The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Can AI Replace Those Retiring Boomers? || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: July 31, 2024

*This video was recorded in mid-July, prior to Peter departing on his backpacking trip. As the baby boomers age into retirement and Gen Z fails to satisfy the gaping hole left in the labor market, will artificial intelligence be able to help mitigate some of the fallout? Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/can-ai-replace-those-retiring-boomers

Hey, everybody. Peter Zine here coming to you from the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri, taking a question from the Ask Peter Forum, specifically on artificial intelligence. The question is, if we're looking at labor shortages because the baby boomers, the largest generation, largest workforce we've ever had, is now retiring. And the new generation coming in, Generation Z or the Zoomers is the smallest generation ever, are there things that can be rounded out and fixed with increases in, productivity such as artificial intelligence and the answer is maybe a couple problems here first of all we are very unlikely to be able to sustain the level of production of

artificial intelligence capable chips that is necessary to fundamentally make over the American or global workforce the problem is that there are thousands of companies that have to be involved in order to manufacture those chips in the first place yes yes yes 90% of them do come from a single town in Taiwan and there's a security issue there, and I don't mean to belittle that, but it's really a bigger problem because most of those companies that are involved in the supply chain to keep those fabrication facilities running only make one product for one end user, which is TSM in Taiwan. And if something happens to them, or enough of them, really just a handful of them, then we're

going to lose the ability to make the chips at all. So the idea that we can have massive swaths of server farms crunching data for artificial intelligence, it's probably not going to happen this it might not happen next decade. We're going to have to build a new ecosystem for that, and that just takes time. The second problem is the nature of artificial intelligence itself. There's becoming this saying is, I want artificial intelligence to do the dishes so that I can spend more time writing. I don't want artificial intelligence to do my writing so that all of this left is the dishes. But this is the problem. Artificial intelligence helps with white collar work, helps with brain work, helps with collation, helps with correlation, things like paralegals, researchers, writers, editors, all that are the sort of jobs that are going to be slimmed down, most likely, because of it. And that's not where the labor shortage is in the United States.

Over the course of the last 50 years, the baby boomers have really focused on getting their kids to college and getting them into high value-added white-collar jobs. But in a world where the Chinese are fading very quickly and where the United States has experienced, in industrial renaissance, we instead need electricians and we need welders and we need linemen. We need people to physically move and make things. That's not white collar work. That's blue color work. And artificial intelligence cannot help nearly as much with that. So artificial intelligence is going to be part of the future. But I don't think it's going to happen as fast as folks happen. When it does happen, it's going to remake industries like finance, moving money around more efficiently so that the swaths of cadres that we have and say New York suddenly all of a

sudden have less to do. It's going to increase the capability of white collar workers and make them more productive so we don't need as many people. It's say like the back end of doctor's offices processing all the insurance claims. It might be able to help crack the genome to make agriculture more productive and it's certainly going to be involved in defense and cryptography in order to increase security, but it's probably not going to be a huge part of manufacturing. And for that to happen, we don't simply need AI. We need robotics, mobile robotics. And AI at the moment is not there. It's progressing, but that's probably going to be a significant issue in the 2040s, not the 2020s. So can it help? Sure, at the margins, but you're probably still going to have to do your own damn

dishes.