AI Utopia v AI Dystopia Part I: Utopia!

Imagine waking up to a world where technology isn't just a tool, but a compassionate partner in our daily lives. Our latest episode takes you through a visionary exploration of an AI-empowered utopia that's (maybe) just around the corner. We're painting a picture of a future enhanced by tech, where seamless human-AI interaction isn't just a dream—it's an impending reality. Even Matt's doomer tendencies are tested by the promises of the journey to AI nirvana.

Step into the transformative landscape of healthcare, where myths crumble, and a new era of hope emerges with AI as the cornerstone. We unravel how innovations like AlphaFold's protein folding achievements and in silico medicine's AI-driven drug discoveries are heralding a revolution in personalized treatments. From tackling the challenges of an aging population to the promise of designer drugs tailored to your DNA, we take a peek at the profound impact AI will have on your health and wellbeing in the years to come.

But what about society at large? We traverse the compelling prospects of universal basic income and a narrowing of inequality, a potential future where robotic companions are both caregivers and friends, and the societal shift toward greater equality. We contemplate a world where the abundance generated by AI and robots ensures that the essentials—food, energy, transport—are available to all, fostering a happier, more content society. Jimmy muses on a world where creativity elevates our leisure time to heights previously unimagined. Join us for a conversation that's not just about technology, but about the very essence of our future society.

Transcript

Matt Cartwright: 0:03

Welcome to Preparing for AI with Matt Cartwright and Jimmy Rhodes, the podcast which investigates the effect 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 social impacts of AI. We're making it our mission to help you prepare for the human social impacts of AI.

Matt Cartwright: 0:27

Don't leave me waiting here, everyone, lead me to your door. Welcome back to Preparing for AI with me, matt Cartwright, and Me, jimmy Rhodes. And this week we are going to do something which some of our listeners have asked us to do, which is to look at the kind of dystopian possibility of the future. But we thought because you, because we don't want to do everything negative that what we do is do a two-parter, where we look at a kind of possible utopia that we could see and then a possible dystopia. So this will be two parts one this week, one next week. First of all, looking at a possible utopia we're going to look at basically 25 years, so something before 2050, and then an episode next week with a possible dystopian future with AI. So I'm going to hand over to Jimmy and we're going to, first of all, because it's obviously the biggest piece of news this week just talk a little bit about what's just come out from OpenAI.

Jimmy Rhodes: 1:23

Thanks, matt. So, yeah, I mean, just in the last 24 hours there's been a huge announcement from OpenAI which has, in the last half an hour it's caused me to resubscribe and go back again from Claude to OpenAI to try out the latest features. So, if anyone hasn't heard or isn't aware, openai have announced ChatGPTO. Which stands for what does it stand for? I've forgotten Omni. It stands for Omni. So, yeah, they've released ChatGPT Omni.

Jimmy Rhodes: 2:03

So what this is is, instead of having like vision and audio and text-to-speech and speech-to-text and LLM functions, all those kind of separate things, which is what they've been up to now, it's basically all in one, and so there's a whole bunch of demonstrations on YouTube in the last 24 hours of its capabilities and it's got near real time speech. So when you talk to it, I think it's got something like a 200 millisecond delay, which is pretty much what you'd have in conversation with a human. So it's very, very natural. The audio, like the actual voice of chat GPT, is much more natural sounding, has all the ums and ahs and pauses and inflections and emotion, and some of the video demonstrations demonstrated like pretty human-like emotion, like I say.

Jimmy Rhodes: 2:54

So it's kind of real time talking to you in real time. It sounds much more, it's got much more emotion in the voice. It can simulate different emotions, it can sing to you, it can be more dramatic if you want it to be, and, um, some of the demonstrations. So it's also got vision. So it's got real-time vision and I think in the near future it's going to have real-time video, uh, vision capability, so it can actually look at what's going on in the room. It can talk to you about what's going on on your video feed, um, and it can. It can interpret what's in images as well. Really, really, really quickly, almost in real time.

Matt Cartwright: 3:27

You can hold up a piece of paper to the camera with two plus one and it will tell you the answer is three. Um, not, not that being able to calculate two plus one is um, is the, you know, the most amazing thing that that, uh, a large language model has been able to do but's got that. You know that's what you were saying about, kind of the multi-modality, and you've talked about this, you know, from the first episode. But we're starting to see it now with this model of bringing those things together. Um, you know it's obviously far off from agi, but you, you know, as you see, that kind of journey to bringing everything together.

Matt Cartwright: 4:00

I think there are there are two points which they're not necessarily the most you know, um, technologically big advances of of this model, but they're things that I think in the real world are really useful to people. One is that what I guessed before was dali, so the image creation. You can now specify text and it gets the text right, um, which is massive, because you know we talked about previously about how it struggled with text, because you know it's a different model. What it was doing, without going into the all the sort of technical side of it, is you're starting with chaos and then creating an image from that. It didn't have the functionality of text, where you can now add text in. I think that is a huge thing, potentially, um, because it's been one of the sort of barriers with image creation, I think, until this point.

