Enrique Rubio on "Our Existential Advantage" Against AI

0:03Last week, I got into a fight with an AI. I was putting final edits on my new book, and Claude just insisted that I had sourced a claim wrong. But I was pretty sure Claude was wrong, because the idea that Claude was claiming was brand new in a recent paper has actually been around in psychology for decades. But I really doubted myself. Like, how could Claude not know something? And how could I be right? Isn't the machine supposed to be smarter than me? That moment is what today's show is all about. My guest, Enrique Rubio, has written a book called Our Existential Advantage. And you might know Rubio as the founder of Hacking HR, which is a huge community of HR professionals who want to do things differently.

0:57Rubio, to me, has always been a cutting edge and different thinker. And that's why I was so excited to talk to him because he's thinking about AI as a historian, a leader, and also as someone who fled a country where democracy collapsed. We talk about what we lose when we hand our thinking to machines. We talk about why loneliness at work might get worse. And most important, we talk about the agency that humans still have, even when so much feels out of our control. I'm Maura Aaron-Smele, and this is The Anxious Achiever.

1:32Enrique, welcome. I know you're going all over the world, and you're so busy, and you have such a vibrant community, and I love to see it. So I'm honored that you're stopping to spend a few minutes with us today on the show. Maura, thank you so much for inviting me. Thank you. It's always great chatting with you. Yeah. I mean, we had a couple of really cool conversations when I was working on some Harvard Business Review pieces. I love how you think about AI. You're such a complete thinker about it. You don't just focus on one narrow element. You have a historical viewpoint. You have a geopolitical viewpoint.

2:07It's wonderful. You have a leadership viewpoint. So let's do it. Yes, yes. I appreciate you looking at my book, Our Existential Advantage, which I finished writing about three or four months ago. and you know it's funny you've written books and the funny story of the book is I wrote the book it ended up being originally 350 ,000 words and yes I know so my editor he said you're out of your mind so let's begin there we you can't do this and he worked so hard and the thing ended up being still 150 ,000 words which is significantly longer than any commercial book that you would ever, you know, create, publish.

2:52And he told me, do you want to do this or do you want to go a bit further? And I said, you know what, I'm going to, I'm going to write the, the, the shorter version of this later. I just need to put all these ideas out. I think, you know, like, for example, you know, there's, in my book, there is, the last part of the book is called the politics of AI. And I know we will talk about that. It is one of the longest parts of the book. And he told me, why don't you take this out of here? And I said, if I take it out of there, then I didn't do anything, writing this book. Even if nobody reads it, at some point in history, when people look back at this year and they think who was trying to do the right thing in 2026 when the world was going bananas with the impact of AI, they have to look at some of the people like me and many others.

3:37I'm not the only one who were trying to say the right thing and steer the conversation in the right direction. So that's why the book ended up being so long. I'm like, I have to say all of this stuff in here. Again, I can create a shorter version. That's pretty easy. But this has to be out there. You know, we have to be aware of where we've been with technology in the past, where we are today, where we could be if we make the right decisions, and where we are going to end up being if we don't make those decisions. So I covered all of that in the book. Well, listen, I appreciate the process. I actually was going to share with you, there was a wonderful article by the poet Dan, I think it's Chasson, in the New York Review of Books.

4:21And it's about writing. Are we going to lose writing to AI? Because writing is, of course, not just, it's not the mechanics of handwriting, right? It's a complex thought. And he says that one of the most dehumanizing effects of AI is the shortcuts it offers through the gaps and impasses intrinsic to the act of writing. And he talks about Emily Dickinson. They found a bunch of her notes. And you could see the ink spots where she had paused to think while she was writing poetry. I wanted to share that. I knew you'd appreciate that. I wanted to share that with you. You know, because it's, it's, this stuff is so, it's so much deeper than a technology, isn't it?

5:09Like it goes to our very soul. Way deeper. Right? Yeah. How does it affect your soul, this stuff? You know, I'm getting a little bit of goosebumps after saying that for, for, for a long period of time, at least here in America, for multiple reasons, you know, health and medicine. and nutrition, our intellectual cognitive capacities were in crescendo. And that is stopped at some point, which we know what that point was with the rise of social media in the early 2000s. And then from there, our critical thinking skills, our creativity, our imagination skills, our social skills, by the way, all of that has been on a downward slope since the advent of social media.

5:56and we were already, you know, since the mid-2000s until today, we were already doing poorly and I think that downward trend will now be accelerated by AI. So we are becoming Domer. That's all I'm saying right now. You know, Domer as in a definition not of IQ, of intellectual intelligence, as in taking a math test, which we are too, by the way, or in reading, which we are too as well, but in the many other things that make up what humanity is. Critical thinking is to make decisions when we're confronted with difficulty, being able to effectively collaborate with others to solve difficult problems.

6:31We have an F in all of these things, you know, F across the board. So the reason why I'm getting goosebumps is because very recently, as recent as in the past maybe year, year and a half, there has been an increasing number of research showing that the more you rely on AI, the less you develop your intellectual capacities, your critical thinking skills. There was a lot of criticism on this research, but then more research came out proving the same thing. There was a research coming out, I believe last year. Can't remember. I don't know if it was MIT or Stanford. They put it together and they presented.

