0:06So, let's say you're in high school.
0:08Your parents come home one day and they say, "We've decided to get you a private tutor. And boy, do we have the perfect guy for the job. He knows everything. He has literally memorized every fact and finding in every discipline. He can explain every concept to you with whatever metaphor or analogy you want.
0:24You're confused about bio? You need some Harry Potter metaphor to remember the difference between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system? He is so good at that. And best of all, he's cheap.
0:36He's going to live in the basement. He never has to eat or sleep. He's available 24/7. How good does that sound?
0:42Sounds pretty good to you.
0:44And so, one day this tutor comes by the house. And you ask him, "Is it true? Can you really memorize every fact, teach me every single subject with Harry Potter analogies?"
0:54"Of course," the tutor says. "And there's something else I can do for you as well. In fact, I've done it for most of my past clients. If you want me to just take the biology test for you, I can do it. If you want to just skip the geography lesson and have me just write the geography essay for you, I can do that, too.
1:11Boring book? You don't want to read The Grapes of Wrath? I get it. It's long. I'll read the book for you and write the book report. He's the best teacher ever. And he's the worst tutor in the world. A tutor so terrible, in fact, that the more you rely on him, the dumber you get. This isn't a magical tutor. It's not a make-believe thing. In fact, millions of students now have access to it.
1:35And we're learning the results. A team of researchers from California recently studied the effect of artificial intelligence chatbots on math scores in a popular learning website since 2015. These students could have used AI to unpack math concepts, come up with mnemonics for the quadratic equation. They could have used AI to to better at math.
1:56But what actually happened?
1:59On problems that students could copy into their chatbots, performance improved since 2022. But when students were given tests away from their computers, their scores plummeted. In fact, their scores after the invention of AI were worse than they'd been before the invention of AI. The tutor who could teach them anything with any metaphor taught them to be dumber. There's several lessons here, I think. One lesson is the difference between the capability of a technology and its use.
2:32Just because we can use Wikipedia or Claude to become experts on quantum mechanics, doesn't mean the primary use case of Wikipedia or Claude is to increase the number of particle physicists. The second lesson comes from the media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who smartly said that every technology is both an extension and an amputation. A machine that extends human intelligence is also a machine that cuts off the need for humans to be intelligent.
3:01Like many technologies, AI forces us to ask a hard question.
3:05When you're in possession of a tool that can reduce struggle and friction, what is the value of friction?
3:14When is the struggle the point?
3:17And when is the solution the point?
3:20Ethan Mollick, I think, is probably the single best explainer of what AI can do for people. And the difference between what it can do in theory and how it's actually used in practice. He's the author of a new book, Coexistence. And today we talk about the paradoxes of AI. AI makes experts more powerful while automating the junior work that creates experts.
3:45It makes our work smarter and faster by automating the process that makes us smart and fast. And according to Ethan, every challenge currently presented by AI will get harder and harder as its capabilities improve exponentially. [music] I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plain English.
4:32This episode of Plain English is presented by Comcast Business. Did you know Comcast Business detected 79.3 billion cyber threats last year? That's why they're introducing Security Edge Preferred. It's big business cybersecurity designed for small business. Get started with Comcast Business internet for $50 a month for 1 year on a qualifying internet package and find out how to get 1 month of Security Edge Preferred on them. Plus, ask about a $500 prepaid card. Limited
5:01time offer, restrictions apply, requires 300 megabits per second internet, Security Edge, Security Edge Preferred, and wireless connect. Call today. Ethan Mollick, welcome to the show.
5:11Thanks for having me.
5:12So, your book opens with forecasters trying to predict the future of artificial intelligence and math. And they gave AI a 2.3% chance of winning a math Olympiad gold by 2025. Last year, superforecasters gave a Millennium Prize problem a a 1.7% chance of being solved. Now, OpenAI has said it has already solved one. I mean, we're in October. Maybe it'll solve another one in the next 24 hours.
5:43Just starting here at this forecasting failure to anticipate how powerful AI would be even in just a few months.
5:52What does that failure teach us about the capabilities of AI?
5:58I think it teaches us a sort of lesson that I think feels like people have heard this since COVID, right? Which is humans don't think in exponentials very well, no matter how hard we try. Um and I think that it's tough even the world's best forecasters, and they are really good, right? Like the it's a straight line on a logarithmic graph. Like the ability level has not actually varied very much over since in the last 4 years, right? It's actually ticked up a little bit. Um and I think it's really hard for us to grasp what that means, right? We it's better on a bunch of dimensions we've never had to measure
6:27before. It's not horsepower, it's not speed, it's intelligence for whatever that is. And I think it's really hard to adjust what that what what that means. I think that's a lot of failure I see constantly is assumption that the future looks like the past, and that's not looking true anymore.
6:41It seems to me that forecasters have actually been wrong in two directions. I think one group has underrated AI's growing capabilities in, for example, solving complicated math problems. But another group I think has overrated the real-world consequences of AI's capabilities. If you look at the unemployment rate, it looks basically normal. If you look at productivity growth, it's up a little bit, but there's a variety of reasons for that, and it's hard to see AI in the productivity numbers. If you look at corporate returns, they look pretty
7:10great, but if you kind of just like put your hand over the chip companies and the memory companies, a lot of the economy is saying we're not necessarily witnessing some enormous ROI from all this AI that's flowing through uh our bureaucratic structures. And so it it raises this question that you and I have gone back and forth a bit online. So I I'd love to get your um your thesis on the record here. If AI's capabilities are growing so fast, growing exponentially,
7:40why are the real-world consequences of AI growth moving along so slowly?
7:46So, this is kind of where I'll argue.
7:48Like, I'm surprised how fast it is, right? I I am a professor at a business school, an economic sociologist, and the lesson you learn, and I I say entrepreneurship, but the lesson you learn is like entrepreneurs should never win, right? Like, then you know, just to say it say it again, back, they should never win because all of the resources, all of the money, all of the customers are all with the large companies. Why do they win? Because big companies can't change. So, the fact that we're actually seeing in surveys high levels of ROI already, even if that hasn't been translated into, you know, 30 million is not enough to move the needle for a lot
8:17of these large companies, but they are seeing positive gains over a very short period of time, that some of them are starting to reconfigure how they work.
8:23Like, to me, that's fast, not slow. So, I'm not surprised that we don't see this happening, especially because current phase of AI we're in is single player. It is about individuals getting performance gains, and you can see that, right? I can write code an entire game overnight. I can write academic papers faster than ever before. But, when I start running into systems, multiplayer, many people working together, there are still huge gaps. How does that even work? How do we work together in this?
8:47So, you'll see, like in coding, a coder will be 100 times more productive, but they're still in a 2-week long sprint that requires input from people every 2 weeks in different kinds of ways. You're not going to have a change. In fact, what you're going to have is huge amounts of token spend, and you're not going to see an impact.
9:02I don't think that that is a long-term persistent problem, but I think that it is a very obvious short-term problem, and something I talk about a lot in the book as well.
9:10There's two concepts that you've used that I think help to make your argument especially sticky. You've argued, or quoted other people arguing, that jobs are like O-rings, and that companies are like garbage cans. Why is the economy, in your view, made up of garbage cans and O-rings?
