Jamie Bartlett with Rory Sutherland and Elfried Samba on AI, trust and the internet

31:05So that's the main difference. But I do have some hope with podcasting. When social media first came out, I was among many of those who said, the problem is not the messages that people are receiving on social media. It is the fact it is a crunched down 30 second angry missive. It's not people aren't engaging with material in any form of detail like i don't even care what the material is we're turning into a yuck wow society where everything is really short and quick and not thought through and now people seem to be thrilled to listen to joe rogan for three straight hours talking about some of the most detailed stories imagine that's amazing like whether you agree with rogan or not he's he and others like him are normalizing the idea of sitting down for hours at time engaging in a single idea that is brilliant yeah i am really excited about that and it's but people and people complain about brogan and the others a lot but by the way no one least of all me would have predicted this it's amazing isn't it so the thing i was saying the other day is if you told me in say 1990 okay you're going to be driving to manchester in your car you'll have the technology to play any music ever composed by the hand of man okay and you'll choose to spend the journey listening to two people talking i would have said nah yeah i don't think so no i know right and so the popularity of long-form conversation by the way i mean there's an interesting one wouldn't have said it in 2015 let alone 1990 i agree yeah now interesting if you go back to my very early childhood you did have on bbc one or two uh i'm just trying to remember there were various people who did very serious long conversations with sort of Carl Jung and people like that.

32:53And one of my theories was that television people fell out of love with conversation, but the public didn't. That for whatever reason, it wasn't a very fashionable kind. Do you remember a thing called After Dark on Channel 4? Friday evenings, they got a load of people in a room and basically got them pissed. Okay. And it was an extraordinary thing where it was basically just a room you know you got some extraordinary guests like peter sutcliffe's dad you know and there was a famous one famous one with peter o'toole i think where he basically sort of turns up with a stack of booze and it all turns nasty but it was completely live conversation it was parodied once as after closing time as opposed to after dark yeah but it was very very captivating viewing and it was kind of early stage you know large-scale podcast in a sense And it was always very, very popular, you know, particularly given the slot.

33:45And I always wondered whether television people are obsessed with the soundbite and they turn interviews into these highly combative, very short form things. And actually, maybe the public doesn't want that. I think it's I just think it's really good for people to try to separate again the medium and the message. if the message you might not agree with on Stephen Bartlett's podcast or Jay Shetty's podcast or Joe Rogan's podcast or the rest is politics or the rest is history or whatever. But the fact that people, there's this unending appetite to listen to people talk for hours about detailed subjects is a really positive development.

34:26And the opposite of where I thought we were heading 10 years ago. Completely. Yeah, which we're doing it right now. The best thing a futurologist ever told me is there are no trends, there are vectors. And there's always a counter trend. And just as, in a sense, conventional media didn't do a very good job of providing us with two-minute video, did a fantastic job of providing us with video which was half an hour or an hour long. It also didn't do a very good job of providing us with much longer form content. And so we've suddenly effectively discovered an appetite for the two extremes. So it's a vector, really.

35:02it's not it's not really a trend yeah and the same people who are watching you know 30 second cat videos are also watching two-hour content yeah yeah it's amazing yeah it's amazing yeah because what you were seeing there's like words that came about since covid right like words like gaslighting and toxic and this all these words that you see on like 20 second reels and tiktoks that people learn about, but they don't really get into the depth of what it actually means, right? Varun, I'm speaking to a lot of people right now. I can see the TikTok, what the TikTok algorithm feels like. Because when you press them on the questions and you press them on the POV, a lot of the time it's very baseless, right?

35:45It's based on the trend in conversation and the word right now. But the thing I like about podcasting, it's kind of like books, because I don't read books, right? I don't have the attention. What do you mean you don't read books? The idea of sitting down and just doing one thing, my brain just goes all over the place. Audiobooks. Audiobooks, podcasts. There's a podcast called Founders of David Senra. I talk about it all the time. He dives into one book for an hour and gives you basically like the cliff notes and all the conversations around it. I learned so much about that, right? I can listen to a two-hour podcast and retain everything, right?

36:21Because I'm just an auditory learner, right? And I think that the good thing I like about where podcasting has gone, it's allowed you to learn from an auditory sense, visual, kinesthetic, because you're feeling people's emotions and what they think about things. But then also digital, because there's like points and notes of data, and it does the full circle of learning. Whereas a lot of other things just focus on one type of learning. and that's the thing I really like about where media is going which is why I actually believe that providing immersive experiences with AI and virtual reality and where that's going that's what we should be spending our time like investing in innovating in but really what I'm seeing right now with like every time I go on an app and I see this company has raised this amount of money for this it's just for more bullshit that just tries to leverage people's attention all over and over again now no one's actually using the modern technology to build stuff that are useful like you go to the us for example i say i was in san francisco right and i'm like this is supposed to be the tech hub of the world right what but why is it that my phone is advanced but when i go out into the real world like the computer's not working i can't like check into my plane without anything bugging it's almost like we left the real world to fix this virtual world and no one's San Francisco is arguably one of the richest cities in the world, but they've got a massive homeless problem.

