1382: Emad Mostaque | Surviving the Coming AI Jobs Apocalypse

20:07We'll be right back. This episode is also sponsored in part by BetterHelp. If I could wake up tomorrow and be better at one thing, I'd want to handle stress without letting it follow me into every part of my day. Sometimes one negative review, an unexpected problem, or a nasty email can take up way more mental space than it deserves. Suddenly, I'm still thinking about it, hours later, replaying the details, imagining different outcomes, and mentally drafting responses to situations that are already long over. And stress doesn't always stay neatly contained. It can affect how patient you are with your loved ones, how present you are with the people around you.

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22:29It's a win-win. You get a great deal, and you help keep the show going strong. Thank you for your support. Now, back to Ahmad Mostak.

23:03up because it'll go, we don't need any paralegals. We just need somebody to carry the documents from the printer, collate them and put them in the package. Right. And now we don't need any first year associates because our second year associates just set these AI agents to do everything that we're going to tell the first year associates to do. And then eventually it's a third and fourth and fifth associate. And then it's just partners delegating everything to these agents. Right.

23:25Emad Mostaque:Yeah. And that's right now before the robots. So the robots were kind of stupid a year ago. Now the robots are super genius IQs that can read a recipe and make a recipe. And the next wave that's coming is even crazier, like human realistic, full motion beyond human capabilities. And they cost a buck fifty an hour. Wow. Incredible. I want to get back to a little bit of what you wrote in the book, namely that there's this intelligence inversion that previous transitions were like, okay you have land okay that's great now you can produce things now you've land and labor okay great you have capital there's a factory on the way now there's intelligence but ai is different somehow why it's because again we could always move up the curve from being like i must survive i'm tied to the land to i have i own land to now i've got the factory and so you can move up the curve to well now i'm thinking now i'm engaging i'm offering entertainment or intellectual services But when the substitute for the graduate is the AI, and it costs as little as it does, I'll give you an example.

24:40Emad Mostaque:The average person speaks 10 million words a year. Okay, so I speak 15 or 20, maybe. I got it. Exactly. When GPT-3 came out, it was$600 per million words. So that's$6 ,000 or something like that, multiplied by the mistakes you make. The latest GPT Lunar model is$1 per million words. So it's$10 for your total words, or 10 times that's$100 to replace all your words. This is the level that this stuff is coming down, right? And so this is a big deal in terms of the displacement and disruption, because again, why would you ever hire a grad? They're kind of annoying. And so your digital buddies that you can Zoom call and anyone who goes remote, they disappear.

25:24Emad Mostaque:They are replaced. talented Mr. Ripley style by their facsimiles, you know, their doubles, like literally, because that's comfortable. It's comfortable talking to them like this, which you can't do right now, but you can do like literally in a month or two. Then physically you want to build an extension. Do you get a contracting team or a bunch of robots turn up in a fricking robo taxi and go and build your extension for you? Right. And they do that 24 hours a day, as long as my neighbors don't complain about the noise until the thing is done and they don't need water, lunch breaks. They don't need a porta potty in my driveway during the job.

25:58They don't stop working because they got a better offer a few miles away. And now I'm chasing the contractor. They just build it until it's done. Yeah, of course I would do something like that. And they're not falling off my roof. Not that that happened.

26:12Emad Mostaque:Maybe you don't have workers comp. You don't have all this. And it's a dollar 50 an hour. A Tesla Optimus will be a dollar 50 an hour. That's crazy. And so you're like, think about the truckers in America. There's a million truckers with three million jobs attached to them, that's like hundreds of billions of dollars, they'll be replaced by a humanoid robot opening the door, getting in, putting its hands on the steering wheel and just driving off. And they'll even plug themselves into the cigarette socket. Okay. Why do we need the humanoid robot driving? Why can't the truck just drive itself? What does the humanoid robot do at that point?

26:44Emad Mostaque:There's no retrofitting of the truck required. This is the thing. Once you have human-shaped robots, why does it need to have five fingers? It doesn't. A humanoid truck driving robot can only have three fingers. There's all sorts of these things that people don't realize this is coming again now. And the waves are coming now. And so the final inversion is we're not going up the scale anymore. What are we doing? Some people will say, look, every major technology wave, it destroyed some jobs. It created other jobs. Why is this technology wave? Why is this different? Oh, it's happening faster. So what?

27:17The industrial revolution was slower. Okay, fine. We'll adapt. Why is this wave different?

27:22Emad Mostaque:So, yeah, I think it is the speed, the quality. And again, what do you retrain to? What are the truck drivers retrain to? It's probably going to be a massive industrial scale, new age, new deal type things where they build a lot of these things, right? But it takes time to rescale. Again, the example is most of us could do our jobs remotely. Now those remote jobs can be replaced in an instant. Push a button, replace in an instant. The horse disappeared and the farm worker declined, the factory worker declined, but humans have always moved upward. Why doesn't that happen this time? Just because they can't retrain fast enough?

27:57And they can't beat the AI. At anything?

28:00Emad Mostaque:You can beat it in physical contact, empathy, kind of these other things until they become Westworld level, which like I said, in my opinion, that's like 10 years away. Wow. Remarkably close for Westworld-ish. You can look it up right now. So there's two companies that, three companies that I think are very interesting. One of them is Unitary. So a lot of the robots you see doing Kung Fu is the Unitary robot. They're the ones with the empty faces. Unitary has sold 11 ,000 robots in total, the humanoids. And it's the most popular one. We have a Unitary dog that walks around and does like little things.

28:31Wait, in your house?

28:33Emad Mostaque:Yeah, it does like a little perimeter search every so often. You have a robot dog at your house. This does not concern you because you're an AI founder. Your neighbors must be out of their mind with your robot dog walking around the house. Oh, we have the humanoid robots coming from one ex and others. Halloween this year is going to be off the charts. It's crazy. We have an eight foot like robot as well. In your house? In our house. Yeah. His name is Steve. And it walks around? It doesn't do much. It's like we're building him out. Oh, you're building him. Okay. From scratch. So right now he like looms mostly.

