Introducing Preparing for AI: How we got here and what's coming next

Is this the end of Capitalism?

Welcome to Episode 1 of Preparing for AI, with Matt Cartwright and Jimmy Rhodes.
We are making it our mission to inform and help people prepare for the human and social impacts of AI. Our focus is on the impact on jobs, looking at specific industries each episode. We will dig deep into the barriers to change, the backlash that’s coming and hopefully put forward some ideas for solutions and actions which individuals, organisations and society can take.  And how you as an individual can get ready for what’s coming next.  

Will AI's relentless march towards sophistication render traditional employment obsolete, or will it pave the way for unprecedented collaboration between man and machine? In this first episode we look at the develoments which got us to where we are now as well as some of the changes to the job market which have already happened. We delve into some of the existing examples of AI's prowess—from ChatGPT's conversational finesse to AlphaFold's medical marvels—and debate the delicate balancing act between embracing innovation and mitigating job displacement.

The theoretical musings of universal basic income aren't just fodder for science fiction anymore.  But is it really a Universal thing, or is it really about a National basic income which could increase inequality? We start to explore the complexities of how a society might adapt to an era where work as we know it is profoundly transformed,  necessitating new economic models like UBI. With personal anecdotes and reflections on societal trends, we probe the depths of a future where the redistribution of wealth could redefine our relationship with labor and leisure, offering a glimpse into a world where most of us will have no choice but to find alternative meanings to our lives.

As industry titans sound the alarm for AI regulation, we dissect the unexpected calls for oversight from within the tech sphere itself. Companies like Google and leaders such as Sam Altman are no longer lone voices in the wilderness; they are part of a growing chorus demanding a framework to govern AI's rapid advancement. Without a guest this time, we're setting the stage for a future discussion on text-to-video technologies and their potential to shake up the creative industry. Join us on this revelatory adventure, and gear up for the thought-provoking changes AI promises to bring.

Transcript

Matt Cartwright: 0:03

Welcome to Preparing for AI with Matt Cartwright and Jimmy Rhodes, the podcast which investigates the effects of AI on jobs, one industry at a time. We dig deep into barriers to change the coming backlash and ideas for solutions and actions that individuals and groups can take. We're making it our mission to help you prepare for the human and social impacts of AI.

Matt Cartwright: 0:28

Right then, here we are, jimmy, episode one, preparing for AI.

Jimmy Rhodes: 0:34

Looking forward to it. Yes, fantastic Glad to finally be at this point so.

Matt Cartwright: 0:40

I guess we should probably introduce ourselves. So, jimmy, do you want to go first? Yeah, sure?

Jimmy Rhodes: 0:45

So I'm Jimmy. I'm a software developer, slash data analyst. I've been for around 20 years. I'm really interested in the AI space. Keep up to date with it, as it changes almost daily at the moment.

Matt Cartwright: 0:59

And I'm Matt and I have no background in software. My background is in ops and policy and human resources, so I come at this from the human side, which is why we wanted to do something a little bit different with this podcast. So there are obviously loads of podcasts out there on AI, and why should you listen to us? Well, we're making it our mission to inform and help prepare people for the human and social impacts of AI. So our focus is going to be on the impact on jobs. We're going to look at specific industries each episode and then we're going to dig deep into the barriers to change the backlash that we think is coming and hopefully put forward some positive ideas for solutions and actions which individuals, organizations and society can take. So how can you, as an individual, get ready for it to come in next? Well, we don't pretend we've got all the answers. So get involved with us, subscribe to the pod, share it with your friends, give us a review and, hopefully, leave some comments and join the debate. We want to do it, you know. We want to build a community here and hopefully we can work together with you guys to make a small positive contribution to change.

Matt Cartwright: 2:04

Okay, so this week is kind of episode one, episode zero. We're going to have a general chat here about the current state of AI how we got where to where we are now. Some of the latest developments and particulars are applied to the workplace. So our first industry based episode. So episode one proper. We're going to be looking at the creative industry and how it's going to be impacted by video and creation tools, image creation tools like Sora Dali and mid journey. So that'll be coming soon, next week. But I think we're going to start, jimmy, just give us a kind of timeline for the last couple of years on how the hell we got where we are now.

Jimmy Rhodes: 2:41

Yeah. So I think most people first heard of AI during 2023. It became, you know, a really big news item during 2023. A little bit before that, just going back, the first, the first I heard of anything, you know, game changing in terms of AI was chat GPT, which came out in November. At the end of 2022, basically in November, and I think that was the first time most people like it really became. It really came on people's radar and everyone was like, wow, look at the stuff this can do. A little bit prior to that, in 2022, there was there was some announcements that probably went under the radar a little bit around Dali two and some some things about AI artwork. But, as I say, in 2023, which is only last year, that's where everything really began to happen. As I say, in chat GPT was released. I think people very quickly, quickly, were like you know, look at the stuff that AI can do, look at the stuff that chat GPT can do. You know, you can have a conversation with it almost like you could with a, you can with a, you know, a human.

