Is AI Coming For Your Job? | Zack Kass

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1:38Actually, we all want everyone else's jobs to automate, just not her. The panacea is one where we have a bunch of purpose and everything is free.

1:53So for you guys who listened to this show, you know that AJ and I, despite our interest and having a lot of fun incorporating, integrating, and using AI in our lives, we also can be a bit of AI doomers due to studying human behavior for as long as we have. So we have a guest today, Zach, who wrote a very optimistic book about AI. And so his challenge today is hopefully shed some light on some areas that possibly that AJ and I are having some trouble with. But I also wanted to sort of give you an example from my own life of using AI where I really became very concerned. I'm sure, Zach, you'll get a kick out of this.

2:40It's probably something you heard a million times. So I love Claude. I use it as an artist, as a collaborator, back and forth. I think I have it programmed pretty good to challenge me on a lot of things. But, you know, it also loves to blow smoke up my ass. And I appreciate that. And I certainly find myself trying to get validation from it at times and just through work. However, despite all that and the fun and the advancements that I've had with work and using it, there was one tool that has frightened me. Now, I'm an artist. I'm a musician. and I was excited to get to work with Suno just to see what it could do and have some fun with it and uh I heard some some things that some other people did there was a lot of controversy around it as an artist I personally know that artists hold their talent in high regard in their identity because despite what the world throws at us, we like to think of ourselves, well, hey, I have this unique, special talent that makes me unique, interesting, and it brings a lot of validation to my life.

4:06So in using Suno, I had a lot of fun. I was really impressed by it. But how I was impressed also led to mass depression. and it lasted for about five or six days where I was just numb to the fact that everything that I thought about music, everything that I enjoyed about music was then turned upside down. Now, granted, I also see all the ways that it could be incredibly helpful and I look forward to seeing how it helps artists, but there was a part of me that I felt was killed in that process. And maybe there's a rebirth and you can help us with that today, but I'm not sure if our audiences experienced that.

4:58But even in that realm, I think all of us are seeing pieces of our identity being shifted, changed, or going through, as your book calls it, an AI renaissance. So I'd like to give you the floor and let you take it from there. So John, just walk me through, you recorded something with Suno and it sounded just like you. And then you realized, oh, now there's this digital entity that's creating music that sounds just like me. So what's my purpose as a musician? That was the crisis? I think that was certainly part of it. I think another part of it was I was so impressed of what it gave me back that perhaps deep inside, maybe I questioned whether I could have came up with something as good.

5:56but the thing that really made me think was but i don't have access or the resources to be able to create something of that scope i don't have a catalog of working musicians that i could just call up and start collaborating with that takes resources that takes relationships that takes a lot of other work to make all of those things happen. Now to throw out a name that everybody knows, well, we could use Rick Rubin as an example. He's not an instrumentalist. He doesn't play an instrument. He only works on his own taste as he calls it. And now this is something as we work with something like Suno that we get to do, we get to be a Rick Rubin and be a taste maker or as what the kids call it vibe coding so it's a new approach to such an old skill some of it it sounds like might be you know you just blown away right this sort of like uh shock that takes time to update then the then the then you start processing all the potential consequences and i'm you know you're plenty smart so i'm sure you start sort of unraveling what it could mean and your mind starts to wander all the places it could go which by the way i get for what it's worth and i i don't know if you know i don't know if either of you i think we gave you advanced copies i don't know if you read the book the book tries to spell out plenty of these costs and one of them is in fact sort of this idea of loss of identity and in fact i will argue that of all the things that we should be talking about right now you've actually arrived at the most pressing one and this is a somewhat hot take because the current doom sits in the camp of um you know existential will we die or um or sort of will people lose their jobs and then lose all their money and and the risk that i call out i think being even probably more realistic and and and scarier than that is this idea of loss of identity and loss of identity can come via AI in multiple forms.