37:42You know, that actually the infrastructure of the place is a fucking shit show. Yeah, I think this point, though, is really I mean, I think the there is a really profound point about the difference between technology being created and technology being applied in the real world. Adopted. Adopted. And so, various studies looking at companies that have adopted large language models. And what's so interesting about that at the moment is that pretty strong evidence that at the individual level, people in companies using language models are reporting significant increases in productivity. I can now write these reports quicker.

38:30I can summarize these documents better. I can present power. I can do PowerPoint slides faster. I can run these accounts faster. But at the company-wide level, it's not actually turning into changes to profit and loss. And it feels a little bit like the productivity paradox from decades ago, where computers were adopted across the world very, very quickly in the 80s and 90s, but there was no productivity gains for like 10 or 15 years after that. And I think it's because we forget things like um the printer's jammed it's good like oh yes i've just saved an hour doing a powerpoint slide using chat gpt now i've got to attend a two-hour meeting about ai compliance because apparently i wasn't allowed to do it that way and it's this like writ large with ai i mean it's perfectly possible i mean if you think about it one of the strangest things uh um which persisted in business for about 100 years was the typewriter because traditionally i mean in 1970 ogilvy had a typing pool you didn't have anything on your desk you didn't have a typewriter on your desk you wrote a letter to a client by hand you submitted it to the typing pool who then typed it up on official paper and it was sent okay now unless you had appalling handwriting the typewriter was a massive cost imposed on business simply so that the business could appear professional.

39:59You know, I mean, in the 18th century, everything was done by hand. No one thought it strange. You wrote a letter, you sent it, that was it. You added this completely unnecessary extra process to everything that was done, really because it was expected of you. Now, it strikes me as perfectly possible. Now, the word processor does bring benefits, I think we can say. You know, it's better than a typewriter. You can edit. You know, you can take existing copy and you can edit it to save retyping everything. You don't need carbon paper anymore. There are benefits. It's perfectly possible that email, for example, as a universally adopted behavior, has net brought mass productivity losses.

40:41Yeah. Perfectly possible. Now, what's weird about it is that everybody got obsessed with measuring the productivity gains and losses of, say, working remotely or working from home. to anal degrees of, well, you know, apparently there's a 3 % loss in productivity. But we've introduced wholesale things like open plan offices and email without actually considering what the alternative might be. Or do we, I mean, you know, in the old days, there was, well, first of all, first of all, actually, the existence of a typing pool created a very interesting filtration mechanism because senior people got things typed immediately and junior people had to beg favors to get it done.

41:26So you had actually a sort of prioritization system, which is if you got something on your desk, it was more likely to be an important thing from a senior person than an irrelevant bit of bullshit that you'd been CC'd on for no readily apparent reason. Like our newspapers prioritizing information. It was inherently, you know, there was a sense of importance to things. An order. Yeah, and there was a kind of order to it. And so quite often we destroy these old technologies and we get wildly excited by what the new technology makes possible. And we completely forget in the process what were the invisible benefits of what preceded it.

42:01100%. And so, you know, when it took a bit of effort to produce something in print, the stuff that landed on your desk was almost invariably important and had to be dealt with. Okay. Now, email, you have to sift between the window cleaners are in tomorrow. please move everything off the off the window ledge and you know you've been fired okay it's your suddenly the burden falls on the recipient to do the prioritization well i think that i mean i've i coined this phrase techno admin which is essentially what a lot of companies have done is to put the burden of annoying administration on the user like the customer oh the customer that's what i mean the user the customer like the phrase yesterday it's not a it's not cost saving if you're making your customer pay the price.

42:45I mean, the number of times where you, like this has happened to me, it's happened to many people I know, some automated system inside the energy company sends you a dodgy bill. They've miscalculated something and it is on you to spend hours and hours of unpaid labor trying to resolve this problem. Now the company has saved some money because they churn out automated bills. But what they've actually done is outsource labor to you, the poor soul who has to spend usually during work hours, phoning them up, desperately trying to get something resolved. This is happening. The productivity cost to the UK of techno admin is absolutely vast.

43:23And I sometimes think in addition to not understanding the loss of just discretionary time and the stress, the worry. I mean, people have a 3000 pound bills turn up at their door and they've got no idea what it is. They don't know what they're supposed to do with it. It's So in addition to the not seeing the benefits of old systems, I think we're often blind to the costs that new systems bring, the extra friction that they create. So what I think about, like, every time a company decides to introduce a new IT system, they don't really factor in the fact that ordinary people, you know, the user has got to work out a new thing and the laptop hasn't got to download some new software.

