Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy - Avi Goldfarb - The Economic Impact of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.321]
Episode Date: March 21, 2023My guest today is Avi Goldfarb. Avi is a Professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, the Rotman Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare, as well as the co-author o...f two bestselling books on AI and its economic impact. His most recent book, Power and Prediction, is probably the best piece of content I have read in explaining how AI may reshape business models, systems, and products. We recorded this before GPT-4’s release last week which, if anything, makes Avi’s ideas on AI’s impact all the more poignant. Please enjoy my conversation with Avi Goldfarb. For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here. ----- This episode is brought to you by Tegus. Tegus is the modern research platform for leading investors. I’m a longtime user and advocate of Tegus, a company that I’ve been so consistently impressed with that last fall my firm, Positive Sum, invested $20M to support Tegus’ mission to expand its product ecosystem. Whether it’s quantitative analysis, company disclosures, management presentations, earnings calls - Tegus has tools for every step of your investment research. They even have over 4000 fully driveable financial models. Tegus’ maniacal focus on quality, as well as its depth, breadth and recency of content makes it the one-stop, end-to-end research platform for investors. Move faster, gather deep research to build conviction and surface high-quality, alpha-driving insights to find your differentiated edge with Tegus. As a listener, you can take the Tegus platform for a free test drive by visiting tegus.co/patrick. ----- Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes. Past guests include Tobi Lutke, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, John Collison, Kat Cole, Marc Andreessen, Matthew Ball, Bill Gurley, Anu Hariharan, Ben Thompson, and many more. Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus Show Notes (00:03:15) - [First question] - His initial reaction to chat GPT when it first launched (00:07:08) - Prediction Machines; The impact price has on how much something is used by humans (00:11:07) - The shift from steam powered factories to electric ones and the transition between the two in regards to systems and application solutions; Power and Prediction (00:17:06) - Midpoints between a point solution and a systems solution and applications that are being built in the middle of them (00:19:10) - What application, system, and point solutions feel like today in the world of AI (00:27:03) - The transition from a world governed by rules to one by decisions (00:30:58) - How the power of prediction moves us from a binary to a decimal framework (00:34:48) - Ways power disruption will occur as we navigate the emerging AI frontier (00:44:33) - Other functions like personalization that entrepreneurs should think about putting into their products and features (00:47:18) - How we should be thinking about the generation of information and data (00:51:32) - A future where technology either desimates or empowers specific industries (00:54:16) - What he’s most excited and worried about given the emerging frontier of AI (00:55:41) - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for him
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This episode is brought to you by Teegas, the modern research platform for leading investors.
I'm a longtime user and advocate of Teegis, a company that I've been so consistently impressed with
that last fall, my firm, Positive Sum, invested $20 million to support Teagis' mission to expand
its product ecosystem to unify and streamline investor research processes.
In addition to the library of 55,000 transcripts, Teagis now combines at-cost, on-demand calls
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on quality as well as its depth, breadth, and recency of content makes it the one-stop end-to-end research
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for a free test drive by visiting tegis.co slash Patrick.
Before we transition to the episode, I want to highlight the Founders podcast, which is part of
our Colossus network.
David Senra, who hosts founders, has devoted his life to learning from history's greatest
entrepreneurs, and every week he distills the lessons of a different founder.
If you want an entry point, I highly recommend starting with episode 136 on Estée Lauder
or episode 288 on Ralph Lauren.
I hosted David on Invest Like the Best last summer, and it's hard not to walk away,
insanely energized after listening to any episode with him. You can find a link to founders and those
episodes and the show notes of this conversation. You can also search all past transcripts on our website,
join colossus.com. Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best.
This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you
better invest both your time and your money. Invest Like the Best is part of the Colossus family of
podcasts, and you can access all our podcasts, including edited transcripts, show notes, and other
resources to keep learning at join colossus.com.
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO and founding partner of Positive Sum and the CEO of
O'Shaunacy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their
own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum or O'Shaunacy Asset Management.
This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be really.
relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of positive sum or Oshonnessy asset management
may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. My guest today is Avi Goldfarb. Avi is a
professor at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, the Rotman Chair in Artificial
Intelligence and Healthcare, as well as the co-author of two bestselling books on AI and its
economic impact. His most recent book, Power and Prediction, is probably the best piece of content
than I have read in explaining how AI may reshape business models, systems, and products.
We recorded this before GPT4's release last week, which, if anything, makes Avi's ideas on AI's
impact all the more poignant. Please enjoy my conversation with Ollie Goldfarb.
Avi, we were just chatting before we hit record about chat GPT. We have to start here.
I'm so curious about your reaction to it because it came out almost immediately after your book
was published. So we're going to talk about all the ideas in the book in great detail.
But first, just give me your unvarnished reaction to when you saw that come out and what you've been thinking about it since.
My first reaction was wow.
I'd seen large language models before.
I'd see the earlier versions of GPT, including GPT3 and stuff from OpenAI and they were doing great things.
But chat GPT showed me to advance faster than I'd expect.
First is wow.
And then, along with my co-authors, we started to think through, well, what does this mean for the future of AI?
What does this mean for AI in business?
And at the time, when we heard people talk about chat GPT, everyone was focused on, oh, no, we're going to have to change the way we write final exams.
Or, oh, no, there's a handful of people who make a living from writing text.
They're going to be toast.
They're going to lose their job.
And those worries are real.
I don't want to belittle them.
They're real worries.
But for most people, it struck us as this huge opportunity.
And what do we mean by that?
Well, there's lots of people who have amazing skills that are not getting ready.
And so writing limits their opportunities for work, their opportunities for income.
And if they have better writing, then a whole bunch of new business opportunities grow,
a whole bunch of new work opportunities grow.
And the organizations that figure out how to take advantage of the people who are good at lots of things,
but not writing, are going to be the ones that get the first pass and take advantage of chat.
GPT. There was this story on Twitter. I'm not going to speak to the veracity of it, but it was a
compelling story. There was this landscaper whose English language skills were terrible. He did not
know how to write a customer service email, saying, hey, I'm going to be there on Wednesday,
and I'm going to do whatever I'm going to do in your backyard, and then I'll send you a bill.
Getting a coherent note out of this guy was really hard, but the story went that he was a
great landscape, but he struggled to find business. A mentor, one of his clients, a little bit
ambiguous who this person was, built an interface with GPT3 to help the guy to turn his
quick notes, hello, arrive Wednesday, 9 to a nice coherent email to a potential customer
and seemed to work really well. The story went that the person's business thrived to
herself. That kind of a narrative, I think, is going to happen a lot, which is someone's got to
reinvent the interface. Something hasn't happened yet, which is somebody has to invent the interface
that allows millions of people to take advantage of what this technology can do to write more easily
and whether that's going to be Open AI that does it or Microsoft that does it or a startup, who knows.