7:10They created various groups of students. One group was something like, this is the problem that you have to resolve, no technology. Think about it and see what you can do. Group number two was told, instructed to think about it and then use AI to help you with the thinking. And group number three was told, go straight into using AI. So obviously group number one didn't resolve the problem, but they went through a very creative experience. Group number two went through a creative experience and got a little closer to the solution. Group number three did worse than any other group because they were able to find a solution, But they didn't remember what the solution was hours after they had said what the solution was because it was all created by AI.

7:52So does that go to my soul when I think about the state of the world in which we are becoming more individualistic where we, you know, I just look around and I'm like, are we even capable of solving a problem together? Do we have the critical thinking to be confronted by something that requires us to step back and think about that something and connecting dots in our head? I think we are we have already lost part of that. And I think AI without thinking is only accelerating that that trend that had already been started, you know, 20 years ago. In fact, in my book, I talk about what I call the 90 10 rule, the 90 10 rule or formula.

8:34What I mean by that is that when you are going to create something with AI, which I do every day, you have to make sure that the creative process to create that something, 90 % is your thinking, and 10 % or more, you know, you can think about it, but 10 % perhaps is your interactions with AI. So AI helps you, should help you see things, possibilities that you are not seeing, connecting dots that your head is not connecting, but you can fully outsource the thinking to AI for multiple reasons, one of which is AI does not own the consequences of whatever you're deciding with AI. So anyway, yes, it goes down to my soul when we think about missing out on that creative process, right?

9:17And I want to say one more thing more and then turn it over back to you. You know, my handwriting, I don't know if we're going to have this in video. My handwriting is a disaster, an absolute disaster. And it wasn't this bad before. It's getting a lot worse because I don't do much handwriting anymore. I do computer. More and more research has been coming out now showing the tragedy for humanity of what it means to lose our capacity to do handwriting. Because when you do handwriting, I know you are a neuroscience person, you know, a brain person. the amount of areas in the brain that light up when you're doing handwriting versus when you're writing in the computer it's just like a it's like a christmas party versus the one light at the end of a you know of a dark room so we are you know we are even losing that capacity just because of computers so all i'm saying is that we can use technology but the more we overdo it there are things that we're not seeing right now that we're losing that are part of what makes us humans, you know, connecting various areas of our brains.

10:24So anyway, just want to say that example. So it doesn't have anything to do with necessarily with AI, but it kind of does because at the end of the day, it's technology. It totally does. I mean, and it's interesting because I think there's a lot of arguments, right? Friction is a big word right now. Friction, are we losing too much friction like with everything from Instacart to AI, right? Things aren't hard anymore. anymore. And, and I think that, I mean, I think that's part of what you're saying is that there is something really valuable in solving hard problems from an emotional level. And you talk about this in the book, it becomes a real challenge when we don't have the skills to resolve conflict with each other, right?

11:07To, to work as teams. I want you to talk a little bit before we dive in to your historical purview, which I think is really interesting. From a leadership perspective, what are you thinking about when it comes to fuller and fuller AI adoption at work? Yeah, I'm going to begin with what I said a few seconds ago, which is AI can help you do whatever you want, but AI will not own the consequences. So when you get sued for something that AI is doing, it's not AI that is getting sued. It is you, it is your company, and you're liable for the decisions that you are outsourcing, quote unquote, to your AI tool.

11:54So when I think about AI, about leadership in the era of AI, I am thinking about total responsibility, about how AI is designed, what it is designed for, how it is adopted and implemented, and the consequences of the actions that AI, that you are, quote unquote, again, outsourcing to AI. In an era when everybody has access to the same tools and very cheaply, because most of these tools are incredible and they are very cheap, it is not the tool itself that's going to make the difference. It is what you do, what you design with the tool. I do multiple programs with AI, and some of them are leadership programs, and some of them are very tactical programs.

12:30and when I tell people when I'm doing the tactical program, when I tell them about what AI is capable of doing, ultimately what I share with them is AI can do anything that you're imagining, but you're the one who has to imagine the thing, right? That is part of the leadership role, right? It is how do we transform? First of all, what is the work that we're doing? What is worth keeping and what is worth not doing anymore with or without technology? Because we do a bunch of stuff that we don't need to be doing. in this day and age. We are not doing things that we should be doing. So that's part of the thinking process way before thinking about the technology that you bolt on top of the process.

13:10So once you have that, all of that on the table, then you start thinking, all right, of all the things that we do right now, which ones are the things that AI can help us with? Either it is either to do things more efficiently, faster, better, cheaper, or to create value that we have never created before because we never had the tools before. And then once you think about that, you're also thinking about the things that should remain exclusively human. All of this that I just described, stepping back and thinking what kind of company we want to be, how can AI help us do that? What are the things that we want the humans to continue to do?

13:47All of those things are leadership activities. Those are activities that AI can't do. And I want to give you one very specific example of this, which I'm going through right now in all my gibberish in my notes. I am preparing a keynote that I'm doing in the Philippines next month. And the Philippines is a country very similar to where I come from, which is Venezuela. And in Venezuela, do we want our companies to make money? Yes. Do we want ourselves to make money? Yes. Will we sacrifice any of our human relationships just for the sake of making money? I doubt it. so human relationships in some cultures perhaps not so much here in the u.s by the way not not at a general level at a family level perhaps but not necessarily at a societal level but there are cultures in which human relationships matter more than anything else so you you don't go to these countries telling them you know sacrifice the human uh just replace that with ai so now your customers, for example, instead of talking to a human, which they love doing, they now will talk to AI.

