The Philosophical Debate About Superintelligence

0:00Josh Bersin: Good morning, everyone. I want to spend some time giving you observations on the observations by technologists about superintelligence. As many of you probably do, I read a lot and I listen to a lot of podcasts and I hear Bill Gates last week talking about AI taking over every domain of science and business, Elon Musk talking about 50 % of jobs disappearing, Dario Amadai, Sam Altman, lots of others, not necessarily Sachin Nadella. He's a little bit more in my camp. And then this guy named Nick Bostrom, who I think is a philosopher who wrote a book on superintelligence. And what a lot of these, Peter Thiel, what a lot of these technologists are saying is that because AI is so powerful, so perfect, so ubiquitous, scaling so fast with infinite scale, data centers circling the earth, analyzing every piece of information ever created, that we're not going to have a lot to do.

1:03Josh Bersin: And we are going to be searching for meaning and searching for pleasure, like the Woody Allen movie with the Orgasmatron, if you remember that movie. I think it was Sleeper a long time ago, where whatever physical or mental or emotional or social pleasure we want, we just press a button and we get it. And that's it. And that includes the abundance movement, by the way. And this is really amazing to me that so many people are talking this way, including this group called Effective Altruism that believes that one of the ways to advance society is to make as much money as you possibly can as fast as you can in any possible way, legal or otherwise, and then use that money to advance good things.

1:47Josh Bersin: And I don't think I'm overstating some of these comments that are coming out. It's very frequent that I read and hear these things from very prominent people. I mean, I'm only one person, and I don't claim to be a guru in too many things, but I think I have some observations that might be helpful. You know, first of all, if you think about the technology evolution for the last two decades, mostly social media, it hasn't been that good. There was a really fascinating study somebody did I saw over the weekend that the average American, I believe it was American, so it may be global, speaks 20 % less in a given day than we used to.

2:24Josh Bersin: So we've lopped off 20 % of our social interactions with other people because we're using our phones and our AIs and our social media feeds. We all know the impact of social media. It's sort of destroyed the concepts of truth and the news media is struggling to maintain their credibility as truly news people. There's no financial model for news anymore. People want to pay for opinions. They don't really want to pay for news. So we've already been going through this experiment for 20 years, starting with, I guess, Facebook, you could say, maybe Twitter around that time. And I mean, some of you may think it's been positive, but I don't.

3:03Josh Bersin: I mean, I think most of us would say it hasn't been positive. It hasn't been good for kids. It hasn't been good for young women. It hasn't been good for politics. And it's allowed certain individuals with either technological power or business power to manipulate large numbers of other people to advance their own interests. So it's created a world that's less equal and fair. Yet the real reason we live, most of us, is for family and art and music and career advancement and learning and fulfillment and helping other people and enjoying the relationships we have with not only our families and friends, but our animals, our society, our trees, plants, oceans.

3:48Josh Bersin: And at least in the Trump administration, none of that matters. The only thing that matters is money. But I think, generally speaking, if I go back to my early years in the 60s when I was a young man, the fact that the Kennedy Center is going to be bulldozed, I mean, that's just almost an iconic example of what's been happening. But the thing that I don't think the technologists understand, and again, I don't claim to be an expert, but I think a lot of you might want to talk about this, is people don't really get up in the morning for pleasure. They get up in the morning for responsibilities, to achieve a goal, to aspire to advance themselves, or to help others, or to cure someone, or to make someone feel better, or to take care of a problem, and to study, and to learn and to advance and to grow.

4:35Josh Bersin: And, you know, even medical treatments, which were supposed to be there to make us feel better and live longer, are now used for vanity and, you know, lose weight and look good. The medical industry is sort of branched off into these angles that are not necessarily about medicine anymore. They're about self-fulfillment. And, you know, yes, people are self-centered. That's part of our DNA, I suppose. But if you really sort of looked at the psychology of human beings, having AI touches a very small, tiny percentage of why we live and why we get up in the morning and why we have fulfilling lives.

5:13And I don't know whether the AI crew just doesn't feel that, or they don't believe it, or they just don't want to talk about it because they'd rather advance their own financial businesses.

