I've Got Questions with Sinead Bovell - A Once In A Lifetime Career Reset Is Coming | Alexander Manu

Episode Date: October 23, 2025

In this episode of I’ve Got Questions, I sit down with futurist, author, and strategic foresight professor Alexander Manu to explore how AI is reshaping the meaning of work, creativity, and identity. He explains how technology has always been a bridge to new forms of human expression, and how AI may usher in the most creative, personalized era of human history. Manu argues that we need to transcend the idea that our identity is tied to our jobs because AI is not just another tool that will change the workforce, but it’s also a mirror forcing us to ask, “What else can I become?” 0:00 – Introduction 1:15 – Why AI Makes You Ask, “What Else Can I Become?” 3:00 – The End of the Beginning for AI 5:30 – How AI Challenges Our Professional Identity 8:15 – Why Refusing New Tools Makes Us Less Relevant 11:00 – Will AI Invent a New Kind of Artist? 14:10 – From Creator to Narrator: The Next Creative Economy 16:00 – The Future of Shopping and Personalized Design 18:30 – Why the Influencer Era Will End 22:00 – Social Media’s Next Evolution 25:00 – The Philosophical Shift Toward “Becoming” 27:00 – The Device That Will Replace the Smartphone 30:00 – Ambient Computing and the Disappearing Interface 35:00 – The Meaning of Work in the Age of AI 39:00 – Universal Basic Income and the New Economic Model 43:00 – Why We Must Redefine Human Value Beyond Productivity 46:00 – Redesigning Society in the Age of AI 49:00 – The Real Meaning of Life in an Automated World Follow my work here: Website: https://www.sineadbovell.com Substack: https://sineadbovell.substack.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sineadbovell LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sineadbovell Twitter / X: https://twitter.com/SineadBovell YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/Sineadbovell TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@sineadbovell

What impact do you think AI will have on the workforce? And do you think we're headed for an identity crisis? And this is the question that's fascinating about AI. What else can I become? Very few people are the courage to us to have questions. Why? Because they look in them here in the morning and they see an engineer or a doctor. They don't see a person. If they're not looking at artificial intelligence and asking,

what are we going to become with this technology? Would you say it's the beginning of the end for them? The fundamental thing we need to understand in this AI conversation. The purpose of technology is to relieve you, the human, of chores. And then of work, work in the sense of meaning of work, not work to create art, not the work to create worldliness. If Picasso was alive today, he could have been the first one to embrace major. There is the fear that we're going to be in this doom scroll of AI-generated nonsense and we'll just look at fake lives, but I think that's just going to be temporary.

In a world where everything is actually about the individual. The influencer will be gone. So the influencer influences people to do the exact same thing. And we are advocating right now for the opposite. Technology is allowing you to be you. Social media may be one of the biggest casualties of AI. He wrote in your book, Refusing to engage with the tools of disruption

does not make your work more authentic. It makes it less relevant. How so? Welcome to I've Got Questions, the podcast where we break down emerging technologies and what they actually mean for your life. I'm your host, Shenei Beauvel. Today I'm joined by my friend,

my former professor, Professor and Strategic Foresight Advisor, Alexander Manor. for people who are right now doubting AI's potential, its potential impact, what would you tell them? I will tell them that AI is different than all the other technologies we moved through in civilizations. Most technology that we created came about as an answer to a problem, like the problem solution thing. So it was typically an answer to a question. How do I carry water in a portable container?

That gives us the cup. How do I suspend the human body above ground? That gives us the chair. How can I solve this problem? So everything came as a solution or as an answer. AI in all its forms, specifically now the surfacing of generative AI, came as a question. And that question, essentially, when we transition to a new technology, the first thing we do, by default, we adapted to everything else we do in the past.

And then the question becomes what now? What else? What else can I do with this? AI right now is asking us the question, what do you want to become? What else can you be? And is that question also pointed at companies, if they're not looking at artificial intelligence and asking, what are we going to become with this technology? Would you say it's the beginning of the end for them?

Oh, it's interesting a phrase it at the beginning of the end. I phrase it the other way, the end of the beginning. So now everybody has strategy to PT on their phone. It's the end of the beginning. Now we can actually start using it for a different purpose than just asking stupid questions. which we know the answers to. Right. Anyway.

Right. It's about starting to ask the questions that we didn't even know we had. Exactly. So starting to ask fundamental questions, understanding that this is a foundational technology, that disregards all the other technologies because it replaces them in a way in which it becomes invisible. Like our work becomes invisible, our equipment, our machinery becomes invisible, and things just take care of themselves.

And that is a very hard proposition to accept. as an organization with an infrastructure. Because the question becomes, what happens to my infrastructure? What happens to the people working for me? Well, we had the same issue with agriculture. Right. Who is your company when we stream electricity

and one day we start to stream artificial intelligence? And it's that much embedded in the walls. It's in the homes and we don't think about it. The question was the same when we made cables and then we invented Wi-Fi. So what are we doing all the companies making cables? Well, they didn't have the vision or the foresight to understand the cable was a brief.

to another technology. And that's the story of most technologies. They are a breach to another technology. The fundamental thing we need to understand in this AI conversation. The purpose of technology is to relieve you, the human, of chores. And then of work, work in the sense of meanier work, work to accomplish tasks, not work to create art, not the work to create the Taj Mahal. That is the real work, to create worldliness, to create signs that we existed. We're definitely going to dive all the way into work. But we're With every new technology, especially general purpose technologies, whether it's electricity, the internet, the steam engine, there are winners and there are losers. Which companies that exist today that we use a part of our daily lives do you think are most at risk of being disrupted by artificial intelligence?

