On the practical sort of programmatic sense, if we zoom in on jobs,
we can look at programmers because it seems like AI systems are
currently doing incredibly well at programming and increasingly so.
So a lot of people that program for a living,
love programming, are worried they will lose their jobs.
How worried should they be, do you think? And what's the right way to
sort of adjust to the new reality and ensure that you survive and thrive as
a human in the programming world? Well, it's interesting that programming, and it's
again counterintuitive to what we thought years ago, maybe that some of the skills that
we think of as harder skills are turned out maybe to be the easier ones
for various reasons. But you know, coding and maths, because you can create a lot
of synthetic data and verify if that data is correct. So because of that
nature of that, it's easier to make to things like synthetic data to train from.
It's also an area of course we're all interested in because as programmers,
right, to help us and get faster at it and more productive.
So I think for the next era, like the next five, 10 years, I think
what we're going to find is people who are kind of embrace these technologies,
become almost at one with them, whether that's in the creative industries or the technical
industries, will become sort of superhumanly productive. I, I think so the
great programmers will be even better, but they'll be even 10x, even what they are
today. And because there you'll be able to use their skills to utilize the
tools to the maximum, exploit them
to the maximum. And so I think that's what we're going to see in the
next domain. So that's going to cause quite a lot of change, right? And so
that's coming. A lot of people benefit from that. So I think one example
of that is if coding becomes easier, it becomes available
to many more creatives to do more.
But I think the top programmers will still have huge advantages in
terms of specifying. Going back to specifying what the architecture should be.
The question should be how to guide these coding assistants
in a way that's useful and check whether the code they
produce is good. So I think there's plenty of headroom
there for the foreseeable next few years. So I think there's several interesting things there.
One is there's a lot of imperative to just get better
and better consistently of using these tools. So they're riding the wave
of the improvement, improving models versus like competing
against them. But sadly, but that's the nature of
life. On Earth, there could be a huge
amount of value to certain kinds of programming at the cutting edge and less
value to other kinds. For example, it could be like front
end web design might be
more amenable to, to, to as, as you've mentioned, to generation
by AI systems and maybe for example game engine design
or something like this or backhand designers or guiding systems
in high performance situations. High performance programming type
of design decisions that might be extremely valuable but it will
shift. Yeah. Where the humans are needed most. And that's scary
for people to address. Yeah, I can, I think that's right that anytime where there's
a lot of disruption and change, you know, we've had this is not just this
time, we've had this in many times in human history with the Internet mobile,
but before that was the Industrial Revolution. And it's
going to be one of those eras where there will be a lot of change.
I think there'll be new jobs we can't even imagine today just like the Internet
created. And then those people with the right skill sets to ride
that wave will become incredibly valuable.
Right. Those skills. But maybe people will have to relearn or adapt
a bit their current skills. And it's the thing that's going to be
harder to deal with this time around is that I think what we're going to
see is something like probably 10 times the impact the industrial revolution
had, but 10 times faster as well. Right.
So instead of 100 years, it takes 10 years. And so that's going to make,
you know, it's like 100x the impact and the speed combined.
So that's what's I think going to make it more difficult for society
to deal with. And there's a lot to think through and I think we need
to be discussing that right now. And I encourage top economists in the
world and philosophers to start thinking about how
is society going to be affected by this and what should we do, including things
like universal basic provision or
something like that where a lot of the increased productivity gets
shared out and distributed to society and maybe
in the form of services and other things where if you want more than that,
you still go and get some incredibly rare skills and things like that
and make yourself unique. But there's a basic
provision that is provided. And if you think of government as a technology,
there's also interesting questions, not just in economics, but just politics.
How do you design a system that's responding to the rapidly changing
times such that you can represent the different pain
that people feel from the different groups and how do
you reallocate resources in a way that addresses
that pain and represents the hope and the pain and the fears of different people
in a way that doesn't lead to division? Because politicians are often
really good at sort of fueling the division and
using that to get elected. The other, defining the
other and then saying that's bad. And so based on that,
I think that's often counterproductive to leveraging
a rapidly changing technology, how to help the world flourish. So we almost
need to improve our political systems
as well, rapidly, if you think of them as a technology, definitely.
And I think, I think we'll need new governance structures,
institutions probably to help with this transition.
So I think political philosophy and political science is going to be key
to that. But I think the number one thing first of all is to
create more abundance of resources, right? Then there's the.
So that's the number one thing. Increase productivity, get more resources,
maybe eventually get out of the zero sum situation. Then the second question
is how to use those resources and distribute those resources. But yeah,
you can't do that without having that abundance first.