5:23Josh Bersin: But it's just astounding to me that so much of the discussion of superintelligence ignores the realities that we know take place every single day in our lives. And somehow, you know, if Grok, Super Grok, or Super whatever we want to call it, becomes, and we use the word super in our book, superpowered a lot. But if this thing becomes super, by the way, as soon as it becomes super, it's not super. One of the things I keep telling people that's so funny about AI is the first time you use some really advanced AI thing, even a self-driving car, you're just blown away. It's just shocking. It's like, oh my God, this thing is just fantastic.

6:03And then the next time you use it, you say, why is it so slow? How come it didn't work exactly the way I expected? We, you know, it's never going to be really super. It's always going to be a work in process. And the people building it and monetizing it are always going to have vested interests. And it's always going to tweak and bend towards financially valuable solutions. So why do we suddenly have this philosophical fear that our lives are going to be changed? I don't think they're going to be changed that much. I think the essence of who we are as human animals, not human intelligence, as human animals, is much, much more nuanced and complex and interesting and beautiful and lovely and imperfect than how much data and how many neurons we can put into a neural network and how fast it can recompute its weights to accommodate a new picture that it just saw or a new object it just discovered.

6:56And so that's just something I don't know, you guys. I think about it a lot, and it seems to me there's far too much glorification of this topic. I'm tired of the New York Times writing about it, and I think we need to push back on that idea, even though the President of the United States is somehow promoting it also. I personally think AI is a tool, and that's it. It's just a really good tool, but it's not a perfect tool like every other tool. If you try to take a hammer and use it for a screw, it's not going to be very good at screwing

7:26Josh Bersin: in the screw, but it's going to be really good for hammering in the nail. And I think we have the same situation here. Superintelligence, or whatever you call it, is very, very good for a lot of things, but it doesn't do everything. And it doesn't have our complex human natures. The second reason that this topic is a little more pragmatically important to me, and maybe to you. I just spent three weeks in Europe working and on vacation in the UK and in Italy. And while I was in Italy, I took a day and with my family and a couple of my kids and went to the Ferrari manufacturing factory. And because I have a relative who owns a Ferrari, they got us in with the first class treatment.

8:05And we had a really, really good guide. We didn't meet any of the executives there, but there were a lot of people around who were pretty high level we talked to, and we got to see all the different parts of the factory, the track, the Formula One area, and walked through the manufacturing lines, all of the manufacturing lines, including

8:21Josh Bersin: seeing the Luce, which is just an amazing vehicle. And I walked out of that thing, obviously loving the cars and the experience and thinking a lot about AI because they don't use AI per se. They do use robotics a lot. The cars are pinned up and rotated around in robots so that people can work on them, and they have robots that move parts from place to place. But it doesn't look like 100 % robotic factory at all. There's a lot of human involvement in the machines, in the manufacturing, and the engineering. So, you know, if you went to the Tesla plant, there probably aren't very many people in it.

8:54But if you go to the Ferrari plant, there's a lot of people in it. They're all wearing beautiful Ferrari clothes. There isn't a speck of dirt on the floor.

9:01Josh Bersin: The actual factories have plants growing in them for sustainability purposes and just to create oxygen and just make it nice. And the people look like they're having a good time. And they take breaks. We were there during lunch. They do take an hour and a half off for lunch. So it's not like a traditional 1920s pin factory. And when you look at how they manufacture these cars, they make about 50 or 60 cars a day. Ferrari is the most profitable car company in the world by far. I don't know if it's always been, but it is now. They make a lot more money than BMW, Mercedes, Tesla, all the Chinese companies, Porsche.

9:37And they obviously charge a lot of money for these cars, but they have a good market. They're a$4 or$5 billion company, so they're not a small company. And with the Luce, they're going to open the market even a lot further. And they do believe in engineering, and they do believe in engines and motors, but a lot of their cars are hybrid. A lot of their more advanced cars are hybrid, and they can very quietly mix the electronic vehicle EV part with the gasoline part.