Matt Cartwright: 4:50

The second thing, and this kind of contradicts something that we talked about in the last episode, where we talked about how, you know, large language models are not that great for doing search when you're doing internet search.

Matt Cartwright: 5:00

But one thing now is, rather than with chat GPT-4, when it used bing search and you would see the sort of you know, the purple wheel spinning around and you'd wait for it to do a search. It's not instant but it's very, very fast now and you can see it's checked multiple sources. Um, I was using the new um meta model the day, which I think is really good actually, and it has a search function using google, but it was coming back with search results and it was using like one, maybe two sources, whereas it looks like this new model, it's searching fast and it looks like it's looking at more different searches sources when it's searching on the web. So even though you know, jimmy in particular was saying that's not the best use of a large language model, which I agree with, but with this new functionality I think it now is much easier to you know, certainly to foresee that it's not far until you will be using probably large language models to do what you would use Google for previously as well.

Jimmy Rhodes: 5:58

Yeah, and like some of those things, the examples you gave there are great, and there are examples where you've just got've just got, you know, things that we already had, but they're much faster and more natural and more real time. But to really bring it to life, some of the examples, to just sort of give some examples of how this might apply to real life situations, some of the examples they demonstrated and this capability isn't there yet, but they demonstrated them to sort of illustrate the kinds of things you're going to be able to do. So one of the examples was there was a blind person and they were actually with a real time video feed, chat. Gpt was talking to them about what was going on around them and could actually guide them through the streets of london. That was one of the demonstrations they gave and again, it requires this real-time capability, like it's. You can't have like a massive delay to do that kind of thing. So it was using the video vision to actually, like I say like talk, basically talk a um a sight impaired person through what was going on around them and actually help guide them through the streets of london, um. Another example and we had a translation episode just in the week, but it was real-time translation, again, without any gaps, without any pauses, as real-time as a human would, and it wasn't perfect, but it did some really good examples of near real-time translation.

Jimmy Rhodes: 7:19

And there was one final example I saw which was, oh yeah, so education. So we haven't actually done a podcast on education, the education sector, yet, but it was similar to what you just sort of outlined. It was basically helping someone with their homework so they could show a drawing or a picture. In this case I think it was a triangle and it was like which one's the hypotenuse, which one's the? How do I find this angle, this kind of thing.

Jimmy Rhodes: 7:48

And again, so it was like using video to help in real time and it's like bringing, like you say, bringing all those capabilities together and maybe their capabilities have been there before, but it's a bit more clunky. This feels a lot more natural real time, understanding what's going on around you, understanding video, audio and visual inputs, um, and sort of deciphering that and working with it in real time. And again, this is this is actually some people are saying this is a uh, you know, a version of chat gpt5 which is sort of part way through the training, something like that, maybe an early release of it, but it's a you're starting to see the direction things are going in, where, like things, it's interacting much more seamlessly with the kind of world I know we need to move on to the main episode, but I just want to finish that that point.

Matt Cartwright: 8:35

Um, a friend of mine, sent a message this morning. He's been uh basically doing coding of ar models to basically fire uh sort of customer service phone call scripts and get them to be summarized, and the message he sent this morning said one of the reasons AI development speed is so disruptive you spend a load of time building something, only for open AI to just launch the ability to everyone. So you know, he spent weeks working on this and I think that is a great kind of summary of what we've talked about. At the kind of rapid speed of change that something comes out and it's great because it kind of democratizes things, but it it just suddenly, you know it does all this work that people have spent hours and hours and hours or weeks and weeks doing and suddenly bang, you can just, you know you can just do it in seconds and it's open to everyone. So good and bad, I guess, Um, but um, um, yeah, good way. So do you want to introduce into this episode?

Jimmy Rhodes: 9:28

jimmy, and and what we're going to do today. Yeah, so today we've we've got a positive spin. We're talking about utopia and then we're going to follow that up with a doom and gloom episode on dystopia. But, um, just to clarify, before we get into it, what we're obviously the theme of the podcast is around jobs and the impact on jobs and some of the socio-economic impact, and there's also the sister podcast talking about the environmental considerations. We're focusing on that and we're focusing on the next 25 years.

Jimmy Rhodes: 9:55

We're not going to get into any kind of sci-fi, enm banks or, you know, terminator 2 or Terminator 2, dystopian Blade Runner style scenarios. We're not going that far. We're talking in the fairly near term and we're going to be talking about the things like, for example, in the Utopia. On the Utopian side, we're going to talk about the potential for shorter working weeks, for UBI, for the potential positive effects on healthcare, these kind of things, some of the things we see happening in the next 5, 10, 20 years. And then obviously, we'll get onto the flip side of that, the side that you love, matt.

