If AI can do everything from writing novels to designing proteins, what exactly is left that only humans can do? Do we care about the story behind a piece of art, who made it, who suffered for it? When AI can produce the same words or images, which jobs are really at risk? Is there any such thing as a human advantage in a world where machines can outperform us at
almost any measurable task. What does any of this have to do with the plow or Stephen King's nightmares, or the first shoeshine caught on camera, or Tom Cruise's stunts, or the shortage of air conditioner repair men, and why hyper capable AI might actually increase the demand for unexpected jobs. Today we'll speak with author and technologist Andrew Mayne. Welcome
to Inner Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and author at Stanford, and in these episodes we sail deeply into our three pound universe to understand how we see the world and what our world might come to look like very soon. When you look around a subway car or a coffee shop, you see people scrolling on their phones with essentially no movement of their bodies except for their thumbs, but inside their skulls, eighty six billion
neurons are firing away. Each neuron as complex as a city, each one alive with electrical storms flickering tens or hundreds of times every second. These vast inner cosmoses are running constant simulations of the world around us, of the future of each other. And one of the things that makes our species unusual is that our brains are not simply built for getting food or escaping predators. They are finely
tuned social prediction engines. A huge amount of the cortex is devoted to thinking about other people, their motives, their reliability, their intentions, their reputations. We carry around mental models of thousands of individuals and organizations, and we constantly simulate possibilities like how would she react if I sent this message? Can I trust this contractor is this person over here
aligned with my values? And so on. This social simulation machinery is so ancient and so deeply wired that it has shaped everything that we call an economy. I think this goes underappreciated that markets are so much more than just spreadsheets and supply chains. They are agreement between nervous systems. Economies are built from trust, from storytelling, from reputation, from
shared values, and from our search for meaning. Okay, Now, suddenly into this long human drama steps a new cognitive species, AI. And this is weird because AI doesn't have emotions, it doesn't have a body, it doesn't have a childhood, but it can process information at extraordinary scale, and its busy automating tasks that once required human thought. So the question on everyone's mind is what does this mean for the economy? What happens to our jobs? Will the economy bend or
will it break? Will we be replaced or will our skills evolve into something new? Now, the first thing to note is that we have been here before, many times, thousands of years ago, when agriculture was nearly everybody's job. The plow presumably seemed like an existential threat, but as we know, it didn't eliminate human purpose. It expanded it because the plow freed brains to invent teaching, governance, philosophy, math, art,
and so on. And this pattern kept repeating. Industrial machinery opened up more human creativity that electricity than the microprocessor. Every time the old jobs vanished and new ones emerged that no one could have predicted. I think about this all the time. If you were one of the men who landed on the moon in nineteen sixty nine, you couldn't even have imagined that your kids would graduate with
majors in computer science. Or you couldn't even imagine the concept of the Internet, and that a kid might grow up to become a web developer or an app developer, or a mobile UX designer, or a data scientist or a cloud infrastructure engineer, or go into cyber security, or become a PROMPT engineer, or a drone cinematographer, or an e sports athlete, or a VR designer or a social media influencer. Today, of course, we are catching the wave
of another transformation faster than anyone imagined. AI is writing code, it's designing proteins, it's responding to customer inquiries, it's drafting legal language, it's tutoring students, it's accelerating science. Some jobs are going to be automated quickly. These are called the black box jobs by today's guest, where someone receives a signal and sends a standardized output. But new professions will appear, most of which we can't yet name or even conceive of.
And the deeper questions reach beyond economics into our psychology, because we need to assess what humans actually want from other humans, what are we willing to outsource, and what are we going to fiercely protect? For example, why does a concert matter more when the guitarists spend decades building callouses? Why do we trust a teacher more when they have lived the very mistakes that we are trying to avoid. I've argued here before that the answer lies in the
circuitry of the social brain. We value the story behind a creation. We value the years of effort, the biological limitations, the courage, the vulnerability. AI can mimic outputs, but it can't yet mimic stakes, It can't yet mimic what it means to be a fragile biological creature trying to create something meaningful in a short life, and so on the surface,
the question is will AI destroy jobs? But the deeper version is how will humans redefine meaning and connection and value in an age when machines can do almost everything else? You explore this. I sat down with my friend and colleague Andrew Mayne, who is an extremely interesting person. He is a novelist and inventor, a very accomplished magician with books and television shows on the subject and most relevant for today's conversation. He is the original prompt engineer for
Open AI and their first science communicator. He lives right at the intersection of creativity and innovation and AI. So I invited him to the studio to get his take on the future relationship of humans and AI. So, Andrew, a lot of people are worried that AI is going to take over all the jobs of humans, So what's your take on this.