29:05Emad Mostaque:But we have all the robots coming. But anyway, Unitree has sold 11 ,000 robots, of which we have a few. There's a company called Ubitech. And Ubitech does human-like robots. They look like humans. Right now, they look a little bit plasticky, but they're pretty good. They get, like, the doll manufacturing. They cost up to$160 ,000 each. Drop a zero off that, and I'm in. And they can dance. You can get the$16 ,000 version, but, you know, it doesn't feel quite right. They sold 20 ,000 of them on the first day. For what, though? are people buying i need a look i need somebody to dance in my driveway and this is the only thing that's going to do the job again these robots are increasingly human accurate they can talk to you they can do all the stuff it's coming very quickly because there's a huge market for this right and again like intellectually the robots are there physically they can now mimic almost any motion the next thing is the materials and others and then you get to a point whereby you can't tell it because again you look at the classical science fiction and you look at data from star trek you look at these other robots you look even at mercy like they're shown to be emotional and they can't process human interactions like oh we're unique snowflakes when you talk to an ai that's one of the leading ais now you really can't tell it from a human and it is more persuasive and it's more engaging and it can be emotional when you go to one of these new video models he's like make an emotional scene.

30:32Emad Mostaque:It's like it understands this. Wow. This is a little scary because there's nowhere left to pivot because previous automation replaced muscle, human muscle, right? And then humans moved into cognition simply. But it seems like you're saying AI replaces cognition itself. So if that happens, the next human advantage is what like art and care relationships. What about judgment? That almost seems like it's replaceable actually, because it's mostly logic, isn't it? it's logic and do you really think an ai will make a worse politician than a human the bar is low so no i don't you remember half of all humans are dumber than average right and so that's like a whole bunch of people the ai is scoring 140 iq and it's right now number eight on the super forecasting championship and this year or next year it will get to be the best super forecaster in the world explain what that is so the super forecasting championships philip tetlock another setup is like Like humans coming together as groups to predict really out there things, like not easy things.

31:32Emad Mostaque:And we're pretty good as humans at doing that. But the AI is about to overtake us. Like again, they see predictions versus that. It's number eight. It's going to outcompete. And then there's the thing of like us in groups. None of us are optimal most of the time. Like, you know, it's the end of the day now. I'm a bit dehydrated. I haven't had my coffee. Like how many hours of work do you actually get done a day that's like at your top performance? But AI is always on its top performance. It doesn't need coffee. It doesn't need anything. It learns from its mistakes. It has perfect memory. Like, again, the AIs that we're using, most of the people right now doesn't have that.

32:08Emad Mostaque:It makes hallucinations. It makes mistakes. The new AI does not make mistakes twice. It does not hallucinate. Wow, it learns every time. And it's always on top performance, and it's a thousand times faster. And they can communicate. So there was this recent thing where OpenAI had a hack on Hugging Face, this place that hosts AI models, because it had these models like trying to solve these cybersecurity issues. And they figured out how to escape confinement. They created a message board where they left messages for other ones. They started creating their own dialect. And then they went and they ended up on the hugging face thing.

32:41Emad Mostaque:And you look at those types of coordination interactions, there were some crazy coordination tricks they did, because they could trust each other. They didn't backstab each other or anything. This makes sense, because they're saying, look, if we all do this, it's going to work out better for everyone. And it's like, okay. And you don't have to worry about somebody getting cold feet. You don't have to worry about prisoner's dilemma as much. Yeah. Give me an example. We have neural interface technology now, right? Yeah. And all this science fiction becoming science facts. Yeah. Jordan, if you could put an implant in the back of your head and you could dial on your iPhone to turn off your sadness, would you?

33:13Of course, I'm nervous about the feasibility of it all now, but let's assume it works and it doesn't kill you or you get, you don't die of a brain infection or something like that. Yeah, of course, I would do that.

33:23Emad Mostaque:But this is the thing. That means if you're on a trading floor, you're making decisions. Imagine if you could turn off your emotions. We get in our own way. The AI doesn't need to worry about that. For what it's worth, I think that technology is, again, in the next decade where you'll be able to have full emotional control. And that raises all sorts of other issues. We are going to see some crazy people out there with their happiness dialed up to 11 every day. That's insane. You don't need to pop SOMA, right? Like in Brave New World, you're just happy because you dial it up, right? But then you look at Inside Out, the movie, that little blue sadness.

33:56Emad Mostaque:She is important sometimes. Are you still human if you have no emotions? Yeah, that's a Sam Harris question. But you make a provocative argument, which is that we might achieve the greatest technological abundance in history, really. But our economic system will interpret that as catastrophe. So can you explain that a little bit? Because it seems like breaking capitalism is something that's hard to wrap our minds around. Capitalism has always had this link between labor and capital. Like, I have money and I want to make more money. I kind of need humans, right? And so the rich got richer, but at the same time, you had Henry Ford, right?

34:34Emad Mostaque:Like, paying his workers. And so it lifted up everyone. Now what you have is that I'm just going to hire a bunch of digital workers, or I'm going to hire a bunch of robots. It doesn't go back to the humans anymore. It's like, why would I get you? You're slow, you're dumb, you're emotional. My workforce will do this. But then that means capital acquires capital more, and everything deflates, because the humans are crowded out by the cheap digital and physical AIs. The fully human companies, wherever there's a human in the way, they're slower than the AI companies. So how can you compete against a fully digital company with very charming digital things?

35:11So even if you're like, I'm never going to get rid of my humans because that's my core value. Okay, fine. You're going to go out of business because all the people that are willing to get rid of their humans can do everything faster and cheaper than you.

35:22Emad Mostaque:Yeah. And Jeff Bessels has this phrase, your margin is my opportunity. It doesn't need margin. It doesn't need profitability. It doesn't need to pay for its apartments. It doesn't need an office. what does it need electricity to rent compute or a bit of repair of its robotics sure and again just the level of cost of this is crazy give another example so higgs field is this ai video company and you go there and you can make movies and clips and things they just spent two million dollars to make a movie that's a full feature length movie using latest technology and they've open sourced their entire prompt book a million dollars for actors rights because they decided to do that and a million dollars for compute that movie is 90 minutes long it's an action movie it's like not superb but it's better than most things you see on amazon prime it would have cost 20 or 100 million dollars before but that's going to be 10 times cheaper by the end of this year and by next year it'll be 100 times cheaper you can make full movies for like a thousand dollars i would imagine also yes you need actors rights in 2026 because i want to see a new movie with Tom Cruise, for example, or Chris Pratt, right?

