AI Bubble Pop: Here’s When, And How Many Jobs Destroyed | John-Clark Levin

John-Clark Levin (0:00)

If even 4% of Americans, age 25 through 54, lose their jobs due to AGI and can't find new ones, we would be in unprecedented territory, and that appears very likely. But most headlines don't capture. AGI isn't just about computers being able to do the same work faster or more cheaply, but actually better, because AGI would also unlock the enormous advantages that computers already have in speed, memory, and parallelizability, meaning the ability for the AI to split itself into many copies that cooperate to solve really hard problems.

David Lin (0:36)

Hyperscalar capital spending is on track to reach almost a trillion dollars by 2027, according to some reports, and part of that is built on the premise that artificial general intelligence or AGI is close.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil has said for decades that human level AI will arrive by 2029 And if he's right, then every assumption about labor, growth and capital changes. If he's wrong, this may be one of the largest misallocations of capital in history. So which is it? Our next guest is John-Clark Levin, and he's a head of research at Kurzweil Technologies. He's going to reveal that answer. He'll tell us when we can realistically expect AGI to hit markets, and what the immediate impact and consequences to the economy would be.

He's also going to discuss what the most game-changing advances in AI will be in the next year or so, and help us evaluate what the best AI will be, so to speak. And he's going to help us evaluate or walk us through how to evaluate this.

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Cauchy is CFTC-approved and available in all 50 states, including California and Texas. John-Clark, welcome to the show.

John-Clark Levin (2:27)

Thank you so much, David. It's great to be here.

David Lin (2:30)

I like to get deep into the economics of AI. I think all of Wall Street and Main Street alike are wondering whether or not A we're in an AI bubble, so to speak, for the valuations aspect of the tech companies, and also what causes this potential bubble to pop. And to that note, we have to dive deep into the economics of AI companies. Before that, let's talk about your work. What are the developments in the AI space that are most fascinating to you, and ultimately what you think are most important and impactful to humanity at large right now?

John-Clark Levin (3:05)

Yes, the top AI labs are now seeing the prospect of artificial general intelligence finally coming almost within reach, as in within the next few years. We define artificial general intelligence, or AGI, as AI that is at least at the level of educated or trained humans across all measurable cognitive tasks.

David Lin (3:29)

Can you just be a little more specific on how you measure whether or not a machine has reached AGI? At a certain point, the definition of AGI has been used and arguably misused a lot in the media.

John-Clark Levin (3:42)

Yes. So there's a concept called the Turing Test, where you can perform blinded evaluations between human foils and AI pretending to be human.

And you can throw all kinds of different tasks at the test subjects. And if the AI is able to perform indistinguishably from the humans across any test, you can dream up from writing to coding to poetry to logic, then that's what we consider AGI. So the number of tasks where humans still surpass AI, the number of capabilities where we still have an advantage is considerable, but shrinking very rapidly.

David Lin (4:30)

Wait a minute, hasn't the Turing Test already been passed this year? In a few examples, I'll just read you one study here. Artificial intelligence systems can now convince you they are human. In a test conducted by Stanford University, a person engages in text-based conversations with both a human and machine without knowing which is which. This was earlier in the summer.