A Once In A Lifetime Career Reset Is Coming | Alexander Manu

25:25Anytime we have a new technology, the first moments are play. In other words, we play, we experiment, we actually call it gizmos and we tell people I'm playing on my computer or I'm playing on my phone and then it becomes more serious. Then you start depending on it. Then the thing transforms you. And then you start figuring out, okay, so I'm transformed but what have I become? And then you start exploring the becoming part. What else can I become? And that's what AI will do. And so I guess what else can you become? It's the same way some people became podcasters or they became creators on a platform called YouTube.

26:00Perfect example. AI will lead to a new type of thing we can become. Exactly. Exactly what we didn't know we could become before 2004, which was the Web 2.0. Before Web 2.0, nobody ever thought about becoming a podcaster. The medium didn't exist. Now everyone in this room is here because of that. Yeah. And how many kids of 11 years old thought they would be making$70 million unboxing? I think that's something we might look back and think we might not be well. Yeah. I want to talk about smartphones, but I want to start with a few quotes about the history of the phone. First quote, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell tries to sell the patent for his telephone to Western Union, which had a thriving telegraph business.

26:46and Western Union says, the idea of a telephone device in every city is idiotic. Why would any person want to use this ungainly and practical device? We do not recommend its purchase. It is of no use to us. 1981, telecommunications consultant Jan David Jubin. But who today will say, I'm gonna ditch the wires in my house and carry a phone around? And finally, 2007, a scathing piece in TechCrunch called We Predict the iPhone Will Bomb. That virtual keyboard will be about as useful for tapping out emails and text messages as a rotary phone. What device do you think is in the pipeline today or has yet to be invented that could replace the smartphone that people today will say, it's ugly, I will never use this, it won't be cheap enough, and nobody will buy this?

27:37XR glasses. so if you look at android xr it's introducing will be parker is making the glasses so they'll be attractive they're attractive right now and a combination of fashion companies creating the looks and technology companies creating the technology will give you something that you will desire now that you know you've been educated and trained to use technology to swipe, to multi-touch, to scale, to all the things we've trained in the last 20 years by the iPhone and other smartphones, we will have to forget them and unlearn them because now we're moving into a different type of world. Ambient world, intent, gaze, where I'm looking is a question and it will be answered.

28:26So that is what an XR Glass does. So that's the technology that right now becomes, first of all, it's available right now. It could be perfected in the very near future. the price points will go down, might be embedded, might be at one point. Wearables are one category, but implantables is probably where we're going. Because implantables give you a very simple solution. I don't have to worry about it. It's in me. The AirPods were slammed that nobody is going to wear these pearls. The iPhone was seen as disgusting. So for people who say, I'm never going to wear glasses, what are they missing? Well, they're missing the cultural shift.

29:04They are thinking about it as a technology and not about a philosophical transformation of life. What the iPhone did was create a category for itself. And also it created a segment of the population that understood that technology can be beautiful and also desirable. So in the moment in which you understand that technology can be desirable, there are people who cannot wait for the glasses. Just like people could not wait for the Google Glass. But it was not a failure. It was a lesson. It was a story. It was something that needed to happen as a bridge towards where we are now, just like the Newton, by the way, needed to happen.

29:45So we get to experiment with the operating system and get to the iPhone eventually. And I think people are imagining doing what they currently do on glasses, and that seems like a nightmare. The idea of just watching 60-second TikTok, we're going to do different things. We're moving to a different philosophy. So of course we're not going to be bombarded with a bunch of notifications in our eyes. We will do something much more graceful that makes sense for the new philosophy. Well, imagine this. What is a phone? A phone is a communication device on which we rarely communicate, by the way, but we express ourselves.

30:18So what do we need for that form of expression? We need an input interface and we need a display interface. Well, the input is here. The display is everywhere. So right now we're looking at what surface can become a display. Now, the display could be initially in the glasses, but it doesn't have to be in the glasses. It could be on any surface. Now, intelligent surfaces exist right now. Intelligent glass surfaces you can project images onto exist right now. So it's not a question of the surface having the information itself. It's us projecting the information to the surface, which totally has been done a couple of years ago.

30:57Because I myself am not convinced about glasses. I see how they can make sense, but I think an AI-first device, kind of like what you're saying, anything might become the thing where we need to interact with. So when you say that the phone itself is just going to vanish, we're picturing just some device that replaces it. But you're saying there could be a future where if we need to see something or check something, we project it wherever it needs to be. The phone right now we have to reach for. In the future we are discussing, the call will reach for us. The information will reach us. The information will come to us where we are because that's the whole point of it.