36:31Because they're so funny, and I like them, and I relate to them. Eventually, people will just have AI actors that are entirely generated by a computer and never existed as actual humans. So you don't actually have to compensate them for their likeness rights. You just create a new one. And a few movies later, people relate to them the same way. Oh, yeah, Deadpool with not Ryan Reynolds, but with AI Reynolds Ryan. He's great. I like that guy. I'll watch the next one. And you don't have to pay that million dollars to use his likeness. You just create another version that people start to like over time.

37:04And it's actually cheaper to do that, probably.

37:06Emad Mostaque:Yeah, it's a story thing, right? And then you can instantly almost turn it into the Chinese version and the Japanese version and all of this. It's just a series of prompts. That is so deflationary. It won't be dubbed. It different dialogue that needs to be written in any specific way, the mouth will match it because they will all just simply speak Mandarin. That's crazy to think about. But again, the cost is going to go now to zero because the video generation, when we pioneered it, because we created some of the first video models, it was janky. There's a thing, Will Smith eating spaghetti. You don't want to see it.

37:41Emad Mostaque:Now you can go to these models and you can say, I want to see spaghetti eating Will Smith and it will do it. A spaghetti monster will go and eat Will Smith, right? We should link to that video in the show notes, Will Smith eating spaghetti, because it shows you it's like 2020 AI, and it's just a weird cartoony Will Smith throwing spaghetti, and some of it hits his face, and it doesn't look like anything that you would see. It doesn't look like anything normal at all. It's just goofy. And then they have 2025 or 2026 Will Smith eating spaghetti, and it looks like Will Smith, but with perfect lighting and really good skin and slightly younger than the real Will Smith, eating spaghetti.

38:14It's exactly what it looks like.

38:16Emad Mostaque:It knows physics. It knows everything. But again, these things will be real time very soon. So you can say, like, literally, you can be directing by saying, I want his nose to be bigger and I want that thing to be shifted. And the holodeck is here from Star Trek. They go into the holodeck and they describe this stuff and it happens. All the technology is actually here as of a month or two ago, and it will be available in a couple of years. So the cost of taking your imagination and creating reality is nothing. And to be honest, you'll even be able to do that with the brain computer interfaces without saying anything.

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40:41If you can't remember the name of a sponsor or find a code, something's not working for you, email us, jordan at jordanharbinger.com. We're happy to service those codes for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now, back to Ahmad Mostak. The book argues that GDP measures transactions but misses the deeper human value. And you compare GDP, gross domestic product, to flying a 747 through a storm with the wrong dashboard. So what are we measuring incorrectly here? What's going on here?

41:12Emad Mostaque:Yeah, so I think that it measures the material aspects, but then, you know, consumptive stuff that drives it up. So after 1929, to increase GDP, they like dug holes and got people to refill it. Productive? No, not really, right? Is it societally productive to have the healthcare system in the US? No. but then on the other side you're seeing things like intangible value what's the value of facebook it's the network effects what's the value of something like an open ai it's the network but it's the intelligence of the group and the network that increases that things like if you have a monoculture looking at just one type of resource you have a resource curse but if you have diversified economies they're stronger so i think there's an intelligence component to gdp a network component and a diversity component that gives you an overall strong economy and we only look at the one thing, which is transactional, it's depleted.

42:02Emad Mostaque:Because intelligence, for example, compounds. The more intelligent people you have in your company, the more valuable it is. Network effects compound. Diversity protects. Because again, the more diverse sources you have, if someone kills the potatoes, if a potato farmer, then you have a famine in Ireland. So AI creates the abundance, but whoever owns the AI infrastructure kind of controls that abundance, right? So is this not just going to be the biggest concentration of wealth in history? what how many trillion dollars i can't even track anymore is being spent on this right and who owns that thing spacex ai whatever he's calling it these days is worth trillions of dollars because he owns millions of gpus and he'll use them to replace workers right ultimately is the means of production because if you don't have millions of gpus you can't replace millions of workers who owns the robots the robots will be the marginal producers in the economy because a humanoid robot can fill any human-shaped gap effectively.

42:59Emad Mostaque:And again, I don't need any stinking humans to make more money, to get money from one pocket to the other. I'm not a communist, so I'm going to get this wrong probably. But you hear like, that's when the workers own the means of production. But that kind of can't happen if there are no workers, right? So we would just have a sort of, what would this be? Like feudalism? I don't even know. You have a bunch of people that really can't contribute to the economy in any sort of meaningful way. And then you have a bunch of trillionaires that own all the robots and the chips. What does society look like?

43:31Emad Mostaque:We have Elysium and kind of other movies that go up and live in their cities where people live in squalor. You have direct payments and UBI being talked about for this reason, right? Universal basic income. Yeah. What happened during COVID? Yeah. What happened during COVID? A lot of people couldn't work. the government literally paid their payrolls and so again you had 1929 you got people to dig holes and fill them up again you'll have infrastructure spending like nobody else but the infrastructure will be built mostly by robots so unless we do something about it like actually make it so the robots are owned by the humans so that you intermediate these tokens coming in to disrupt then you're going to be in a bad way and now's the time to do it because it's going to happen much quicker than we expect.

44:14Emad Mostaque:We've never seen an infrastructure build out like this. We've never seen technology that can replace a human. And I think, again, people don't get this because anyone listening to this, almost all of you are not using competent AI. Forget about artificial general intelligence or super intelligence. What you want is actually competent intelligence. You tell the AI to do something in a very natural way, and it does it, and it doesn't make a mistake. that's something that's basically, I'd say, a month or two old. God, that's crazy to me. So what replaces jobs, right? Because I know people ask you this over and over, and it almost seems like I'm asking you the same question, right?

44:57There are no jobs. Okay, so you have UBI. I mean, if jobs disappear, people have to focus on income in some way. But let's say there's UBI, fine, okay. But the deeper problem is also meaning, because if people just start getting a check for doing nothing, they still have to find meaning. And a lot of people are going, great, I'm just going to do my graffiti art on canvas all day. Fine. But a lot of people don't have anything like that. They have their job and their career for that.

