Sinéad Bovell: The Hidden Cost of AI Productivity and How to Protect Your Critical Thinking | Artificial Intelligence | E418

21:48They'll just be a voice assistant. And the same, even with using AI on your smartphone, it's much easier just to kind of pick it up and chat to it. Yeah. So all of these kind of micro ways that we start to remove reading from our world And I'm personally conflicted about this because I read a lot, multiple books at once. And again, I love it, but then I also don't because it's hard. Cognitive friction for me. So I force myself to do it. And when young parents asking, what should my kids study? What should they do? They're 10 years old. I say, just have them read. That's a great set of skills that they're going to build just from that.

22:24I don't know, is reading going to become like Latin, where reading and writing were so foundational to society, and then yet somehow we're no longer connected to it? and is it because it could go one of two ways we have figured out the next step that we can take the same way when writing was invented and Plato and Socrates thought this is going to be the end of our memory we're going to outsource everything to the book no one's everyone's going to appear wise and know nothing and it turned out to be okay yeah is AI in this next kind of voice first chapter going to lead us to something that's actually surprisingly better maybe if we can figure it out and we can make school and learning more rigorous?

23:12Or are we going to lose a lot? And I'm not sure. So I think the safest bet is to continue to read or to continue. And reading is not for everyone. Some people can get friction in different ways. It works for me. But so that's why I always advise, you know, I think it's a point that we hold on to this, that maybe I turn out to be wrong in a decade.

23:30Hala Taha:It's so crazy to think about the fact that like books were controversial at one point. Really controversial. The printing press was controversial. Yeah. And they were somewhat controversial for different reasons. I think the printing press was because it was a monopoly on knowledge and monopoly on intelligence and who could know what. And then when you democratize that, suddenly now people have access to different methods of knowing. People can know things that previously only certain powers could hold. And so that just created... That's kind of a good... That was a good thing for the masses. Yeah, there was a bit of chaos in the onset of it, a few years of war, but eventually we figured it out.

24:08And then writing was very controversial for a different reason, reading and writing, because books, and it's similar arguments we hear with AI, are you going to learn anything or are you just going to pair it with somebody else has written? And what's that going to do to memory? Because prior to having access to a book, you had to write out everything that you learned and what you wrote was what you knew. And now you could just read somebody else's. So these arguments are very similar and we figured it out and we, books actually made in the printing press, learning much more rigorous because now knowledge could compound and it became more complex.

24:44So you can't just kind of make up some chemistry formula because somebody else had printed something a year ago that already showed that that was false. So now your idea has to build on top. So we figured it out as a society and we got through it and academia got more rigorous. Can we do it now? Do we have the patience? Do we have the right mindset of what we need and who's making these decisions? I'm not sure.

25:07Hala Taha:Yeah. But we're definitely at a pivotal moment. I know like a hot topic that you talk about is how AI should be used in schools and how AI should be like monitored with students. And I think you have a really cool perspective on this. I'd love for you to share it. Yeah, I think AI and education, and it depends on the age. So I don't think that there's any need for a young child to be engaging with a chatbot as a, I don't think that that's just helpful. So we don't really need to be doing that. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't be educating kids on chatbots so they can use them safely. Or if they encounter one, they know what it isn't and what it is.

25:46So it's like you can talk about these sorts of things with them without actually having kids on chatbots. That's one thing. But when it comes to academic rigor and academic integrity, and people are saying, you know, we should probably ban artificial intelligence or steal us.

26:00Hala Taha:Lots of kids are getting like expelled for using AI. Yeah. And my stance on that is we can't pretend that this technology doesn't exist at home. It does. So maybe what you can control in the classroom is if you think it's better to have oral exams and do that or written exams. Let's go back to that. That's probably harder. the Socratic method, but you can't assign an assignment home that looks the exact same as it did pre-AI and expect somebody just to not use artificial intelligence. You'll have a few outlier students that maybe will do that, but we are biologically wired to take the path of least resistance, to minimize and conserve energy.

26:37So people, of course, are going to use that technology. So instead of hoping everything stays the same and we just ignore this AI thing, I think this is a moment to raise the bar on what we're even asking from students. So in a world where supercomputers, how does school become harder? What different skills do we need to be able to cultivate? Like raise the bar a bit. Yeah. So that means maybe where curricula gets more challenging at younger ages because we have these technologies. And maybe sometimes it doesn't even mean we're engaging with AI at all. Maybe it's interdisciplinary thinking. Imagine walking into your English class and you have to debate the climate policies that you learned in civics based on the chemistry you learned in science.

27:18All oral, no AI involved. But somebody who's able to do that well can also use AI probably well because they have strong communication and judgment skills. But school does need to look different.

27:28Hala Taha:Yeah. The school system we have today was largely designed in an industrial era that has come and gone. Careers are different. The world we're preparing for is different. So you can't have everything about a society change and one system stay the same. Yeah. And that goes for many of our institutions. Like everything, nobody's immune. And we can all understand, oh, the accountant's job is going to change. And oh, probably this person's job. But why not our institutions? They, everybody, no one's immune to these transformations. I feel like it's been too late. It's been too late. And we've been here before with calculators.

28:05Yes. So, and calculators, it's an interesting example because of course it's not the complexity of an AI system. But what did we do when we got this technology? We all got stuck with harder mathematics at younger ages because now we had this device. So we all got calculus dragged into high school because now you have this launch, this kind of springboard called the calculator. to if we're to use that as an analogy, and it's not a perfect one, but what would it mean for if AI is now, if what AI can do is the baseline, that is the bare minimum, how do you teach people to think beyond a machine, to think past it?