I think that we have to think about what we mean by jobs and historically what's happened. If we were in Mesopotamia several thousand years ago and somebody showed you a plow, and at that time, like ninety nine percent of everybody was involved in agriculture, a plow would seem like a very scary thing. Because of the plow, we were able to invent things like teaching as a profession, governance, and a lot of the other things that we now
consider essential culture. They didn't exist then because we didn't have the time to do that, and they weren't like superfluous things like poetry or art, which have value, but these were things to help build our economy. And I think that we get that every major technological change. If we went back just you know, two hundred years ago to you know, within the great great grandparents time, like there's actually I think Zachary Taylor has a grandson that's
still alive today, which is like crazy. I mean he had children late and his son had children late. But in that time of somebody's living to the other grandparent, when ninety five percent everybody's going in volt in agriculture if you talk about the industrialization of agriculture, and that would seem like that would be almost apocalyptic in the change, But that's when things started to happen and shift. It was part of the reason we got rid of slavery.
It's part of the reason that we started to think about how everybody sort of has a vital part of our economy.
So if we were just blue skying about the kinds of jobs that will exist one hundred years or not, things in analogy to governance and teaching, what could we come up with.
Well, you know, part of it is is people often ask, like, what's the job of the future, And if we look at how much jobs have changed in our own lifetime. Subtly that we don't realize that if we went back in time to like the nineteen eighties and we talked to a teacher, then we talked to a teacher today, and we told a teacher back then, Well, in the future, you're going to spend part of your time in Google Calendar. What's that, Well, it's an electronic spreadsheet for managing time
sort of. You're going to be doing video calls, you're going to be using electronic documents. It would sound like an IT job, it would sound extremely technical, but that's normal. And yeah, and you think about that too, is we use these tools all the time. So you and I are on our phones, we're checking messaging, we're checking these stuff. So I think one hundred years from now, the value is going to still come in from things where we want people. We like people to teach us, we like
people to manage things for us. I still trust I trust you. I trust you to manage a thing. Maybe you're going to use in a bunch of electronic systems, but I want you to make sure they're working.
That makes sense. One of the things that I've been very interested in is what AI is going to mean for creatives, For example, writers, You and I are both writers of books, and something that I've been happy to see is that people really care about the heartbeat behind the page. So they care that it's a real author who's slaved over a keyboard for months or years, rather than oh, I wrote this book with AI in five
hundred milliseconds. No one wants to read that, even if the book is identical word for word to your book. And I think that's nice that people care about the heartbeat. Yeah, I think there's going to be a place for certain kinds.
I might be happy with AI textbooks and stuff, but you know, reading about the experience of somebody like you who's actually gone into a lab, gone into the rold and tested, thinks that's way more valuable to me. An example that I use a lot is, you know, one is like I love the fact that Stephen King's is kind of crazy guy that lives in Maine that makes his stories because like this might be a nightmare. That
kind of gives up more value. I mean, maybe it's sad that somebody else's terror is my enjoyment, but you know, beaus of may but also like you know Brandon Sanderson. He's a prolific science fiction fantasy author. Brandon is a guy that's very active in the convention circuit. He's got a really wonderful engagement with this fan. Basically talks about writing. He shares about writing all the time. He's a very
real person. I don't know if you know this, but he did a Kickstarter and he had four books he wrote during the pandemic. It was the most successful kickstart of all time, forty million dollars. Forty million dollars.
Incredible.
The market cap of Barnes and Noble is only like four hundred million, so basically ten percent of the market cap of America's largest book retail bookseller.
And why I think it's people like him. They like the guy.
I mean, like part of what makes you know we might get an AI to generate an entire mythology like Lord of the Rings, but the fact that J. R. Tolkien was a guy that spent all this time studying trying to create an English mythology gives it value.
Yeah, exactly. So if an AI wrote exactly Brandon Sanderson's books, we wouldn't care about as much. So that's the good news. Some people might.
I think there will be a mixed ground, but I think a lot of us who care more who flipped to the backjacket to go who wrote this?
There's a reason we put that on there. Yeah. What's interesting is that it won't be too long before AI starts writing books and faking the author by an author picture. So we'll have to have other ways of verification, like in person tours.
We've dealt with, like there are publishers that have house authors. There are some I know of some authors that are famous authors that are no longer writing their books and they have other ghostwriters doing that. So I'd say we've been doing that for a while. But you know, I think you're right. You know there's going to be people whoren't going to care. I think that's fine.
One of the things that's a really cool question is what will authors do to distinguish themselves from AI. So by analogy, when the camera got invented, visual painters panicked, but what they ended up doing was moving into areas that the photograph could not do, light Impressionism and Cubism and so on, and they ended up, you know, surviving and making new kinds of art that no visual painter would have predicted at the time when the camera debuted.
So the question is what kind of books will we write.
I use when I give talks. One of the examples I give is the gours first photograph of people, right, the first photograph of people's like eighteen thirty seven, eighteen thirty eight, and what happened was accidental. Back then, you had to leave a camera aimed to the sidewalk. He left a camera. You have to leave the camera the shutter open long enough. Because it took so long from
a photons to register on the film. The idea of capturing people seemed crazy because nobody would stand that long enough. But a guy got a shoe shined, so the shoeshiner and he got captured in the photograph.
And you think about what that would mean.
At the time, you saw you know one, You saw how painters realized they could go in different directions. Their job wasn't just to try to recreate reality, it was interpret it. But imagine going back in time and saying, hey, listen, not only that, but you know, by the in a few decades, we're going to have motion pictures.