But once someone writes that interface and figures it out,
then the potential to upskill millions of people is amazing for the economy.
Not to ignore that thousands of people will be worse off.
ChatGPT is emblematic of something that we see in lots of emerging AI applications,
which is, yes, they automate something that,
humans do, and there's reasons to worry about that late market consequences. But the hope is that
what they're automating is something that the people who really earn a lot do. So you think about in
medicine, what's AI doing, it's automating diagnosis. And diagnosis is the domain of doctors,
and doctors earn more than just about anybody else in medicine. So if you could automate diagnosis,
then what happens, well, nurses and pharmacists and all the other millions of medical professionals
can now provide much, much better medical service.
And they can take advantage of their skills.
There's hundreds of thousands of doctors in the US,
and their special skill and diagnosis is going to go away.
They'll have to retool and figure out how to deal with that.
But there's millions of other medical professionals who are now going to be able to do their
jobs much better, be much more productive.
And that upskilling provides a lot of what we see as the hope and opportunity for AI.
If you were to just back up to your first book, prediction machines now, and talk
about what happens when the price of something falls, in this case prediction, and the impact
that that has compared to other similar examples of some valuable thing and the price of it falling,
whether it be electricity or something different. Talk at a high level about the importance of
that simple concept, that the cost and friction of something matters a lot in terms of how much
it's actually used by humans. You ever took an economics class? The very first thing you learn
is that when the price of something falls, you do it more. So if coffee gets changed,
cheap, you're going to buy more coffee. The reality is coffee can only get so cheap. But with technological
change, the fall in the price can be extraordinary. Think about your computer. It feels like the
computer does all sorts of things. But really under the hood, your computer just does one thing.
It does arithmetic, does it really, really, really well. And so what we saw is the first
applications of machine arithmetic problems. The really first applications were effectively World War II
and Trubby after we had cannons and they shot cannibals. And it's a difficult arithmetic problem to figure out where
those cannibals are going to land. And so we had these teams of humans whose job was called computer
who figured out the trajectory of those cannibals. Then machine arithmetic came along, computers,
and they could do that arithmetic better than the human computers. The first applications were,
we were already doing arithmetic, and now we have machines doing it. Then I think about accountants.
Yes, I'm an accountant from the 1950s or 60s or even into the 70s, but they spent a lot of
their time doing. It was arithmetic. But then machine or arithmetic got better, and we no longer had
accountants spend a lot less time adding up columns and numbers.
They spend a lot more time thinking about tax policy and strategy, etc.
But then arithmetic got even cheaper and started to realize that lots of things that we didn't
use to solve with arithmetic can be solved with arithmetic as an engineering problem.
When arithmetic is cheap enough, mail can be reframed as arithmetic, music can be reframed as arithmetic,
even pictures could be reframed as arithmetic.
Kodak solved pictures with chemistry, chemical engineering.
They were fundamentally a chemical engineering company.
But machine arithmetic has gotten cheap.
that by 20 years ago, we started to really think about pictures as an orthotic problem,
no longer a chemical engineer.
So as something gets cheap, we do more of it.
And when that change is several orders of magnitude, then we can identify all sorts of
extraordinary applications with today's artificial intelligence.
You can usually think of it as prediction technology.
By prediction, I mean in this statistical sense, taking information you have and filling in information
you don't have. The first applications of machine prediction
were good old-fashioned prediction problems. You walk into a bank, you want a loan and
a little officer at the bank looks you up and down and decides whether they trust you and
predicts whether they're going to pay back. Over the course of the 20th century, that became
more and more rigorous. And now increasingly, banks are using machine learning tools,
using AI to predict whether you're going to pay back. I already talked about medical diagnosis.
Medical diagnosis is prediction. You take in data about your symptoms. You feel in the missing
information of the cause of those symptoms. That's prediction. In writing, turns out, a lot of
writing is prediction. How do you write in response to a query? Well, you're filling in this
information about where words should go and what words belong next to other words in response to a
particular query. Free form writing, maybe not, but if the chat CPT is doing fundamentally,
is it's taking your query, write a five-paragraph essay on how AI will affect investing,
and it will look at other five-paragraph essays that exist on the internet. We'll look at
discussions about AI and investing that exist in its data set, and it will fill in the missing
information of what should those five paragraphs look like. We never imagined, frankly,
even when we were writing prediction machines, that writing essays would be a prediction problem,
but here we are five years later and very clearly it's. And so that's the essence of it,
which is as something gets cheap, we do it more, and when that change in price is exponential,
or is at least several orders of magnitude, the way we think about problems can change,
things that we didn't used to think of as prediction in the context of AI, really dark.
I love the computer example so much that you start with good old-fashioned X problems
and then you start to migrate into more interesting areas that are hard themselves to predict.
You can't predict what prediction will be used for other than to say it will be used for lots of
cool things that we can't imagine.
Another favorite example that I've seen you write about, which I think really nails this
point home more on the business side, is the transition between, say, a steam-powered factory.
I'm interested in the deep details here, like how one of these factories is set up and construct it to one that is fueled by electricity.
And the story between that transition is a great opportunity to talk about point versus application versus systems solutions.
I'm happy to spend as long as we can here because I think it's such an incredibly powerful way of understanding how the business world and the entrepreneurial world might start to imbibe this technology.
I love that question because it is the core thesis of our new book, Power of prediction, unpacking that.
It's what I've been spending more time than anything else thinking about it in the last couple of years.
Let's start a little bit on motivation, which is we wrote prediction machines in 2018,
thinking the revolution in AI was about to happen.
And then three or four years later, we felt like we saw some cool uses of AI, but the world hadn't changed.
That led us to think about the history of technology generally and electricity in particular.
Edison's patent for electric light bulb was 18.
So if you're paying attention in the 1880s, it was clear that this technology was going to be
transform it. The patent office was inundated with new patents. The newspapers were filled with
people coming up with new ideas and how electricity might be used in all aspects of society.
But if you look at the adoption rates of electricity in factories and households, how many people
were actually using it. It wasn't until the 1920s that half of U.S. workplaces and half of U.S.
homes were electrified. It took 40 years from recognizing, hey, this technology has extraordinary
potential to most people being affected by electricity at home or at work.