Matt Cartwright: 10:35

Yeah, this is going to be a tough episode for me trying to be the optimist, right, right.

Matt Cartwright: 10:41

So I'm going to start off this episode, actually, so that we start off on a really positive note, with an introduction on something called tech optimism, and this is from Andresen Horowitz at 16zcom, who's also on Substack, so to credit him with this. So here we go Lies. We're being lied to. We're told that technology takes our jobs, reduces our wages, increases inequality and threatens our health, ruins the environment, degrades our society, corrupts our children, impairs our humanity, threatens our future and it's ever on the verge of ruining everything. We're told to be angry, bitter and resentful about technology. We're told to be pessimistic. The myth of Prometheus in various updated forms, like Frankenstein, oppenheim and Terminator, haunts our nightmares. We're told to denounce our birthright, our intelligence, our control over nature, our ability to build a better world. We're told to be miserable about the future. Truth Our civilization was built on technology. Our civilization is built on technology. Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress and the realization of our potential. For hundreds of years, we properly glorified this until recently. But I'm here to bring the good news we can advance to a far superior way of living and being. We have the tools, the systems, the ideas. We have the will. It's time, once again, to raise the technology flag. It's time to be techno-optimists. I looked at a few polls this week and healthcare was regularly coming up as the top choice, where people who feel optimistic about AI think it will positively affect humanity. And that's definitely my personal feeling and I think, jimmy, you're in pretty much the same space as me. So let's start with that. You know we want to do a whole episode or even a series on healthcare soon, when we just wait for some guests, so we won't spend too much time. But looking ahead then, 25 years in the future, I don't think we're, you know, looking at a world with, you know, no disease and everything cured, but much less disease, and primarily because I think you know, personalized preventative care and better treatments, but also reduced cost of health care leads to, hopefully, more equality of access, and you know things are already happening. So this is a really kind of good space.

Matt Cartwright: 13:06

So alpha fold three, which is developed by deep mind, which is a kind of protein folding prediction, called an algorithm um, let's say call it a technology which basically can predict the 3d structures of proteins, and it's absolutely crucial for understanding things like cellular process and drug design.

Matt Cartwright: 13:28

It's something that the DeepMind CEO this week, when they kind of announced this, is predicting within two years that there will be new drug treatments developed by AlphaFold which will be not just created but will actually be available in the market. So there are no guarantees, but this is something that's happening now, and the most recent one that that you know came up before this is in silico medicine and they've actually designed a drug already ISM3412, it's called. It's got FDA approval in the US and that is literally, you know, ai discovering a drug, developing a drug. It's what's called a small molecule in inhibitor of MAT2A, which targets MTAP deleted cancers, and this was designed on this in silico's generative AI platform called chemistry 42, which uses machine learning techniques to basically generate novel molecular structures. So you know, there are things already happening. I think for me, this is, you know, it's number one and it's the one that I'm, like, properly optimistic about.

Jimmy Rhodes: 14:38

Yeah, and just to be clear, I think we're talking about novel solutions which you wouldn't be able to do very quickly in human time but I mean, where do like, where do you?

Matt Cartwright: 14:47

we're talking about 25 years, and this is stuff that's happening now, right. So like what do we see happening 5, 10 years into the future, or even 25 years? I mean I've said, you know, we won't cure all disease. I mean I don't think we will, but but we're being speculative here but where do you see the kind of big developments?

Jimmy Rhodes: 15:08

Protein folding. So the stuff you were talking about with Algea to do is simulate all of the different effects that drugs will have on the body, and there's also the potential for what's called designer drugs, which effectively we can already take someone's genome and sample their genome and see what they're like.

Matt Cartwright: 15:28

Genetically sorry designer drugs for friday night yeah designer drugs for friday night.

Jimmy Rhodes: 15:35

Yeah, exactly that as well.

Matt Cartwright: 15:36

Design your own drug before you go out on friday night?

Jimmy Rhodes: 15:39

that we would never do but um, but yeah, absolutely like the, the, the. So basically, what they can do is they can take your um, they can take a dna sample from you. They can look at your actual genetic sequence, one one. They can already look at that and and tell you whether you'd be prone to different kinds of disease and what kind of um you know, like in your, in your genetics themselves. But in the near future they're going to be able to also start looking at creating and implementing designer drugs, um which target, like specific targets, specific diseases, but actually like specific to your genetic like structure as well, your dna basically.

Jimmy Rhodes: 16:24

And so there's only there's going to be absolutely tons of advances in this kind of area, and I think, um, like the latest advances in ai are only going to accelerate, and all we're talking about here is with respect to drugs, we'll obviously move on to like pharmaceuticals. We'll um obviously move on, like in this, in this, in this segment as well, to the potential for like um for care by like things, like robots. We talked about robots a few episodes ago and one of the things that is looming is this huge um generational shift where, you know, people have been having much less kids and there's going to be a much older population in the near future and healthcare is like already creaking all around the world. So I think that's an area where, like AI is kind of arriving at the right time, in a way like if you can offer care.