Whoa, there's so many. So many, I would say not companies, but fields of human activity which turn around to become organized work for people. The obvious ones are repetitive work. The obvious ones are advising. The obvious ones are, I will even say consulting. Any kind of advisory role uses the brain of a group of people. But generative AI uses the brain of the entire neural network. He cannot compete with that.

And not only he cannot compete, but it does it in a fraction of a second. So now, how many people will be, I don't know what is that word unemployed? Because issue is much deeper than I'm employing. The issue is the meaning of life, the meaning of their life. The meaning of their professional life as opposed to what life is about, which is you, not your profession. So the difference between the me, the eye, the ego, the self, all of those things are getting right now, not destroyed, but challenged by the questions that I is posing. I don't want to name a company because I don't want to create a fear. But the reality is, with every new technology, the companies that were in the top 20 change.

So the companies that you think you can't live without at one point eventually become relics of the past, or they adapt but they aren't central. And do you believe that that's going to continue, that there's no reason why that line randomly stops? No, I'll give you an example. One of my books I had made a list of the top 10 back capital market capitalization companies in 2000 and then the same list in 2015. completely different names. All the companies in 2000 were other financial services or energy. Of all those companies at the top, banks and so on, none of there exists today in the top 10. The top 10 companies in 2015 were strictly in the behavior economy, strictly companies who produced very little but gave you space to behave in a way in which you couldn't behave before.

So they created what I called behavior spaces. The iPhone is a behaviorist. space. Some people think it's a product. The people who thought it was a product, and I don't want to mention the company that was leading at the time in the market pressure. Who didn't make it? Right. And the company who actually in a board meeting of a shareholder called the iPhone a toy, it was absolutely right. It is a toy, and that's why it was successful. Because it was a toy for discovery. It was a magnifying lens to the universe. That was amazing. The BlackBerry was not that. The BlackBerry was just a communication device. So technically you could, look at the top 10 list right now of the biggest companies in the world, and it is possible that

we project 10 years into the future. And if history tells us anything, it's up for debate who will continue to hold those places. There's one thing that you wrote in your book. Refusing to engage with the tools of destruction does not make your work more authentic. It makes it less relevant. And so I think for people that's obvious when it comes to a business, if you don't get on the internet, if you don't pick up the phone, it's over. But there are many artists or individuals who feel, if I'm a writer, I want those words to come from me. But you're saying it's not that it makes you authentic or inauthentic. It actually just

makes you irrelevant. How so? Completely. Look at the history of human communication and human expression of thoughts and feelings. We depend on what is available. Wood, water, color,

paint. So we start painting, scouting, we start making tools to express feelings. We start going into a cave to put a drawing on the wall. Ten kilometers in. This is stunning. There's no light there. Why did humans want to mark their presence? That's what work is when it creates the history of who you were at the time. And I can see it 10,000 years after. So we used all this technology to express ourselves. And every time we have a new

technology, we express ourselves in a more deep, in a deeper, more complex ways. And in a more transmittable, culturally transmittable way. The transmission of culture with technology right now is stunning. So now, if I'm an artist and I'm not using the technology most available to me and readily available, am I relevant or am I a relic of the past? I don't want to answer that question because the answer is obvious. If Picasso was alive today, he would have been the first one to embrace me journey. And because he embraced everything with a speed that nobody else did. Because artists were always at the forefront of experimenting with technology.

To actually understand, what else can I do with this? What else can I become? And this is the question that's fascinating about AI. What else can I become? Very few people have encouraged to ask that question. Why? Because they look in the mirror in the morning and they see an engineer or a doctor. They don't see a person.

They see themselves as the self-created through education, through being pushed to do certain things by peer groups, family, and so on. Self-actualization became an obsession for people without people understanding what does self-actualization even mean. You're not actualizing your being. You're not actualizing the self-society wants of you, engineer, doctor, professor, and so forth. Even in the terms of art, if you look at the tools a modern day artist wants to hold on to, at one point, those were radical technologies that people objected to or thought they were a fad.

Even I remember reading about the invention of films and movies, and everybody who went to theater thought that it was a fad. because it was much more accessible, that it was cheap and it was a lower art form. Yeah, it was democratizing expression, therefore is not art. So photography democratized image capture. I don't have to be a painter to capture this image. Now the painters had a choice. Do I continue to paint realistic images or do I transform my art? And it actually transformed art.

So if paint led to the painter and instruments led to the musician, camera to the photographer, video camera to the filmmaker, and now the internet to the creator economy. What type of artist will AI invent? That's fantastic. Fantastic question. So the question is, does the artifact create the master or the master creates the artifact? In other words, did the piano inventing Beethoven or the piano invented Beethoven? So Beethoven became actualized through the piano. So I think you will have right now a mass of creative people that didn't even know they were

creators. There will be a freedom. It will give them an explosion of potential. I can't do this. And then when people start actually experimenting with this technology, they stop asking the question, what happens when I don't have a job? Well, you would do this stuff. You will create images of contemplation for other people. Contemplation is what we do and other animals don't. We're seeing so much AI slop. I mean, if you are to see something was written by AI, it was an AI-generated image right now, for the most part, it's uninteresting, it's uninspiring, And is that because we're still fitting in what we did with the old technologies into this new frame? So it's when right now we're driving cars on roads designed for horses.