Why didn't it take 40 years of wandering to get from, hey, this is a big deal to
it actually making an impact in most people's lives?
Well, in the 1890s, if you ran a factory, here's what your factory would have had a steam engine,
sometimes a watermill, particularly a steam engine at the center of the factory.
And that steam engine powered everything.
It was one big power source.
All the machines in the factory were connected by belts to the steam engine.
And if you remember your high school physics, the more distance that the energy has to travel, the more energy gets dissipated.
So what you want to do is you want to locate your most power-hungry machines as close to the steam engine as possible.
The logic at the factory was built around the power needs of the machines.
To the point where in order to make sure that you're using energy efficiently, you'd put machines above and below your steep edge.
They'd had these tightly cluster multi-story factories typically where the logic of the workflow was determined by the location of the power source.
And so you'd have people moving pieces up and down and around because of where the power sources were.
And then once you did that, that's really inefficient.
So you'd even have workers doing a lot more at each station because they'd put a lot more pieces together.
They were much more specialized workers because once you were located somewhere using a machine, having to then move it up to the next machine and then back down was really costly and inefficient.
With a steam engine, that was the logical smart way to build it.
Then electricity came along and a few people said, you know what, this is cheaper power.
We can save 5, 10, 15% on the energy cost, perhaps because we don't have as many belts where energy gets lost or we happen to be near a good source of electricity.
So they take out the steam engine, drop an electric motor at the same point, but not mess with anything else.
This is what we call a point solution, where you take out the old way of doing things, drop in a new process, but don't change the workflow at all.
And those factories, they did save a little bit on energy costs.
But for the most part, it wasn't worth the bottom.
For most factories, saving 5, 10, 50%, percent wasn't worth trying to figure out how to get
ready to steam engine and drop in the electric motor, find that the way to get electricity
into the factory, all these different kinds of changes.
And so they just kept doing things the old.
Starting around 1900, a couple of people recognized that electricity wasn't just cheap power,
but electricity was distributed power.
It allowed you to decouple the location of the power.
source for the location of the machines. And once you can decouple the location of the power source
and the location of the machines, you can build an entirely new kind of factory, where the logic
of the workflow in the factory is determined by the production process, inputs and outputs, rather than
by your powering. And so the quintessential 20th century factory that you might imagine, which is in
cheap land and suburban areas, huge factories, inputs come in one end, outputs come out the other with
modular production. That exists of a reinvention of how factories worked after the recognition
the electricity did is it decoupled the power source from the machines. So it created a whole
new factory system. Once people started to figure out, hey, that's much more efficient. It's a much
better workflow. It can allow us to produce much more efficiently, much more effectively,
and maybe even different kinds of consumer products, like the mass market automobile that were
not possible before under a steam power check. That's what we think about as,
system change. It's not just taking out the old process, dropping in the new one, not messing with
the workflow. That seems easy, but if taking out the old and putting the new is costly,
then it's probably not going to be worth the bother. It's only worth the bother to electrify your
factor if you can do something totally differently and deliver a new kind of value. And if you
look at the history of technological change, these big picture impactful technologies called
general purpose technologies, also called GPs, but it's a different GPD. That kind of reinvention
process where in order to get value out of the new technology, you have to do things differently,
occurs over and over again. So it occurred with electricity. It actually occurred with a steam engine,
100 years before electricity. It occurred with the impact of computing on the way business is
operated through the 70s, 80s, and 90s. And now we expect the same thing to happen with artificial
intelligence over the next decade. Can you say a bit about the midpoint between a point solution
and the system solution, which is this idea of new applications also being built in the middle,
what's going on there?
So what was different about electricity is that machines could be switched on and off
and can be taken in and out of the overall workflow relatively.
But if something's powered by a steam engine, turning on and off the steam engine was really, really hard.
Everything is powered by the steam engine, to connect the steam engine by a belt, by a thing moving fast.
It was costly and risky to turn on and or off a machine because you'd be,
moving one of these fast-moving belts.
And so typically you just kept your machines on all the time.
With electricity, even if you took out the steam engine,
dropped an electric motor and didn't change where things were in the factory,
you could start to do different kinds of machines
because you could have them flip on and off.
And once you can have the machines flip on and off,
you can take advantage of electricity within the existing workflow,
but to allow different production processes.
Application solutions are at a high level.
There's somewhere between the point solution and system solution.
So they allow you to build new processes without having to mess with the entire system.
And often when you have these technological changes, a lot of the successful entrepreneurs in the early days are building new applications that can usefully fit into the old system, but allow the companies, the organizations do things better, faster, cheaper, more efficiently in various ways.
In the internet, we can think about applications.
We call them applications.
In the 1990s version of the internet, it was new ways to look through information, new ways
to connect buyers and sellers, but without inventing a whole new company.
Electronic communication led to this technology called EDI, electronic data interchange
in the late 80s, 90s that really helped supply chains be more efficient, like retailers
connect with suppliers more efficiently, but it didn't really involve totally changing
the workflow.
It was an application that allowed them to do.
what they were already doing, but better, that actually led to real value.
That was like the Walmart and Amazon standard.
I remember Amazon trying to change it, and it was so deeply embedded that they couldn't
mess with what Walmart had originally built, which is fascinating.
If you think about these three ideas, the tendency, I can't remember who originally coined
this idea, but maybe it was Steve Jobs or Chris Dixon or someone like that.
But the idea is when a new technology comes, you do point solutions.
They call it skeuomorphism.
You tend to take the tech and apply it to something we did in the prior era.
So the Notes app on an iPhone looks like a notepad, a digitalized version of the old thing.
And that's the point solution as you described it.
As you think about prediction and machine learning, prediction models, artificial intelligence, whatever you want to call it,
talk about that same progression as you've seen it so far and as you expect it may unfold in the future.
What do those same ideas of point solution, application solution, system solution feel or seem like to you in the world of prediction and AI?
I'm sitting in Canada.
My favorite example of the point solution is company Darifin.
And Verifin is predicting financial fraud.
So they do.
It turns out banks need to predict financial fraud, and they have all sorts of processes
to do that, a combination of human and almost symbolic logically, a bunch of fifthend states.
Derafin actually was in that business already in predicting financial fraud, but not using machine
money, not using AI.
They were fine.
And then they realized that given the data they had and given what they were trying to predict,
they could use machine learning to do the exact same thing.
It was just cheaper and better, but no one had to change anything.
In fact, many of their customers were already using Gerafit.