Matt Cartwright: 17:20

I think it actually like you go back a step. It's actually the thing that's not there. So much now, and although Maybe it's the very first episode, I talked about a particular example where I'd been to this event and they'd basically taken a picture of my eyes and then told me about the sort of arteries between my eyes and my heart and they'd be able to look at, you know, a diagnostic that that basically assesses your particular situation and your particular risks and then allows you, from a hopefully a fairly young age, to then target, you know, certain kind of therapeutics and you know I I take a lot of supplements and I've researched it quite a lot and I've researched things that I, you know, that I kind of trust and believe in, but they are. But these are, you know, these are quite sort of general. These are like supplements, that is, a recommended kind of, you know, stack of supplements that will help with your brain health and will help with blah, blah, blah, but none of it is, you know, is targeted as an individual, on your individual structure, and I think that's one of the things that ai has got the ability to do is to be able to to really create things that are very specific to your, like you talk about sort of your, your dna or your gene structure. I mean, when you were talking then I was kind of feeling myself almost getting into the dystopia episode, as we, you know, analyze everybody's DNA and have a kind of record.

Matt Cartwright: 18:56

But, you know, as we're on the positive account on healthcare here, you know, there is definitely the potential, if it's done right, for this to absolutely revolutionize. You know, people's lives, people's lives and you've already got, you know, when, when you, you know, have a baby, before the baby is born, you're able to do, you know, checks from um, essentially from the womb, of certain indicators of, you know, of potential disease, and that's not an ai thing. But using ai you're, the bigger data sets that you get and the more, more, more data that you get on patterns and are able to then, like you say, create a specific designer with a specific kind of designer drug, not Friday night designer drugs, but designer drugs for disease. So this seems like something that I can't see how it can't be an improvement, you know, big pharma put aside. So let's, let's stay with the positives here.

Matt Cartwright: 19:59

I don't see how this is the one area for me of AI where I you know, even if there are difficulties where I think in 10 years time we're going to be in a, an almost unimaginable place in terms of you know what we can do with with healthcare like we're going to explore all this much more in a future episode on healthcare, but, um, I think it can't come quickly enough.

Jimmy Rhodes: 20:22

In a way, like I've been, I've been speaking to a lot of friends of mine and family and all the rest of it um, you know, and it and um, you know, health care systems around the world are really struggling, as an example in the uk like.

Matt Cartwright: 20:38

I mean, they're collapsing. They're not struggling. They're absolutely on their knees, aren't they? Let's be honest they need ai?

Jimmy Rhodes: 20:43

yeah, exactly, and so you know, and I think that's, if anything, that's probably going to be the problem here is like how quickly it gets adopted, because some of these institutions are notoriously very, very slow moving.

Matt Cartwright: 20:58

I mean they're leaving the profession.

Jimmy Rhodes: 21:00

They're leaving the profession.

Matt Cartwright: 21:02

You literally need AI because you know we're not actually going to have I genuinely think we're not going to have enough healthcare workers without AI. We're not going to have enough healthcare workers without ai, like it's. It's one I think we talked about before, about, like, removing the burden and how in most industries, like you know, ai is seen as a threat. I actually think, in in healthcare, like, people should not feel threatened. If you work in healthcare by ai, it's just going to make your job, you know, sort of acceptably um, busy because there is so much overload and it's only going to get worse. And let's not get into all the reasons here.

Jimmy Rhodes: 21:34

But, um, this is something that we need, like we need it yesterday, so it can't come quickly enough yeah, and just as a final note, like I've heard a lot of people complaining, like maybe because people are overworked and overloaded and all the rest of it, but complaining about the bedside manner of some you know some healthcare professionals and all the rest of it and um, interestingly, there was a study not that long ago where just finishing off on on that exact point, because you you mentioned kind of healthcare and social care.

Matt Cartwright: 22:02

Um, so ai driven kind of virtual assistants and and I call them chatbots they're not really chatbots but are being developed that can provide companionship and support for the elderly. You know you can get, you can get an ai girlfriend. Um, like jokes aside, you know that kind of thing we we think of as something that the very young generation are going to use. You know that kind of level of of support for lonely elderly people and and also on a practical level, you know virtual companions whether they're robots or on a computer that can engage in simple conversations, remind people when to take medication, you know, assist with daily tasks forget robots being able to lift people in and out of beds and stuff but you know actually just giving some level of.