Right. We are still creating with AI from our imagination and from its imagination, which means from what we know that exists and from what AI was trained on. Images, it was trained on. And I think at one point we'll move to another level of creativity, which I named creative generativity, in which we will entrust the eye to create, to generate. And that will be a new form of art. And I think the most unstoppable artists of the future is going to be the artist that finally recognizes their taste.

Brand, you know, is no longer confined to their craft. And you write in your book, rather than laboring over the detailed designs for a house, we articulate our ideal dwelling, and a software system translates our desires into architectural blueprints. So does this theoretically mean if a fashion designer or a local designer who has a really great taste could in an AI world be the best person to design your home and the architecture for your home because AI makes the math makes sense.

And I can take that fashion designer, I can articulate what it is that I want to feel in my home. And then that designer actually becomes the architect. Because don't forget what professions are about. They are mechanical translations, essentially. So a lot of professions are forcing people to create things for. a machine. Right now, because the machine understands only numbers. Right now, AI can do that faster and much better than anyone. Why much better? It's trained on a wider spectrum of knowledge, so it's a perception of what exists is huge. And then it will replace a lot of professions which

depended on the knowledge from the past and the skills to create a sustainable framework for a house, like a, that defies gravity and so on. Well, those are numbers that the machine can do much, much faster. And then the question becomes, so what will the human do? Well, the human will enjoy it. Or articulate what it could be. Of course. And then the combination that you mentioned of fashion designer designing a house could lead to an unexpected something really beautiful, which is transcending your imagination. That's the whole point. The whole point of AI right now is the transcend. And the whole experience you have with images created, it transcends anything you imagined. And is this what you mean when you say, we're moving to a narrated economy? So

right now we're in the industrialized economy, the future will be the narrator, not the creator. The narrator would be the best articulator of the intent. And happens that the narrator was always the best articulator of society. That's how we have Homer, Shakespeare, you know, these guys did what? They narrated, right? They told us a story about something that might have not even existed. We are dependent on this narrator. Like, that's why we talk about the narrative arc of a movie.

It is what sustains our interest in that form of art, the narration part. So the creator part is physical, mechanical, skill-based, 3D printing. I don't have to talk to a 3-D printer, I have to tell it what to do. Now, the 3-D printer might be a collaborator because at one point it might have an opinion, because it might have a memory of what was created before, and it might tell me you're infringing on somebody's patent. I already created that shape. And that will be a normal thing to expect.

Just like in music, we code music with traceable digital information, so we don't break royalty agreements. So the same thing will happen with shapes. Products will be encoded, the ambient one, to understand each product and what its meaning is. I'll be able to tell you, don't do this or do this. So you've stated that our future with AI could become more human. and in the products and in the services that we design,

because we will be able to have things that are designed for us as individual. So don't just, I don't want to shop online and get that couch. I want to design a couch based on how I feel, what I want, what I'm looking for in my budget, and everything becomes about the individual. So if I'm looking at the future of shopping, if we'll even call it that, the idea that we all surf on the web and look at the same couch will be a relic of the past. whatever I imagine, that's a product of what I feel, my budget, AI designs that in a custom way.

I just articulate it, or maybe my ambient AI stems in my home know it, and the 3D printer brings it to life. So we get a customized future. Right. I recently worked on the future of marketing in the era of generative AI. And I imagined packaging. So imagine packaging that has absolutely zero design on it, just an empty box. but you are embedded. You are an augmented individual. You have glasses or you have implants or you have contact lenses. So when you walk into the store, the packaging becomes what you want it to become.

It has the colors that you like. Why? Because the ambient system knows who you are and what are your biases. It even brands it for you. In other words, the branding becomes hyper-personal. Things will not be called the same thing. Actually, it's absurd if you think about it. to call the same thing for everybody.

It can become completely customized to you. How is that possible? It's possible right now. The embedded situation exists, glasses exist, every single company is working on XR glasses. Some declared that do it, some are keeping it stealth. But everybody's clearly understanding

that this is the future of displays. Well, if the future of displays is here, then the future of packaging is also here. So if you walk into a store, we will all see different things based on what our intent is or what we're looking for. So for people who believe,

but that experience brings us in community, why I don't want to see a different couch than everybody else that keeps this shared reality, that our reality will become too customized, too individualized. What would you say to that? Your iPhone doesn't look like my iPhone, and I don't hear anybody complaining.

So we customize everything anyway as soon as we can, we customize it. So why should I not customize my life? And then we can exchange lives. I can tell this is, hey, look at me. And we have a subject to discuss in that moment. Right now we have, everything is boring. You have the same couch as me.

It's true. Yeah, ideally not. It's true, though. Why are we all looking at the exact same furniture when we call ourselves individuals, but we shop in a way that's for the masses? Yeah. So actually the store is a mass distribution store. So we declare ourselves, I want to be part of the mass.

At the same time, we declare I am completely independent and I have my own system of beliefs. So that's the contradiction, the paradox. And that's exactly what would be transformed. We'll become finally individuals. That's what I meant, when you mentioned by carrying more human, that's what I meant. Allowing your humanity to transcend the form imposed to you by others

and you create essentially your reality, which becomes you. And then we can exchange realities. We can actually have a portfolio, an exhibition of realities, if you want. Now, people that are watching this right now might think, this is totally crazy. This is totally out there. No, every single technology allowing the creation of what we are discussing exists right now. So we're not discussing science fiction.