14:51Yes, that's going to help you make more money. Now, is that going to help you be a company that people are proud of in those countries or those cultures? I don't think so. All of this, all of what I just described is part of what leaders have to do. AI can help you think, as I said before, connecting dots, thinking about possibilities. But those decisions, that analysis, all of that has to be done by the humans with very strong leadership capabilities. And one last thing that I want to say, the conversation of AI, and this is so sad to be honest, the conversation of AI for most for-profit companies has been so focused on efficiency gains and not on value creation.

15:31These are complete, they sometimes, it's like two curves, right? That they go like, sometimes they converge where efficiency and value creation are touching each other in the same point, but sometimes they go so far away from each other that they are diverging in such different directions. So if all you care about is squeezing the cash cow for a little bit more, you will do it until somebody else comes in having thought about what they can do with AI and disrupts you, right? So the conversation here is what value can we create? What are the dreams that we've had as a company that we were never able to realize because we couldn't.

16:11We didn't have the money, the resources, the time, and now we can unleash all those dreams with AI. That's leadership too. The conversation about value creation is pure leadership. So that's the role that I see leaders playing in this new world of work and this new day and age. That all sounds great. But coming back to what we originally talked about at the soul level, I think what I worry about is, you know, we form habits. And if we get in the habit of hashing things out with a machine who ultimately is never going to fight us or tell us we're, you know, we, we, our muscles atrophy, just like your handwriting.

16:54And I worry that our appetite for humans are messy and dysfunctional and challenging and a pain in the butt. And the more you work with a machine, the less appealing it is often to fight and have conflict and deal with your nutty colleague who always like pushes back on everything and says no, right? And so I worry that we will all enjoy working with the machines because they're so much easier than humans, that we will sort of default to that, you know? And I've heard from people in very AI-heavy companies, and actually Connie Noonan Hadley has great research on this, on how AI use fosters loneliness because on some level we also, many, most of us, some people prefer to interact with the machine.

17:54You know, we need that connection as uncomfortable and messy as it is. And so leaders may have all the intention of doing all this great stuff in value creation, but like it just may be more pleasant to work with the machines and we will start to cut humans out and we will be lonely and our souls will wither away. Yeah. Well, I don't know if you want to go in that direction because that's opening a massive can of worms that's very messy and we have to unravel this thing. To begin with, as you know, we are already lonely. You know, that's, so the baseline is not AI will make us lonely. The baseline is AI will continue to make this problem worse than it already is.

18:46So that's one part of it. And technology has made us lonely. I talked about our lack of collaboration skills, our lack of social skills, which ended up happening, coinciding, not coinciding by design, by the way. It's not just coincidental that it started pretty much with the rise of social media in the early 2000s. Not surprisingly, this lawsuit against Meta, you know, when it came to, you know, making younger people sick, including feeling lonely. AI, I think, will contribute to that in significant and very painful ways. AI is like sugar right now. It is designed to be sycophantic. And by the way, this has been thoroughly documented until now.

19:34There was a research in October or November of last year. There was a research by some Washington Post journalists. They look at publicly available chats with ChatGPT. And they found that the amount of times that AI validates an idea, even if that idea is French, compared to the amount of times that AI says no to something because it's completely wrong. I mean, the disproportion, you know, in between these two things is just ridiculous. You know, it is like almost like nine out of ten times tells you, yes, you're right, even if you're completely wrong. So much so that what these researchers found was that the AI tools, after multiple interactions, started to adapt their own language to be more sycophantic to the fringe ideas that the user was expressing in whatever chat.

20:27That is extremely, extremely dangerous. Extremely dangerous. Now, if you go to ask the scientists working on AI if they know why, some of them will tell you it is by design. And some of them, like Jeffrey Hinton, the father of AI, will tell you, we don't know. We don't know how that's happened. Literally, by the way, he was interviewed by 60 Minutes in 2000. I believe it was 18 or 19 when, you know, when it was very clear that that AI from a user from a user facing interface was going to become more prevalent. He said, you know, I feel scared because we don't know how these tools are making decisions.

21:05And that is a big problem. And it is. Maybe they have a fawning response. I don't know, but you know, will AI make us feel more lonely? Absolutely. But it's not just because it is easier to interact with AI. It is also that I'm thinking, I'm putting myself in the shoes of teenagers these days. They are already lonely, number one. Number two, to get access to support, whether it is professional support or a community of friends that support them, the barriers are like, more abundant and taller. Yes, yes. So if they need to talk to somebody and there's no therapist, there's no friend, mom and dad are working 15 hours a day, who do you think they're going to default to?

21:48They're going to default to AI. And is that the kind of world that I want to see? No, I don't want to see that work, but we know that that is going to happen. So if we know that that is going to happen and maybe stopping that from happening will take us a long time, I think the best next thing that we can do is regulate the ways these AI tools are working, which, by the way, I know it's going to get us in the political conversation of how irresponsible our American government is when it comes to putting guardrails around AI. But, you know, I want to be able to live in a society where people have communities of support, their own tribes.

22:22To do that, we need to stop the inertia that we have had for the past 20 years, and we need to start going in a different direction. That's going to take a significant amount of resources, effort, you know, a coalition of society stakeholders that are moving in that direction, right? In the meantime, we do have to put guardrails on AI. And in the workplace, for example, if you want your people to be using AI, which I think is a completely valid request from your users, you also have to create intentionally the opportunities for them to collaborate without AI, without AI. You have to create the spaces to tell people here, I just wrote down, we have a massive problem.