28:42What does it mean to outsmart or to think differently alongside this technology? So I think it's a rewrite for everyone, many industries, education as well. If we get this right, it will be amazing.

28:55Hala Taha:Yeah. It's a big if, but if we do figure this out, then it could look great. We could advance just like all the other technology before AI helped advanced humans. You talk about this, I think, era of independence, how traditional careers and job titles are going to essentially go away and we're going to all act more like entrepreneurs. Yeah, the independence era. And this has been in the works for some time where the tasks within a role have started to change much more rapidly that the initial title that that role was supposed to contain no longer makes sense for the tasks that happened within it.

29:40And AI is just going to accelerate this, where what this technology can do today will be different in six months. And it's not just what the person in that role has to do will change. A company's business model is also going to continue to evolve. So this idea of the sticky job container, that is just going to be a chapter of history where you had one job at one time and you moved linearly up a career ladder. And the career ladder only made sense because we could stack the container that we call jobs. And if you were to be in a position for two years, you probably know more than somebody who's been there for six months.

30:14Therefore, you could probably be more senior than them. In a world where you have AI changing the types of problems people solve, seniority doesn't necessarily guarantee you're the best person to solve a certain problem at a certain time. Roles are going to start to be much more fluid. So the whole structure of work starts to change. Why I do think we're probably seeing more independent based work, and we already are because of the Internet. So the Internet did decouple many professions from this kind of linear career path. But what AI does today will be different in seven months, in 20 months.

30:48And so what a business needs is going to continue to change. So what you need from different people will change. I may need a marketer with these skills today, but a totally different set of skills in a year. It's going to be challenging to hire for that full time when I might need an entirely different thing 12 months from now.

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33:37Hala Taha:You go from working solo to managing a team, serving clients, and balancing the systems that keep your lights on. I really felt that shift as Young Improfiting grew from side hustle to the media company that it is today, YAP Media. Suddenly, reliable connectivity is no longer just a nice to have. It's become essential to keeping everything moving smoothly. That's why I want to put you guys onto AT &T Business. Think of AT &T Business as your go-to for reliable business connectivity. They help your team, devices, systems, and day-to-day operations stay connected so you can focus on the important stuff, serving your clients and growing your company.

34:15Hala Taha:You work way too hard to let a shaky signal slow down your momentum. Give your business the rock-solid foundation it needs with AT &T Business so you can step into your CEO energy. Powered by AT &T Business. Built to work. Get AT &T Business at business.att.com. Let's make this practical. So like as you're describing it, what I imagine is it's like kind of like a freelancer that works on Upwork that has like digital skills. Maybe they're good at video editing, copywriting, graphic design, and they're like, they put up the fact that they're good at these skills and people can hire them based on different skills that they have.

34:53Hala Taha:Is that kind of what you're imagining? Yeah. So I'd say a way to think about it is if you, whatever you do in your work right now, forget the job title, what are the skills that you perform under it? Now, if you were to think about those skills as a company, that is what you offer. So these are the skills that you are endowed with. These are the skills that you've cultivated. if you were to offer those to a few different companies at once. So maybe you're really good at understanding where markets are going in terms of reaching consumers on social media and whatever comes next. You will probably work for a few different types of companies offering those skills.

35:28And so, yeah, you can think about it kind of like the Upworks of the world, but with much more knowledge work inside of that. So a lot of us will be offering our skills to a few different places at any one time and much more of an independent kind of entrepreneurship box.

35:45Hala Taha:We've been hearing about this like job apocalypse for like a really long time, right? Like since AI came on the scene, like let's say three years ago, everybody's saying jobs are going to go away. Like not much has changed. So how has your thoughts evolved in terms of like job disruption? Where do you see it in three years versus like 10 years from now? It's probably not going to be as stark as suddenly we wake up and nobody has a job. That doesn't really make sense to me. And neither does the idea that an economy goes away. Economies don't disappear. They reconfigure. So I think, I mean, the jobs that you and I do today are completely unpredictable to somebody 80 years ago.

36:28Yeah. Would have made zero sense trying to explain any of it. And so I think we're going to transition again into something very new and very different. And so maybe in 15 years from now, again, the jobs are just as unrecognizable as they were 100 years ago. So the transition does concern me of how do we get from where we are today to what work looks like in 10 to 15 years from now. We'll probably work less. And that's been the trend for the last 150 years. We've worked less and less. Now we have five days. We'll probably go to four for three. I don't think there's going to be no work. I think it's just going to look different.

37:04Hala Taha:Yeah. And then I think how we go from today to that chapter, it doesn't have to be bumpy like the industrial revolution. But if we aren't making the right decisions about this transition, it will be. Talk to us about how job disruption isn't necessarily linear. Like, let's take like lawyers and doctors, for example. Like, how do you think that a doctor's job and a lawyer's job will get disrupted? What kind of jobs do you think will go? What kind of opportunities do you think will be created? I mean, it depends. This pulls on a lot of economics. So it depends on what part of the lawyer's job, for example, gets automated.

37:41So if AI is really good at doing most of the, not just admin, but something that doesn't require fierce judgment, a lawyer powered by artificial intelligence can just do a lot more. So we'll need far fewer of them. Maybe what they charge is cheaper, but they can do a lot more things. if society reconfigures enough to where the system, I mean, law is kind of built into the infrastructure of what we do embedded in AI, then that kind of changes the needs of the profession. Yeah. The data is really interesting on something like a physician, because let's say AI gets really good at medical diagnostics.