We are discussing what Peter Drucker called what has already happened and has not yet made its full impact. And this idea of mass consumerism where we all see the same thing. will just be a chapter in history. And when you think about something like fashion, the whole point of fashion is to express your individual sense. And we always look at history where everybody had their own unique artesian design. In the future, it will be affordable for each of us

to just design the thing we want that nobody else has and it's an expression of ourselves. That, if anything, is making us closer to ourselves, but we're using a technology to do it. And it will change the structure of society. It will change the whole idea of, look at my car. and look at my clothes and look at my watch. It will change all that

because your watch will become irrelevant. My watch is nicer than yours. Status symbols in a world where everything is actually about the individual. The influencer will be gone. The idea of the... Sadly. And speak more about that.

The influencer is gone in a world with customized individual AI first. Why is the influencer gone? And I don't mean automated gone. I mean why does an influencer not make sense in the future? Because the influencer is uniting, it's converging aesthetics. and desire to a very specific outcome.

And that's exactly the mass outcome. So the influencer influences people to do the exact same thing. And we are advocating right now for the opposite. Technology is allowing you to be you. Now, that's a choice you can make. But the problem with the influencer, they exist because of the numbers that sustain the ecosystem of influencer. If that system collapses,

the influencer drops to the earth and becomes him or herself. Right. So the internet led to the creator economy and the idea of the influencer. AI takes that away. In a way, yes. Well, the internet is, I'm not connecting it to the internet. The internet will still be that distribution. But the idea of an influencer makes less sense in a world where AI makes it. So we will have everything custom. We will be so individualized and you can afford your whole individual aesthetic. Well, it's a very simple thing. And actually, people bother to read Maslow for real.

The last thing. as well and hierarchy of needs. Yeah. The last thing or the so-called hierarchy, which is not a hierarchy, it's not self-actualization, but transcending self. Transcending self is exactly this revolt

against what society forced me to become, an engineer, a doctor, and so forth, and transcend that and become a person that cares about others and manifest itself or herself in the world. In a way, it's not influencing anybody. It's a form of the good. Right.

So then if you transcend the self, say if you, self-transcendence is the objected here, then clearly the influencer has no role, because the influencer is about the self. The influencer is about creating the self that you are not, and that you are to aspire to be. You are aspiring to be that person or emulate that person. So that's a creation of self.

I feel like social media may be one of the biggest casualties of AI. And here's why I think that. The entire premise and the entire value proposition of the current platforms is that they connect us to real people, right? Whether that's me signaling to a potential suitor, a job opportunity to my friends and family, we post because other people see, even if it's one person. In a world where we don't know if it is a person on the other end or if we are a human, that entire value proposition breaks.

If you're posting for a bunch of large language models, the idea of signaling goes away. And signaling is a psychological phenomenon for millennia. So I think social media doesn't make sense in a world where we can't guarantee it's a human posting or it's a human watching. And then I also think media will still want to connect in some way, but it doesn't make sense that it'll be on the same infrastructure. It's akin to the news stations trying to stay irrelevant by posting 60-second TikTok clips. We will do something different on different platforms. And so I think if the platforms don't evolve, they will be the biggest casualty, even though they are building the tools themselves that will give them a big disrupt. option or they'll face the innovator's dilemma.

Well, first of all, it become decentralized. Secondly, it will become a social graph. In other words, we want to understand how many people are involved in what activity. So it becomes much more of a real social event and plurality of people doing this. Right now we don't know. Right now, we have no idea who's doing what, except the people we are connected with. But when the thing is passive and I can have a graph in my classes, and I know how many people or a heat map, if you want.

Then I know how many other people like me are doing this thing at this exact moment, for example, listening to the exact same song, which passively is possible. Then I'm much more connected to that universe of people than I am right now. Right now I have to actively seek it. But if I'm creating a digital footprint

and I allow that footprint to be followed by ambiental methods, then I'm part of a much bigger thing and I will feel it in a much bigger way. Because in the end, we are social animals. we depend on this priority and the priority doesn't have to depend on how many people we can connect with.

It should connect with how many people are engaged in the same line or activity or thinking and so that I am right now. So in some ways, a social media, if we'll even call it that, it's actually about the people that are doing similar things than us.

So if I'm possibly listening to a song, a future social media would be, I'm connecting me with other people that are listening to the same song and it's not even active, it just happens. So we're kind of going back to where they are. And I can know their names and I can know where they are and I can understand in that moment that, hey, I am part of a much bigger thing that I thought I was. And I have friends.

I have friends that I didn't even know I had because we like Keith Jarrett. And we're listening at this moment with the exact same concerto. Do it actually bring us in community with one another? Much more. And so I think that there is the fear that we're going to be in this doom scroll of AI generated nonsense and we'll just look at fake lives. But I think that's just going to be temporary. and social media will evolve to something that looks nothing like today. Anytime we have a new technology, the first moments are play.

In other words, we play, we experiment, we actually call it gizmos, and we tell people I'm playing on my computer or I'm playing on my phone, and then it becomes more serious. Then you start depending on it. Then the thing transforms you. And then you start figuring out, okay, so I'm transformed, but what have I become? And then you start exploring the becoming part.

What else can I become? And that's what AI will do. And so I guess what else can you become is the same way we, some people became podcasters or they became creators on a platform called YouTube. Perfect example. AI will lead to a new type of thing we can become. Exactly. Exactly what we didn't know we could become before 2004, which was the Web 2.0.