It was a perfect point solution in the sense that there's already a workflow, you're already making predictions, it's already intermediate, so it's not even replacing a human in that particular context, but we can do it better and more efficient.
At the point solution, they took out the old machine process, dropped in an AI process, workflows stayed the same, and they took off.
This small St. John's, Newfoundland-based business suddenly became.
became a tech darling and was, at least for Canada, our first AI unicorn.
I think about application solutions.
Another company we've worked with is called Ada Support.
It is a startup for AI and customer service.
They were small.
They stood in startup mode, but the real moment came in March 2020.
In December 2019, they signed up a new customer called Zoom.
In December 2019, no one knew who Zin was.
And what they were focused on was automating parts of the customer service work.
In particular, when people emailed Zoom for password resets or a handle of other requests,
what Ada figured out is those requests are pretty standardized,
and you can predict what kind of response to those customers are going to want.
You can add an AI into the workflow that automatically at least writes the email for the customer
service representative to look over and send, and eventually could totally automate that response.
And they did, and they helped Zoom.
But then March 2020 came and Zoom's demand for these customer service services,
queries went up by well over a factor of 10. And they could keep up because as they were scaling,
most of the customer service queries were pretty straightforward. And they could have this application
layer, this application AI, which is not quite doing what they were doing before, but it plugs
enough into their existing processes that it can work to allow Zoom and others to scale. So
Ada was an application, which lets use AI to support customer service representatives so that one
customer service representative can serve many, many more customers. And application solution doing
things a little bit differently, but plugged into an existing value chain. System solutions for AI are
harder to find. You can think of two. One of them is in prediction machines, we talk about, we call
the knowledge. If you're a taxi driver, especially a taxi driver in a complicated city like London,
it could take a long time to learn your way around the city. So the city of London, they call that
ability to navigate the city called the knowledge. And it actually takes about three years of
school to know enough about the city to be licensed as a tax driver. Then a prediction tool came
along called GPS and some maps that allowed you to get from point A to point B with real-time
traffic reports, even if you didn't take three years of school. If you went to the city of London,
you have to get used to driving on the other side of the road. But notwithstanding that,
you could get from point A to point B not quite as efficiently, but almost as efficiently as
a professional on a taxi driver who had three years of school. What that meant was the first
applications, I should say, were point solutions. So many people, who was taking advantage of
real-time traffic at GPS, they were professional drivers. Whether they were truck drivers or taxi drivers
or others, people who made a living as a driver, became more productive if they knew real-time
traffic reports and had these predictions and could use the GPS, Google Nax or something else.
The eventful of companies realized if we take digital navigation, so navigational AI, navigational
predictions anyway, combine it with digital dispatch and combine it with a prediction tool about
where people are going to want to get picked up by taxis to go from point A to point B, you can build
an entirely new kind of business. Uber and Lyft and other ride-healing services created an entirely
different system. They use that same technologies that taxi drivers could use to drive more efficiently,
figure out how to find customers better, but in the process, they upskilled anybody who could
drive could now effectively be a professional taxi. So they created a whole new system for
transportation. The other example of prediction leading to an entirely new way of doing business
is in digital advertising. Advertising in the 1990s wasn't that different from the advertising
industry in the 1960s that you might have seen, say, on Madden. I don't know about the sobopper part
of it, but the way the business worked where there was a lot of charm and a lot of fancy dinners and
big sales was a lot of how Madison Avenue worked back there. And when digital technology came along,
when online advertising came along, the way people did it in the 1990s looked exactly like the way
used to happen. If you wanted to advertise in a magazine in the 70s, 80s, 80s, you'd go to the
magazine owner and say, hey, I want to advertise in your magazine, and they'd say, okay, here's our rate
card, here's our prices. It'd be some back and forth in negotiation, but fundamentally, there was the
prices. And you would advertise. So if you want a full page out of people magazine, it's going to cost
you out a thousand dollars, certain years, that's what you get. And they tell you their circulation.
And the internet came along. You wanted to advertise online. That was the model they did.
They said, hey, the internet's like the magazine industry. So you reach out and say, hey, yeah,
who I want to advertise on the ad. And they say, great, here's our rate card. If you want to
advertise in real estate, it's going to cost you $20 per 1,000 views. If you want to advertise for
small businesses, it's going to cost you $50 per thousand views. If you just want to advertise in the
search engine, that's a generic advertising. It's not targeted at all. It's going to cost you $10 per
thousand views, something like that. The industry just took the old model and applied it to
a point solution. Then some people will realize, well, online advertising is different. Online advertising is
different because there's this one-to-one relationship between the server sending you the ad,
in the user. And that allows them to know not just whether the user's seeing an ad, but to predict
a lot about the user who they are in their particular context of that particular moment.
So what's different about online advertising is recognition that we can target ads based on the
prediction about who the user is. And so over the next 20 years, an entirely new industry arose
that still called itself an advertising industry. But with completely different players,
completely different technology, a completely different way of doing things, there's an opportunity
to show somebody in an ad, and now the industry has this real-time auction that happens in fractions
of a second for that slot. That was inconceivable in the old advertising world, but because we have
this prediction combined with other complementary technologies around digitization, we have an entirely
different advertising industry that now has players that we never even heard of before, demand-side
platforms, fly-side platforms, and measurement agencies, data providers, all these types of players,
a lot of them are just Google, but all these players are only it exists because of the AI.
as an industry is an industry that's experienced system level change through prediction technology.
Can you talk a little bit about the transition from a world governed by rules to one governed by
decisions? To say more about this concept of why a decision governed world might be more
interesting than a rule governed one. More interesting and more complicated. A lot of the way we do
things now, because we don't have good information, so we just follow the instructions.
Because if we follow the instructions and everyone else follows the instructions, we know things will
coordinated well. And what we mean by decisions are if you have a prediction, then if you know the
state of the world, you don't have to do the same thing every time. You can start thinking creatively
and doing things different. After our experience over the last few years, the rule that many of us
experienced was stay home. Warranty, we have no idea if you might be infectious. The easiest thing to
do is to apply a rule to everybody. Just stay home. Joshua, my co-author on the book,
recognized pretty early something that most people in the public health community weren't talking about,
which is that for most people, COVID was not a health problem. At any given time, more than 99% of the
population, this was summer 2020, did not have COVID. And if you don't have COVID, COVID's not a health
problem. If you don't have COVID, what COVID is is an information problem, because you're worried
about all the other people you might interact with whether they would have COVID, which would then turn it
into a health problem. Once you understand that COVID's an information problem, well, now we think,
Here's an opportunity for AI.
