#206 - Emad Mostaque - "Your Job's Economic Life Expectancy Ends In 2 Years"

**Emad Mostaque** (0:00)
Next year, it becomes really usable, and then a year after, you can push a button, replicate your entire workforce, their entire mannerisms, all their knowledge, and you won't be able to tell it's a human or an AI on the other side of the screen, so economic life expectancy ends effectively.

**Peter McCormack** (0:15)
In two years.

**Emad Mostaque** (0:16)
In two years. Next year, on the current pace of robotics, Tesla Optimus or equivalent robot, a buck 50 an hour, can get into a truck in America and just drive it off, and that's a million American truck driver jobs gone. So what we did is, we made people think of a bottle, for example, and then we did an fMRI, and then from the MRIs, we reconstructed the image using our image generating software. You look at not being able to lie to an AI because it can tell your facial structures, the words, and we can even read your brain. We will never get access to the top AI anymore, as of now.

**Peter McCormack** (0:52)
It's done.

**Emad Mostaque** (0:53)
It's done. Like there's AI for the, me and AI for the. The top labs, it makes no economic sense for them to give superhuman AI to the hoi polloi, you know us plebs.

**Peter McCormack** (1:03)
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Anyway, man, listen, nice to meet you. Thank you for coming in and doing this. I'm very intrigued by this idea of our economic life expectancy, because there's a lot of people worried about their jobs and what's going to happen to the economy, and then we've got Elon Musk telling us we're going to have universal high income.

**Emad Mostaque** (1:44)
Yeah.

**Peter McCormack** (1:44)
Can you explain this concept of economic life expectancy?

**Emad Mostaque** (1:48)
Yeah. First of all, thanks for having me on the show. We have this thing of we're trained to do a certain task, and we turned a little bit into robots by our system, do the task, how it verified, etc.
COVID really showed up what that was when we ended up doing a lot of this stuff remotely. But we're reaching a point now where AI is becoming actually competent intelligence. Next year, it becomes really usable, and then the year after, you can push a button, replicate your entire workforce, their entire mannerisms, all their knowledge, and you won't be able to tell if it's a human or an AI on the other side of the screen, except for the fact you pay a hundredth of the value, and a human will make that team worse because they go to sleep, they make errors, they wake up a bit grumpy when they don't have a coffee. So your cognitive value goes negative, so your economic life expectancy ends effectively.

**Peter McCormack** (2:41)
In two years.

**Emad Mostaque** (2:42)
In two years for any job that can be done remotely. A few years after that for the jobs that can be done in person, because you know we got to build the robots a little bit better.

**Peter McCormack** (2:50)
Right. Okay. And has anyone done any mapping of what kind of percentage of the workforce that is?

**Emad Mostaque** (2:56)
Yeah. So we've had some from McKinsey and OpenAI. They estimate about 50 percent of all tasks. Yeah. I think that it will take, it's not like everyone's going to be fired overnight. It's not nice to fire people, you know, but it's going to be very difficult for companies with humans to compete with companies with fewer humans and fully AI companies. Again, particularly in the digital space, if your job can be done remotely.

**Peter McCormack** (3:20)
So lawyers, accountants, a lot of that work.

**Emad Mostaque** (3:23)
We're already seeing it. Like junior hiring in law firms is decreasing because they like push a button on AI. Like what is the job of a partner? It's a relationship job and it's a liability job. And so it's going to be the entry level that gets hollowed out first, because those that own the assets, the knowledge base, the relationships and others, can use compute to leverage themselves up more, and they don't have to deal with annoying grads.

**Peter McCormack** (3:48)
So it's like a ladder. We've taken off the first rung. We're going to come for the second rung until we take the whole workforce.