Ethan Mollick on AI: Practical Wisdom for Human Agency in a Chaotic Future

So, when you're interviewing for a job, and everybody's good because of AI, how do I stand out and and get a job that

still that they still need to hire for? I'm fascinated by that. >> Like, if Claude is really good at

running your company, Claude's also good at running every other company, and there's no variation between them, and

generically high quality with no variation means there's no boats or competitive edge. I think humans who

bring competitive edge to this, one way or another, just by providing variation, if nothing else, is a useful way to

think about problems, right? You start to care a lot more about the taste of that person than you do about the entire

organization built to deliver the product. >> We're all a little afraid of AI. Even

the people who love it are a little bit afraid. Some of us are afraid it'll take our jobs or make us dumber, or change

everything so fast we'll never be able to catch up. It doesn't help the most AI experts fall into one of two camps.

There are the doomers or there the zealots. That's why I wanted to talk to Ethan Mollick. He's an AI expert who,

refreshingly, is neither. Ethan's a Wharton professor studying how AI, entrepreneurship, and innovation impact

our work. He focuses on how employees actually use these tools, rather than how they're theoretically supposed to

improve our work. His New York Times best seller, Co-Intelligence, and his popular Substack, One Useful Thing, have

become the go-to resources for all those people trying to make sense of AI without losing their minds.

Ethan believes we have more agency over AI than we think. It's our experience, our taste, and our genuine points of

view that are things that AI can never replace. And that's important because the choices we make about how we

integrate AI, personally and at work, as a society, will shape what it becomes. If you liked this episode, please

remember to subscribe. This is A bit of optimism. >> [music]

>> You are very popular right now. >> [laughter] >> What were you I know you teach

entrepreneurship and other things. Before AI, what was the what were you teaching that was the the the hot thing?

>> In addition to AI stuff, my other thing I really care about is games and education and education at scale, two

related things. I've done a lot of work on using for teaching. So I was I was as the brand says not famous but known in

that space of thinking about games and teaching at scale. How do we teach transformationally? So that has been

something I've worked on for a long time and the AI work was sort of parallel to that.

>> And was it your own personal curiosity about AI that that sucked you in or was it that you you were forced to use AI in

the work that you were doing cuz it had to cuz it made it better? >> I went to business school and my PhD

program at MIT and I worked with the MIT Media Lab with their AI group. So Marvin Minsky was one of the fathers of the

field and I was the non-technical guy in the group. So I was the person who had to explain to other people what AI was,

how it worked. When we'd go talk have technical conversations, I'd come along. I've been AI adjacent or involved for 20

years but always in the sort of non-technical like how do we use this, how do we explain it role and everybody

else was technical cuz it wasn't really working out. Like AI had limited use cases and so when GPT-3 came along and

started to be make a splash little and then ChatGPT after that, I was sort of well positioned in this world of someone

who had been thinking about explaining this for a while in in a non-technical world.

>> The reason I was really interested in talking to you cuz I I to be honest with you, I try not to have AI guests on.

>> [laughter] >> And the reason is is because they generally come in one of two flavors,

right? It's the greatest thing that ever happened and it's going to make the world a

better place or it's the worst thing that ever happened, we're all going to die.

And the conversations are for obvious reasons a little lopsided and one-sided and they usually have some vested

interest in one opinion or the other. >> Yes. >> And the reason I wanted to talk to you,

to be honest with you, is yours is just more practical. It's not it's the savior, it's not it's going to kill us

all, but it's kind of like, well, it's here. You know, kind of like the internet

showed up, what's the best way to use this thing and and it's a it's a little more down the middle.

>> Yes. It's nice to be in a place where being somewhat pragmatic makes you unusual. Um that's not usually the place

where you get publicity for being the non-bombastic version. >> It's true.

>> But it also those the other problem with those two opinions is they tend to eat the world, right? If you think that

we're getting a machine god who's going to save us all, then, you know, all that matters is discussing that, right? Just

like any other sort of religious belief. And if you believe that we're all going to die, how can you have a conversation

about anything other than, you know, this is going to doom us all? And the fact is this is general-purpose

technology. It's going to affect everything we do one way or another. It's worth spending some time on that.

And then some of those effects will be good, some will be bad. >> I do remember the sort of the rise of

the internet. I'm old enough to remember it. And the conversations were somewhat similar.

Maybe less less dramatic on on either side. >> a lot of positive energy at that time.

>> Mostly positive. But but there was lots of conversation like I remember people who, you know, there were the zealots

who believed that the internet and everything online was going to replace everything. You know what it is? It's

the difference between eating to live and living to eat. You know, and if you leave it to the

technologists, they think all technology is living to eat. >> I mean, they literally made protein

powder shakes. I don't remember it Soylent or you're supposed to >> I remember Soylent. I remember.

>> for people who thought eating was too annoying. Why are we spending all our time worrying about eating when we could

just get it taken care of, right? It's a different view of efficiency. But it's also a view that kind of blinds you to

the fact that technology is the most human activity, right? We're making tools for ourselves. How we use them,

how we adopt them, how we regulate them, those are going to have big influences. You know, AI is more self-directed than

most technologies, but we still have a lot of agency over what happens next. >> I mean, I know from my own experience,

most people are misusing or underutilizing the technologies that are available to us. And I'm already getting

to the point where I'm turning on, you know, social media or listening to friends or reading an article, and I'm

already feeling overwhelmed by all of the advice of people telling me that I should be using it like this and I be

she's setting up an agent to run my life and setting up an agent to do my marketing and set up an agent to do my

finances. I'm already overwhelmed by all the advice of how I should even be prompting the machine to the point where

I'm almost backing off and shutting down because one minute Gemini is that you got to only use that one, the next

minute you got to only use ChatGPT, the next minute you got to only use Claude. It's all too much already. And for

anybody who's not predisposed to like be all in, that reaction, I think, is pushing some

people away, believe it or not. >> Well, I absolutely believe it. I mean, look, I'm I am a nerd of the old school,

so I like getting into the details of stuff and partially like explaining them, which is I think part of why you

have me here. But also, it is overwhelming. I mean, part of what's actually interesting is AI has gotten

easier, right? Not to be too, you know, too evangelistic about it, but like it used to be the stuff mattered. Like you

had to like all those little details. Like prompt engineering mattered. So, it mattered how I phrased things, it

mattered if I said, you know, you are a physicist, it was better physics. If I said, think hard about this, that

mattered. If I offered bribes, that would matter. Uh we've been testing all that. None of that matters anymore. The

models have gotten good enough that if you're good at giving instructions like a human to humans, you probably do okay

with this. And similarly, all the models are getting good quite quickly. So, whether you OpenAI or ChatGPT, they're

like ChatGPT or Gemini or Anthropic, they're all three of those are pretty solid. There's like one or two hints I'd

give people, but otherwise it's really just use it for stuff and don't stress how you're using it cuz you'll figure it

out. >> Also, when we talk about like AI is going to take away all of our jobs. And