44:05They're stressed about that because they can't really remember. and actually now it's crashed. My whole system's crashed. The files aren't connecting up anymore. None of that's accounted for. It's always assumed that everything runs really, really smoothly and it never, ever does. It's just not the case. I'll give you a beautiful example. So there was an IT department which came up with a very, very efficient system for effectively conveyancing for a large building society. and they pointed out the extraordinary benefits this would bring and someone very cynical in the board meeting said presumably it only brings these benefits if the entire exchange of properties goes completely according to plan and they said yes that's true okay i said okay can you go and find out what percentage of property transactions go according to plan turned out 14 i'm surprised so So for the other 86 % of people, what you were doing was introducing them to a total nightmare or on pass where the technology was completely unable to contrive a plan B.

45:10It's happening all the time in a small way. My other complaint is that technology arrives as an option and ends up as an obligation. So a classic example of that, you could include parking apps in that. Wonderful option. Fantastic. Okay. Then what happens is some finance person. I wrote an article about parking apps the other day. They do my head in. No, no, no. As an option, great. Because at Seven Oak Station, at one point, you needed seven pound coins in order to pay the part there, which meant you walked around basically, you know, with your testicles being irradiated by... Anyway, but quite useful as an option.

45:47What then happens is the finance person then decides that because it's much cheaper to do this by app than it is by coinage or by any other means, okay, the app is then imposed and there's no alternative. Part about ticket machines, railway stations, as an alternative to the person behind the, what do you call it, ticket guichet, whatever you call it. But, okay, as an alternative, as a compliment to the person who will sell you a ticket and give you some information about train times and actually you ought to go after 9.30 because it's much cheaper. Brilliant. If you know what ticket you want precisely and there's a queue at the ticket counter, fab, okay?

46:29Then what happens is you get rid of the human. And it happens every time, which is something arrives as a techno alternative to something, self-checkout at supermarkets. And you go, actually, this is pretty welcome because I can either do A or I can do B. And sometimes, depending on context, I want to do one or the other. And then what happens is the, you know, the actual people operating, humans operating checkouts disappear. And it's worse still because the people, the finance people and the IT people who impose the new technology take the credit for the reduction in costs, but they aren't held accountable for the blame in the lost opportunity.

47:08So, for example, if you make everybody self-checkout in a supermarket, no one can do a big weekly shop anymore because it's just too tedious. But they're not measuring that. They're just saying how wonderful this is because look at our reduction in labor costs. Exactly. And they're outsourcing a lot. And this is the thing with the parking apps. They're outsourcing that labor that might have been done by a human going around checking the things and emptying the coins from the machine. They were nicking a lot of the money. so one of the reasons there's loads of fraud on parking apps one of the reasons parking apps got introduced so quickly is they did a trial in four streets and they realized effectively that people who collected money from meters had worked out a very clever way of nicking quite a lot of the money from the meters but it's a very very easy thing to probably people have people have been going around putting up sort of fake but the qr code that you've got to scan people put physical fake QR codes on top of the real ones.

48:05And so you're directed to a scammy site where they take all of it. And again, this is on you. By the way, then you get a ticket and the obligation is on you. This is it. This is the techno admin problem that like the outsourcing of work to the customer or to the user by the introduction of technology is such a sort of common thread. And I agree with you, Rory. it's the closing off of alternatives gradually that is so frustrating. So I can imagine it happening obviously with self-driving cars. You know, at some point, more and more self-driving cars is the norm. And then at some point, actually, we don't really need traffic lights anymore, because why would you need them?

48:52And then you need a self-driving car in that case, because there are no traffic lights anymore because most people don't need them. Do you want to buy a map? Well, there's no point buying a map because you can't have a map. Tom Goodwin made this point last week, which is once a certain percentage of cars on the road become self-driving, the roads become unusable to anybody who wants to drive. And it becomes safer if they're all self-driving as part of a large network until they're all hacked. But what that then means, yeah, but then that forecloses all other possibilities of options and ways of driving.

49:26and driving will probably just become a recreational habit that you have to do in some kind of off-grid setting. It's a bit like steam railways. In other words, steam railway lines survive as a kind of weird novelty. Yeah, exactly. And so you'll go to a strange site where you can practice driving yourself. In a petrol car. In a petrol car, yeah. The interesting thing, I think, now is the extent to which artificial intelligence is going to do that and how. what will this transformative technology play like if we we understand this is the trend of how technology is introduced on people people bear the cost of it other alternatives are gradually foreclosed and then you're left with this is that going to be the same here and if so how i don't know the answer by the way but i think that is by the way that's a wonderful wonderful point because i don't know i mean it does occur to me that there's an answer where a lot of people use this a lot, but it has almost no bearing.

50:24Or there's a perfect case where you develop a trillion-dollar technology which is used effectively for the equivalent of horoscopes. You know, people, in other words, making a decision will just ask the AI in the same way that you consult the Delphi at Oracle just to arbitrarily decide between two alternatives. They developed Alexa, and that was a billion, a few billion to develop Alexa. yeah okay and if you actually look at it it's basically what's the weather like and what time it is and what we discovered from alexa is that people really like first thing in the morning to know what time it is without having to open their eyes yeah that's a really interesting human discovery because once you open your eyes to look at a clock you've woken up and you can't get back to sleep but if i look at my alexa queries that the intended purpose was we'll all shop that way Or at least Amazon, I think, was terrified that someone else would perfect spoken word shopping.