38:22What happens to the role of the doctor? So it could branch into two different things. So the doctor becomes something else. So diagnostics goes to maybe AI and the nurse. So that role becomes interesting. And then the doctor can do something much more complex. So if AI is getting our basic things, predicting our basic illnesses beforehand, the only thing that would reach a doctor is something very complex and very strange because AI has started to get good at the small signals and maybe it connects to your wearable. So you don't get those types of diseases that we maybe have today. But I don't think the doctor goes away entirely.

38:56I think it just transforms into something very different and strange. And maybe the doctor is part computer scientist, part synthetic biologist, working with quantum computers to model your cells, and then helping you with urgent health care needs.

39:09Hala Taha:And like maybe people get more like private doctors and private doctors become more accessible. I think it will probably look more similar to concierge medicine where people used to have a doctor that came to you. Yeah. I think now as as where as you start to wear more of your technologies and things are catching things earlier, I think just the whole system is going to look different. And I think that's something that we're bad at as a species. We see the future as a linear extension of the present. So we hold everything the same. And then we ask, OK, well, how will I make this faster or different?

39:40But sometimes the whole system changes. So medicine might be an industry where everything just comes to you. And that is what the future of medicine looks like. It's just part device-based in part physician that comes to your house and just does things.

39:54Hala Taha:It's so interesting. A really great example that I heard on your podcast with lawyers, actually, is that AI might make it really easy for people to make contracts. And so there might be a lot more contracts and a lot more volume of contracts, but we still need that like last check of somebody to like validate, make sure this contract is good. And so there might be like a new role where there needs to be more lawyers who are doing that last step of fact-checking a contract before it goes out. And so jobs can also just change or the needs change. Totally. The tasks within a job and the legal services, it's a great one because maybe there's also a new type of job where it's someone who can review a contract that isn't a lawyer in how we think about it today, but powered by AI, they can learn a certain set of skills and that's something different and new.

40:43And then the lawyer goes on to do maybe just the highest, most complex style cases that are just unforeseen and it's really hard to prepare for them. And that's what we ask for from lawyers. So jobs can change. And I think that's nothing is fixed about a role, right? Businesses hire people to solve certain problems at a certain point of time. Problems change, technology changes. So the roles that fall in them also change.

41:04Hala Taha:And industries can be created, entire industries. Like why was marketing? Yeah. And this is one of my favorite examples. And this is when people say AI is going to be able to do absolutely everything and there's no jobs left for anyone. It's always really interesting because the industries that we exist in today were so unforeseeable and it was only because the invention of certain technologies that then that industry made sense. So marketing is an example of that. With the second industrial revolution, we now have assembly lines. We're manufacturing all of these goods much cheaply. So now, well, how am I going to sell all of this?

41:40I have to generate demand. Before you only just needed a sales rep to try to push the few products that you had. Well, now you have 10 ,000 canned goods and before you had five. Where are those demand signals coming from? I'm gonna need to create something called a brand to actually have an identity. The first brand managers were in the 1930s and I think it was P &G that created that role. And the first marketing classes didn't exist until the early 1900s. And marketing isn't just sales, right? It's a cross between you have to work with the finance department, you have to work with advertising.

42:12It only happened post-industrial, second industrial revolution. So and that's an entire industry. So I think we're going to see more of those really strange things that it is impossible to predict because of where we are today.

42:23Hala Taha:It's like super fascinating to think about even just how marketing is going to evolve in the future. So in the future, there might not even be an internet anymore because AI is kind of going to be doing a lot of tasks that we humans traditionally have done on the internet, where maybe the internet as we know it now isn't going to be the same. Maybe there won't be websites anymore. And AIs use APIs to get the information that you need. And then suddenly, who are we marketing to? The AI agents? And it's like, how do we actually create brands or create desires? Yeah, it will just have to evolve. How do you reach people when you don't reach them directly, you probably reach their team of AI systems.

43:10And so it will probably require a different type of skill and a different type of domain. And we probably won't even call it marketing. It will probably be something entirely different. In the same way, we had to figure it out with websites and the world of social media. And then we realized, oh, we can reach people a different way through influencers. And so all of these different things that we kind of originated based on the technologies of the time. But yeah, the internet is going to look very different if we're even going to be on it in a decade.

43:37Hala Taha:I feel like this is a good place to transition to a game. Actually, this is a game that I played with Gary V. Yesterday, I interviewed Gary V. And he's big on AI too, and he's great at predictions. So I was like, let's do some AI predictions. So I'm going to throw out one word and you tell me what is your prediction for this in the next five, 10 years? How do you think this is going to evolve? Okay. The first one is preferences. Like, will AI know what we want better than we know ourselves? Unfortunately, it's possible. I mean, algorithms already have a scary amount of data on us. So hopefully we can figure out the data crisis in a way that's privacy centered.

44:16But I think preferences, our preferences may actually get more complex because AI can handle a lot more of that complexity. So an example is, let's say I want really good skincare.

44:28Hala Taha:Yeah. And I just know that I want it to be clean and I want it to be a certain price. I only have a certain amount of time that I can look for that. And I only have a certain amount of understanding of ingredients. But AI has unlimited time and unlimited access to ingredients. So our preferences may actually be able to become much more nuanced. And for that price and for that ingredient, clean, whatever it is that matters to you, you'll have an AI that works 24-7 all day to find that and source it from a particular place. So I think our preferences will evolve in really interesting ways. That's so interesting.

45:03Hala Taha:I didn't even think about it from that point. I could even imagine where like you've got all this health data and like you've got all this data about your skin and what your skin needs. And AI is like constantly like reflecting that, ordering you new stuff. Yeah, it will be our preferences will be informed by different types of data. Our internal microbiome, maybe how we slept and we'll have systems. And again, hopefully we can do this in a way that makes sense with privacy. but your preferences are now much more informed and hopefully accurate or aligned with the goals that you have or the person you're trying to be.