Here's an opportunity for prediction machines.
Because what does AI do?
It fills in missing information.
That's what prediction is.
Once you say, Cohen, for most of us, it's not a health problem.
It's an information problem.
We see an opportunity to overcome the rule of stay home.
Because if we had the information about who was infectious,
then we don't have to follow the rule of stay home.
We can now make a decision based on our predicted likelihood of being infectious
and interacting with another infection.
So in the presence of predictions, we could actually have gone about our business.
We had a good AI for predicting whether somebody had COVID, then there would have been no
grids.
And effectively, we would say, hey, you know what?
You 1% of the population stay home and the rest of us, we can go about our business.
We didn't have a video.
Actually, there were all sorts of people trying to build that over the course of 2020 and
AI to predict whether somebody had COVID.
And there were these apps that you cough into your phone and to have some prediction.
They worked all that well.
Retrospecting seems kind of funny.
Now that worked.
The best tool we had for predicting whether somebody had COVID was a rapid test.
It's not perfect, but at least to figure out to predict if somebody was in fact,
it worked pretty well. Unfortunately, that tool for a long time wasn't useful. Because we were so
focused on rules, in order to use that prediction to make a decision, to move from rules to decision
making, all these other things that happened in companies had to change. If you wanted to use
rapid testing to test people coming into your business to make sure they didn't have COVID, and then
open up if you were one of those businesses that were shut down, well, it seems easy. You just have a
decision about whether people can come in or not. But there's all these other decisions that
coordinate with it, then you'd have to start figuring out. If you're doing it for your employees
and they test positive, are going to give them sick pay. Well, lots of companies didn't have
sick pay. Now they have to think about it. If you don't give people sick pay, they're not going to
want to test. You need a whole bunch of decisions around health data because health data is private
and how do we treat them. Turns out you need decisions around toxic waste disposal because
this was considered biohazard because it was a medical test. We had to develop new processes around
that. There are all these different pieces that in order to be able to move from the rule of, hey,
has to be shut down. We are, for that matter, our business is just going to stay open and
the rules are open or closed. The decision is we allow our employees to come in to work
if they test negative. To make that decision happen, there's all these coordination challenges
that require a whole system. If we had control or whoever is trying to overcome the rules
and say, hey, I want to make a decision, if they're also making all the other decisions,
that it's easy. You don't have to worry about coordination. The problem is, in most companies,
and in most contexts where you're trying to really move from rules to decisions, you need to coordinate
between lots of people within the company and even between others outside the company.
All sorts of other people are involved and it becomes a much more complicated process.
As you're talking, I'm just picturing the world moving from integers to decimals,
a binary decision, which is a rule of thumb, treat everyone the same homogenously,
to now what everyone's going to need to understand about the world is that it's probabilistic.
There's some percentage chance that some set of things happens, and that's what a decision is.
Investing, for example, you're thinking about expected value.
A whole bunch of things could happen.
what are the weights or the odds that certain things happen? When those things happen, what do I get as a return? You're building a probability tree. Is that the right simple way of summing this all up that what the power prediction does is move us from a binary to a decimal? I like that way to think about it. The world was always in decimals. If we're trying to fill in missing information, there's always some probability. But without a prediction machine, you have a lazy way of thinking, which is we tend to think it's either this or that. And so therefore, we're going to round up or down. We're going to round up or down. We're going to round up or down.
And what prediction machines do is they give us an explicit number.
Oh, there's a 36% chance this is going to happen.
And then the hard part is most of us aren't that good at figuring out what to do if there's a 36% chance of this going to happen as opposed to a 28.
There's a whole learning process in getting used to making these decisions in the face of statistic.
People who are probably best in the world of this are investors.
Some investor audience is very familiar with.
Let's think through the probabilities right out the decision tree or do our Monte Carlo simulation and figure out how this all plays out.
But for many decisions, even investors when they're not investing, it's hard to think through
what's probability.
Give an example of this of where it gets really hard.
You've seen a movie I have a robot?
Yeah, of course, and read the book.
It's a great science fiction.
In the movie, there's this flashback scene about why he hates robots.
Here's why he hates robots.
The protagonist, Wesmith, and his little girl, they're in a car accident, and their cars are sinking into a river,
and it's clear that they're both about to drown, and that a robot comes along and saves him
and not the goal, and that's why he hates robots.
by his aside, he then figured out, hey, it's a robot, I can figure out why it made the decision.
The human you can never know, he audits the robot, and he figures that the robot predicted that he had a 45% chance of my, and the girl only had an 11% chance.
That's why the robot saved the adult man and not the girl.
And then he says, well, the 11% was more than enough, and a human being would have known that.
But that's not a same about the predictions, that's the same by the decision.
The judge is the relative value of an adult man's light versus the little girls.
The protagonist in the movie, Will Smith, says that that girl's life is worth more than the decision.
than four times his life effectively.
11 versus 44 or 45, then you get them more than four.
I don't know that we humans all agree on that, but I think we agree that that's hard.
It's uncomfortable, and it's not something like doing.
There's lots of decisions where it's useful to us.
It's convenient that the prediction and judgment are bundled in our head.
And hiring decisions is the same thing.
Why don't you hire this person and not that person?
Well, maybe it's because you predicted that they had a better chance of succeeding in the company
versus the other person.
or maybe it's because your tastes are toward people who look like that or act like that or speak like that.
It's convenient for us that our predictions about success are bundled with our human biases
so that we don't really have to face our biases explicitly.
But once you have a prediction saying, okay, this person's 90% likely to succeed and that person's 85% likely to succeed, which one are you going to hire?
Now we have to face our biases in a way that we do.
That could be good.
A lot of my optimism around AI is partly around how bad humans are and all sorts of things.
things, including bias, but in this particular example, it's just that decoupling of the
prediction from judgment. So the prediction for the rest of the decision is hard. And it requires
a different kind of skill because most of us don't think probabilistic. I know a lot of your audience
are a vestor. So another way to think about this is that skill you have at investing and thinking
probabilistically will permeate all aspects of life because when you're trying to decide what to do,
rather than just relying on doing the same thing every time, you'll now have information on
the relative likelihood of different things happen. I can't have a good discussion on AI on a business
show without talking about concepts like disruption and sources of power in businesses. And I think
there's a really interesting concepts when there's a GPT, the general purpose technology kind,
regime change, which is probably at the peak of the steam engine era of a factory. The biggest factory
was really hard to compete with. They had perfect.
lots of efficient movements and structure and planning and blah, blah, blah.
