Most Replayed Moment: AI Safety Expert Predicts The Next 20 Years! Will It Really Take All Jobs?

Steven Bartlett (0:00)

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You must hear a lot of rebuttals to this when you say it, because people experience a huge amount of mental discomfort when they hear that their job, their career, the thing they got a degree in, the thing they invested $100,000 into, is going to be taken away from them. So their natural reaction for some people is that cognitive dissonance, that, no, you're wrong, AI can't be creative, it's not that. It will never be interested in my job. I'll be fine because you hear these arguments all the time, right?

Roman Yampolskiy (1:47)

It's really funny. I ask people, and I ask people in different occupations. I ask my Uber driver, are you worried about self-driving cars? And they go, no, no one can do what I do. I know the streets of New York. I can navigate like no AI. I'm safe. And it's true for any job. Professors are saying this to me. Oh, nobody can lecture like I do. Like, this is so special. But you understand it's ridiculous. We already have self-driving cars replacing drivers.

That is not even a question if it's possible. It's like how soon before you fired?

Steven Bartlett (2:21)

Yeah, I mean, I've just been in LA yesterday and my car drives itself. So I get in the car, I put in where I want to go. And then I don't touch the steering wheel or the brake pedals. And it takes me from A to B, even if it's an hour long drive without any intervention at all. I actually still park it. But other than that, I'm not driving the car at all. I mean, obviously in LA, we also have Waymo now, which means you order it on your phone and it shows up with no driver in it takes you to where you want to go. So it's quite clear to see how that is potentially a matter of time. For those people, because we do have some of those people listening to this conversation right now, that their occupation is driving, to offer them a, and I think driving is the biggest occupation in the world, if I'm correct.

I'm pretty sure it is the biggest occupation in the world.

Roman Yampolskiy (3:08)

It would be one of the top ones, yeah.

Steven Bartlett (3:11)

What would you say to those people?

What should they be doing with their lives? What should they, should they be retraining in something? Or what time frame?

Roman Yampolskiy (3:18)

So that's the paradigm shift here. Before we always said this job is going to be automated, retrain to do this other job. But if I'm telling you that all jobs will be automated, then there is no Plan B. You cannot retrain.

Look at computer science. Two years ago, we told people, learn to code. You are an artist, you cannot make money, learn to code. Then we realized, oh, AI kind of knows how to code and getting better. Become a prompt engineer.

You can engineer prompts for AIs. It's gonna be a great job. Get a four-year degree in it. But then we're like, AI is way better at designing prompts for other AIs than any human. So that's gone. So I can't really tell you right now, the hardest thing is design AI agents for practical applications. I guarantee you, in a year or two, it's gonna be gone just as well.

So I don't think there is a, this occupation needs to learn to do this instead. I think it's more like we as a humanity, then we all lose our jobs. What do we do? What do we do financially? Who's paying for us? And what do we do in terms of meaning? What do I do with my extra 60, 80 hours a week?