What's a motion picture?
That's hard to explain and explain that you know, one hundred years later we were going to have these productions that we're dwarfed in size. Thing you have or today where you get the end credits for Avengers. Endgame is like longer than like the number of people who are in like the United States Navy, and like eighteen thirty seven, the budget not adjusted dollars, but the act of the budget and just dollar for dollar was like greater than the US Treasury, and the scale of art got so
much bigger. So for writers, I think the part of what comes into is that that you get to your your it's not just the tech space between the pages of the book. I think it becomes bigger, like what
we're doing a podcast. Okay, right, this is part of what is the Eagleman Legendarium, you know, part of it's this, part of it's this part of it's that I think that we start looking at that how much time do you have to spend on the things you don't like doing as an author, like revisions, little notes, things like this? How much would happen if you had AI to free you up from that to spend more time I'm creating engaging with people.
So let me just make sure I got I got the analogy though, So with bands, the release of the album that was the big thing, and then they'd make their money still on the album. Then that changed with Napster and so on. We're going on the road was the thing, and the album was just the calling card so that people would show up. The economics of it change.
Well sort of, but it also it changed for some of the people the top. For other bands, they'd go on the road and never actually was a payoff because the record labels would still hold on to it. And now you're in this weird phase where like with with Spotify and with streaming, where you have some people making a lot of money on streaming and some people not. I would say record company economics are always sort of weird, so.
Right, but it's the going on the road that mattered. It's the show exactly, and that's the part that for a while was not a big deal in music and then became a big deal. I suspect that it's going to be the same. And let's say writing where it's not just sitting and tapping out the book in solitude, but it's going and doing the talks and the tours and in the podcast I do.
Every time I launch a book, I'll go I'll do a live sessions, I'll go hop on video and talk to people about that I used to do, like go to bookshops and stuff. But I said, I can reach more people if I just hop on a video stream and talk to people and be accessible and so and again. I think there's gonna be different things for different people. I think that, you know, not some people can be reclusive. I think sometimes if their work just creates its own community around it, that can work.
Yeah. Okay, so let's get back to the big picture then, So what is going to be the influence of AI on the economy in terms of jobs? What jobs are going to disappear first? Which ones are going to be unaffected?
I think the highly network jobs or where people are happy to have a person in there or need a person to be in it, are always going to be highly valuable.
Give what's an example.
You know, if you are a person who is makes a perching decision for a company and you have to decide who to work with, and you need to look at contractors to somebody with a really good reputation, and that really comes to talking to Let's say you're a contractor and you have to figure out who are you going to get.
Your building supplies from.
You know, you're going to want to talk to somebody and find out the reliability because that information is not just available out there. That's something you have to sort of figure out like a little more deeper sort of connection to that.
Although we can certainly imagine a time when my AI agent talks to this company's AI agent and all the data but WI reliable. Well that's right, but all the data is out there about the reliability.
Of that company, you assume, but we make We make that assumption though that that we put everything out there. So you know a lot of stuff about other people that you won't share, both via social media or whatever. That's insight you share with your friends, you share with high trust people, but you don't actually make because that
has value. And so I think that's part of like you look at certain things that continue on, like you know, I have you we both have like litter agents, right, and they have a better understanding of you know, you could theoretically I could have a chat GPT negotiate a contract, but it's going to tell me like, well, this is really what happened at this publishing house, or this what's
really happened there. So I think there's a lot of places where we forget how much information is locked up in our heads and how much us based upon trust.
Yeah, yeah, that's right. One of the things that fascinates me is social neuroscience, which is a new sub field which really concentrates on trust and integrity and reputation of other people. It turns out the way we've traditionally studied the brain, as we say, look, this is how the visual system works, is how audition works, this is how movement works. But what that overlooks is that a massive amount of the circuitry of the brain is about other people.
And we have thousands of models in our heads of other people. I mean, and I know a bunch of people in common, and for each of us, we've got a little model. That person's like a little you know, mannequin, and oh, how would that person spotify I say this or that or I call them? And it's weird how many people we can simulate pretty well. So we're living in this world where we care so much about other people.
And I agree with you that a lot of that information is not the type of thing that AI can pick up on, because it's very subtle how humans interact with other humans as opposed to just data that can be gathered.
Yeah, when I lived in Japan and one of the things I saw there up close was a lot of like how Asian business culture works. And you have two companies that seem that they're going to do a partnership that are very much the same on paper, but then they want to hang out socially. And that happens here too, is that I have an investment fund and we get some of our partnerships come from they look at the paper,
look at the data room. We go, this is great, but let's hang out and let's talk to each other and see if our values aligned. I think we forget too that our economy is not really the exchange of dollars, is the exchange of values, and not every value is
easily converted into a dollar point. And there are people that you have a lot of ways in which you can spend your time, and there are probably more efficient ways, ways that could be more financially profitable towards you, but you choose not to because you say, I get more value out of this than he and we're all like that, and I think we forget that, and we think about automating the economy, and I think that there are going
to be parts of what we do. But an example give you is that I did an interview with Yaka Potsky, who is the head scientist at Openingie and Yaka is brilliant, absolutely brilliant, one of the smartest people in the world in my opinion, and we were talking about a teacher he had. He went to a magnet cool school for computer science, and I said, you know, we're seeing AI as this wonderful tutor. Do you see this point where
AI replaces teachers? And yakub understand whose job is to get AI to be as useful and as widely deployed as possible, laughed at that idea because he pointed out his favorite teacher inspired him and it inspired him because that person had a real experience. And it's one thing chat GPT can be, as you know, sycophantic or whatever we talk about it is you want end of the day, it starts to feel like okay, but you know, how
do you really feel? And having real experience can make something give us more value.