It would have been foolish decision to go up against them.
I'm going to build a better steam factory.
But if you came as an electric factory, you could compete because of this transition.
Talk a bit about that through the lens of prediction.
There's lots of big technology businesses, let's say, there's lots of great data businesses.
I'm trying to think of the existing dominant steam engine equivalent of today.
Say a bit about what you think will happen, how disruption will occur, where power will shift and accrue
I love thinking about those dynamics, and I think that's what all investors are, at least of my type, are thinking about now.
Who's going to win in all this? Is it going to be the incumbents? Is it going to be the disruptors? Is it going to be some combination?
Where all the great businesses? Where all the bad businesses? Some of these businesses that have taken off probably are not going to be good in the long run because they're so easy to copy, et cetera.
I just love these dynamics of power and disruption. In any gold rush, the lack of a better metaphor, people benefit by providing the equipment.
There's going to be huge opportunities for companies that are providing the compute power underlying A.
Right now, that looks like it's the traditional big tech companies, and they're providing the underlying compute power, and as the demands for compute power grow, there's going to be opportunities.
Basically, everyone's buying cloud that's all running Nvidia GPUs.
Exactly. If you make chips or if you provide cloud services, then for you.
There's going to be a handful of opportunities there for sure.
Second point is, maybe more interestingly, there's a whole bunch of business opportunities
that are constrained by bad bridge.
My favorite example is thinking about pharmaceuticals.
So pharmaceutical companies have patents, which means they have a monopoly on certain drugs
over a period of time, and they can make a lot of money.
But it's often a challenge to identify people who need their drugs, particularly for
those that are relatively rare tree or relatively bare.
There's a push in that industry toward Blockbuster that, hey, if you hit 65 or need this
drug pretty much no matter what, we don't have to worry about the pretty much.
It's not quite world-based, but really mass market.
That's where a lot of the opportunity is.
Now, imagine we have an AI that does better diagnosis.
And in particular, a diagnosis a disease that it's not that rare, but it's hard to identify.
And so you have a prediction machine that identifies it.
You have a drug that helps cure it or at least manage that disease.
In the presence of a good prediction machine, the pharma company can now sell a lot more, increasing the profit,
and also help a lot more consumer.
This isn't a pharma company exploitation.
This is, hey, because we have a better prediction technology, we can diagnose.
we can diagnose people at scale more efficiently for this previously seemingly rare disease,
any production capacity on that kind of drug becomes much, much more profit.
There's a lot of this kind of opportunity, which is once you have better prediction,
you can do things that you couldn't do before.
And if you have the assets that are a complement to prediction that could take advantage of it,
there's huge money-making opportunity.
You can see that in pharma, can see that in some kind of personalized goods and services.
This is because I sit in education, but I think there's huge opportunities in education because
there's rules everywhere in education.
We have people go co-work by cohort.
Everybody in the second grade kind of learns the same stuff.
Everybody in the third grade and stuff.
Historically, we haven't had a really good way to deal with that because everyone in the second
grade in terms of social emotional benefits by being with other second graders.
And so how can the same teacher teach in a class of 30, teach 30 different lessons.
It's impossible.
Add in a good prediction technology.
We can now think through personalized education in terms of what they're learning
the classroom. That's the best way to get this particular kid to do better and to reach their
potential while also potentially keeping the class at the social emotional needs altogether with
your cohort. I described that in the second grade, but I also think that same thing applies to
my MBAs. Doctoral students largely get personalized because two doctoral students per professor,
but the rest of the university, they don't get that personalized education, but they could.
In the presence of good prediction tools, we could deliver an entirely new kind of education.
So that's piece one. Now, let's talk about disruption. There's two different concepts of
disruption in the academic literature and they get mixed together. There's the Claytonson kind of
disruption, which is that you start up creating a worse product effectively, but it serves a
particular niche in a way that's not of interest to the core customer. So the plaintiffs and kind
disruption was talked about disc drives and each new generation of disk drive was cheaper. Maybe didn't
have as much storage in the first waves as the older ones, but could be applied to a wider variety
of applications. The established discarized companies were selling into the same big enterprises
and the big enterprises didn't care about the digital storage that was going to be for small-scale application.
So they ignored it. And a new company came along. And as they got better and better and better,
they ended up disrupting and being able to do the stuff for the big ones as well,
who called demand side disruption.
Rebecca Henderson developed, well, you might think of a supply side disruption,
which is companies have a way of doing things. This is around SOP,
state operating procedures. And it's very hard to break them.
If a new company comes a lot, new business idea comes a lot, new business model,
if that's going to change who does what in your organization, you just might ignore it.
And so it may never happen.
The example we talk about Empower and Prediction is in the context of Blockbuster Video.
I was a kid.
It was a big event on Saturday.
We'd go, we'd go to Blockbuster video and pick our video.
After the activity was going to Blockbuster and picking a video.
Such good memories.
This generation will never know the joy.
That just not a thing anymore.
The story we often hear is that Blockbuster didn't see digital distribution coming.
But if you actually look at the Blockbuster documents, they saw it coming.
they just couldn't manage their organization to move it in the right direction.
They were largely franchised, and the franchise owners, they didn't want digital distribution.
There wasn't really a way to incentivize them the way the company operated to enable digital distribution.
This is the shirky problem you talk about in the book.
Exactly.
It wasn't that they didn't see it coming.
Given the way the organization was set up, there wasn't much they could do better.
The failure of Blockbuster in the long run, maybe there could have been some way to hive off a separate company.
or do something like that, but it wasn't a failure of vision of recognizing what was happening.
It was a failure of not knowing how to take the organization they had and turn into the organization.
That's when we see disruptive opportunities, which is there's an incumbent, and they do things the way they do things.
And what prediction enables is a totally new way of operating.
And while a totally new way of operating requires new humans and a different set of humans who are doing different things, a different set of assets,
and that could just be too heavy a lift for a company.
One of the hilarious things that's happened predicting how this will all play out was that we would replace a bunch of easy to replicate human jobs first and eat up this chain.
The truck drivers were screwed and then eventually maybe 20, 30 years from now will get to the white collar artists or something.
And it seems to have happened almost exactly the opposite.