by the way, those are the technologists saying that. When one of the things that I also love is the technologists are

also very fond of saying, you know, things like 80% of the jobs today didn't exist 20 years ago. Which

means it's fair to say that 80% of the jobs in 20 years we can't even imagine. And to your point about prompting, it

wasn't that long ago where the technologists were telling us prompting is going to be the thing and people are

saying I'm going to get a degree in prompting and the technology got good enough in just a few minutes that that

literally went away. >> Yeah, and I I think that that is part of what makes this kind of interesting,

right? Is we can't imagine the jobs or we we'll keep trying. And also not imagine the jobs does get nerve-racking

when like you know, AI is here and it's like what is the job? Well, I'm not 100% sure. I mean, I think there's both

legitimate reasons to worry about jobs. These systems are very capable and very confident and they do change their

impact real work. This is not electricity in the same way of like we need to figure out a way to harness or

use this thing. There's a real impact. >> I've talked about this a little bit. I actually think that, you know, nature

pours a vacuum, markets correct. When we have a bubble, the stock market will at some point, not of our choosing, correct

itself. And all systems seek equilibrium at some point. I'm fond of saying that in the 70s and 80s, robots started to

enter factories and the blue-collar world said, "Hey, we're going to lose our jobs." And the and the white-collar

world said, "It's the future, baby. Progress stops for no one. Reskill, you know?" And you know, the pendulum does

swing. And and cuz your plumber doesn't care about AI, the carpenter doesn't care

about AI, the mechanic doesn't care about AI. The people who care about AI are the knowledge workers.

>> Yes. >> And you know, it's the future, baby. Progress stops

for no one. Reskill, baby. >> [laughter] >> Yeah, that I mean that's a really set of

I mean, there is a come up with but there is another thing, right? Like if you look at the last three industrial

revolutions, there's either two or three. I mean, that's all we've got, right? And the reason they worked out

wasn't because the technology made everything great alone, It was because it was also labor fought against, you

know, capital and you had a whole bunch of fights happening. Unionization is how the benefits got spread around, right?

The technology doesn't naturally do that. What's really interesting is we're going to have a similar fight here,

right? Like AI, we already have good data, right? AI is pretty good at being a doctor. It's getting better being a

lawyer all the time. Like most lawyers I talk to see a trajectory where not too long from now you will be able to get as

good advice for not the most complicated issues from the AI if you're not already, right? And

there's ongoing debate about this. But the thing is lawyers are not going to be quiet about

losing their jobs. And it turns out a lot of Congress is lawyers and a lot of people don't get any money or lawyers.

And I'm willing to bet that you're going to see laws passed in every state that you need to have a lawyer officially, a

human, sign off on so that even if they're worse than AI, right? >> Yeah.

>> So part of this like there is a little bit of oh, it's your comeuppance white-collar workers, but it's also like

no, no, they've got the like there there are fields that are not going to go easily, right? And and

>> you know, doctors, lawyers, it's going to be interesting. Coders really really do not have the protection that doctors

or lawyers or actors or other kind of guilds or associations do. So we'll see a lot of conflict over these issues in

the near future. >> Lobbying for our own interests is not a new thing. So for example, for years

there have been people who trying to to raise money for the government, you know, where we can get more income. The

average lifespan of a dollar bill is about 1 year. The average lifespan of a coin is something like 30 years. And so

the proposal to move dollar bills to dollar coins because it would save the government, you know, untold billions

per year in printing and all of the rest of it. And the reason we haven't done it is because of the ink and paper lobby

because they like those billions being spent on them to make new dollar bills every year. And so, you know, we're used

to doing things that are not to our advantage because of lobbyists. And this is just another thing where those who

have access to power and those who who have influence will protect their interests, as you said.

>> And not necessarily badly, right? Do we want all lawyers out of a job? Is it an question? A lot of people be like, yes,

yes, please. But like, you know, [laughter] I I mean, already actually lot There's some early evidence that the

number of cases being submitted to judges is expo- exploding exponentially, where people are pleading their own

cases with AI at law. And like, how do you deal with that? It used to be that we had a filter, right? So the secondary

thing is, you had to convince a lawyer to take your case. And if they did a bad job, they would be punished. And if it

you got a 100-page legal brief, a person wrote that. And that was an indicator of real effort. But now it isn't. How do we

deal with that kind of system? So we're going to have all of these ripples in all kinds of areas that will require

policy changes, regulation changes, societal changes, even if we don't have sort of an apocalyptic AI event the way

we're talking about earlier. >> So let's let's go from the theoretical to the practicals. And as we sort of

said before, which is a lot of people who aren't technologists are underutilizing or or misutilizing this

this remarkable technology. Some are still using it as a glorified Google Google to search. This is more of an

answer machine, but still it I mean, we all do that because it is a very simple and fantastic use case. The more nuanced

and complex prompts, I think I know I'm underutilizing. Like I ask for an answer, even if it's in

something that has some depth, but I don't ask it to write a report or make an interactive, you know, dashboard of

the data that I'm not I know that I'm not doing that, and I'm already ahead of some in terms of my utilization of the

thing. I have two two questions. One is, you're teaching students, you're

teaching a lot of grad students at business school. Is it a false belief that just because people are younger,

they're all in on this technology? Or are they also sort of bumbling and fumbling their way as they as they learn

about it? >> So we actually have a paper on this. Like, so I think what people think I

hear this term in the internet we're talking about digital native all the time. People talked about this, right?

Like, kids these days are good at using the internet. And indeed, like if you talk to somebody who grew up with

TikTok, they will know all these intuitive ways that, you know, as an older person you will not understand.

Like, oh, that's cringe. There's a bunch of rules and slang and approaches that you want to take. And I think that that

model kind of carries through that younger people get the technology. It does not hold for AI. Like I talked to

like a CHRO and I was like, oh, the kids these days they're they're AI native. I'm like they're not AI native. You're

just talking to Claude. They're conduits to Claude. Like if you ask for a report, they'll give you a beautiful report.

They have no idea what's in that report. How could they? They have no knowledge of this. They're just giving you what

Claude says. And we actually found some evidence in this when we did a study at BCG at Boston Consulting Group, we found

junior employees were often much worse at using AI. They seemed like they were using it well. They were adopters. But

how could they judge whether something was good or bad? I think this is a rare case where the more experienced you are

in something is the older you are, the better you're going to be at using AI if you decide to use it. Because you can

intuitively grasp how do I give instructions? AI works enough like people that if you give an instruction

and you're good at a field, you'll have to be like, no, no, I understand what went wrong there. You're thinking about

this, you should be thinking about that. Even though the AI is not a person, it doesn't think. You'll know what kind of

information to expect to get good answers. So, I think actually experience really does matter. If you think about

how our education system is built, where where actually schools are in chaos. I mean they're always in chaos, right?