45:35Materialism, how do you think that's going to evolve? It depends. So this could go in one of two ways. There's a world in which AI makes access to personalized products, fashion, design clothes, whatever it is, furniture. so what you think you need or want is less influenced by mass consumerism because it's much cheaper to produce and manufacture and design so then in a world where we're less influenced by just the masses or a few people we seek influence from maybe we might not be as material because there's no core person who's everyone's trying to emulate or everyone seeks too for certain.

46:20Hala Taha:And also like no not a lot of if we're not on the internet like there's there's not a lot of ads there's not a lot of like screen like scrolling and like keeping up with the Joneses to your point. So that could yes and I don't think we'll be on social media the way we are or at on it at all for that matter so I think that there's a world in which it can go I don't need to compare myself like I truly can manufacture this for 10 bucks on my own I don't know what you're wearing I'm going to wear what I like there's that world but then there's also a world in which it depends on what happens with kind of advertising laws and data laws that if an AI knows us better than we know ourselves and it's not controlled properly, you're constantly bombarded with advertisements and it knows your insecurities.

47:01So it knows the things that you're going to be susceptible to, then maybe we end up shopping and buying more because we constantly feel like, oh, I could be better and there's more for me to do and to how to evolve. So it can go one of two ways. Yeah. Probably a myriad in between.

47:16Hala Taha:So interesting. Okay. The next one is love and relationships. Goodness. I mean, I don't think we're in the best spot with, I think dating apps had the right intention. And it was when they first came out, I think when you look at the early data of how they transformed love and people met that would have never met and all of these interesting things. And then we really went full speed in the gamified economy. And the way you shop for a dress, food, makeup, TikTok, and a partner. And it all looks the same and the exact same ecosystem. So I feel like if we can reroute a different way, then maybe love and relationships.

48:02I mean, people are starting to do more things offline, running clubs and craving more human connection. I hope we can step out of this kind of digital vortex that we're in and do more things in person and therefore remain connected to one another. I am really concerned about the companionship with these AI systems and AI systems filling these kind of superficial needs. Yeah, back to that AI is not your friend. Well, and can it be even more than that? People may see it as, I mean, it's flattering me. I can talk to it all night. And if you think about, you know, the dream, they understand me. They can laugh at my jokes.

48:40We have similar humor. They may be, I'm intellectually inspired by them. They don't bother me too much. You can superficially think that that's what an AI can give you. Yeah. So I am worried that some people are going to just end up in some kind of AI companion ecosystem. Yeah.

48:57Hala Taha:I mean, that's already happening. I think somebody like in Asia got married to an an AI. People are leaving marriages for their AI, but maybe it's also right. We could boomerang into a different direction where people are going back to restaurants and run clubs and doing things and meeting people with common interests in different ways. So I'm curious to see how that nets out. And when you bring the data down to, for example, Gen Alpha that are engaging with social media in very different ways than Gen Z or Z because I'm Canadian and millennials, where there are some of them are on social media, even though they're very young, but they're not necessarily contributing to it.

49:33We're seeing one in 50 phones that are sold is a dumb phone to some form of a flip phone. So some of those cords to this hyper digital world, your life, your boyfriend, your job, everything is in this device are getting cut.

49:46Hala Taha:Yeah. So we might again kind of boomerang into a different way, which could be great. Yeah, it'd be awesome if AI and technology actually made us more human. And I think the linear, again, I really hope, and I think dating apps are already starting to do this, but I hope they don't, where they see, okay, how can AI help the dating environment? Oh, AI should just go on dates for you. And then it can do some kind of concierge thing. And then by the time you go to the date, it's already been vetted. But to me, that's a linear way of thinking about the future. Yeah. It's just an exchange, automated extension of what we already do that already doesn't work.

50:17So you're just kind of piling another technology on top of something that wasn't working to begin with. I hope people figure out much more innovative of ways that maybe AI can help in a way that doesn't make us, yeah, at the gambling store looking for partners.

50:31Hala Taha:Oh my gosh, I remember when I was single and I was using dating apps for the first time. It's like a struggle. It's a struggle. It's really like crush your soul. Let's talk about taste. How do you think taste is going to evolve? In a world of AI, what does taste look like? Is taste going to be more important? I hope people can become more creative because they can see so many different types of designs. I think taste as a competitive advantage becomes really interesting. Somebody who has really great taste because when you can, and just from an economics perspective, if things are very cheap to manufacture, cheap to design and cheap to make, whether that's content, whether that's clothes, whatever it is, if everyone can do that, what becomes scarce?

51:17And if it is your eye and the way you put things together in an abundant kind of a good society, then I do think taste becomes interesting. And people who have taste could have some form of a competitive advantage in the future.

51:33Hala Taha:Yeah. Especially because I feel like AI is kind of just like spitting out what it gets fed in. And if you're somebody who's creative that's kind of bringing a new perspective, I think that can be really valuable. And AI, I mean, it's just kind of the average of all of us, right? So it's been trained on all of our stuff. And it's just kind of the average middle of the road to somebody who has a really different way to look at something. Yeah, out the box thinking. I think it'd be really interesting. Purpose. How do you think purpose is going to evolve? I think purpose is going to have to evolve.

52:03I think we've spent the last 130 years wiring ourselves into a society where you are what you do. And we ingrain that in childhood. As young as you can start to put sentences together, people ask you, what do you want to be when you grow up? And it's asked with the best intention. And it can be a really fun question to ask and to be asked. But then we also tell people you are what you do and your dreams should be tethered to the job you want to do, not the person you want to be. And that worked for a certain type of economy and workforce where unfortunately or fortunately work became your life and a part of your identity.

