Should We Be Concerned About AI? l

Should We Be Concerned About AI?

like the winners press conference at a deep level because they didn't know enough about chest but I think the lesson there is it when the Tactical

part was outsourced it shifted it first of all changed the people who were the best at the task like this and it

shifted the humans to the more strategic level and so I think that's what we need to be ready to think about what can we

hand off so that we shift to a more strategic level how might you be wrong maybe the Strategic level maybe these

tools will be better at the Strategic level than we would ever be I still think there'll be a role for us in determining what their goals should be

and that's a whole other level of strategy is like what kind of world do we want to live in I don't think in the near term that we're going to be taking

our cues from them in that role but I think even the people like last year I was sitting around a campfire with one

guy who's running a generative AI company and another guy who was like his first investor

and who himself had worked in AI like you know they were both uh technologically Adept incentives

aligned and one guy was saying we'll have artificial general intelligence within three years for sure and the other guy was saying I think this is a

glorified toy I still use Google more and these were two people with similar expertise with incentives aligned which

to me suggests the degree to which even the people working on this stuff don't totally understand what its capabilities

are or what it's doing um and so I think there's a lot that's I think there's a lot that's unknown someone made the case

to me that they said uh think about it like this Steve you've got this Steve here say my IQ is 100 and there's

another Steve through that war whose IQ is a thousand what would you give me to do as a task versus what would you give

him to do as a task who would you want to drive your kids to school who would you want to I don't know answer you're

saying we give everything to that person well this is the analogy he gave me he was like what are you left with okay even even if it comes to that point even

if it comes to that point there'll still be the issue of comparative Advantage which is that these these models are incredibly energy intensive right and so

you'd want to delegate energy to them for the things that you really want them to do so even if they are do end up

better than us at everything because energy is not unlimited there will still be things that are more valuable to have us doing than to have them doing right

even like I mean that's the case all the you may be better at certain things in your business but you're not doing them

because it's a comparative advantage for you to do this instead of those other things so I think even if they do get to

the point where they're better than us at everything there's still roles for humans but incredible amount of disruption right like what really

worries me I mean I was reading about last year about technological

innovation in history you know and we have like to put it in a very coarse

nutshell it's like for 300,000 years we lived like squirrels and then for 10,000 years we lived like farmers and then 250

years it's like everything changed every generation like crazy um and that's been hard to to

adapt to um and I think you know I thought that the Industrial

Revolution this you know which pulled ultimately led to pulling billions of people out of poverty you know changed

everything I thought that because productivity increased so much that wages and things would have increased right along with them but it turns out

that there's pretty good evidence that there was actually a gap of probably about 40 years between the increase of productivity and the increase of

Wages that's not good like a 40-year gap between a huge technological disruption

and like Shar shared Prosperity that's not something I think we can really afford and and what sort

of helps solve the problem is that when lots of people got urbanized for the Industrial Revolution and looked around and said hey you have the same problem

that I have we need to band together for Collective action I think the challenge now is we're like an invisible Factory

so it's it's harder to get people to collectively act because we're not sitting next to each other dealing with this problem but I think we need to

start thinking as a group of this technology is

cool but identifying problems that we want it to work on not just building it out be for the sake of Jus it's cool

what kind of world do we want to live in I think we need to be asking those questions I think it's quite unlikely that we'll be intentional with it in the

way that you're hoping it'd be unfortunate I mean I think a good sign though I think is that even

the kind of technologists who I think are usually prone to Hyperbole and

saying like this will be the greatest thing even when it's obviously not going to be are sounding some notes of caution with this one in an early stage and so I

think that's a tuned other people to some of those notes of caution I don't think that gets us out of the woods by

any stretch the notes of caution worry me oh well that's the point they should worry I think if we if if we were where

we are and not worried right now I think that would be a lot worse what is the most important idea in your work that we

haven't discussed in your opinion in the sports Gene I think the most important idea um that we haven't discussed is

that uh Talent at Baseline like the talent you if you take

a test in something your let's say you haven't trained in that thing that we'll call that your talent

Baseline is sometimes correlated with your ability to improve from training so

people training looks just like medicine because of differences between us some

medicine might work for you in a way that it doesn't for me training is similar two people will get different

results from the same exact training and sometimes how good you are to start is predictive of how rapidly you'll improve

but very often it is not and that's a huge deal because we usually judge people's potential based

on what we see right now or what we see at Baseline before they've really had a chance to train what I think the science shows is that this Talent of

trainability is even more important than Talent at at Baseline and so if you're trying to evaluate people before they've

really had a chance to find a training that fits for them again it's a messy answer because it means people have to experiment with the kind of training

that works for them and that trainability is the most important kind of talent and I think that's a different picture of talent okay this is quite

this is very important because it immediately as a employer I thought when I'm hiring people I you know if I'm hiring a

producer for one of our podcasts whatever I shouldn't be focusing so much on if I'm was planning for them to work

with for me and with me for 10 years I should be thinking about their trainability yeah I was going to say it

depends how quickly you need them to get going right if you need them if you need to know what they know today and they need to be using that thing tomorrow

yeah that's one thing um but if if it's about how good they're gonna get in the long run you just shouldn't assume that

what you're seeing today predicts like their ability to improve at a certain can you measure someone's train ABY I

mean you can measure it very easily and things like their aerobic capacity you know the amount of oxygen that they can uh move through their body I mean some

of the initial studies of this were done in in scenarios like that where you had everyone doing the exact same training and you were literally measuring

physiological parameters you can do it in other types of cognitive testing and ability testing if you're looking for a

sort of specific task that's a little harder if you're looking for a task that's customized to something in your business I think that's more difficult

it's going to be a little more subjective I guess you could you can kind of look at other areas of their life I guess in the professional context

to see how quickly they developed one of the things I look at when people apply for jobs to work in one of my businesses

is I look at their LinkedIn resume but specifically how quickly they got promoted and moved through departments

because that's kind of an indicator it's obviously not the most important thing but you'll go you click on someone's LinkedIn and you'll see they joined as

an intern and then a year later they were a manager of the team then a year later they were the like director of the team then a year later they moved up to

a different department a year later they became the global head and I'm like oh my God that this person really moves through the system well um and that is

an indicator of a few things they get on with people because someone's pulling them up and saying that person go up their team are also um basically voting

that they should be the manager um they have Proficiency in in learning rapidly because especially if they jump between

sort of departments from HR to um culture whatever um and I I always think

that makes them a bit more adaptable and teachable if they've shown that track record of changing profession and moving up the

organization quickly interesting because that feels a little related to I think the an important idea that we didn't

talk about from range has to do with so-called serial innovators these are people who make repeated creative contributions to their organizations no

matter where they are even when they're changing like I said changing places and these people like a woman named Abby

Griffin a professor and her colleagues who studied these people some of the descriptions of who they are uh these

are like literal phrases from her work they are systems thinkers they read more

and more widely than their peers they have a need to learn outside their domain they have a need to communicate

with people with expertise outside of their own area they appear to flit among ideas which doesn't usually sound like a

compliment um they repurpose things are already available in new ways all these sorts of things and you can feel in her

writing almost she's almost like talking to HR people saying just so you know when you define a role too narrowly

you're making sure you select these people out or force them to go somewhere else to try to cultivate that kind of breath and I don't think you can create these people from Whole cloth but I think you can absolutely stifle them