AI Talent Wars Hit Google Hard In the Pocket

**Brian** (0:00)
Hey, what's going on, everybody? Welcome to The Daily AI Show. We're live. It's Tuesday. It's 10 a.m. Eastern on, well, it's 10 a.m. Eastern on the East Coast. That's redundant. It's June 23rd, 2026 I'm joined by Beth, Andy. I think Anne will be here in a little bit. We see her in the backspace in the green room, so she might be coming on in a few minutes. And Brian, I'm so glad you're here. Thanks for everybody starting to jump in the chat. We appreciate you. And yeah, we had a great conversation yesterday. We really enjoyed that.
And in fact, like I said, I'll give you an update, guys. Remember I said at the end of the show, I was like, hey, you guys gave me two good ideas for conundrums. So I continued to flesh them out, which going back and forth on whether which one should be for this week, ultimately decided on a robotaxi conversation that we had, but also was trying to do it in a way that, sometimes with the conundrums, it can come out a little too easy with, my pushback would be like the human, the person listening to the podcast goes, I just picked the middle and there's no debate in your head. You just literally, it's too easy to say, I pick a little bit of A and B, I'll take a little from both cups, thank you.
I had to workshop it a little bit, I will say, to get it to a place where it didn't feel so easy to pick a middle ground, because I feel like that makes for poor quality conundrum, honestly.
I always feel like the test is at the end of the episode, you're just as confused as to which way you might go if somebody told you to vote on it right then. You'd be like, I don't know, I gotta sit with this for a bit, I'm not really sure which side I'd be on. That's like the holy grail for me. Most people feel that way. So I had a workshop it a little bit, but I think it ended up coming out to be a good conundrum, and then I will probably use the, it was the first of the two conversations we had, which was more health related, but since we tend to have, health is an easy conundrum, there's a lot that could be done with health. I've had a lot of conundrum episodes that fall into that category. I pushed that till next week, and so I'll workshop that one. So I've already listened to the AI conversation for it, and I thought it was pretty good. I thought it was a pretty good, a pretty good discussion to what ultimately comes around.
Sort of what we're seeing with the Bernie Sanders news, or sort of what we're also seeing for the government about, should there be profit sharing? Should the people who train the data ultimately get a piece of the pie? In this case, it would be talking about the drivers, the taxi drivers and things like that. Do we owe something back to them, or are they ultimately no different than switchboard operators where technology came through and just did away, or lamppost lighters? It just did away with their job. There's nothing we can do about that, the technology advance that it is, it is. Or is AI inherently different? Because switchboard operators got electricity and abilities, however, that the system worked in order for them to not have the job. It's not because some model trained on how switchboard operators moved the plugs around to move calls around. Is that different today? Should we treat it differently today? Or is the answer, no, gig workers should be exactly like anybody else. And if you chose to drive an Uber on a side job or as a full job or whatever, and Uber deploys in some future state, all cyber taxis that require no humans. And again, remember the caveat for this conundrum is it's definitively known scientifically and proven through data that driverless cars are safer than humans. And we're keeping that as a starting point, right? So at that point, do we owe anything to the drivers that perhaps, you know, aided all the Tesla driver, you know, that aided to the data that eventually aided to them no longer being able to do that work? So long story, but that's sort of where the conundrum is.

**Beth** (4:01)
Yeah, that makes sense. And it is the conundrum because as you're saying it, what I'm what I'm remembering is the example of do you save the 100 people on the train or do you save the mom with the baby on the tracks?