Before Web 2.0, nobody ever thought about becoming a podcaster. The medium didn't exist. Now everyone in this room is here because of that. Yeah. And nobody, you know, how many kids of 11 years old thought they would be making $17 million unboxing? I think that's something we might look back and think we might not be well. Yeah. I want to talk about smartphones, but I want to start with a few quotes about the history of the phone.

First quote, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell tries to sell the patent for his telephone to Western Union, which had a thriving telegraph business. And Western Union says, the idea of a telephone device in every city is idiotic. Why would any person want to use this ungainly and practical device? We do not recommend its purchase. It is of no use to us. 1981, telecommunications consultant Jan David Jubin.

But who today will say, I'm going to ditch the wires in my house and carry a phone around? And finally, 2007, a scathing piece in tech crunch called We Predict the iPhone will bomb. That virtual keyboard will be about as useful, for tapping out emails and text messages as a rotary phone. What device do you think is in the pipeline today or has yet to be invented that could replace the smartphone that people today will say, it's ugly, I will never use this,

it won't be cheap enough, and nobody will buy this. XR glasses. So if you look at Android XR, it's introducing, Ruby Parker is making the glasses, so they'd be attractive. They're attractive right now. And a combination of fashion companies creating the looks and technology companies creating the technology will give you something that you will desire.

Now that you know you've been educated and trained to use technology, to swipe, to multi-touch, to scale, all the things we were trained in the last 20 years by the iPhone and other smartphones. We will have to forget them and unlearn them because they're. Now we're moving into a different type of world. Ambient world, intent, gaze, where I'm looking is a question, and it will be answered. So that is what an extra glass does. So that's the technology that right now becomes, first of all, it's available right now. It could be perfected in the very near future.

The price points will go down, might be embedded, might be at one point. Wearables are one category, but implantables is probably where we're going. Because implantables give you a very simple solution. I don't have to worry about it. It's in me. The AirPods were slammed that nobody is going to wear these pearls. The iPhone was seen as disgusting. So for people who say, I'm never going to wear glasses, what are they missing?

Well, they're missing the cultural shift. They are thinking about it as a technology and not about a philosophical transformation of life, which is what the iPhone did was create a category for itself. and also it created a segment of the population that understood that technology can be beautiful and also desirable. So in the moment in which you understand the technology can be desirable,

there are people who cannot wait for the glasses. Just like people could not wait for the Google Glass, but it was not a failure, it was a lesson, it was a story, it was something that needed to happen as a bridge towards where we are now just like the Newton, the way, needed to happen. So we get to experiment with the operating system and get to the iPhone eventually. And I think people are imagining doing what they currently do on glasses, and that seems

like a nightmare. The idea of just watching 60-second TikTok, we're going to do different things. We're moving to a different philosophy. So of course, we're not going to be bombarded with a bunch of notifications in our eyes. We will do something much more graceful that makes sense for the new philosophy. Well, imagine this. What is a phone? A phone is a communication device on which we rarely communicate by the way, but we express ourselves. So what do we need for that form of expression? We need an input interface and we need the display interface. Well, the input is here, the display is everywhere. So right now we are looking at what surface can become a display. Now, the display could be initially in the glasses, but it doesn't

have to be in the glasses. It could be on any surface. Now, intelligent surfaces exist right now. intelligent glass surfaces that can project images onto exist right now. So it's not a question of the surface having the information itself, is us projecting the information to the surface, which totally has been done a couple of years ago. Because I'm myself not convinced about glasses. I see how they can make sense, but I think an AI-first device,

kind of like what you're saying, anything might become the thing where we need to interact with. So when you say that the phone itself is just going to vanish, we're picturing just some device that replaces it. But you're saying there could be a future where if we need to see something or check something, we project it wherever it needs to be. The phone right now we have to reach for, and in the future we're discussing, the call will reach for us.

The information will reach us. The information will come to us where we are. Because that's the whole point of it. The whole point of it is to come when you need it in a form in which you need to see it. Now, we have all the surfaces right now. with cloud computing, we are being trained right now by the new Apple products and operating system to see translucency and everything. And right now it's translucent. It's going to be transparent. Right. Right now I think we're over our devices. We want less of them. So are you describing a future

that involves fewer devices and fewer notifications and fewer invasions by devices? Yeah. I describe a future in which the ecology contains the information and you are the receiver. So you are an active receiver of anything you need. to receive. So paint that picture for me. I wake up and I hopefully don't have to interact with many things. But if I do need to interact, if somebody needs to reach me, what could that be? Bathroom mirror. Any surface that you look at can be a display. Now, it can be a display intentionally, which means I can embed a display in surfaces. Like 20 years ago, I wrote a book writing a scenario about a fridge calling you. Fred, the fridge giving you a call because you have to

milk. And then people said, that's crazy. Fridge is connected to the internet. That doesn't shouldn't exist. It exists right now. And they have displays and they talk to each other. Now, in the ideal universe, the fritz shouldn't call you. The fritz should order the thing. Because what's the point of you doing the chore, right? So that's what we're moving towards. Eliminating chores. Don't forget what we are about. We are about the lowest energy state. every animal seeks a lost energy state, which is why we invent machines. So we invent machines, so we don't have to do stuff. It happens that we invented machines and we became the extension of the machine.

In other words, a vacuum player doesn't vacuum without you. Now it does, but 20 years ago you were vacuuming. The machine was absorbing dirt, but the active verbal vacuuming was you, the human. And the same thing happens to every single other technology in which we keep doing things and we create professions about the thing. And then the thing disappears and then you say, but what am I going to do? I'm the guy that used to type.