Matt Cartwright: 22:48

Maybe it's difficult for an elderly person to see a robot as companionship, but you know a robot will listen and a robot or an AI can sit there and listen to you for a long period of time. It doesn't need to go to sleep, it doesn't need to go and look after somebody else the idea of everyone having their personalized you know assistant in a care home to look after them. That's got to be better than the current situation. So you know social care, like we said, we want to do an episode on this, so I think we we avoid going too deep into it, but there's so many you know potential positives from health care. So let's have a look at something that we have kind of already talked about.

Matt Cartwright: 23:32

We talked about ubi universal basic income on a previous episode, but this idea of more time to yourself to do what you want to do less work I your emails, managing your diary this idea of being able to focus on the things that you do and study the things that you like doing, rather than studying the things that will get you a stable job. I mean, 25 years is a long time and it's difficult to work out what an economic model is going to look like in 25 years, but I think I'll put my neck out and say it's going to have to look very different to what it looks like now. We're not going to be able to reach the utopia with our current economic system.

Jimmy Rhodes: 24:28

I think, almost I guess, we're talking utopia. We're being idealist in this part of this episode. So, for me, what the utopia looks like, I've heard various things. I've heard people saying AI is going to create jobs and actually there will be plenty of new jobs, and maybe that's true. I guess to narrow it a bit like let's, let's, so let. I suppose the scenario is ai is going to take all the jobs, but we're going to get the utopia for that to happen. For me, the path over the next 5, 10, 25 years to get to that position, because ultimately, in 25 years time, what you're saying is pretty much no one has a job. Everyone is on some form of universal basic income.

Matt Cartwright: 25:22

Well, their job is not the main purpose of their life anyway.

Jimmy Rhodes: 25:25

Their job is a part rather than yeah.

Jimmy Rhodes: 25:27

Yeah, something like that, right, so it's just not 9 to 5, five days a week anymore in 25 years time. You get supplemented with universal basic income. It's enough to get by. You're comfortable, you've got everything you need. You don't necessarily it's not like everyone's got a yacht and a Ferrari and all the rest of it. We're not all rich, but everyone has their basic needs fulfilled and we actually have a lot more scope to do the things we want to do in our life. That's kind of the utopian vision we're talking about, right, so like it's not that everyone can have anything they want anytime they want, but where we have a lot of freedom and we get that. We get to that point with kind of minimum disruption. And for me so going back to what I was saying for me what that looks like is very rapidly, governments around the world start looking.

Matt Cartwright: 26:16

I think that maybe we're like we're not ambitious enough when we think about a UBI and we almost think of it. Like you know, it's almost like a social security payment that's just paid out to everyone, you know, like universal credit in the UK, but that's just paid out to everyone. I wonder if it's and we're talking about a utopia is about making as many things as possible that people need to live available without charge. So, you know, energy is free, food, to a certain point, is free. You know, transport is free because if we're able to and you know, let's not get into detail of whether we tax the hell out of companies or whether we just use the productivity of, you know, robots and ais to to create that but if we do it right, the the wealth that's created by machines, that wealth can be put back into the system and it's not going to be the same everywhere. You know different countries are going to do it a different way, but there's a way in which you can provide not just the basics to live, but provide the basics for a, you know, a reasonable standard of living, where you know you don't have enough money to travel over the world all the time, and maybe we don't do that anymore because of, you know, climate change or all various reasons, but you have enough that. You have all the things that you need.

Matt Cartwright: 27:38

You know, in the way, that when society started to be built, that's what it was about. You know, money was only ever there as a, as a way, you know, it replaced kind of bartering. It was a. You know it's a currency, the idea that a social system provides you all of the things that you need to live. And then, you know, there'll always be people who have more than others and there'll always be an ability for people to potentially go out and find a way to use their, their talents to, you know, increase that amount. But I think it needs to be more than just everyone gets, you know, four thousand pounds a month. It needs to be about providing the things that that people need and societies need to be at a function to a, to a level that is very different and is much better than than than the way that the world is functioning at the moment do you want to know what sam altman said just last week, what his take on it is?

Matt Cartwright: 28:35

well, I've read an article on sam altman's, not from last week but on his, like his new version of capitalism, which I wasn't a big fan of.

Jimmy Rhodes: 28:42

But no, you tell me what he said last week well, I'll read this because, um so sam altman's always been a fan of this. Is I just I'm reading this? I'm a bit cynical about this because of where it's coming from, obviously. Um, so sam altman has always been a fan of universal basic income, but he's his idea for people struggling financially um, in the future is he thinks we should have, yeah, get a job.

Matt Cartwright: 29:07

He thinks we should have universal basic compute, so I'll just I'll just draw you back to I'm trying to just check when this is from 2021 where sam altman wrote a paper paper is it a paper essay, I guess called moore's law for everything, where he said that moore's law for everything should be the rallying cry of a generation whose members can't afford what they want. It sounds utopian, but it's something technology can deliver. Imagine a world where, for decades, everything housing, education, food, clothing becomes half as expensive every two years. Um, and then he goes on. You can look at this article. It's at https forward slash, forward slash.