University has always been in chaos. This is not new. You know, people are cheating with ChatGPT, but we actually

know the pathway forward, right? Like it's going to be a little bit messy, but like we'll do in more in class We did

this with calculators. We'll do more in class assignments. Outside of class we use AI tutors which are turning out to

be very effective in controlled experiments. We'll make them work better than we do now. In class we'll be active

learning. We'll figure it out. I'm not worried that we can't figure it out. I am worried about the next stage. I I

teach people who are generalists at Wharton and I they become a specialist the same way we've taught specialists

for 4,000 years, which is apprenticeship, right? I send them off to work for whomever, right? They go

work, you know, they go work at, you know, Bank of America or whatever and they learn the job and everyone gets a

good deal. They get a little bit of income, but not as much as they would probably deserve, but they get a chance

to prove themselves and they learn the ropes by doing grunt work over and over again. The middle manager assigns them

grunt work that they don't want to do anymore and gets to evaluate whether this person is any good or bad for

moving up the ladder. And it's been a great mechanism, and that just broke, right? Because every junior person knows

less than ChatGPT, and they would rather just use ChatGPT, and they'd be kind of dumb not to use ChatGPT or Claude to

give you answers because it's better than what they could do. And every middle manager would rather delegate to

the AI than a flawed human who takes forever to give them an answer and isn't as good. And so everyone's just doing AI

work to each other. And I think that that is exactly the problem that you're talking about here, which is the danger

is that we lose the talent pipeline. There are solutions to it, but they're going to require fairly radical change

in how we think about talent pipelines. >> How much of this is kind of like art? And and and here's where my brain is

going, right? Which is I am an art fanatic. It's the thing that I love more than most things. And I am

totally fine with AI making art. It doesn't bother me. I'm totally fine with AI making music. It doesn't bother me.

However, when I hang something on my wall, I like knowing that a person conceived of it. I like

knowing that a person made it because when I buy a piece of art, I'm not just buying the visual thing on the wall. I'm

buying the story that goes along with it. Or for example, I was listening to some music this weekend. Uh I was

listening to Jon Batiste's Beethoven Blues album, which is, if you haven't heard it, spectacular. Now, could AI

make a blues version of a Beethoven sonata? 100% it could. But the joy that I got from listening to that music was

not just the music that I was listening to, but I was smiling that a person had the creativity to to come up with

this, and that was part of my joy. When we look at the work product, you know, there's two things we're we're

neglecting, which is I like thinking. >> Right. >> I enjoy debate. I enjoy making my head

hurt at difficult things. I enjoy learning. The same way a painter likes painting

and a musician likes playing music and and composing, where is the human desire to want to learn?

And then will our schools, but especially our places of work, allow for that to

happen, or they all become so obsessed with efficiency that we actually, even if we want to learn, you you see where

I'm going with this. >> there's 10 million directions from here, right? So, I want to put a pin on the

art thing cuz it's actually really important and interesting, which is, you know, obviously there might be a

rise of our more artisanal human-made things. It's more The most direct version of this, by the way, is when you

have AI write poetry or long-form fiction, there's often a lot of things wrong with it, but because we're used to

if we read something that reads beautifully and it's effortful to read, we assume that there's a purpose behind

it. So, we spend our own effort figuring out the holes. Like, for example, the AIs are very famous at weird analogies,

right? So, it might say, "This conversation's like a gap tooth smile." Now, that is not meaningful, but if you

spend some time thinking about it, you're like, "Oh, how is it like" and you will reach a feeling of meaning,

right? If that was, you know, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy or someone else writing this set of stuff and I was reading it, I'd

be like, "Oh, this person thought hard about that analogy and I should spend the work to do it." If it's the AI doing

it, you know, in some ways it's beautiful, but the meaning comes from me and am I being cheated because I have to

create the meaning that has no intention. >> The intention no longer belongs to the

artist. The intention now is shifted to the to the listener. >> right? And maybe it always has. Death of

the novel stuff, but like so that's one angle that's kind of interesting, right? And then I think the sort of second one

is, you know, is I'm thinking about developing some of these kind of, you know, how do you develop intuition? And

we actually have a way of way of doing that. We we know how to train people. Like, we can teach people to be experts,

but the problem is it's effortful. Um and so, you you're like there's always been this sort of view that I you know,

I told you early on I make I made games for education. And one of the most depressing things you learn is you can

make something incredibly fun, but first of all, it's only 80% fun. It's not as fun as actually doing a thing for fun.

And second of all, learning is effortful. And if you're not doing effortful work, then you're in trouble.

And now for the few areas that we intrinsically care about, for you, you know, it might be art history or music,

or maybe for some people it's math and science, maybe for some people it's, you know, it's a sport they care about.

Whatever you we are effortful about and intrinsically motivated, you're like, why isn't all learning like this? And

the problem is, you don't care enough about it. Like, and so, but I still want you to learn math even though you don't

want to learn math. I still want you to learn American history. And And if you shortcut that through AI

giving you the answers, you learn nothing. We We have enough experiments to show this. So, making people

essentially lift mental weights becomes the problem in a world where you there are shortcuts.

>> You know, I find there's a great irony in all of this, which is the problem actually doesn't lie with AI, which is

we've been on this steady drumbeat, this this path to this point where we are, you know, discomfort avoidant. The

concept of ghosting is is a thing where you just avoid a difficult conversation, or you see it now, uh particularly among

young people, where they're more comfortable with quitting a job than having a difficult conversation or

getting negative feedback. And and then the idea that we become so end result oriented, you know, as as capitalism has

become short-term focused and more focused on a shareholder supremacy, shareholder value over the quality of

the product or customer satisfaction or employee satisfaction, you start to see we become more results-oriented, and

we've left out the work product. This is not a new concept. AI is just the most exaggerated form of being

results-obsessed at the expense of the effort, the work, or the journey to get there.

>> Well, and and just to take another path from that. I mean, part of this is what makes AI work so challenging, right?

Because if you want productivity gains, you just you go get 100 times more PowerPoint, right? Like, if my job is

producing PowerPoint, like, so, it requires you to rethink what the work is.

And so, what the work product is can't be the same thing. I mean, even the most basic way, coders can write 100 times

more code than they could before. If they are embedded in an organizational process where it takes 2 weeks to do, a

you know you know a product sprint as they as they often call them, right? So each there's stand-up meetings every day

and the assumption is the coder will write x number of work, the product manager will do this, the designer will

do this, the marketing people will do this, and suddenly one person is a hundred times more productive. What does

that even mean for an organization? It becomes a problem. So part of this is our systems where you're coming back to

that theme we've been developing throughout, which is human systems are not built uh for an AI world. We have

we're effort you know school wasn't built for a place where anyone could write your essays, right? Like you know

and like work wasn't built for people to be able to produce PowerPoint on demand without thinking about it, right?