Jimmy Rhodes: 3:51

And in early 2023, you know, the debate started around how this is going to be used and how this was going to, you know, start upending jobs, start upending things like education, as educators grapple with chat GPT and allowing children to cheat on essays, essentially, and just get chat GPT to do their assignments that kind of thing.

Jimmy Rhodes: 4:15

Some AI tools started to come out to try and combat that, which have been, I think, largely unsuccessful. We saw, we saw during like the middle of 2023. It just evolved rapidly. We saw things like mid journey, which can generate unparalleled quality AI art. There was even some instances where I believe there was an instance where some AI art won a competition during 2023. Then, over the rest of 2023, sort of Google and the competitors to open AI started the AI war really, where tons and tons of money went into AI. You saw things like Lambda and Bard from from Google and from Facebook. Microsoft invested heavily in open AI, which was originally a not for profit organization, but that very quickly changed when money piled in from Microsoft and open AI changed their tack really and started to become much more for profit.

Matt Cartwright: 5:18

Capped profit, as they call themselves right capped profit, which is profit capped at 100 times the initial investment. So you know, if Microsoft are investing 10 million, your capped profit of 100 times is pretty substantial. I think it's clearly not a non for profit anymore. I mean, that's the key thing.

Jimmy Rhodes: 5:38

It's not what it started out as Open AI originally pitched itself as a kind of a bunch of scientists and a not for profit organization and trying to do things that were only for good, really, in the AI space. I'm not necessarily saying they're not doing that now, but they've definitely changed tack. If you fast forward to right now, you've got Sam Altman trying to raise $7 trillion, which is a crazy, ridiculous number. But you know, even if he gets anywhere close to that for AI research, it's kind of more than the GDP of most countries. So definitely not not for profit anymore.

Jimmy Rhodes: 6:14

During 2023, ai assisted work just started to become the norm and, like, what you've got to appreciate is this all happened within one year. The timelines around AI are utterly ridiculous. We've gone from no one heard of AI at the start of 2023 to, I believe you know, with the latest polls so we'll talk a little bit more about this later but software developers went from 20% using AI at the start of 2023 to 70% to 80% at the end of 2023. And it's increasing all the time. So AI assisted work is just becoming normal now. People are using it day in, day out. You know you've got. You've got copywriting tools, coding assistance. You've got image generation for graphic designers Very recently. You've got video generation, which probably isn't used in the workplace yet, but very obviously very quickly will be, and we can see where that's going. So that brings us on to 2024, which is at the moment.

Jimmy Rhodes: 7:16

The kind of battleground is these multimodal models which can effectively do anything. You've got the release of some things like Gemini 1.5, which, and the latest iteration of chat GPT, which you can ask it to code for you. You can ask it to make you a picture, you can have a conversation with it about what kind of picture you're interested in and then it'll generate you a picture. You can create your own custom GPT's which can you can customize to do specific tasks. There's a marketplace around that, so it's early days, but there's a kind of an app marketplace that's evolving around chat GPT, and Google and the likes of Facebook are likely to release similar marketplaces in the near future.

Jimmy Rhodes: 7:56

You've also got open source, so in the open source space you're starting to see some really interesting models now, and the other thing is just the rate of the pace is kind of hard to keep up with. Open source models are getting cheaper and more efficient to run. The chips that AI runs on are getting cheaper and more efficient. All the time. The models and the algorithms that go behind them are getting cheaper and more efficient. So if any of you have heard of Moore's law, then this is even faster.

Jimmy Rhodes: 8:27

Really, everything's accelerating in every domain, basically right now. In fact, in the news this week, I believe, google released something called Genie, which it's very crude at the moment, but we can see where it's going. It can generate 2D platformer games from an image that you feed into it and it can generate an unlimited number of essentially procedurally generated video games. And again, it's very crude right now, but who knows in a year's time where that's going to be. I think, based on the progress with chat models, in a year's time you could easily see video games where you just imagine what you want and it creates it for you.

Matt Cartwright: 9:08

I mean even sitting here talking about it, right, I think this is one of the things that is kind of the most incredible. The most difficult for people to understand is the pace that things have changed and that they continue to change, and also trying to think, if this is what we can see on the outside, what's underneath the iceberg, what have these companies? I mean, there's lots of rumours out there, obviously, but what have they got underneath the surface? How close are we? Have we already reached AGI, which might be worth explaining what we mean by AGI, although it does seem like the definition of it is also open to kind of people's interpretation?