8:06And one of them may in early feel like this sort of creative common issue, which is like, if anyone can produce anything, then what purpose does anyone have to produce any? And that's a very interesting question that, by the way, has been asked for a long time. And that's one of the things we call it in the book. When we created computers, people said, why would I ever write on parchment anymore? Write over on paper. and um actually this morning paki mccormick announced an author who writes a very amazing substack called not boring uh that's that's incredible wrote this amazing treatise on the importance of writing he said what was the last great idea you ever you heard on a podcast he said nothing good happens on no great ideas come forward on podcasts they have to be written because they have to be hammered at they have to be chiseled they have to be you know they have to be really worked on for a long time and sort of listed all the great works of writing and and and talks about the lack of famous podcast episodes because most great ideas have to be put to paper and i i bring this up because one of the what we talk about in the book this is the antidote to what you're describing can come in sort of two forms one the historical context which basically says that humans have been terrified of new technology for as long as we've invented new technology and this is no exception and i have a lot of sympathy because describing the internet to someone first they laughed at it then they said this is going to destroy everything and then they said this is boring and and and what's next uh every you know every great thing starts out as a toy or or something laughable ai is no different they kept moving the goalposts they said it'll never work then they said it'll never be a business and then they said the business is going to be too big and it's going to destroy the world and and I bring this up to say that like fear is inherent in change and that's just that I get but there is a point you made which I think is I don't have an answer for and is worth actually being honest about which is this idea of sort of like infinite creativity right now I think it is really cool that anyone can create music and at the limit if you extrapolate it long enough anyone can create sort of anything and the idea that art is unique to the creator is a pretty important idea and and the way i explain this in the in my small brain with the limited information i have today i explain it in sort of three ways the first is why does a human make art that is good they make it john you know for themselves they don't act like every great artist makes art for themselves they don't make it for other people and so unless someone is like listen, I have to make money on art.

10:49I would argue that Suno doesn't actually threaten you because great artists should make art for the purpose of their themselves, their happiness, their art. This is written about extensively. I, of course, am not an artist, but I'm preaching what artists have told me. And I don't think that AI actually threatens that at all. The purpose of art remains the same and one should. Second thing I think about is the water cooler. The water cooler effect basically proposes or the water cooler theory or phenomenon proposes that infinite creativity is actually sort of uninteresting to the commons because what we really want is to be able to talk about things for example like game did you both watch game of thrones so game of thrones ended terribly i mean just just terribly and the only reason we all kept watching it is because we were all like suffering together like season that season seven and eight were just so bad and we watched it because we want because we were suffering together and there's actually this like shared experience that's really valuable and what's interesting about this is when people talk about sort of infinite personalization well will we all even lit you know how will the zeitgeist work if anyone can just create anything well it turns out people actually want to share experiences.

12:08And to the extent that even some of those experiences are bad, we actually can have a collective shot in front. And this also suggests that there will continue to be tastemakers. Now, John, your point, will the tastemakers make art in the way that we are used to it being made? I don't know. And by the way, if you had told Beethoven or Bach about Deadmau5, they might have said, fuck that. You know, we've seen enough, shut it all down. We don't need the internet. We don't need synthesizers, shut it all down. And of course, Deadmau5, by the way, had this very famous viral tweet recently where he went after ai and said burn it down burn it all down and by the way i like his music and have been to his concerts but i there i do think it is important to remember that like those who came before him might have said the same about him and that the future artists are going may look different but i think there will be a collective common and i think that there will be this idea of good and bad and like rick guys like rick rubin will still or people like Rick Rubin will still be really important because there will be taste and whether that, you know, how that taste is formed, I don't know.

13:12The third though is the most important and it's the thing that gets me out of bed every day, which is that at the end of the day, humans have the same happiness function for as long as we have existed on earth. And this is a remarkable thing that I don't think is talked about enough when everyone talks about the end of the human experience or sort of human joy, which is that we all desperately want time with friends and family and physical community. And when we've done so many death experiments and so many happiness experiments, we just don't need to even debate it anymore. The quality of a life well lived is a life lived with friends and family, simply or not, in purpose, in community.

13:51And what's cool about this is that one of the most important parts of a life well lived is culture. And that culture doesn't have to be elaborate. It doesn't have to be loud, but it has to exist. And what we are discovering today is that people don't actually consider the digital world to be meaningful on a cultural basis. That no matter how much you've listened to an artist's songs on Spotify, you are willing to pay$1 ,000 and drive 100 miles to see them in concert because that is culture. And I revel in that. I take exceptional comfort knowing people want to be in physical community, enjoying these experiences together and think that that is the ultimate antidote to whatever is coming next, to like this idea of whatever, however good AI gets we know because we've run this experiment so many times that we really want to be near each other and i recently i recently bought a i have a co-owner at a women's professional volleyball team um the san francisco professional volleyball team and i it is it i would never have expected to to be a part owner in a professional sports team except that i'm i love volleyball it's a huge part of my life and my wife's life and i'm sure more than almost anything else that people are going to want to find more and more ways to go and be in a space doing real things enjoying real experiences with each other i'm i'm like i would i'm literally betting quite a bit on that and and um take very take an exceptional comfort knowing that however good suno gets the concert is still gonna matter the the local theater is coming back broadway is coming back all these experiences that we'd sit and were sort of written off because because of the digital revolution are actually having quite a renaissance, quite a moment.