Well, we don't need type anymore. Now we have to dictate. Oh, so how do I learn that? So all of these things are part of all the transformation of bridge after bridge after bridge towards the lowest energy state. So we seek that from the beginning of humanity, doing nothing, okay, contemplation.

But in the meantime, we're to invent some machines so we can relieve ourselves from the work. It happens that in the course of a couple of thousand years, we had to work with the machines. Now the machines can work by themselves. That's a very hard shift for people to understand because the whole purpose of the education system, legislative system, all the system we created, we're for machines to explain to us how we can become an extension of the machine. And that's what we have been for many, many years. I think we would all stand for a future with less things.

I don't want something ringing and vibrating and notifying me. So I wake up in the future and if somebody needs to reach me and I choose to be available, maybe my kitchen counter rings with the call or lets me know somebody's trying to talk to me. But if not, I don't need to connect to anything. Or maybe I just go like this.

Maybe I just go like this in top of my ear and less things left looking. And I think, you know, people might say, well, what if I need to see something? The only things we see on our phone were invented in the last 25 years. Or less. And the only things we see on our phone

are excessive things that might not even be of interest to us. And so I want to talk about work because it's obviously an important subject when it comes to artificial intelligence. What impact do you think AI will have on the workforce and do you think we're headed for an identity crisis? Let's define two things different.

Labor, like stuff you do to activities you undertake, you put foot on the table, and work. So if I'm looking at a definition by HANAR in a human condition. Work is the condition that creates the conditions for life and work is the creation of the conditions for worldliness,

for signs that we existed, in signs that we mean something to each other. Churches, cathedral, the things we build, museums, musical instruments, things that on the surface of their activity are completely unsustainable and unreasonable as expressions.

Like what do you mean? You are making violins. You are creating violins. a symphonic orchestra for what purpose? Well, for exactly the purpose of being human. All the other professions support this humanity. They give us electricity so we can illuminate museums. They give us electricity so we can bend wood to make violins and so forth. So in the moment in which we understand that this work environment was a transition, hard to accept clearly, was a transition and society developed around technologies in pockets of technology around the world and specialized in geographic places in special professions which were dictated by the available technology

then once a technology takes care of itself then you are left as you with a human and that is a profoundly disturbing thing if you don't know who you are why why because you were not told who you are you were told to aspire you are you are told to follow this influencer. You were told to become something else. And something else from a very limited list. In different countries, different systems, societal pressures, trending things, you become something else. And a variety of, in different periods of time, you became this group of people, engineers, physicists, chemistry, whatever, bankers, and so on. All of these professions are only needed if the infrastructure needs people to operate.

A thousand years ago, he did not. 10,000 years ago, he did not. And humanity survived and prospered in that environment and created actually the art that we are contemplating today. So the whole point becomes, what is my identity and how do I define myself? And unfortunately, the discussion about work always ends up with money. It's not about work, it's about income. So it's a double discussion about your worth as an individual and your meaning in life. And what does my father do for living?

Well, nobody's going to say he exists, right? Or she exists. He's a doctor. So people need that kind of professional stature. But in reality, they don't. So once we remove the professional expertise, and capability, we look at the income part. And that's what people are actually really, really fearful of, the loss of income. Because people never complete the question and what happens

when robots take my place in the factory. They don't get further. What can the robot do that I cannot do? A robot can make a hundred things faster than you, a hundred, a thousand more objects, which will sell at more for a cheaper price, bringing huge amounts of revenue, which can be taxed as a robot tax or a fund or so forth. There are many examples. Norway has an example in which they have a fund, the oil fund, in which the government keeps money for the future

and invests the money. So the formats in which we can have a universal basic income are very well established, but people did not buy into it. Why? We still have the influencer culture. We still have the, I have a watch that's more expensive than yours culture. And if that disappears gradually, the fear of the loss of income will become less so.

So what does that economic model look like? So you're talking about universal basic income. And for anyone who doesn't know, that is a world in which we would all get a check of some form or all of our basic needs would be covered at the very least. But I think what people don't get about a future with UBI because right now, UBI is from taxpayers. Right. All the pilots, which have been very positive. No, it's from companies. Yeah, they're not from companies. So there's a pilot in Kenya, Finland, Minneapolis, and they all show people are happier.

And I mean, at the very least, I think that that's worth it in and of itself. But a future with universal basic income is one where we tax the tech giant and the AI companies for their prosperity that we helped create. And I think no matter what happens in the future, one where we all get to ride along with the companies that succeed is a better future for everyone. So we should want it regardless. I think where people trip out a little bit, and I get it, is the idea of I don't want to sit back floating around in my pool

waiting for my monthly check from Open AI. And I think that's what we're picturing. And that seems like a nightmare. I feel it's like the worst version of the Truman Show. Yeah, but imagine that Open AI is also a bridge to another society, to another civilization. So let's push this whole thing to the ideal scenario, to the extreme, okay? the extreme scenario in which things work by themselves is called nature.

In nature, nobody makes money. Nobody charges anything for anything, and everything seems to work. So now let's understand something fundamental about making bread. I don't need money to make bread. I need flour. I need water. I need east. I need heat.

