Sholto Douglas: prediction

Transcript context

…That's so tough, right? I don't know, become a podcaster? I feel like that job's still gonna be around. It's funny, because I studied computer science, and in retrospect- at the time, you could've become a software engineer or something. Instead, you became a podcaster, it’s kind of an irresponsible career move, but in retrospect, it's like… It kinda worked out. Just as these guys are getting automated. I get asked this question all the time, and one answer that I like to give is that you should think about the next couple of years as increasing your individual leverage by a huge factor every year. So already software engineers will come up and say, "You know, I'm two times faster," or, "In new languages, I'm five times faster than I was last year. " I expect that trend line to continue, basically, as you go from this model of, "Well, I'm working with some model that's assisting me on my computer, and it's basically a pairing session," to, "I'm managing a small team," through to, "I'm managing a division or a company". Basically, that is targeting a task. And so I think that deep technical knowledge in fields will still matter in four years. It absolutely will. Because you will be in the position of managing dozens- or, your individual management bandwidth will be maxed out by trying to manage teams of AIs. And maybe we end up in a true singularity world where you have AIs managing AIs and this kinda stuff. But I think in a very wide part of the possibility spectrum you are managing enormous, vastly more resources than an individual could command today, and you should be able to solve so many more things with that. That's right, and I think I would emphasize that this is not just cope. Like, it genuinely is a case that these models lack the kind of long-term coherence which is absolutely necessary for making a successful company or… Just, getting a fucking office is kinda complicated, right? So you can just imagine that for sector after sector- the economy is really big, right?…

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