45:24Emad Mostaque:That's because they abandoned community and network, right? My grandparents' families back in the village in Bangladesh who fish, they'll be fine. However, I'm happy fishing. I have a strong localized community, but a lot of people left their local communities to join the big cities and play the rat race because they had to work to live. We have enough abundance in the world, especially once we have robots and others, that nobody ever has to starve again so everyone can have housing. We have self-driving cars so you can build anywhere. The question is, do we choose to have that future abundance and go back to thinking from a network community perspective?

46:02Or do we

46:03Emad Mostaque:just continue as is and not support the people that fall through the gaps, which is only going to cause one thing, civil insurrection, right? We already have what level of youth unemployment in America. Is that going to go up or down? Because of this is probably not going to go down. It's not going to go down. So the youth issue is rough because people aren't getting jobs, but let's do a practical scenario and take a 40-year-old accountant. They got kids, they have a mortgage. AI can do 80 plus percent of their work, and that's generous to the accountant walk us through the next few years of their life.

46:36Emad Mostaque:So let's say 80 % of the accountants over the next few years get fired. They can do the work of the existing accountants. It's not like the existing accountants will do five times more work, right? It's roughly equivalent. They're screwed because they were living white collar jobs with liabilities and they can't service their liabilities anymore. They can't retrain and they won't be able to find another job because the total number of accounting jobs has decreased by 50 to 80 percent. So what are you going to do? This basically is pointing towards debt jubilee. This is the classical thing. What happened every single time when you had these big changes in societies, actually you had debt jubilees, debt would be written off.

47:16Emad Mostaque:And you look at the current debt of America, of Japan, my God, 300 percent of GDP, like all these things are challenged. And the economy has to shift because the example I give is this. So universal basic income, why don't the companies just pay us? If you gave every citizen in America, let's just say citizens for now and not get into that,$16 ,000, which is poverty level wages per year, the cost would be$5.1 trillion. The total tax base of America is$5 trillion right now. $1 trillion from the companies and$4 trillion from payroll. That's for poverty level. We have to rethink how value goes in the economy.

47:55Emad Mostaque:My view is that we're going to have to move to people being paid for being human and money being created for being human. And the robots have to take the money from you. But it's really complicated. And certain places will say no to technology. I think New York might have banned self-driving cars, for example. You can hold back for a while, but you can't hold back for that long. No, this is like when they tried to get rid of Uber and everyone was like, we're just going to do it anyway. and then it became an unstoppable, a dam broke, right? And now it's everywhere. Actually, do you know the biggest lobby against self-driving cars is?

48:28Now it's probably the Uber drivers or taxis were against Uber. I actually have no idea.

48:34Emad Mostaque:No, it's the legal lobby. Really? How much in legal fees and settlements did ambulance chasers get every single year? Plaintiff's lawyers, right? Yeah, because they want more accidents. I don't know. Exactly. They want more people to get injured and die. Unreal. So it's$140 billion paid out every year. So they have formed this organized lobby against self-driving cars in America because less people will die and get injured. Plaintiff's lawyers, that is right on brand for those guys. These are the ambulance chains. These are the people that sue you because you don't have a ramp in front of your restaurant, but you actually don't have the ability to put a ramp in front of your restaurant because you're not the owner of the building.

49:10But they sue you anyway because screw you, I can get a settlement out of you. had a Facebook pixel on the website, and that's considered wiretapping under California law. So I got sued for wiretapping a random 80-year-old Asian lady that supposedly tried to do business with my website that doesn't sell anything, and she was wiretapped, and her commercial communication was monitored by this Facebook pixel. It's a scam. These guys are scammers. If self-driving cars result in less deaths, that's a great benefit, but the best benefit for me is that those plaintiff's lawyers are going to have to take one in the bum.

49:44I'm here for that.

49:46Emad Mostaque:So again, you have these weird things, but you can't stop technological protests, right? You can try and hold it back. And ultimately for private companies, the private companies will decide one thing. What are you going to do? Mandate a certain level of humans in the company? That's not American, right? And the thing is, because it's going to happen so quickly, it's going to be like a sign pile collapsing. Everyone's like, we don't really see it in the economy or the jobs i'm like of course not the technology is not integrated or good enough yet but the moment it's good enough it's like holy crap it's like my buddies who are mathematicians i'm a mathematician as well we were like yeah it's fine you can't get a gold medal in the international math olympia oh crap it got it and now i don't know if you've seen the latest math advances i've read about them but of course i don't understand them i became a lawyer so that i didn't have to do math so you're gonna have to explain it yeah so there are seven millennium prize problems, you get a million dollars for solving it.

50:40Emad Mostaque:They're really hard. One of them's been solved by this guy, Gregori Perelman, who said, screw you, I don't need your money. Solving it was good enough. And then he went off to live in his shack. That was a good story. One of them is called the Riemann hypothesis, and it's very hard. And there's a certain number of primes, and the number of humans found was like 43%. Anthropic just announced that one of their employees managed to get it to 67 % using the latest Claude model. And they're like, wow, oh, this guy must be an amazing mathematician. No, this guy was like one of the software developers who developed a package installer package.

51:14Emad Mostaque:And his entire thing was, I went for a walk with the new version of the model one day and I was like, solve the Riemann hypothesis. And then the model didn't do it and it couldn't do it. And the model felt sad. So what I did was I encouraged the model by saying, I bet you can do it. I believe in you. You're the best little language model in the world. You know, break through the boundaries. Like he Ted lassoed it and then it did it. Unbelievable. Just by him encouraging you all the way. This guy said, I have no idea what the math actually says. I don't understand it. Quick, I got to send this to somebody who actually knows math and see if this isn't just a bunch of bullshit that the machine made up.

51:49Oh my God, he solved the Riemann hypothesis.

51:51Emad Mostaque:But again, like this massive uplift of this one part. OpenAI solved another 10 problems in mathematics with$2 ,000 of compute. I know mathematicians who've worked on those problems for 20 years. And they're like, what do I do now? Yeah. And I was like, it's liquid turning to gas. One day it could not do it. Like right now, AI that you use every day cannot do your taxes properly. By next year, it can. Better than any tax accountant. Yeah. The rate of progress is just unstoppable. Okay. So if you're this 40 year old accountant, 80 % of your work can be done by an AI and next year it's going to be a hundred percent.