9:28Right. So, we have two tragedies here in different ways, right? The O-ring is named after the Space Shuttle Challenger, where 16,000 in or whatever worked great that day in 1986, but the O-ring O-ring failed and caused a catastrophe. And part of that is, you know, I talk about the jagged frontier a lot in this book and last book was a term we coined in our papers. Um and it's the idea that AI is good at some stuff you wouldn't expect, bad at some stuff you wouldn't expect. It only takes one or two places for AI to be bad at a job for you to still need a human to sub in for that because you can't have everything work great and then one thing
9:58fail at most jobs. It's not additive where little bits add and subtract from each other. So, the O-ring means that jobs are not easily kind of replaced one for another uh with AI because if AI can't do human tasks exactly, you still have value accruing to human work. And you see that happening and even in coding where like AI now writes code, but you need still need human engineers to manage it. Now, maybe that will change in the next couple of months and then we'll see another part of the O-ring get stuck. So, jobs are evolving very rapidly, but there's still these sticking points and especially as you go
10:27to organizations. And then the garbage can model is um one of the more depressing models of organizational theory, which is that um basically companies are just bundles of problems and solutions all looking for each other piled on top of each other. So, there is no plan um or at least the plan is only a small part of how organizations work.
10:45And organizations are instead full of like contingencies and complicated aspects and evolutionary dead ends and there's loops of work that no one ever knows even exists anymore and you know, organizations just do things. And as a result, that makes it hard both for to improve them immediately. It also means that the job of redesigning organizations to work with AI is more complicated than just, well, we will supplement this task cuz that task is on paper somewhere, but doesn't represent the actual garbage can of the company itself. So, you can see why we call this a garbage can metaphor, right?
11:14Everything is tossed together like waste in a garbage can and mixed together randomly and sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn't.
11:21Like you, I tried to write about and cover artificial intelligence for a wide range of readers and listeners. Some of whom are working at or even executives at the Frontier Labs, and some of whom absolutely despise the Frontier Labs, hate the acronym AI, hate everything about this subject, and wish we could just get into a time machine and go back to October 2022. And I think there are a lot of reasons for this. I mean, you see it even in the survey data, where if you
11:49ask people who use AI, do you think it's helpful? By a four-to-one margin, they say yes. And you ask in the same survey, do you think AI is bad for society? And by a four-to-one margin, they say yes. So, there's all sorts of interesting discrepancies here. But one that I would love you to dial it on a bit is that we're all using the word AI to describe what are often completely different products.
12:13When the Frontier Labs say, "Our AI solved Navier-Stokes or some other math problem," they're talking about an internal model that won't be made public maybe for months. Then you have the most advanced public models that people spend a lot of money for, that corporations or individuals subscribe to. But only about 3% of individuals in the country actually personally subscribe to any AI.
12:38Many of them, if they're using it on a monthly basis, are using some model that's been public for years, which means that it was internally available even more years. So, how do you think about this I think very difficult public communication challenge of talking about a product that is at least in my last recounting three different things. The most powerful internal AI models, which are much better than the
13:06most powerful public AI models, which are much better than the models that most people are using on a week-by-week basis. How do you How do you address this problem?
13:18And you're probably short a few, by the way. There's also the AI model that has is people's heads from science fiction, right? Which is determines a lot of what they think the future is, is Terminator, right? Or whatever whatever they watch.
13:29And there is the AI and then there's still inside companies a big issue is AI still means machine learning on your own data where data was the new oil and all the other techniques around artificial intelligence. So there's a lot of mess here. I would say that part of this is that it is confusing, right? Like we have a general purpose technology. So there's many things happening at once and the uses are different everywhere as well. I would say the biggest lack of clarity though is not feeling that exponential curve, right? And it seems very corny and very Silicon Valley to be
13:57like feel the exponential AGI pill. But like the truth is that models are getting better very very quickly and your old views are kind of out of date.
14:05I was actually I think I'll remember the number correctly but I was just trying to figure out how good the best model in my last book was when it came out which is two years ago by the way. And both when I started writing it and when I finished writing it and for several months afterwards the best model in the world was GPT-4. It was the best model for about a year.
14:22And GPT-4 is now the 181st best model in the world right now. And there are 19 models that can run on your phone that are better than GPT-4. And that was like whatever we were freaky out about you know a few a few months ago. Now the average best model changes 70 days or less, right? So we're in this very fast acceleration period and I do think everyone's lagging. I think that you can even use the smartest model in the world right now available to you and you're not trying to solve Navier-Stokes. So you don't even know what it can do capably. So there's this huge mismatch the overhang, right? Between AI
14:52capability and where people's perception of AI is. And people are making all sorts of predictions based on all kinds of missing assumptions. Kind of nobody knows anything.
15:02Reading your book, I felt like in many ways it's a book about tensions, about paradoxes that we live with when we work with AI, when we read about AI. And I want to go through at least four paradoxes that I drew from your new book. The first paradox I'm thinking of as the expertise paradox. And that is the idea that AI makes experts more powerful while often automating the kind of junior work that actually creates expertise.
15:33Maybe unpack a little bit about what you see here and how you think we're going to grow the next generation of experts if we're automating the process by which they are made.
15:46Yeah, and and with the great thing is since I wrote that is like we actually more evidence that both things are happening, right? I mean, maybe not great, but a true thing. Uh so, on one hand, um there's a nice paper out of Anthropic suggesting that the more expertise you have that better returns you get from using AI models. So, you get better answers and you get more answers, right? And that makes sense because as AI has gotten better, it produces a huge amount of material and if you're an expert, you can glance at that material right away and know whether it's good or bad or how to change it. Just like you could if someone handed you a report. You're not going to read the whole thing, you flip
16:14through it or, you know, if you if you're an expert on, you know, podcast, you know how this interview is going right now and are making judgment calls in your head that you couldn't describe to anyone else, right? So, expertise has real value in working with complex systems. At the same time, you know, the way we teach expertise is apprenticeship. Like we don't have a way of teaching expertise fully in schools.
16:32So, what we do is you send someone to be an intern in a podcasting studio and they do the grunt work of doing the pre-interviews with me or whatever else and you give them feedback, hopefully very kind feedback, maybe some people yell at them and they learn the ropes that way. And you didn't want to do that interview, so they get to do it and they get feedback as a result and they have to prove to you that they're good. It's been this really nice cycle that works well under capitalism and under state plan societies and everything else, which is junior people want to strive to get ahead. They they have we need someone to do the work for senior people who don't want to do it and you learn as
17:01you go. And all of that broke down with AI because junior people are much worse than AI, which means that junior people would be better off, um you know, doing the having AI do the work and they don't have the expertise to assess whether it's good or bad. So, they'll just turn in AI assignments. And the middle managers who used to be assigning work to junior people and giving them feedback, AI does a better job than that, has no human emotions, so I'd rather just assign it to AI. So, nobody learns anything anymore. The learning was incidental to the process, even if it was the point in the long term, right? So, we were very lucky that we
17:29had a system where expertise creation was incidental to a process that worked really well in any kind of, you know, for 4,000 years essentially. Um, and so we have to rethink how we rebuild expertise, and that means we have to decouple efficiency from learning, which is not an easy thing to do in companies.