31:33The whole point of it is to come when you need it in a form in which you need to see it. Now, we have all the surfaces right now. We have cloud computing. We are being trained right now by the new Apple products and operating system to see translucency in everything. And right now it's translucent. It's going to be transparent. Right. Right now, I think we're over our devices. We want less of them. So are you describing a future that involves fewer devices and fewer notifications and fewer invasions by devices? Yeah, I describe a future in which the ecology contains the information and you are the receiver.

32:07So you are an active receiver of anything you need to receive. So paint that picture for me. I wake up and I hopefully don't have to interact with many things. But if I do need to interact, if somebody needs to reach me, what could that be? Bathroom mirror. any surface that you look at can be a display now it can be a display intentionally which means i can embed a display in surfaces like 20 years ago i wrote a book writing a scenario about a fridge calling you fred the fridge giving you a call because you have to buy milk and then people said that's crazy fridge is connected to the internet that doesn't shouldn't exist it exists right now.

32:46And they have displays and they talk to each other. Now, in the ideal universe, the fridge shouldn't call you. The fridge should order the thing. Because what's the point of you doing the chore? So that's what we're moving towards. Eliminating chores. Don't forget what we are about. We are about the lowest energy state. Every animal seeks the lowest energy state. Which is why we invent machines. So we invent machines so we don't have to do stuff. It happens that we invented machines and we became the extension of the machine. In other words, a vacuum cleaner doesn't vacuum without you. Now it does.

33:23But 20 years ago, you were vacuuming. The machine was absorbing dirt. But the active verb of vacuuming was you, the human. And the same thing happens to every single other technology in which we keep doing things and we create professions about the thing. And then the thing disappears and then you say, but what am I going to do? I'm the guy that used to type. Well, we don't need type anymore. Now we have to dictate. Oh, so how do I learn that? So all of these things are part of all the transformation of bridge after bridge after bridge towards the lowest energy state. So we seek that from the beginning of humanity, doing nothing, okay?

33:59Contemplation. But in the meantime, we have to invent some machines so we can relieve ourselves from the work. It happens that in the course of a couple of thousand years, we had to work with the machines. Now the machines can work by themselves. That's a very hard shift for people to understand because the whole purpose of the education system, legislative system, all the systems we created, we're for machines to explain to us how we can become an extension of the machine. And that's what we have been for many, many years. I think we would all stand for a future with less things. I don't want something ringing and vibrating and notifying me.

34:33So I wake up in the future, and if somebody needs to reach me and I choose to be available, maybe my kitchen counter rings with the call or lets me know somebody's trying to talk to me. But if not, I don't need to connect to anything. Right, right. Or maybe I just go like this. Maybe I just go like this and tap my ear. And less things, less booking. And I think, you know, people might say, well, what if I need to see something? The only things we see on our phone were invented in the last 25 years. Or less. And the only things we see on our phone are excessive things that might not even be of interest to us.

35:04And so I want to talk about work because it's obviously an important subject when it comes to artificial intelligence. What impact do you think AI will have on the workforce? And do you think we're headed for an identity crisis? Let's define two things as different. Labor, like stuff you do to activities you undertake to put food on the table. And work. So if I'm looking at the definition by Hannah Arendt in the human condition, work is the condition that creates the conditions for life, and work is the creation of the conditions for worldliness, for signs that we existed, and signs that we mean something to each other.

35:46Churches, cathedrals, the things we built, museums, musical instruments, things that on the surface of their activity are completely unsustainable and unreasonable as expressions. What do you mean? You are making violins? You are creating a symphonic orchestra? For what purpose? Well, for exactly the purpose of being human. All the other professions support this humanity. They give us electricity so we can illuminate museums. They give us electricity so we can bend wood to make violins and so forth. So in the moment in which we understand that this work environment was a transition, hard to accept clearly, was a transition and society developed around technologies, in pockets of technology around the world and specialized in geographic places, in special professions, which were dictated by the available technology, then once the technology takes care of itself, then you are left as you the human.

36:49And that is a profoundly disturbing thing if you don't know who you are. Why? Because you were not told who you are. You were told to aspire. You were told to follow this influencer. You were told to become something else. And something else from a very limited list. In different countries, different systems, societal pressures, trending things, you become something else. And in a variety of, in different periods of time, you became this group of people, engineers, physicists, chemistry, whatever, bankers, and so on. All of these professions are only needed if the infrastructure needs people to operate.

