that are coming along with that. I know you're going to hate me because I always see a silver lining a lot of stuff, but there's a lot of things to be genuinely concerned about.

2:05So this episode goes out to Jackie's 212. This one's for you. What I wanted to kick off first is there is a breaking story that has been happening over the last week where essentially Jeffrey Hinton, who's kind of known as AI's godfather, he quit Google because he is worried about the direction of AI and where it's going and the danger that is coming with that. So he's, as I said, seen by a lot of people as kind of the godfather. He's 75 years old. He just announced his resignation from Google. And he told essentially the BBC recently in an article that some of the dangers of AI chat bots were quite scary.

2:52He said, I quote, right now, they're not more intelligent than us, as far as I can tell, but I think they soon may be. Now, of course, I think for everyone looking at the rate of advancements right now, right? Of course, there's all the gotcha articles where people are saying, see, it messes up this or that, it's not that good. Like, just look at the rate of improvement. These things will be perfect. They will be smarter than us, they will be much more advanced, we have the technology and all the information ever created, you know, now on the internet. So I would say, obviously, these things will get very smart, and it is very important to look at what the repercussions are, of course, what the positives and negatives of that are.

3:31And this is something that Dr. Hinton is very concerned about at the moment. So he said that essentially these neural networks, as we know, they're kind of set up similar to a human brain in a way that they can learn and process information. This isn't just traditional coded programs, right? When you write a software program, you tell exactly what to do. These AIs are different in a sense that you kind of build what's called a neural network, which is set up to, you know, simulate a brain, you feed it information and you tell it what answers are correct and let it learn to learn, essentially. And it comes up with things.

4:06That's where these kind of AIs get away from us is a sense that it can learn things maybe we never taught it. It can learn things maybe we haven't learned. And people kind of worry that the advancements it is making could scale rapidly. Now, he said right now, what we're seeing is things like GPT-4 eclipse a person in the amount of general knowledge it has, and it eclipses them by a very long way. In terms of reasoning, it's not as good, but it does already do simple reasoning. At given the rate of progress, we expect things to get better quite fast, so we need to worry about that. I 100 % agree.

4:44I think a lot of people, like, honestly, I try to stave off my AI anxiety. The rate everything's advancing is crazy. That's probably why a lot of people, that's why you and a lot of people are listening to this podcast right now, things are changing so rapidly, you need a way to be able to stay up to date on it all and see what the advancements are, because they're having massive implications for your industry, your jobs, your projects, businesses, and everything you're working on. So it is definitely concerning. I think it's something that we will want to look at. He's worried about bad actors and that are essentially going to use AI for bad things.

5:19It's really, really hard to be fair to predict all of the negative ways that AI can be used and set up adequate safeguards. Same with the internet. When the internet was first launched, the very wild west, of course, horrific things have happened on the internet. Incredible things have happened because of the internet. And it's up to us to, as we, you know, learn and grow with these tools to set safeguards. I think it's really, here's what I'm concerned about with AI and perhaps why I'm not as hard as some people are on it. The problem is a lot of people coming out right now calling for like, hey, we need more regulation, we need to crack down on AI, we need to shut down this and that bad ways it can be used.

5:59And if you can think of some, you know, bad ways it can be used, I'm all for, you know, finding good ways to block those. But that being said, I just worry that like a lot of these people that are kind of Elon Musk and, you know, this guy coming out and saying like, oh, it's really dangerous. I feel like they're all just kind of putting these disclaimers out because no one really knows everything bad it can do is capable of. And when something bad happens, it's all going to be like the I told you so moment of all these people being like, you know, see, like I told you it was terrible. And you guys should have listened to me.

6:29But like, at the end of the day, a lot of these people are not offering very realistic solutions. Elon Musk's six month pause on developing AI, I find completely unrealistic considering China and Russia are going to continue developing their AI. And I think I would rather that come out of, you know, a country that I'm in personally, I'm sure Russians listening to this would rather come out of Russia. So there you go. Imagine if your government told you to pause AI developments for six months, you probably wouldn't like it either. And so I really just think a lot of these people coming up with solutions, they're not very realistic solutions.

7:04And I think we're, you know, we should try our best, absolutely best to make this safe, but it's really hard to predict the things that are going to happen. And it's going to be really easy for a lot of these people putting the criticism in right now in six months and a year when things happen, something bad happens to say, I told you so, but like, they're not telling us exactly what's happening, exactly what to do about it. So I think, you know, the people that are developing are the heroes because they're, you know, if it's a good intended person, it's more likely that that person is going to discover a negative way it can be used and stop it versus if we just left it up to bad actors.

7:39Let's say everyone banned AI, you know, North Korea definitely wouldn't ban AI. And we don't really want them or any other bad actor state to be really advanced with AI, I would say. So that's kind of where I where I fall on that. Now, that being said, there's another kind of I guess some people call alarming piece of news on AI recently, which is that an AI researcher out of Brazil recently said that AI could replace 80 % of jobs in the next few years. That is massive, like 80 % of jobs in the next few years. Now, I know this guy probably wants to get some of the hype up around AI. So there's definitely an aspect of that to it.

8:24But it's not far off. So this is coming from Ben Gortzel. He's a lead AI researcher. He is the chief executive of Singularity Net. So that's a research group he launched to create artificial general intelligence. And he has seen a lot of the advancements that are coming down right now and a lot of the implications. And I really don't think it is far off. 80 % oof, I have a hard time believing that with blue collar jobs. But then again, you have Tesla, Tesla humanoid robots and other humanoid robots that if they could get the information on how to be a plumber and electrician or anything else, it would make sense that a lot of those jobs that right now we view as safe.