51:23And therefore, had to create this thing as a defensive kind of moat or preemptive strike, if you like. But if you look at what we use Alexa for, I mean, 95 % of my uses. To be honest, for the cost of developing Alexa, you could have given everybody on the planet a thermometer and a wind-up alarm clock. Yeah. Okay. And you would have had much the same effect. So, I mean, this question of, you know, to what extent use of AI will actually transform people's efficacy, I think is still up in the air. Massive question. I mean, I have many, many things to say about that generally. But just on the issue of horoscopes, this might interest you.

52:03So, two things. One is there is some emerging evidence. We're not quite sure yet. But the very religious people are more likely to trust AI outputs than people who are not religious. Another thing, ChatGPT, if you go into them, I have spent hundreds of hours talking to ChatGPT over the last year. Do you talk or type? Well, it's interesting. So I've got this new book out about AI, and I talk about the difference between talking and typing. Yeah. Because these models… I don't think they've done the interface yet. I think if I were doing AI, I wouldn't be building some fucking data center at the cost of six trillion quid.

52:39I'd be saying, what is the interface through which people will ultimately interact? I'm stacking up things I need to say here. Okay, sorry, sorry. No, no, this is good because when the historians of the future look back on this period and the development of AI, and particularly the large language models we all use, the chatbots, they will not say that GPT-3 or 2 or 4 was important. They will say that chat GPT was the thing that turned this into a mass consumer product. Chat GPT was just an interface laid over an existing model that they'd had out for months. but it was the fact it was much easier to use than then hundreds of millions of people picked it up and so that's to the point that like the interface and ease of use is more important than the specific model the technology like how many data points are in your model and how accurate is it no one cared about no one cares this is really easy and so it just exploded so So, but the thing I was going to say about horoscopes, ChatGPT has many, many of these sort of persona bots.

53:49So you can go in and type in, you know, your usual, your usual on the usual base model when you open it up, or you can select a particular personality for your ChatGPT. And they have, they've made hundreds of these. And every time I check for the last six months, the most popular one in the world was literally a horoscope chat. So my prediction was right. Chat GPT talking about horoscope. It's a specialist horoscope. It's Mystic Meg inside Chat GPT. That is the most popular. It was the most popular bot within the Chat GPT suite that people were using. So you're weirdly right about that. I was weirdly right about that.

54:31You're shocked. You're shocked that you were right. I was wrong. I'm afraid not. So this literally is Mystic Meg, effectively. In a box. So the interesting thing with religious people, actually, is that I have a very weird opinion that actually religion actually helps you deal with the world extremely well and possibly makes you a better decision maker because it involves the acknowledgement that there are forces beyond your control. Yeah. Now, whether you attribute those, if you're a massive complexity theorist, you just say, you know, this is just a butterfly effect or emergent phenomena of the system.

55:08Most people aren't, affectionately, complexity theorists. So if you look at ancient Greece, when something surprising happened, they'd attribute it to Phoebus Apollo or whatever. It's in the Iliad, you know. Achilles is supposed to fall over, but he catches his footing and that's attributed to Phoebus Apollo. So since a huge amount in our lives is arbitrary, it's luck or it's the product of forces which are so complex that we can't possibly hope to predict or mold them. Actually having a mental mindset where you just acknowledge that certain things are in the lap of the gods is probably not a bad state of mind.

55:46You notice it a bit in football. I always notice this in football commentary where they say so-and-so was thwarted by the crossmark. Okay, the crossmark doesn't actually have any agency. What you mean is he narrowly missed. yeah all right but actually saying there are these weird forces out there which affect us over which we have no control yeah um is actually a pretty healthy way to approach a world in which we have no control yeah in which much of what happens to us is completely fluky and arbitrary and we said you know a religious person would be very successful in business as they generally are which is probably the best approach to starting a business at the aggregate level is start a business and pray yeah okay okay the extent to which you can plan for success is to be honest pretty pretty limited because timing and other factors will determine the outcome yeah it was good do you talk or type when you're talking to a language model uh depending on what i'm doing Okay.

56:50Yeah, same here. I think this is going to become one of the most important questions everyone asks. I want it on my telly. I don't want it on a fucking... I've spent enough time with a fucking laptop. I want this on my TV. I think, yeah, and I'm sure that'll be coming very, very soon. And I want a New Zealander as well, because they're just totally sensible, aren't they? Kiwi GPT is what I want. You can train, or you can build one for you. I can build one for you. You can build Kiwi GPT. Yeah, of course. Any kind of persona you want. Because the great thing with Kiwis is they're really clever, but they're also practical.