37:32A thousand years ago, it did not. Ten thousand years ago, it did not. And humanity survived and prospered in that environment and created actually the art that we are contemplating today, right? So the whole point becomes, what is my identity and how do I define myself? and unfortunately the discussion about work always ends up with money it's not about work it's about income so it's a double discussion about your worth as an individual and your meaning in life and what does my father do for a living well nobody's going to say he exists right or she exists. He's a doctor. So people need that kind of professional stature.

38:18But in reality, they don't. So once we remove the professional expertise and capability, we look at the income part. And that's what people are actually really, really fearful of, the loss of income. Because people never complete the question, and what happens when robots take my place in the factory? They don't get further. What can the robot do that I cannot do? A robot can make a hundred things faster than you, a thousand more objects, which will sell at more for a cheaper price, bringing huge amounts of revenue, which can be taxed as a robot tax or a fund or so forth. There are many examples.

39:02Norway has an example in which they have a fund, the oil fund, in which the government keeps money for the future and invests the money. So the formats in which we can have a universal basic income are very well established. But people did not buy into it. Why? We still have the influencer culture. We still have the, I have a watch that's more expensive than yours culture. And if that disappears gradually, the fear of the loss of income will become less so. So what does that economic model look like? So you're talking about universal basic income. And for anyone who doesn't know, that is a world in which we would all get a check of some form or all of our basic needs would be covered at the very least.

39:42But I think what people don't get about a future with UBI, because right now UBI is from taxpayers, right? All the pilots, which have been very positive. Not from companies. Yeah, they're not from companies. So there's a pilot in Kenya, Finland, Minneapolis, and they all show people are happier. And at the very least, I think that that's worth it in and of itself. But a future with universal basic income is one where we tax the tech giants and the AI companies for their prosperity that we helped create. And I think no matter what happens in the future, one where we all get to ride along with the companies that succeed is a better future for everyone.

40:16So we should want it regardless. I think where people trip out a little bit, and I get it, is the idea of I don't want to sit back floating around in my pool waiting for my monthly check from OpenAI. And I think that's what we're picturing. And that seems like a nightmare. It feels like the worst version of the Truman Show. Yeah, but imagine that open air is also a bridge to another society, to another civilization. So let's push this whole thing to the ideal scenario, to the extreme, okay? The extreme scenario in which things work by themselves is called nature. In nature, nobody makes money.

40:50Nobody charges anything for anything, and everything seems to work. So now let's understand something fundamental about making bread. I don't need money to make bread. I need flour. I need water. I need yeast. I need heat. And you will say, heat costs money. And I will say, it doesn't cost money. It costs money in this system. But it doesn't have to cost money. The entire mindset should be, let's imagine for one hour, just play that game, that money doesn't exist. What do you think will change in your life? You'll still, if you want to work, you're going to work. You're going to create things.

41:29You've got to go to the land and get some wheat and make flour. We come from there as a civilization. We come from a place in which money did not exist, and everybody made bread. The things exist by themselves. So if I push it to that degree, I'm excluding open AI from this whole thing and other companies. Because essentially, if you look at it, right now we have a linear economy, a linear stream of thinking. I work, I get paid. I work, I make, I get paid. But think of a circular thing. I don't work. The thing works. The thing pays for this. This money goes here and here and here. Taxation, consumption, any form you can imagine.

42:13And this is where the imagination stumbles because we cannot imagine the thing that doesn't exist. This goes against every single thing a human being has learned. People learn that when you turn seven years old, you stop playing with your food and you go to school. and you follow this curriculum. And this was written 25 years ago by people who didn't even know this technology exists or woke up. And then you graduate from this school and you go further to university. You're not questioning any of these steps, except in Finland or in other countries. You start questioning what is the meaning of education?

42:48What is the meaning of literacy? What's the meaning of writing with your hand? The deeper you go, the scarier it gets because people didn't learn these things. So we have a lot of fear right now because we have lack of knowledge. And the issues are not properly explained and articulated, and nobody goes deeper into what is the world about and life about. This is about money, making things, and where does wheat come from? Wheat comes from soil. We're so ingrained in this industrialized society where we are producers and we are consumers that it becomes so foreign to think outside of it. But if you were to ask somebody to design their ideal society from scratch, is it one where we learn linearly, where we work 40 hours a week, where we kind of live almost like robots and where our basic needs are only met if society values the labor that we do?

43:41I think we would tear it all down. And AI potentially gives us the opportunity to. The problem is it puts so much trust on the AI leaders and the people leading the AI revolution are laying it with the bricks of capitalism. We can't trust the social infrastructure this is all being built on. Somebody has to break free from it. And how do I trust somebody who is a fiduciary duty to the shareholder, not to me? Right now, the people that have the will to do it have a motivation based in economic gain. The people who have the will to criticize this are the contrarians of that economic reality. They don't want this to happen because they're losing their foothold into what they own right now.