Matt Cartwright: 29:47

Moores m-o-o-r-e-s dot sam altman dot com. And then he talks about capitalism for everybody. Um, so, yeah, I guess I just said this some inequality is okay in fact, it's critical um, but he talks about progressively taxing income and how that hasn't worked and we should focus on taxing capital rather than labor. I don't disagree with that and it's quite an interesting article, but I think, unfortunately, um, when sam altman suggests it, um, there's going to be a lot of us who are a little bit cynical yeah, I mean he's, you know, when it's the super rich, super elite club who are actually at the front of what's happening right now and what's driving the change to society.

Jimmy Rhodes: 30:28

I'm a little bit cynical and, um, a little bit jaded at some of their suggestions. Um, but I mean being serious, like I think. I think you're right, I think, I think, going back to what you're saying before, I think maybe we do think too small. I, I think, on a 25 year time span, things like universal basic income are more realistic. But I do agree, like, in the long term, what is capital for and what is money for if things become cheaper and cheaper? And I mean, I guess, I guess it's a way of saying it's a way of democratizing what you do with your time.

Jimmy Rhodes: 31:04

So if you get given, you know, if you get given your universal basic income, then you might spend it on a car and a plasma telly and a um, you know, a nice house, and I might prefer to go traveling around the world in a camper van and just do that eternally.

Jimmy Rhodes: 31:23

And so I think it gives it's, it democratizes things. It's not, um, you know communism. So I think, I think maybe there'll always be a place for that? Because, because people like to be able to choose what they do with their lives, but ultimately in a kind of utopian. I think the main thing about this conversation is how do we get to that utopia and we'll talk about the dystopia later, but the main thing is that I think governments and societies and people need to get involved in the debate, like as soon as possible, because, I mean, we could be wrong, but in our opinion, I think this this this is that's what I'm gonna have to be careful here to make sure this comes across as a positive point, um, and it's a sort of follow-on from the economic model.

Matt Cartwright: 32:11

But I think one thing that that will definitely happen. You know, whatever happens happens, actually, even in the kind of dystopian ways. I actually think there will be a kind of lower inequality, because and the reason I say that, I think in the utopia and the dystopia, I think, unfortunately, there's going to be a very powerful, you know, top class, whatever happens. But I think what will happen is a squeezing of everything else into a narrower band. And I think most people maybe not your kind of ultra capitalists, maybe not a lot of, um, a lot of Americans maybe will disagree with me on this.

Matt Cartwright: 32:48

But I think if you look at a kind of European model, you know the countries that do really well for you know happiness are always the Scandinavian countries and they have less equality.

Matt Cartwright: 32:58

But what you get with less equality is you get a kind of squeezing into a narrow band, like I said, which you know, at a societal level, means you have much less of a gap between the middle class and the working class, where you don't have a necessary a middle class and a working class, the middle class and the working class where you don't have necessarily a middle class and a working class.

Matt Cartwright: 33:15

But I think where this is difficult is if you are in the upper middle class now and your family has maneuvered yourself from a lower class into a higher class in our current system, then, even if you're okay, you see a relative kind of drop in status relative to those lower social groups that are bought up. And I think the difficulty is going to be if you're someone who is, you know, upper middle class, a lot of upper middle class. You know, city liberals would say they would be much happier in a world where we had more equality. But when their kids are no longer going to the best schools because they're going to the same schools everybody else, because we have a much narrower band, yeah, I think one of the interesting things will be how, how people accept that, because then their, their lot, is not necessarily getting worse per se, but their relative societal status is changing the counter argument I would give to that and given that we're talking about utopia here is that I mean I, I can see a radical change.

Jimmy Rhodes: 34:19

I mean, it's only a specific example that you used, you talked about, you know, one-on-one yeah, I think we're all gonna have one-on-one customized education that's at the right level for the child or the person. Um, fully tailored education, I can see that coming. I mean, it was literally in the education.

Matt Cartwright: 34:39

You have to change so much anyway, isn't it? Education is going to. It's one of the big ones. Again, we want to do a episode or a series on it.

Jimmy Rhodes: 34:47

But education, the whole idea, the premise, the system, everything is going to have to change at some point in education yeah, it was one of the it was one of the points we had in the show notes is, like again in the utopian world, like actually a lot of the services that we have to pay a lot of money for now, or where there's a status or where there's this another, there's a massive democratization of all those. So, like your legal, creative, professional services, where all of that can be done by ai in the future, it either becomes a lot cheaper or effectively free. Right, um, you can already get free pretty much free legal advice, um, off off. You know some of these ai models and they'll say it's not legal advice and all the rest of it.

