Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
We're heading towards a point where human cognitive labor is effectively negative. Not zero, but even negative. How many years that could actually be far out, like 10 years most? 100 days as of today. We built machines that can substitute for muscles. Now we're building some machines that can substitute for brains. Where do we have left to turn?
Your job will be able to be replicated every single email you've sent, every single thing you've worked on, and it'll be just like you, except for it won't make mistakes, it won't go to sleep, and it's tax deductible.
Chapter 2: How does AI threaten the value of human cognitive labor?
You'll be like, hey, there's Bob. It's a freaking GPU, not Bob anymore.
It's a little bit creepy. But what happens to the human meaning when so much of our perceived worth is derived from our work? Well...
The last few human-only breakthroughs are literally in the next few years, and that's it.
Chapter 3: What happens to our identity when work becomes obsolete?
The current race is a race of power to create machine god that stops all other gods and somehow works for you. I mean, this might be the great filter. Maybe all societies get to this point and they don't get past it. We're only going two ways. Complete destruction or we're going to the world of abundance. It's a coin toss right now. But humans are good enough.
Chapter 4: What are the potential futures shaped by AI?
There's no problem in the universe that we can't solve if we coordinate with common positive stories. This is the last chance. Something else comes, but not what we knew before.
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Know Thyself podcast. Our guest today is a mathematician, a former hedge fund manager and founder of Stability AI, the company behind Stable Diffusion, and now building the Intelligent Internet. He is the author of The Last Economy, which states now less than a thousand days from now, because of the developments in AI technology,
human cognitive labor is going to become economically irrelevant. This has immense implications on every aspect of life. And so we're going to be exploring that and more, such as what happens to human meaning, consciousness, and much more. Ahmad Mustaq, thank you for being here. Thank you for having me.
You said you have been in rooms where the mathematics of human obsolescence has been calculated. That's a trippy statement. Can you unpack that a little bit for me?
Yeah, I think we've all seen the generative AI wave. So when I wrote the book, it was a thousand days since ChatGPT was released. And that was the end of last year. And now I said within a thousand days, 800 as of today, we're heading towards a point whereby human cognitive labor is effectively negative.
We've just reached a point at the start of 2026 when you actually have actually competent intelligence. Like the first chat GPT, where it would hallucinate, it would say all sorts of weird things, to now, when you have Clawed and Clawbot or OpenClaw and other things like that, it's taking over the world. And in these rooms, the discussions are usually, well, how can we increase profits?
How can we have more access as opposed to what really happens to the people? Like, what really happens to the people is usually a question of how do we stop them revolting as opposed to how do we uplift them effectively?
Because most discussions around AGI in particular, artificial general intelligence, that most of the big labs are pushing towards, were around how can we get the most power and control first to make sure nobody else gets it? So there have been very interesting discussions, but very scary ones to say the least.
Yeah, I'm curious to hear how you think just pure competition is driving these considerations as opposed to some sort of nefarious act. Occam's razor would refer to the former. I'm curious what...
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Chapter 5: What can we do to guarantee positive outcomes with AI?
I think we need to have a very public discussion about the data that goes into these models and who they actually reflect and work for. I think we have to have discussions about the governance of that as soon as possible and articulate the positive stories of humanity.
Because right now, I think what's going to happen in the next few years is violence and riots like we've never seen before because large amounts of humanity were displaced. And we're going to a zero-sum versus positive-sum imagining of this.
Chapter 6: How do we change the narrative around AI and societal impact?
Right now, 20% of global GDP is public sector, 10% education, 10% health. More and more AI is being used for war and dividing people than solving the world's problems. How do we change that narrative? How do we get it so that this computation, this resource is used for good rather than that, or at least balancing? Can we?
In such a short amount of time in which it would need to be done?
Yes, we can get together and say, if you're an AI company, you must give a certain amount of compute for social good. And then we can use that compute for social good. Like right now, one of the things we're going to do is we're going to organize all the cancer knowledge in the world, autism knowledge in the world, and make it available to everyone.
That's not going to come top down from governmental force, right? A government can force that. But Historically, does it seem likely?
Chapter 7: What should parents teach their children about AI?
Well, this is the thing. I think it's unlikely until it is, right? Like when you have COVID, when you have the Great Depression, things move. And when you start to see white collar workers be displaced, things move. Like you have certain things like the Teamsters Union for the, what's it, the ports. They froze entire ports and no automation is allowed in American ports.
Whereas SAG-AFRA, I think, had a terrible deal on the AI. They didn't realize what's coming.
Chapter 8: What practical AI tools can individuals start using now?
And so you're going to see a lot of displacement here in LA, for example.
So, I mean, I feel like likely any true transformation societally stems from traumatic events or things needing to get bad to a certain point for people to realize the immensity of the problem. And... That boiling point where water turns into gas, that moment where there is a revolution in paradigms, we're clearly facing a shift in a paradigm.
And is your intuition that it will likely need to probably get worse, shake up some feathers before we wake up to that?
Yeah, I think that people are waking up to it right now. What's the biggest discussion in politics going to be by then? Obviously AI. Because again, the real human impact is there, but who's judging that human impact? Who's speaking on that behalf? People need to articulate a move. Right now, people in their jobs, like AI doesn't have skin in the game, as it were.
Nassim Taleb of Black Swan fame has this concept like intellectual yet idiot, right? A lot of our public officials, leading intellectuals, don't have any skin in the game. They don't care. They're intellectual, you idiot, because they have misaligned incentives. AI doesn't care about you. But you can use AI for something you care about. You can use it to make your company better.
You can use it to take an advantage. Or you can use it to mobilize. You can use it to understand stuff better. And so this gives a disproportionate thing where you can actually change policy, where you can solve things within your own community using it. So you go from local to global. And like I said, we're working on the global.
So we have an initiative, for example, called the Sovereign AI Governance Engine with multiple countries, like France. friend Peter Diamandis and I are kind of doing that. We're mapping all the policies of every single country in the world and giving a free system to every government and policymaker that keeps a track of all these massive breakthroughs and makes them understandable.
But we're also going to make that available to every citizen to give feedback to their leaders.
That's huge. That's amazing. It seems like life... has an inherent duality to it that no matter what the innovation, there's almost equal sides, good and bad, that could come from it. And it sounds like individuals like yourself and folks that you're working with are really examining what we can do on the social change side so that...
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