44:21And that's the majority. Now, sadly, this happens when we have a disruption coming from the outside in, which is a major disease, an earthquake or an invasion of some extraterrestrials, in which all the values we hold dear will disappear. And they disappear in one hour, one second. COVID made us understand that we can rejig society in one hour. March 18 was in Canada when we started everything. So it happened in one hour. And all of a sudden, people were receiving checks at home. So the thing is, we need to unlearn a lot of life in order to be able to move to this level. And I think what COVID taught us is we can redesign society in 45 minutes if we choose to.

45:09Sure, sure. It's a question of will. Yeah. And with any big disruption, I mean, AI is going to be that moment. And that's why I think it's so important for more people to get in the game. Because if this technology does give us the opportunity to redesign that society from scratch, Do you want your voice in it or do you want it to be the seven people in one small quadrant of the world? Right. And so we can't unsubscribe from this moment. Yeah. I think there's so much resistance to using AI for a variety of reasons that people have opted out from it altogether. But you can't opt out from a general purpose technology really.

45:39And the more you use it, the better feedback you can give. So if you do have a lot of criticism, the more you understand the technology, the better and more useful that criticism can be. So it's maybe that jobs go away, but work doesn't. Work doesn't, yes. And what's interesting is I did a social media experiment a few days ago with my community where I asked them, what is the meaning of life and what does it mean to be human? And I want to read you some of their answers. So to be the reason that another living being can find peace. Oh, very good. To evolve, to witness, to have meaningful experiences with people we care about.

46:14Not one person said to produce, to consume, to work. Yet, when we ideate on the prospect of having a future where AI does more of the labor than humans, it feels so terrifying, yet instinctively we know we are not here for our jobs. So when did jobs become a vehicle we think we need to express our humanity? industrialization probably in the 1800s when we start we left agriculture to machines and we had to do something and we went to the city we became workers we became employed which meant we became dependent on the machine because that was employment for a machine to operate the machine so in that moment you become an extension of that system and you're a part of that system And to become part of the system, you have to learn the skills.

47:08So that transforms education into a preparatory ground for industry. And that's the story of every country. And that's why they are organized based on what the industries were at the time. And then you stop asking the questions because the first generation is 10 years, the second one is 10 years after. And they don't know where they come from. And they perform their duty connected to the machine of the moment. And then you slowly, slowly, slowly, you create other institutions to give this machine certifications, to have FCC. Manage the books for that institution. It's that indexing everything becomes a library of a lot of different components in the system.

47:48And the system starts to dominate the humanity of who created it, right? Because it was created for a purpose, but the purpose was never itself. The purpose was so your life is better and you mean something to other people. Do you know what I think also scares people about the idea of having less work? So say we have a future where we work two days a week. And even if it's doing the things we love, the idea of having so much free time. And I think it's because we technically have more free time today than generations ago did. But our time has been bought and sold and auctioned on the markets of capitalism that we now spend the time we have doom scrolling, being polarized, being sold in securities by marketers we didn't even know we had.

48:30So we can't even imagine a future where we get to just be free from the chains of capitalism with that time and just be in community. I mean, is that even possible? We need to start challenging this more and more. We need to start challenging, do I really need this object? Because it's all about what? Satisfying the self or satisfying your ego or satisfying the person that you really are, which needs a lot less than the self and the ego. So then you realize what makes me really happy. I do an exercise called presencing and I'm asking people, so what is your major challenge right now and key opportunity?

49:03And then you answer it. And then the second question is, what do you truly love? And in that question, people don't know, what do I truly love in my profession? What do I truly love in my life? And then you have to make it clear. It's about the simplicity of the question. What do you truly love? So then you realize they will ask exactly like they asked it to you. No connection to work, no connection to money. And any time you do a top 10 list of the most important things in your life, money is not even there. Love, health, friends, tons of other things, but not money. There's so much we have to unlearn.

49:39Or work, yeah. We're not going to top 10. As you said, the Industrial Revolution, it created this hyper-consumerism society, and producers were consumers. Created their reasons, sure. It created their reason for a profession. reasons for organized marketing of stuff created something called retail right retail and shopping are totally different things shopping is you looking for things you need to survive and retail is people displaying the thing well it happens right now that display part doesn't have to be physically in a store that's why we have street after street after street with empty stores in Toronto at least.