9:06Like I've talked to friends and they're like, man, their advancements in AI are happening so fast. It makes me just want to give up because anything I try to develop, Google or Microsoft is coming out with tools that do the same thing. I just want to go be a plumber. And that's like, that might work. They'll might buy you five years, but like in five years, there will be robot plumbers that come to your house and can just do the job. And if they're half the price, I promise a massive percentage of people, regardless of their, you know, their ethical qualms or implications are going to go with the cheaper thing because you just need to get your toilet plugged.

9:40And that's the one that's going to come at 3am and be half the price. So it's gonna be interesting to see what happens there. Anyways, what Ben, this AI developer from Singularity Net was saying, developer, the executive, the chief executive of Singularity Net. He was at a web summit in Rio de Janeiro, and he was talking and he said, someone asked him, how far are we from artificial intelligence with human cognitive abilities? He said, if we want machines to really be as smart as people and to be agile in dealing with the unknown, then they need to be able to take big leaps beyond the training and programming.

10:19And we're not there yet. But I think there's a reason. I think there's reason to believe that we're years rather than decades away from getting there. That is so interesting. Take a moment to think about that. He's saying they need to get leaps and bounds beyond their training and programming. This is what everyone is worried about. This is the concern. They're not doing what they're true, what they're trained or programmed to do. They're learning how to learn. They're getting further from us. And if they really can go leaps and bounds beyond their training and programming on their own, then that is essentially the AI getting away from us, becoming more smart than us.

10:51And that's what people are really concerned about, you know, it destroying us or whatever else some of the concerns around this would be. Another question someone asked is, what do you think of the debate around AI such as ChatGPT? Should it get paused? He said, I don't think we should pause it because it's like a dangerous superhuman AI. These are very interesting systems, but they're not capable of becoming human yet. They can't invent new things outside the scope of their training data for now, right? He says that's not very far off. He says, of course, they can spread misinformation. But he thinks it's kind of weird that people are calling for them to be banned because he said the internet does exactly that.

11:28It gives you way more information at your fingertips and it spreads all sorts of misinformation. I think we should have a free society. And just like the internet, it shouldn't be banned. Or just like the internet shouldn't be banned, we shouldn't ban this. So as far as talking about the threat to people's jobs, he said you could probably obsolete maybe 80 % of jobs and people that people do without having an AGI. So this is interesting. His company literally is designed to create an artificial general intelligence, AI that is smart or smarter than a human. But he thinks even without the AGI that everyone is like working towards and his whole company is founded on, you could still obsolete 80%.

12:06So come up with an AGI, that's a scary number. He said, and what I think is a fair point to bring up though, is you could obsolete 80 % of jobs. That doesn't mean you wouldn't create a whole host, an astronomical host of new jobs is all technological innovations. Oops, there you go. You caught me. That's the silver lining. There might be new jobs that come out. Of course, this is massive and really important point to take into consideration that 80 % of jobs could be could be obsolete because of this. He said, I don't think it's a threat. I think it's a benefit. People can find better things to do with their life than working for a living.

12:42Pretty much every job involving paperwork should be automatable. Oh man, sorry. I'm trying to be serious here because this is a serious topic, but every job involving paperwork, oh man, taxes, I hate them. That's just me. A lot of just bureaucracy and paperwork stuff. If AI can do it, I would be thrilled and people yeah whatever okay that's that in any case what can robots do for society today that will know that um they that will and what will they be able to do in the future if AGI is achieved someone just asked him that he said they can do a lot of good with AI um like Grace a robot nurse we showcased at Web Summit Rio in the US a lot of elderly people are are sitting lonely in older folks homes uh it's not they're not bad in terms of physical condition you can have medical care and food, and the problem is they don't have emotional and social support.

13:35So he says if you inject humanoid robots into it that can answer every question, listen to your stories, ugh, anyways, I won't even get into it. You get the idea. I don't love that concept that we're just going to give all of the old folks in nursing homes humanoid robots. That to me is depressing. I feel like we should find better solutions for helping them, but you know, maybe it is what it is. In any case, someone else asked him, what regulations do we need to have AI making a positive impact? And he said, what you need is society to be developing these AIs to do good and the governance of the AI to be somehow participatory among the population.

14:14All these things are technically possible. The problem is that the companies funding most of the AI research don't really care about doing good things. They care about maximizing shareholder value. oof that's obviously a direct stab at um microsoft and google who are the big ones right now google's really concerned about their company their shareholder value uh plummeting and that's they're just trying to capture the most shareholder value possible and microsoft some would say is using this to really try to springboard ahead of google on everything so it's going to be really interesting i definitely think that there is a lot of concerns around the misinformation and the the downsides of AI, I do think there's going to be a lot of opportunities.

14:54Sue me for being optimistic. I'm bullish on AI. I'm pretty optimistic on the, you know, what's coming. And also that probably comes from a point for me of like, I don't think there's any way you can stop it. I don't think you can call a six month pause. I don't think anything like that will work. And so for me, it's just like, love it or hate it. Let's make a plan and move forward with it because it's coming. and we just need to learn how to adapt and how to integrate it and not be replaced by it. What are the new jobs that will come up? What are the new things we'll need to be doing? And so I think it's a really important thing.

15:32I think it's the mindset. If you want to be a winner in this next phase of technology, it's just the mindset you have to adapt whether you like AI or not. You just have to decide that you're going to move forward and try to find the benefits and the ways that you can use it to be a positive impact because there's no way you can stop it. It's the internet all over again, a massive innovation and disruption. So it'll be interesting to keep following some of these things that are happening. I will try to keep a balanced approach showing sharing pros and cons to what is coming out.