The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Most Replayed Moment: AI Safety Expert Predicts The Next 20 Years! Will It Really Take All Jobs?

Episode Date: May 22, 2026

Dr. Roman Yampolskiy is a leading voice in AI safety and a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering. He coined the term “AI safety” in 2010 and has published over 100 papers on the dangers of AI. In today’s moment, Roman unpacks the jobs AI might replace, and how the idea of work itself could be challenged. Driverless cars, humanoid robots, superintelligence on the horizon…is it too late to regain control? What will our future actually look like? Listen to the full episode here! Spotify: https://g2ul0.app.link/kM19qMRnG2b Apple: https://g2ul0.app.link/D8XtGbUnG2b Watch the Episodes On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Roman: https://www.romanyampolskiy.com/

A couple of weeks ago, I was traveling through Ireland with my team, and I was telling them how I don't love when things in my life sit idle, whether it's my time, my energy, my health, and my investments. If something has value, it should be working, even if just quietly in the background. And one of the most overlooked examples of this was when you're traveling and you're away from your home. Because when you're not in your home, they just sit empty, and they're not doing anything for you. Which is easy not to think about, but it's still a choice that you're making. We're choosing not to get anything back from something that has real, very very. value because our home can easily play a part in someone else's holiday experience. Airbnb is one of my partners, as you know, and hosting with them is a quick, easy way of changing that. You make your

home available for dates that suit you, and instead of it just sitting there, someone else gets to experience and enjoy your home and your neighborhood and your city. Hosting on Airbnb, it also lets you make a little bit of extra money on the side, which you can put towards your next holiday. Your home might be worth more than you think, and you can find out how much it's worth. You must hear a lot of rebuttfuls to this when you say it because people experience a huge amount of mental discomfort when they hear that their job, their career, the thing they got a degree in, the thing they invested $100,000 into is going to be taken away from them.

So their natural reaction, for some people, is that cognitive dissonance that, no, you're wrong. AI can't be creative. It's not this, it's not that. It'll never be interested in my job. I'll be fine because. You hear these arguments all the time, right? It's really funny.

I ask people, and I ask people in different occupations. I'll ask my Uber driver. Are you worried about self-driving cars? And they go, no, no one can do what I do. I know the streets of New York. I can navigate like no AI. I'm safe. And it's true for any job.

Professors are saying this to me. Oh, nobody can lecture like I do. Like, this is so special. But you understand it's ridiculous. We already have self-driving cars replacing drivers. That is not even a question if it's possible. It's like how soon before you fired? Yeah, I mean, I've just been in L.A.

Yesterday and my car drives itself. So I get in the car. I sit, of putting where I want to go. And then I don't touch the steering wheel or the brake pedals. And it takes me from A to B, even if it's an hour-long drive without any intervention at all. I actually still park it. But other than that, I'm not driving the car at all. I mean, obviously in L.A.

we also have Waymo now, which means you order it on your phone and it shows up with no driver in it and takes you to where you want to go. So it's quite clear to see how that is potentially a matter of time. For those people, because we do have some of those people listening to this conversation right now, that their occupation is driving. To offer them a, and I think driving is the biggest occupation in the world, if I'm correct, I'm pretty sure it is the biggest occupation in the world. It would be one lit up once, yeah. what would you say to those people? What should they be doing with their lives?

Should they be retraining in something or what timeframe? So that's the paradigm shift here. Before we always said this job is going to be automated, retrained to do this other job. But if I'm telling you that all jobs will be automated, then there is no plan B. You cannot retrain. Look at computer science.

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

It's going to be a great job. Get a four-year degree in it. But then we're like, AI is way better at designing prompts for other AIs than any human. So that's gone. So I can't really tell you right now the hardest thing is design AI agents

for practical applications. I guarantee you in a year or two it's going to be gone just as well. So I don't think there is a, this occupation needs to learn to do this instead. I think it's more like we as a humanity than we all lose our jobs. What do we do? What do we do financially? Who's paying for us?

And what do we do in terms of meaning? What do I do with my extra 60, 80 hours a week? You've thought around this corner, haven't you? A little bit. What is around that corner in your view? So the economic part seems easy. If you create a lot of free labor, you have a lot of free wealth, abundance, things which are right now not very affordable, become dirt cheap. And so you can provide for everyone basic needs.

