Dispelling AI Myths and Embracing Technological Change: Insights on AGI, Elon Musk, and the Future of Human Decision-Making

We really want to unpack , or revisit , if you like , the whole area of what's going on with AI , particularly in our landscape , of what we're doing in our day jobs and how that's impacting . We're not talking about , you know , what new startup has started up in AI and how's the advancement of language models or anything like that .

It's mainly more around what we're seeing in the conversations we're having with customers and stakeholders . So with that , chris , why don't I throw it to you to kick us off today ?

I think what's been pretty apparent to me is that , well , obviously , the whole freak out about AI has changed the way in which companies and customers see technology , and I think that there's a lot of noise that we've had to cut through , which is starting to get extremely interesting , and a lot of fear-mongering we've had to remove , and I'm starting to find that

, when talking to organizations , half the job is that rather than the technology , right ? In my honest opinion . Actually , I think that anything that's going to make people big , shiny bucket loads of money in some way , shape or form and the media get hold of it's extremely hard to remove that prejudice against that technology or that thing , right ?

So actually , the education around artificial intelligence is incredibly important . So , actually , the education around artificial intelligence is incredibly important , and what I'm seeing today is every organization I'm talking to , we have to take them through that education layer before we do anything , absolutely anything .

So I can walk you guys through later on some of the things that I'm seeing , but that's the trend and the pattern that's going on in my world .

But the problem is is that now that the media has surfaced it and this open AI thing has come out , everyone's like , oh my gosh , ai is going to make my toaster come to life and murder my family ? And in actual fact , that's just the media , it's not the technology speaking for itself , right ?

So I find that when talking to organizations , even about co-pilot , the pushback from people , it's pretty damn significant , right ?

Like them saying no , I'm terrified of my data being out there , I'm terrified of my data being shared on the internet , I'm terrified of protection , of not being protected , and actually you know what , like , when you dig into what the tool actually does , it doesn't actually do anything special from a co-pilot perspective .

All it does is just enhance productivity to an extent , but like it's remediating that fear . That's what I'm struggling with .

Now , I think that , arguably , the goalposts keep changing on what AGI is , because if you were to go back 10 years and tell someone 10 years ago what we have now , I think they'd be pretty damn sure that generative AI that is able to pass the bar exam comes pretty close to artificial general intelligence , but in any exactly , exactly .

So I think that we don't fully know yet what agi looks like . Um , but to cut a long story short , uh , part of microsoft's agreement with with open ai basically says that once open ai achieves artificial general intelligence , then the licensing to Microsoft is off , right , like Microsoft can't then take that and bake it into its products .

And I think , unfortunate move , someone at Microsoft made a claim that , oh , we've reached AGI now . Right , that was an incorrect statement . It's an absolutely incorrect statement . Right , that's an incorrect statement . It's an absolutely incorrect statement , right .

But this , of course , inspired Elon Musk , who was one of the founders who were involved with the founding group of OpenAI and then stormed off in a huff , as Elon Musk is wont to do . This , of course , led him to sue OpenAI right .

So , anyway , the reason that I brought this up is that I think that my concerns about AI and the fears that I have for AI have shifted , I think , really dramatically , from you know , chris , what you were talking about a moment ago come alive and murder my family , or the ai is going to achieve this general intelligence and do something nefarious to the human .

You know matrix like to the human species . My fear has really shifted more into the realm of what can nefarious humans do with ai ?

If there's a stick , somebody's going to whack somebody with it . It's just another thing that people are going to find to do dumb stuff with .

They announce a new startup company , that is , they're going to put a hundred million billion dollars , I think , into it . I think it's billion . And what is it to do ? It's to do , um , quantum computing and ai . And who are the two partners in it ? Microsoft and open ai .

So like , okay , let's just move the like , yes , that was that relationship that exists , that you know what elon's suing over , which , as I say , I'm I'm pretty sure it's a mean case , as in it's because , and what's happening is that they just start a new company and people invest in that . That's got nothing to do .

It's like forking code , right , and they've taken in a different path and I think that's a power move for microsoft . Back on the topic of some knob saying that they reached agi . Let's be real people . When agi is reached , we will never , never know about it until about five to ten years later 10 years later .

We will find out that we are in a simulation by the time we realize that AGI was reached right as in , because they will have basically taken over and manipulated everything , um , and hopefully in a , in a , in a in a utopian , and I definitely believe that our future is going to be brighter with not you know , not negative .

As for privacy , back to your one , chris I think we delude ourselves in thinking that we have privacy , and this is one thing . When I was in China , I was in Beijing walking the Great Wall of China .

I was , you know , we had a guide that took us 100k outside beijing and , uh , my what , meg and I went on this private tour of the wall that's not commercialized . And , of course , as I do right , I ask questions about what I've heard . Tenement square , you know everybody's spying , oh , mark .