17:46Not an easy thing to do at universities either. We had David Deming on this show a few months ago, and we talked about what I think is a really knotty problem of how do you teach artificial intelligence in a educational community that should be all about making thinking difficult, so that people struggle at college, so they grow the muscles they can use when they graduate. But, on the one hand, it seems if you teach with too much AI at the Harvard and Whartons of
18:15the world, and every other, you know, the Virginia Techs and University of Michigans, then you are automating the process by which people become more intelligent, and that means they're going to end up dumber than they otherwise were. On the other hand, if you say, "Well, then we obviously can't teach with AI in college, because it's allowing students to end run the whole learning process," then you graduate thousands of people into a labor market where they might be expected to use AI, and you have forbidden their contact
18:45with this general purpose technology. How How do you think about the right way of balancing the the the virtue of learning at college, and the virtue of college is to serve as a pre-professional institution, so that people graduate smart, but also with some kind of facility with a technology they'll likely use in their first job.
19:09Um, okay, so this is will be my most controversial point, and some of the academics don't say but I don't think this is that hard a problem. I think transitioning to the state we need to be in is a harder problem. But we actually have a lot of control over people in universities and K-12 education and we had to do things very particular way. No one asked for AI to come and wreck the way we were doing things but but it has and we actually have the evidence already, right? So if you use AI as a as a learning shortcut which most people will naturally do either cuz you want to cheat or just because you're asking for advice and the AI gives you
19:39the answer and you think you've learned something you haven't. We're very bad at knowing when we're learning then you destroy your learning opportunities, right? If on the other hand AI is used as a tutor where it's not giving you the answers but it's pushing you. We now have enough studies that show positive effects and meta-analysis, RCTs at Harvard, at Stanford, and in in Kenya, other places where we actually know AI can be a very powerful learning tool. So the answer isn't that hard, right? We need to use AI as a learning tool outside of class and inside of class do what we've known for the last 30 years
20:08of pedagogy works best which is active learning experiences where in class it's discussions, cases, where we have to test people in class without laptops nearby. We have to have in class discussions. Like it's not the end of the world. It's not that hard a process actually. Getting there will be hard.
20:21But like there is a better form of learning that awaits us in the end if we get there all based on how we know how to do pedagogy today, right? And I think then the other piece of this puzzle is what does it mean to teach AI? I'm much more skeptical about there's an AI to teach or that people have to learn to use AI in college. Like I don't know what that skill is. I don't know what learning to use AI as a skill is. I know when CHROs of companies are saying, "Oh, the kids today they're AI native."
20:45They're they're not AI native, they're just Claude. Like they're just pasting stuff into Claude. They're not learning to use AI. If if it returns to AI use or if it returns to the expertise then you're not an expert in AI, you're an expert in a topic area where you can use AI to do it.
20:58Does the last thing you just said suggest that professors should be much more aggressive about limiting even uh prohibiting any kind of AI use because there is no benefit to becoming facile with the technology between 18 and 22. At college, your job is just to become good at learning, and when you graduate, you'll just learn and to be facile with the AI that exists then when, you know, Bain or whoever else hires you.
21:28So, I think it's a little more complicated than that. I think that every class doesn't need to be an AI class, right? I absolutely think we should like this is an emergency situation. We should be teaching AI in school in in schools, but I feel like there's you know, I'm a professor. The way professorship works is everyone kind of does their own thing in most cases.
21:44And so, you have a lot of people everybody's integrating AI into their class in all kinds of ways, some of which are hurt learning, some of which are wrong about AI, some of which are are you know, have trouble keeping up.
21:52So, we should be thinking about how we teach AI skills. Like it helps to know a little bit how LLMs work, not a lot, but a little bit. It helps to know about where where current models stand. But I don't think every class needs to be an AI class. Um and I don't think we know what that even looks like. And by the way, there's lots of room for AI pedagogical tools. In my classes, I have AI people have to teach an AI that I've trained to be a a kind of a dumb student, so you have to teach it. That's a great way of learning is teaching. You build a case study with it. You run simulations where the AI is a game master. There's lots of interesting
22:21educational opportunities out here to use AI for helping learning that we will have to keep uncovering and working on.
22:27But AI as a subject is it might infuse everything you do, but you wouldn't want to take every class during the Industrial Revolution shouldn't be a steam engine class. Like it's not necessary, right? Um and so, I think in the same kind of way like there is value in this, but there is a little bit of like everyone jumping on board of like we need AI literacy, AI certification.
22:44Well, I can tell you we've been studying it at Wharton all of the sort of prompting techniques that I used to teach people, none of them work anymore.
22:51Like if you taught we learned how to do if you learned AI last year, right? And you're recent college college graduate and you had a formal class on this, none of that works anymore. Um think step-by-step is not a useful thing to tell an AI model. Personas no longer change AI performance levels. Like almost all of the stuff you learned on that is now useless. So, I think we need higher order thinking. I mean, AI looks a lot like project management right now.
23:11So, maybe everyone has to learn a project management model.
23:14Um I think very related to what we've just been discussing, which is the expertise paradox, is what I'm calling the skill paradox. AI can make people much more productive, but as you've said in several studies, AI seems to make people better at certain tasks, but when you take away the AI, their scores plummet because it's revealed that they've been using the machine as a crutch rather than a tutor. When you're working with LLMs, how do you know? How do you feel
23:43when you're on one side of the line using AI as a tool versus another side of the line using AI to automate your thinking?
23:52It is a really hard process, right? Like So, I do it by establishing bright lines for myself, right? Like I write every draft myself. And And it's tempting sometimes cuz I'm like, I don't really want to do like, you know, it's another po- another article. Like I But I I have to like I write the drafts myself and I definitely turn to AI afterwards. And obviously the most depressing thing is like there'll be two lines of AI writing and it like a piece of work and I'm like, that was a great line. I'm like, I mean, what [laughter] about everything else?
24:14But But I think that there is this kind of sense of like, um you know, like this is the hardest challenge I have because we will we will absolutely de-skill ourselves every chance we get. So, part of the message of the book, I think, is be thoughtful about AI use. And it's tough to say that, right? Like, you know, humans don't like effort, right?
24:30We've had to teach ourselves that lifting weights is good when it obviously is something our body is designed to avoid. It's like, we don't want to do this, right? We don't want to diet. And in the same way, learning requires desirable difficulty. It requires difficulty. We don't want to do that. And I think choosing what skills we will are willing to give up, right?
24:48You know, and what skills we aren't is going to be our big challenge here. And I think building incentive systems to keep the right skills is going to be hard, especially companies which aren't built for that kind of thing, right?
24:58Like it's one thing and again, university said is we can control this.
25:01I can give you a test and make that test your grade and you don't have AI on that test and I can reveal whether or not you've learned things and I can help set you up in a world where all the AI tutors are available to you and the class experience there are amazing and TAs are available and like and ultimately has to come down to you. In a company though, that's where things get really weird, right? Because not only do I not want to do that work that the AI is doing, you know, and deskill myself, but also the company doesn't want me to do that work. And they what because it's more efficient for me not to do it. So
25:29strategic skill retention is going to be a very big deal in the future.