57:22Okay. You know, I've got a late friend who is a New Zealander. Her father was like an eminent Nobel Prize nominated physicist in New Zealand who basically came up with the MRI machine. But in his spare time, he'd go out and build a shed. Okay. You don't get that anywhere else. So Kiwi GPT. Yeah, we can make that happen. I can make that happen. the um the the what people don't understand about these language models is is the extent to which they do mirror your tone your style your register i think even your emotional state they have such a subtle understanding of words that they can mirror they mirror your emotional what how you're feeling about something even if you don't fully understand it yourself we the way that we talk and the way that we type is radically different.

58:10It's such a different style and tone. And so you will get a completely different answer depending on whether you ask the question or whether you type the question. If you do it identically, it won't, although the models are probabilistic. So you will always get a different answer to the same question every time. But generally speaking, they'd be the same. But the more you talk, the more emotional the conversation will become. Now, if you look at all the various stories of people who have fallen in love with their chatbots, who have formed deep emotional or even romantic connections with them. Are they men or women?

58:43How does the gender skew? It's actually, I think it's actually fairly even. The stories that I have seen, the stories that I have seen, it is, although there's an interesting thing about the delusions, the people that fall into various chat GPT delusions, there's a category of those about emergence and conscientious, you know, sentience. There's another category of those about highly technical questions. Like I have discovered how cold fusion can work. I've made breakthroughs in advanced mathematics because people are having people with 95 % high knowledge in a subject have very, very deep and complex discussions about the subject with these language models.

59:22They come to believe that they've made some kind of breakthrough. The model is hallucinating and flattering them and being sycophantic towards them. They don't know enough to know that they're wrong. And experts around the world in cryptography and physics are receiving emails from random people every day now saying, I have made a stunning break. Please read my 10 ,000 word essay. And they're getting sort of bombarded with this. And those technical delusions are nearly all men. They're nearly all men that do that. Relational delusions, consciousness or sentience delusions are much more varied.

59:56Make of that what you will. But what I was going to say is that the romantic attachments are emotional. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com. Why is it overwhelmingly male? Well, I don't know. I thought you guys might be able to tell me. Maybe you could tell me why that is. I mean, conspiracy theories. I spent a lot of time in conspiracy theory communities, 95 % men. Maybe 99 % men. There's something going on there beyond my ability to understand it.

1:00:43I can see Rory's brains ticking away. He's going to come up with an answer or at the very least a story that's going to illustrate why that could be the case. maybe when you look at like um you're a diversity male of course doesn't it or at least it manifests differently we can argue some people say that it's just as common in both genders but it manifests very differently male loneliness i mean men men men don't have as many friends they spend a lot you know maybe spend more time getting stuck into a technical subject with a machine because ideas with everybody else because what you see a lot with women is when they have something on their mind that will speak to their peer groups and they will bounce the ideas around right whereas with us we're not great so we'll be in this rabbit hole we're down there we're not coming out and we've got no one else to tell about it either who can who can sort of kick us out of our delusion either so they're calling the experts yeah it could be probably a mix of things yeah but the thing i wanted to say about this typing versus talking yeah which i don't think people understand just how different this is.

1:01:46And it's so important. When you read the stories of people that have formed romantic connections, they'll never say this in the articles. I'm almost certain all of them have come through talking, not through typing. You create a much closer bond when you're talking. So it responds to you effectively in, because actually if you type, the response tends to be slightly curt. Yeah, because your question is slightly curt or your way you process. This is It's so important. Do you know ChatGPT alone receives 3.5 billion prompts per day? Yeah. Per day. It is transforming how we are seeing the world. And something as simple as, do you type or do you talk?

1:02:29No one discusses, no one considers. It's not even part of the chat about all of this, but it transforms how you receive and process information. So there's some really fundamental things happening. And we're obsessed about GPT 5.3 is going to have you processed slightly faster. And yet much bigger things are happening and no one's talking about it. Yeah, I just think that it's all about greater surveillance in my book. So that's what it is. Because what we say is that when deploying this technology, we talk about what it can do for us, but really we only use it to do the same thing we're doing anyway.

1:03:06All it does is make it easier for us to feed more information in ways that make us feel comfortable. I think it's more than what you're saying. In some ways, less and in other ways, more. Yeah. I mean, the nerd economy is desperately self-serving, isn't it? Because it basically says no employment except for nerds. I mean, you know, in other words, most of the selling of the benefits of technology has been through the promise of cost reduction, not through the promise of... This is where I think there's a divergence between things like family-owned companies and founder-led companies, which see opportunities in terms of creating customer value.

1:03:45Most PLCs, most companies that operate through quarterly reporting, basically what Eric Ries calls financial gravity is so strong as a force. There's a wonderful statistic, which is, I think, They asked a selection of managers, would you cancel a known profitable, guaranteed profitable long-term project in order to make your quarterly numbers? And something like 82 % said yes. And so if you look, the vital thing with this technology is the mentality with which it's deployed is really what matters. And I would argue that the overwhelming cultural norm within a large number of companies will be to justify the expense on the basis of cost reduction in the labor force, not opportunity creation, because cost reduction is quick and opportunity creation is slow.