Fiction wasn't built that I could write as many papers. Law clerks and courts weren't built for anyone to be able to

bring up a case. That's not a problem. That happens in every industrial revolution. It's just all happening at

once everywhere and sometimes the AI wins, sometimes human systems win, sometimes we both lose, but that's where

I'd watch the adjustment happening. >> I'm going to go backwards a little bit here. Let's go back to practical, which

based on classroom and in the in the business world cuz I know you study that as well, what are better simple ways

that we could be using the technology available to us? Like I said, most people are mis- or

under-utilizing the tool and and you know, I'm overwhelmed by the people giving me advice as how I should be

doing things and what I could be doing, but you know, from a from a just a a basic

standpoint, how can somebody level up just 1 to 10%? >> You can get more than 1 to 10%. I take

no money for AI labs so you don't sound like a sh- I don't sound like a shill, but you have to end up paying 20 bucks a

month to one of the big three companies is what I'd recommend, either Google's Gemini, OpenAI's ChatGPT, or Anthropic's

Claude. And you have to actively pick the best model available at that point, which is a what you'll have access to

what are called thinking models and those will change over time, but you have to actively select that. It

defaults to a lower one. You will get huge impact improvements just from picking the most recent model and using

it. The second thing I would say is AI has gotten quite good. So, you know, there's kind of three phases of AI.

There's prior to ChatGPT where when most of them we talked about AI we'd be talking about how you use, you know,

data analysis basically. There's all this talk about algorithmic fairness and price mining and all the like, you know,

customized pricing. All of that came from prior to ChatGPT. Then ChatGPT kicked off generative AI and what I will

grandiosely call because of the title of my book, my previous book, um, co-intelligence where you'd work back

and forth with a chatbot to get an answer, right? I'd type in the chat, it would give me an answer. Now we're in a

new phase which is called agentic AI. And it's really just three or four months old practically.

>> What does that mean? What does that mean? >> An agent is an AI system that can

independently go do work if you ask it to. So, agentic is just the the adjective of of agent. Agent, right? So,

agentic is an AI agent and there's marketing terms around it, but it's an AI that can do work. The most important

thing to realize is how good the work is and how long the work really is. There's this paper by and test by OpenAI, so you

always take it with a grain of salt, but there's been independent enough assessment I feel good about it, called

GDP val. And what they did was they took people representing 5% of the US economy, so journalists and product

managers and lawyers and private investigators and with an average of 14 years of experience, they had them each

create a really hard problem that they faced in their field. They had another set of people with 14 years of

experience to do it. Took them about average 7 or 8 hours to do the work. They and then they had the AI do the

same thing. Took about 15 minutes for the AI. Then they had a third set of experts come in and spend an hour

evaluating the outputs from each of these not knowing whose is whose and voting on which they like better. And

when this came out a year ago, the best AIs in the world were getting about 48% 48% of the time they were tying or

beating humans. Then the latest models as of when we're recording this are about 84%. So, 84% of the time the

work that they do, 7 hours of human work, are equivalent to or better than a human. What that means, going back to

the practical piece, is you would probably save three times effort and three times a cost if every complex job,

you would give it to AI, and even if it took you an hour to put it together and evaluate, even if you had to give up 30%

of the time, you would still save time and effort. So, one of the things I think you're doing is not using AI and

giving it hard enough tasks to do. >> Okay. And And so, that's the other thing, which is the value of the AI,

where efficiency is not how quickly it can solve the problem, but how quickly you can evaluate whether it got the

problem right. >> Which again brings us back to expertise. An expert can look at this right away

and be like not just is wrong, but like often it's wrong because of a specific problem that

you should have either specified better, or the AI is stupid about something. And sometimes you can instantly get Oh, it's

never going to get this cuz it's too subtle and I can't communicate the point. I'm just going to do this myself.

But sometimes you're like, Oh, yeah, yeah. This is a rookie mistake, and I should remind it that when it writes

articles to not just factually explain everything, but explain it with a story, or whatever your thing is. And then it's

better, right? So, evaluation, feedback, these are things experts are good at, and the AI responds really well to that.

>> Here's the other problem, which is I remember when I wrote my first book, right? Everybody told me, everybody in

the publishing world said, "The most difficult thing for any author is, quote unquote, to find their voice."

Right? To have a voice. Now, it's a very hard concept to understand, you know, what voice is. Essentially,

it's when you read my words, they are of me. They might be They're my personality. They're They're my point of

view. It's not just nicely written, but it is It is of me, right? And it's very hard to do for an author.

And I have found that AI can write beautifully, but it has no voice. And if you ask it to have a voice, it's going

to always have voices that are available to it in the in the world, in other words, published people, but not you.

And so, most writing will start to just sound the same. I mean, I'm already seeing it.

I'm getting AI-generated emails in my inbox, and they're all basically the same email.

>> It's not X, it's Y. It's doing the heavy lifting here. The thing that keeps me up at night, um you know, this is a

load-bearing argument. Uh the Cicada 3301, but you know, word word word >> starting to just delete them all because

they're all familiar. >> Yes. It's a word. And none of them stand out. Right. And I push back. I'd say

it's not that it doesn't have a voice. It has a voice, right? A singular voice that is all voice or chat GPT. It's

actually not a bad voice. Like if I was get if I didn't see it 4 billion >> your voice. It's a voice.

>> And it's a perfectly good voice, right? It's a little dramatic. It just sometimes is like it it loves

transitions too much. Obviously loves, you know, M dashes too much, but it's not your voice. And that is another

thing that is like developing your voice. Now, a lot of people can't, right? Like not everyone's a good

writer. No matter how much we teach them writing, they don't get it. Ghostwriters have been around forever, right? I'm

glad, you know, that I'm writing is something I do and have established voice. I know plenty of people who use

ghostwriters to do their kind of work. I agree on the AI voice. Now, I will say you can get it significantly more like

you. Not for the kind of long-form work of a book, but a tip here if you want to do this is give AI a large sample of

your writing and then say write two pages summarizing the style of this. And the instructions of how to write in

the style. And then you paste that into your custom instruction and you say write in the

style. It will not It will be slight parody of you, but it will be infinitely better than if you just say, you know,

write like this famous person. >> Right. Um I I mean, I did something recently as

an experiment, which is I walked around the living room just talking into Claude and said, "Write an op-ed in the style

of Simon Sinek. Here's the idea." And I just walked around the living room for about 3 or 4

minutes and then it gave me a pretty remarkably written article. Then I said, "Fact-check it." And it

said, "Well, that's wrong. That's wrong. That's wrong. That's wrong." I said, "Okay, go offer me what I could say to

make it factually correct. And the thing that I enjoyed about doing it, which is you know, it takes 80% of my time to

make a shitty first draft. And then editing is reasonably efficient and a lot more fun to really just clean

something up. Most of the time is the is the first draft, right? And so here I got a shitty first draft in a few

minutes. And then I sat down and with it you know, it fact corrects it which is so efficient. I didn't have to go do all

the research myself. Although I did double check all the research just to be sure.