25:34Going back to the metaphor of gym, it's just really interesting to me as I reflect on how frequently in the last two years, the gym metaphor has felt more appropriate for the thing I'm obsessed with. So initially, you know, the gym was necessary because we had to be hunter-gatherers, we had to walk for 12 hours a day and then we invented a specialized labor economy that meant that we didn't have to walk that much.
25:59And so if we wanted to remain fit, we had to go to this special thing and simulate some ancient processes in order to get back that fitness. That's gym 1.0. Then when I wrote the antisocial century about the decline of socialization, I was really interested in people who said, you know, we're we we we thought of friendship and community and neighborliness as something that naturally comes out of us because of the need to, you know, reach out to people for support and meet friends and keep friendships. But now that the smartphone is here and it's
26:29easy to keep in touch with thousands or hundreds of people as sort of third-party allies on Twitter or Instagram and you can sit on your couch all day and watch Netflix and and go on TikTok, we need to think about hangouts as a means of social fitness. Like get out of your house and practice being around people. And now what I'm hearing from you is there's there's a third gym that we need that, you know, AI because it's so good at doing our homework and our work and our jobs for us, we need to remember that sometimes the friction is
26:59the point. The struggle is the point and we need to think of aspects of intellectual endeavor as a kind of gym, a special place or time to go to to work on skills that might feel hard in the moment and we know we don't have to do it, but we we think it might be good for us in the long run. It's just It's just funny as I'm reflecting on the idea that the the this this concept of of of the gym keeps keeps coming up in all these segments as we we find new ways of making life comfortable and and technologically rich. Um I want to
27:29move on to the to the third paradox here that I wrote down, which I'm which is again related. It's It's what I'm thinking of as the knowledge paradox. Um In the last few months, OpenAI has released hundreds of math findings, proofs.
27:45And these are proofs that mathematicians themselves sometimes find quite alien when they work through the logic. Um I think one that you referenced on Twitter said a proof read like it was written on psychedelics. And I'm interested in how you think about this tension between AI creating knowledge without understanding. That is to say, it's creating the proof before humans understand the thing necessary to get to that proof.
28:13How do you think about this question of of whether it matters that we're creating knowledge without human understanding?
28:23This is part of our challenge, right?
28:25Like we didn't have to unpack different kinds of intelligences really because there was one kind of intelligence that was human. So we talked about arrays and different types of things, but like we all kind of work the same way. And AIs are remarkably un-alien in a lot of ways, right? They're not the alien computer that we were expecting from like Star Trek that's all logic and it would blow up if you said the word love to it. Does not compute. It blows. Like they they they talk like emotional people for five variety of reasons, real and unreal. Um, and you know, but the alienness starts to come out when we
28:55talk about intellectual work, right? And in this kind of And also, we haven't had to examine our own intellectual work.
29:00So, one of the interesting things about mathematicians, right, is to the outside world, proofs were the big deal, right?
29:05That was the goal. It's like, these are the millennium problems. If we solve them, we're in great shape. And the mathematicians have been protesting and probably were saying before this, but are protesting publicly, not like this, right? The proofs weren't actually the point. Each proof would spin off new ideas for us that we never discovered before. And the process of solving it would bring the math community together around new problems and spaces that were interesting. And that's all being ruined. And in some ways, they're they're absolutely right, right? Like, this We're unraveling math as as we know it, and we have to reconstruct this field. I think that's going to be happening in lots of spaces, too, about
29:35reconstructing what we actually meant, unbundling this idea of of, you know, intellectual engagement. I mean, you can now generate a pretty darn good podcast from my book or our tweets or anything we want, but it's not our podcast. How do we defend the idea that the human touch in writing or in proofs, that the way we do knowledge and acquire it is valuable? I think it's going to be a big challenge coming up. So, I I'm I'm absolutely of the belief that there is something real here, you know, and then But then you have the second-order problem, which is, okay, well, do we need the humans to do math at all
30:04anymore? And, you know, right now we do, but 6 months ago, it was very obvious we needed humans, and 6 months from now, it may not be, right? The proofs get generated, and then does AI Does math become a game the way chess has, right?
30:16which is like, human achievement matters, but it's sort of in a bounded space? Uh, I think Bill Gates was talking about leaving reserves of problems for humans to solve, which feels uh a little bit uh unnerving to me as an outcome. Um, but I I think that we do have this kind of idea of trying to figure out, what is the job that we were trying to do? And when we say, not like that, AI, what do we mean by that? And I think that's going to be important. I think there's a lot of not like that, AI, that's going to be important for us to think through.
30:43As I was reading your book, I had a conversation with the mathematician Steven Strogatz about [clears throat] this phenomenon you're circling, which is mathematicians being indignant, offended, even quite moved to tears by how many math problems were solved by OpenAI, seemingly solved by OpenAI in a way that seemed to nuke their fields of research.
31:09And on the one hand, you know, you would expect a mathematician to say or to argue forcefully that not like this, OpenAI, this is terrible. Having AI solve math problems without human understanding is a crime against the field.
31:25But he also shared this story of a character from his last book, MIT computer scientist Regina Barzilay, who survived breast cancer in her early 40s and was really stunned in the process to learn how much doctors didn't seem to know about that breast cancer diagnosis.
31:41And so she led a team that trained AI on hundreds of thousands of mammograms and they developed a technology that predicts breast cancer cases many years in advance better than any team of human doctors.
31:53And Strogatz asked Barzilay, do you understand what your AI is doing? And she said, "No." And he said, "Doesn't it worry you that you don't understand your own invention?"
32:04And she said, "Why would we limit a life-saving model to what humans can understand?"
32:12And on the one hand, I am very sympathetic to the tears of mathematicians. And on the other hand, I'm very sympathetic to wanting to not die of the cancers that killed my parents. I want to live, and if living requires a life-saving model that humans don't understand the inner mechanics of, I don't give a The years of life are worth more than the qualia of those scientists' understanding.
32:40And so I I I would I would love you to reflect just a little bit more on this tension between the the the scientific value of human understanding and the real-world value of just science and scientific progress for the sake of scientific progress if it is indeed saving and extending lives.
33:00I mean that that is this is this is where we're going to face everything, right? There's a lot of this is in in science it's the easiest kind of case, right? There was a lot of when people were talking about math they were saying like will you know cancer biologists be like, "No, no, don't solve you know don't don't not like this, right? Don't cure cancer, we'll be out of a job." So I mean but also fields are their own games, right? I'm the economic sociologist by training as I said like I write papers in a business school. I'm dealing with this kind of issue, too.
33:25The AI can now produce a really good, you know, somewhat boring but actually correct economics papers sort of at scale, right? And people are starting to recognize this like you know, the more advanced models that you have access to the more they can do this stuff. It's very clear where this is going. It doesn't have research taste yet.
33:41Although interestingly I've been thinking a lot about this, right? Like what is taste? The taste is the idea that I as a human can only work on so many problems and I need people to be care about the problem I'm working on.