10:02Josh Bersin: And because they have so much experience in racing, they understand the performance dynamics of a vehicle and the weight ratio, And in the Formula One area, which we walked around a lot, they actually have a whole room full of engineers who look at every single component in the car to figure out how to make it stronger and lighter every single time they go back to Formula One. They have lots of experimental cars driving around if you go over there. And they're beautiful vehicles in all kind of unique ways. And it's a very Italian, beautiful, human-centered feeling. There's no one giant factory.

10:38Josh Bersin: There's a lot of small lines in different buildings, and it's in a town called Maranello, which is a beautiful town, smaller town, right in the middle of a bunch of grape vines and wineries and other small towns around it. So it's not the kind of industrialized factory kind of thing you would imagine. But here we have a company that's the most profitable company in its space. Now, they don't do the volume of a Tesla or a GM, but that's not their goal. They want to make something beautiful, and they want to make money at it, and they want to have all sorts of other products around it. And the people that drive Ferraris love them, and the other people we met when they were there are just as avid fans of what the company does as my relatives are and other people.

11:21Josh Bersin: So what about AI for them? Well, I talked to the guy who gave us the tour, who works there and has been around, knows a lot of people. And they're very well-trained, the people that give the tours. They, of course, have a lot of AI in their robots, but they don't over-automate everything. When you look at the manufacturing line, there's a bunch of people working in different stations, carefully doing, fitting things together or welding or polishing or painting, whatever it may be. And there's different cars coming down the line of different makes. So one team will spend an hour or two on one vehicle, And then the next vehicle that comes down the line is a different model, but they will do the same type of work to that model.

12:04Josh Bersin: So they're all cross-trained on the domain that they do in all of the models. So it's not like they have one line for each brand of car. They're not that big. They can't do that. So they specialize in a different way. And one of the steps in the cars that we saw, and we saw most of the lines, actually. They give you a pretty good tour. And the other interesting thing about the tour is you're actually walking right next to the cars. You don't have a big glass window or some kind of a barrier separating you from the manufacturing line because it's so clean and safe and elegant that you could literally reach out and touch the car if you wanted to, which they don't want you to do, but you could.

12:44And they said, look, don't touch the car. It's somebody else's car, and somebody's waiting for it, so don't put your fingerprints all over it. So I asked the guy who was giving us a tour, that seems a little bit of an odd way to manufacture things. It doesn't seem very efficient. He said, well, the way Ferrari thinks about it, each car is unique. And so each car, which has been assembled with component parts, most of which are from Italian manufacturers, they don't outsource stuff. They carefully manage the supply chain, as most automobile companies do. And once it's welded and bolted together and assembled, that's a unique car because it was done by humans.

13:24And even though they have torque wrenches and various devices to make sure they do things in a standard way, it might be a little different from the car right before it. And so one of the steps they showed us they go through is near the end, they have a robot that carefully photographs and videotapes every possible angle of the car. and they store a digital representation of the actual geometry and physical makeup of that vehicle. And he said, and if you ever bring your Ferrari back in for refurbishing, and he said, we will refurbish any Ferrari for 25 or 30 years at any time, they will pull up the original specs of your car and they will make sure that they refurbish it exactly the way that it was when it was built.

14:11Josh Bersin: Now, that's a bizarre concept in this throwaway world we live where you buy an iPhone and then you throw it away and get another one or clothing that you throw away or shoes that you throw away or all of these disposable things we get now that you just pay for them by the month and then replace them all the time. That's not the way they do this. And maybe it's very old fashioned, very luxury oriented. But this is the way the luxury brands work in general. If you look at Chanel or Hermes or any of the really high-end manufacturers that are like this. And there's a lot of benefits to the consumer because it's your car and you get to keep a car that's going to hold its value forever and you get to be proud of the fact that it's unique for you.

14:52And if you do need help with it, they'll take care of it. They don't sort of outsource it to some repair guy and say, I'll take it to our dealer repair network who's an outsourced repair company. So what is that telling us about AI? It's telling us, as I said earlier, that the human needs, the human desires, the human pleasures, the human aspirations are not uniformity or speed or intelligence. We like things to be unique and subtle and beautiful and interesting. We like to know the history of them. We like to have a legacy. We like to know the relationships we've had with our lives and our jobs and our careers and our companies.