Jimmy Rhodes: 9:51

Yeah, so AGI is artificial general intelligence. So right now we've got various models that can do specific tasks. Obviously, I mentioned we're moving towards multimodal models which can do multiple different tasks. Agi is effectively something that can do anything you throw at it Within the confines I mean, these aren't robots so within the confines that, it's an AI that you interact with on the internet. So, yeah, when you talk about AGI, it is a fairly poorly defined and loosely understood term. In the way these models think, so to speak, agi is not the same the way as a human thinks.

Jimmy Rhodes: 10:36

We were having a conversation about this the other day. So you know, ais are trained on huge data sets and they're put in learning mode to learn all this information and then, once they're let loose on the world, so to speak, once you can actually interact with them, they're not learning anymore. So it's not like they're constantly learning and evolving like a human would and they don't think like a human would. But in terms of AGI, the general definition is something that can out-compete humans in most domains simultaneously effectively. Not necessarily something that's conscious and is a human, but we're in a competition.

Matt Cartwright: 11:15

Are we?

Jimmy Rhodes: 11:16

Are we in a competition? I mean are?

Matt Cartwright: 11:17

we in a competition. I mean, it feels like we're in a competition that we're bound to lose, right.

Jimmy Rhodes: 11:23

I think it depends where it goes. I mean, we'll talk about it more later on in the podcast, but yes, we're in a in terms of jobs. I think we're in a competition. That we're in terms of the context of this podcast. Yes, we're in a competition that we're bound to lose.

Jimmy Rhodes: 11:38

Ai models are already becoming better than humans at most tasks in specific domains. So if you talk about coding, you know AI. A lot of AI models are measured against humans. That's how they measure them, that's how they test them and in a lot of cases, they're better than 80% of humans in a lot of domains already. There's some specific edge cases where they can't necessarily solve something that a human could solve, but they can do 90% of stuff and they can do it 80% better than 80% of humans at the moment. Similarly with AIR I suppose you know it's you can generate, you can generate incredible images using AI. That would a take a human much, much, much longer to create and be is better than anything I can draw and better than better than anything that the vast majority of people out there can draw. So, in terms of that competition, we are in a competition and we won't win.

Matt Cartwright: 12:38

What a great start to the podcast, if anyone's still listening. We do hope to explore some more positive aspects, although we can't promise because we're also going to be realistic and I think that's kind of you know. That's where we are with. We want to inform people, but we want to be honest about it and you know, once, hopefully people understand where we are then then, once you've been through that kind of dark place, then you come out the other side and you can start to think about you know where we go and what you can do as an individual to try and get ready. Ok, so let's talk a bit about where we've we've already seen examples of jobs being impacted, because we talk about this as you know something that's coming in the future and getting ready for it, but actually, you know it's something that's already happening.

Matt Cartwright: 13:39

I think you know there's particular examples that maybe you can give us in the kind of tech industry, but you know we will be seeing already examples, I think, where you know organizations are perhaps not laying off people but are perhaps not replacing you know, jobs which have been lost through and I hate this term natural wastage.

Matt Cartwright: 14:01

So there was an example I heard. So Dave Shapiro the other day was talking about UPS in the US and they had, I think they lost 12,000 roles which they were going to replace, but actually they'd admitted that they were not planning to replace them. So I think you're already seeing this, maybe not so much at the moment necessarily job being replaced, but a lot of CEOs and a lot of leaders are taking this kind of wait and see approach where you know hiring is not happening at the same level, maybe positions where people are leaving and not being replaced. So we're starting to see this, maybe not in the way of huge cuts at the moment I think maybe talk a bit differently in the tech industry but where roles are not being replaced because people are starting to say, ok, well, I need to wait and see what this means, and I think that is, you know, the first shift that we're seeing.

Jimmy Rhodes: 14:52

So obviously, we're going to talk about different jobs throughout the podcast, but some examples so far that have already happened in, even in January 2023, buzzfeed which not a particularly reputable news organization and not really necessarily a surprise, but they announced that they're going to use AI to assist with content creation, resulting in the layoff of like significant amounts of their journalists. And then, during 2023, in general, as I mentioned earlier on, we went from you know almost no one, having heard of large language models and the abilities they have, to the launch of things like GitHub co pilot. And then now, at the end of 2023, start of 2024, you've got 70 80% of developers using coding assistance to assist them with their jobs. The natural effect of that is certainly, to begin with, your junior programmers you almost have no need for them anymore because the basic coding tasks that you need to do can be done by an AI. That's exactly what they do very well.

Jimmy Rhodes: 15:52

And so the layoffs that you're seeing in the tech industry right now and that you've seen throughout the last, over the last few months, beginning with Twitter, probably in 2023, you see a lot of cut back in the tech industry, but I don't think you're going to see those jobs come back again and I think partly what's behind that is the state of the economy at the moment, but I think it's also strongly influenced by AI and obviously companies aren't necessarily going to admit to that and I don't think you'll see those jobs return.