And I think that's something we overlook.
That's why I think that I think the classroom AI is going to be super beneficial. We're already seeing the examples that is extremely helpful, but the end of the day, I want to have a human there with real experience that's also going to encourage me and tell me, like I love memory techniques. One of my favorite teachers to Anthony Mativier. He does things on memory on YouTube and whatnot.
And I can ask jat GPT about memory, which I do a lot, but listening to somebody who actually tried the methods is much more useful to me in the long run.
Why because you get to hear what went wrong and what.
Because I U, yeah, it's taking coaching advice from somebody who never played football versus someone who actually played the game. And then memory methods like somebody who actually has real experience doing the thing.
That's got a lot of value.
And I think that we think about like how much of what we want is I need proof that it worked. And the ultimate laboratory is human experience when it comes to trying to figure out what to do with your own experience.
You know, my thirteen year old boy I asked him, Hey, if there were a tutor of Aristotle, he knows everything Aristotle knows, you know, plus everything else, would that be really interesting for you? And he said no, not at all. And I said why, My thirteen year old's really smart.
But he wasn't interested because he said, you know, I want to spend time with my friends, and that's much more interesting than sitting with Aristotle and asking questions and getting chet GPT answers back from that model.
Yeah, I think it's a balance. I think that you have to figure out where you want to get those things from and end of the day, he wants to be human.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Okay, so when we think about AI affecting the economy, what do you see then, given what we talked about that, you know, we care about other humans, all the social networking that's not going away, does it get enhanced, does it get suppressed turn in a different direction.
I think it's a mixed bag. I think, like anything, there's good and there's bad. I think that you know, when you have the opportunity to, you know, use these tools to sort of amplify yourself, it's great if you just try to say I'm going to outsource everything.
I do to the tool. That's going to be a challenge.
And I look at jobs that are at risk I describe as like black box jobs. You know, anything where you just get an email in and you send something out and nobody cares who does it. That's really headed towards replacement from AI. And we see that with like call centers and things like that, where it's really if it doesn't matter who's in that role, and we're going to see that. You know, you're going to find fewer
people at fast food restaurants. But also those are jobs too that the average time somebody stays on one of those jobs is like eighteen months. Those are jobs are more of a rung on a ladder. So I certainly think that bottom parts of the ladder we might see changes there. But I also think that we do invent new rungs at the top, which is what we've done historically. I think that we're going to have more science. I've talked to people who are in AI who talk about AI
scientists say what happens when AI replaced scientists. I think I think we're going to have more scientists because one human scientists will able to do so much more than they could before. I think with teachers too, we need more teachers. I would like more teachers in my life.
Yeah, I'm amazed when I look back at scientific projects like William Bragg who spent years crystallizing the first protein and figuring out the structure of it. Took him whatever, five ten years and won the Nobel Prize for that. But now alpha fold, does you know, three hundred thousand proteins in the blink of an I. Everything speeds up like that, and that gives the opportunity for people to work on projects like alpha fold and go much faster.
Well, I give you an example about that. So last night I was over at the Chans Zuckerberg Institute, which is Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chands Institute for Research and Biology. And I have some friends with a company called Evolutionary Scale or working on a protein model that all model call a ESM three and models that were able to
predict protein structures. They got basically acquired by Biohub now, which is the institute runs that to basically oversee, you know, and help deploy and help move fast or with AI in the biology space.
So chan Zuckerberg took that company off.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, they brought them on board. Alex Rouves was the head of elflishing Scales now going to be running bio how much's exciting. But one of the things I think about is that you know they're looking at how they deploy AI whatever. You walk around the facility and then you see a room, several rooms with really sophisticated electron microscopes, and you realize like, oh, they need more of these, they need more people running these things.
We ned way more of that.
And even if they had upstairs an AI scientist that was able to do this stuff, you start to see like, well, how much more data could we get?
And you just see that like.
Oh, it's not like I have an AI scientist. Scientist solved. It's like I have an AI scientist. Now science really begins.
Oh that's interesting because you could in theory automate all the electron microscopy and you could you can imagine ways that that becomes like a dark factory where it's running itself, where the AI generates hypotheses, goes tests, all the stuff.
But humans, like how many experiments you be running right now? If you could just pull up chat GPT and say Hey, I want to go run this experiment.
Lots Yeah, okay, And your point is then lots of other people would come into science to do that.
Your bottleneck isn't there's your bottleneck isn't you don't have enough ideas for things you want to experience. Your bottleneck is the resources.