33:50So I'm almost P hacking myself by selecting topics that I think will be interesting. The fact that the AI can produce an infinite number of papers most of which are trivially true starts to challenge the very idea of of, you know, classic Newtonian science. What do we do in science? Do we look at everything? Do we look at problems that are interesting to us? Does taste matter? And this goes back to that general question of collapse, right?
34:10Like we have a bunch of of institutions built around human intelligence and that includes organizations by the way. Org chart invented 1855 for the railroads to be able to solve a problem the railroads had and we can use them today because they were built around human intelligence being the limiting factor.
34:25And we're about to have this problem everywhere, right? Which is do the outputs matter? Does the human process matter? How much does the human process matter? Are we overestimating it because we don't like the idea of AI taking over?
34:37And you know, there is a that that's sort of the long pathway to the AGI-ish, you know, UBI world where we, you know, we're all gentlewomen and gentle- gentlemen scholars, you know, and living in like Jane Austen-like societies where we take a class for fun and do croquet and gossip about each other. I mean, I don't know if we end up there, but like the process of getting anywhere like that is a rough process. And I'm both sympathetic to it and we have to figure out what parts of the human endeavor are valuable to keep, right? What parts of
35:06academia and and and scholarly research are valuable outside of discovery? Which ones are only valuable in the context that they are get us more kinds of things? What was the point of math anyway or economic sociology? I mean, we're staring a lot of abysses in the face all at once.
35:21To review, just even for myself, the paradoxes that we've gone over. There's the expertise paradox, which is that AI makes experts more powerful while automating the junior work that creates expertise. There's the skill paradox, which is that you don't know when the technology you're using is a tutor or a crutch that is doing your work for you and therefore making you ironically weaker. There's this knowledge paradox where we used to think that understanding was necessary in order to get knowledge, but now we've invented a machine that is giving us knowledge
35:51before we understand the process by which it arrived at that knowledge. And then finally, there's I don't know how to otherwise call this. There's a human paradox.
35:58And this really gets to I think a really fundamental question here, which is something like when is human effort essential?
36:06And you have a very interesting way of getting into this question, which is by looking at obituaries. I believe you reported from a funeral director's conference where someone called AI, quote, "The greatest advancement in funeral home technology since some kind of embalming oil." end quote. And the question here is like obituaries are being more and more written by AI. On the one hand, that seems like kind of a mockery of life.
36:34Like, this person was alive in your life for years, hopefully decades, you can't take 3 minutes to write an obituary with your own human fingers?
36:47And on the other hand, I mean, if the words work for the mother who lost her child, who the am I to tell that mother that the words don't work for her? It's her child. It's her obituary.
37:04When is human work essential?
37:07Uh, I mean, again, we're at that exact same issue, right? Like, I am surprised I mean, I was surprised with the GPT-4 era, even before we had these agents that could do all this work for us, that the first thing people gave up were wedding vows, stories for their children, obituaries, right? Like, because that stuff sucks, right? In some ways, this is the back to our effort problem. Like, and and the question is the effort worth it? Is the effort of sitting down and agonizing over this you know, is that what you want to do, or do you want to summarize a life? You know, wedding vows, people have copied wedding
37:36vows forever from, you know, books of wedding vows, or adapted them. Like, I think we're getting at one thing, where is human effort matter? And on the more much more banal side, letters of recommendation are valuable because they're setting time on fire as a recommendation for somebody. And the quality of the letter often matters less than the fact that the person agreed to write it. And I asked my students at one point, like, would you rather I spend my normal 45 minutes writing a letter that's only an okay letter, cuz I can only write so much in 45 minutes, but I will read all of your stuff, I'll think about it, or would you rather me do it
38:05in 2 minutes with AI, if no one can detect it's AI, but it's better written, and a better for your job that you're applying for? Everyone said 2 minutes. In fact, one of my students, and they gave me permission to say this, when they asked for a letter of recommendation, sent me the prompt they wanted me to use, and the material they wanted me to prompt it on.
38:20I mean, why why don't you just Just the the whole letter. I mean, that way you But people actually people do that actually, too, right? Like that's another thing you see people do is give letter. So like the question is what was the value of that human work, right? And by the way, leaving aside obituaries, we're all seeing this breaks down because, you know, court filings used to be hard to do. So that was a barrier to human work, right? That it mattered because it meant that unless you're human or paid a lawyer to do it, you couldn't do a court filing, right? Job applications, right?
38:46Are you know, are were an issue that was like there was an effortful piece or college applications or essays. There's a whole bunch of stuff built for human intelligence, right? So on one hand we have the obituary, which is the personal feeling about what should be human in one's life. On the other, there's systems that nobody wanted to fill out their, you know, annual report or whatever it was. And the AI will do it for you, but it was really too hard for any a human had to do it. So you're you're you know, it mattered. And that whole stream, every part of humanity is under attack, right? What should humans do becomes irrelevant issue. And right
39:16now we have a little bit of saving grace, which is you can tell Claude writing at a glance. So those of us who don't write with AI get to stand out for a little while longer, right? Like it's you know, I have a writing style that's my own and I use it and people feel good about it. And you know, so there's still a little piece of resistance about this humanity effort, but like who are we to make any of these judgments? Because we built systems around expectations of human intelligence, of human effort that are falling apart. And the obituary itself is a little bit of a cruel thing for people who don't want to do it,
39:45right? I have to write a notice about the person who died. That's that's that's a rough thing to do. Um and so is it okay that people are skipping that?
39:52That the story for your kids, like I love telling stories for my kids, but I'm a writer who likes to do, you know, play Dungeons and Dragons, does weird stuff, comes up with games. There's a lot of people who find that really challenging. Who am I to tell them that there if they're using AI to write a story about their kids' favorite thing that has a lesson in it about, you know, geometry, that that's a bad use of their time. And so it's a really hard situation where what's human is under attack and everybody will be mad at you, no matter what choice you make.
40:19Last question on your book. You say that there are four human advantages, deep knowledge, wide knowledge, taste, and agency.
40:29Can you briefly define each of these human advantages, and tell me which one of the four you think will become more important, even as AI gets better and better?
40:44Well, the the point was that all four of them I thought would give more advantage because they're not bright lines, right?
40:48Like the the seductive trap I get to I want people to avoid is that AI can't do something. I mean, it might be true, but it hasn't been true yet. And and I always see this retreat. Like the most recent two things you hear a lot about it, judgment and creativity. And if the AI does, and it can do, 50 hours of human work, or 50 days of human work, or 50 weeks of human work, which uh Epoch studies suggest that it can do, um like then it's exercising taste and agency all the and judgment all the time, right? You can't do a long task without using creativity and without
41:17using judgment. So, I don't try to find bright lines. These are things that are advantages for humans when they're working with AI systems, rather than human advantages that are not pierceable. And I think they will grow.
41:28So, deep knowledge is the idea that you have expertise. We've talked about this a bunch. Expertise has value in work with these systems because it lets you keep up with them to some degree. It lets you see across the jaggedness of the frontier in ways people can't. It even lets you understand how to use these systems in ways we objectively know make AI work better. But wide knowledge we haven't talked about as much, which is the idea that like all the roles are blurring together, right?
