In today’s episode, you’ll gain a fresh perspective on the question of AI safety. Instead of focusing on the distant threat of superintelligence, I’ll address a more pressing and often overlooked danger: income erosion. Discover how the drive for profit maximization, combined with AI’s rapidly evolving capabilities, could impact your livelihood and what you can do to adapt. You’ll learn practical strategies for staying ahead of the curve and leveraging the power of personal branding in an increasingly automated world. Tune in to gain valuable insights into the real-world implications of AI and how to navigate the future of work successfully.
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In today’s episode, Robert asks, “How worried should we be about artificial general intelligence? Is there such a thing as safe general intelligence? Is there such a thing as safe super intelligence? What should we be doing about this? How much should we worry about it?”
Don’t. Not right now. Worry about what’s happening now, first. This is something I’ve seen a lot on LinkedIn, too: people worried about super intelligence, a machine that is vastly more, more intelligent than human beings. These things are not sentient. They’re not self-aware. They’re not Skynet. They’re not going to create an army of Terminators.
We don’t have the compute power for that. We do not have the computational power to pull that off. And until we get either bio-neural computing or quantum computing working well—and I don’t want it to work particularly well at the moment—it’s not going to happen.
When people wax poetic about the dangers of AI, they’re often talking about some mythical super-intelligent machine deity that’s going to wipe out humanity. That is improbable, but it is also kind of a smokescreen. There’s also kind of a misdirection because it, it hides the actual dangers of AI today.
Things like bias, making systems that reinforce existing biases. That’s bad. That is something that shouldn’t be happening, and it absolutely is happening. And it ignores the big structural problems that combining AI with late-stage capitalism causes, like hyper, hyper acceleration of income inequality.
One of the biggest dangers of AI that is clear, is present, is obvious, it’s happening now is income erosion. And by income erosion, I mean any force that erodes your ability to optimize your income, whatever it is that you do for work. This is nothing new. We’ve had income erosion forever. It’s why things like unions exist because companies in a capitalist system inherently always want to maximize profits.
That is the function of a company, is the function of company is to generate revenue and maximize profits. That’s what companies do—the exception being nonprofits. And so, as companies fulfill that mandate, they’re going to look for ever cheaper ways to get things done. What is the lowest cost possible way to get this thing done so that we can maximize profits? That isn’t necessarily inherently a moral or immoral, but that is just what companies do.
And AI is the latest step in a long progression of this: from slavery and indentured servitude centuries ago. That was the easiest way to run a highly profitable company: enslave a bunch of people and you make them work for nothing and you kill them. And you do all sorts of horrible things to them to compel them to do what you want.
This, that is, slavery is what, thousands of years old? We’ve only run, recently figured out that it’s, that’s kind of bad, humans. We’ve had unequal labor laws where there was a period of time up until like the last 200 years where it was like, “You know what, it’s okay for little kids to work in, in dangerous factories or in dangerous jobs,” because they had to in some cases, like in agriculture, and in other cases because there’s no protection. And again, companies are like, “What’s the cheapest way we can get this done? Let’s get little kids to do the work instead, because we can pay them less.”
Let’s have evil, uneven labor laws where different classes of people get different pay. If your skin is a certain color, you get paid less and you hire as many people like that to, to maximize your profits. Let’s pay women 60% of what we pay men, get the same work out of them. That is profit maximization: outsourcing and offshoring. Let’s send the jobs overseas or to some other place that has cheaper labor, so we can maximize our profits. You’re going to have things like a banana company, Chiquita, hiring death squads to kill off competition.
That’s, that’s like, it was a couple of decades ago. That wasn’t like in the past, that was like last century—the court case I think was in the nineties. That’s real.
AI is just the latest in this long line of ways that companies try to reduce expenses, and income erosion is a real, a real problem for certain types of work. It’s going to impact everything, but certain types of work are going to be impacted more than others because companies want to maximize profits.
If it takes you four to six weeks to get a piece of content spec’d, built, developed, delivered, reviewed, and published, like a blog post, and it takes you four to six minutes to do the same thing with ChatGPT, and the quality isn’t any worse, what’s the logical thing you’re going to do? If your, if your mandate is to maximize profits, you are going to take the four to six-minute approach.
Back at my old, the old agency I used to work at, we had a client that was cranking out 150 blog posts a week, and they were, they had a huge army of freelancers writing okay content. If you were to go back and look at that content today, ChatGPT could do as good or better a job, create more content, in a way more cheaply. That is income erosion.
So those people who are getting paid, 150 to300 per blog post, you don’t need to pay those people anymore for the same lack of quality. And that’s the part that I think is really important for people to understand, that this is something that comes up a lot with generative AI: generative AI does not have to be the best at what it does, it just has to be better than the average because the average is what you pay for right now.
When you hire a freelancer to write blog posts for your company—which a lot of companies do—you’re not specifying in the job description that they have to have a Pulitzer. Like, you just need to work for 50 cents a word or 25 cents a word, or however you can reduce the cost. And in those situations, AI is a cheaper method by far. It is faster and the quality, properly prompted, isn’t worse.
It’s kind of like that old, cliche: you don’t have to be the fastest runner to evade a bear, you just have to run faster than the slowest runner in your group. The same thing is true for AI. You don’t have to be the best in the world, but you do have to be better than AI, and AI is getting better and better and better day by day.
So, that income erosion is a major problem with artificial intelligence, particularly generative AI, because it makes producing the same corporate dreck way faster and way cheaper. And that will erode the income of people who produce corporate dreck slower and more expensively. And I hope that—and I think there are indications that generative AI will actually get, create better dreck, which sounds like a terrible band, but it will do so without those people. And then you have to figure out what else are those people going to do for work.
That is the clear and present danger. And part of remediating that danger—which is why no one in the business world likes to talk about it—is acknowledging that perhaps maximization of profit is not the most important thing. It’s important: you’ve got to keep the lights on, you’ve got to pay rent, you’ve got to pay your employees, but perhaps it’s not the most important thing the company should be doing.
That’s why you have purpose-built companies, companies that, special types of sub-companies: nonprofits, not-for-profit entities, that are trying to, trying alternative methods of doing business where they still have to earn a profit—let’s be clear, they still have to earn a profit—but they don’t necessarily have to maximize profits at all costs, including hiring death squads to kill your competitors.
And part of that is going to be about using AI thoughtfully and not handing off work that people enjoy doing. But for the most part, the market is going to rationalize around the fact that AI can do better work faster and much, much, much cheaper. So, for those folks who are in those fields—like video creation, image creation, music creation, writing—you’ve got to figure out how to build your personal brand so that you are irreplaceable and a machine would have a very difficult time replicating you, and get good at operating the machines so that you can scale your own unique way of doing things. Because one of the fundamental truths, particularly in, in B2B stuff, is that it’s true generally, people, all other things being equal, people prefer to have relationships with and buy from other people. That is a common thing, and that’s a window of opportunity—if you are a creator in these categories—to reduce the impact of income erosion. If people are buying from you because of your brand that they can’t get elsewhere, that’s an advantage. You’ve got to take advantage of that.
But safe super intelligence, that is to me almost a distraction—an intentional distraction—away from the very real challenges that AI is posing today and that we need to address. If you enjoyed this video, please hit the like button, subscribe to my channel if you haven’t already, and if you want to know when new videos are available, hit the bell button to be notified as soon as new content is live.
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