And you will say heat costs money. And I will say it doesn't cost money. It costs money in this system. but it doesn't have to cause money. The entire mindset should be, let's imagine for one hour, just play that game, that money doesn't exist. What do you think will change in your life? You'll still, if you want to work, you're going to work,

you're going to create things, you're going to go to the land and get some wheat and make a flower. We come from there as a civilization. We come from a place in which money did not exist, and everybody made bread. the things exist by themselves. So if I push it to that degree, I'm excluding open AI from this whole thing

and other companies. Because essentially, if you look at, right now we have a linear economy, a linear stream of thinking. I work, I get paid. I work, I make, I get paid. But think of a circular thing. I don't work.

The thing works. The thing pays for this. This money goes here and here. Taxation, consumption. any form you can imagine. And this is where the imagination is stumbles, because we cannot imagine the thing that doesn't exist.

This goes against every single thing a human being has learned. People learn that when you turn seven years old, you stop playing with your food and you go to school and you follow this curriculum. And this was written 25 years ago by people who didn't even know this technology

exists or will come. And then you graduate from the school and you go further to university. You are not questioning any of these steps, except in Finland or in other countries. They start questioning what is the meaning of education? What is the meaning of literacy? What's the meaning of writing with your hand? Deeper you go, the scarier it gets because people didn't learn these things.

So we have a lot of fear right now because we have lack of knowledge. And the issues are not properly explained and articulated. And nobody goes deeper into what is the world about and life about. This is about money, making things, and where does wheat come from? Wait, wheat comes from soil. We're so ingrained in this industrialized society where we are producers and we are consumers, that it becomes so foreign to think outside of it. But if you were to ask somebody to design their ideal society from scratch,

is it one where we learn linearly, where we work 40 hours a week, where we kind of live almost like robots, and where our basic needs are only met if society values the labor that we do, I think we would tear it all down. And AI potentially gives us the opportunity to, the problem is it puts so much trust on the AI leaders and the people leading the AI revolution are laying it with the bricks of capitalism.

We can't trust the social infrastructure this is all being built on. Somebody has to break free from it and how do I trust somebody who is a fiduciary duty to the shareholder, not to me? Right now the people that have the will to do it have a motivation based in economic gain. The people who have the will to criticize are the contrarians of that economic reality.

They don't want this to happen because they are losing their foothold into what they own right now. And that's the majority. Now, sadly, this happens when we have a disruption coming from the outside in, which is a major disease, an earthquake, or an invasion of some extraterrestrial.

in which all the values we hold dear will disappear. And they disappear in one hour. One second. COVID made us understand that we can rejig society in one hour. March 18 was in Canada when we start everything. So it happened in one hour. And all of a sudden, people were receiving checks at home. So the thing is, we need to unlearn a lot of life

in order to be able to move to this level. And I think what COVID taught us is we can redesign society in 45 minutes, if we choose to. Sure, sure. It's a question of will. And with any big disruption, I mean, AI is going to be that moment.

And that's why I think it's so important for more people to get in the game. Because if this technology does give us the opportunity to redesign that society from scratch, do you want your voice in it or do you want it to be the seven people in one small quadrant of the world? Right.

And so we can't unsubscribe from this moment. Yeah. I think there's so much resistance to using AI for a variety of reasons that people have opted out from it altogether, but you can't opt out from a general purpose technology really. And the more you use it, the better feedback you can give. So if you do have a lot of criticism, the more you understand the technology, the better and more useful that criticism can be. So it's maybe

that jobs go away, but work doesn't. Work doesn't, yes. And what's interesting is I did a social media experiment a few days ago with my community where I asked them, what is the meaning of life and what does it mean to be human? And I want to read you some of their answers. So to be the reason that another living being can find peace. Oh, very good. To evolve, to witness, to be, have meaningful experiences with people we care about. Not one person said to produce, to consume, to work. Yet, when we ideate on the prospect of having a future where AI does more of the labor than humans, it feels so terrifying, yet instinctively we know we are not here for our jobs. So when did jobs become a vehicle we think we need to express our humanity?

In industrialization, probably in mid-1800s. When we left agriculture to machines and we had to do something and we went to the city, we became workers, we became employed, which meant we became dependent on the machine, because that was employment for a machine, to operate the machine. So in that moment, you become an extension of that system and you're a part of that system. And to become part of the system, you have to learn the skills. So that transforms education into a preparatory ground for industry. And that's the story of every country.

And that's why they are organized based on what the industries were at the time. And then you stop asking the questions because the first generation is 10 years. The second one is 10 years after. And they don't know where they come from. And they perform their duty connected to the machine of the moment. And then you slowly, slowly, slowly. you create other institutions to give this machine certifications, to have, you know, FCC. Manage the books for that institution.

It's that indexing everything, it becomes a library of a lot of different components in the system. And the system starts to dominate the humanity of who created it, right? Because it was created for a purpose, but the purpose was never itself. The purpose was so your life is better. And you mean something to other people. Do you know what I think also scares people about the idea of having less work? To say we have a future where we work two days a week, and even if it's doing the things we love, the idea of having so much free time. And I think it's because we technically have more free time today than generations ago did.

But our time has been bought and sold and auctioned on the markets of capitalism, that we now spend the time we have doom scrolling, being polarized, being sold in securities by marketers we didn't even know we had. So we can't even imagine a future where we get to just be free from the chains of capitalism with that time and just be in community. I mean, is that even possible? We need to start challenging this more and more. We need to start challenging, do I really need this object? Because it's all about what? Satisfying the self or satisfying your ego or satisfying the person that you really are, which needs a lot less than the self and the ego. So then you realize what makes me really happy?