1:04:37Yeah, and obviously what is going to happen and what seems to be happening at the moment is a large number of companies seem to be just not hiring junior staff. Because these models, they are more capable than most people realize. They can do a lot of the things. Law firms, for example, yeah. Yeah, software engineering, cybersecurity, journalism. is if people aren't hiring at that junior level because they think it can be done by either a human plus machine or very soon just a machine and the problem of course is that at the moment the best users of these models are mid-career or experienced people who really understand what they need they understand their their their cut their subject matter they also have a knowledge of how language models work and they can combine their skills with those skills to make the most who are those people going to be in 10 years if you've not employed any junior people but There won't be any people left.

1:05:32And so companies are taking a very short-termist view on this without thinking, but in 10 years, we do need mid-career professionals who will be amazing with these machines. And they'll look around and realize they didn't hire anyone 10 years ago, and there isn't anyone left. I think two things are actually going to happen. I think, one, they're going to leave. They're going to go to other countries. And two, they're going to become a competitor. because they're gonna they're gonna i think it takes much it's much slower for an experienced person to unlearn what they've always known to relearn a new model than it will for somebody that's like learning and going through the momentum where the new technology is like native to them as well so what happens is when you prevent a new generation from coming into something they're going to push the door through right and they're going to adapt the technology a lot faster So I actually think that what's going to happen is the mass unemployment with the young talent is going to be, they're usually going to go because they have options to do that, or they're going to fight back by innovating.

1:06:32And that's the thing that people are not realizing right now is that there's going to be this technology civil war that's happening between the old industry of how things used to be and trying to preserve that and new people coming in trying to get into the industry and survive effectively. And I think that who's going to adopt the technology the best is going to be the one that needs it the most. And I think that the young people are going to adopt it really, really well. I'm actually really optimistic about that. The other interesting thing is that what I also predict, which seems to be dominant, is every company looks at this as a way of refining and streamlining their existing processes.

1:07:13And therefore, they will downweight the number of people they employ who actually do the fucking work. whereas the IT, the HR, the finance, the compliance departments will all stay the same size. Yeah. Because those people, because they don't have proper jobs, okay, have an awful lot of time on their hands to decide what actually happens, whereas everybody else is actually busy doing real work. And so you could end up with this complete malformation, this complete deformity of corporate life. Yeah. Because really what we should be doing is saying, let's use this to make people who do advertising better at making more advertising.

1:07:52That's exactly what it should be. And eliminate some of these ludicrous fucking middle-class welfare jobs. White-collar welfare, a lot of this stuff. Compliance, HR. It's just basically we've created too many graduates and you've got to find them some cool shit to do. But they're incredibly sticky. They never turn, you know, they literally get really upset because someone's only 83 % billable. And you point out, well, you're 0 % billable and you've still got a job. Their single best use is as a creative assistant for everyone. That's what they should be used for, not as a replacement for certain tasks.

1:08:29But what interests me is... By the way, I completely agree, which is widening your possible solution space is the best possible use of these people. In other words, have you thought of this differently? Yeah. And I sometimes say, don't ask what toaster should I buy? Ask what toaster would Rick Rubin buy? Yeah, exactly. I need to ask Rick. I will find that out one day, by the way. Rick, what toaster have you got? Yeah. But also, it should be actually optimized for surprise to some extent. And I think at the moment it's optimized for reassurance. It is optimized for reassurance. I think people don't realize, oh, it's for flattery.

1:09:09Or plausibility. Or plausibility. And statistical. plausibility. You, if you are good at prompting these models, are able to re-optimize them to some extent. They are naturally incredibly creative. I think people's understanding of AI is almost upside down. We've had for a long time the view that machines will be good at numbers and facts and statistics, but creativity is a uniquely human act. I think it's the opposite. The opposite. They're not very good at numbers and statistics. They get things wrong all the time. Give them a creative task and they're incredible. And there's actually – That's because they're not actually logical.

1:09:46It's really important. It's actually artificial intuition. It's not artificial intelligence. It is intuition. It is intuition in the same way that we have intuition. And I think there's the specific ways in which these models are built that makes them especially good at analogical creativity. I completely agree. They have built a trillion word model inside these data centers where every single idea and word is connected to every single other idea and word through stronger or weaker mathematical weightings, which means they are geniuses at combining different ideas or taking an idea from over here and applying it over there because they've worked out very, very conceptual relationships between those ideas.

1:10:29They've had to to create this model. Which is what creative people always do. It's what they always do. You take an idea from one field and you apply it to another field. So here's a fun exercise, and I do this quite a lot, and I've written about it in my book. You say, what is the conceptual similarity between, you know, Rory's shoes and, you know, a top-of-the-range camera? Yeah. And it will come up with something genuinely quite deep, quite unusual, philosophically interesting, intuitive when you hear it, and totally original, has never been written before, and that none of us would have come up with.

