Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…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. There's a couple of threads I want to follow there. One is people hear this, there's a lot of headlines around this. Most people probably don't actually feel this yet or see this happening and so there's always this, I guess, I don't know, maybe, but I don't know it's hard to believe, my job seems fine. Nothing's changed. What are you seeing just happening today already that you think people don't see or misunderstand in terms of the impact AI is having on jobs? I think part of this is that people are really bad at modeling exponential progress. And if you look at an exponential on a graph, it looks flat and almost zero at the beginning of it, and then suddenly you hit the knee of the curve and things are changing real fast and then it goes vertical. That's the plot that we've been on for a long time. I guess I started feeling it in 2019 maybe when GPT-2 came out and I was like, "Oh, this is how we're going to get to AGI." But I think that was pretty early compared to a lot of people where when they saw ChatGPT, they were like, "Wow, something is different and changing." And so I guess I wouldn't expect widespread transformation in a lot of parts of society, and I would expect this skepticism reaction. I think it's very reasonable and it's exactly what is the standard linear view of progress. But I guess to cite a couple of areas where I think things are changing quite quickly. In customer service we're seeing with things like Fin and Intercom, they're a great partner of ours, 82% customer service resolution rates automatically without a human involved. And in terms of software engineering, our Claude Code team, like 95% of the code is written by Claude. But I think a different way to phrase that is that we write 10X more code or 20X more code, and so a much, much smaller team can just be much, much more impactful. And similarly for the customer service, yes, you can phrase it as 82% customer service resolution rates, but that nets out in the humans doing those tasks, able to focus on the harder parts of those tasks. And for the more tricky situations that in a normal world like five years ago, they would've had to just drop those tickets because it was too much effort for them to actually go do the investigation. There were too many other tickets for them to worry about. I think in the immediate term, there will be a massive expansion of the pie and the amount of labor that people can do. I've never met a hiring manager at a growth company and heard them say, "I don't want to hire more people." That's the hopeful version of it. But with things that are lower skill jobs or less headroom on how good they can be, I think there will be a lot of displacement. It is just something we as a society need to get ahead of and work on.…

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