>> As you were saying, the error rates of these things have dropped. If you use a modern model, it's not making mistakes

the way >> making mistakes the same way. I have to say it was actually kind of fun to edit

it in my voice, with my sense of humor. And the last finishing touches I realized I could put my voice. I was

pretty impressed. I was pretty impressed. Now, I could cheat because I have written enough that it can know my

style and I wouldn't say it was perfect, but it was it was scary good. >> Yeah. I mean there's a few things going

on there. One of those is this idea of disruption to writing. And I mean there's costs to everything, right? So

one option of writing the crappy first draft is it's your crappy first draft. So I always recommend some crappy first

draft because otherwise the AI's ideas will take over your ideas. It's very good at ideas and you're like you will

find you can't brainstorm. But with that said, I find this kind of similar loop of like editing is a weird way of

approaching a like it's not how we used to do it before, which is like I can get something written in my form and then I

edit it. You know, I'm sure some writers have worked that way for years, but that's a disruption to writing that

might be better, right? It might be where it's hard to know. Something you're a factory, you know, producing

first drafts that you know, click all the time. And or maybe some people are just really good at editing and they

weren't good at draft writing and suddenly they're more productive than they were before.

>> I think this is one of the future jobs that we under appreciate, which is not just that jobs are new, but that the

weight of the job will shift. Yes, to your point you know, we've always celebrated the writer and editors have

always been like just there. If you work for public relations or you work in magazines, like the person who's the

writer who wrote the press release, they're the person who went to school to write the press release and we just sort

of like the editors are just the lower paid, you know, >> Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

>> failed writers, you know, quote unquote. But now I think the writers, I think that the balance will shift.

>> we're going to see that across a lot of jobs, by the way, to come back to the job thing. So jobs are many tasks,

right? A writer does like as a writer you're in charge of writing and editing and fact checking all and the AI does

some of that work, it shifts the burden of what you do, but it doesn't take away everything. And I think what we're going

to see in a lot of jobs is this idea of bottlenecks that the AI is good at some stuff but bad at other stuff. We I we

call the jagged frontier of AI in our early papers on this, which is it's good at some things, bad at some things you

won't expect. Where it's bad, right? Writing perfectly in your voice, getting a joke right. Like suddenly the demand

for your labor is higher there, right? And your value is higher. It might have been that your jokes were not what was

getting you, like that was not your main deciding factor, but if you're better at jokes now, suddenly there's value. Same

thing's happening in coding, by the way. Used to be that writing really clean code was a really good skill. Now the

AI's write most of the code, being an architect is good, being an engineer manager is good. The jobs change, what's

important and what isn't important changes and that changes who's good or bad at it, too, creating new

opportunities and new risks. >> You may have, instead of 100 coders, you might have 50 or 30 working on the team,

but there's still human beings with egos and insecurities, you know, lack of sleep, all of this stuff and there's

still somebody overseeing the project who has to manage all the messy human stuff regardless of how good the

technology is. I for one believe that doubling down on human is going to become even more important now because

we still have to take care of the people who are working on the products with their AI agents.

>> Oh, absolutely. And and also when I wanted to get coded in the past, I had to hire a company to do it. Now, there

might be a coder working for every two-person team, and more software is being created than ever, right? So, the

jobs are unimaginable in the future is sort of an annoying thing to say. I think it is

annoying because I think we actually have some idea of what this looks like, which is not that coders are replaced

by, you know, prompt engineers, but that the job of coding changes. The demand for coding shifts from giant

organizations where a thousand people work together programming to now dispersed and your car dealership might

have a coder building customized software for you around the what the managers want in the team. You might

have two developers working for you rather than outsourcing web development that are, you know, evolving things. The

nature of software and the jobs change, and I think that that is a missing piece of this puzzle, also.

>> And I think the other thing we aren't appreciating, which is the more things get good,

right? Cuz it used to be that quality would help you stand out. >> Yep.

>> That if you were smarter, a better coder, a better writer, a better this, a better that, whatever it was, being good

at something made you stand out from the crowd, right? If the quality of, let's just say, everything gets slightly

higher or a lot higher, then it commoditizes so many products. And so, what I'm curious about and cannot

predict and don't even have a thought about what happens here, but if it everything just becomes

generically good, then how do you stand out in a market now? And we've we've kind of seen this

with the rise of social media. We're in the last generation that has movie stars. I think it's the death of the

movie star. Nobody's really buying a ticket to go see a movie because a particular actor is in it. Like like one

battle after another. You know, lots of people went to see the movie, very few went to see it because Leonardo DiCaprio

was in it. You know, and that's what the movie stars used to do. They used to make people go see the movie. Now, we'd

rather see the franchise. We're interested in Marvel than who's in it. And this is what I mean by

commoditization. I'm so curious as everything becomes better and commoditized,

TV channels, everything's commoditized. What's the thing that makes companies, products, and people stand out? So, when

you're interviewing for a job, and everybody's good because of AI, how do I stand out and and get a job that's still

that they still need to hire for? I'm fascinated by that. >> I think a few things are

There's a lot of things there again, right? Part of this, by the way, is writ large, right? Like, if Claude is really

good at running your company, Claude's also good at running every other company, and there's no variation

between them, and generically high quality with no variation means there's no votes or competitive edge. I think

humans who bring competitive edge to this, one way or another, just by providing variation, if nothing else,

>> Yes. >> is a useful way to think about problems, right? Like, your sense of taste

matters, right? And presumably it's why, you know, why people listen to It's like, your sense of taste, or who to

talk to, the kinds of questions you ask, you know, it's similar to the sense Like, do you like Rothko, or do you like

Rembrandt? Like, there's different tastes that have different kinds of outcomes.

>> Yes. >> thing is developing taste, right? Is a bigger issue, which is how do we get

people to develop taste? It's usually a casual casual lifetime thing. That might be one of the new talents we teach

people is developing a sense of taste, which requires, you know, experiencing broad things and making choices and

having the vocabulary to describe your sense of taste and choices. I think that as people become bigger creators and

they can do more, their taste matters more. Like, directors may end up mattering more than ever because I

understand what I'm getting with a Wes Anderson experience, right? And if he can direct the whole thing the way he

wanted to, what would that look like? >> Yes. >> And we might find the same kind of thing

with all kinds of other stuff. There's someone who has a particular taste in ice cream styles. Now, you can make ice

cream on demand because the AI will connect you through the APIs to a, you know, to a vendor that makes that

product for you. So, it kind of fits in of enabling one person to do much more, you start to care a lot more about the

taste of that person than you do about the entire organization built to deliver the product.

>> So good. I mean, And have my own biases and opinions, but I'm curious, is there actually a difference between Gemini,

ChatGPT, and Claude? I know Claude has a much more B2B focus a business model. That means security is

more of a thing because business wouldn't stand for, you know, any lapses in security, maybe like customers might.

Is there actually a difference? >> So, there are. Just a half step back on the boring educational side of this. You

when you think about AI now, you want to think about three things. The model, which is the brains of the bunch, right?