23:06We don't know how to solve it. Leave your phones and your computers outside. Come here, spend an hour. I'm going to bring food for you and you're going to talk about it. And then we bring technology. A little bit of tough love without the devices, because we all know we're addicted. I mean, I want to, I want to circle back though, to what I, I think, is a main theme of your book and of your work. And that is agency. You know, the same person who is increasingly hanging out with AI because it's easier or more helpful or for whatever reason is also slowly surrendering their agency to AI. And I see the agency issue.

23:46It's so powerful. And I have no idea what the answer is because, you know, every, when I do my AI workshops around your AI anxiety and how does AI make you feel and does AI, is it aligned with your values or contradicting your values? There's a sense of, well, it doesn't matter because AI is just happening to us. It doesn't matter how I feel. It doesn't matter that it makes me sad that my teenager will only know this world. I don't have a choice. And yeah, you can't control the government, you can't control Sam Altman. How do you think about agency in all of this? Like, if we don't have agency, we don't got nothing.

24:27Yeah. You know, I'm going to go back to this section that I wrote on what I call the politics of AI in my book, right? Obviously, in this section, I talk about the worst things that AI can be used for, including war, which, by the way, it's not even a fringe idea anymore. It already happened when the Pentagon and their big, Pete Hex said, try to force Anthropic to allow them to use AI to launch missiles. And Anthropic said no. And, you know, obviously they sued the government and we know how all of that ended. But OpenAI said yes. OpenAI unfortunately said yes. And then they regretted it because they lost like a million users in 24 hours.

25:06So in this section of the book, I talk about that kind of politics of AI and participating in the political processes, like, you know, obviously going to vote and then, you know, talking to your candidates and asking them what their ideas on AI are. But the second part of that is the part that belongs to our own agency at an individual level and at a corporate level. At an individual level, obviously, you know, part of the agency means seeing something and questioning that something, not assuming that there's something that you're getting out of AI is the word of, you know, a master of the universe, right?

25:37You see something and if it sounds strange, it's because it is strange. And you have to question that something. You can't just take that at face value, like the ultimate truth, because sometimes it may be, and sometimes it may not be. So that's part of the individual agency. It is how you use AI. For example, my daughter, who is 15 years old, she uses AI. And I don't do it like, let me come here to my office, and I'm going to lecture you on AI. What I do is, do you use AI today? Oh, yeah. I asked this couple of questions. And I said, oh, you know, for that question that you just asked, like, what was the answer that you got?

26:14Oh, I got this. And I'm like, oh, sounds interesting. A little weird, though. I mean, like, do you ask this other question? Like, in a very subtle way, I try to make her think about, oh, I didn't think about asking that question. I'm going to ask it next time. That is the agency that I have for my own use of AI and the use of AI that my family, you know, gets into, right? But there is also corporate agency, which is that as leaders, you are capable of designing your own guardrails. you're capable of designing what you want your organization to do the way you want it to behave with AI. That agency, you know, can take multiple forms.

26:49Like for example, one of them is that if your customers are interacting with something that sounds human, but it is not human, it is an AI tool. Right now in the US, you don't have to do this. In Europe, you do. But in the US, you don't have to tell that user that you are an AI tool. But you can take agency on that. You can say, Trump will not enact any legislation about this or Congress, at least not this Congress right now, to force companies to say that if the thing that they are saying has been purely created by AI without the interaction of any human, there has to be a small disclaimer saying this message was created by AI.

27:24You don't have to wait for the government to do that. You can do it. You know, that is agency. That is telling people, take this, you know, we believe that this answer is an accurate answer, but take it with a grain of salt because it was still created by AI. So sacrificing that agency means you're nothing anymore. You know, you have lost the one thing that makes us human, which is, you know, some people call it free will. In this case, we're talking about it as agency. So anyway, my point is we have individual agency that can take many shapes as in you questioning the results that you get from AI or telling your daughter or your son.

27:58that answer that AI gave you sounds a little weird. Let's talk about it together. You know, two, as a company saying, these are the things we want people to use AI for. These are the things we don't want people to use AI for. And whatever other form you think that conversation can take shape in your company. That is the kind of agency that you're referring to that I think is so powerful for us to embrace. It's powerful. It's powerful, but it's more like if you think about the circle of influence, right? It's more like the center circle of like what I literally can control, right? And then the outside layer, what I can influence.

28:37There's still a huge, giant circle that is like, I have no control over this. Yes. And I think that, and that's always true with everything, but there's something about AI where it's so existential. And, but also the answers to solving it feel to me always unsatisfying. Yeah. Well, not surprisingly, my book is called Our Existential Advantage. I know. Yes. What is our existential advantage? The things that makes us uniquely human, critical thinking, creativity, imagination, owning our shit. when we make a mistake and doubling down on things that it's not that AI can be trained to do, to be a critical thinker, but ultimately it is us who own the consequences.

29:33So our existential advantage is the things that traditionally makes us human, that we have lost over time and we're losing faster now, that we can go back to and say, if something like this idea of what I said before, Or if you look at something that AI is telling you and it sounds weird, it's weird. You know, so instead of doubting yourself about it being weird, doubt AI and say, maybe it's not me who thinks that this is weird. Maybe the thing is actually weird. I had a fight with Claude. I had a fight with Claude yesterday. So I'm finishing my book and it's in final. It already went through like peer review and my editors at HBR and stuff.

