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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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A master's in computer science from Stanford in 1988 in artificial intelligence. I was a new partner at a law firm called Lomer Cutler and Pickering in Washington during international trade. What did you see in artificial intelligence at the time?
It's an honor to be with you all. I wish I had been a behavioral economist. That was my only real big regret in life. And so what did I see in AI, which is sort of related, what's the nature of intelligence? I think I saw a dream of understanding ourselves and our society a little better. And that was sort of the primary motivator.
I will say that the AI that I studied was the equivalent of the sun goes around the earth field. So we had a fundamental theory in the 1980s that was completely false and didn't work, but we didn't know it at the time. So me and many other people then fled to all kinds of other fields. And it's exciting now to see a new set of techniques really be transformative.
And to Mike's reference on the news this week, you know that I'm enamored with subscription models. And now I've become more aware about tender offers. And I like TV channels. So we're announcing today, Mike, a tender offer for Bloomberg. We hope you will consider it appropriately. Your board members are willing to debate the transaction.
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Chapter 2: What insights does Reed Hastings share about his background in AI?
And we've been the dominant humanoid species for a couple hundred thousand years. And the two of us look down, and we see Homo sapiens. We're like, look at those guys. They're so skinny. They're hairless. What? They're pitiful. But those guys were really intelligent. and ultimately those homo sapiens dominated the Earth and killed off us Neanderthals.
So I would say intelligence per species has been highly selected for and that homo sapiens intelligence has allowed us to become the dominant species on Earth because we use our intelligence to make tools and do other things. So I think it's a lot different than, say, mechanizing muscle power.
So if you think of bulldozers and how did that transform society, it did a lot, but it did it over 100 years. And although muscles are important, they're not the core human attribute, thus the dislocation of the Neanderthals, which were much stronger than humans.
So if AI develops to actually be superintelligence, then it will be a lot more profound, I think, than anything else, and that we will have actually real species threats because the AI will keep getting smarter and smarter and smarter without limit. And natural selection works quite slowly in terms of making humans more intelligent.
So then we have to sort of say, okay, how fast and how, you know, will the computers really think? Obviously, when we all use AI as consumers, we can find, you know, it's pretty miraculous in some cases, but in other cases, it's not very effective. But, you know, we're understanding more and more of the techniques.
And again, one theory is it'll be like Moore's Law and just AI will get better and better and better and better. The other theory is it's sort of like the war on cancer, where cancer developed over a very long time. It has lots of different etiologies. And we keep coming up with a solution for one cancer, but not another.
And our overall progress in society against cancer has been pretty steady, but flat and definitely not exponential.
and so you know it may be that as ai gets better it hits various walls and that we've got some time to deal with it or it may be that it stays on this exponential so we're just going to have to watch but i think we need to be prepared for it to be on the exponential in which case um we're going to have a lot of societal stress over the next 20 years
So your analogy is very helpful, but a little disturbing because I don't see many Neanderthals around anymore, right? We have a lot of homo sapiens. In your analogy, what can we do to make sure that we survive that, that this thing we're creating doesn't become so smart and perhaps not even have our best interests at heart?
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Chapter 3: How does Reed Hastings compare today's AI advancements to past technologies?
And one view is enough of our fellow Americans, it's just too much. and it radicalizes them and they're willing to vote for things they wouldn't normally vote for. And if that's fundamentally what's going on in US society, as well as Brexit and a couple other places, then we're in for a pretty big storm because the rate of change is not gonna slow down.
The rate of change in society, partially or maybe largely driven by AI is gonna be large. And so that may be that, you know, how everyone today is nostalgic for Reagan. You know, there may be a day when we're nostalgic for Trump, that our polarization has really continued to increase because the rate of change has continued to increase.
So that's why I think it's so important that leaders like all of you are thinking about How do we build bonds? How do we have people of Americans care about each other so that we can keep the society coherent and caring despite the rapid amounts of change generated by technology?
I want to come back to something you referred to, which is to explore a bit more, and that is how are we going to pay for it? There is so much money going into data centers investment right now. and to some extent i think it's been supporting the markets because there's been so much investment uh how do you get a return on an investment without laying off an awful lot of people
With GDP growth. So you can either automate away the jobs. That's one theory. And the other is that people will produce more. I'm sure it'll be a mix. But efficiency often generates more growth. I mean, we did the radiology example. So it's sort of that at larger scale.
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Chapter 4: What are the potential societal impacts of generative AI?
So the way we pay for it is more GDP growth.
You can do GDP growth with fewer people. And so what happens to the people who are out of work or have to take much more menial jobs than they had before because it's the knowledge workers?
Well, I think it's a great question. Compare it to globalization. Probably this is a room full of globalists who believe in the benefits of trade. And yet, despite that that really did deliver in terms of the overall economy, there was enough dislocation and enough of the countries that our politics has been shifted. So I think there probably will be things like that
because of AI, but at least it's not, again, it's not a mass layoff scenario, most likely. It's much more likely that there's a growth response and that we also see significant GDP growth increased beyond what we typically see because of the productivity of AI.
What I hear from you is AI has enormous potential, a lot of it for good, some of it for decidedly not good. It's very complicated. It's coming very, very fast. Where will the leadership in directing AI come from? Are there people who understand this, who get it, who have the right values, who can help us go in the right direction, particularly given how fast it's coming?
I would say that's an emerging area. I mean, I think this was likely to be a big political issue in the next couple cycles, because many Americans will be concerned about the world changing too fast and too much, and I think It's up to our politicians to sort of understand that and channel it in some productive way.
There's leaders in the industry like Jeffrey Hinton that spends full time now on these, how do we keep humans at the center of the system? So there definitely are emerging leaders in that way. But again, it's a new area like nuclear energy or other DNA for a long time was very controversial.
Timing is everything. And it comes, the developments you talk about come at a time when there's a decided rise in populism in the United States, as well as in much of the Western world. Right now, the early things I'm hearing, at least about political, from the people is it increases our energy costs and it reduces our jobs. were against it.
And some politicians are showing signs now of trading on that and saying we should be against actually data centers, we should be against them. How do you put together the rise of populism with the likely effects of generative AI?
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