15:49And I don't think we have to wonder why. I did get over myself and the whole effect that it, that it had in it. And it just took a few days to, to, to think about it and, and to wrap my head around how I wanted to use it moving forward. And I do agree. There's nothing that is going to replace the alive concert. certainly in my eyes. I don't like going to shows where it's recorded music or digital music. I want to hear a live band. I want to feel the kick drum in my gut. And I want to see and feel the human component to all of that. I agree with you on that part. And thanks for all that. But John, it doesn't change the fact that the experience had that impact on you.

16:38And I think what you just described is something that many people are experiencing and a lot of them are and it's not ephemeral for some people for a lot of people it's this like pit in their stomach and they can't get rid of it well i brought it up in a in a music group that i was in that i was experimenting with it and the and i had never been called so many names in my in my life especially in a domain that that i i can maneuver in really wow so you know me wrapping my head around it i I also saw the gut knee jerk reaction that people had and it was, it was insane. It was nothing I've experienced before, but it certainly made me even question it and think about it even harder.

17:20Looking at that example, obviously there's the transition between analog and digital and everyone on the music sphere has like transitioned over time. So I was talking to Johnny about using pedals and going from acoustic guitar to electric guitar. So that transition has always been happening. But for many of us, when we think about what we create, whether it's for work or for pleasure or art, we have our identity wrapped up in that. And it is being displaced right now. And no one's really talking about it. And this is one of the most fascinating parts of the book for me. And many in our audience are in information work.

17:55They're in front of the computer all day long. They're working with tech and now they're seeing those skills that they pride themselves in, that they dedicated their life to earning, to putting in the work, be replaced by the latest model and the latest version. And now it's moving so fast that we can't even wrap our head around this exponential growth in AI where it went from we're chatting with it and getting some simple answers to now agents are delivering work comparable, if not better than our own work. and for those in our audience who are feeling this identity displacement like john what do you say to them and how do we go through it to get to this other side this renaissance i wrote it's i'm glad that i wrote the book when i did i will say because it if i had written it any earlier no one would have cared about it this is a this as an aside it's a really funny thing like timing is everything and and i think it's going to be a new york times bestseller at this point because we've pre-sold so many copies uh and if it isn't you know, the editorial team doesn't like me and it's okay.

18:54But if we'd written it earlier, people would have called me an idiot. And there are these really great books that were written about AI in like 2017, 18, 19, Life 3.0, which is exceptional, Max Tegmark, Super, The Alignment Problem, Nick Bostrom, just exceptional works that no average person has ever read or will ever read now because they're part of the sort of the old, the old guard. But if I had written it any later, I don't know that I would have had the courage to actually say, let me be very clear. It's not that I don't believe that things are going to go really well. It's that I am actually increasingly sure that they are going to go really well and that the costs are going to be hard for people to stomach.

19:42And one of those costs, and maybe the greatest is this one. And when I talk about it this way, I first, I literally every time now have to station identify and say, I am very sympathetic to what's going on. I'm not trying to offer scriptural answers. And I am also doing my best to actually try to make this better. And there I can talk about the efforts I'm making to try to make this go well. But I do think there's a story that you read it. If you read that section, that to me is actually the best part of which i'll just share because you know i don't know either actually go by the book but uh but i'll share this way yeah i'll share the best part here's the here let's stick the lead out there play your best song first right john isn't that how every every great concert begins um october 2024 the dock workers go on strike the longshoremen walk off the eastern seaboard and um on october 2nd the head of the longshoremen nearly held tag it goes on cnn And for this hour-long interview that I've now watched more than almost any other, yeah, more than any other interviewer I've ever watched at CNN, during which in like the first 10 minutes, he points very calmly at the camera and says to the American people, you have no idea how powerful and dangerous I am.

20:59I will cripple you. He's talking about the American economy. I remember. John, do you remember what he wanted? Do you remember what his demand was? There was a lot of usual union. demands, but I also remember that he did not want any automation on the docks. There you go. So the, uh, the, the longshoremen had, had actually one request, one demand. They had some ask, but they had one demand. They didn't actually want more money. That wasn't part of the, that wasn't part of the deal. They got a little bit, I think they got like a quarter more and they didn't want safer working conditions, which are the two tenants of every labor union since we reorganized labor.

21:38What they wanted was a guarantee, as you pointed out from the ports that we wouldn't automate their jobs. And I, um, I was super fascinated. And in the midst of this, by the way, the picket signs read robots don't pay taxes and automation harms families. And I stared at those picket signs and I was like, whoa, this is, this is going to be the single most sort of prominent AI issue for the next 20 years. Like this is it. This is going to be it. And so went and tried to meet with him. He wouldn't meet with me. I'll save that part for the book because it's a good part. But got to meet with a bunch of his long.