Some people say you can provide beyond basic needs. You can provide very good existence for everyone. The hard problem is, what do you do with all that free time? For a lot of people, their jobs are what gives them meaning in their life. so they would be kind of lost. We see it with people who retire or do early retirement. And for so many people who hate their jobs, they'll be very happy not working.

But now you have people who are chilling all day. What happens to society? How does that impact crime rate, pregnancy rate, all sorts of issues. Nobody thinks about governments don't have programs prepared to deal with 99% unemployment. What do you think that world looks like? Again, I think a very important part to understand here is the unpredictability of it. We cannot predict what is smarter than our system will do. And the point when we get to that is often called singularity, by analogy with physical

singularity. You cannot see beyond the event horizon. I can tell you what I think might happen, but that's my prediction. It is not what actually is going to happen because I just don't have cognitive ability to predict a much smarter agent impacting this world. Then you read science fiction. There is never a superintelligence in it actually doing anything because nobody can write believable science fiction at that level.

They either banned AI like Dune because this way you can avoid writing about it. Or it's like Star Wars. You have this really dumb bots but nothing super intelligent ever. Because by definition, you cannot predict at that level. Because by definition of it being super intelligent, it will make its own mind up. By definition, if it was something you could predict, you would be operating at the same level of intelligence, violating our assumption that it is smarter than you.

If I'm playing chess with superintelligence and I can predict every move, I'm playing at that level. It's kind of like my French bulldog trying to predict exactly what I'm thinking and what I'm going to do. That's a good cognitive gap. And it's not just he can predict you going to work, you're coming back, but he cannot understand why you're doing a podcast. that is something completely outside of his model of the world.

Yeah, he doesn't even know that I go to work. He just sees that I leave the house and doesn't know where I go. Buy food for him. What's the most persuasive argument against your own perspective here? That we will not have unemployment due to advanced technology? That there won't be this French bulldog human gap in understanding and understanding. I guess, like power and control. So some people think that we can enhance human minds,

either through combination with hardware, so something like Neurrelink, or through genetic re-engineering, to where we make smarter humans. Yeah. It may give us a little more intelligence. I don't think we're still competitive in biological form with silicon form. Silicon substrate is much more capable for intelligence.

It's faster. It's more resilient, more energy efficient in many ways. Which is what computers are made out of versus the brain. So I don't think we can keep up just with improving our biology. Some people think maybe, and this is very speculative, we can upload our minds into computers. So scan your brain, kind of comb of your brain, and have a simulation running on a computer. And you can speed it up, give it more capabilities. But to me, that feels like you no longer exist.

we just created software by different means, and now you have AI based on biology and AI based on some other forms of training. You can have evolutionary algorithms. You can have many paths to reach AI, but at the end, none of them are humans. I have another date here, which is 2030. What's your prediction for 2030?

What will the world look like? So we probably will have humanoid robots, with enough flexibility, dexterity to compete with humans in all domains, including plumbers. We can make artificial plumbers. Not the plumbers. That felt like the last bastion of human employment. So 20, 30, five years from now, humanoid robots, so many of the companies, the leading companies, including Tesla, are developing humanoid robots at light speed, and they're getting increasingly

more effective. These humanoid robots will be able to move through physical space. or, you know, make an omelette, do anything humans can do, but obviously have, be connected to AI as well. So they can think, talk. Right, they're controlled by AI. They always connected to the network, so they are already dominating in many ways.

Our world will look remarkably different when humanoid robots are functional and effective. Because that's really when, you know, I have something cry. The combination of intelligence and physical ability is really, really doesn't leave much, does it for us human beings? Not much. So today, if you have intelligence through internet, you can hire humans to do your bidding for you. You can pay them in Bitcoin, so you can have bodies just not directly controlling them. So it's not a huge game changer to add direct control of physical bodies.

is where it's at. The important component is definitely higher ability to optimize to solve problems, to find patterns people cannot see. And then by 2045, I guess the world looks even more, which is 20 years from now. So if it's still around. If it's still around. Ray Kurzweil predicts that that's the year for the singularity. That's the year where progress becomes so fast. So this AI doing science and engineering work makes improvements so quickly we cannot keep up anymore. That's the definition of singularity point beyond which we cannot see, understand, predict. See and understand predict the intelligence itself? What is happening in the world? The technology is being developed.