30:08So I'm like putting in all the final edits. and I got in a fight with it because it said that I was improperly sourcing a claim. And it wanted me to source a claim to a newer, very narrow line of argument. And I said to it, this line of thinking has been present in psychology for probably 50 years. Why are you trying to make me source this so narrowly? Like this idea didn't originate with this scholar. And it kind of wouldn't let go. Now, Claude and I are, Claude is very well trained and Claude fights me a lot. Actually, I wish it was more sycophantic, but I finally like had to take a break. Because, whoa, Claude has access to the entire archive of research.

31:04And I'm just me. But I'm pretty sure this isn't true. But Claude is right because everyone has said that Claude is smarter than me. Yeah. And it was this very weird moment. I love talking to people who want to start their own business. You have an idea. You have a plan. How do you jump off? I have a great book for you. And it's by legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur Mark Pincus. It's called Life at the Speed of Play. Launch products people love. It's a fast-paced, 170-page read created for exactly the uncertain times we live in. Whether you're working at a company or you really want to start that business, it was an instant national bestseller.

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34:26I don't think it is smarter than we are. Yeah. Cause this, this claim didn't pass the smell test. I was like, if a reader reads this, I mean, most readers aren't going to check your footnotes, thank God. But I was like, they're going to be like, no, this is an older theory. Yeah. But Claude didn't know that. Yeah. Again, it is trained on, on knowledge. It doesn't have an infinite amount of knowledge. it still has a limited amount of knowledge. But more importantly, it's not just that it has a limited amount of knowledge, which the greatest thing about AI is that it makes everything sound really awesome.

35:00And it makes everything sound like really, you know, really with real expertise, right? Like, you know, you read and you're like, this sounds like it was written by Shakespeare, you know, or whatever thinker, you know, of modern management or neuroscience or whatever it is. But that doesn't mean that it has infinite amount of knowledge. which none of us has, but AI doesn't either. But in addition to that, even with all the data that it has, it is incapable of tapping to all the data at the same time. So it will still give you a sliver of all that is possible and it will continue to miss things out, which is more observable, by the way, when it tells you to do something and you say, but that's something that doesn't make sense because of this and this and that.

35:44And what the AI says to you is, I don't know if you've gone through this or anybody else, what AI would say back to you is, I'm sorry, you're right. I made a mistake. And you're like, okay, so thank you for recognizing that you made a mistake, but what would have happened if I had gone with what you actually said, that was a mistake. You know, what would have happened if I hadn't had the agency to question the one thing that you were saying to me, if you had done that yourself, by the way, and you would have trusted Claude with the one thing that you know it's wrong. And then you post your book, there's going to be one nerd out there that is going to be looking at the footnotes and saying, Maura, this is wrong.

36:19And they very likely will try to post it on social media. And now you're going to have to find yourself, you know, fighting against 10 ,000 people saying that. Oh, that's definitely going to happen. That's normal part of the human process, right? But it's worse if it's coming out of AI and you're trusting that AI is telling you something that is true. And it may not be true. It may, but it may not be. And you didn't have the agency that when you saw something, I always like to, you know, like in the metro, when you go to a metro station, the speakers, it's always like, if you see something, say something.

36:51I always like that expression in the world of AI. Because if you see something that sounds weird, you got to say something to somebody or to AI. If you take it on its face value as the ultimate truth, then you wouldn't have gone through the thinking process that you went through, probably going to other books to see like, well, let me see if Claude is wrong. And you would have assumed that to be the truth. So that's kind of like the agency, You know, going back to that that we were talking about before. So, you know, I mean, as incredible as it is, it doesn't have all the data of the world. And if it did, which it doesn't, but if it did, it is incapable of giving you an answer that brings all the data together.

37:30That AI can't do that. Right. And of course, I can't do that either. Yeah, of course. But, you know, but you own the consequences. AI doesn't, you know. So, you know, AI is like, oh, you know, people were mad at you because you cited something that has been disproven. And, oh, good luck figuring it out, you know, but you told me to do it, right? So that can be a little scary. Well, and now we're all experts because we can just run something through AI and then it'll tell us, it'll help us sniff out other people. I want to come to the political discussion. Well, no, we didn't talk about the history.

38:00Can we spend 10 minutes? Sorry, we have so much to talk about. Can we spend 10 minutes of you helping us place this revolution in history? And, you know, obviously with your critical lens on it, why does it matter to know the history? So in the book, I talk about five, there have been multiple technological revolutions, you know, and you can go, you know, thousands of years back in time to the invention of fire, for example, and the invention of cooking and the invention of the wheel, you know, and the invention of agriculture. I talk about five more recent technological revolutions, the first one being the printing press and ending with the era of the Internet that pretty much exploded in the 1990s.

38:48So the reason why I talk about all these technological revolutions is there's a moral of every story, you know, across these revolutions, right? One of them is things change and things change, but historically the change has been gradual, sometimes painful, but gradual, which allowed society to adapt to the changes that were happening. They rarely happened overnight the way the AI revolution is pretty much happening overnight. so so you know when i talk about the printing press obviously i was talking about the massification of knowledge right which is very equivalent to to the ai revolution right now when the printing press allowed you know there were like i can't remember the exact number right now i put it in my book it was like there were like 2 000 books in europe you know before gutenberg and like the next 20 years, there were like 20 million books being printed every year.

39:48So this allowed for access to knowledge and information that triggered, by the way, the enlightenment, you know, the renaissance in Europe. So phenomenal opportunities, but none of them happened overnight. A lot of similarities with that, with the AI era, it's only that this is happening extremely quickly. So that's one lesson that I draw out of the technological revolutions that we've gone through. The second thing that I or the second lesson that I that I am sort of taking out of the technological revolutions is that even when the technology has changed enough to produce great value, the structures that are supported by that technology may not be changing equally fast.