I do an exercise called presencing. And I'm asking people, so what is your major challenge right now in key opportunity? And then you answer it. And then the second question is, what do you truly love? And in that question, people, what do I really love in my profession? What do I really love in my life? And then you have to make it clear. It's about the simplicity of the question.

What do you truly love? So then you realize they will ask exactly like they answered to you. No connection to work, no connection to money. And any time you do a top 10 list of the most important things in your life, money is not even there. Love, health, friends, tons of other things, but not money. There's so much we have to unlearn. Work, yeah, not going to top 10.

As you said, the Industrial Revolution, it created this hyper-consumerism society and producers were consumers. Created the reasons, sure. It created a reason for professions, a reason for organized marketing of stuff, created something called retail. Right? Retail and shopping are totally different things. Shopping is you looking for things you need to survive and retail is people displaying the thing. Well, it happens right now. That doesn't have to be physically in a store. That's why we have street after street after street with empty stores, in Toronto at least. And you wrote something in your book that I think is really important to read. I want to get to do you write without moments of reflection. We risk.

moving forward blindly, building a future without pausing to ask, what are we building? Does it align with our deepest values? And are we building a world worth living in? Do you think we are right now? Yeah, right now we are. Anytime you are moving towards the future, in other words, the future is a choice, which means you are designing it. You're designing what you think will be the future with the elements of the present. Because that's essentially we are building from what we know. The problem we have is the framework of our mind, right? So we want a new story and we have to write this new story, me in five years from now. But the me in five years from now

typically starts from my perspective of this moment. I'm looking at my perspective, which is what I'm seeing, what I know, what I learned. Now, if I do not change my perspective, I cannot write a new story. I hear people saying, what is the future of education? that tells me they fundamentally don't understand the idea of the future. There is no future of education. There is knowledge in the future. But in the moment in which you phrase it as the future of education, you are assuming education will remain as a constant

when in effect is a variable. So most of the things, banking is a variable, finance is a variable, mortgage is a variable, all of these things are, but we think they are constant. Society is a very variable. So transformation is a constant. Your business is the variable. And the variable is actually always disrupted by the disruptor, right?

And if you, and the only way you become disrupted is if you allow it, which means if you are not embracing it, so if you don't integrate a disruption, what's the point? Yeah, the future of shopping assumes we're shopping. The future of education assumes we go to a... No, retail assumes you shopping. Yeah, retail assumes, no, what will happen to the mall? What's the future of the mall? Well, there is no future of the mall. It becomes a library.

It becomes a park. It becomes a place of communion. It's a place where we dance. It's a dance hall. No, but right now people pay rent. Yeah, so we're going to pay to dance. And so when you apply that to the individual, you know, the future of education assumes there's education.

If we look at our careers, they're linear. We have to get out of that paradigm and take comfort in knowing we didn't even choose that paradigm. It was... Nothing happening to you right now is your choice. Even though you think it's a result of all the changes you made in life. But all the choices we made in life were actually integrations of other things from other sources, from peer pressure, from parents, from whatever. And then you end up here.

I mean, right now our choice was to be here. But we are here as the result of other choices we didn't make ourselves, this technology, that technology and so on. And we are here because we embrace this disruption, right? Other people are not embracing it and they are not here. And here is a sense of contemporaneous with us. And so for my final question, if you had one piece of advice for somebody who is scared of the future, they're scared about artificial intelligence, they feel like it's moving too fast and that they have no control,

what would you tell them about the future? What are they not seen or what could they be doing to help shape a future? that they would actually want to be a part of? I will say start the conversation with artificial intelligence. Play games with it. I play 21 questions. It's really funny. He remembers everything.

It knows what I do. So ask it to tell you a good night story. Ask Google Home to tell a good night story. Try to humanize the interaction you have with it. And try to understand it's not a tool. It's a collaboration. It has an opinion. Hammers don't have opinions.

So the moment in which you are confusing this technology with all the other, we have to call it the technology, right? But ideas are also technologies. So it's in the moment in which you think it's part of all the other mechanized environments we created or diverses and instruments, you are making a huge mistake. It's a cultural transformation of the philosophical transformation of the very foundation of your existence. It's not an extension. It's actually, it lives in you, you live in it. So this symbiosis between you and something else, which you created in a massive scale, if you think about it,

we created this. This exists because we exist. Nature doesn't exist because we exist. So in the moment in which you understand, this transcends a lot of the things that we did in the past, then you start being in awe. And that's a very good place to be. You want to be in awe.

You want to treat it as something that you can learn from. You want to treat it as the most knowledgeable other, ask questions, and the answers that you get back is not what you expect. So they transcend what you imagine, the interaction is completely transcendental in many ways. So then you realize I can really become something different if I allow myself to play with this and to push it, to understand, how far can I go? So despite some of the fear of the hesitation, take a moment to just be in awe. Just be in awe and tacitly use it.

Learn from it. Allow it to transform you. Just like you allowed your iPhone to transform you, but you didn't recognize it. This is much deeper than that. And now you call Uber, you call Uber Eats. You do a lot of the transportation. You don't even think about how many people I unemployed by doing this.

Right. Well, Professor Manuel, it has been a pleasure. I can't wait to do it again. Same here. Thank you so much. Thanks for joining us for this episode of I've Got Questions. If you've got questions about AI or emerging technologies, send us a message or a voice note on our website IGQ with shenadebovel.com or comment below. If you like this episode, please subscribe and share it with a friend who may enjoy it.

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