James Manyika

That's a happy story.

Let me describe the less happy end of that complimenting story.

The less happy end of that is when

The machine automates a portion of your work, but the portion that it automates is actually the value added portion of that work.

And what's left over is even more commoditized.

Commoditized in the sense that many, many, many more people can do it.

And therefore, the skill requirements for that actually go down as opposed to go up because the hard part of what you used to do is now being done by a machine.

The danger with that is that that then potentially depresses the wages for that work, even when you're complementing.

So even the complementing story I described earlier isn't always in one direction from a wage effect and its impact.

So all of that to step back is to say the second thing to worry, if the first thing is reskilling, the second thing to worry about are these wage effects.

And then the final thing to worry about are how we think about redesigning work itself and the workflows themselves.

So all of that is to say, even in a world where we have enough work, as in the next few decades, we still are going to have to work these issues.

Now, you were posing a question about what about in the long, long future, because I actually think it's in the long future that we're going to have AGI.

I'm not one who thinks it's as imminent as perhaps others think.

No, I don't have a timeline.

I just think that there are many, many hard problems that we still seem like a long way from... Now, the reason I don't have a timeline is that, hey, we could have a breakthrough happen in the next decade that changes the timeline.

So we haven't figured out how to do causal reasoning.

We haven't figured out how to do what Kahneman called system two activities.

We've solved system one tasks, but we have system... So there's a whole bunch of things that we haven't solved issues of...

how we do higher-level cognition or meta-level cognition.