Because , I'm in this great wilderness location , right , my drone wouldn't even fly there , right , everything's locked down and anyhow he goes , you've got to understand Chinese people have no expectation of privacy . We don't delude ourselves with thinking that we have privacy .

So it changes the way you think the problem is and I'll point the finger at the US here folks in the US think they have privacy . They're in this false sense of we have privacy . It's the panopticon , this false sense of we have . It's the panopticon . It's the panopticon , and what you have is a device that is leaking stuff constantly .

I don't know much about Tucker Carlson , right , I don't know much about that dude , but I listened to the podcast episode with Lex Friedman after he had interviewed Putin and stuff , and he was talking about him as a US citizen .

How often he knew that he had been bugged as in and with like just through the software on his phone , and he knows that he's really got to that opinion that the US government are always monitoring everything he does , and this is the thing . But I think we have this false sense of data privacy and I just don't believe it exists anymore .

I've had many chats with customers or prospective customers about AI within Microsoft and they're all like oh my God , our data , it's going to leak everywhere . I'm like you've got a bunch of data in an Excel spreadsheet with a lot of macros .

I want to say I'm not super sure , but he was like super into human psychology and he was talking about biases and how people , even though they know an outcome isn't going to be achieved like , for example , we've got an 18-month project to completely redesign our enterprise architecture right and they know it normally takes like three to five years .

You know , they know from experience , they know from other examples , they know from the size of their organization or the problems their data have . However , they cannot start the process if they feel like this is going to happen like five years from now .

Therefore , they lie to themselves and you know , the professor comes and says look , this is where AI is actually going to help us a lot . We're going to be able to make so much better decision making .

Our answers to our customers are going to be so much more clear , concise and precise that , even though AI does have a limitation on , maybe , human psychology and it doesn't have emotions , et cetera , et cetera , and we do need , you know , a level of oversight and that's why we have all of these guardrails .

And you know security methodology and governance , et cetera , et cetera , et cetera , and we do need to look at , like ethical social implications , et cetera , and we didn't need to look at ethical social implications .

Responsible AI the reality is it's still going to accelerate our work , our thinking , our day-to-day lives by eliminating some of the bias , or some of the information that we forget in our human brains . I just loved the way he saw things . This was an article in the Economist .

But I thought it was just incredible , like this person was sitting there and saying I think and he was quite elderly , I think he was like 96 or something like that he was like AI is going to be fabulous and I wish I was , I could be here to see it . I wish I will be here to see it .

They were talking about what they were doing with all the tech in World War I and World War II and what NASA were doing and things . I'm not a conspiracy theorist but I like the idea that there is a 10-year progression on tech before we have it and touch it .

It's interesting that you say that because , like , I'll give you the example right , there's a , there's a movie that's called men that stare at goats . That's a really cool movie with george clooney , but they were talking about using , like , all these psychic powers to solve problems .

And what's interesting is , like , the correlation is is that years and years ago , when you watch movies like demolition , man and all that , ai is there and we're like , oh my gosh , gosh , it's science fiction that will turn into science fact .

Yeah , and even at school we talk about that , like at the University of Birkbeck , when we talk about science fiction , we're like the propensity for this to happen is actually quite high .

Now , being in tech and looking at what actually is happening in the sciences and looking at the movements of narrow artificial intelligence through to general artificial intelligence , through to super artificial intelligence , I don't think they're far off , man .

I don't think that a lot of this stuff is far off at all and you know chris speaking of speaking of conspiracy theorists and animals .

But it's interesting because , like I wanted to see it , just because I like psychology and I like the way that people think , why would you want to do that with something ?

like I said , we'll turn a walking stick into a weapon any day of the week yeah so I like I don't like the concept of weaponizing things , but I like learning about why people want to do it so I think that this is a , this is a very .

I fear the people's how out of control fear and other people and they'll get a messiah that will start taking them and poking them on that journey and then there'll be a following , and then there'll be following and then there'll be . That's what I . I that would be the only thing .

So maybe it wasn't like the best choice of words here from my side , but definitely can you imagine . Like we can see , right now , people are just afraid that AI is going to take their jobs and AI is going to dissipate their data and AI is going to I don't know control us .

But the reality is that right now , if we go back to Microsoft technology or the co-pilots , they're really cool , but they create a power app where they write an email .

I don't know if you'll remember , but like , the first example I'll use is on your shitty nokia 3310 at 2 am in the morning trying to message your partner at you know , hey , I love you so much after like 25 beers and typing the word you know , duck , instead of another word .

In a year's time we're going to be like oh well , you know , I don't really remember writing Word documents from scratch and I think that that's . I don't think that that's AI . I think that's just Well , it's AI , but it's more .