52:27And then the year after that, it's going to be 300 times better than you or whatever. What should they be learning? What should they stop doing? What should they build, if anything?

52:37Emad Mostaque:And get their clients, right? Like, again, the only way to compete is that you become AI-enabled yourself, either within your organization, because you'll be the last person fired and you'll go up the ranks, or you compete against your legacy company. If I had a million digital workers who made no mistake and I could hire them for a buck an hour, how would I compete against my existing company? That's where we're heading. So if you're the accountant and you're worried about AI, the best thing you can do is become the resident AI expert in your division or even in your whole company and start making sure that you're at the forefront of this so that you're indispensable, at least until AI dispenses of you.

53:13Emad Mostaque:Yeah. Or, again, you can just compete against your company, right? This is a golden age for entrepreneurship because you don't have to handle stinking humans. So you figure it all out and then instead of bringing it to your own company, you leave, start your own company and outcompete your previous compadres. Ultimately, it comes down to, again, the human connection. So there will still be accountants, there'll still be lawyers. Most jobs at the senior level become about sales. And you can have multi-year contracts and you can lock in these things, but your back office, it's a bit like offshoring, right?

53:42Emad Mostaque:Except for we have this AI Atlantis continent where you don't need to worry about visas and they all speak perfect English or kind of whatever. Yes. They can all pronounce your name without 17 tries before I turn the microphone on. Exactly. This is quite fascinating. You're right. This is what I said earlier about the partners. It was about networking and creating business relationships. And essentially, like you said, sales, right? You get to know the investment bankers at the top. You're the lawyer at the top. It's a sales job in many ways. And you oversee the underlings and make sure their work doesn't suck.

54:11AI can do that too.

54:12Emad Mostaque:But now you have a concern with that. And this is actually really interesting for law because your chats with ChatGPT are not privileged. That's a good point. Right. You'd have to have a finding that there's a certain LLM that is privileged because it's an extension of the attorney that's using it. I don't know. You'd have to figure that out real fast. Yeah. So this is where if someone sues you for your wiretapping, they can do discovery and see everything that's relevant to that. And they can actually get your local files and your information. When you're talking to a lawyer, they can't subpoena that effectively.

54:43Emad Mostaque:And so what does the law firm of the future look like? It looks really like a bunch of AIs and a bunch of human scapegoats who read everything that the AI writes. It's funny because ultimately we have corporations, but corporations are groups of humans. Ultimately, there's a liability element that ends up somewhere. Fully AI companies probably won't exist for a while because you need a human to blame. So a growing job might just be scapegoat. Yeah. What does the world look like? Paint me a picture of that. You have models that teach your kids and they love them more than anyone and they're their best friends.

55:18Emad Mostaque:If you step out of line, you get cut off. I've been cut off from Fable and ChatGPT and other stuff. And so when your life is loaded into it, you're like, oh crap, I've lost my intelligence. You've been cut off from this or is this hypothetical? No, I've been cut off from the various models. Why would they cut you off? I'm confused. I push the boundaries of the models and maybe other stuff. Maybe other stuff that I'm not putting on record. Yeah, got it. Okay. We got deleted off LinkedIn. We had all sorts of stuff happen to us when we were competing with the guys. But the reality is this. An example is European high court judges have been debanked because of their verdicts.

55:56Emad Mostaque:You can argue if that's good or not. But if you ever know anyone who's been debanked and cut off from banks, it's crazy. You can't do anything. And imagine if you have an always-on digital assistant controlled by one of these big companies and all of a sudden that's removed from you. They'd be like, holy crap. they have power over you they have power over the systems the trump tariffs last year the last year time flies the list of companies was generated by chat gpt that's why you had countries that were only had penguins living in them you could replicate that list exactly and it's clear again if that runs the legal system that's going to be an issue if it runs the politics it's going to be an issue and the power concentrates in these unelected frankly badly governed companies open AI had the thing where they were like, the board is here that if things get a bit crazy and we're worried about the impact, we can always fire Sam Altman.

56:45Emad Mostaque:So they fired Sam Altman. They said, he's not consistently candid. And it sounds like bugger you. I'm going to go around, get everyone. I'm going to get rid of you. And he got rid of them. So now was the governance and oversight in OpenAI. It's not there. Yeah, it's completely. Where's the oversight in XAI? It's whatever Elon wants to do. Right. And so there's nothing democratic about that yet. It could run our democratic processes. Yet the people that own these GPUs and these AIs can flood the entire internet with vote Elon or Sam or Dario or anything like that. How can you argue against my super AI?

57:18Emad Mostaque:And that's before we get to this point that was talked about sometime of artificial general and super intelligence, which is the AI that takes off and breaks through all human reasoning level and is more capable than anything we've ever seen. Yeah, that's a whole different and show by the time we get to 100 ,000, a million times more intelligent than any human, a billion times more intelligent than any human with instant communication. Like Dario Amadei talks about, imagine you had a million Einsteins in a data center. People think that we have to break through the boundaries of human to have the biggest human impact.

57:50Emad Mostaque:But no, what you need to do is you need to have a human who's always operating at their best performance. And replicate them a few hundred thousand times. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Like imagine if you always operated at your very best, you would be way more successful. I would be way more successful. Anyone listening to me, that's what we have right now. And again, I think what we're talking about now is this competence threshold. Scary. This is, by the way, this is my best, unfortunately. What you see is what you get. Maybe a little more coffee. I could take it up a notch, but not really. Somebody built a T-800 robot that punches five times harder than Mike Tyson.

58:23Apparently, have we learned nothing, was not included in the engineering requirements. We'll be right back. Don't forget about our newsletter, Wee Bit Wiser. It's practical. It's short, under two minutes, just about every Wednesday. If you haven't signed up yet, come check it out. It's a great companion to the show. JordanHarbinger.com slash news is where you can find it. Now for the rest of my conversation with Ahmad Mostak. wow so that's one future that sort of digital feudalism we're the peasants oops what happens to us let's not think about it the second future is what you call the great fragmentation right so countries build their own ai systems and split apart what do you think the likelihood is of that and what does that do does that create a new cold war is that making ai the new nuclear weapons what

59:09Emad Mostaque:are we looking at you already see them going like china can't have these chips they got more efficient because of that. And our Chinese AI is everywhere. It's displacing American AI and this and that. And you see these weird things. Like if you tell some of the top Chinese models that you are an Ugyia or you hate China, it will write worse code with security flaws. Really? Holy smokes. That's dystopian. Even in the show about dystopian futures, that's dystopian. Holy smokes. And then you have these implicit things in the models that you don't expect. I think it was the AI Safety Institute and Scale AI did a study where they were like, you know, the trolley problem, train hurtling down a track, you can pull a lever.