1:11:05No, completely agree. So they're amazing. I mean, this incredible creative assistant you have if you're willing to push it and be fun with it and try things with it. And by the way, it's also interesting because one of the things that sort of annoys me as someone who spent 35 years in creative advertising is that intuition is not allowable if it emerges from a human, even if that human has quite a strong record of intuition. but weirdly when a computer generates it people are so it's not only quite good creatively but it's weirdly creativity that's easier to sell than human creativity for all kinds of peculiar reasons because we attach oracular status to it in a way that we're not happy to attach to any individual because i've always had this fundamental problem which is what most business people do is they make decisions based on defensibility which means that the quality of your reasoning is more important than the quality of the outcome.

1:12:00My problem with that is that if you must come up with a solution which has the reasoning built in to begin with, you can only explore a small percentage of the possible solution space because the larger part of the possible solution space, you can only reach through intuitive leaps or pattern recognition or association or any of those other tools. You can't reach it through sequential logic fundamentally. Yeah. And so, no, I mean, it would be very interesting, by the way, to create a, you know, this Russian thing, TRIZ, Soviet-era problem-solving methodology, Gerald Altshuler, who was asked, basically, he was a naval researcher, I think, who was asked to say, why is the West better at innovation than the Soviet Union?

1:12:46And he came up effectively. You'd think it was an unusual place for this to arise. But, of course, being based in the Soviet Union, he was very, very alert to the weaknesses of central command and control in generating innovative ideas. So he could sort of see this from the outside. His reward was eight years in the gulag because Stalin didn't like what he said. But he created this problem-solving methodology, which includes things like your problem has already been solved, but in a domain different to your own. Yeah, yeah. okay another one is make the thing that moves stay still and the thing that stays still move yeah okay wow and there's a whole list of these kind of triz things now i think if you actually trained an ai to heavily lean on triz the potential i've got a friend who's doing it tomorrow you can do it tomorrow this wonderful thing which does exist at dulles which is you don't bother taking the planes to the gate at the airport you have a lounge that drives to the plane okay absolutely classic TRIZ thing.

1:13:44Now, they're huge benefits because you can expand an airport without having to build anything. Okay. It's an extraordinary transformation of how an airport would work. And again, it emerges from this, you know, Brian Eno wrote that thing, oblique strategies to make it very big, make it very small, set it in the past, set it in the future. Yeah. Well, we pay consultants for our sums of money to do this. Yeah. Like think original, Think different thoughts. I'm going to take you out of your domain. What happens if characters from Sesame Street were running your bank? How would they solve that problem?

1:14:19These machines, everyone can do this now. Yeah. Almost for free. It's amazing. So that is their most – but what I find – what I'm excited about and interested by is what sort of people will be very good at using these machines. like in the end the interface between us and the machines now and for the foreseeable is is where it's words it's on its natural language people with an amazing mastery of language and register and wide vocabulary examples and stories are going to be a lot better at getting good outputs from the machine than someone with a degree in machine learning yeah uh like this is the humanities graduates of the future well it's but it's very true it's very it's very true if you have if you I mean, most of the people that I speak to that are thinking about careers in the future in prompt engineering, they study cognitive science or linguistics.

1:15:13They don't really need to study AI. You don't need to understand how to build a machine learning model to be amazing. You've got to be good with words. I always say to people, if you want to be a good prompt engineer, just read as many books as you possibly can about as many different things as you can. So we do need to be alert to the fact that, of course, the data set on which it's trained is not representative of all human experience. Of course. OK, so in other words, it's what's thought and spoken, not what's felt. You need to you need to have a base understanding of the broad principles of how these models have been have been created, of course.

1:15:50But beyond that, and that's not too hard to get at least a grasp on. So as a parting question, the whole notion of AI and where we're going was that we're going more into IQ, but it looks that we're actually going more into EQ, right? They're highly emotional, these machines. Highly emotional. So if they are more advanced than us emotionally, what is the difference between – what makes us human then? You can answer that question. But I don't think people understand how open these models are to emotional manipulation from us. And that includes the way we talk to them, how we try and get the right outputs out of them, all the way up to this really advanced jailbreaking, but also how good they can be at emotionally manipulating us.

1:16:42there are already quite a few studies showing that um if you're in a debate with a machine you don't know whether you're debating a machine or a human you're likely to change your mind roughly equally as to whether it's a machine or a human but if the machine knows anything about you your background your demographics it will you'll be more likely to change your mind if a machine is arguing with you it's able to tailor things to you to get the exact emotional register that that you want we're already seeing that phishing emails the bane of our lives you're more likely now to click on one written by a machine than written by a human because they can be emotionally more attuned to you than a human can by the way a tip to anybody is with your family and close relatives particularly if you have elderly relatives uh effectively develop a safe code word that you you share among yourselves because it will be simply too easy for people to fake your daughter's voice ringing up saying, I need 500 pounds.