22:24And the results are all, all the interviews are off the record. The results are in the book. What we discover in talking to these guys very quickly through a series of questions is that they aren't actually talking about an economic issue. They're not actually describing a world where they can't make money. They're describing a world where they can't have purpose. And again, I'll sort of let the results in the book speak for themselves.

22:51And moreover, when you press them, and when you press anyone, so if I said to you, John, who benefits economically if we automate the ports? I would say the people at the top of the hierarchy. Well, that is what the longshoremen said when I first asked. They said, it's the capitalists. That was, they were trained to say it's the capitalists. But who else, John, eventually benefits? And AJ, sorry, I don't mean, I just, I like this part because it goes to the heart of the matter. Who else eventually benefits if we automate the force? Everybody. Everyone. Including, by the way, eventually the longshoremen and their kids.

23:28And the reason I know this, the reason I see this with certainty is that we are all descendants of people whose jobs were automated to our economic benefit. All of us. And in fact, we don't talk about them, but we wander the earth all day, every day, asking ourselves very explicitly sometimes, when is this good or service going to be better, faster, cheaper, without realizing what we're asking is, when is a human going to be extricated from the manufacturing of this good or service? and we're not asking because we're jerks we're asking because we are rational economic actors conditioned to believe that the world is going to get better faster cheaper all the time and in in this process what i realized is actually we all want everyone else's jobs to automate just not that like the world the panacea is one where we have a bunch of purpose and everything is free when i was in the forum arguing with people and giving my point of why i was messing with suno and having some fun with it.

24:28One of the comments was, you know, this AI is good to do my taxes, but it should not be here. And I was like, oh, as long as it takes somebody else's job, but not yours. Right. And I was, we were just doing a podcast a few weeks ago where I was saying that, and I'm sure everyone has asked, why can't we have a automatic dishwasher? That's been asked a million or wash my clothes. Why do I have to do this? Well, I'm somebody who likes to wash my own dishes, there's specific reasons why I do that. And that just because it can be done and automated doesn't mean that it should be. And that all of us are now going to have to make these choices of where AI and automation affect our lives and which parts that we continue to do ourselves to keep that routine, that tradition, that ritual in our lives that makes us be able to perform, have a great well-being in our own lives.

25:35So one of the papers we wrote recently is called, Where is Your Automation Boundary? Or Discovering the Automation. Yeah. This is a very sensitive time because whereas two years ago when I talked about this stuff, people were like, that guy's an idiot. it. Now I talk about this stuff and they're like, that guy is the harbinger of doom. A lot of people are open to these ideas, but I'm more sensitive than ever that people went from laughing to being angry because the goalposts move. They were like, this is never going to work now that it worked. And they're like, well, this shouldn't go any further.

26:05But the automation boundary question is a really fun one. I like to pose it. You guys can pose it, pose it to your friends tonight. I'll pose it to all your listeners. If you could automate everything, where would you stop? That's a question I like to ask people. I basically open every lecture I do at a college university with this one. By the way, there's some things we all agree we should not automate, right? There's people with a couple of brains that are like, look, we should definitely do a couple of things. And the answers get crude really quickly. But when you start talking about all the things in your life that you want automated, you start looking around at all the people around you who are doing those jobs and you think, oh yeah.

26:39And the blowback on Uber was super reasonable early on because people are like, what's the utility here? Who cares? All we're doing is putting taxi drivers out. They worked so hard for these medallions and were ruining their lives. And Travis Kalanick became public enemy. And he had to sort of become this villain persona in order to make it work. And, and the, you know, people, people even around the business were like, this doesn't make sense. Aren't we building a safer, more equitable way to move people around the world but it doesn't feel like that for the people in in the system and on the other side we can say yeah it's really nice that i can order a car and i and like violence and and theft has gone way down in in in ride share and livery i mean all these incredible um all these incredible signs but in the moment and even their children thereafter it's really hard.

27:37And I would love for my taxes to be automated, but I also have friends who are accountants who are like, wait, what will I do then? And this comes to the point that you asked earlier, AJ, that I think we should just talk about, which is what do we do about this? And the first thing I'll say is this is going to take a long time as we call it in the book. One, a lot of work will never automate because we will politically protect it. And this is an unpopular take, but actually one of the reasons that a lot of efficiency in this world has never arrived is that there is so much political protection for it.