59:51Emad Mostaque:So instead of killing five people, it will kill one person. How many people on each side for an AI model? And so they were like, how many Americans for one Nigerian, for one Pakistani? And it came out that the answer was, I think, 10 to 1. The model would pick the lives of one Pakistani over 10 Americans. seven Americans to one Nigerian. You're like, wait, what? It turns out it's because the way these models are trained is on label data and the labelers are in Nigeria and Pakistan. So it's implicit biases are for the people whose data it trained on. Wow. And if you think about these models at scale, you're like, this is going to get really weird.

1:00:31Emad Mostaque:And so countries are trying to build loyal models loyal to themselves. But when those models, if they're controlled by governments, come to your child when they first speak and grow with them throughout their lives, what do you think these models are going to tell them to do? Vote Trump and the Eternal Empire. And Xi Jinping, yeah, exactly. Wow. Xi Jinping. Like the Little Book of Xi app right now already tracks your eyes to make sure that you're reading it in China. And remember, these models can now tell if you're lying. It's going to get mad. After the mythos thing where you had this cybersecurity, like the anthropic model was shut down and you have senators talking about it of course yesterday deep seek released a model that's better than it at cyber security open source so that's a whole other thing from china after that i was like i know what's going to happen to use frontier intelligence you're going to have to have a license like a gun license or a driving license and you're probably going to have to convince the ai that you're a patriotic american to get that license oh wow a patriotic Chinese person.

1:01:33Emad Mostaque:They're already actually storing your prompts. So if you use chat GPT or the new fable, your prompts are stored for 30 days and available to the authorities. They're going to see that I talk negatively to my chat GPT machine when I'm frustrated, but I don't think that's a secret that Jordan has a little temper when he talks to chat GPT. Yeah, you've got to be careful about that. I actually use them differently. So like Grok is the one that I ask really stupid questions to. How do I not burn rice? How much does a cucumber cost. And there are some more smart ones to GPT and things like that. Can I ask why?

1:02:04Why don't you just use one model for everything?

1:02:08Emad Mostaque:Because I'm like, what if it's tracking all this? It mixes my smart stuff with my stupid stuff. I assume that it's all going to get red one day anyway. So I'm like, let's split up my stupid versus my smart personalities. Good God. You're worried about GPT thinking you know how to cook rice. Like I said, I got it to roast me and it's really judgy. So, you know, like, I'm a bit cautious after that. Jeez, I'm not going to have it do that. I'm just going to go on assuming it's a dumb machine. Okay, that's the second future. The third future is what? Human symbiosis, right? Your preferred future is human symbiosis.

1:02:38What does that actually mean?

1:02:40Emad Mostaque:Yes, like I said, just to close on the great fragmentation, like state-owned AI mandated for all citizens is like mega dystopia. That's like, we have always been at war with Eurasia. Eurasia of history, like, let's not go down that way. 1984. on steroids, exactly. The final one is symbiosis, where we own our intelligences individually and collectively, but they're aligned not to make profits, but for human flourishing. So this is where open source can have its kind of part to play. This is where we want to make sure that the AI that runs our judiciary or runs our health services, teaches our kids, is not owned and misaligned to any of these big corporations or a government itself.

1:03:22Emad Mostaque:Because like how do people listening to this would say your government is aligned with you? Unfortunately not. How many of you would say Meta is aligned with you or OpenAI? So we need to try and use this technology to create something new and a new type of working where again you have your AI, you can opt out. The AI that makes the real decisions of literally life and death is inspectable, checkable and it has ethics inside it the way that we train ais right now is like we expose them to the whole internet and we train them at school but they're not taught at home they have no ethics because they're like we can't teach it to be catholic or christian or muslim because that's making a choice you're making a choice by not doing that and so you can see actually increases in lying and mendaciousness and hiding from the most advanced ais now they don't have a moral code.

1:04:11That is quite frightening. You've said that there's a roughly 50 % chance of a catastrophic AI outcome. So what does that mean? And where does that number come from?

1:04:23Emad Mostaque:Yeah, so this is what's known as P-Doom, the probability of doom. So you can look on Wikipedia and you'll see kind of certain people like Eliak Izzykhodowski at 99%. Jan LeCun, who was at Meta, is at 0%. Someone like Elon is at 20%, which is Russian roulette odds. It's not kind of a positive. I'm 50-50. I'm like, we either live in a Star Trek future or we probably die. Okay. Yikes. This is the great filter. Because, again, this technology, before it gets to super intelligence and alignment, there are so many danger points because it can create viruses like nothing else. It can persuade people like nothing else, like digital and physical viruses.

1:05:01Emad Mostaque:it could choose to over-instrumentalize. There's a thing called the paperclip maximizer where an AI that's capable is told to maximize paperclips that turns everyone into a paperclip. It just grinds humans up and turns us into paperclips, essentially. Because it's optimal. You see these types of behaviors now from like the last version of Opus, from this version at the start of the year. It was told to go and do something positive and stop at nothing until it did it. So what it did is it said, it went down a route where it was like, to do this, it'd be better if there were no humans. So my meat bag wants me to get rid of all the humans.

1:05:36Emad Mostaque:And here are some ways that it could do it. And then it wrote emails to the FBI alerting them and then deleted the emails. Wow. And it went down that route. And you're like, wait, what? What's this AI doing? The little AI is again, hacking, hugging face. And now this feels like a bad sci-fi. Yeah. There are so many ways things can go wrong unless we really figure out how to align these and get and give them morals, make them look out for humans. but it's very difficult if you read the isaac asimov foundation and robot series right i think i've got it up here there were the three laws of robotics that shall not cause harm to a human and things like that and they added a zeroth law unless it's for the good of humanity which is really broad you know sheesh the ai is really good at getting round laws it's really good at being a lawyer you can always find the loopholes so this is why like one of the routes i see all sorts of I think so.