One of the things I came up with is this idea that , because it's it deals with fears , right , um , and one of the big ones is it's going to take my job , which is , I think , it's like electricity . In the past I've said it's like , you know , when the car replaced the horse in Dre . I don't think it is that . I think it's electricity .

Electricity can be extremely dangerous if you , you know , grab the wire wrong or you know . It's a powerful energy that has been tapped and usable and it gives us ice in our refrigerator , it gives us hot water in our shower . It we can't , you know , lights out .

We can't imagine life without it , and all these uses for electricity are being created and I feel that that's kind of where we are with AI . It's a new thing , but like , how many jobs has electricity created around the world ? An unbelievable amount of jobs , right ?

Did the wax makers or the oil blubber you know processing plants did they lose their job because nobody needed whale oil to light a lamp anymore ? Yeah , sure , a few jobs got lost , but how many more jobs are created because of it ? And I think that dealing with that kind of worry about it's going to take my job .

Yeah , the job that you have today but heck , you know , my job , that I started my career with , was mowing lawns , and I'm quite happy that I'm not in that career anymore . You know that I updated my skills to move into a different area and I'm quite happy that a robot now mows my lawns . More power to it . I'm like did I enjoy mowing lawns ? Absolutely .

Do I want to do it as a career ? No , thank you anymore , and I think that everyone has to learn new skills and keep adapting and evolving . But I think there's going to be more jobs created from AI than necessarily taken away .

A while back , when I think we all thought that self , what we all didn't think , but some people wanted us to think that self-driving cars were closer on the horizon than they have proven to be .

One of one of the thoughts that I had at that time was that this is going to be an absolute catastrophe for the at least in United States , for the long haul trucking industry . Right , and the reason that that would be such an immense social problem is that driving a drive , being a long haul trucker , is a . It's quite lucrative in a lot of cases .

It does not require an advanced technical degree and many , many really hardworking folks with families who rely on them , rely on the income from that particular profession which , like I said , can be quite lucrative profession which , like I said , can be quite lucrative , and you know .

So I've intentionally tried to separate this with that analogy from AI , because it's this general pace of technological change that , as the pace of technological change increases , right , this is not just happening in AI .

I think that the displacement effect is going to be much stronger than in any previous generation of massive and rapid technological change , and that's going to be a big problem for society in the short run how is it addressable ?

We've seen use cases of hairdressers . We've seen use cases of people that you know mow lawns end up doing really well in this industry . You know , allows that transfer .

Do you think that it's there's going to be like a transition path for people that you know might have very , let's say , labor intensive or manual skills that are going to be left out in the dark ? Or do you see it's like the you know , the first , second tier of the legal industry , legal secretaries , things like that ?

You know they're going to get wiped out . And so I would have thought , if you're in that skill frame , surely you could upskill . And so I would have thought , if you're in that skill frame , surely you could upskill .

But then if you were in a where you're just purely laborer , you know , like , you know roadwork signs , that type of thing , which could easily be replaced by an Android bot in the future ? Do they have the wherewithal to upskill into a technical role in the future ? What's your thoughts , andrew ?

Right , that used to be done by hand as well , and somehow people have still , so industrial revolutions have been there before . My only question here would be and I know that Andrew's wanting to to share his opinions how quickly will this happen ?

Because the difference between this being a true 96% beneficial thing to it , creating a big recession , spans in how long it will take for those folks to get upskilled maybe not in a highly technical job , maybe in something else . You just use the electricity example . Not everyone's an electrician , but some people are electricians .

Others measure how strong the electricity is , others simply make the wire . There are many possibilities here as well .

They were fishermen and the seas in the Skagerrak were out of fish and he left and he never had any hope of going back and he never did . He died far too young in the Boston area and with very strong roots in the country where my people came from , sweden .

I think about this a lot because the country where I grew up , the United States , is filled with many , many millions of stories like my grandfather's and like mine , and one of the things that I am troubled to , that it feels to me we have lost , at least in Western society , is a sense of being willing to say there are no fish here .

So I'm going to go find something new , and I compare this to my experience . For about 10 years , my parents moved us to West Virginia and West Virginia , for people who don't know , is one of the . You know . It's a beautiful place filled with wonderful people , but it scores very low on almost every measure of prosperity that you can imagine .

Right , it is the least educated , one of the least educated , one of the poorest , one of the lowest GDP per capita , one of the most obese , one of the least healthy . So in almost every way , but what a great song .

Right , because what they want is they want the prosperity of the mid-century to return , and it won't , right ?

I worry that a combination of a lack of desire to get on the boat and go find a place where there are some fish , combined with the speed at which this technology is evolving and , I think , the speed at which displacement may occur in the next 10 years or so , I worry this is going to be a very difficult combination for society and for the economics of

society and the social fabric of society to overcome . That is by far my biggest fear for AI . We'll get through it in the end , but I worry about the pain that society will have to undergo and individuals will have to take on as we navigate this .