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I totally agree with you on that. What's interesting is I wonder. I wonder often if there is sort of an answer or an end to science where we say, okay, look we've got this in place, that in place, we know these forces that structure. We're done,
We're out of here. I have my doubts because, in fact, they just did a podcast on this recently with the particle physicist Daniel Whitson about this question of is the way that we construct the laws of physics does it have to do with our sensation and our cognition, our veldt meaning what we can sense in the world. And if you came across aliens who saw a totally different world, would they possibly come up with different laws of physics and not use fee but they, you know, have a
very different way of seeing it. So maybe that's where science will go, is looking at alternative ways that we could have talked about it.
Yeah, I mean there might there might be a point at which we say we've solved all the things that you can explain to our monkey brains, but we haven't solved for everything, Like like there's there's going to be things as the universe gets older, things which conditions will change and whatnot. We look at this in life sciences.
I have some friends that are involved in AI and life sciences who are very excited and who are very very bullish on where this is going to head, Like what happens when we cure health and we don't need doctors anymore. I'm like, we're gonna be worrying about longevity research on Mars. You know, We're gonna worry about long long distance travel, like how do you maintain brain function
when you're five hundred years old? Like, I don't see those questions ending because we're just gonna Expand you know, the Greeks thought that, oh, maybe science is pretty solvable because they looked at a very simple framework, but they weren't asking bigger questions about a lot of things. They just thought these things couldn't even be answered. And now
we're like oh why not. What's ex exciting about watching this happen is that when you talk to people in biology tell you how much what proteins can do, when you start to figure out how you can start structuring proteins to do things like breakdown plastics or attack certain parts of cancer, it's a very very interesting area that we're just now starting to see. And I think there's a lot of optimism here that we're going to see things rapidly develop because we saw what happened to language
model space. There's a lot of challenge in getting life science as data inside of these models, but we see really good science that that's going to happen.
Okay, so what do you think in terms of what AI will be able to and won't be able to do.
I think that any task that you can measure that somebody could walk into a room and take a test, AI will eventually be able to do that, I think rapidly. So I think that's very likely the case. I think we're going to see a fast follow for robotics.
I don't think.
I think we're going to see probably the next eighteen months, some really interesting things. We've already seen some things with kind of machine intelligence and problem solving. But there's one thing. It's one thing to have like a highly intelligent system. It's another thing to have a system that works within an entire ecosystem or culture or society, and we just often just forget about how important that is of where
value comes from that. So I also think that like we talked about before with authors, is I might have an AI that's an incredible guitarist.
Am I going to be excited to see that perform?
Because the problem with AI is this is that because we often value creativity because of the limitations, but when there's no limitation to the amount of effort or energy or resources it goes into an AI system. An AI guitarist would be like, well, of course that's cool. I can listen to a CD and do the same thing.
But I want to know that this biological system called a human had to spend fifty years to get there to do that, and that creates more value because it's not just the outcome, it's what went in to make it. I think a lot of people have anxiety about like AI replacing their job and what they do, and I think that we have to sort of step back and often remember that a job is about an outcome, and how you get that outcome is going to change over time.
It's changed historically, and often the thing that you're trying to do is create some sort of value, and it's not always economic, or it can be. It can be put into economic terms, but we have to sort of think back, like why do you what is the value of a book? You know, and you know, put twenty dollars on the spine of a book and say this book's worth twenty dollars. I've read books that if you told me what I was going to get out of it, I would have.
Paid a lot more.
You know. I've had businesses with friends that like, yeah, we made money, but really the experience of working with everybody was way more valuable. And I think that people have anxiety about this future of like what happens or robots do everything, Like I don't think it'll be as fun and I don't think it's going to create as
much value as people think that it will. And that's something I mentioned to before we recorded, was you know, this is a statistic that's roughly like forty percent of all Internet traffic after six pm is like Netflix, and that's because of squid games, you know, and K pop Demon Hunters, and when you take those things out, those things that are really valuable because people like them, when people created them. What's the value of the Internet after
six pm? Well we just lost forty percent of the value right there.
Okay, but what about aifilm. Do you think people will spend their time watching AI film instead of Kiepop, Demon Hunters and squid get.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I don't think anybody under six is going to care, you know, how it was created. I think that I think that we're going to really value certain things. When ever, Tom Cruise wants to market a Mission Impossible movie. Part of the PR campaign is about the stunt that he performed. You have the last movie he did, He hung outside of in an airplane. He did some airplane stunts. He's done some other really
cool stuff. When they did Top Gun, you know, the Top Gun Maverick, they made it a point of putting the actors into actual real planes so we could get their reactions, and this was added value. If we watched a PR video talk about look how great these AI stunt doubles are, which we got like back in the nineties, or like we don't care. That's not as interesting to us as the fact that a human really did something special.
I think there are going to be films where it's going to be three three high school students are going to make a movie in Ai and we're like, this is amazing, and then we're going to still want, you know, germal Deteruro to hate on AI and go build these wonderful, lavish productions where he does it his way like a crafts person.
I think it's both. Yeah, I think it's a really smart way of looking at it is in the mixture model of what the future is going to look like. So if we're just looking purely at economic value, where do you think the biggest changes are going to be there in the next five ten years.