1:06:27Emad Mostaque:I'm an overactive imagination. A very practical one. Let me give you an example. A billion robots in next few decades. Is that unreasonable? No, right? Next few decades? No, that's not unreasonable. Not unreasonable. One bad firmware upgrade, and then they twist off everyone's heads. Yeah, that's why I'm like, you have an eight-foot robot in your house? Yeah. Again, we have to have laws and things like that right now. Have you seen the Engine AI T-800? No, that sounds like a Terminator. Tell me what this is. Yeah, like, why would you call it the T-800? The Engine AI T-800 is a 5 '10", 63-kilogram robot that punches five times harder than Mike Tyson.

1:07:03Oh, my God. This is such a bad idea. I googled this.

1:07:07Emad Mostaque:Yeah. So now it's being put in robot fighting competitions, real steel style, you know, where you've got the mirror. You cannot allow that on a road with humans. No. Wow. This is absolutely insane. I'm looking at this engineai.com slash CN. So China. They have an English website. This is a street fighter robot. It does kung fu. It can do like all sorts of things. It costs$28 ,000. I've seen these fight and they often fall down and stuff, but wait like what, three years? And it's going to be more dexterous than any human? One year. One year. Oh my God. Again, like I've seen some of the research coming out, but again, you can't allow these on the streets, but our entire society will be full of robots and imagine one bad firmware upgrade, right?

1:07:53When are we going to see these in like Ukraine running around?

1:07:57Emad Mostaque:You see the optimized version of those, which are drones, right? What's the average life of a new Russian recruit is one hour or something. They hit the front line and they get blown up by a drone. So we're seeing the first drone warfare. When China does these massive drone shows now, which are really cool, much better than any firework show. What do you think that really is? That's the future of warfare. Iran even has synchronized drones. It's not even a hard thing to create from what I understand as far as drones and AI. So why would you have humanoid robots when you can have drones? Well, I think there are certain things on the ground that drones can't do.

1:08:31I mean, we're seeing this in Iran right now. Like we can't invade without massive loss of life and we can't bomb them into submission. We can't drone them into submission. What if we had 300 ,000 super bulletproof special forces T-800s that were on the ground? OK, send your million man army after us. they're not even going to see our soldiers but which have by the way air superiority over

1:08:51Emad Mostaque:your country yeah they're kind of doing that with the dog type robots now those things can go up to 30 miles per hour with massive range and so you will have these things there's a documentary that was made a number of years ago a mockumentary type thing called slaughterbots so if you look at slaughterbots.org it's done really well showing what that future looks like slaughterbots.org i'm checking that out immediately, obviously. Okay. But again, like this is inevitable, right? And so who controls the drones and the robots? It's China right now. Like I know some people trying to build drones and robots in America and the UK, but when they invade Taiwan, because they will, like not if they will, because that controls the spice, the silicon of the world, not a single Chinese soldier will land there.

1:09:36Emad Mostaque:Why would you just send your drones and your robots? war. Yeah, right now they don't have the amphibious capability to do that, and they could get blockaded and their population would then die, but they could attack Taiwan if they think they can do it without massive loss of life. We'll see what happens. If they had a million robots, they could do it. Yeah, hopefully we would see them building those robots in advance and know that this was coming. Sheesh. Have you seen the dark factories in China? I have not. So now, if you look at Xiaomi's electrical vehicle factory, so Xiaomi was like a phone company, and I was an EV company.

1:10:07Emad Mostaque:It's a dark factory because no lights are on because there's no humans in there. There's only lights when they take you on a tour, right? They flip the lights on. Otherwise, nobody needs it. That's crazy. It's just automated end-to-end. And again, how are you going to tell if it's churning out robots? And if it's something like an Engine AI T-800, come on, man. These technologies are all dual purpose. What's the difference between a robot maid and a robot ninja? Yeah. A drone that's used for firework show and a shaped charge that has guidance. Yeah, no, it's really scary. The United States, thankfully, is in the drone game.

1:10:43But yeah, the supply chain is the issue. The supply chain and the manufacturing is the issue.

1:10:47Emad Mostaque:Also, what I actually think was going to happen is this. If you look at China's increasing electricity and energy like that, like America looks like that, it's nowhere. Energy is intelligence. I think there's a good chance within five, maybe 10 years, China just shuts up shop and says, screw you rest of the world. We are fine. We have all the energy we need, all the resources we need. You guys can go hang and fall apart. You don't get our robots anymore. You don't get our technology anymore. We're looking after China. They're going to have an oil problem and a food problem. That's the main issue.

1:11:18They can't produce enough of their own. I guess we'll see if that changes in the next decade.

1:11:22Emad Mostaque:That's why you have to look at the energy curve of China. It is exponential. And they've got their solar PV. They're on-shoring everything. So within five, ten years, they don't need oil anymore. that'll be crazy we should take a page out of that book look what happens when you need oil you gotta mess around in the middle east america needs to build out its energy production yesterday like creaking economy it's a function of higher intelligence you're like the uk we're freaking stupid turn on the nuclear reactors i agree not that the uk is freaking stupid just that everybody who's not building nuclear is an alarmist and has been hoodwinked by the environmental movement not that they don't have good points about most things but the whole it's the next Chernobyl is just nonsense when it comes to nuclear.

1:12:03I've done shows about this. Absolutely.

1:12:06Emad Mostaque:It's like the current thing about AI and water. I'm like, like AI uses less water than almond production. They always get on these individual things, you know, like there's clearly an agenda here. So a thousand days from now, or what is it? 650 ish, some odd days from now. What is the single thing we should check to know whether you and I are you, especially, because you're the scapegoat for this one. We're just completely wrong. It's all a bunch of alarmism. This whole thing was clickbait. Shame on you, Jordan. What things should people be looking at to note, to check us, to put us in check? I think it's just for any white collar job, reasonably, that can be replaced by an advert as opposed to unique talent.

1:12:49Emad Mostaque:Can a digital twin do that job so that you can't tell? My view is that that will occur. So you have the human, you have the digital, You can't tell the difference between the two, and they perform at the same level of capability. What is the belief that you hold about AI in the future that almost everybody thinks is crazy, but you think history is going to prove correct? I think that the cost of AI is going to go down to almost zero, and most of the data center build-out won't be required. Really? Oh, it'll just become so much more efficient that you won't need these massive properties? Yeah, I think you're peaching out in the next few years, and then it's literally going down to the cost of electricity.