Matt Cartwright: 35:30

But in the future, yeah, I should just say I mean my my point with that was like from in a societal level, I don't think anyone would argue that that's a bad thing. All I'm saying is that one of the the tricky things is that to get there, what it's going to require is is for people who are currently higher up the chain to be relatively worse off, and I think the transition is going to be relatively worse off, and I think the transition is going to be difficult. I mean, I think there are many positives. So you know, I think this, if it happens, it means less war, it means less social issues, it means less crime because, you know, people are generally happier, more more equal societies there is. You know, there's a reason. Yeah, exactly, there's a reason.

Matt Cartwright: 36:11

You know people generally, people who are stealing things from people, you know, I don't want to, I don't want to kind of, you know, say it's okay, but most people who are stealing things don't have something and the people they're stealing from do have it. So you know there is a difference in, in some way, whether it's class or whether it's just in, you know, in material wealth. You make a more equal society, then you have generally a happier society. But I think it's just the challenge is that narrowing that band is more difficult for the people at the top, um, because relatively, they feel let's talk just a little bit, I think really briefly, because you you were kind of touching on it, on, on on your last point. But, um, I'm gonna let you do this because I know you're, you're someone who's sort of very positive about the idea of you know personalizing content and entertainment and and the sort of you know democratization, I guess of of you know services and and creative, you know, or just the ability to create things wait, we talked about sora.

Jimmy Rhodes: 37:27

Um, I always get sora and suno mixed up. But sora was the open ai text to video model that came out a little while ago and it's been a bit quiet since it came out. But Sora was the open AI text-to-video model that came out a little while ago and it's been a bit quiet since it came out, and we should say it's not publicly out.

Matt Cartwright: 37:41

It exists, but at the moment it's being kind of red-teamed and used by industry people to get it ready for a public release at some point, and sticking with the optimist side of things.

Jimmy Rhodes: 37:53

I really can't wait to be able to apply my own like. I can't create videos, I don't have that creative ability, I don't have the time or the money but I can't wait to be able to create my own versions of, like, popular video, popular film and tv stuff. Like, for example, like I'm sure loads of people can resonate with this like george lucas really messed up the uh, the um original star wars series when he did the remasters. I want the ability to create my own version of star wars, to create my own little universe, all this kind of stuff. I don't have the creative ability to do it myself, but like I can see that happening in the next five to ten years. Actually, we talked about customized designer, you know um medical solutions and pharmaceuticals uh, solutions like I really want.

Jimmy Rhodes: 38:47

And it's already happening with things like um suno, where you know there's an argument against it because you're ripping off the creative industries, and you're because you're ripping off the creative industries and you're making it more difficult for the creative industries, all the rest of it.

Jimmy Rhodes: 38:58

But at the same time, you can make a song about whatever you want right now and this kind of stuff's only going to get better and better.

Jimmy Rhodes: 39:04

Soon, you'll be able to make your own feature-length films purely from your imagination, and I think some of that sort of stuff is is incredible. Um, because you know and and like for kids as well. Like the imagination of kids, I can imagine, you know, probably want some guardrails on it, but like they can, you know, you can create stories for kids, you can create, they can create their own stories. I think there's some like really amazing stuff that we're going to be able to do in the next 10, 15, 20 years in that kind of space, which which which, yes, there's a downside there's a downside that is taking away from the creative industry in a big way. But we're talking about a utopia here where people don't necessarily need to work or people have more hobbies or people have more free time, and I can see that like entertainment and I don't think we need to go into a lot of detail because it's episodes that we've done before.

Matt Cartwright: 39:52

But you know we talked about legal and kind of professional services and as those become cheaper, as you know, you're able to use. You know whether it's large language models or or whatever. You know, whatever the architecture that's being used in the future is a democratization of those kind of services can only be a positive people and you know a way for people to know their rights, to be able to use AI, to be able to ensure you know, fair treatment. I think you know that kind of democratization is something that in a utopia, I guess again, it's you know it's equality, isn't it? It's more about you know everybody having rights and taking the power away, and legal is the best example of you know the person who has the most money is just able to win a court case. That doesn't necessarily have to be the case if you democratize it.

Matt Cartwright: 40:50

Another thing we had an episode on robots. I think we should talk about robots in terms of them becoming actually helpful, whether it's looking after your kids, or whether it's cleaning your house, whether it's doing you know your admin, whether it's providing security for your house, supporting the disabled to be more independent. You know robots coming into our lives and serving a positive purpose yeah, yeah, 100%, like I think.

Jimmy Rhodes: 41:29

I think there's a load of situations and we again we're not like, we're not necessarily talking about here like, okay, the robots can just deal with the elderly. I don't think there's a load of situations and we again we're not necessarily talking about here, like, okay, robots can just deal with the elderly. I don't think it's about that, so it's not going to be. That's their only form of interaction. But you've got to acknowledge that there's a huge gap already where there aren't enough people know, I mean, my, um, my grandmother like has someone who comes to see her and spend a bit of time with her every day. And you know she's lucky, she's living at home, she's in her 90s, she's, but she's living at home and she has care and she has a bit of help and relatives come and see her and all the rest of it and as someone with two kids, you know one of my it's not fear, but you know concerns is when they are at school.