At the time we're recording this, that's Opus 47 from Anthropic's. That's a Claude model, ChatGPT 5.5, and Gemini

3.1 Pro. By the time you hear this, they will be slightly higher numbers on all of those things based on how things are

going, right? But those are the those are the brains, right? The better your AI model is, the smarter it is at

everything. It's better at negotiations, it's better poetry, it's better math, it's better like But that's the brains.

Then you want to consider apps. Apps are the tools you access these. For most people, when I say app, what they should

be thinking of is chat.openai.com or claude.ai or gemini.google.com. That is an app. But the apps that people

increasingly talk about when they use AI are things like Claude Code, OpenAI's Codex, Notebook LM, which I haven't used

for Gemini is free and very impressive for research and gathering data. And those are very specific tools built for

certain purposes. And then finally, there's what we call harnesses, which are how the AI can do things, right? So,

a harness lets the AI write code or do internet searches or make images for you. So, right now, the three big

companies all have roughly equally good, will probably, you know, jockey for position. Yeah. But they're all making

very good brains. The models are all very good. Right now, Google has a um the most diverse set of products of

apps, but their main apps are probably weaker than Anthropic or OpenAI. And they have worse harnesses for the

main app. So, if you want to use AI to do things, right now, the most powerful tools are Claude Coder Co-worker on your

machine if you're using Anthropic or OpenAI's um Codex tool. And what makes those different is they sit they use

your computer. So like you can give it access to your files, to your email. It can you know, it can do work for you

using your machine, your web browser, whether you like this or not, right? And and do work. So because of that those

two are kind of jockeying back and forth for the lead, but all three of them are quite good. The models are good across

all of them. >> So now let's talk about security, right? So we're all tired of meta and all the

other companies, you know, filling our computers with cookies, tracking our every movement on every website even

after we've left their website and their product. And then we've all become very sensitive to turning off cookies and

data privacy is now a thing. You know, do I want to give any of these AI models, do I trust any of these

companies to have access to all my computer, all my browse history, all my finances, etc. etc. etc.

>> So it's a hard question, right? I mean there there are more secure versions where you can even run your own version

of these tools, but they will not be as good as OpenAI and Anthropic and Google's. There is a couple kinds of

security concerns you might have. One of them is are they taking your data and using it to train their next model? If

you pay 20 bucks all of them have an option turn off that training feature. Is that enough privacy for you? It's

hard to know, right? There's open questions about whether or not someone's AI history will be searchable. Is is it

you know, is it something that lawyers can demand to look at it, right? Discoverable. There's open questions

about you know, what will companies do with this in the long term even though they sign agreements with you. But on

the other hand, you have Gmail probably has all your email in it, right? Like these look like enterprise software

applications at this point rather than sort of invasive individual tools. So do you trust how much do you trust, you

know, Google with your information or Instagram with your information? We're in that same kind of boat over

again. >> The difference is is as much as I don't want Google to have access to my Google

my email, I know that it does, but I know that nobody can go out onto the web and and ask a query in in a Google

search to read my email and tell me something. I think a lot of us are afraid that somebody could just go on to

chat GPT or open, you know, one of the others. >> can't do that. They are not They are You

There's no It's just like Gmail in that way, right? There's no bleed over where There's just one giant inbox and you're

just barely holding it together, right? It works the same way. I mean, it looks like enterprise software. So, that has

its own risk, right? But, the basic risk of like can someone just ask for something and get access to your chat

GPT? No. If they log in with a, you know, you have to do all the same things you do. Set up two-factor

authentication. Don't leave yourself logged on to a computer. But, it works I The analogy I would have is Gmail,

right? Like Google has all this information. processing it and using it for their own purposes, but they're also

not going to, you know, they've anonymized it in some way to try and create trust. It takes effort to hack

into someone's Gmail. It's the same kind of boat, right? Now, whether or not we want you want a company to have even

more power over you, those are choices you get to make. But, I don't think we should put this in a separate privacy

category. Their actual risk is if I let it have access to my computer and it can use my web browser, you know, could

someone convince my AI to send them all my money if it's, you know, if it's reading all my emails. And that is, you

know, hasn't happened yet, but is not impossible. >> Right. So, obviously, because you are,

you know, you teach this, you embrace this, you allow your students to use it, I assume. I don't know how to ask this,

which is how do you ensure that your students are learning if they are allowed to use these tools to learn?

>> So, [laughter] I went viral first in education with my syllabus right after chat GPT came out, the first version,

which uses what we call GPT 3.5. And, you know, that was around for a few months. GPT 3.5 was pretty flawed. Like,

it would make up arguments all the time. It would obviously hallucinate. It felt like a, you know, like a smart, you

know, ninth grader or something like that, right? And so, I teach college courses,

I could tell. So, I My original policy was use AI for everything you want. You're accountable for the output. That

was great for 4 months until GPT-4 came along, um, which is now obsolete. But it was good for a while. And it was as good

as my students across something, not across all things, but enough that a low-effort student was was worse than

GPT-4. And I can no longer tell people just use AI, I can tell, because the AI was giving them the answers, not being

the answers. And we've seen this over and over. There's a lot of studies that show if you just use ChatGPT to get

answers to questions, you think you're learning, even if you're not cheating, you think you're learning and you're not

learning because the AI gives you the result. But turns out we actually know pedagogically how to solve this problem.

We did this with calculators, right? With in school, which is we can do in-class testing, we can make you use

the AI for some stuff and not for others. So for my classes, I'm lucky enough to teach entrepreneurship. So

output is in some cases like I I gave all my students, for example, what I called the, um, Voight-Kampff test,

which is the name of the Blade Runner human test, but I made my own version of it. And they had to launch their

startups using AI, but based around areas they were experts in, experiences they had had, knowledge of the world

they had had, a viewpoint they had, which kept them in the picture. And then they also had to do a lot of in-class

stuff, right? We had to have a discussion about these things. I actually had them use AI tutors that

asked them questions. They had to use an AI to build a case study with it. And I set up the AI so it wouldn't give them

all the answers. It would challenge them to come up with the case study information. So there's things we can

do, but it does require changing how we teach. >> But the reality is technology does

affect our brains. Like, so I mean, I'll give you a I'll give you a real-life one-to-one example, right? My I my mind

I used to have a steel trap for phone numbers. I knew everybody's phone number. You tell me you gave me a name,

I'll tell you their phone. I and I didn't have to memorize it. I just heard the phone number and I had a steel trap

of phone numbers. It was just It was just how my brain worked. And I in the early days of I bought a Casio digital

diary. I got it for my birthday. I remember, you know, it had 2K of memory. I think I upgraded to the 6K when it

came out. It was like hardcore, right? And it was the most remarkable thing and I programmed all the phone numbers from

my memory into the device and then slowly added more and more phone numbers as I learned them. And my brain was

like, "Okay, if that's what you want, fine. I can't remember a single phone number

anymore." And if we have to remember that they're like the Iliad and the Odyssey

were oral traditions. >> Yes. >> You know, this book that we were forced

to read in school that's a that's like, you know, 800 pages, you know, go back a you know, a couple hundred years and it

was like, "Son, it's time I tell you the story of the Iliad. And you will tell your son the story of the Iliad." It was

oral traditions that people remembered, but because of the printing press, our brains just stopped remembering stuff.

