Lenny Rachitsky: prediction

Transcript context

…Yeah. So I think the real impact of AI in the next 5 to 10 years really is going to be in farming, in mining, in construction and self-driving trucks. That's where you're going to have a real impact. Though I think... I mean, I love this stuff that's happening on these platforms, but it's still segregated to frankly developers and a very, very small part of society. I wasn't planning to spend so much time here, but this is extremely interesting. And I think it's important for people to hear from folks like you about where things are heading, because as I said, everyone's just like, "What is happening? What is going to be my future? " The jobs piece is really interesting. And a thread that has emerged on this podcast recently is that people are afraid AI will take their jobs, but in reality, AI is coming just in time to save us because populations are declining, people are aging, and we need something to help us there. I know this is something you... And this is something Marc talked about and you're really close with him. Help us feel better about just how AI isn't going to take our jobs and actually going to save us. Yeah. I think honestly speaking, these industries, they need autonomy and it couldn't come soon enough, frankly speaking. This is not like people are not fighting for those trucking jobs. If you look at farmers, the average age of a farmer is in their late 50s, 58 or so. What does that mean in 10 years from now? That means many of those farmers are going to be retiring if they're not already retired, and 20 years we have even a bigger problem. That, by the way, is every verticals like that. And my hypothesis here, sometimes people say McDonald's can't hire or the mine and local quarry can't hire, and where are all the people? The people are still here. I think just the trade off is just not worth it anymore. In the 1980s and the 1990s, doing the long haul trucking job was what the family has to sacrifice, the father not being there for days and weeks on end. And today, that same working class family can make that decision and say, "You know what? I will drive for Uber or DoorDash and I'm willing to do that because I can turn that app off and pick up my kid and I prioritize that." That is where I think this kind of intelligence kind of revolution in the real world is really, I think, is going to fill those gaps in rather than an entire industry is suddenly gone and it's just automated. I don't believe that future, mainly because the realities of actually replacing an entire industry's robots is still, that's too complex. One day it will happen, but it's not happening anytime soon. But the entire society will be different by that point. And I think, again, use the Industrial Revolution as a good version of that. The earlier question, if I'm somebody who is not in the AI ecosystem and I have this anxiety, and how would I deal with it? Reading history books is a great way to really understand how society deals with this. And there's a lot of literature because industrial revolution doesn't happen like in the dawn of Christianity where not many people are writing and not many people are reading. Lots of people are writing, lots of people are reading in the last 150 years. And you can read both the people who are impacted by the Industrial Revolution, people who are benefiting from it. And writ large, it's a very positive experience. And that doesn't mean... Again, there are downsides. We should mitigate the downsides. But the thing that we can't do, and this is maybe specifically as America or society, as the global population as a whole, there's this impetus to say, "We got to pump this break on..." Again, don't say AI, say technology, pump this break on technology. The issue then is the American economy really ends up stuttering, and that impacts the lowest end of the labor market way more than anybody else. And so in the attempt to help the people who are the most marginalized, we actually hurt them the most. And the statistics between Europe and America are pretty explicit.…

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