Matt Cartwright: 42:15

That's finishing at three o'clock every day. Well, you know what the hell do we do? How? How the hell do you get kids to the bus in the morning? Or I mean, okay, school might look very different, but you having something there that's able to help you with I don't want to call it care, but help you in terms of, you know, supporting your family and allow you to be independent. I guess you know, if you're not working so much, actually you maybe don't need that, but it's having something.

Matt Cartwright: 42:44

And another way to flip it around. I had this conversation with someone the other day was going back to the healthcare example is actually well, maybe what happens, rather than the robots doing the healthcare, is maybe the robots and you know AI does the other work, and then we have more time people to do that healthcare, you know, and look after our families and be able to be together, and the robot is able to support us with that, but we're able to provide that personal service. So your example of your grandma is she doesn't have anyone there in the in the day. Well, that's because they're out doing other things. But actually, if they don't have so many things to do, there's the ability to spend more time with your family absolutely yeah, it's going to free up, free up our time and resources.

Jimmy Rhodes: 43:24

There was one other thing I was going to mention on robots, which is there are tons and tons of dangerous jobs.

Matt Cartwright: 43:31

There's loads of dangerous jobs out there, people having to you know, then for me that's great because that's getting rid of exploitation customer service jobs where people get abused by, you know, by people and, and you know, police, whatever, you know any of those people who who deal with difficult people being able to replace that with a robot. You know it saves a person. And also, maybe you know the person's not not going to take such an aggressive tone with a robot when it knows the robot can, you know, shoot them through the brain shoot them through the brain.

Jimmy Rhodes: 44:09

Well, I was going to say. I was going to say the robot's going to have no emotion. I'm ready for the dystopia episode. I'm going to change my mentality over. You're warming up for the dystopian episode. No, I think there's tons of areas where robots will be a huge huge, huge benefit to society.

Matt Cartwright: 44:36

I just wanted to finish off with a couple of little points, because we have the kind of sustainability series and we talk about pandemics and stuff in other episodes. But this definition of many people may be not familiar with this term, but there is a term called wicked problems. Wicked problems are these unsolvable, huge problems that we have in society Climate change is one, pandemics, natural disasters, early warning signs as well as being able to potentially fix some of those problems. So if you look at things like earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunami, things like that, there is definitely a way in which some of the prediction tools that are currently able to be used for weather systems I mean, I think it was in the last couple of weeks there is a new tool which is able to forecast weather much, much more accurately than we are currently. All of those kind of tools. They're not going to fix those problems in one go, but they are a way for us to deal with those wicked problems and a way to kind of be able to better prepare ourselves and, you know, get ready for some of the challenges we're going to face. Prepare ourselves and, you know, get ready for for some of the challenges we're going to face.

Matt Cartwright: 45:56

And the last point I wanted to make, which was a really minor point, but I think it's. It's something that's been sort of sticking with me in the last couple of weeks we we talked about the ai pin and the rabbit r1 and you know it's been ridiculed and and we've sort of mocked it a little bit. Um, but you know, a reduction in screen time has to be a positive thing. So if we can start to carry out tasks by converting our interactions with tech from typing and looking at screens into natural language, you know, we're still going to look at video, we're still going to look at content, but a lot of the things that you do, you know you only access it through a screen because you have to.

Matt Cartwright: 46:34

I like to get my information from podcasts, you know, and from listening to stuff. One of the things I'm studying at the moment, every article is available as an audio file. I find it much easier to do it that way and part of the reason actually is genuinely I'm I'm sick of looking at a screen. I'm sick of it if I can have some time where I close my eyes and or, you know, are able to look at the sky outside. So it's a tiny, tiny thing in in the scheme of some of the things we've talked about today, but I think that is something where ai is definitely and and hopefully fairly quickly going to move us away from relying on all of our interactions with tech, from being looking at jimmy uses this example of you know, we all sit down and look at rectangles to a much more natural interaction, and you know that can only be a good thing. So I think that's probably it for our Utopia episode.

Matt Cartwright: 47:25

I think I'm sort of won over by some of the points. I'm looking forward to the Dystopia episode, but there's definitely, you know, there's definitely, you know there's definitely a lot of positive things in there and I think still for me, the healthcare thing and the potential to kind of change equality those are the two really big ones in there. So that's been really fun to do. We will end, as we usually do, with a utopia song. So a very happy song for us to end on today and we look forward to next week's episode where we will hit the dark wall of dystopia. So that's it for this week. Thank you for listening, keep following, keep spreading the love and make sure to subscribe and pass it on to all your friends.

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