52:45I think AI is going to force us to decouple it. And again, not because no one's eventually going to work. I'm not in that department, but because we're going to transition out of this chapter and work will look very different. and I don't know if it would be as coupled with identity and maybe we're closer to work in ways that we enjoy more and then that's a good thing. But I think, yeah, we've kind of backed ourselves into this world where you are your job and we all know we hate going to a party and the first thing somebody asks is, so what do you do? It never has sat right with any of us. Yeah.

53:16So I think AI is going to decouple some of those strings.

53:20Hala Taha:I'm thinking the next 20, 30 years, there's still going to be a lot of problems for us to solve, don't you think? Yeah. I mean, I think we're great at generating problems and then giving ourselves problems to solve, especially generationally. So I think, yeah, and that's one thing that I do say when it comes to kids. I mean, they're very creative and imaginative. What problems would they want to solve in the world? What would they want to bring to life and make possible versus what is some job that you hope to do? Because that job probably won't exist if we're going to be real. Yeah. And the concept of a job might not even make sense.

53:54Hala Taha:Okay. Last one is trust. How do you think trust will change? It could go again one of two ways. So one, we recognize that a society that has no trust, that can't believe anything, is just going to be entirely dysfunctional. And we're kind of close to that in the social media. Things aren't going so well from a trust capacity, from a trust standpoint. But there is a lot of resources, or there are a lot of resources being poured into something like provenance, where you can see how information moves throughout a digital system. So we might end up in a world where people have built the solutions to solve these trust problems, and then it looks great.

54:30Or we end up in a world where if we don't figure that out, and is what I'm looking at real or is it not? Is the thing that I'm talking to real or is it not? Then we're in this complete trust deficit. So again, it kind of depends. And I know I give us a lot of different types of scenarios, but that's what the future is. It's not one way or the other. It's decisions that we make that take us to different futures. So it's, you know, what choices are we making today? And I hope we build a world where we can trust things more. But right now it's kind of a free for all.

55:07Hala Taha:As we start communicating with AI more and AI really becomes more of our thought partner and maybe the internet becomes less of a thing. And like you mentioned, there might not be like physical devices that we're scrolling. And so we don't have social media echo chambers anymore, but we're talking with our AI all the time and AI is giving us information about the world and maybe even filtering that information based on our preferences, our moods, whatever it is. What kind of a reality will that end up being? Like paint that picture for us. Yeah, I call this the post-reality era. Right now, I think we're in a post-truth era where depending on which social media ecosystem you inhabit, you're going to see a slightly different set of facts and different scenarios in the world and so forth.

56:04But at least theoretically, I could see if you fell into an echo chamber of something, I could probably find the Facebook group or the Twitter group, whatever it is, in a world where if the future looks like a world where I just ask my AI, you know, tell me about the latest geopolitical crisis in X or tell me, is the economy or is the economy going well? And AI generates that answer and that reality for me. Well, reality becomes something that is AI generated and I decide if it's real or not. And that and your reality would be very different from my reality, depending on what you ask and depending what the AI knows about you and depending on your data and so forth.

56:44And there's genuinely no overlap because in a world where even if you and I believed very different things about the world, you could theoretically see where somebody, where a post originated and who's saying what, when. It's hard, but we can do it. Yeah. In an AI-first environment, if we don't have the right type of transparency or the right kind of ground rules, we could end up in an entirely AI-generated reality. And I actually think this is really important that, I mean, I talked to national security officials about it because the signals that I see that show we're already moving towards a post-reality era.

57:18Some people have different perspectives on AI-generated music. So for some people, it's this is atrocious. This is diabolical. Where are we heading? And for others, it's, you know what, this song made me feel something, though. I felt it saw me as a mom. It saw me as a divorcee, whatever it is. And so that reality, even if it's AI generated, it worked for me. So when you scale that up and we turn to AI and we say, here are my medical records, what does this mean for me? Imagine that times, what does this economy mean for me? What does this vice president mean for me if they're to run? All of these things become this kind of AI ecosystem.

57:58them. And so it's something I really talk a lot about in national security rooms because we could just be in complete la-la land.

58:06Hala Taha:Private companies own this AI, so they can theoretically be feeding it the answers that they want people to hear. Yeah, and we're already seeing different countries kind of data poison the environment. So AI learns from the data that it's trained on. A lot comes from the internet. We're already seeing different countries start to produce a bunch of content and blog posts that align with their views, knowing that AI is going to learn from it and then we'll parrot it. So that's already happening. And yeah, so some of it, some of these are private companies. You can't really even inspect where's AI pulling information from?

58:42How is it making decisions and trade-offs? And these are questions that we're going to have to get to the bottom of. We missed it with social media and now we're all trying to figure out where did democracy go wrong? Yeah. We don't have to with AI, but we have to be forward looking. And that's why it's important to kind of engage with these scenarios. And it doesn't mean we have to experience them, but if you only want to see that it's going to go well, it doesn't actually help society in any way, not engaging with, well, what's the worst case scenario that we don't want? And are we doing anything today?

59:12Are we making any decisions that are steering towards that?

59:14Hala Taha:Yeah. What do we as individuals do now so that we make sure that like, we're getting like a really like full worldview and that we're not like leaning on AI too heavily for information? Like, what should we be doing? It depends on the questions that you're asking about AI and how consequential they are to you. So, I mean, journalists, I know that there's a lack of trust in information for myriad reasons, but there still is some form of rigor that a journalist has to uphold when they report on a story. So if something, if you're trying to learn about something that's really important to you and you're asking AI for it, maybe it's sufficient, but can you at least double check it with maybe an institution of journalism in some way, shape, or form?