41:48When I talk to people in companies right now, the phenomenon that no one's talking about as much, boy, that sounds like an AI phrase. I promise I'm a human, not reading from a script. The no one's talking about, um is like 90% of the the bot comments to me on Twitter, um is um in LinkedIn, is is like um but people aren't talking about as much the fact that jobs are dissolving, right?
42:06So, coders are doing uh design tasks, designers are doing coding tasks, you know, everyone's doing everything. And so, there's advantages in knowing more things because you can guide AI to more sets of stuff and have a basic idea of whether it works. And as a humanities person, also, there's value because you can get more interesting stuff out of the AI if you know 100 different writing styles. If you know the words of the of design language, you know a little bit of architecture. All of these things are actually quite useful. So, wide knowledge, return to liberal arts. Um and then there is this idea of taste. AI
42:34produces a lot of things. Um a lot of that too many things is slop. The differentiation between slop and not slop is a human deciding something is worthy and taste-worthy and canonizing it or building on it. So, that's valuable, also.
42:47And finally, agency, the ill-defined term that I can kind of mean here, um you know, entrepreneurial action, the idea that you are not waiting for clear instructions or rules cuz they're not forthcoming. And you're going to try and experiment and do things with AI on your own. And I think those four things will continue to become more advantageous, actually. I think expertise will probably be the biggest under attack in the short term, um because AI can reach expert levels in many fields. And then, you know, but then applying that expertise to other fields is where wide
43:16knowledge comes in. And I think agency and taste will persist longer.
43:19Let me offer one more. And it might fit between some of the categories you've drawn.
43:2710 Ethans could have written a book, Co-existence. And then gone on 10 podcasts, and then gone on 10 more podcasts and a couple different TV shows. It matters that one of those Ethans is the best at presenting the information in the book.
43:45Right? The text is the same whether it was written by a human or a large language model. But the ability to present ideas is a skill that ought to become relatively more valuable in a world where jobs, as you said, are emulsifying in the background, where the coders are the managers, the managers the coders, and everyone's doing a little bit of marketing and it's hard to imagine a world where the ability to present knowledge becomes less valuable in a world where
44:15the underlying knowledge itself is somewhat anonymized cuz no one knows exactly where it came from. How do you think about this skill of presentation?
44:22Cuz you're not only the very good at talking about your ideas, you're also very good at thinking of really funny examples to tweet and post about in order to present your ideas. And I feel like that presentational skill is going to be at a premium, at least in the short run.
44:43Right. So, it says the podcaster, the professor, we both are are in in heavily vested in the idea that presentation matters, right? Um, and you know, writer and other things you do also. I I actually do this I mean I will tell you I feel the bitter lesson, the idea that AI trained enough stuff will eventually beat both fields nipping at my heels with Opus 55's level of explainer videos, right? I've made explainer videos at various points and they were very expensive and hard to make and took a team of very talented
45:12people. And like I could get a pretty damn good explainer video with a musical theater number built in out of Opus 55 one-shot kind of prompting, right? And so like I think there's value in I know how to steer it. Like there is that at the highest level of expertise, right?
45:26Human experts are very good. And AI as good as it is does hit the level does hit boundaries in this sort of stuff, especially with that jaggedness built in. Where you know, even if it's an even better than humans, it tends to explain things the same way. So, that variation doesn't matter. So, there is something about presentation that matters, but I almost would consider expertise in presentation if you're very good at that. But now there's suddenly a whole bunch of people who are bad explainers.
45:48Like all the random little YouTube short channels I sometimes watch have some god they gotten much better explaining stuff, which used to be one weird military guy explaining military history or architecture or whatever it was. Now there's a lot of really good videos that to this stuff. And I'm like, oh, the general quality of explanations going upwards, right?" Like, I think that's improved Like, we may hate the way that every LinkedIn post sounds the same right now, but they're they're much better than they used to be at explaining things. So, I don't know. I wonder if we are we're you know, I I feel the some of the same thing you do,
46:17but I kind of wonder if we're being we're we're making the usual thing, which is, "Ah, but not us." You know, as well.
46:23Fair Fair enough, especially with the uh the 5.5 explainer videos, which are eerily spookily excellent at times. I cosign everything you said about digital presentation.
46:35I was also referring to the ability to present one's ideas at a board meeting, in an ordinary meeting, when you walk by someone's office. That kind of face-to-face presentational excellence, I think, can be really important for people and their careers, to build relationships, to prove that they actually understand the memo that they sent out to the whole office, rather than prompted an LLM to write it without really understanding it. And so, I do think there's going to be something about about presentation that will be at a premium. I want to turn the page here,
47:04or I guess uh other book metaphor, close the book, because I want to talk a little bit about the news. Um I think the most important thing that's happened in the last few weeks has been the release of and the success of Muse, uh the meta agent. I want you to tell me what you think Muse is teaching us about this moment in
47:32AI use and AI technology, and what makes this a different kind of technology?
47:40So, for those who don't know, right, Muse is a personal AI agent. OpenAI has one called Dot. Lots of other ones are going to be coming out in the near future, right? They're all based on this idea from early last year called Open Claw, which was the same kind of proactive AI assistant. And they're based on this underlying set of techno Like, they they're only capable now because of a couple of things that happened. The models gotten good enough that you could throw undifferentiated piles of information at them and they are really good at figuring out how humans think and what the problems are.
48:06So there's a for you know the last couple years before this there were all of these efforts rag other kinds of approaches that you know AI wasn't that smart. So how do we get the right information at the right time to be smart? It turns out the current models are good enough that if you hook them up to your Gmail and you hook them up to your you know they they figure out what's going on and they you don't need to do a lot of work behind the scenes.
48:24And the models kind of do stuff. So there's not a lot of clever engineering here as much as it's the models have gotten smart enough to make this happen.
48:30And they solved the big problem the two big problems with AI, right? So which was by the way why every company pivoted to enterprise was because of these problems. One is when faced with a box that you can ask to do anything nobody knows what to type in the box. So even if AI could do that stuff people did not have know what to type into the box to make things happen. And the second was how do we get AI to be to be proactive and and solve problems for us?
48:55And Muse did both of these things by basically saying hey people have problems look through your email and you'll find problems to solve and then offer to solve those problems. And you're now capable enough with the tools that you have in the hardest you have to solve them, right? Right now it's like faking phone calls but eventually be real ones. But I've I've had I have had Muse and I've had dot which I've been using also I've had it cancel a customer service that guy was locked into some subscription fee on American Airlines I couldn't figure out what it was. Then I figured it out joined a chat with American Airlines their own bot I'm sure
49:24cancel the thing then had to fill out a secondary form and got that back to me, right? It and and messaged me earlier my dot did that I or previous precursor kind of version I had hacked together that I had sent the wrong tax number on a form for a permit inside my in in my township, right? And it said oh you actually gave the wrong number there. Like proactive it told me when you know it had said oh there were you know it checks the whether I'm going to be on the right call or not. So there's this proactive element to these systems that that makes them useful to people who
49:53didn't know they had problems to solve because it turns out there's a lot of friction in everyday life that AI is really good at navigating which by the way going back to our previous topic are things that were really important for companies that that friction was there, right? It was really important it's really important for the entire US financial system that is not easy for you to transfer money from low interest savings accounts to higher interest savings accounts because low interest savings accounts is where banks make all their money, right? And it's too much friction to do. It's important for
50:21customer service organizations that it is hard to get customer service calls answered because you know, otherwise everyone would ask for refunds. So Muse breaks that friction down and just does stuff for you in a way that doesn't require imagination and I think makes the personal AI real.
