My Positive Vision for the AI Future, from the Existential Hope Podcast

**Amar** (0:00)
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**Nathan Labenz** (0:31)
Hello, and welcome back to the Cognitive Revolution. Today, I'm excited to share a crossover episode from the Existential Hope Podcast, hosted by Beatrice Erkers, where I recently had the pleasure of appearing as a guest. If you've followed this feed for any length of time, you've heard me say that the scarcest resource is a positive vision for the future. What sort of social contract should we be working toward in the AI era? What do we hope that daily life will look like? And what sources of value will continue to resonate in a post-scarcity world? These questions, in my view, get far too little attention from the AI community today, myself included. And so, Beatrice's invitation was a welcome challenge to spend some time developing and articulating some of my own ideas on the topic. As you'll hear, we cover a lot of ground in this conversation. Exploring the mundane but transformative deployment of self-driving cars. The potential for AI-powered individual tutoring for all students. My hope that access not just to expertise but also to experiences could be democratized. The promise of radically improved health through AI accelerated science and medicine. And much more. Along the way, we also touch on Eric Drexler's famous comprehensive AI services vision as a possible way to square our desire for superhuman quality services with our need for safety and control.
As well as my sense that we should encourage higher expectations for progress across society. And why I think that writing fiction is one of the most powerful ways in which an individual can help shape the future. With that in mind, I encourage everyone to check out the Tomorrow's AI and AI Pathways projects that we discuss. And to challenge yourself to help flesh out how these different AI futures might actually unfold in a positive way. And of course, subscribe to the Existential Hope Podcast where true visionaries, including Nobel Laureate David Baker and Adam Marblestone, CEO of Convergent Research, have recently come on to share their own positive visions for the future. For now, I hope you enjoy this exploration of my own partial vision for a positive AI future with Beatrice Erkers from the Existential Hope Podcast.

**Beatrice Erkers** (2:43)
I am very happy today to be joined by Nathan Labenz, who you run the Cognitive Revolution Podcast and we just were talking a bit briefly before starting this recording about just how many episodes it is that you've done. It's so many. So it's a bit intimidating, I think, to interview such an experienced podcast host. Feel free to direct me if you have any prompts.

**Nathan Labenz** (3:06)
Not at all. Well, thank you. I'm excited to be here, looking forward to this conversation. And for my part, I'm basically just obsessed with AI and trying to understand it as well as I can. And of course, it's such a horizontal technology. It's touching all aspects of life and society that there's a never-ending number of angles to come at it from. So eight episodes a month, honestly, isn't really enough to get after all the angles that I would like, but it's probably as many as anybody could reasonably produce. And certainly, I don't expect anybody to listen to all of them. But it's been a really fun learning journey for me. I honestly don't consider myself to be very charismatic in all honesty. So I mostly just pinch myself that anybody wants to listen to it at all. But I'm looking forward to this conversation here today with you.

**Beatrice Erkers** (3:50)
Yeah. Well, today's angle that we have is going to be like, you know, the theme of this podcast, Existential Hope. And I know you've said that the scarcest resource is a positive vision for the future. So I think that's what we're going to try to dig into today. And especially in relation to AI, I think is like the most interesting question right now. So, I don't know, let's start. If you woke up 10, 20 years from now, and we had a really good positive future with AI, what would you see around you?

