The Week: AI Is Getting Smarter. Are We?

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1:32Greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. See terms. Welcome to The Week from Prof G Media, where we break down what mattered and what it all means. I'm George Hahn, and it's Friday, September 11th. Today, AI is getting smarter. Are we? Then, Trump wants Canada to fold. Instead, he may be strengthening its hand. And finally, what a divorce attorney says actually keeps a marriage together. Let's get into it.

2:09First, AI. Ed and Scott spoke with economist Tyler Cowen, an advisor to AI Labs who has been called the man who wants to know everything. The skeptics say AI is overhyped and unprofitable. Cowan isn't buying it. He thinks the technology already works. And when Scott asked where it's changing real work, Cowan pointed first to programming. And I don't think humans will disappear from programming, but they've already taken on a fundamentally different role. They're more like impresarios, and they're consulted in the meantime, like, oh, is this going in the proper loop? Is the work actually being done?

2:49Is this the thing I asked it to do? Over time, more and more of that will be AIs themselves monitoring. But that's the clearest example of a very positive change. The biggest negative, I just think, will be cybersecurity. There'll be a lot more hacks. There's plenty of evidence for this already. Those cost the world a lot. We'll spend more on cybersecurity. It won't be fixed quickly. And I think it's a very real concern. We need a national, international effort to really firm up all of our major institutions as quickly as possible. The upside may be real, but this week brought another warning about what happens when we let AI do too much of our thinking.

3:33The OECD released its latest global assessment of 15-year-olds across 91 education systems. Reading and math scores have fallen to record lows across OECD countries. AI didn't create that decade-long decline, but emerging research shows it could make the underlying problem worse. Students can appear to perform better with AI, then struggle when the tool disappears. Ed asked the Financial Times' John Byrne Murdoch what the evidence tells us. we're seeing this in all sorts of settings we've seen this come out from u.s universities as well so i think at this point there's a really solid case that relying on ai as part of the learning process is extremely risky in terms of it essentially um being used as a crutch that when taken away people just collapse at the end i think it's also just incredibly hard to enforce use of ai in the education setting where that doesn't happen you can talk about having locked down versions of chat gpt that kind of thing that encourage study hours but ultimately if someone wants to cheat they're going to find a way to cheat and we've seen this with all sorts of different forms of educational technology over the years as well as it's a really really fine tightrope to try and tread and we don't seem to be able to do that i think as well we have this problem where a lot of the people in silicon valley who create these tools they are people who have always worked really hard at school, they're always hyper-focused, they don't struggle with distraction.

5:09For them, it maybe seems obvious that, well, you know, kids who are given these tools are going to use them to learn even more. But I think that is just born out of a real disconnect from what real classrooms are like in modern UK, modern America, where just the ability to focus is a huge challenge for a lot of people. So much for the smartest people in the room. The danger isn't that AI makes us less intelligent. It's that it allows us to avoid the work through which intelligence develops. And from one self-inflicted problem to another, this week, the trade war with Canada came roaring back. On Raging Moderates, Scott compared it to a famously hostile divorce.

5:52This is kind of like, remember that, did you ever see the movie The War of the Roses with Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner? Forever ago. But yeah, forever ago. Yeah. But basically a very hostile divorce, but they decide to stay in the same house. That's what this is. There are cars and auto parts that cross the border, Canadian-American border, eight times before final assembly. You can't undo this marriage overnight. It's taken 30 years of NAFTA and all sorts of agreements. This is like a divorce where you live in the same town, go to the same church and shop at the same Walmart and live in the same house.

6:33There's just nothing they can do. And like all tariffs, the person who initiated it likely ends up on the losing end of this. There are alcohol exports are down 80 percent from the U.S. because Canadian consumers have something American consumers don't have, and that is resolve. and that is American consumers are like, whatever, Trump, what's he doing? Canada, I don't care. I'm gonna go back to watching, you know, beef or whatever my favorite streaming program is. Whereas Canadians are rallied behind this. They are really upset and angry and they are buying specific products that damage specific states.

7:13And kind of the tell here is$25 billion is landing inside of US states, Michigan and Texas. and I mean, they're going after the heart and lungs of some of these red states. This is kind of like threatening to stop talking to your business partner of 30 years because he won't let you renegotiate the deal every six months. This again is another attack on the structural. What has been probably the greatest unlock in prosperity in America has been international commerce and international trade because we have a tendency to produce higher margin, higher value-add products that result in greater market capitalization.

7:53So every dollar in international trade accretes a disproportionate amount of shareholder and stakeholder value to the U.S., including our trade with Canada. You just can't hate this guy enough. $25 billion in the main scheme of the$700 billion in trade that we did with them last year is small. It does, I mean, it's meaningful. It hits certain states and manufacturers really hard, which is intentional. I'm overwhelmed by the contrast between the precision with which Canada is doing this and the slop factory that seems to be our trade apparatus at this point. The United States and Canada have spent decades building an economy neither country can easily disentangle.

8:44But if the Trump administration expected pressure to divide Canadians, it appears to be doing the opposite. On Wednesday's Prof G Markets, Ed spoke with Canadian economist Mike Moffat about how this is playing out north of the border. But I think Canadians are trying to take the position that we just shouldn't take the bait, right, that this is an attempt to go to. So it's one of those things where we start to get angry and then we go, OK, deep breaths. Let's just calm down. We don't you know, this is the what Trump is trying to get from Canadians. So let's let's calm a little bit. But we're certainly not happy about it.

