Lex Fridman: uncertainty

Transcript context

…And the reason for that, Lex, and you know, as you’re saying for the audience, I think the goal of, the goal of specification, the artistry of specification, the goal and the artistry of it is going to depend on what problem you’re trying to solve. When I’m thinking, when I’m thinking about giving the company strategies and formulating corporate directions and things that we should do, I describe it at a level that is sufficiently specific that people generally understand the direction and it’s actionable. It’s specific enough that they can take action on it, but I under-specify it on purpose, so that enables 43,000 amazing people to make it even better than I imagined. And so when I’m working with engineers and when I’m working with people, I think about who, what problem am I trying to solve? Who am I working with? And the level of specification, the level of architecture definition relates to that. And so everybody’s going to have to learn how, where in the spectrum of coding they want to be. Writing a specification is coding. And so you might decide to be quite prescriptive because there’s a very specific outcome you’re looking for. You might decide that, you know, this is an area you want to be much more exploratory, and so you might under-specify and enable you to go back and forth with the AI to even push your own boundaries of creativity. And so this artistry of where you are in the spectrum, this is the future of coding. But just to linger on it outside of coding, I think a lot of people, rightfully so, are worried about their jobs, have a lot of anxiety about their jobs, especially in the white-collar sector. I don’t think any of us know what to do with tumultuous times that always come when automations and new technology arrives. And I just… First of all, I think we all need to have compassion and the responsibility to feel sort of the burden of what the actual suffering feels like for individual people and families that lose their job. I think whenever you have transformative technology like that’s coming with artificial intelligence, there’s going to be a lot of pain, and I don’t know what to do about that pain. Hopefully, it creates much more opportunities for those same people for the same kind of job as the tooling evolves and makes them more productive and makes them more fun, hopefully, as it does in the programming. I have been having so much fun programming, I have to say. Like, I’ve never had this much fun. So hopefully it makes their job, automates the boring parts and makes the creative parts the ones that the human beings are responsible for. But still there’s going to be a lot of pain and suffering. So my first recommendation before… And this is now how I deal with anxiety. In fact, we just talked about it earlier. Enormous anxiety about the future, enormous anxiety about the pressure, enormous anxiety about uncertainty, I first break it down, and then I’m gonna tell myself, “Okay, there are some things you can do something about, there’s some things you can’t do anything about. But for the stuff that you can do something about, let’s reason, reason about it and let’s go do it.” If we were to hire a new college graduate today, and I have a choice between two, one that has no clue what AI is and one that is expert in using AI, I would hire the one who’s expert in using AI. If I had an accountant, a marketing person, the one that is expert in using AI, supply chain, customer service, a salesperson, business development, a lawyer, I would hire the one who is expert in using AI. And so I would advise that every college student, every teacher should encourage their student to go use AI. Every college student should graduate and be an expert in AI. And everybody, if you’re a carpenter, if you’re an electrician, go use AI. Go see what it can do to transform your current job, elevate yourself. If I were a farmer, I would absolutely use AI. If I were a pharmacist, I would use AI. I wanna see how, what it could do to elevate my job so that I could be the innovator to revolutionize this industry myself. And so that would be the first thing that I would do. And then I would also help them… It is the case that the technology will dislocate and will eliminate many tasks. And because it will automate it, if your job is the task—then you’re very highly going to be disrupted. If your job’s purpose includes you, certain tasks- … then it’s vital that you go learn how to use AI to automate those tasks. And then there’s the world of spectrum in between.…

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