40:31and that creates a massive problem and a massive problem that generally ends in winners and losers. Because when you have a technology that is changing so quickly and the infrastructure of most other companies that were relying on the older technology has not changed, there may be one company that says, I'm seeing the value in this, let me adapt it. And that company kills the entire market, right? So same thing happens with AI right now. Lots of, same thinking, lots of companies in multiple industries right now, they know that AI is something. They just don't know exactly. They haven't asked themselves the leadership question that I asked before, which was, let's step back and let's redesign our entire way of working to then bring AI to the table.

41:18They think AI is just to make you faster and better. But there are companies right now that are saying we need to either to create a new company, fully AI native or transforming ourselves fully to be fully AI native. And those companies will dominate the market because the rest are the structure that are supported by a technology that only can give you so much if you don't change the rest of the structure. You bring in Clayton Christensen here, I think, you know, and talk about the classic problem of like using innovation to fix what you already have versus building the new thing. That is correct.

41:54There's a book that I don't know if you've read it. It's a book that I that I find, and it's like my, even if I don't quote it, it's always in the back of my head, it's called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn, which was one of the most prolific, you know, scientific philosophers in American history. So in 1960, I can't remember, I think it was in 1963, he came out with this book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. And obviously, you know, they're the detractors of the history and whatnot. I just think that the book says something that I have observed in the facts across history.

42:27What the book explains, the bottom line is that there are theories that explain the things that you observe. But the moment that you observe something that cannot be explained by that theory, the theory has to change because you are observing something that is what happened with the loss of gravity by Newton with relativity. The loss of gravity by Newton stayed in place for, what was it, 250 years or 300 years until there was this guy who said, yeah, they apply, but they don't apply to small things. So for small things, we need a new theory. You know, that new theory may contain the laws of Newton, you know, the laws of gravity and motion by Newton, but those laws do not explain anymore what is happening.

43:13So the same principle applies, you know, when we're thinking about the era of AI. You are trying to think about AI for observing the power of AI and trying to force it into structures that do not work anymore for this new era. So you need a new theory. And when I say a new theory, it can also be a new framework, a new way of thinking, a new leadership mindset. I talk about in the book about new educational institutions, a new way of government as well, because we need to adapt to a new technology that is not being explained or the effects of that technology are not being explained by the existing technologies and by the existing structures.

43:52And by the way, I know I don't want to get too controversial here, but that includes the way we organize our government here in the U.S. and globally. You know, our government, yes, it has lasted 250 years, but hey, you know, we are in a new era. So maybe it's time to think differently about, you know, the things that are not explained by that, that we are observing, but do not fit into the traditional structures. We have to think differently. That's what Thomas Kuhn explained in his book and what I think all the time about. I have to read this book. I'm so nerd about this stuff, by the way. It's just incredibly fascinating.

44:30Just to fast forward to the political thing. I think that's the biggest problem with why the government is so passive in regulating. It's a little bit of a too big to fail situation. The current way that we design our economy is so dependent on AI. right there's ai is propping up so many systems of power and capitalism the thought of threatening that is too overwhelming i mean but even that is all but even that is all thinking by the way it is all thinking but it's like that is all thinking because because to think that you can't innovate if you regulate it is it is it is obsolete right i mean but that's the republicans His biggest victory over 50 years is that regulation kills innovation.

45:23Let me ask you something, Maura. Tell me what country do you think has one of the most sophisticated AI frameworks in the world? Tell me what country you think has one of the most sophisticated AI frameworks in the world. Just guess it. I don't know. I would say China, but you're going to tell me something. Yes. China. Right. So we are talking here about competing with China and China winning the war for AI while they are. doing this stuff and regulating their own AI companies. And they are pretty competitive, by the way. So much so that a lot of people here in America, with all our freedom and all our capitalism and all whatever you want to call it, a lot of people here using AI and the tokens of AI are moving into using Chinese companies because they are cheaper, right?

46:05They are significantly cheaper than we are. So they have a communist government, which I would never agree with because I escaped a communist country. But they have a communist country. They have legislation. They have all these companies doing this stuff. And here in the US, we have absolute freedom to do whatever we want with AI. And even then, companies are transitioning into using Chinese AI models because they are more competitive than our American counterparts. So even that idea of regulating an industry, the premise has been regulating an industry is an enemy of the innovation in that industry.

46:42Thomas Kuhn, if he was alive today, he would say, I'm going to have a heart attack and I'm going to die now. You know, if you continue thinking that way, because, you know, you can, you can even, I mean, freaking, you know, you know, John Smith, you know, I mean, he would have, he would have agreed that we needed to provide some regulation in some, in some industries for those industries to do what they needed to do. sometimes even faster by the way that requires again going back to Thomas Kuhn that requires a different kind of thinking and we can have that different kind of thinking as long as we have you know some of these people in government that well you know we have to vote out you know so yeah that is the politics of AI part of it yeah oh gosh I've been so well conditioned by all the messaging over the years I have like a million rebuttals but at the end of the day right that's old thinking too things have to change well just think you know like let me give you i live in the state of arizona so we've been in a drought for 30 years the hoover dam lake powell two of the reservoirs that give people water and hydroelectric power to more than 40 million people empty you know empty you know probably within the next two or three years they will have to turn them off because they won't have any more water to produce hydroelectric power so now we're talking about fast-tracking Trump, talking about fast-tracking data centers in areas with no freaking water.

