Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…I think AGI is kind of a loaded term, and so I tend not to use it very much anymore internally. Instead, I like the term transformative AI because it's less about can it do as much as people do? Can it do literally everything and more about objectively is it causing transformation in society and the economy? A very concrete way of measuring that is the Economic Turing Test. I didn't come up with this, but I really like it. It's this idea that if you contract an agent for a month or three months on a particular job, if you decide to hire that agent and it turns out to be a machine rather than a person, then it's passed the Economic Turing Test for that role. And then you can sort of expand that out in the same way that for measuring purchasing power parity or inflation, there's a basket of goods. You can have a market basket of jobs, and if the agent can pass the Economic Turing Test for 50% of money-weighted jobs, then we have transformative AI and the exact thresholds don't really matter that much, but it's kind of illustrative to say if we pass that threshold, then we would expect massive effects on world GDP increases and societal change and how many people are employed and things like that because societal institutions and organizations are sticky, it's slow to have change, but once these things are possible you know that it's the start of a new era. Along these lines, Dario, your CO recently talked about how AI is going to take a huge part of, I don't know, half of white-collar jobs, that unemployment might go up to something like 20%. I know you're even more vocal and opinionated about just how much impact AI is already having in the workplace that people may not even be realizing. Talk about just what you think people are missing about the impact AI is going to have on jobs and is already having. Yeah, so from an economic standpoint, there's a couple different kinds of unemployment, and one is because the workers just don't have the skills to do the kinds of jobs that the economy needs. And another kind is where those jobs are just completely eliminated, and I think it's going to be actually a combination of these things, but if you just think about 20 years in the future where we're way past the singularity, it's hard for me to imagine that even capitalism will look at all it looks today. If we do our jobs, we will have safe aligned superintelligence, we'll have, as Dario says, in Machines of Love and Grace, a country of geniuses in a data center, and the ability to accelerate positive change in science, technology, education, mathematics, it's going to be amazing. But that also means in a world of abundance where labor is almost free and anything you want to do, you can just ask an expert to do for you, then what do jobs even look like? And so I guess there's this scary transition period from where we are today where people have jobs and capitalism works and the world of 20 years from now where everything is completely different, but part of the reason they call it the singularity is that it's a point beyond which you can't easily forecast what's going to happen. It's just such a fast rate of change and so different that it's hard to even imagine. I guess taking the view from the limit, it's pretty easy to say hopefully we'll have figured it out. And in a world of abundance, maybe the jobs themselves, it's not that scary, and I think making sure that that transition time goes well is pretty important.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.