How to Spend Your 20s in the AI Era

**Garry** (0:00)
Think about the area under the curve of utility that you could contribute to society. And everything else is simulacrum. It is not real. When you think about SPF, when you think about Theranos, when you think about the things that truly disgrace us as people who create technology, when you peel back a little bit, you realize there's nothing. It was a fucking lie. I don't want that for us. People outside of this room, the world at large looks at tech, and they hate us sometimes because those are the people who represent us. And I say not for me. They don't represent us.
Welcome to another episode of the Lightcone. This time, we're doing it live. We're not used to doing it in front of a studio audience. So we thought we would start off with a controversial topic. This is something that a bunch of people who are at this conference have been, I don't know, just talking about, coming to us to talk about, is this the last window to get rich? Are you worried about this? Are you guys worried about this? Is this the end of capitalism? What's happening?

**Harj** (1:10)
I feel like, no.

**Diana** (1:11)
Mom's going to stop to exist with EGI?

**Garry** (1:15)
They won't admit to it, but in private conversations, this is one of the topics that certainly we've been debating. Why is this coming up, actually?

**Harj** (1:24)
Seems like, at least when we speak to people replying to IC, who are members of the audience, there's a real sense of uncertainty created by AI right now. There's things like the sense of, will the jobs that we thought would be there be available? And if we're not, if they're not, what do we do? And if we don't have real ownership in something that's valuable and growing, what will we be left with? But that seems to be the thing that comes up a lot.

**Jared** (1:53)
I had dinner with some undergrads who were here last night, and they were saying that this is one of the things that people are talking about a lot on college campuses. It's like, hey, the AI has gone really good at programming now. What's going to happen to all the programming jobs? It used to be the case that if you were a CS major, there is a very clear path to a very stable upper middle class background where you get a good stable job as a programmer. But are those jobs still going to be here in 10 years? Yeah.

**Garry** (2:24)
Yeah. My parents were really proud when I got my degree, and then I got my job at Microsoft, and I was a level 59 PM, lowest of the low, but I had health insurance, and my parents were really, really proud of me.
One of the fears, frankly, we're hearing and it's coming out in the numbers is that, will there actually be jobs? I think it's a tricky thing right now with the advent of intelligence. Some of the simplest things that people rely on entry level, people right out of college for, they're not hiring as many of them anymore. And the craziest stat, I think this came out of the New York Fed in February of this year. Computer science majors, obviously, this is not the people in this room. This is just out of a normal distribution of all computer science majors. 6.1 percent unemployment in February of this year. Art history, in contrast, was only 3 percent.

**Jared** (3:29)
Wait, you're saying that the unemployment rate of art history majors is lower than the unemployment rate of CS majors?

**Garry** (3:35)
Unbelievably, but that's what the stat indicate. Don't worry, guys, no one in this room, no one watching the online.

**Harj** (3:42)
It's just the average CS student.

**Garry** (3:43)
We're talking about the median, which you guys are so many standard deviations above, don't worry.

**Diana** (3:51)
That's concerning, right?

**Jared** (3:52)
Yeah, but this role of level 59 engineer at Microsoft used to be this super stable job. If you do that job, all the adults in your life will be like, good job, you made the safe choice, the prudent choice. But one of the things I've been noodling a lot, it's like, is that actually the safe choice? Is it possible that the world has become inverted and the career path that seemed to be the lowest risk, most safe path, might not be anymore?

**Harj** (4:23)
Yeah, I think one thing that's going to be interesting to this audience is that there's one theory, there's a, Brian Kaplan has this theory on education, I think it's Brian Kaplan at least. It's like where it's basically all about, it's credentialing, but it's actually a very specific thing that's being credentialed. It's like what colleges are credentialing to employers is that these people graduate our program, which means that they can show up to a place on time and perform a series of instructions and not do too many drugs and make it through, which is the kind of people you want to hire. They'll turn up, they'll do the job.