So right now, if I have an iPhone, I can look forward to a new one coming out next year, and I'll understand it has slightly better camera. I imagine now this process of researching and developing this phone is automated. It happens every six months, every three months, every month, week, day, hour, minute, second. You cannot keep up with 30 iterations of iPhone in one day. You don't understand what capabilities it has, what proper controls are. It just escapes you. Right now it's hard for any researcher in AI to keep up with a state of the art. while I was doing this interview with you, a new model came out,

and I no longer know what the state of the art is. Every day as a percentage of total knowledge, I get dumber. I may still know more because I keep reading, but as a percentage of overall knowledge, we're all getting dumber. And then you take it to extreme values, you have zero knowledge, zero understanding of the world around you. Some of the arguments against this eventuality are that, When you look at other technologies like the Industrial Revolution, people just found new ways to work and new careers that we could never have imagined at the time were created.

How did you respond to that in a world of superintelligence? It's a paradigm shift. We always had tools, new tools, which allowed some job to be done more efficiently. So instead of having 10 workers, you could have two workers. And eight workers had to find a new job. And there was another job now you can supervise. this worker, so do something cool. If you're creating a meta-invention, you're inventing intelligence, you're inventing a worker, an agent, then you can apply that agent to the new job.

There is not a job which cannot be automated. That never happened before. All the inventions we previously had were kind of a tool for doing something. So we invented fire, huge game changer. But that's it. It stops with fire. We invent a wheel. Same idea, huge implications, but Will itself is not an inventor.

Here we're inventing a replacement for human mind, a new inventor capable of doing new inventions. It's the last invention we ever have to make. At that point, it takes over, and the process of doing science, research, even ethics research, morals, all that is automated at that point. Do you sleep well at night? Really well. Even though you spent the last 15, 20 years of your life working on AI safety and it's suddenly among us in a way that I don't think anyone could have predicted five years ago. When I say among us, I really mean that the amount of funding and talent that is now focused on reaching superintelligence

faster has made it feel more inevitable and more soon than any of us could have possibly imagined. We as humans have this built-in bias about not thinking about really bad outcomes and things we cannot prevent. So all of us are dying. Your kids are dying. Your parents are dying. Everyone's dying. But you still sleep well. You still go on with your day.

Even 95-year-olds are still doing games and playing golf and whatnot. Because we have this ability to not think about the worst outcomes, especially if we cannot actually modify the outcome. So that's the same infrastructure being used for this. Yeah, there is humanity-level death-like event. We're happening to be close to it probably. But unless I can do something about it, I can just keep enjoying my life. In fact, maybe knowing that you have limited amount of time left

gives you more reason to have a better life. You cannot waste any. And that's the survival trait of evolution, I guess, because those of my ancestors that spent all their time worrying wouldn't have spent enough time having babies and hunting to survive. It's suicidal ideation. People who really start thinking about how horrible the world is usually escape pretty soon.

One of the, you co-authored this paper, analyzing the key arguments people make against the importance of AI safety. And one of the arguments in there is that there's other things that are of bigger importance right now. It might be world wars. It could be nuclear containment. it could be other things. There's other things that the governments and podcasts like me should be talking about that are more important. What's your rebuttal to that argument? So superintelligence

is a meta solution. If we get superintelligence right, it will help us with climate change. It will help us with wars. It can solve all the other existential risks. If we don't get it right, it dominates. if climate change will take 100 years to boil us alive and superintelligence kills everyone in five, I don't have to worry about climate change. So either way, either it solves it for me or it's not an issue. So you think it's the most important thing to be working on? Without question, there is nothing more important than getting this right. And I know everyone says it. You take any class, you take English professor's class, and he tells you, this is the most important class you'll ever take. But you can see the

meta-level differences with this one. Another argument in that paper is that we'll be in control and that the danger is not AI. This particular argument asserts that AI is just a tool. Humans are the real actors that present danger. And we can always maintain control by simply turning it off. Can't we just pull the plug out? I see that every time we have a conversation on the show about AI.

Someone says, can't we just unplug it? Yeah. I get those comments on every podcast I make. And I always want to get in touch with a guy and say, this is brilliant. I never thought of it. We're going to write a paper together and get a Nobel Prize for it. This is like, let's do it. Because it's so silly.