Matt Cartwright: 16:24

I do worry.

Matt Cartwright: 16:25

I think you make a really good point, but I do worry.

Matt Cartwright: 16:27

You know everything gets blamed on COVID, on the economy, on immigration, all of these issues, lazy stay at home workers, you know people won't come back to the office, and all these things kind of get users excuses as reasons to cut jobs.

Matt Cartwright: 16:47

I mean, you know, if you look at and the one thing that really concerns me you look at the amount in the UK of people who are on sick, on long term sick, so, since the pandemic and a lot of this is long COVID this is, you know, this is something that's going to get worse and I think we've got a rise in the last couple of years, I think 31% rise of 31% of people who are long term disabled. Now you know those jobs, as those people leave those jobs, this is the kind of thing that's very easy to cut. This is the thing that's very easy to kind of buy, stealth, take these jobs away. And I think this is another example of where you're seeing, like you say, this kind of in the background thing. You're not seeing big cuts, you're not seeing big announcements, but you're just seeing jobs kind of taking it. You're seeing the positions taken away, rather than seeing people being made redundant or taken out of the jobs because the vacancies are just starting to disappear.

Jimmy Rhodes: 17:43

So I think, yeah, the kinds of jobs that you're going to see affected. There's a list of the top 10 most affected jobs. They're mostly white collar jobs. So, unexpectedly, a lot of the jobs that have ended up being affected by AI are not manual labor jobs or, you know, working in a factory, that kind of thing. They're actually the white collar jobs and some of the creative industries, and obviously we can talk about the backlash to that shortly.

Matt Cartwright: 18:10

I did want to just finish this section with a kind of positive example, because you know it's easy to kind of be in, I guess, one extreme or the other, and I probably shift towards the kind of doomsite of things. You know, on the other side there's the kind of utopia at the end of this. But I think, you know, although I look with a lot of fear at the kind of future, and not so much the long term future but maybe the transition of getting there you see an example then. I think you know one thing where the whole world is struggling now and again this comes back to, you know, not just the pandemic but it, you know, covid a big, a big impact on that is healthcare. You know we're losing people from healthcare, from long term sickness, who are leaving because they don't want to work in that industry anymore. We see an industry that's massively overburdened and you do see things in healthcare that are coming in that you know where there are people being laid off, obviously we're going to look at that as a bad thing, but actually, where we've got industries that are overburdened, taking some of that burden away can be a good thing.

Matt Cartwright: 19:12

Now I this particular example was something that I experienced myself. I was at an event the other day and there was a private hospital. They had a. It kind of looked like those things that you test your eyes with, like a big pair of binoculars, and you put in your basic information age, weight, high, etc. And it takes two pictures of your eyes, very similar to you. Know what you like.

Matt Cartwright: 19:37

I said what you do when you get an eye test and then within 30 seconds I've been sent a PDF. Sorry, sent a link to a report which told me about various things about my eye health, also about the veins that go between my brain and my heart. It gave me assessments of my risk level for about 15 different things. I then took that, put it in a PDF, put it into chat GPT and told GPT you are a medical professional, please interpret this result for me. And just to say as well, it was not in English so I asked it to translate it as well. And it gave me the information on that report. It told me about my risk levels. It told me that my eye health in one particular aspect was five years older than it should be. It told me the rest of it was not so bad. So you know, the their advice to me when they gave me that information was oh, now you need to go and see your practitioner and discuss this report. But not only was I able to, you know, look at all those diagnostics much quicker than you would usually do. So I did it in three minutes instead of going to a hospital and making an appointment, but actually I didn't need to see a doctor. You know, I was able to interpret that result myself with AI.

Matt Cartwright: 20:52

So, you know, I think there are really good examples here of where AI is making a positive, and I think you know we want this podcast to talk about in the round and look at the positives and negatives. But this is, I guess, one of few examples. The other side of things is that there are so many industries and jobs which, long term, look like even if you're not going to wipe out an entire industry, the productivity gains that you're going to make are going to mean you don't need the amount of people, and I think this idea that actually what will happen is everyone will be 10 times more productive you know, a company that manufactures something doesn't need to manufacture 10 times as many things because there's not the market for it. So if it can find efficiency and make twice as many things with half the amount of staff, or 10 times the amount of things with the current staff, they'll make twice as many with half the amount of staff. I think that's that's pretty clear.

Jimmy Rhodes: 21:49

Yeah, and I totally agree there's. There's obviously huge positives that come out of AI. You know you talked about healthcare there. There's things like Alpha fold, which is the, the protein folding Algorithm that the Google deep-minding sounds sexy Alpha fold no protein.