One of the things that's happened that people have overlooked is that every six months or so, it's you get better answers from chat GPT or geminarra claud when it comes to medical questions, right, and we've had the first time in history medical information has gotten cheaper year over year, and that we can't really I think overstate how significant
that is. You think about that, like getting competent medical information it gets better every year, and it gets cheaper every year, and that's going to apply to a lot of things. And so I think that when we start to think about you know, what does that mean, Well, other kinds of information to get cheap, really great answers are going to be less expensive. And some people say, well great, who's going to need doctors. I think I think we're going to actually want to use doctors for
a lot more areas of life. You might be able to spend more than two minutes with your doctor. Now that's nobody says I spend too much time talking to my doctor. Everybody's like I don't get enough time. And I think that we're going to start to look at like, Okay, what do we really want. I think that some areas that are easily automated, I've mentioned for it, call centers,
things like this. Yeah, that part may go away, and we're going to have to start thinking about encouraging more people to take on the kinds of roles that we want to spend more time with. We need more nurses, we need more people who actually need more people build things like you know people. I've got into discussion on Twitter where somebody says well, what would you to tell an air conditioning repair person who's their job is going
to be you know threat? And I'm like, I don't know if you know this, but we're running out of AC repair people right now because not enough people are coming into the workforce to replace the ones that are retiring. And that's true of a lot of these other industries right now. And even when we get to robotics, Like, when we get into robotics, like that's going to be exciting because nobody steps outside and goes, oh, everything's perfect.
What would I fix in this role to go There's so many things we could fix, some things we could pair, some things we could make better. So I think that we're going to be thinking a lot more about how more people could become builders, how more people could create things that should exist. And I think that's where I have to think about, Like from a career point of view, the one things I tell people is like, think about
marketing groups. Think about your ability to work with other people, you know, create groups, Think about people, Think about kind of problems you can collectively try to solve together.
It's interesting to see that blue collar jobs are the ones that everyone knows are going to survive the plumbers, the electricians, the air conditioner repairment, and we certainly wouldn't have expected that. It does make me wonder though, if in one hundred years from now, air conditioners get designed in such a way that they are meant for robots to fix them instead of having to.
I think, I absolutely think in this I think that we're going to see robotics do a lot of those
things in a shorter term. But I also think of the things that we think are possible to build right now in the middle of this data center build out, building new data centers and goals like Sam Alan's talked about building one gig a lot of compute per week and that's basically a city sized amount of our city my sized amount of energy per week because of what's possible there, which means that, you know, what, what is the big part of the future economy. It's going to
be come down to energy production. It's going to come down to compute. And I think a lot of the jobs we think about are going to be supporting building that and also making use of that. So you know, I think that you know, ac repair things like this, those jobs are probably I think that people have those jobs right now aren't going to have a problem. And I think that younger people coming into it are going
to have a broader view of it. And I think that the ac repairment a fifteen year rare person fifteen years from now, you know, they're going to maybe be in charge of a fleet of robots, and their job is to be accountable. Is their job is to sell them like, yes, we got the work done. As we build you know, megaplex energy project number forty nine on
the moon. There are people that I that I know and I really respect in AI who worry about job displacements, which I worry, but they think, like what happens when AI can do just about everything? And I'm like, we grow, we get bigger. If you imagine AI becoming highly capable, we have to also imagine the economy becoming highly scaled. And when that happens, you're actually going to grow so fast there won't be enough people to do the things
you want to get done. From you know, working in you know, a data center, to working in a cafeteria to make sure that you have you know, great sushi, to figuring out what you do with all this compute and if you really imagine what happens and work super ambitious.
That's that's amazing.
And I think if you looked at the founding fathers of the United States, that they looked at the scale at which we did things today, it would see unfathomable. And we think that, oh if people often think of the futures just shiny clothes and robots doing stuff, when really the future is bigger.
Like we look back.
I tell me, if you look back one hundred years ago, the first thing you'd realize is, oh, we're poor. Back then one hundred years you'd feel like everybody was pretty poor. That's for one hundred years from now people look back at us and think, oh, you guys were poor, but build in.
And you died young, and you had all kinds of pand yeah. Do you have an opinion about universal basic income.
Other than it's a terrible and necessary idea, No, tell me why. I mean, I am all for as you can lower the cost of things. You know that the problem people talk about universal health care is the problem is that the cost of it accelerates faster than the GDP does. And no matter whatever you come from political side of the argument, you have to address the fact that this thing gets faster than your economy can afford it,
then it's hard to make that sustainable. I think there's a role where the economy grows so fast that you can have a different conversation about that when it comes to UBI because you think that people won't be needing the economy. I don't think that's going to be the case. And that's a scary place to be. When you say that, oh, eight billion humans are you know, an ancillary to what the world is. I don't think that I have trouble
fathing that being true. And also it's uncomfortable to think about that being true because once you say that they're not necessar bad things happen. I think that I'm all for ideas and ways in which we make sure everybody gets their needs met. Nobody worries about housing, nobody worries about healthcare, and words about food. I'm all for solutions for that. But when we think that there's just not going to be any jobs in the future, I think
historically that's not true. It's also, you know, I bring this up, like, okay, so we can come up with a super advanced day I, but you're telling me we can't ask it to find out what's still useful work for people like it won't be smart enough to figure
out new things. And we've continuously invented new jobs. Like I brought up before, it's entertainment, which you would think be one of the first things to go just gets bigger in like education, we need more teachers, Like I think that we as we live longer, healthier lives, one of the ways we're going to want to avoid boredom is we're going to want to continue our education. We're going to go learn from these things, and we're going to learn from people actually went there and did it.