50:17And you wrote something in your book that I think is really important to read. I want to get to. So you write, without moments of reflection, we risk moving forward blindly, building a future without pausing to ask, what are we building? Does it align with our deepest values? And are we building a world worth living in? Do you think we are right now? Yeah, right now we are. Anytime you are moving towards the future, In other words, the future is a choice, which means you are designing it. You're designing what you think will be the future with the elements of the present. Because that's essentially we are building from what we know.

50:55The problem we have is the framework of our mind, right? So we want a new story and we have to write this new story, me, in five years from now. But the me in five years from now typically starts from my perspective of this moment. I'm looking at my perspective, which is what I'm seeing, what I know, what I learned. Now, if I do not change my perspective, I cannot write a new story. I hear people saying, what is the future of education? That tells me they fundamentally don't understand the idea of the future. There is no future of education. There is knowledge in the future. But in the moment in which you phrase it as the future of education, you are assuming education will remain as a constant when in effect is a variable.

51:45So most of the things, banking is a variable, finance is a variable, mortgage is a variable, all of these are, but we think they're constant. Society is a variable. So transformation is a constant, your business is the variable. And the variable is actually always disrupted by the disruptor, right? And the only way you become disrupted is if you allow it, which means if you are not embracing it, so if you don't integrate the disruption, what's the point? The future of shopping assumes we're shopping. The future of education assumes we go to No, retail assumes you're shopping. Retail assumes, what will happen to the mall?

52:25What's the future of the mall? Well, there is no future of the mall. It becomes a library, it becomes a park, it becomes a place of communion, because it's a place where we dance. It's a dance hall. No, but right now people pay rent. Yeah, so we're going to pay to dance. And so when you apply that to the individual, you know, the future of education assumes there's education. If we look at our careers, they're linear. We have to get out of that paradigm and take comfort in knowing we didn't even choose that paradigm. It was... Nothing happening to you right now is your choice. Even though you think it's a result of all the changes you made in life, but all the choices we made in life were actually integrations of other things from other sources, from peer pressure, from parents, from whatever.

53:11And then you end up here. I mean, right now our choice was to be here but we are here as a result of other choices we didn't make ourselves. This technology, that technology and so on. And we are here because we embrace this disruption. Other people are not embracing it and they're not here. And here is a sense of contemporaneous with us. And so for my final question, if you had one piece of advice for somebody who is scared of the future, they're scared about artificial intelligence, they feel like it's moving too fast and that they have no control, what would you tell them about the future? What are they not seeing or what could they be doing to help shape a future that they would actually want to be a part of?

53:54I will say start the conversation with artificial intelligence. Play games with it. I play 21 questions. It's really funny. It remembers everything. It knows what I do. So ask it to tell you a good night story. Ask Google Home to tell you a good night story. Try to humanize the interaction you have with it. And try to understand it's not a tool. It's a collaboration. It has an opinion. Hammers don't have opinions. So the moment in which you are confusing this technology with all the other, we have to call it the technology, right? But ideas are also technologies. So it's in the moment in which you think it's part of all the other mechanized environments we created or devices and instruments, you are making a huge mistake.

54:38It's a cultural transformation and philosophical transformation of the very foundation of your existence. It's not an extension. It's actually, it lives in you, you live in it. So this symbiosis between you and something else, which you created in a massive scale, if you think about it, we created this. This exists because we exist. Nature doesn't exist because we exist. So in the moment in which you understand this transcends a lot of the things that we did in the past, then you start being in awe. And that's a very good place to be. You want to be in awe, you want to treat it as something that you can learn from, you want to treat it as the most knowledgeable other.

55:20ask questions and the answers that you get back is not what you expect so they transcend what you imagine the thing the interaction is completely transcendental in many ways so then you realize i can really become something different if i allow myself to play with this and to push it to understand how far can i go so despite some of the fear the hesitation take a moment to just be in awe. Just be in awe and tacitly use it. Learn from it. Allow it to transform you. Just like you allowed your iPhone to transform you, but you didn't recognize it. This is much deeper than that. And now you call Uber, you call Uber Eats, you're allowed to transform.

56:00And you don't even think about, oh, how many people are unemployed by doing this? Right. Well, Professor Manu, it has been a pleasure. Can't wait to do it again. Same here. Thank you so much. Thanks for joining us for this episode of I've Got Questions. If you've got questions about AI or emerging technologies, send us a message or a voice note on our website IGQ with Sinead Bovell dot com or comment below. If you like this episode, please subscribe and share it with a friend who may enjoy it. You can follow us on all social media channels and we look forward to seeing you next time.