1:00:02Can you triple check different sources? So if AI tells you one answer, can you also kind of pull up, where did it pull that answer from?

1:00:08Hala Taha:Yeah. And just at least go that next step. And do you have a diversified information environment to begin with? That's why I watch various news stations, not because I agree with all of them. I try to understand how are different people seeing this mess. So I can understand why we may be in it to begin with. And so I think that there's just various different things. And then always just think critically about information. What incentive does this platform or does this AI system or the company behind this have? What is motivating them? Is it profit? Is it information integrity? Those incentive systems really do matter.

1:00:45Hala Taha:Yeah, I think it's scary because I think people think that AI truly has all the right answers and they're trying to use AI as like a like a fact checking. Yeah, fact checking. And they're like, well, no, this is the answer. AI said it's the answer. But if AI is scanning YouTube shorts to get its answer, anybody can upload a YouTube short. Totally. And so people should just know that this is not a fact finding machine. Yeah. At all. And that's just not what it's been designed to do. It can solve really cool problems that can be creative with you, but it's not there to solve and find facts for you.

1:01:20And we're just going to have to have some form of skepticism with what it shares with us. And until we can figure out some of that data provenance and we can figure out a way to have much more reliability in AI. And I think that's possible. And there are a lot of smart computer scientists working on it. But for now, sometimes the answer will be as good as some random blog on Reddit. And if you're about to change your entire life over that random, would you change your life, if you're married, you're everything over a Reddit thread, probably not. So have that air of skepticism with AI.

1:01:51Hala Taha:Okay. So let's talk about some of the challenges that we think AI is going to bring. You say that you're neither like an optimist or a pessimist, right? But let's go to the pessimistic side of things. One of the things that I've really gotten a lot of pushback, so I've been talking about AI since like things started to get more popular and trying to teach about it. And generally, like I'm bullish on it. I think entrepreneurs should use AI. I try to teach people how to use AI effectively. And in the last six months, I've gotten a ton of pushback on my social media posts. People are fearful of their jobs.

1:02:27Hala Taha:And then people are also really angry about the environmental impact of AI. So what are your thoughts around energy consumption, water consumption? Do you see it like being a long-term problem? Or do you feel like this is something that's going to get solved. I mean, I think we need to be much harder on AI companies and the choices they're making to power these data centers. It does not have to be powered by methane gas or any of the types of coal, whatever energy that people are finding to power artificial intelligence systems. And I get that there's kind of an energy shortage, But that is a choice people are making.

1:03:09You could also power it with solar, hydropower. There's many clean energy options. Sure, it's going to take a little bit longer. But I think if you have the billions of dollars in funding to build the data center in the first place, you probably have the funds to fund it or to build it in a much cleaner way. So I do think that we need to be harder on the AI companies and the choices that they're making to build these AI systems. And it is a choice, right? Because, I mean, America often points to the race with China and China's building a lot of solar and a lot of nuclear plants. Of course, they pollute in many different ways, but they're still building out green energy solutions.

1:03:52So I think people are right to press the gas pedal on. No, no, no, we need to do this differently. Yeah, for sure. And I'm, of course, I do think AI is going to be a part of our future. I mean, this technology, it's been here for years. So that's happening. But how it gets built is not inevitable. And it's not too late to figure out the environmental impact of it. And I hope we do. We don't want to build a future at the cost of the planet and the planetary health. So I think it's possible that we can get both. I really do.

1:04:29Hala Taha:When you think about AI, like, what's the worst that could happen? Like, in terms of, like, what is the most dystopian feature that you could imagine if, like, everything goes wrong? Oh, goodness. The worst case scenario with AI, there are quite a few. maybe some biology bio event some kind of bio weapon event and that's becoming less and less implausible more and more plausible the more sophisticated ai gets that at creating different novel viruses that can be used for many ways many things sometimes they're being used to figure out antibiotic to solve antibiotic resistance great but you can also take that technology and design a bioweapon for a specific person based on their microbiome.

1:05:18My God. It could be really scary or hooking AI up to critical infrastructure like water, a water treatment plant, and having it not only just cut off water, but maybe change the chemical balance of water.

1:05:31Hala Taha:And are you thinking like a company would be behind this or like AI would do it on its own? Not necessarily a company. I'm not worried about a company intentionally doing that. companies on for better or for worse are incentivized to make money yeah so that's usually what they're trying to do not necessarily like take down a nation so i would say it'd be much more of probably some form of a foreign adversary yeah terrorist group or that's trying to yeah and then in terms of ai doing something on its own i don't really subscribe to the ai is going to one day rise up for no reason and just turn on everybody uh maybe there are a few scientists working on that scenario great i'm glad that they're funded i don't think that's the thing that all of us need to try to solve together, everybody in humanity.

1:06:14But it isn't entirely implausible that AI goes about achieving a goal in a way that's not aligned to how we would achieve that goal. And the second order impact of it is something that is a worst case scenario. An example that I like to give is maybe you ask AI to book you a reservation at a restaurant. And if you were to ask your assistant and the reservation was full, your assistant would probably come back and say, sorry, it's full. I probably should have done it earlier, but it's full. Where else do you want to go? And AI might think, okay, well, the goal was to book you a spot. So maybe I'll either hack the restaurant and get you a spot.

1:06:51And there you go, goal complete. Or I'll try to convince you to go somewhere else. I don't have to tell you that I failed the goal. And so that's just the kind of easy way to understand when AI is misaligned. But if it's something much more significant, that would probably be a scenario that I wouldn't want to be a part of.