48:02That is ridiculous. Because yes, what are we going to do? Are we going to become a competitive AI country while 40 million people don't have electricity? Where is the rationale? Where is any extensive reason in this? So you can tell those same AI companies, well, I'm going to give you all tax cuts if you can build those data centers with renewable energy. And by the way, China has produced$25 billion more,$25 billion a month in electric, solar, and wind power, while Trump has got us engaged in a war with Iran. And we're all suffering from gas prices in here. Fuel efficiency to shockingly levels of 2022, while China has got the electric car game sewn up.

48:53is, I mean, you know, I mean, I think, but this, this again is the agency discussion of just the temptation to just sit back and say, God, I mean, we've been in a drought for 40 years. We haven't solved it. We're all still here. I guess it's going to be okay. Right. So what else did you learn from your technological revolutions? I love talking to people who want to start their own business. You have an idea, you have a plan. How do you jump off? I have a great book for you. and it's by legendary Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Mark Pincus. It's called Life at the Speed of Play, Launch Products People Love.

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53:41And number two, if the structures that the technology is supporting are not changing, the technology will not do anything for you. Three, even when the revolutions in the past have taken, you know, like the printing press took 150 years to become, you know, quote unquote productive, you know, the steam power, electrification, the computing power, the internet, they all took time to become quote unquote productive. There was a transition period, which ended up being very, very painful for a lot of people. And when that happens in the past, we didn't have the structures. for the most part, there weren't a structure to support the people who were left in limbo, you know, when their way of living was completely disrupted by the very technology that we were adopting.

54:26That's going to happen to a lot of people with AI. I'm hoping to be wrong, but like, I think the next two or three years, we will see the effects of this transitional period. And there may be a lot of people who will be losing their jobs. And at least here in the US, we don't have a safety net. We don't have a system to support the people that will lose their jobs because of AI. And, you know, we are telling ourselves this lie of like, oh, we're going to be upskilling people. You will upskill some people. You won't upskill everybody. The data on upskilling is really, I did a whole rabbit hole dive on that.

55:02It's not very good. No, I mean, you can, you know, like how many people do you think you can upskill? You know, Like, I mean, 10 % of your employees, you know, perhaps maybe 20 % if you're generous. I mean, what's going to happen with all the millions of people who are at risk of losing their jobs? The other lie that we're telling ourselves is, which I talk about in the book too, this other lie is that there will be more jobs created because of AI than the jobs that will be lost. That is partially true. There will be a lot of new jobs created like it's happened in every technological revolution.

55:34That's not a question. But in every other technological revolution, those jobs, you know, we had enough time to get ready for those new jobs, which we may not have the time right now. That we are assuming that the mindset of people who control, you know, some of the capital in our world today, they have the same mindset that we had, you know, 200 years ago. and I don't think that's true. I think there's a hoarding oligarchy kind of experience going on right now, which is like, let's hoard as many resources as we can versus reinvesting those resources back in the country, in the people. That's going to have an impact too.

56:15So yes, we're going to be creating a lot of jobs. The question is, are we going to be ready for those jobs? Will we give those jobs to people or other technology? So these are lessons from the history of technological revolutions. The speed, the impact, the transition, and the fact that we do need safety nets in place, and we don't have them right now. Let me ask you a question. You talk about data capital. I mean, I'm really interested in the movement around data capital and considering that, you know, in this brave new world, our data is worth a lot of money. Like just the fact that I'm a, you know, certain 50-year-old, you know, white woman with three kids who lives in this zip code, like that's worth something to companies, right?

56:58Um, so, so you have that argument that, you know, that everyone's data becomes capital that has economic value when we all lose our jobs. Then you have sort of the whole sovereign wealth fund idea. What do you think about the, I mean, these are novel approaches. What do you think about the feasibility of any of these? Well, first of all, you know, we have to, again, this, this requires, um, you know, I'm, that's why I needed to put the book out in the way I put it out. Right. I talk about AI and I love all this great stuff that I can do with AI, but I'm not a stupid. You know, I'm also aware of this, of the multiple dangers and limitations that AI has.

57:33Most of them because of how irresponsible we may be in the face of this incredibly powerful technology, particularly our government, by the way, this government anyway, right now in the US. But right now we are commodity. You know, right now we are the commodity of all these companies that are harvesting our data to, you know, do infinite amount of things by just look. They know who you are. They know that you are a 50 year old white woman who lives in whatever zip code and has three kids. You know, they know who I am. You know, this guy is Venezuelan, you know, and he lives in Flax of Arizona and he's vegan.

58:11You know, they know that stuff about me and they are harvesting that to make more money. yeah so you know these are things that unfortunately we can't that's way outside of our circle of control and influence that's right way outside we still have some agency and that agency comes that's i talk about that in the politics of ai that that agency comes when we go to vote you know because the conversation right now unfortunately for some people it is like well you know you know left and right republicans and democrats i'm like you know well you have almost an entire party that is telling you do whatever the heck you want with ai coincidentally we know where the party is so So, you know, so right now it has to be more about do I want to preserve any, you know, meaning about what it is to be a human, you know, protecting my data, protecting my family, protecting our future.

58:59That hopefully makes you vote in certain directions. So let me stop you here because, you know, as we said, I am a political consultant by trade. I'm retired pretty much from that line of work, although my husband is very active. You come from a country, democracy. Doesn't exist anymore. Doesn't exist. Yeah. The country obviously is in a great deal of pain and conflict and all of those things. So I really value your opinion on this. You believe, do you believe that voting is the answer for our agency? We still have that in the U.S. Well, we don't. We sort of do. It depends where you live and who you are, but okay.