15:33And those of you that are HR business people, you know that this has a lot to do with your employment value proposition and why people work for your company and why they like working for your company or they don't. And you can have a company that wants to build the fastest, cheapest chips and we don't care about any of the stuff that Ferrari does. That's fine, too. But that's a deliberate decision. This idea that the AI is going to make everybody think that way all the time, I think personally is absurd. and I don't think it's even half, I don't think it's even slightly true. I think what's going to happen with AI, and this is what we're helping companies with right now, is as more and more intelligent agents become available, we're putting together, I'm working on a big piece on multi-agent architectures that's coming out next week.

16:19For those of you that are clients or you have Galileo, you should really read it, is that you're going to take the AI tools, which are going to be spectacular, no question about it, and you're going to apply them to the thing that makes you excited. Maybe it's an automation of your business. I have a close friend I was with this week who's using AI to automate his business and he's just having a blast. Or maybe you're gonna use it for art or maybe you're gonna use it for music or maybe you're gonna use it for psychology or maybe you're gonna use it for doing your taxes or whatever, many, many opportunities.

16:50And that unique thing that you do with it is gonna be yours. It's not gonna be the AI doing it for you. This idea that these agents are going to take things over from us and we're not going to have anything to do, I don't see any logic behind that. A self-driving vehicle doesn't decide where I want to go for dinner or when I want to go see my kids. It just makes it easier for me to do what I want to do. And one of the, going back to the beginning of the conversation in the early part of this podcast, you know, social media unleashed this massive amount of agency we have. And then the social media companies got involved in messing with it and screwing it up and making it no fun anymore.

17:31And let's just hope AI doesn't go that direction. I mean, you could predict, based on every other technology business that's ever been created, that eventually the AI is going to spy on us and manipulate us and be used for power grubbing or political purposes or things like that. Maybe not. Let's hope not. Like the Excel spreadsheet never became evil. It still just sits there and stares at you with a blinking cursor. It's not trying to get you to do anything. So maybe AI will be like that, but I'm not sure that it will. And I think what I would sort of urge you guys to do is when you read these things from these armchair philosophers, everybody's a philosopher in their own way, and they talk about some weird future where we have nothing to do and we can get any piece of information or any amount of pleasure or any amount of knowledge or any amount of learning at any time, don't believe it.

18:23One more thing that I just want to point out along the same lines. In the field of education or online learning, but let's talk about the education industry, there's been years of efforts to use technology for education. When I was at IBM in the 1980s, we did a lot of work with the UC system. And a lot of my early career activities were actually working with academics on using technology. And it was originally PCs and Macs and then Unix computers and others.

18:51Josh Bersin: And they were usually used for science stuff and mathematics and computation, things like that. But a lot of studies have come out now, 40 years later, that seem to show that the actual educational outcomes from all of these initiatives and technology waves and cool things that have happened in universities have been negative. because learning is a process of struggling and thinking and putting things together in your mind to train yourself how to do new things and understand new things. And if you don't struggle, you don't learn. So I think we're already learning from the past couple of decades or four, three or four decades, that even if the technology is great, there's no guarantee that it's gonna make things better.

19:35It's just gonna make things different. It's up to us to decide what better means. So anyway, it's a little bit of a philosophical podcast for the day because I'm coming back from this trip, but I don't know if this helps you.

19:47Josh Bersin: We'll apply all of these principles to the business side of this for you because in the business world, it's a little clearer what the objective is as opposed to the whole rest of our lives. And it is kind of cool how we've become very philosophical about life in the middle of this new era of technology. but maybe that's not unsurprising. And it's probably happened every time there was a technology in the past. The printing press, the loom, the barcode reader, electricity, electric motors, the personal computer, the mainframe computer, the spreadsheet, all of those things probably had many similar philosophical conversations created around them.

20:25Josh Bersin: Okay, have a good weekend, everybody. Talk to you next week.