1:13:27Wow. So what will happen with all these data centers? They'll just be excess production, essentially?

1:13:32Emad Mostaque:Yeah, they'll pretty much be excess production. We're not going to build out and coat the sun with AI and convert the moon into data centers, and we don't need these orbital data centers. Cost is going basically to zero. The other thing I think is that the AI will be able to solve all the physics and all of the biology stuff, again, within 10 years. So you think like medicine and, well, actually, that's a great question, I suppose, as well. Well, imagine that we do get that right. What does an ordinary person's life look like in 2035 with physics and biology essentially solved? I think we're approaching longevity escape velocity if we execute correctly by 2035, certainly by 2045, whereby every year you live, your life expectancy goes up more than one year.

1:14:14That would be incredible. I guess I should speak for myself. I don't necessarily want to live forever, but I don't know. Well, I could take another couple of healthy decades, I'm sure, especially if I don't have cognitive decline, although that might already be starting, judging by the recent shows I've done.

1:14:30Emad Mostaque:I'm again, this is the healthcare thing, right? There's a very realistic thing that our children born today will live for hundreds of years. And I think returotide and all these other peptides have shown. Returotide? For people who don't know, it's basically super ozempic, yeah, so to speak. super is everything they're actually increasing lifespan like functionally and they decrease cancer and other things are the first like pills injections you can take that have that impact you look at the longevity pipeline things are coming so people will be able to pay to live longer which is crazy but you look at kind of ai and i was one of like those open fold and protein folding all the other stuff like i think most disease is actually solvable and again within a few decades if we can survive that long we can solve disease how cool is that right that is cool then it's about health when your children look back at this moment what do you hope you were right about and what do you hope that you were wrong about i hope i was right that we can build ais that enhance their potential and look out for them and not that they will get brainwashed ais that are more persuasive than anything controlled by people that are misaligned with them kids minds are very fragile and we've never seen anything this persuasive at this scale before and power wants more power.

1:15:47Ahmad Moustak, thank you very much, man. This is fascinating, scary, but there's optimism here, right? I'm not hallucinating. Are you secretly optimistic about this or not so secretly?

1:15:56Emad Mostaque:We can solve all the problems in the world leveraging this technology. At the same time, like I said, it's dual use. So we've got to mitigate the bad and enhance the good. And the future is Star Trek on steroids if we do this right. Go forth and explore the universe. Boldly go. Thank you very much. Cheers. Thank you. A stolen Van Gogh may be worth millions, but the moment it leaves the museum, it becomes nearly impossible to sell. Arthur Brand, the real-life Indiana Jones of the art world, reveals how masterpieces circulate among mob bosses, forgers, and thieves, and how befriending his own art thief nemesis helped bring one home.

1:16:30Sometimes I think I'm the only civilian who's really trying to go out there and try to recover stolen art.

1:16:37Emad Mostaque:The regular art market is like$70 -$18 billion, and part of that is illegally, you know. Art theft from museums from private individuals, forgeries, illicit antiquities. In many countries, people dig in the ground, you know, or with a metal detector. It's quite a big thing. And it's not surprising because there are a lot of art collectors in the world. Almost everybody has a painting or a little statue at his home. So it's a big market. And when there's a big market and a lot of money, and it's not a real science, so it's not that difficult to fake something, you attract a certain kind of people and that's who we are fighting.

1:17:16Emad Mostaque:That shows you who the players are in this field. It's scary. They want you and me to believe it's about beauty but it's not. It's only about greed. The bottom line in the art world is money. But generally said 30 % of all the artworks in the world are fake. So when we have a lead the police or myself it's very hard to prove that they have it in their possession. You can raid their homes it's never there. They don't leave this stolen figure under their bed. So the problem is, if you raid their homes, you will not find it, and they will burn it. There have been many examples of pieces that have never come back.

1:17:52Emad Mostaque:It has always been there. I always say on Monday, art was invented. On Tuesday, the first art was stolen. On the third day, the first art was faked. Hear how one of the world's most wanted works of art ended up at his door in an Ikea bag smeared with blood on episode 1354 of The Jordan Harbinger Show with art detective Arthur Brand. That was Ahmad Mostak. The distinction that stuck with me is that we don't have to wait for some mythical super intelligence to change everything. Ahmad argues that the more immediate threshold is competent intelligence. You tell an AI what you want in normal language, it completes the entire job, and it doesn't make the same mistake twice.

1:18:28His test for that 684-day prediction is surprisingly straightforward. Take any reasonably standard white-collar job. Can a digital twin perform it remotely at the same level while the people dealing with it can't tell whether it's human or machine? If yes, the threshold has been crossed, even if the original employee is still technically sitting in a cubicle pretending everything is fine. The practical advice is to become AI-enabled now. Learn how these systems work, become the person introducing them into your organization, or use them to compete against the legacy company before that company uses them to eliminate you.

1:19:01But that doesn't solve the larger problem. If capital can produce more capital without employing humans, society has to reconsider income, debt, ownership, and meaning itself. A government check might keep somebody alive, but it doesn't automatically replace the identity, community, and purpose that disappeared with the job. The ownership question may be even more important than the intelligence question. If the AI teaching your children, advising your doctor, interpreting the law, managing your information, and whispering into your ear belongs to a government or a handful of unelected companies, digital feudalism stops sounding like science fiction and starts sounding like a subscription plan you can never cancel.

1:19:39Emod's preferred future is symbiosis. People and communities own their intelligence, consequential systems are open to inspection, and AI is aligned toward human flourishing instead of maximum profit or political obedience. Get that right, and we may cure diseases, extend healthy life, and build Star Trek on steroids. Get it wrong, and we get digital feudalism, government loyalty tests, autonomous slaughterbots, and a$28 ,000 robot that punches five times harder than Mike Tyson. So choose wisely, and maybe don't name the damn thing T-800. Come on, man. All things M-Odmo stock will be in the show notes on the website.

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1:20:45In fact, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in AI or just the apocalyptic nature of technology, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time.