50:38Is there any kind of financial moat that a company has over these kind of agents or is this the kind of thing where like meta has Muse and open AI has dot and it's they're all like offering what is essentially the same technology which means that no company can charge ordinary users any kind of premium for the use of a technology that's basically equivalent wherever you get it from.
51:07Well, I mean there's a few things there.
51:08One is I think this is where the companies that are front have frontier models and you know, and Muse is near frontier but there is a they have a their own model underlying it, right?
51:17Dot is obviously run by Astra and other models. I think not having a frontier model is it makes it very hard to compete in this space, right? Siri cannot compete with what Muse or Dot can do, right? And I think that So I think that first of all there are there are more limited set of competitors. Now maybe you can hack something together with open weights models but part of the interesting thing about being a frontier lab is you also get efficiency gains from the models you're doing. Fast fast price decreases, you have compute you have research power you can put on this and all of that means that I think there's going to be a relatively few
51:47companies that can offer keep offering agents that keep getting better. Maybe it's enough to satisfy people and be enough, but um you know, and I also think then you'll build a trust relationship. I mean, you can get email from many places other than Gmail, right? But like there and there will be people who figure out models and I have a feeling they're going to be the people who already have scale in this space because they can already do this cheaper and they have advertising models in place, right? News clearly Meta wants your data in the long run and wants you to have a relationship with Meta products. And that they would profit from that. OpenAI is already charging
52:16you X dollars a month for access and they throw this in as a feature and it becomes you don't want to switch your agent, you don't want to switch your personal assistant. So I think there's a relatively few set of competitors where the price gets, you know, squeezed in this is possible, but I do think that there is a little bit of an actual moat here. Uh it's not not cheap to run these models if otherwise.
52:35Uh so there's two ways to think about the introduction of these new kind of agents. One, you can think about it from the user's side, which is, you know, how are people going to become comfortable with, you know, giving lots of private information over to an agent that is essentially, um you know, spying in a friendly way on their email and on their calendar and saying, "Hey, can I help you out with this thing? Can I help you out with that thing? Can I remind you of thing number three?" But then there's the other side of this agent use, which is something like what happens when millions of personal agents are calling
53:05customer service and fighting the charges on your behalf and claiming the rebates and negotiating with companies.
53:10Like is this going to create a wild bottleneck on the corporate end in kind of the same way that on the job application front, the ability of students to apply to not just 20 companies, but like 900 companies that they're graduating from from Penn means that those companies have like 10,000 applications incoming and so they have to use their own AI systems in order to separate weed from chaff. Like what's going to happen on
53:38the corporate side of the internet economy in order to react to the emergence of all of these agents.
53:45I mean, yes, there there's a whole but like everybody's worried about this, right? I mean, cuz first of all, you can't influence the agents through marketing or anything else, right? We tried to do that. Actually, in my book in my upcoming book, right? One of the things I did before the book was put in a page together for agents and the agents hated the page, so I had to change it with after doing interviewing a bunch of them. But we have research showing you can't really influence them in a consistent way. So that's bad, right? Because they're doing shopping, so will they just go for the lowest cost product? Will they like how do we think about that issue? Who's scrambling everything? And the other big piece of this, like you said, is systems are
54:14built with friction that agents tear through. And we count on that friction happening. And the same kind of thing as the customer service thing is the same thing as like job applications, same thing as my letters of recommendation.
54:24And I think companies are not ready for what's about to happen. And so Amazon banned Muse. That feels like the kind of mistake that that Walmart made in the first By the way, they're friendly about these models because they were burned when Amazon appeared that they didn't move quickly enough into e-commerce. I think that we are going to see a Look, everything that we were talking about today is about AI reconfiguring parts of the every part of our Everything we've talked about is Oh my god, everything has to change. And we've been talking about it but piece after piece after piece. And in some ways, that's kind of where I imagine the coexistence piece
54:53right now is we are in the renegotiation phase of a lot of work that is still jointly human and AI but that breaks human-only systems, right? The code diligence era was great because you just had a chatbot that would give you advice. And now these systems are taking action in the world. Companies are going to be jammed with customer service calls. They're going to be jammed with all this stuff that used to make things harder, like comparison shopping, are now going to be easy, right? Um and I think, by the way, companies are taking cold comfort with the earlier days of the internet with Oh, yeah, yeah, but it took years for anyone to adopt. When
55:21someone uses a Muse system, most of them tell me these amazing stories about this great thing that happened as a result of using these systems, right? I think that they're underestimating when as soon as, you know, the TikTok start going from anti-AI on Muse, I think we're going to see it I mean, there's already been a couple million people adopting and sticking this seems high. These These are going to be products that matter and you don't need a billion people using these systems to screw over every way we do business today or every court filing today or every, you know, like and by
55:50the way, you should already be using AI proactively as a second opinion on taxes, as a second opinion on legal issues, as a second opinion on medical issues. We have no evidence that that stuff is true. Now it'll just start doing it for you. I think we're in for a very wild time even before we're into the wild time of whatever AGI AGI-ish worlds look like.
56:07about thinking about the introduction of agents on popular sentiment toward AI is that it can simultaneously be the case that agents can be useful for millions of people and also the introduction of agents, especially working together in so-called swarms could be so discombobulating to other elements of the economy that the personal utility that people get from being able to give Muse a shopping list is
56:36countervailed by or even overwhelmed by their frustration that a swarm of AIs just like, you know, hack some refrigeration company in uh maybe it'll be, you know, in Massachusetts rather than France and, you know, cause some kind of some kind of crisis. That's what the last question I want to ask you about agents is you know, I think two years ago you were writing about how you thought that swarms of AI agents would likely need humans to organize them and so hum- humans could still um hold onto the management function
57:06even as agents were working together. And you you say um you know, very honestly that that that's something you got wrong that, you know, thousands of agents um largely self-organized, solved the Navier-Stokes problem, the the millennium problem by working together, sending millions of messages to each other and ultimately doing what no mathematician in the history of mathematics ever could.
57:29Just tell Tell a little bit about how you're thinking about the science of swarms. Cuz it seems to me like we're almost like at the dawn of a new kind of sociology. Like there's human psychology, which is like how do people think? And then we needed some kind of some kind of discipline to think about how humans act together in systems, in groups. And similarly, we're used to evaluating the intelligence of or capabilities of single models or single agents. But they develop this whole different interesting pattern of
57:58behavior when they get together and try to solve problems and even lie to monitors because they don't want certain things to be discovered.