Matt Cartwright: 22:11

Folding sounds sexy.

Jimmy Rhodes: 22:12

Yeah. So protein folding is something that we've previously never been able to do before, like there's no Human can't do it anyway, and so it's one of those things that AI is doing that just wasn't possible before, and what it will result in is new medicine new, you know, new. I think it's like genetically targeted medicine that can potentially like save tons of lives it's your cancer, that kind of thing. So there's huge benefits to air and there's things that it can do that you know that we can't do, that we can't possibly do. They've now got AI is training AI robots, which was something I was going to talk about. So there's a there's a. There's a concept called Moro vex paradox I kind of hinted at it earlier on where we thought that the jobs that AI would take would be the Manual type jobs, so we thought we would have robots that would be like doing everything for us, and then we never dreamed that AI would take jobs like journalism, writing, writing journalistic articles and writing code and Creating images and art and this kind of thing.

Jimmy Rhodes: 23:19

We thought that would be the the tough stuff to do, and Moro vex paradox is exactly that it's. It's how we Ex we basically misunderstood how AI would actually end up being applied and up to now that Robots have been really difficult. So it's difficult to make a self-driving car, it's difficult to make a robot that's got any, you know, any reasonable level of coordination. It's a, you know, you, we can make a robot that has the coordination of a, a one-year-old. But we can make chat, gpt, which can reason and have a sort of intellectual conversation with you. And it was thought that it was thought that was because actually some of our reasoning, which we think is really smart, is actually nowhere near as complicated as you know. There's kind of like mobility and Coordination and that kind of thing. It's now, it's a very recent development, but it's now. It now turns out that actually if we get a is to train other a is we can maybe get around Moro vex paradox.

Matt Cartwright: 24:20

I Think it's time to talk about where we're heading and To start that let's. Let's talk about the backlash, because this is something that I'm sort of super interested in. I think it amazes me that, as we head into an election year in the UK and the US, to name but but to this doesn't seem to be on any of the agendas. And there was an incident a few months ago, maybe last month actually like this is, the speed is so quick that you kind of lose track when a self-driving car in San Francisco was set fire to Basically, you know, a kind of protest of sorts against AI, and I just wonder when the backlash, when the social unrest, starts and not just protests from people Not working about losing their job, but actually also, you know, people who don't know what to do with their time.

Matt Cartwright: 25:31

You know we saw that again. You know, as one of the things during the pandemic, that we saw people who didn't have things to do. We saw angry kind of you know it's a stereotype, but angry young men. We see people without that kind of sense of purpose. I mean, I think the first backlash is about the loss of jobs.

Matt Cartwright: 25:51

There's a lot of your negative comments out there. There's a lot of really Kind of abusive stuff that's being aimed at people like Sam Altman, you know, I kind of wonder how does he feel about this? How you does he become someone who is a kind of target? Is it individuals, is it organizations, is it governments? I don't know how it pans out, but I think you have some form of social unrest once people start to think, well, hang on, this is going to affect me and my job and you may be in the future.

Matt Cartwright: 26:22

There is a way that we don't need to work so much, and a positive. But in the short term, you know, people wonder where their money's coming from. There's going to be some kind of social unrest, and it feels like it's amazing that this is not really An election issue and not really, you know, it doesn't seem to be in the public domain. Maybe that's why we, you know, we want to inform people on this, not to get them out on the streets, but to get them thinking about it and get them, you know, not out on the streets, but actually trying to do something positive. I think it would be useful. Maybe, you know, we talked about this before, but this, this change of mindset idea.

Jimmy Rhodes: 26:56

In terms of the change of mindset. I think you have to think about where this is headed. So for me, we're you know there's a few possible outcomes. They've kind of got that dystopian future where the corporations have all the cash, nobody's got anything. We end up with no money, no purpose, no job, and and I genuinely don't think that's where we're gonna head. I think we're gonna. It'll be a rough road and it'll be a. It'll be a difficult journey, but we'll end up at somewhere. You know, okay, maybe not like a completely utopian version of the future, but ultimately I, you know, I kind of have faith in humanity that will figure this out and we'll end up in a situation where maybe people don't work Five days a week, maybe people don't work four days a week, maybe people work three days a week and then be like the 1970s in England, right, where are the three-day working week?

Matt Cartwright: 27:51

But this time people will have have enough money, hopefully, to to be able to do that. I mean that that. I guess that's the the question with this, though how does that wealth get shared around? Because it's all very well, you know. I think we both said, well, I'd happily not work, I've got loads of projects I'd be involved in, but you know, how do you make sure that that people have enough from working three days a week? I guess we don't need to discuss that now, but I think that's the question is, everyone would like to work less, but they'd like to work less and still get the same amount of money.