**Nathan Labenz** (4:20)
It's a hard question. And, you know, I go, I say that all the time. You know, the scarcest resource is a positive vision for the future. I really do mean that. And I don't think that I am particularly advantaged in terms of having, you know, a crystal ball. Another one of my common jokes is my crystal ball gets real foggy more than a few months out. So, I'm, you know, in kind of uncomfortable territory, trying to see farther into the future than that. But, here we go. I think we are going to see just about everything change. You know, the reason I called my podcast The Cognitive Revolution is by kind of obvious analogy to the Industrial Revolution, the Agricultural Revolution. You go back into these before times for these previous revolutions, and what people were doing before versus after is just totally different, right? I mean, at some point, we were small bands of hunter gatherers, you know, always on the move, always searching for food, kind of living literally like hand-to-mouth. You know, then we sort of figured out how to grow food, and that, you know, created a whole different thing, and much bigger scale at which people could come together and live together, and those economies of scale created, you know, the sort of beginning of the technology exponential that looked really flat for a long time, but, you know, seemingly was kind of already on an exponential even then when people didn't know it. And the same thing has happened again with the Industrial Revolution. Mechanizing farming took us from a scenario where whatever, 80, 90 percent of people were growing food to now today, I think that's only like 2 percent of people in the developed world are needed to grow food because machines can do a lot of that work. So I think the same thing happens for cognitive labor. And if AI were to stop progressing today, I think we already have powerful enough AI to automate the majority of cognitive work. We don't have everything wired up in the right way. We don't have all the data structured in the right way for AI to consume it. So there's a lot of plumbing sort of work, implementation sort of work that would need to be done to realize that dream of automation. And that would take, I think, five to 10 years and probably longer because I always tend to underestimate the timeline to implementation. But I think we do have enough sufficiently powerful AI that we could automate a majority of cognitive work already. And then the question is like, well, what are we going to do? If everybody has moved from in the past, roving around to settling down and farming, and then from farming to factory jobs, and then from factory jobs to these sort of white-collar cognitive jobs, or at least a significant part of the economy, what do people do if AIs can handle the majority of that? And I don't know. I think one candidate answer is sort of the carrying economy broadly could be like the next big thing. I think that's a little bit challenging even there because you do see these studies and survey results that often show people prefer talking to AIs for a lot of things. You know, the AI doctors, for example, like tend to get higher ratings on sort of bedside manner than human doctors because they do have some unfair advantages, right? Like they can be infinitely patient. You know, they're not time-bound in the way that human doctors are time-bound. So they'll answer all your questions, you know, and they don't really have any constraints on how much time they can spend with you. So, you know, I wouldn't say that's like an exactly fair head-to-head comparison, but there are some real advantages there. I'm not sure how that shakes out. Teaching is another area where, you know, I think we will want, for as long as the world is at all recognizable, we will want humans to be role models for the next generation of humans. But we already see schools where AIs are now starting to be responsible for all the content, and humans are kind of moving into a more guide, coach, mentor, motivator sort of role, where the AI gives you the lessons and grades are homework, and the humans are just kind of there for these like softer skills. Is there enough demand for that, that people will like need to do that for, you know, jobs and that those jobs will like absorb, you know, all the people that are probably going to get displaced from the jobs they're currently doing? I don't know. I think that seems like a stretch and it's kind of a rocky transition, but that's at least one answer. I think another answer is just like we might actually have that life of leisure that people have dreamed about for a long time. Famously, Keynes said 100 years ago or whatever now that by the time we get to today, we should be working 15-hour weeks. We're obviously not, but maybe that's another way that things could go. I think Zuckerberg has had really interesting, and like many things in AI, I have very mixed, ambivalent feelings on what Zuckerberg is up to. But in his post and message where he introduced the personal super intelligence concept, one of the things that he pointed out, which I thought was really interesting, is the macro trend that people are just spending less time working and more time socializing, creating, consuming media. Maybe consuming media is like a little bit crowding out the connecting and socializing, which isn't necessarily all to the good. But the big trend of the shift from work to leisure maybe accelerates, and maybe people start to do a lot of stuff in VR and AR, and maybe we start to get Neuralink becomes like a very broad technology, and these experiences, especially if they're literally connected into your brain, could start to be like extremely compelling. So maybe we're spending a lot of time in VR is one answer for the 10 years from now future. Beyond that, it's like really hard to say, right? Classically, people are like, well, we didn't know what the cell phone was going to bring us. Nobody had Uber in mind when we introduced the iPhone. So what are the apps that are going to be built on the AI technology foundation? I think it's very early and kind of very hard to say. But yeah, I think one other thing I think could be really interesting is a sort of radical egalitarian mode of access to frontier technology. I mean, I often use the example of doctors again. It's a scarce resource today. It's obviously not everybody can become a doctor. It takes a long time, a lot of training, very expensive, yada, yada. Not everybody can access a good doctor with the AI technology. That should change and people should be able to get quality medical advice regardless of their means. So that's exciting. I was reminded in thinking about this, of the Andy Warhol quote where he goes on about how, the great thing about American consumer culture was back in the, I think, 60s, is that everybody can get the same stuff. The president drinks Coke and movie stars drink Coke, and you can get your own can of Coke and you know that it's the same as the one they're drinking and it's all the same. Even if you were richer, you couldn't get a better Coke. That's been true of the iPhone. I don't think that will be true of AI in exactly the same way. Because I do think there will be probably frontier, like very high powered systems that frankly, not everybody needs on a daily basis, but there are still uses for. But if you think about that VR world, one of the big differences right now between the haves and have nots is just the sort of experiences that they can access. That could perhaps become really collapsed, where the exciting life of adventure that is currently only available to the select few, that could perhaps be made scalable through some combination of neural link type connections and VR all delivered in a low energy, low resource way that could scale to potentially everyone in the way that Coca-Cola did years ago. So I'm probably going to get a lot more wrong there than right, but those are at least some musings about just how different the future could be. And it's coming at us fast. This technology, the Industrial Revolution took like 200 years depending on how you want to count. The electrification of the United States took 60 years from like 1880 when electricity was invented to 1940 when basically everybody finally had electricity. Huge difference there was they had to actually build out the wires to everybody's house. Now we already have the wires that deliver the AI to the point of consumption. And so you can have these centralized upgrades where from one version to the next the capability leap and what everybody at scale can access can flip much faster than in previous generations. So I think it's going to be a wild ride, exciting and also a little bit scary. Hey, we'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors. Being an entrepreneur, I can say from personal experience, can be an intimidating and at times lonely experience. There are so many jobs to be done and often nobody to turn to when things go wrong. That's just one of many reasons that founders absolutely must choose their technology platforms carefully. Pick the right one and the technology can play important roles for you. Pick the wrong one and you might find yourself fighting fires alone. In the e-commerce space, of course, there's never been a better platform than Shopify.