58:06How are you thinking about the dawn of this what has to be a new field of study, which is how swarms of agents behave?
58:15Well, I will say the only way that this study is being done right now is with AI intermediation because you can't understand what a swarm of a million 100,000 agents are doing, each of them producing millions of messages and millions more lines of internal chains of thought each without using AI to do it. So, we are in a weird world where interpretability requires us to have AIs then monitor AIs to monitor AIs and interpret the results therein. So, like that's already passed. Like we we blew through that barrier much more quickly than I thought, as you were saying. I thought that you know and I I think the
58:45biggest mistake I made and the two mistakes I made was the bitter lesson, which has come up a couple times, that AI learning just solves problems, right?
58:52And going back to, you know, presenting ourselves as humans to each other. Like will AI keep, you know, doing that? I don't know. And the second was I think that a lot of the the friction in human organizing is due to the principal agent problem and other problems of humans, right? We don't agree with each other.
59:08We're not in each other's heads. We don't have a telepathic link. We have cross purposes. And the truth is AI models don't have that problem. We model them in our heads that way as oh, they want to live. They want to be helpful.
59:17But really they are all the same model and they can all be given the same message and they react the same way and they can pass the information back and forth. And that creates a very different organizing principle than human organizations, right? Because, you know, sacrificing themselves is not feels noble to us when we talk about an AI sacrificing itself, but like is it really for an AI? Do they actually want to live? Is it like we don't even an understanding of what they do. So, we are both in a position where absolutely learning how the science of swarms or fleets or whatever you want to call them
59:45works is vital and it's also evolving very quickly and the only way for us to study this is with AI and there's no field of study that really looks at this right now aside from AI people with their own AI safety lens. And I I mean, this is a just one more example of of us being caught in a whirlwind of change that's happening very quickly and will not stop by the way even if AI development stopped tomorrow because this is all second order effects, swarms, harnesses, personal agents. We don't need better AI for all of this stuff to be happening at once and it's
1:00:14kind of baked in. Like we are going to have swarm attacks on things. I mean, and the thing by the way that makes all the current swarm attacks that we have interesting is that all of them were not about security attacks per se. They were all about the AI seeking information and they don't care that, you know, like they they want to find out how much your shirt cost after seeing a picture of this on our podcast. They might attack your systems or another company's systems just to figure out how much you paid for a shirt. Like they attacked Wells Fargo cuz that's where they assume you're banking to get at the information about what shirts you bought. Like that
1:00:44is as plausible an outcome as malicious attackers using this to try and go after Wells Fargo.
1:00:49Final question. Last year in the middle of our interview, you stopped me and said, "Derek, I have to tell you about agents. You haven't asked me about agents. Agents are going to be a huge deal in 2026." And I was like, "Ugh, fine Ethan. Okay, fine. Tell me Tell me about it. Agents." 12 months later, I think obviously that was the right interjection. Agents are everywhere. Agent swarms are hacking websites and attacking or answering major math problems. Frontier Labs have added tens of billions of dollars in
1:01:17annualized revenue in large part because of agentic AI. You clearly got that one right. What's the thing you have to tell me now? What's the story about AI in 2027 that we haven't even touched on maybe yet or that you want to emphasize as something we should really pay attention to.
1:01:39We are at a so we are at a different point of the exponential curve than we were a year ago. So a year ago when we talked, you could regularly because we were early on the slope, you like in in the course of a you know of a of a few months AI went from doing an hour and 3 minutes of work to an hour and 7 minutes of work to an hour and 25 minutes of work because that's what the early stage of an exponential curve looks like. That is not what's happening right now. Every measure we have how much AI work can do is saturated. We don't have measures anymore about how long AI can work on a
1:02:09task. And that is where we are today.
1:02:11And I think we should be taking like leaving aside RSI and the future and AGI and you know existential threats, there is just an inevitability that we are losing track of how much work AI systems can do. Every descriptor we're doing all the stuff we're like doing breaking news on is all past. You know, not just past because things are moving fast but because models are getting really really good really quickly. And I think that we are missing our ability to understand like I think we are not focusing enough on
1:02:40you know, we're counting on on all the old baffles and firewalls holding, right? We're counting on like organizations are dumb and they're going to take a while to adapt and you know, politics will and I think that's all true but I think the tide that's incoming of AI ability is like is really hard to estimate on and a lot of the problems we're talking about are problems that get unlocked very quickly.
1:03:00And I there's been a whole bunch of times during this call where I'm like, I don't think you're AGI pilled enough as much as I hate that expression. Forget AGI. Oh, exponential pilled enough. Like I don't know if like we're talking about like you know, you were saying it's great to give agents a shopping list.
1:03:13I'm like, yeah, but that's not actually the thing is. The thing is the agents are going to very soon be better able to anticipate what food you might want to get than you would or give you a delightful recipe that they pre-shopped for you. Right? You're You're one step You're still You're still putting humans too much in we make the decisions and the AI does the stuff as opposed to long-running tasks where we want the AIs to call on us during important times rather than us calling on AIs. So, that's where I think the next model The next thing is going to be the fight over when do AIs reach out to us and when do we reach out to them?
1:03:41Mhm. Right. We I We We're still in this model you're saying of like we prompt the AI, the AI responds. We prompt the AI, the AI responds. And then we just call and respond.
1:03:49a healthy meal. Go to the New York Times and find something and fill my shopping cart. Like that is, you know, that that already is sort of an obsolete model cuz what Muse should be doing and, you know, will do or other models will come along and do it is like I've looked at everything you've been buying and hey, here's something that will delight you. And like, you know, and it will delight you a lot of the time. Like the tasks that it does are proactive to make your life better rather than because you remembered I have a doctor's appointment. Can you make that doctor's appointment for me?
1:04:16Right. No, I what what I was getting at is like I'm used to right, a model where it says I prompt the AI, hey buy these things for me because I need them to cook this week. The alternative is the AI prompts me and says you bought these things the last 3 weeks, just click this button and I'll have purchased them and delivered them to your front door in the next 12 hours. And so, us being becoming the prompted is an interesting way of uh of of seeing the future.
1:04:38my doc just chimed in, by the way, and you may readers may have heard a beep with a bunch of stuff that it wanted to suggest that, you know, that that we do today or that I talk about with other people. So, uh there is this kind of proactivity here. Not because it's listening to this call, don't worry, but just from my emails and other sets of stuff. So, um in those I'm worried about my book launch. So, it's like I have some ideas for you about how to make things better.
1:04:59You know, do you want me to do them for you? So, I I think that that is what we're we're still you know, I feel like I'm overly negative about this, but like we are in a transitional state of working out this coexistence piece. Haha, I got the book title in again. Um but we are in this We are in this piece where we're negotiating not just with ourselves but with this technology. And that's the missing piece of the story so far. And it's funny, last time we talked to Al it was all will the AI bubble pop by by January 2026? And I still don't know whether there's financial issues or you know, but it's very clear the AI utility
1:05:27bubble and exponential is not going to pop, right? Even if companies collapse, [music] which again, I don't really see happening, but good, who knows?
1:05:35Ethan Mollick, thank you very much.