1:07:09Hala Taha:What are the immediate things that you think government should try to implement now to help regulate AI? That's a great one. I think it's so complex with government because there's so many governments that need to actually be working together. AI is not just going to be a national project. It has to be an international one. AI does not walk around with a passport. So we do need governments talking and working together. I think I mean maybe not releasing at this point in time the most advanced AI systems that are capable of all of this cybersecurity threats and because that could have many economic impacts you don't want to crash the stock market so many different things could go wrong hacking a hospital so maybe government could step in and say I don't think we need to be if we cannot control AI right now or we don't have the cybersecurity infrastructure to protect against it we're just not ready for this latest version of this model, you need to be able to hold that.

1:08:08I think pressuring companies to invest much more in safety with their systems, reliability, explainability. If we can follow AI's reasoning better, if we can ensure that it's much more reliable, we're much less likely to end up in these kind of strange scenarios that we don't want. So I think that there's a lot that can be done. Are people doing it? Who's incentivized to do what is a whole other nightmare.

1:08:34Hala Taha:And what are you most optimistic about when it comes to AI? Like, how do you feel like it's going to help? Like, what are the big things that you see it doing in terms of improving our world? I mean, I think healthcare is one I think a lot of people are very excited about, myself included. AI is wired to handle a lot more complexity than the human brain. And the human body is one whole system. But because it's so complex, we've branched it out into specialty. So somebody is a specialist of, you know, the stomach of this, of that. I think AI is going to do some really interesting things of kind of allowing us to see the body in a whole system.

1:09:11Hala Taha:Yep. And if you can bring diagnostics into the home, if we can get it right and reliability right, being able to catch stuff before it turns into a crisis, I don't know anyone who doesn't want that. Yeah. So if we can figure out how to get that right and safe, I think that's going to be awesome. and even something like legal services. So many people just don't have the ability to, the financial means, to go and have their real estate contract reviewed by a lawyer or they want to start a small business and they sign some shammy property agreement because they just didn't have the funds to do that.

1:09:46If we can have AI systems that are much more reliable and people can pass that to an AI for 25 cents and it lowers the barriers to starting your own business or making different decisions, I think that's going to be awesome.

1:09:58Hala Taha:Yep. I'm not a futurist, of course. I don't have your credentials. But when I think about the future of AI, the fact that we'll have a lot more free time, hopefully, there might be universal based income or like people just might have more abundance, I think will become more human. And I think that will, I don't think all parts of the world will get there as fast. Right. So I feel like in the US and like, UK, like will be more advanced. But But I think that will give us an opportunity to go help people that are struggling or solve world hunger. And like we'll be able to use our capacity that we used to use for our regular job to actually like help humanity and make sure that like nobody goes hungry.

1:10:40Hala Taha:And like I just feel like charity work will become a lot more popular. Community based work could be. And that could be something. I mean, yeah, I mean, if there's things that we're able to automate that also nobody wanted to do to begin with, and people have the means and the teammates now to be able to go to different world projects or local community projects, because now they have a team that's going to handle the finances, their AIs, handle the legal contracts, their AIs, and they want to deal with, you know, animal fosters or doing something globally. That's going to be really cool if we can unlock that potential for people.

1:11:15I think we are going to work less no matter what. No matter how fast AI moves or doesn't move, we've always been working less. I think a three-day work week is absolutely in the cards. And I think it's important that people know about that because, so let's say AI can shave off a lot of time for an organization and they are much more productive.

1:11:36Hala Taha:Yeah. Do you get to bank that time back or do they just cash it in in terms of making more money? So I think a world in which we can work less and we're also reaping the benefits of it, I think will be great. Yeah, let's stick on that. So you're basically talking about how people actually get compensated moving forward. Yeah, so I think there will be a stretch where we'll probably start to work less after the dust has settled in this transition. And so maybe that looks like a three-day work week. And again, if that seems fantastical, so is the idea of a five-day work week. So is the idea of working every day for somebody else at a factory with a steam engine.

1:12:15So all of these things were just kind of strange technological transitions. So a world in which we could work three days because we're much more productive or much more efficient is absolutely in the cards.

1:12:26Hala Taha:I was talking to Gary Vee about this yesterday, and his perspective, at least in the short term, was really interesting. So he was basically saying, like, when it comes to headcount, he thinks of his employees as like an army. and AI is a better weapon. If he's competing against a company that has 2 ,000 employees, he's got 2 ,000 employees. If he cuts his employees in half, but everybody has the same weapons, like he's going to lose. So for him, he's like, well, I'm not cutting my employees because it just builds more capacity. It's not really necessarily about like reducing headcount. It's like, how do we make this bigger and do better?

1:13:03Hala Taha:Yeah. Yeah. The myth is that AI is there to cut people and replace people with AIs, that's a really short-term and short-sighted way to think about it. I see it much more as a top-line technology. It should be there to drive revenue. What new markets can you now play in much more fiercely that you couldn't play in before? If your staff are powered by supercomputers, what can they do now? And I think that's a much longer-term way to view it than just kind of trimming your organization. And now the whole environment that you're competing in also looks different and now you have no people to operate in it.

1:13:32So yeah, I'm much more on Gary's side there.

1:13:34Hala Taha:All right, I'm going to end this conversation with another game. Okay. It's called Bet On It. All right. So I'm going to give you two choices. Some of it we've talked about today, but I want you to basically bet on what scenario is actually going to happen. Okay. Bet one. AI makes the average person smarter versus AI makes the average person less capable of thinking independently. I have to bet on one. You have to bet on one. I have to. Goodness, I have to hitch my aspirations to number one. So AI makes the average person smarter. Yeah, I mean, that's what's happened in the past, right? Yeah, I feel like if we design towards that, then hopefully we steer towards it.