Like, can you turn off a virus? You have a computer virus you don't like it. Turn it off. How about Bitcoin? Turn off Bitcoin network. Go ahead. I'll wait. This is silly. There's a distributed systems. You cannot turn them off. And on top of it, they're smarter than you. They made multiple backups. They predicted what you're going to do. They will turn you off before you can turn them off.

The idea that we will be in control applies only to pre-superintelligence levels, basically what we have today. Today, humans with AI tools are dangerous. They can be hackers, malevolent actors, absolutely. But the moment superintelligence becomes smarter dominates, they no longer be important part of that equation. It is the higher intelligence I'm concerned about, not the human who may add additional malevolent payload, but at the end still doesn't control it. it is tempting to follow the next argument that I saw in that paper, which basically says, listen, this is inevitable. So there's no point fighting against it because there's really no hope here. So we should probably give up even trying and be faithful that it will work itself out.

Because everything you've said sounds really inevitable. And with China working on it, I'm sure Putin's got some secret division, I'm sure Iran are doing some bits and pieces. every European country is trying to get ahead of AI. The United States is leading the way. So it's inevitable. So we probably should just have faith and pray. Praying is always good, but incentives matter.

If you are looking at what drives these people, so yes, money is important. So there is a lot of money in that space, and so everyone's trying to be there and develop this technology. But if they truly understand the argument, they understand that you will be. be dead. No amount of money will be useful to you. That incentive switch. They would want to not be dead. A lot of them are young people, rich people, they have their whole lives ahead of them.

I think they would be better off not building advanced superintelligence, concentrating on narrow AI tools for solving specific problems. My company cures breast cancer. That's all. We make billions of dollars. Everyone's happy. Everyone benefits. It's a win. We are still control today. It's not over until it's over. We can decide not to build general superintelligences. I mean, the United States might be able to conjure up enough enthusiasm for that. But if the United States doesn't build general superintelligences, then China are going to have the big advantage, right? So right now, at those levels, whoever has more advanced AI has more advanced military. No question. We see it with existing conflicts. But the moment you switch to superintelligence,

uncontrolled superintelligence. It doesn't matter who builds it, us or them. And if they understand this argument, they also would not build it. It's a mutually assured destruction on both ends. Is this technology different than, say, nuclear weapons, which require a huge amount of investment and you have to, like, enrich the uranium and you need billions of dollars, potentially, to even build a nuclear weapon? But it feels like this technology is much cheaper. to get to superintelligence potentially, or at least it will become cheaper. I wonder if it's possible that some guy, some startup, is going to be able to build superintelligence in, you know, a couple of years

without the need of billions of dollars of computer or electricity power. That's a great point. So every year it becomes cheaper and cheaper to train sufficiently large model. If today it would take a trillion dollars to build superintelligence next year, it could be a hundred billion and so on. At some point, a guy in a laptop could do it. but you don't want to wait four years for make it affordable. So that's why so much money is pouring in.

Somebody wants to get there this year and lucky and all the winnings, light cone level award. So in that regard, they both very expensive projects like Manhattan level projects. Which was the nuclear bomb projects. Right. The difference between the two technologies is that nuclear weapons are still tools. some dictator, some country, someone has to decide to use them, deploy them, whereas superintelligence is not a tool, it's an agent. It makes its own decisions and no one is controlling it. I cannot

take out this dictator and now superintelligence is safe. So that's a fundamental difference to me. But if you're saying that it is going to get incrementally cheaper, like I think it's Moore's law, isn't it, that technology gets cheaper? It is. Then there is a future where some guy in his laptop is going to be able to create superintelligence without oversight or regulation or employees, etc. Yeah, that's why a lot of people suggesting we need to build something like surveillance planet where you are monitoring who's doing what and you're trying to prevent

people from doing it. Do I think it's feasible? No. At some point it becomes so affordable and so trivial that it just will happen. but at this point we're trying to get more time. We don't want it to happen in five years. We want it to happen in 50 years. I mean, that's not very hopeful.

Depends on how old you are. Depends on how old you are. I mean, if you're saying that you believe in the future, people will be able to make superintelligence without the resources that are required today, then it is just a matter of time. Yeah, but so will be true for many other technologies. We are getting much better in synthetic biology.

where today someone with a bachelor's degree in biology can probably create a new virus. This will also become cheaper. Other technologies like that. So we are approaching a point where it's very difficult to make sure no technological breakthrough is the last one. So essentially in many directions, we have this pattern of making it easier in terms of resources, in terms of intelligence, to destroy the world. If you look at, I don't know, 500 years ago, the war's dictator with all the resources could kill a couple million people. He couldn't destroy the world.