The stuff that's getting created the magic of Chad GPT or of Dolly or the stable diffusion models or whatever is sort of giving us stuff.
by a prediction, and that's all these things are. Pixel prediction or word prediction or letter
prediction. It's all these things do, which is why they hallucinate and do weird stuff sometimes
because they're just making the best prediction they can. And we know it's wrong. Back to your point
on judgment. What do you make of all that? What do you make of the ordering in which this technology
seems to be attacking existing functions or areas of the world or economy versus what we thought
they might? I just find it so funny that we can't predict what the prediction technology will do.
we absolutely can't predict it. It's prediction technology, so it relies on data. It's something
totally new. We don't have data. So we have no idea what's going to happen. Partly because it's
prediction technology, and if we think about, especially in generative models, what makes them so
useful is they make the process much more efficient as long as you know what good output looks like.
So if you think about, I don't know if you play with JetGPT, presumably you have, or Dally, too.
You know what you're looking for. And that's when it's most useful. If you know the anxiety,
I do you see around chatchipt ads giving all these wrong answers.
There's a lot of gotchas.
I'm an expert in this and I asked to write a five-barragraph essay on that five-paragraph essay was wrong.
Of course it was, but it's a great starting point for you to now turn it into a great five-paragraph essay.
You use Dolly for graphic design.
There's lots of people, including me, who are terrible at drawing.
But I often want to embed to graphic design and things I do.
I can now create images at scale in a way I couldn't before.
You ask for an image and it'll give you 10 and maybe only one of them.
is what you're looking for, but you know what you're looking for. You know what the right answer is.
And if you know what the right answer is, these models are incredibly helpful. The hype and
excitement is running away from the technology and the anxiety is running away from the technology.
Because this so far is a technology that's great if you know what you're looking for.
That means when you're trying to identify the business opportunities from general of AI,
AI, more generally, you need to think through. You need to recognize this isn't going to be able to
allow me to take humans out of the loop and processes that happen. But instead, maybe you have someone
who spends all day writing an article. And now that's going to take them five minutes. They're going to know
what the right query is. They're going to look at it and read it and say, oh yeah, that's great. I need to
edit these six words. Done. And then they write a lot more content. They can embed imaging in that
content through other tools. And somehow, I don't know what the example is because it has happened
yet. Some creative entrepreneur is going to take that and figure out how to create a new advertising
industry, a new consumer products industry, a new entertainment industry, etc. Earlier, you talked
about personalization as like a function. We should think about that function of personalization
as something that gets drastically cheaper. Are there other functions? And again, I'm thinking about
now I'm shifting my advice to businesses. If I'm an entrepreneur out there, how I should be
thinking about the world differently. And it's very helpful for me as an entrepreneur, my
myself to think what's like the more hyper-personalized version of this thing? Because that's going to be
a lot more feasible or easy or cheap or whatever because of this technology. What other functions
like personalization would you urge entrepreneurs to put as arrows in their quiver as they think
about their products and their features? So start with what does it mean to serve customers in
particular industry go? And then you think through how do we actually serve customers in that industry
and go to, okay, let's take a company. Let's go through their process.
and try to separate the things they do into two categories.
Category number one is actually delivering on your mission to serve customers.
And category number two is the things you do to compensate your customers for your failures.
And the more things that fall into that second bucket,
the more you worry about disruption,
and the more entrepreneurs should see a real opportunity.
As an example of this plays out, think about airports.
It often airports in the world, Solention or Singapore, they're spectacular.
They're beautiful.
They're multi-billion-dollar.
structures, great shopping and restaurants and all this other stuff. But how did the super rich fly?
What are the airports of the super rich look like? Their sheds. Private terminals don't have great
shopping and great restaurants and all those things because the ultimate in service in air travel
is to ensure smooth air transportation. That's actually the mission of Solentian Airport often voted
the best airport in the world. But most of what they do is about a failure to deliver on that. Most of what
they do is to compensate customers for the fact that they have to spend hours and hours' vehicle. But no one
wants to spend time at year. That's an industry where you can think through, well, here's all the
things they do that aren't about serving customers well. In lots and lots of industries,
you can identify serving customers well sometimes means personalization. Sometimes it means efficient
processes. Sometimes it means no waiting, depending on the context, it can mean all sorts of
different things, getting you healthy quickly or preventing you from getting sick in the first place.
But think through what does serving customers well mean and then go through the core companies in that
industry and identify how much of what they're doing is about serving customers well, and how much
of what they're doing is about failing to serve customers, compensating customers for the fact
they fail to serve them well. And then the last step, because we're focused on AI disruption,
is among those, can you use prediction if you had better information? Could you then go directly
to serving customers well and skip all that architecture that you have, all those SOPs that deal
with the fact that you don't serve your customers as well as you could?
I love the airport example. I love the category example. It's exactly the kind of thing I was thinking about. And it raises an interesting question about information and data. We've talked a lot about the importance of those two things and why if we had perfect information in many cases, we would do things differently. The COVID example is a great example of that. How should people think about the management of generation of information and data? It just seems this is an afterthought probably for a lot of, even now, even in 2023, the vast majority of data that gets created.
never gets used. And the fundamental lesson of AI in the last five years is that the scale and
quality of data is everything. The way these things get better is by feeding them infinitely more
data, not by structuring them better or imputing human knowledge into them. It's just more data.
Say what you've learned about data and information and how people should think about it.
So I love the way you put it's scale and quality because it's not just scale. You actually need both.
And both of those need to serve a particular purpose. So if you don't know what you're trying to
accomplished. Lots of companies say, we're going to try to organize all of our data. They spend
millions and millions and millions of dollars creating a easy-to-use data interface, but they have
no idea what the data is going for. They don't know what they're predicting, and ultimately,
much of that money ends up being wasted. When you're thinking through scale and quality of data,
your starting point really should be, let's say we're going to do system level change in our
company. Let's say we have identified a way to deliver a much better product through a new
system-based of better prediction. What does that ultimate prediction look like?
what are we trying to predict?
And then you go back and think through
what data do we have already
that's going to help that and what data do we need.
Now, in second stage, what data do we need?
Well, now, how do you go up on collecting data?
Strategy number one is you can buy it.
Sometimes it might be out there.
But more commonly, you can create it.
And you can often create it
by launching products into the market
that don't represent the system level change,
but that represent either a point solution
or application solution on the way.
In the auto industry, we think a lot about autonomous vehicles.
The company that launches the first autonomous vehicle,
and they can start collecting data at scale from that,
is going to have this beneficial feedback loop,
and they're going to collect more and more and more data.
It's going to be hard for anybody to compete.
But in order to actually launch that autonomous vehicle,
you need to have enough data in the first place
that you overcome the regulator and you're creating a safe and not dangerous.
And so far, that's been a meaningful barrier, hasn't it?
So what's the strategy?