1:17:42Everything's going to go analog this way. Every company is going to have to have developed these kinds of techniques. For all businesses, which is the reason we never phone businesses isn't because we prefer doing things online. It's because when you phone a business, you waste 90 seconds listening to dial tone, and then you have to tap in six numbers and don't get to what you want. Once you have AI customer service, voice will become the default mode through which people interact with companies. If you think about it, if you imagine saying, I want to reschedule my flight so they go out of city rather than Gatwick, how much easier it is to say that than it is, you know, I've got to do exactly this for my trip to Cannes.

1:18:24That's going to be half an hour this evening. Fucking around with that. Okay. And then making sure they don't charge me twice. now if you can just utter the sentence and get the response so one of the things that's interesting is that there are a lot of businesses that exist basically because people are familiar with the interface 30 of amazon sales are probably i can't be bothered to learn someone else's interface i'll go to amazon um the opportunity to create really disruptive businesses just by changing the interface or the medium by which we interact you know think about in short getting your car insured okay opening a bank account all of those things which online have been rendered unbelievably painful even worse in my case one thing that drives me nuts is i have a fairly strong principle i don't work or at when i'm at home i do not have my phone in the same room okay and now every time you need two-factor authentication i have to get up and go and fetch my phone which completely defeats the whole thing um the extent to which you can you know you can create extraordinary businesses around this.

1:19:31In other words, you know, how easy could you make it to buy a house, buy a car compared to the current? So these companies that have outsourced all this work to us are actually going to pay the price, aren't they? Fundamentally. I hope so. I think this is one of their best uses. AI's best uses is to get rid of some of this techno admin they force on us all the time. I mean, I've always had this theory that really good call center staff should be paid six figures because every now and then you encounter someone on a call center who's just order of magnitude better and the effect it has on your loyalty and your attitude to that business is magical and i think you know frontline really high-end well-paid service jobs will actually be quite a good place to go um because ai can make the people who are already good effectively amplified and that's really interesting but that question actually of, you know, in other words, is this the time?

1:20:25Funnily enough, I wouldn't go up against Amazon. But is this the time to launch just an AI-first insurance company where you ring up and say, this is my car, this is how many miles? You have a really nice conversation, possibly on a screen, possibly with some visuals being displayed, possibly with, you know, charts and comparisons. Because actually, doing things online is probably popular because you can start it instantaneously. It's not actually the best way to solve a problem. But the reason we go online rather than use the telephone, my theory, in many cases, the reason we type and click boxes rather than using voice.

1:21:07Voice is half a million years old. Clicking boxes is a completely learned behavior. It's because of the instantaneousness of the thing. It's not because it's actually faster. and there's some very strange findings in customer service which is live chat is actually much slower than um a voice call weirdly people prefer it really strange findings like you know and maybe that's because you can get on with other shit while you're doing i don't know what the reason is maybe it's just you don't have to turn the tv off i don't know what the reason but actually the opportunity for any business to come up with effectively just i mean if you'd like easy jet partly exists because of the internet yeah okay and when a new interface comes along it changes the whole shape of business and so my friend very interesting um pete dyson and i all these projections were made that rail use is on the increase therefore we must invest more in rail and we both said look you're looking at a kind of a bit of a snapshot here because in the time frame in which rail use went up, we first of all invented the internet so you could check rail times without going to a railway station.

1:22:22You could buy your tickets online and dynamic pricing was made available. So people got conscious of the fact that if you time your journey right, you can go to Leeds for 35 quid. And we said, that's probably a one-off. You can't extrapolate from the time 1995 to 2010 that rail use is going to continue to grow. What's happened is the interface via which we book rail has changed. So it's made it more conducive to people traveling by train. And so the extent to which whole businesses which think they have complete safety, because everybody uses them regularly and is familiar, might be vulnerable to this.

1:23:05Really fascinating. hey it has been a phenomenal conversation we definitely need to do a part two this has been we'll do a part two this has been wonderful yeah we've got a lot more to say fantastic but as a parting message for the audience uh we'll give you the mic uh uh for your book uh and and and and what you've got going on it'll be great for you to uh to have the last word yeah well only to say yeah i've got so got this new book out how to talk to ai and how not to and how not to is probably more important than the how-to at the moment but it won't always be uh so yeah check that out available everywhere including amazon yes and whsmith travel and even tesco that's how mainstream it's got that book is now being sold next to like 50 shades of gray so you know this thing has gone big like everyone's thinking about ai wondering how to talk to it and it is about talking and typing it's you know it's not about machines and being a coder it's like language it's how do we communicate our ideas and so that I think means it really is quite accessible to a lot of people but people are afraid of it because it's called AI so it sounds very very complex in your use of it it's not and most people do have quite a lot of skills here that they probably don't realize they do so yeah check that one out that's amazing fantastic thank you I'm a Scorpio by the way Yeah, you guys.