Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. If you are no longer in your 20s, do you remember what that time was like? Do you remember a mix of possibility and panic when it came to your career?
In this talk, technologist Vlad Tenev takes us way back in the history of work and then rockets us forward through the massive tech revolutions that recent generations have lived through one after another. Throughout, he traces one sweeping pattern that might leave us rethinking everything we thought we knew about AI, technology, and the future of work.
Let's take a moment and reflect back upon our lives when we were 20 years old. Think about where you were and the opportunities for work and career that lay in front of you. I'm curious. Tell me, how many of you had a pretty good idea of what you wanted to do for your career? Okay, not too many. How many were overwhelmed by all the options? Okay. I know I felt the same. Well, buckle up.
It's only going to get more overwhelming. When I was 20 years old, I was graduating from Stanford University with a degree in pure mathematics. Nobody had sat me down to tell me that my pure math major wasn't going to be the most desirable qualification for prospective employers. And I probably wouldn't have listened if they did.
So I went off along my default path, a math PhD program at UCLA, buying at least one more year to figure out my career. Now, my first month in graduate school, Lehman Brothers went under, the start of the global financial crisis. Most of my friends, particularly the ones that felt the most secure in their financial careers, found themselves packing up their cubicles out of work.
Some of us wondered whether the economy would recover at all or whether we were in store for another decade-long Great Depression. But amidst the uncertainty, the pessimism, the malaise, really, of that time, some of us found a source of optimism. The iPhone, and in particular, the App Store, came out that very same year, 2008.
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Chapter 2: What historical patterns in job disruption does Vlad Tenev discuss?
I still remember when the SDK, which was the instruction manual for how to build iPhone apps, was released. I was at my parents' house, and I was up all night reading it, learning, trying to understand. I saw an opportunity for a new level playing field. And if you think about it, pretty much everything I've done since then, the company that I created,
my professional career since that point was a product both of the economic malaise but the technological optimism of the time as well. But times have changed. If the questions I'm hearing on the podcast circuit are any indication, the average 20-year-old today also has quite a bit of fear. But this time, emerging technology is not the antidote to that fear. It's the source.
And they're asking themselves, will that career I'm looking at even be around in 10 years? Will humans still be writing computer software? Will we even be writing books? And I think one reason why it feels different this time is because AI, unlike the iPhone, is the first tool that we've built that's capable of leaving the toolbox, and we don't yet know its limits.
A few years ago, I founded another company with the mission to build mathematical superintelligence. That's an artificial intelligence that can reason and solve problems better than any mathematician. You know, when I grew up, I always thought of mathematics as the pinnacle of human intellectual activity. If you could solve math problems, you could do pretty much anything.
So, a superhuman AI at mathematics could potentially be superhuman at everything. And that's a bit of a scary thought. So when you think about that, and I combine that with my day job, which is running a global financial services platform, it's led to me spending a lot of time pondering one very important question. What do we do in a world where the vast majority of today's jobs are gone?
And I want to analyze this question rationally, without fear and hyperbole. One way to do it is to look back through history and see if there's been a time where we faced this type of job disruption before at anything near these levels, and how we as humans have navigated it. I should... say one thing.
I'm a technologist, not a historian, so with that caveat, let's go back in time to a world a 20-year-old would have known very long ago, tens of thousands of years ago, to be more precise. The main occupations of this time, the Paleolithic era, are largely gone. Hunters, gatherers, tool makers, but they didn't disappear overnight.
Instead, they were subdivided into lots of other more specialized jobs. So why don't we move forward to the Neolithic era? Now here, humans have mastered a few new things, farming, keeping livestock, and this was a big transformation. Actually, the invention of these things allowed us to spend more time doing what we consider creative work and less time on pure survival and subsistence.
And this opened up a lot of new jobs. You had artisans like weavers, you had farmers, of course, potters, construction laborers, and these jobs, too, largely all gone. So, in the US today, we should say farmers make up less than 2% of the workforce. Let's move ahead through the changing jobs of the Bronze Age.
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Chapter 3: How did the global financial crisis impact career choices?
We really don't know if we're building a super assistant or an apex predator. We don't. And certainly, all change and disruption brings with it a painful transition. Jobs will disappear. Perhaps they'll disappear at an accelerating rate. But at the same time, what we've gone through here is tens of thousands of years of human history, and we see one undeniable trend.
There's going to be new jobs, and lots and lots of them. AI researchers talk about this idea of a singularity, an intelligence explosion. But what we see in the data is that we're also on a curve of rapidly accelerating job creation, which I like to call the job singularity. A Cambrian explosion of not just new jobs, but new job families across every imaginable field.
Where the internet gave people worldwide reach, AI gives them a world-class staff. And so, if you look at this cloud of jobs, certainly there's going to be some jobs that we can't predict yet. But I think we can make some predictions.
There's going to be a flurry of new entrepreneurial activity with micro corporations, solo institutions, and single-person unicorns, which, by the way, I don't think we're very far from. Another defining feature of this job singularity is that when you look into the future, the jobs will not look like real work. Much like to our predecessors, our current jobs would have looked like leisure.
We have people getting paid to play video games, eat at restaurants, travel, and talk to their friends on video. Those last people we call podcast bros. And we take our jobs very seriously.
Those of us that do well certainly wouldn't say it's easy, but if you took someone from the 20th century, when people first started contemplating these problems, and they could peek into our world today, they would think that all of the predictions around technological unemployment came true. They'd say, we don't have any more jobs.
and I bet that we would feel the same about our descendants in the future. So now what? We've shown that there's going to be lots of jobs to choose from, some would argue too many, and that the jobs, along with the flurry of new entrepreneurial activity, will likely look like leisure to us. much like our jobs did to our ancestors.
And I can tell you with near certainty that a humanity that's capable of building a super intelligent AI also has the creativity to navigate through this potential job doom and gloom scenario. Although we'll never stop worrying about it. We'll never stop worrying about it because being hyper vigilant about threats to our survival
is a key part of our survival mechanism, also a key part of evolution, what makes us human. And although it'll take a lot of time to go into what kind of jobs are future-proofed, I can tell you that you shouldn't take predictions about future job disruption to keep you from doing something you feel very passionately about. You know, when I was a kid, in the 90s,
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