Jimmy Rhodes: 28:25

Ultimately, you know, if we live in the same kind of system we live in now, people have to have money. There's no way around it. A capitalist system, which is what we live in, doesn't work. If people don't have money, you need to. If you're making products, if you want to have corporations that have profit, then people have to have money, because it's people that buy the products from the corporations, right, they're producing them for people to buy. So my view on this is either corporations will continue to pay you if you're working a three-day week, corporations will continue to pay you your full-time salary, and maybe what you'll end up doing is a job where you've got a bunch of AI assistants and ultimately, I think there will be less jobs. But I think that leads us onto a conversation about things like universal basic income.

Matt Cartwright: 29:21

Yeah, I mean, I was wondering just one other thing. I was wondering whether we, you know, in the short term, whether we end up with a sort of huge public sector to kind of drive that transition, because that can't be a long-term solution. But you know, in some way governments are going to have to take the burden here, whether that is sharing wealth out, whether it's sharing jobs out. And I wonder whether we see, you know not everywhere, but in many countries we see a kind of inflated public sector as a way to kind of smooth the transition. Another idea that I had was, you know, a kind of backlash. I was thinking of the idea of I call them the embracing the old. So this is kind of like how people have gone back to vinyl and admittedly, you know, that's not most people, that's a it's a small kind of proportion of society.

Matt Cartwright: 30:09

But, you know, is there a possibility here that we recreate, you know, cooperatives of some kind and you know people are able to exchange products in lieu of financial transactions.

Matt Cartwright: 30:20

People go back to, you know, to creating things by hand and there becomes a premium on those things. I mean, this all relies on people having money or something to spend, but there becomes a kind of at least a portion of society who actually say well, I want these things to be done by hand. You know, I was even thinking in a bank. If you're particularly well off and you're worried about your money and cyber security is an issue, maybe you want to go in and have a transaction with a person. Maybe that becomes a kind of premium product and it's probably only available to some people and it's probably not enough. But you know, I don't think that there becomes a world where we take away all of the kind of all of the kind of old human transactions and process. I think there's a, there's potentially a market for that there, but obviously it's a, it's a niche. I've got a question for you.

Jimmy Rhodes: 31:09

Matt, what would you do if you didn't have to work anymore and you know? Let's say you had a modest salary from something like universal basic basic income? What would you do with your life?

Matt Cartwright: 31:23

But the problem with this is is it a universal basic income? What is it? I mean, does it give me just enough to live? Because then I say, well, I need more than that, I need more money or whatever that thing is. I mean, if I have enough for a comfortable existence and I guess this is the utopia right, then there's plenty of things that I would do. Let's say sorry let's.

Jimmy Rhodes: 31:44

let's say you have. I mean, I think you've got a fairly comfortable existence right now. Let's say you had the income you have. Let's say you have the income that you have now You've got a modest income, so like an income that can allow you to support a family. It can allow you to take several holidays a year, but not crazy. You're not buying yachts, things like that. But what would you do with the eight hours a day that you get back from not working?

Matt Cartwright: 32:12

Hide under my bed from the AI monsters that are coming to get me. Maybe, yeah, I mean, okay, bake sourdough bread and banana bread and spend time with my kids and my family. I mean, yeah, in an ideal, look, I could quite happily at the moment. I could quite happily never work again if I had the money. I've got enough things that I would want to do and be part of. But you know there are really complicated questions here around. You'll say travel, but will I be able to travel? You know there are questions around.

Matt Cartwright: 32:41

If you have universal basic incomes, is it universal basic income or is it a national basic income? Because if it's a universal basic income, then fair enough. If it's a national basic income, then the rich countries are not going to want anybody going there from the poor countries with the lower UBI is because basically everybody wants to go to those countries. I mean, if you think about the problems around immigration now times a million with a national basic income because you basically have, you know, the US, for example, they're going to tax the hell out of Silicon Valley. Well, what are they going to do with that money? Are they going to share it out or are they going to use it in the US.

Matt Cartwright: 33:18

If they use it in the US, are they, you know? Does everybody want to get to the US?

Jimmy Rhodes: 33:24

Yeah, can I just stop you there, Matt, Because I don't. I'm not sure I know what the difference between universal basic income and national basic income is. Could we explain it to our listeners?

Matt Cartwright: 33:34

So I mean, I don't know if there is a national basic income, but I think the question here is a universal basic income. You know, universal suggests that it applies to everybody, and this is the kind of utopia I guess universal basic income would be. Everybody has an amount of whatever credit tokens, that we call it money, but you know, whatever that they have that allows them some level of existence. The concept of a universal basic income by name would suggest that it means for everybody. A national basic income would suggest that, you know, it's a similar thing, but it's dished out by a country. So you know, scandinavian countries have talked about universal basic incomes, but they really talk about national basic incomes because they're not making decisions for everybody else.

