The End of Work: Why your kids won't have careers in 15 years

0:00 I'm very focused now on the societal implications of AI. Um I spent the last several years, you know, I was back at Google and, you know, a lot of the last 15 years have been involved in AI and the technology and how quickly it is gathering steam, how much more advanced it's getting, how much more advanced it will be in the next decade, that is something which is going to be wildly more devastating than any of the consequences of the mismanaged technologies of the last 15 years. And the consequences will crash-land on societies all over the world. We are not prepared for these things at all. Economically, societally, geopolitically, environmentally. And that's the agenda that I'm really focused on. The tech industry has massively distorted the agenda for how to manage these things. We talk about AI

0:46 governance. There's a whole bunch of stuff which is about how you manage the AI systems themselves. That's like 1% of the problem. 15 years from now, probably less than 15 years, when a lot of people have lost their jobs to AI, and we have no economic solutions, we have no idea how to give people a good quality life, that is a much, much bigger problem than some of the technical issues we're facing with those systems. What happens when AI turbocharge industries consume wildly more resources and they destabilize already reeling ecosystems which we know are hanging by a thread and which will impact the lives of millions if not billions of people. Um between 2018 and 2023, the world consumed almost as much resources as 1/3 of the 20th century. And it's accelerating all the time.

1:33 And these are these are things where in fact, you know, big tech companies, they go to government who are desperate for economic growth now, right? A lot of the advanced economies in the global north, they've got plateauing growth, they've got declining living standards. They go to them and say, "Build this wonder technology. Build this infrastructure. We will give you back the keys to a good future." And of course, that's not happening. Um this is something which on the present path promises to enrich a tiny sliver of societies, mostly in the United States, mostly in China. And I think the world we're going to end up in, you know, in the next, you know, 10, 15 years is going to be much more unstable than today with rapidly declining living standards for hundreds of millions of people. I think a lot of graduates will not be able to get uh good jobs at all. People who did a whole bunch of things in their lives and were

2:19 told if they did these things right, they would get a good life and their kids would have better lives than them. That is not going to happen at all on the path we're on. And so, is the tech industry going to solve these things? No. And in fact, they've they have tried to minimize debate about these things. They've tried to point people back towards the technical solutions. Now, it is a moment in which societies and our leaders need to have a mainstream conversation about what the heck we're going to do to manage all of those effects. And that cannot be left up to the tech industry. But now we're in a situation where like you said earlier in the conversation, the world affected tech and now tech is affecting the world. Right? In the lead-up to, you know, some of the elections happening in the US, the tech giants have put together some

3:06 of the most insane like amounts for for for um political campaigns. They're going after every single politician who is proposing any type of restraint or constraint on um AI. And whether we like it or not, you know, money shapes a lot of uh an election. So, you have the tech industry fighting to define how it should be managed or it should be governed. And the people who are going to govern it being funded by them, it seems like a an infinite loop that's that's for the most part already lost unless something big breaks, as we've seen, you know, in the past. It's only when something big breaks that that something changes dramatically. I mean,

3:51 I I don't think we should be under any illusions. The most likely path we're on, the one we are on right now, leads to disaster for our societies and all societies globally. I actually don't think anyone gets out of this thing. I have spent the last, you know, 6 months traveling the world talking to leaders and, you know, a whole bunch of people behind closed doors where you have some really, you know, spine-tingling conversations. And there's a there's a strain of opinion, mostly in the US and China, which thinks we can just win the this race for AI and yeah, a bunch of other people will get screwed, but we'll be okay. And that's not going to happen when of course you have societies all over the world that are going to be in chaos. No one gets out of this thing in one piece. But uh we're in a moment now where I think actually a lot of people across societies, you know, who are

4:37 paying a bit of attention, they're seeing things are failing on any number of fronts. >> Yeah. You know, you look at all the polling. Why is it the overwhelming majority of societies in almost all the world say things are generally going in the wrong direction? People are angry. They realize that, you know, there aren't new answers. There is no vision coming from the top anymore. And in that context, you then have big tech racing to install these systems where people are now really worried about their jobs. You know, there's a lot of polling showing that the number one thing that gets people, you know, panicked about AI, which explains why it is in fact incredibly unpopular with societies, is because they're worried about their future jobs. Um so, this is something where I think actually there's a lot of people who already are looking for a very different approach to how you manage these things. Um the debate has not shifted there yet

5:22 because I think a lot of people don't understand the scale of what might happen, the speed at which this will unfold, and how interconnected all these agendas are. When people really do understand that the technologies that might give you your amazing apps on your phone also might be things that destroy the prospect of your kids having future jobs and also will threaten, you know, natural ecosystems, then it becomes a very different um agenda. >> [music]