Joel Pearson

Last year, I went to one of the big UN events in Geneva where all the countries come in and talk about sovereign AI and those

pretty much zero mention of societal disruption, of job losses, or any of this.

That sounds wild.

It was all safety, you know, how do you stop it from blowing up a nuclear power plant?

Or what are the guardrails?

Yeah, and they are important.

I don't want to... But I...

I think you can trace all this back to everyone going to advice, this bias of going to getting advice from computer scientists, that they have not realised how big societal disruption is going to be from AI.

Yeah.

And that's why I've sort of, you know, my lab traditionally was neuroscience, but I've kind of shifted and pivoted to now I say this is my full-time job of how do I create awareness to shift the conversation from all the tech and everything around that and the computer science to society and to our quality of life, our jobs and all this.

Yeah, it's amazing.

And you can think about that yet to influence government, to get them to think about it, to expand the scope of these AI safety centers.

because that is what is mattering right now, and it's already happening.

So that's the thing I didn't mention earlier, that the way, in terms of job loss, the way companies are using AI and what these frontier models are actually capable of is a big gap.

So what does that mean?

It means if you could magically freeze AI development right now, we'd still see a couple of years of job disruption.

Yeah, so we have to be careful with, so some people will talk about this in terms of like a renaissance time where we're going to be able to sit back and it's all holiday time, we can all just exercise or sit on the beach or write poetry or just do whatever we want.

The problem with that, it does sound a lot like retirement.

And we know that generally speaking, when people retire, it's really bad for their health, not just mental health, but physical health.

We have other studies showing that those that have purpose to their lives, when you measure the questionnaire, let's say, are less likely to die from all causes by about 140%.