Zack Kass: Should You Be Scared of AI? Former OpenAI Leader Reveals the Truth | Artificial Intelligence | E405

**Hala Taha** (0:00)
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**Zack Kass** (2:07)
There is incredible negativity towards AI. Housing, healthcare and education have gotten 280 percent more expensive over the last 30 years. These three things are not technological failures. They're expensive because of policy failures. We are governed by a pernicious, antisocial, geriatric group of parasites.

**Hala Taha** (2:28)
Most people hear AI and immediately think, what is this going to take from me? My guest today, Zack Kass, wants us to ask a much better question. What could AI make possible?

**Zack Kass** (2:38)
Most people are really excited for everyone else's jobs to automate just not their own. Everyone wants stuff to arrive a little bit faster, a little bit cheaper on Amazon without realizing it means automating the ports.

**Hala Taha** (2:49)
I heard Elon Musk say something recently, that work one day will be more like a hobby. How do you feel about the future of work?

**Zack Kass** (2:55)
First, the reason the future of work is such a ridiculous discussion right now is because none of the economists understand AI, and none of the technologists understand labor economics. The second problem, and no one's really talking about this, is why are communities pushing back against data centers?

**Hala Taha** (3:13)
There's lots of people who are really upset about the environmental impact of AI.

**Zack Kass** (3:18)
If you really care about the environment, the most environmentally efficient thing you can do is-

**Hala Taha** (3:24)
Zack, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast.

**Zack Kass** (3:26)
Thanks for having me.

**Hala Taha** (3:27)
We are just going to jump right in.
I was reading your book, and a big premise of it is that people are scared of AI, and not just because AI is dangerous, but because we're wired to be scared of change and things that are new. So help us understand why it's our natural instinct to just be afraid of AI.

**Zack Kass** (3:49)
That is a good question that not enough people ask about everything that they're afraid of actually. We are wired as humans and the disclosure here is I'm not a behavioral psychologist, but I'm going to tell you what many behavioral psychologists would say.
Most of what any human believes is they are predisposed to believe. So most of actually what you experienced, and this is a little controversial, actually comes from genetic predispositions. Your ancestors passed you a bunch of beliefs and biases that are inherent in your DNA, and then you have lived experiences that compound those things.
A lot of people actually from a very young age, their lived experiences either confirm or slightly tweak what it is they are predisposed to believe, but of the 180 cognitive biases that we have, there are a few that are really powerful. One of them is a confirmation bias. So we often see things that we already believed, and they reinforce what we believe. So they confirm or reinforce our ideas. One of them is a negativity bias, and the negativity bias served us a long, long time ago, and actually to some extent can still serve some people today, especially those under constant physical threat. The negativity bias tells us to look at something as though it can harm you, even if the chances are low, and the negativity bias is the thing that plagues a lot of the people who are most cynical in your life as it is or most pessimistic. Then we have a bias that we call rosy retrospection, which is one of these really incredible biases. We tell ourselves that the past was way better than it actually was, and we tell ourselves these really romantic stories of a bygone time with a sense of nostalgia.