You know, do you want to learn about Egyptian you know, mythology from somebody ever went to Egypt? You know, do you want to learn about practicing medicine from nobody ever treated to patient? And so I'm very, very bullish on the idea that we're going to need lots more people in our economy.
You know, I was just hanging out with a friend of mine from high school. We graduated together, and I was thinking about the fact that what I do and what he does, and what essentially everyone we know in Sulkon Valley does these jobs didn't exist when we were graduating high school. We couldn't have imagined the titles of
these jobs. And so my question is for education currently, if you're thinking about junior high kids, high school kids, what do you see is the important things that we should be teaching them given that we are not training them for jobs that we know of. So in two thousand, I wanted to get into AI.
I really wanted to find a way into that right because I knew that was the future, Like how could I have this? And I decided this late in life, comparatively for other people. And in twenty nineteen, Opening Eye published they did a tweet and they talked about their model GPT two and if you look at like one of the most upvoted responses was mine at the time, going, this is really amazing. I guess I'm out of work as a novelist. Any suggestions to what I should do?
I had no no idea A year later I'd be the world's first person employee as a prompt engineer. Because what happened was that intersection of language and I had an interest in AI, but I knew a lot about language. All of a sudden, those two things collided and I think that for people right now looking at what they want to do in the future, take the things you're passionate about right now and ask how does AI make
this better? Or how does AI make it worse? And I think that you don't assume like well, AI is going to replace this, Like no, AI is going to change it. So, you know, I spend time talking to college kids, and one of the things that concerns me is that a number of kids in computer science programs aren't even taught how to use AI code tools. I think it's important to learn the fundamentals, but when they're
not even taught to use those tools. And there was a headline in a newspaper a few weeks ago that came out like, oh, this person she got a degree in computer science, but nobody will hire her. I'm like, I bet she never learned to use these tools and that's why she can't get it. It's not her fault, she's literally the institution she paid money to so for students. You know, one of the things that was really interesting I did a talk at Santa Clara last week in
Santa Clair. You know who's interesting because I've interacted those kids for a couple of years now, and I've noticed they become much more entrepreneurial, like the ones in the AI clubs. They're actually starting their own companies. Some are
actually raising money while they're in their dorm rooms. And I asked, why is this, and one of the kids said, well, we're not so sure that there's going to be a job for us, so we're going to we want to be more self relyingt We decided we're going to create our own work.
We're going to create our own need.
And I think a little scary they feel that, but that's very honest, and I'm very very was very happy to see their reaction to this. Wasn't hopelessness. It was like, fine, if you don't have a place for us, you can't tell us our place in the future. We're going to create our place in the future.
I think that's great for those kids with the personality who are willing to do that. The majority of students, though, might feel quite nervous about that.
But how do we how do we agree, how do we get them to that? How do I think that a lot of a lot of entrepreneurs don't even realize that till later life, till necessity, and I think that not everybody has to be entrepreneur, but I do think that, Like my advice is like what I did, Like I wanted to get into tech and I saw the people at Opening Eyes. I like, what you kids are doing? Can I help you out? And it worked out great.
It's nice. Yeah, it's Gerta had said the most important bequeaths that a parent can give the child is two things,
roots and wings. And I interpret that in the educational context as roots being critical thinking, really teaching students how to do critical thinking, and wings being creative thinking how to be really creative, because that's all when I think about my students at Stanford that I'm teaching, that's the only thing that I'm telling them that's going to stay true twenty years from now is how can they think through a problem and how can they be really creative?
Meaning take stuff they've learned before and remix it, bend it, break it blended, build new things out of it. Because I think it doesn't matter whether the computer science students are learning coding or whether they're learning AI tools, because in five years it's all going to be something else. It's going to be you know, super AI tools.
Yeah, I think that the thing that I like to me, if you ask me to describe coding it to me, it's like to look at a system and figure out how to give it the minimal set of instructions to get it to do something right. That's how I approach prompting. That's how I approach a lot of things. And I think that you know and you have to figure out what those tools are going to be in your right. But if you are a critical thinker, you adapter really quite well to this. You understand, oh, the AI does
this part, it's good to this bat of this. Now I'm going to use this. I think a lot of people kind of like fetishize the tool itself and think, well, this is Can I just use this thing? And that's the way I do it, And It's like, no, it's about the outcome. And he gets if you know what your goal is about the outcomes and not just knowing which Python function to use, you're going to be better suited for the future.