The strategy is you embed sensors,
into all the cars you have on the road, even if you're not as an automotive company, an autonomous
fuel. You don't have autonomous driving yet. And we've seen Tesla do this. They have cars with all
sorts of sensors that are driven by humans and are trying to create data at scale through the
sensors. And the other car companies are doing the same thing. If you bought a car in the last little
while, the privacy policy on your car is incredibly complicated. Basically, it's because
they're sending all the data about what you're doing, probably to help you now,
but a lot of it is to help them build the car in the future.
Some of the AI is already in there,
like a warning for what the other drivers might be doing,
but some of the AI are not there yet,
but they're collecting that data strategically
in order to build what they want.
Category 2 is to proactively collect the data
based on actually going out and doing things with customers.
There is a third category that's really intriguing,
which is what we used to call simulation,
but now the word that people use is digital twin,
fundamentally the same thing,
which is you create a simulated version of the world that your product gets embedded in.
And then you try different things and see how the system reacts.
The challenge there is making sure the simulation is good enough to do what you want.
Singapore has a digital simulation in the entire city.
If they're going to build a new building, they have a sense of what that's going to mean
in terms of extra density, extra drivers, etc.
And they can simulate if we build this new building, what's going to happen to traffic?
And do we need to change the roads?
And they can simulate building the building and changing the road this way versus that way
or adding it want versus not and see how it all plays out.
A third way to collect data is if you know enough about the situation, you can simulate it
and then try hundreds, thousands, or in millions of different possibilities.
And the underlying technology there is another kind of AI called reinforcement learning.
You can think about it as a way to strategically collect data in order to help your predictions.
You mentioned I robot earlier.
One of the scenes that I distinctly remember in that movie is when Will Smith is trying to
trying to take over control of a car, and it's incredibly hard for him to do so. All the cars are
not driven by humans. It makes me think of this interesting dichotomy I'd love your opinion on,
which is, in the one sense, some stuff's going to be like farmers. We all used to be farmers,
and now none of us are. Technology killed the profession. And then the other end of the spectrum
would be, well, maybe Dolly makes more designers, not less, because the barriers to being a designer
are far lower and everyone's imaginative and people like design output.
Maybe there's latent demand for design that we just can't fulfill because the frictions
are too high.
How do you think about those two categories?
Because you start going down the professions, doctor, lawyer, accountant, are these
going to be like farmers?
There's just going to be no lawyers left because law is code-ish and we still need some
farmers.
So we'll still need like some lawyers, but we've got 97% less of them or something.
This seems to be a really important question of those technologies.
make a category blossom or does it decimate it? And I'm curious if you have ways of thinking
about that applied to specific professions or industries. Farming blossom. Just be clear. So there's
a lot fewer farmers. But a lot more efficiency. Right? My hope, and I'm using the word hope on purpose,
is that all those other professions turn out to be like farming, where we don't have to worry about
the stress and cost of dealing with the legal system, whether it's for taxes or criminal or
whatever else. That friction mostly goes away, but we still have a few lawyers. That sounds like
an amazing world. The transition is stressful to be managed, but the future, we all can deal with
the state efficiently without having these very expensive intermediaries between us and the law
of being lawyers. That sounds great. Medicine too. A lot of the stress in the medical system
is around the social aspects and the personal aspects of dealing with bad health news. Right now,
doctors don't have a lot of time for that. Other medical professionals might.
So a world where we have fewer doctors, but 10 times as many medical professionals,
sounds like a wonderful one. That's an upskilling one. You describe those as a dichotomy,
and I kind of think one's almost a necessary condition for the other, especially since we saw
what chat GPT can do, the thing that I'm most excited about for AI is this idea that millions
of people can now do the things that historically only thousands could do. That's going to be
stressful and disruptive for the thousands, and that's a important policy question. But it's
going to be amazing for the rest of us. And thinking through the transition from the 19th century,
through the 20th and farming, yeah, we've a lot less farmers, but food shortages are,
aren't really an issue with North America anymore. That's amazing. If we can do that across many
industries, that's the real opportunity for AI. We've obviously covered a ton of ground here,
conceptual, specific, et cetera. In closing, what are you most excited about and what are you most
worried about? If you just think about the spectrum here of the future, what sits at the end of
those distributions in your mind.
I've covered the most excited, which is I think this opportunity to take things that only
a handful of humans can do, they're in sort of an outside living because of it, and allow
everybody else to do it, or not everybody, millions of others do it. It's a very exciting
world to imagine, whether it's writing or graphic design or diagnosis or aspects of
financial services or other things. What I'm most worried about? The direct consequence of that
is there are people who will be hurt.
And I worry for them and try to think through,
how do we mitigate the pain that they're going to experience?
Whether that's for income or training or other,
else there's a whole set of questions around there that are a thing one to order about.
Perhaps bigger thing to worry about is, yes,
the technology cannot skill many, many people,
but the underlying technology might be owned by a small number of companies.
If this AI future leads to a reduction in equality in terms of skills,
but leads to a massive increase in a handful of people who essentially own capital, who own the machines,
and they become much, much better off.
But leading to massive inequality and exploitation of their work of power, that's a real thing to worry about.
Maybe the best way to put it is, I worry about the concentration of power through AI.
What a fascinating conversation.
I really encourage everyone to go read the books, especially Power and Prediction,
which is the more recent of the two, just again, lots changed since the first one came out,
But just conceptually, it's been the best piece of content I've encountered on applying these
ideas to business and systems and products.
And I just think it's so valuable as people can tell from this conversation.
Whenever I interview anyone, I asked the same closing question, what is the kindest thing
that anyone's ever done for you?
Early in my academic career, I had a lot of failure.
First, maybe 10 papers I submitted to journals, got rejected.
It was brutal.
Our vice dean at the time, I had charged a faculty.
He seemed to believe in the underlying idea of understanding the economic
technology. We would be clear. At the time, I had no idea he was doing this. I only know this
with the benefit of hindsight, but he essentially structured my early career in terms of who was
responsible for promotion decisions around what I was doing and what my responsibilities were
at the university to set me up for success despite what on the service was failure after failure
after failure. He believed in me in what I was doing and really more than anybody else career-wise
sent me up for, I like to think of it as success anyway. I'm really appreciative.
It's a nice magical example, especially because you didn't know what's happening behind the scenes.
There's something about that that makes it all the more special. I only found out when he retired.
Well, this has been a really great conversation. I'm excited to share it with more people.
Thank you so much for your time today. Okay, thanks. Take care.
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