59:47Because of where I come from, that provides an additional layer of context to tell me that my vote in Venezuela does not matter at all. And I know, yes, I know that in Texas, there's a county that votes Democrat and they shut down 92 polling stations, you know, which is the only thing that a fascist government would do. And we know who did it, you know, the Republican Party in the state of Texas particularly. So we know what they don't want that to happen. but we still know that as difficult as it may be somebody can get in a car bring three other people go to a voting station the one voting station that the polling station that remains open and you will vote and we will tally those votes and we will still get a result that you know some of us may not like some people will like so that still has at least in our country has more value here in america than it has in venezuela so do i believe that if things don't change in november in our country, that's going to remain true?

1:00:48I don't think so. I think we are at the gates of what real fascism and authoritarianism will really look like. You know, despite the many differences, I think this is Germany between 1923 and 1933. So that's what it feels like, you know, and I'm a nerd of all these things, obviously, you know, that's why I can talk with so much, you know, conviction about the fact that that's what it feels like. You know, it feels like we are closer to the Germany of 1932, 1933, when, you know, the Nazi party, you know, took 30 % of the Reichstag, you know, and they were able to enact all these insanity laws. So I think we, you know, we've talked about this before.

1:01:28We've talked about this is the last chance. This is the last chance. I do believe that this may be one of the last chances that we get to to elect a different Congress, you know, to hopefully it's not just because I'm liberal, which I am. It's also because I believe in the power of this country. I believe in democracy. I would love to have a conversation with a sane conservative about less taxes or more taxes, you know, globalism and protecting the environment. but there are very few of them left. The ones that you can talk to about policy and not about insanity. They are coming out though. I mean, the only, you know, it's interesting, and you see this in the polling and the kind of Charlie Cook's phrase of the red undertow, right?

1:02:13That I, someone, Amy Walter, who I love put it so beautifully. She said, you know, people understand that this country doesn't work and they are itching to get past the pettiness of the red-blue fight to just sort of try to bring things to a state where it still feels like America might work. Yeah. I think America will work. I think there's a fascinating book. I can't remember the name right now. It's called The Next 100 Years. And my gosh, I forgot the name of the author. A phenomenal book about the power of America and how America will remain America and will remain the main country in the world, which, you know, for better or for worse, we are for the next 100 years.

1:03:00I think what the only thing that this person didn't account for is Trump. You know, so the only little thing that this person didn't account for was that the traitor was inside, you know, the Oval Office, right? And not China or North Korea or Iran. I do believe in America. I believe this country is incredibly resilient. I don't think we're going to get over the pettiness, you know, at least not in the next couple of years. I think it's going to take us another 10, 15 years to rebuild our institutions. This is a very dark, sad chapter for America. But the one thing that I love, especially from some Republicans too, by the way, like Thomas Massey, you know, as much as I disagree with him in almost everything, you know, and hopefully he runs for something else, you know, in the future.

1:03:49So the fact that we need to provide guardrails for an office that we didn't think was capable of doing the things that have been done, you know, in the past couple of years. So I am hoping that we're going to see a renaissance of legislative conversations about the guardrails that we want our country to have. You know, we don't want the president of the United States to be trading on his personal accounts, you know, in the stock market. You know, we don't want the president, never do we want the president to accept gifts, you know, from foreign countries. You know, we don't want the president alone to select what country can have nuclear power and which one can't.

1:04:27Or shut down the press. Or shut down the press, you know. So I think there's going to be a revival. I'm hoping that there will be a revival of democracy after this very dark episode of the second Trump administration. The first Trump administration was horrific, but that's like, you know, playground compared to what these people have done in a year and a half. So do I believe in America? Do I believe that we are resilient? Do I believe that we can rebuild significantly better? I do think so. I do think that we have we don't have that many, you know, too many opportunities left to be able to restart and kick off that process again.

1:05:05And one of them is coming up in this next cycle of elections. You know, I also think that there is a group of people, you know, 30 percent of them who, you know, their their, you know, racism and their misogyny and their, you know, xenophobia and transphobia are are so powerful that no matter what these people do, they will they are just, you know, we don't need them to win. We don't need them. Yeah, but they are really crazy, and very French, and they are 30%, which is, by the way, when you think about Nazi Germany, Hitler never had more than 35%, 40 % of the approval. Is that right? Yeah, so that's as much as he had, and look at all the things that happened in Germany with that level of approval.

1:05:51So we don't need, you know, we need to put control over the insanity. But, you know, I think that even some Republicans right now are, this is too much. This is too crazy. I think that's true. So I'm hoping that there's a revival of democracy. I'm hoping that there's a revival of common sense. I'm hoping that we can talk to each other and say, okay, you believe in less taxes. I believe in more taxes. Let's talk about what the right decision is in here. There's a gate, that one gate that we have to cross for that. And it's electing a different kind of Congress in November so that we can begin that revival process.

1:06:27Amen. I'm going to leave it there. Let's see where it goes. Thank you so much. Thank you, Maura. Great conversation.

1:06:37That's it for this week's show. If you like the show, follow us and tell your friends. And please leave us a review. It really helps the anxious achiever get found by people just waiting for our content. I'm your host, Maura Aarons-Mele. Lots more to come in the next episode.