9:21And there is, you know, ironically, when those things happen, there is kind of a rally around the flag and Carney himself gets more popular. So if the administration is trying to force Canada to sign the deal, it's probably the worst possible thing to do because it just makes Carney more popular in the eyes of Canadians and gives Carney more ability to back away from a bad deal. What are some of the other consequences that you think will come out of this? I mean, is it possible that, for example, the relationship could never really be repaired? I mean, what are the other long term consequences?

9:55I think in the kind of short and medium term, I think we're going to see a shift in defense spending. I think that may come out of this EU deal. So, you know, there's been this debate in Canada for decades about buying the F-35. You know, we might see that go away. I do think the Canadian-U.S. relationship is repairable, but it's going to take a while. It will take, you know, kind of a few administrations of goodwill. But, you know, I do think our countries have too much in common, you know, to be forever at odds. But it certainly feels that way right now. Like, this really does feel like we're going through a messy, angry divorce.

10:41and it does feel hard to reconcile, but I'm an optimist. I'm certainly hopeful that we can get through this. We'll be right back.

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13:39Terms and limits apply. Go to Chime.com slash disclosures for details. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Getting better at something is hard, whether it's running gardening, playing an instrument, or anything else worth doing. You need to commit to the process. It takes practice. It takes patience. It takes a willingness to be vulnerable. But it's also really rewarding when you look back and realize that the thing you couldn't do when you started now feels like second nature. Taking care of your mental health is no different. Changes are gradual and hard-earned. The results come from making a plan and sticking with it, and the journey is far more important than the destination.

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14:52Welcome back. Speaking of divorce, this week Scott co-hosted an Office Hours special with divorce attorney James Sexton, who has spent 25 years watching relationships come apart. Together, they answered a listener's question on what really ends a marriage. You know, I think the biggest predictor of divorce is something subtle, and that is just disconnection between two people. I think everybody looks for, like, the big relationship killers, you know, like people who are in open relationships or people who, you know, sometimes that's the blood and the water, you know, of the relationship being in distress.

15:28But I think it's actually much more subtle than that. I think people get divorced and their relationships fall apart the same way that I think Thomas Wolfe said people go bankrupt very slowly and then all at once. So I think it's a lot of little small pieces of disconnection that eventually just catastrophically lead to the failure. You have a great story about one of your clients and it involved granola. Do you know what I'm talking about? Oh, yeah. Can you tell that story? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, you know, I talk about it in the book too, where I had a client, very put together, beautiful young woman in her 30s, and she was getting divorced, two young kids.

16:04He was a successful guy in finance. And, you know, you spend a lot of time with people when you, you know, you go a lot of miles when you're their divorce lawyer and you get to know them really well in a very candid way. And I was just sitting outside of the courthouse with her and we were chatting. I was drinking espresso on a lunch break. And I just said something along the lines of like, when did you realize that the relationship was over? And she told me a story about how there was granola, this particular type of granola that she would put every morning in her yogurt. And they only sold it at this one Whole Foods.

16:31And she said he used to just always like buy the granola for her. She never had asked for it. He didn't ask for like, you know, what Chris Williamson calls good boy points, you know, and we do something for our significant other. And we go, oh, babe, did you see what I did? He would just do it. And she said it made her always feel so loved. And at some point she said, you know, it just the granola just ran out. And she kept waiting for him to refill it. And he never did. And she realized, you know, yeah, this thing's going down. And I said to her, was there anything like that on your end? And without missing a beat, she said, yeah, blowjobs.

17:04And I spit my espresso across the courthouse. And she said, yeah, when you're first dating, I was like, you know, like I would give them to them pretty often. Sometimes in the morning, it set them off on the right tone for the day. And she said, man, at some point, you know, maybe when the kids came or life got in the way, she said, I just got to the point where I was like, oh, well, you know, I'll wait till tonight. and we'll have sex and we'll both enjoy it. She's like, but I don't really know why I stopped. She's like, it wasn't like something happened. We both just, and really it stuck in my mind because there was this sense of like, there's this atrophy that starts to happen and it starts to create this weird spiral where it's like, well, I don't owe you that.

17:41Well, I don't owe you this. And, you know, what's interesting to me about that as a divorce lawyer is I see the effect of it. But then in this work I do in the relationship space, I find myself thinking, Well, you could kind of reverse that spiral, which is I don't have to send a text in the middle of the day saying, hey, babe, I was thinking of you or leave a note in the morning that says like, hey, I had a lot of fun watching a movie on the couch with you last night. I married the prettiest girl in the world. But it's nice to do that. It doesn't cost anything. It takes 30 seconds. And maybe it reversed because what, you know, I said to her, what came first, the chicken or the egg?

18:11Was it the granola or the blowjobs? What ran out first? And she really couldn't tell me. And so I think there's a lesson there. James Sexton meets marriages at the end. Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, Stanford educators behind Designing Your Life, joined Scott for a live taping of conversations and offered a simple test for choosing someone at the beginning. Well, it just occurred to me there's an old saying that, you know, the best marriages are when each person thinks they got the best deal. Right? Certainly, I got the best deal. My wife, Cynthia, is amazing. I got the best deal. I don't know why she puts up with me, but I think it's amazing.

18:53And I've asked her, and she says, no, no, no, actually, I got the better of the deal because you're kind and you're nice and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I think you're looking for a situation where you think you, not that you don't deserve it, but you think that you're going to get the best deal and that this person is irrationally attracted to you. If you've got that, and it goes both ways, see, they're holding hands there. That's good. Then I think that's what you're looking for.

19:36And before we go, today marks 25 years since the attacks of September 11th. we remember the nearly 3 ,000 people who were killed, the first responders who ran toward danger, and the families whose lives were forever changed. That's The Week. I'm George Hahn. We'll see you next Friday.

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