So, this has to have an impact on our intelligence. There's no getting around it.

>> I mean, absolutely. I mean, look, my my grandfather was an engineer who built like the fire

suppression systems for Cape Canaveral and his like dissertation was writing doing a single piece of matrix

multiplication. I have no idea how to do what he just did and he used slide rules to do it. I have no idea how to use a

slide rule. My kids have not learned cursive, right? Like, we give up stuff all the time. The whole idea of

technology is on purpose, we give up things that we used to be able to do >> Yes.

>> to machines so we don't have to do them anymore. And every time we face the same choice about what's valuable and what's

not. And what I worry about like the the default version of that is bad, right? I mean, we've seen this happening with

like, you know, you could argue short-form video has killed reading because it's more entertaining to do

that and I don't need to spend the effort reading the book to get there. Okay. That was a bad choice. We're going

to have a ton of these choices, right? Around AI. It doesn't hurt your brain, but it is a choice that you can hurt

your brain with, right? As an educator, part of my job is to get around that problem anyway. People can survive a lot

without reading very well. They can survive pretty well without doing math. They don't have to learn American

history. Like, there's some degree of of making this a requirement. >> but, but, but, this is this is a

slippery slope, right? Because now now we go down the path of Oh, you don't need university. There's a whole

movement that you don't need to go to college. And what we forget is you may not need the subjects that you learn at

college, but going to higher ed teaches you to think critically. It teaches you to to argue with people who have way

more education than you and form strong arguments to take them on. It also teaches you adulting. And so my problem

isn't that technology replaces that that there are sacrifices like I accept that I don't have to have a memory for phone

numbers because of technology anymore. That that that I accept that. My concern is that thinking, the ability to think,

is the sacrifice here. And that's way more damaging than than remembering phone

numbers or the you know, remembering the Iliad. >> So I push back. I don't think it

destroys your ability to think. I mean, I think for a lot of people it gives them even more ability cuz they have a

conversation partner at their level who's willing to discuss a topic. As long as people have any curiosity about

the world, all right? All of this is processed as for thinking. I mean, books were thought of like someone else came

up with an argument for me and an opinion. That doesn't mean that there aren't negative effects in that. It

doesn't mean we won't give up things we shouldn't give up. Part of what heartens me is like we've got 12 to 16

years of school, you know, schooling to try and get some of this right. And if we do it right, AI accelerates some of

that. And if we get to make choices in a society. Now, will people make bad choices? Yes. And so I do worry about

this, right? I'm I'm thinking a lot about how we What do we give up? How do we stay human? It's going to require

effort, just like a lot of other things. And there is danger there, but I guess I feel like that feels like a big leap to

we're not going to think anymore. The AI will tell us what to do. We'll just obey its instructions.

>> think it will stop thinking. I think it'll hurt thinking. Like the quality of thinking, critical thinking, gets hurt.

And I mean, look, you know this as as a somebody who studies education. You talk to any college professor and they'll

tell you forget about AI. Just the introduction and distractibility of a phone, you know, that they'll say that,

you know, the writing is abysmal these days. Every college professor is complaining about the writing being

abysmal. So, kids don't know how to write. And when I say write, I don't mean like but I mean form an argument.

And they'll say like the first paragraph was fantastic, second paragraph was fantastic, the third paragraph was

fantastic. The problem is the paragraphs have nothing to do with each other because it's clear that they're like

getting distracted in between paragraphs. >> I guess I would say on one hand you're

right, but we've been very bad at education for a long time. Like a bad way to teach is sage on a stage where I

go up and give a lecture, right? And a 100 people write things down. But we've done it for a couple thousand years

because there's a lot of other constraints that make it the way we do work. There is a negative side, but I

like one of the things that really excites me is AI tutoring. We have some early evidence that has big effects on

learning, right? Like instead of me lecturing to a classroom and assuming the height of learning is I lecture to

what the upper part of the classroom, people who really knows it, the middle, I you know, I I lecture to the person

who doesn't know things as much. Personalized education is now an actual possibility. Like there is a cure as

well as a a poison in the in this thing. And I think that it's worth paying attention to both. Like if we don't

change anything, the effects will be bad in education, right? But that implies that we're all going to sit down and

just be like, I guess it's done, you know, like and I don't I think for the first time

as opposed to short-form video where you had to do this very elaborate thing of like, we'll do TikToks for education and

that never works. We actually have a tool that is a pretty good tutor that can talk to you at your level, that can

make you get into an argument. That's part of what I do in my classes. >> And we see schools adapting, right?

First they put computers in all the schools and now they're slowly taking them out.

>> And it was partially because we just like comes back to the human thing. It's complicated. Like the thing that makes

AI interesting >> Yeah. >> is it understands understands in quotes,

right? For those who are just listening to this, I'm making air quotes with my hands. It it understands humans. It has

theory of mind effectively. And that's what the other technologies don't. Like it can teach to your level. It can

understand what you're confused by. It can help you make this interesting for you, if your only interest is basketball

or you know, basket weaving. It can give you basketball and basket weaving analogies and problems. This was the

holy grail of education, and I think it's one thing to say, yeah, technologies have little risk and

everything else. I also think we undersell some of the impact positive that we can get from this.

>> The strong argument that you're making here is, and I don't know how many people have done this, which is where

you use the talk function, where you can actually have a conversation backwards and forwards with the AI, as opposed to

typing. And I think the case you're making is the idea and I like is that you can debate with someone at your

level. So, you're not explaining to somebody who's not at your level. You're not feeling dumb or trying to keep up

with somebody who's more experienced or smarter than you, but rather that you can go backwards and forwards and and

learn the way you like to learn. And I I've tried this, where I I'm having a debate or conversation backwards and

forwards, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, and I'll say things like, oh,

wait, is what you're telling me this? But I think this. That I think is really, really interesting, to your

point. >> There's two other tricks there. One is the AI sycophantic. So, if you're having

a debate with it, it's going to agree with you. So, you have to tell it to act like a critic, right? Like if you say

And then the second is you want to take advantage of the meta piece also, the learning piece of saying, actually,

halfway through tell me what I'm doing wrong with my arguments. How can I be more persuasive? What patterns am I

missing in discussion? Give me some examples of those patterns and how I could have used them. So, again, back to

the effort piece. If you're willing to do the lifting yourself of asking the questions, like everyone always says

they want to come to office hours and have this debate with professors. That's Most people don't come to office hours.

You sit as a professor and you're waiting for somebody to come and debate to you on the great issues of the day,

and you sit alone in your office during the hour that people are allowed to come to you cuz they have other things to do.