1:14:17So that one could be much more aspirational than probable, but I have to bet on one.

1:14:21Hala Taha:Okay, bet number two, we were just talking about this. AI gives us more free time versus AI simply raises the expected output of every worker. So short term, I think it's two. it raises the output and we're actually just busier and doing busy, busier nonsense. Long term, I think we'll have more free time. But three, a one person billion dollar company versus mass adoption of AI agents inside traditional companies. Do you feel like it's going to be like companies of one or do you just feel like companies are going to have their employees adopt AI? I would bet on the newer companies that are going to be AI first.

1:14:59And maybe that's one person, maybe that's two people. and they're designed with AI from the beginning. And sure, they could be worth billions. I think smaller companies are going to be the future for sure. So I would bet, I mean, I'd have to see the person. Yeah. But yeah, I think that if they're super capable and they know the industry well, that would be an interesting bet to make.

1:15:20Hala Taha:Okay, bet four. Smart glasses replace smartphones versus smartphones remain dominant through 2035. So in nine years, will we likely be on our smartphones or we'll be using smart glasses. The reason why I might go with smartphones is because I don't think it's going to be glasses. Yeah, I don't think it's going to be glasses either. I think that there'll be a subset of people that use them. I think that they'll be functional in certain ways. And maybe I'm entirely wrong about this, but I think it's going to be a different type of device that makes more sense for this technology. So I would go with a smartphone.

1:15:56Or some other device, I guess. If there was an option three, I would go with that.

1:16:00Hala Taha:Another device. Okay. Bet five. AI creates more jobs than it destroys versus AI destroys more jobs than it creates. Maybe less jobs, but more work. Because I think it's not going to look like jobs. So I think it's going to look like how our days are so varied. What part of it is your job? And what is the one job? So I think it's people like the idea of jobs will start to make less sense and people will work, but it won't be considered just a job for an employer. And so it'll just look very different. Yeah, it seems like the whole world is going to look very different. OK, bet six. This is the last one.

1:16:42Hala Taha:AI assistants becoming trusted purchasing agents versus humans keeping wanting to browse and choose for themselves. I don't think we're going to be browsing anywhere. Really? You think it's done? What if you enjoy shopping? Sure. I don't think shopping is going to go away. Browsing on the internet will. We'll shop in different ways. So yes, I enjoy making final decisions. But I think the idea of a browser, we probably won't even use that word in a decade. And I think it's going to be similar to when everyone said, there's no way I am shopping online. Like there's no way I'm buying, how am I going to buy a shirt online?

1:17:20I haven't even tried it on. And my whole outfit's from online. I think eventually whatever comes next won't be browsing on the internet, but it will just be shopping in a different way.

1:17:32Hala Taha:Totally. It's also super inefficient. Like right now we're shopping, we're ordering things in two sizes, we're returning the other stuff. Oh my goodness. It's just like such a waste. And you're going through a row after page one. Oh my gosh. Page two, page five. How much time have I spent doing that? Yeah. Yeah. And just looking at the same things. This was an awesome conversation. I feel like we covered so much ground. We did cover a lot. Before we go, you're speaking to hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs right now. What do you want them to know? I mean, this is such an important moment for entrepreneurs.

1:18:08The skills you've built as an entrepreneur, you're self-directed, right? You're self-motivated. This is such an awesome moment for you. if there was ever a time to take that additional bet or even if you're thinking of stepping into an entrepreneurship game, I think now is the time to lean into this technology in terms of as a springboard. And if there's ever ambitious goals that you wanted to add to your dreams or to your pipeline, go after it now.

1:18:40Hala Taha:Sinead, thank you so much for joining us on Young and Profiting Podcast. Thanks for having me. Yeah, Bam, you guys know that we love staying ahead of the curve. And when it comes to AI, that means more than knowing the latest tools. It means understanding what we gain from this technology, but also what we slowly give up if we let it do too much of our thinking. One of my biggest takeaways from Sinead is that AI should be an input, not the decision. Before you ask it what to do, think through the problem yourself. Decide what a good answer would even look like. Then bring AI in as a sparring partner.

1:19:12Hala Taha:Let it challenge your assumptions, poke holes in your argument, or surface something that you missed. That keeps you in the driver's seat while still getting the benefits of the technology. And that connects directly to Sinead's idea of cognitive friction. We're so used to thinking that easier is always better, but some struggle is actually useful. Reading a long argument, writing notes by hand, or working through a problem yourself forces your brain to engage. Sinead compared it to going to the gym. If there are mental skills you still wanna have for five or 10 years from now, you've gotta keep exercising these skills.

1:19:45Hala Taha:That same thinking applies to your career. Sinead calls what's coming the independence era. As AI changes, the tasks inside our jobs, the title on your LinkedIn profile, we matter less than the skills underneath it. So instead of only asking what your role is, get clear on what problems you can solve and what abilities you can bring into different environments. The more fluid your work becomes, the more valuable that adaptability will be. For me, that's the bigger lesson from today. The goal isn't to compete with AI or avoid it. It's to use it without slowly handing over your judgment, your skills, your agency in the process.

1:20:21Hala Taha:Thanks for listening to this episode of Young and Profiting. If you know somebody who's using AI for everything right now, send them this episode to get the conversation going. And if you learned something today, drop us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to the podcast. These reviews help more people discover the show. We also recorded this one in person live in New York City, So go watch the full conversation on YouTube or Spotify. This is definitely one that you want to listen to more than once. You can follow me on Instagram, TikTok, and X at Yap with Hala and LinkedIn at Hala Taha.

1:20:52Hala Taha:And this is your host, Hala Taha, aka the Podcast Princess, signing off.