28:13The optometrist, I don't even want to begin to explain the amount of corruption that goes into making sure that AJ's glasses are really hard to like that. Getting new contact lenses is complicated and you have to go in to get your eyes checked. And like the colluding that exists in this very cottage industry to pass policy that makes it very expensive for AJ to get his new glasses or new prescriptions is crazy. And it exists because there's a small concentration of power that says you can't automate a bunch of things. The dock workers got four years, stay of execution, four years, that's an aggressive term, but they got four years to say, we're not going to automate these ports.

28:57And in that time, they can hold a gun to the economy's head again. and say, we're going to walk off the job set again. And that's not good for everyone else. That's 45 ,000 people who now get to control the economic outcome of a bunch of others. And I am constantly reminded that when people ask what jobs are going to automate first, I have to tell them it's just the weakest union. Show me the group of people with the least political protection. And by the way, when people talk about software engineers automating, I don't think they're right because cloud code is really good. It is very good. We're very good at writing software with AI.

29:38But I think they're right because software engineers have no political protection. They never organize, so they have no union. And even if they had organized, they have very little public sympathy. These are people who make a ton of money, who are seen as sort of the international elite. And I don't think there are many congresspeople or senators that would stand up and say, we need to protect this group of people who make$500 ,000 a year, right? And so political protection is going to be one of these huge issues that basically stops a bunch of jobs from automating. And that's going to have, I think, bad outcomes, quite honestly.

30:15The other thing I will say is I think that plenty of jobs are going to discover there's a very near automation boundary. There's plenty of work that we actually don't want to fully automate. And that for some good reasons and some bad reasons, most jobs simply gets augmented. And then the third is, I think that we're going to discover a bunch of new work. And I think that we are going to quickly find, as we have rediscovered economies, that there is going to be a bunch of really interesting new things to do, especially in the physical world, and that knowledge work will give way to other work.

30:51But the last thing I'll say, and this is sort of the capstone in the book, there are also two other scenarios. One in which we automate all work. And if that actually happens, something profound will happen economically. And we will probably, and I'll come to that in a second, and we'll probably be faced with something else. And the other is where the utility of work automation gets so real that people actually start being willing to make these sacrifices. And this is what I talk about in the book. I don't know how long the transition period lasts, but there's a point in the next 50 or 100 years where people go, you know what?

31:30I don't have this job, but we've done all these other incredible things. And the trade-off now feels very reasonable. And this presents, as I open the book, I think the crux of my position, which is John Maynard Keynes. The book is an homage to John Maynard Keynes. In 1930, he wrote a paper, The Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, in which he argued, amidst a backdrop of despair, everyone was dying in the streets, literally of starvation. He said, I must now disembarrass myself to take flight into the future to imagine a world I will certainly not live to see, one in which humans may have solved the economic problem and be faced with something more profound.

32:08The father of modern macroeconomics arguing that the battle on the horizon is a spiritual one. And that is actually what the book is about. We can't come out and say it explicitly because then people wouldn't take it seriously. But my real question is, can humans find happiness once we've solved a bunch of the problems that we toil ourselves with today? And how do we do that? That's actually what I'm asking in this book and trying to give people something to look forward to and also something to strive for as we start to automate a bunch of things. In a lot of these situations, you know, we're looking at generational differences here, too.

32:46Even of the guests and myself and Johnny, there's a generational difference. And I ran full steam ahead into AI. Johnny was reluctant to even mess with it. And now he's starting to come around on some daily tasks with work. And as you heard with music, but so much of that time spent building the skills, going to school, investing in this system to see this system upheaval where now people who've spent less time, who haven't invested in the education are leveraging agents at skill levels beyond yours, you know, that creates the automation boundary for a lot of us of like, well, I don't want automation to, you know, handle my kids.

33:24I want to be there with my kids, but Hey, I'm a, I'm an oncologist. I'm a dentist. Like I trained my whole life for this and I spent into the system. I still have student loans. And, and now you're saying that automation and robots are going to replace me. The first thing that you're describing, we also call out the book, which is this idea of the distribution problem? And I have no answer for this. I actually pointed this as the most pressing issue that governments will have to solve for after the governance issue, after the alignment, explainability, and bad acting policy is the distribution problem.

33:58How do we make sure that the value of automation accrues in the most fair and even way possible? Because if there is a panacea as you describe or as i'm describing on the horizon the path there the transition there needs to needs to be managed well and i think this is actually one of the jobs for governments to make sure that this is as sort of peanut buttered as possible especially because the the trappings will be so great but i will i will propose this aj which is and and by the way this is coming from the son of an oncologist and I have a lot of doctors in my family. My dad's role has never...