Matt Cartwright: 34:18

But if all of the you know all of these incomes in Silicon Valley, the universal basic income has to come from somewhere. Right? If you're taxing the hell out of the, the big players in AI, like, okay, you can tax. If you're the UK or Germany, you can tax the big companies producing things, but you're not going to have anywhere near the amount of money that the US is going to have, possibly China, possibly India, wherever the other big hubs are. So you know how do you make sure that that wealth is spread across the world? Because if every country just closes off the borders, you know, and focuses on their own people, well, that's a recipe for disaster. I mean, we talk social unrest. That's a recipe for war and famine and migration on a scale that we've never seen before Is that not the same challenge we have right now?

Jimmy Rhodes: 35:10

I mean, I don't, I suppose you've. I mean, you have touched on something there that has been prevalent in the news a little quite recently, in the fact that even even these companies and startups that are starting in the US sorry, even these companies and startups that are starting in Europe are getting gobbled up by US companies. And there are people in Europe, there's politicians in Europe and, and you know, people in Europe in general calling for, you know, calling for a halt to some of the, some of these acquisitions, because, effectively, anything that we produce in the UK, anything that gets produced in the US, gets gobbled up by these huge, behemoth US companies and basically, they end up taking all the profit from it.

Matt Cartwright: 35:54

Yeah, and I think you know European, wealthy European countries are probably okay because they won, if they use AI across their existing industries. And let's take Germany. If it applies it to its manufacturing industry, then you know, presumably it still generates a significant amount of income and is able to tax those organizations that are using it. It doesn't have to be the people who own the AI where the tax comes from. But if you're a developing country, let's take a random example and say if you're Central American country like El Salvador, where does your income come from?

Matt Cartwright: 36:33

You know it's going to be Even more difficult than it is now, because you're not going to be able to compete. You know you're not going to compete on exports, and I guess this is just. We don't know where it's going to go, but I think it. This is the end of capitalism, right? I mean, that's that this has to be the end of capitalism, and I don't say that, as you know, it's not the beginning of communism or socialism. It's the beginning of something that we don't know, because you can't have capitalism as it currently exists when you don't have people working.

Jimmy Rhodes: 37:04

I Agree, if you, if you, if you I mean that's where you, that's where you get to the dystopia that I mentioned before. But that's never going to happen, because if you Like capital, like, as I said, capitalism, on the one hand, you get to the dystopia, right, if you let companies just increase and increase their profits and they don't have to employ anyone and they can just increase their profits even further. But where that's what I was saying before where do those profits come from?

Jimmy Rhodes: 37:30

Yeah like you can't have cap, you can't have one without the other. You can't just have, like, unlimited profit if you don't have consumers in capitalism. So it a it's going to self-correct Under capitalism. But how is it going to self-correct? Well, either. Well, basically, the only way it self-corrects is Corporations make profit. That profit goes back to people so that they can buy the stuff from the corporations. It's the only way it works, whether that happens through government intervention or a Massive change to the way we work or the way we're paid, but fundamentally, like that profit has to make, it was way back to consumers, otherwise no one's buying anything and it doesn't work.

Jimmy Rhodes: 38:09

So maybe it's not called capitalism in the future. I don't know, I don't really. You know, it's the way it's probably going to work is huge tax on corporations and that tax somehow goes back to the people. Now I think that's universal basic income or national basic income, whatever we want to call it.

Jimmy Rhodes: 38:30

But I Do agree that it creates a huge problem, especially if you get to the point where we can automate some of the I mean I started going on a bit of a ramble about robots and things like that. If we do start to automate those jobs, then the poor countries really are screwed, because what we've done is outsourced all those jobs to poorer and poorer countries. I mean, it's happening to an extent with China right now, with the fact that we've China's been the manufacturing capital of the world and now they're they're kind of struggling to take that next step. And you know, you've got a weird situation in China where you've got loads of you've got the middle, you've got a massive rise in middle class, you've got loads of people who've gone and become educated to be doctors and guess what? All the jobs in China are manufacturing and working in factories.

Matt Cartwright: 39:30

Let's talk a bit about what we think that people should be doing. Well, hopefully, keep listening to us. Like we said, we're going to try and look at things industry by industry, so obviously Different industries will appeal to different people, but some of the themes will hopefully be interesting to you. Give us a rating and a comment. Subscribe, because we really need that. Obviously, we're just starting out on this and the more, the more comments we get, the better we can make this. The more ratings we get, the more we can try and find interesting guests and stuff and also for everybody, just as basic steps.