I think that we overestimate how this this sort of shining city on a hill, where we'd sit down and debate and have

these discussions. Like, that's not how most things work. Now we have a tool that can do that. If you're interested,

you can do that without having to come to my office hours. >> I want to double click on the two points

you made because I think they're really valuable, which is remember that the AI is a sycophant, and you've got to tell

it to criticize or critique, and ask it to evaluate your thinking and help make your thinking stronger. Those are two

brilliant, brilliant prompts that I think more of us should remember to improve the quality of our our

interaction with the technology. >> We were talking earlier about AI and writing. A piece that was missing in

your conversation, you talked about using it for fact-checking, it's very good at that. I would use it more for

initial research. All of the AI models have a deep research mode that's quite good,

um and will actually do research for you. But the thing you're also missing from that is when I write something, I

have the AI evaluate from different perspectives. So, I will have the AI like read it through as a reader who

doesn't understand much about this topic and tell me what I need to change. Read this through as an expert who, you know,

who's out to get me on social media. Where would they nitpick my arguments? Right? Am I being irresponsible

anywhere? Did I make human fall flat? So, giving the AI personas don't change the AI's ability. So, saying you're good

at physics doesn't make it good at physics, saying you're physicist, but it doesn't make it talk like a physicist,

right? Or parody physicist. Talk like a cynic. Talk like a critic. Talk like a naive person. You will get

answers you couldn't get without going to a wide range of readers. Also true in entrepreneurship, by the way. Get

feedback from the AI in different personas about your idea. >> This is very practical and very good.

What are you actually afraid of? >> I think we're in for a period of chaos, right? It doesn't like let's say the

Industrial Revolution works out like the last three did, like the AI Revolution. >> Yeah.

>> Living through it still sucks, right? Like Charles Dickens is basically just a story about how miserable the Industrial

Revolution was, right? Like you have haves and have-nots, you have social change. Even if everything works out

fine, now we have better tools as a society, but I don't see a lot of action. You led this conversation by

saying that, you know, people either are doom and gloom or, you know, or everything is going to be great. I find

policy making is in the same place right now. Either it's all going to work out great, or we have to stop this whole

thing. And neither of those are realistic outcomes. How do we help cushion people in on it if they're

uninsured? Turns out training programs for new jobs never really work. Is there something we can do better this time

around to you know, reskill people? We're going to have negative effects on informa- on you know, deep fakes are

going to be everywhere. How do we deal with who we trust for information? There's a thousand little good and bad

things that are going to be happening all of the same time that are going to be very complicated and they're going to

get boiled down because of how social media and everything else works to either AI all bad, in which case you

have a list of all of these things that are mix of real things, you know, and fake things about AI water use or

whatever it is that and it's going to be AI is bad or AI is great. And it is a thing. It's a technology. It interacts

with people. You know, technologies are neither good nor bad nor are they neutral. They have effects on our world

and I worry that we're not taking this seriously. The other thing I worry about is people don't know how good these

systems are. They are better than you think, right? I'm a I have a doctorate. I, you know, I'm a professor for a

while. I published in journals like the AI writes a pretty damn good academic paper now. Not just a paper even an

academic paper if you give it a data set to work from. It is proving math at a level where you really need to be one of

the best math professors in the world to know whether this system is right or wrong and it's often right at this

point. It is doing really good images and marketing work that beats most marketers in studies that we have of

this. It be like these are really good systems. Their development is not slowing down. So, we have to start

thinking about what we want the world to look like rather than just assuming it's all either going to work out or not.

>> And how much agency do we as the general population have or are we just the subjects? Are we just the pawns in this

game between these three major companies, Microsoft, Open AI and and Anthropic?

>> So, I think that we have there's two levels of agency we have. Level of agency number one is societal, right?

Like there's a reason why people are floating, you know, data center bans, right? Because they think that would be

popular. The usual mechanisms of policy making of of organizing of of you know, writing letters to your congresspeople,

those still work. The second is where I think there's even more agency. The AI labs are full of coders and they have

found an unreasonably effective way of making a a that mimics human thought. Like it's

weird the large language models work as well as they are. Like, we have we know they work technically, but we don't know

why this is so unreasonably good. Like, how can it do poetry and offer, you know, and, you know, interior decoration

and write, you know, and um just kind of cash flow analysis and, you know, a pitch deck about, you know, the

Gettysburg Address. Like, it shouldn't be able to do these things. It does all this stuff. So, we give them too much

credit. They don't actually know much about how AI is useful or not in your field. Remember, this is a jagged

frontier. It's good at some stuff, bad at some stuff. Your biggest source of agency is actually using it to positive

use in your own job and work. Like, a large part of what I post about is like, this is a way to help humans thrive with

AI if we use it this way, rather than just automating away human work. And I think our biggest sense of agency is,

okay, you have access to these tools, you know, Simon, how do you use that to expand your business to make sure that

all the people who work for you I've spoken to some amazing folks, they're all really smart. How do they do more

than they did before? How do they do more satisfying jobs? There's a lot of agency there. And if then you talk about

it through your platforms, that changes things. And a lot of what I do is talk to executives and leaders of companies

where I'm like, we have to you have to show people how augmentation, how this can be used to make humans thrive, how

it can make your business thrive, rather than the default plan of like, if I fire everyone and replace them with AI,

profits will be higher. Like, that's the dangerous thing. So, to me, the real agency right now is let's find positive

examples and there were tons of them out there, use them and build them uh to make AI make the world a better place

and not worse. >> I really appreciate this. Like, you've given me you've enriched how I can use

this product. I I'm going to take you on. I'm going to have the the agency that you recommend.

>> I think this is a moment for transformation. And I don't and I think people aren't being ambitious enough.

Everyone's like, what if I record my like, it's not, you know, how would you reach every one of your audience members

separately if you could do that? And why don't you just build it rather than waiting for it to happen? Like, what is

>> sure I'm going to use it that way cuz I like the artist. I take pride in the fact that when somebody's talking to me,

that it is actually me, my opinions. >> Oh, I I don't I don't think it's about automating Simon, like creating a Simon

clone. I I've never liked that. Like, there's people who create Ethan bots. I don't I don't think that's the way to

You're talking to a, you know, a fake version, a parody of yourself. I'm saying, what do I want people to

accomplish in this world? Like, how do I build a tool for everybody? >> Yes, that I believe in.

And I I like I said, I would do a Simon AI with a very specific application that it lives alongside. But, I like people

knowing that when they see me and they think it's me, it really is me. >> I I agree. I mean, it's the same thing

with my writing. I write all my own, you know, my own Twitter posts and everything else. And, you know, it's

important to keep the muscles alive if nothing else. >> Ethan, such a joy. Thank you so so much

for taking the time. I really appreciate it. >> Thank you. It's a pleasure.

>> As always, thank you for watching. If you liked this episode, please subscribe to Brit Opt for more interesting guests

and even more interesting conversations. New episodes drop every Tuesday. But, if you'd like more optimism right now,

click here to watch another episode. Until next time, take care of yourself, take care of each other.