Now we know nuclear weapons we can blow up the whole planet multiple times over. Synthetic biology, we saw with COVID, you can very easily create a combination virus which impacts billions of people. And all of those things becoming easier to do. In the near term, you talk about extinction being a real risk, human extinction. and being a real risk. Of all the pathways to human extinction that you think are most likely, what is the leading pathway?

Because I know you talk about there being some issue pre-deployment of these AI tools, like, you know, someone makes a mistake when they're designing a model, or other issues post-deployment. When I say post-deployment, I mean, once a chat chit or something,

an agent's released into the world and someone hacking into it and changing it and reprograming it to be malicious. of all these potential paths to human extinction, which one do you think is the highest probability? So I can only talk about the ones I can predict myself. So I can predict, even before we get to superintelligence, someone will create a very advanced biological tool,

create a novel virus, and that virus gets everyone or most everyone. I can envision it, I can understand the pathway, I can say that. So just to zoom in on that, then, that would be using an AI to make a virus and then releasing it? Yeah. And would that be intentional? There is a lot of psychopaths, a lot of terrorists, a lot of doomsday cults. We've seen historically, again, they tried to kill as many people as they can.

They usually fail. They kill hundreds of thousands. But if they get technology to kill millions or billions, they would do that gladly. The point I'm trying to emphasize is that it doesn't matter what I can come up with. I am not a malevolent actor you're trying to defeat here. It's the superintelligence which can come up with completely novel ways of doing it. Again, you brought up example of your dog. Your dog cannot understand all the ways you can take it out.

It can maybe think you'll bite it to death or something. But that's all. Whereas you have infinite supply of resources. So if I asked your dog exactly how you're going to take it out, it would not give you a meaningful answer. It can talk about biting. And this is what we know. We know viruses. We experienced viruses. We can talk about them. But what an AI system capable of doing novel physics research can come up with is beyond me. One of the things that I think most people don't understand is how little we understand about how these AIs are actually working.

Because one would assume, you know, with computers, we kind of understand how our computer works. We know that it's doing this and then this and it's running on code. but from reading your work, you describe it as being a black box. In the context of something like Chachibit, or an AI we know, you're telling me that the people that have built that tool don't actually know what's going on inside there. That's exactly right. So even people making those systems have to run experiments on their product to learn what it's capable of.

So they train it by giving it all of data, let's say all of internet text. They run it on a lot of computers to learn patterns in that text. And then they start experimenting with that model. Oh, do you speak French? Or can you do mathematics? Oh, are you lying to me now? And so maybe it takes a year to train it and then six months to get some fundamentals about what it's capable of, some safety overhead.

But we still discover new capabilities in old models. If you ask the question in a different way, it becomes smarter. So it's no longer engineering how it was the first 50 years, where someone was a knowledge engineer programming and expert system AI to do specific things. It's a science. We are creating this artifact, growing it. It's like an alien plant. And then we study to see what it's doing.

And just like with plants, we don't have 100% accurate knowledge of biology. We don't have full knowledge here. We kind of know some patterns. we know, okay, if we had more compute, it gets smarter most of the time. But nobody can tell you precisely what the outcome is going to be given a set of inputs. What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you.

A couple of weeks ago, I was traveling through Ireland with my team, and I was telling them how I don't love when things in my life sit idle, whether it's my time, my energy, my health, or my investments. If something has value, it should be working, even if just quietly in the background. And one of the most overlooked examples of this was when you're traveling and you're away from your home. Because when you're not in your home, they just sit empty. And they're not doing anything for you. Which is easy not to think about, but it's still a choice that you're making. We're choosing not to get anything back from something that has real value, because our home can easily play a part in someone else's holiday experience. Airbnb is one of my partners, as you know. and hosting with them is a quick, easy way of changing that. You make your home available for dates that suit you, and instead of it just sitting there, someone else gets to experience and enjoy your home and your neighborhood and your city. Hosting on Airbnb, it also lets you make a little bit of extra money on the side,

which you can put towards your next holiday. Your home might be worth more than you think, and you can find out how much it's worth at Airbnb.ca slash host.