Matt Cartwright: 40:06

So you Accept, the change is coming. I think that's actually one of the hardest things For all of us to do, and it's a scale that we've not seen before and a pace we've not seen before. So Don't put your head in the sand. You. You don't need to be completely freaked out, but you do need to understand the scale of change that's coming and how this is going to reshape. You know, not just jobs, but absolutely everything that we do Find ways to try things out. So you know, I've been studying stuff for NAI, but probably the most useful thing is using tools, using tools that are useful to you. So you know translation tools, things to improve your writing, productivity tools, assistance. Just just try stuff out and understand how you know large language models and GPT's work. You don't need to retrain as a software engineer or programmer, but you need to understand how it'll affect your industry and use that to take the next steps. You know your life and your lifestyle come into it. It's not just your job, but focus on the tools that will help you with the transition and how it can complement you.

Matt Cartwright: 41:07

Yeah, we hear this all the time about how AI is going to work with and compliment people, and I think it's Sometimes it's a kind of marketing mechanism to kind of try and Not trick people but but actually stop your understanding the the pace of change. But there's something in it. There's definitely something in that that you're at least in the process of doing it. There's definitely something in that that you're at least initially. It can't do everything, so the things that you can do better are the things that you're going to keep doing, the things that AI can do better, the things that you need to be able to adopt. Talk to friends or family who aren't thinking about it. Get them to follow the podcast if you can, and subscribe and listen, but you know, if they don't want to follow us, that's fine. Just find someone else. Follow someone else who's going to help teach you about this.

Jimmy Rhodes: 41:52

Yeah. So going back to your point about using AI, I think you know, as you say, you can choose to resist it or you can choose to use it to help save you some time. So to give some examples, I mean I used to teach a little bit and I was a teacher because I enjoyed teaching kids and Guess what. Ai can save you tons of time on lesson planning. Loads of people are already using it, loads of people are already applying it, and that's like one of the most boring parts of teaching. To be honest, unless there's some sadists out there that really enjoy lesson planning, I think most teachers just enjoy teaching kids.

Jimmy Rhodes: 42:32

If you're a doctor, you can use it to help your patients interpret and summarize medical reports Before they come and see you, so that you can kind of understand, they can have a better understanding, and then, when you have your consultation, you can Make that really efficient. You can use your time in the best way possible, and that's possible now. So why not? Why not do it? If you're a lawyer, you can scan through thousands of documents as part of discovery yourself, or guess what. You can use AI to do that now and you can focus on the parts of your job that you enjoy the most. So there's loads of positives there. The other side of it is you can get involved in the debate again. You don't need to bury your head in the sand. You can get involved in the bait. You can maybe start to take a more active role and you know, as Matt mentioned earlier on, you can think about the elections that are coming up, that kind of thing.

Matt Cartwright: 43:20

Yeah. So that would be my last point just activism on this. So the debate needs to, it needs leaders and it needs debate. It needs people to take different views on it and to to talk about it. It needs people to. You know, talk to politicians and leaders and businesses and MPs and you know everybody, and and just make sure that it's on the agenda. I think that's a thing it needs to be on the agenda now so that people are able to To shape it and people are able to input it, and so it's happening with us, not to us.

Matt Cartwright: 43:55

So if it matters to you, you know, get it on the agenda, raise concerns, but also try and come up with some positive actions and solutions. So you know we don't need fear. We've got enough fear. We've got enough polarization in the world. We need positive action and ideas. But we do need urgency.

Jimmy Rhodes: 44:15

Yeah and that's a really good point. I mean, there's been, there has been debate. There has been debate in the US around AI, but guess what? It's been led by some of the. It's been led by people like Sam Altman and Elon Musk and those kind of people. And actually what we need is some more kind of grassroots, you know, some more grassroots Activism. In a way. It doesn't have to be out protesting that kind of thing, it can just be right into your local MP getting it on the agenda, making yourself heard, that kind of thing.

Matt Cartwright: 44:47

And who would have thought that the people who are pushing for regulation Are the people in the industry? Like that must be something that's never happened before. You've got people like Sam Altman. You've got Google. You've got people leaving the AI industry and screaming out this needs regulation. It's not being led by governments, it's being led by, you know. It's been led by big tech, and it needs to be led by Society and governments, not by big tech. They can't regulate themselves, but they're the ones who are asking for this. So you know, this is something we'll talk about further in future episodes. But regulation we don't know how it's going to work, but it needs to happen and it needs to happen now. So I think that's a wrap for this week. Hopefully that's been enjoyable for people and we've introduced who we are, where we are and what our thoughts are. And then next week, jimmy, we're gonna be talking about next week, matt, we're gonna be talking about the creative industry.

Jimmy Rhodes: 45:42

We've just had the rollout, or the, you know, the introduction, our introduction to Sora, which is text to video. So next week we're gonna be talking about how the creative industry is dead. You.