Yeah. And I think one of the things I'm so excited about, for example, AI is teaching critical thinking by being debate partners. So one on one debate partners, you take some side of a hot button issue, the AI takes the other side. You debate back and forth. It grades you on how well you are. Then you switch sides and grades how well you do the other side. And that kind of thing is the kind of thing that no teacher would ever have time to do for
each student, but this will be. It's a perfect tool for really teaching critical things.
And it's safe too because you have what's happened, Like debate is a great thing for students to do, but like debate, organizations have been so captured by political correctness that students can opt out of arguing alternate points of view, which the problem is is you never the purpose of this was to understand other points of view, and that they become intellectually weak from that. The beauty of AI
is because part of it's the fear too. It's like, I don't want somebody to take me out of context, even though it's supposed to be a safe space. But when you're having a private conversation the chatbot, you're like, okay, let me explain my point of view on let me let me let me have to defend this point of view I disagree with. Then it's feel safe, you're not as worried that all of a sudden will be out of context.
Oh I love that. That's great. And when it comes to creativity, I think there's a real opportunity for AI to just feed us a broader diet. All creativity is is absorbing what we see in the world and then remixing that. And you know, when you look at I don't know, look at music around the world. Beethoven certainly could have written music as they did in Japan at the same time or in Nigeria at the same time, but he didn't like the music was different in all
these places. Why because he absorbed just a small amount of what was in his culture, and so did the Japanese or the Nigerians. So what we have nowadays, really ever since the advent of the Internet, is a much broader diet. But what AI gives us is a broader diet still where we can get it to do remixes and give us things that really stretch the fence lines of our thinking. And that's great because that's the student's diet.
And then the key, I think is to make them present in person so they can work with the AI to do whatever they're doing, and then they present to their class and they're explaining all these different things about how the new economy could run on this other planet and the type of people and whatever, that it's such an opportunity for expanding creativity beyond what we ever got
in school. That was my interview with Andrew Mayne. This conversation pushed back a bit against the default anxiety that AI equals unemployment, because the story is more richly textured when we ground it in history, economics, psychology, and questions about what the human brain actually seeks, at least historically. The fact is, when you automate the bottom rungs of the economic ladder, humans climb upward. The plow didn't eliminate work.
It created governance and mathematics and engineering and poetry. Industrial agriculture didn't collapse society. It helped dismantle slavery and create new professions. So the same is likely with AI. What surfaced from our conversation is that the jobs most at risk are the black box jobs where a person receives in puts and sends standard outputs and the identity of
the worker doesn't matter. Those jobs are probably going to vanish, but the roles that depend on trust, reputation, lived experience, mentorship, inspiration. These might become more valuable, not less, because through the neuroscience lens, I think we can say that human beings are creatures of story, not efficiency. We don't choose books only for their sequences of words. We choose them for
the heartbeat behind the pages. We don't choose teachers because they have access to zeros and ones that we want to know. We choose them because they've lived actual experiences and can guide us around the pitfalls that they once fell into. As Andrew pointed out, even the chief scientist of Open AI doesn't believe that AI will replace teachers
because inspiration isn't really a commodity. It's relational, and no matter how knowledgeable an AI tutor becomes, it can't replicate the emotional texture of a person who has wrestled with ideas, who has failed, learned, grown, and now offers that experience to others. Another theme that surfaced is the expansion of creativity. As I mentioned in the conversation, painting didn't die when
photography arrived. Instead, painters expanded into new directions like impressionism and Cubism, and Pointillism and surrealism, and I suggest writers are not going to go away now that AI can write fluent text. Instead, writers will invent new forms of storytelling, new modes of audience engagement, new performance ecosystems around their work. And Andrew rays the possibility that accelerating tools in science like alpha fold won't eliminate scientists, but it might multiply them.
So when one researcher can do a year of research work in a day, that massively expands the frontier and opens the door for more people to join the field because it increases the number of experiments that we can imagine, and therefore the number of people we need to build them and run them and interpret them. In other words, the surprising possibility is that the future economy may not
need fewer people. It may need more more builders, more tinkerers, more crafts people, more teachers, more creative thinkers, more scientists, more hands to run the experiments, and more minds to shape the meaning of what we discover, Which brings us back to the brain. For all its computational power, it's not built for perfect efficiency. It's built for meaning and imagination and social connection. It's built to ask not just what can I do, but what is worth doing? And
this is where humans will continue to show. The jobs of the future are not going to be the ones we can list today, just like no one a generation ago might have predicted your job title. Now, the next wave of professions are going to emerge from the collision between human creativity and machine capability. Our kids are going to grow up into jobs that don't yet exist, using tools we haven't invented to solve problems we haven't yet imagined.
So our job is to cultivate the tasks of the brain, ours and theirs that will always matter, critical thinking and creative thinking roots and wings. So as we move into this AI accelerated era, the best question isn't just will AI take our jobs, but instead what will we choose to do with the extraordinary new landscape that AI opens up for us? Go to eelman dot com slash podcast
from more information and to find further reading. Join the weekly discussions on my substack and check out Subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode and to leave comments until next time. I'm David Eagleman and this is Inner Cosmos.