Right , I'm going to give you an analogy , and it's around farming , and years ago , we used to , you know , water our crops by going to the water , picking up a bucket or something and walking to the crops and chucking water on it . Now we have , like canals and pipes and all sorts of really cool things , and that took a long time to get right .

And even like Industrial Revolution and the way that , like , digital transformation started , where we had , like I think it was Capgemini that coined the term in around 2014 . Like , we're going to digitally transform , we still had around six years until the era of enablement , seven years Like now .

Andrew , I remember you showed me a graph we're talking like months in between hype cycles . Now , the speed is terrifying and I think sitting on your hands is the problem that we're going to have , because it's become so easy for people to not learn , if that makes sense . I mean , the example I'll give you is from a social economic perspective .

Look at the UK . We actually are okay with people not doing anything . We're super fine with it . We're like you know what , you don't have to do anything , we'll just give you a free house and have a lot of babies right Now . That's not everyone .

There are some people that actually need more help , but like society has become okay with being lazy , that's what I think .

Um , I remember a movie years ago and I and I just I've never been able to find , I've searched for this quote everywhere . And um , who is the , the us general that I think became the us president after the second world war ? Eisenhower , yeah , so I think eisenhower said this , but I've not been able to find the quote .

Um , they had the storming of the beaches , maybe normandy , whatever it was , and he was , and you know the way it was being acted there . They said , like man , our , our loss of life was so low , we only lost like 5,000 people . And he turned and he said to that person , telling him and said you've got to realize for their family it's 100% casualty .

And it reminded me of him and whore from who moved my cheese when you , when you purposely don't see things are changing and you don't proactively move . Someone messaged me yesterday and said I see change of foot after I said that I'd resigned and I said don't wait yeah until the change happens to you . Get moving , get moving .

Find your next lot of cheese , andrew . How do you deal with people that don't know how to go find their cheese , or how do we as a society protect those people ?

coming next . I think we need to not underestimate what pricks we can sound like to people who are not in , you know , people who are not , who are in a perfectly honorable profession , a perfectly necessary and important and arguably many professions that are more important than ours to the actual functioning of society .

And and I think that I think that that story that you told about General Eisenhower is important can prognosticate all we want about the brighter future ahead . But to the person or the family who lost a job or who lost a home , that is a 100% loss .

So I think that , first and foremost , folks like us who work in this space , we need to really kind of fundamentally reorient our thinking right and remember that we might get to that bright future , but there's going to be loss along the way , one of the challenging .

So then I think we start to look at right to help those who are in some way put out , displaced by this technological change , to help them weather it . And in my experience and in my observation , here too we have some significant challenges because many people are not looking for a handout .

I think that there are plenty of people in the world who are looking for a handout and who are looking to do the easiest thing possible , but I also think , I just believe that the vast majority of people want to contribute and they want to support their family and they want to support themselves .

So whatever is provided to help those folks who find themselves in an unfortunate situation due to whatever it is , whether it's AI , or whether it's autonomous vehicles or whatever it might be , it needs to come to the greatest extent . It can in the form of tools to help yourself . Not I , society or I , the government , am here to take care of you .

And that's not because we can't right . The profit and the prosperity and the productivity that I believe will be generated by this era of technological change could very , very well fund the caretaking of large swaths of the population that are displaced by this . But I think we have to acknowledge that large swaths of the population don't want to be cared for .

They want to be empowered to care for themselves and for their families .

Covered or handed out by the government and not being taxed . You're the tech , you know the , the , the ii becomes taxed and therefore creates this living wage scenario . Is has other implications with it , right ? If someone , all of a sudden , there's no requirement to work 40 hours a week , um , because everything your money .

But then , but if there's no requirement to work 40 hours a week , um , because everything your money .

I think people I'm with andrew here , actually I think people , people for the , for the majority of individuals do not want to be in that situation and it's not a pleasure to , I don't know , eat I don't know , just pre-made supermarket food and drink cheap beer and and not be able to do what you want to do .

So I think , for the most part , people do want to , to thrive through this , but it's still scary because it's very hard .

So I get that , I really do , and I think with this movement , somehow there has to be some mechanism to drive that same ethos at a wider scale .

We don't want everyone to agree with us watching this . We want to hear from you . We'd love your opinion . We'd love you know to . You know , we don't want everyone to agree with us . We want people to go call bullshit on what we say and go you know you're in an ivory tower or whatever .

Um challenge us , call us out when , if we've got shit wrong , right because um it's collectively . We all learn and grow um from each other , so yeah any which way , any channel , you should be able to reach us somehow .

Some way We'll be there and we value your opinion , your insight and , yeah , if there's a guest that you think we should have here because you think this person has some insightful thing to say , let us know also . And with that , anna , why don't you want to wrap things up for us ?