AI Should Scare You

I very much in some ways match the profile of the type of person who should be very enthusiastic about artificial intelligence and I cannot bring myself to be excited by it. Quite the opposite. I think it's interesting from a technological standpoint. It's obviously interesting, but I think that on a on a large scale, I get the sense that I don't want to say humanity because it's only a very tiny tiny tiny percentage of people who push and advance these technologies, but I I get the sense that as a species, we've kind of forgotten what technology is for. In my ex in my view is my perspective. I believe that technology should always serve humanity. Technology should like if human beings make technology and we should make technologies that are a net positive and that are beneficial to our species. And all throughout history that's generally been understood. Has technology been used for bad things? Yes, of course. But generally speaking, it's like cool, we're making this thing because it's going to make life better. It's going to help human flourishing. It's going to make us more prosperous. It's going to make this difficult thing easier. It's going to help people live longer. It's going to help fix this disease or issue. Whatever it is, right? Like that's always been the case. And it seems that now we're moving into this stage of just doing things because they can be done. It's like, well, it might have all of these catastrophic, horrible potential effects and it might uh, you know, this could be a civilization ending thing if it doesn't go perfectly, but let's just do it anyway because it's interesting and it's and I'm that's that's the thing that I'm seeing. I'm just kind of like, why? Sometimes I'm just like, why? Right? It's like, oh, we we can do this thing. I'm like, but why? There's a lot of weird stuff you could potentially do with technology. And this is not unique to AI by the way. This also goes into I don't know them trying to do splice animals to make some like new animal or something. But interestingly that that's generally banned in most of the world. Um it could be you know some people are super passionate about like artificial womb technology or something. And I'm like what's what problem are we trying to solve? Is it are women across the world suddenly no longer able to have children? Are we like why? I can see a lot of ways these things can go horribly wrong and yes there can be benefits to certain technologies but the sort of riskreward ratio and then also just the speed of it and the like like what you said about just leaving people behind right so a lot of super AI enthusiasts are just kind of like oh yeah you know it's probably going to displace like I don't know hundreds of millions billions of jobs or whatever um but you know that's just the that's just the cost you know that's just the cost of doing the thing. And I'm like, well, so why are we doing it? Is that a good thing? Is it is it good to replace? Let's say in the last Okay, let's just throw Let's just say that in the next 10 years, a billion people get fully replaced by AI. I'm like, is that good? >> No. >> Right. Like, [laughter] >> no. No. No. >> Is that a good thing? Like, do we want this? Is this good? So there's a number of things. The Jeff the Jeff Goldlum quote is absolutely fantastic for that. You're so preoccupied of whether or not you could, you didn't stop and think of whether or not you should. Um and I I will say the answer to that is because it's a competitive edge, right? If you're able to do something, it's uh you know either economies of scale or you know optimization uh to find the cheapest path or most optimal path, right? So, like if you can if you can train a robot to do something, uh you and you can manufacture that robot for $50,000 and then it never calls in sick. You don't have to pay it um you know, I don't know, unemployment or medical benefits or any of these other things. Whereas the human variant of that is 150,000. It it becomes you have a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders of your company company to optimize revenue and profitability, right? So like a lot of these companies are just seeing it as like hey this is the not only is it a path of lease or resistance it's a path path to more profitability in so many different ways and I I think we do have to have that conversation is where where do people fall in that world do like you know I hear hear these conversations around universal basic income or universal high income I don't think that that's you can give people any arbitrary number that you want but that becomes the baseline what is money at that point I think that you have to you you have to say if you're if you're taking and you're displacing a human being, you need taxes are uh you know kind of counter to my ethos in so many different ways. But at at the point at which there is a monopoly of three companies that extract all the value of humanity, >> you have to say for all those people that are displaced, they're going to have to counterbalance that in some way, shape, or form. So maybe it's a a distribution on displacion, right? So, it's like uh you don't get a $1,000, everyone gets $1,000. It's all the jobs that are displaced. There has to be some type of opposite, you know, distribution. Uh because at some point, like the I I fear that we're running to uh a point where there's going to be a an erosion that is unprecedented between the halves and the have nots. >> Um and that that's that's a very dystopian feature. It's accelerating what people are already concerned about >> and people and again these conversations people will be like you know universal high income and everything is like where in history has greed not won out yes like the the the none of these people are going to get on the throne and say you know what I'm going to give this Uh,

Watch the full episode here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxVhHKivKPw&t=214s In this video, Zuby sits down with Richard Ryan to talk about artificial intelligence, the mass displacement of jobs, and why the race to build powerful technology has outpaced any serious conversation about whether we actually should. Zuby raises a question that rarely gets asked — if AI replaces a billion jobs in the next decade, is that actually a good thing? — while Richard breaks down why corporations are financially incentivized to replace humans with machines regardless of the human cost. They dig into the growing gap between the haves and have-nots, why universal basic income isn't a real solution, and why greed historically always wins out. A sharp and sobering conversation about where unchecked AI development could take humanity. Subscribe to the 'Real Talk With Zuby' podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify & more - https://fanlink.tv/zubypodcast Follow Zuby: https://realtalkwithzuby.com https://x.com/zubymusic https://instagram.com/zubymusic https://facebook.com/zubymusic Merch, Music & Books - https://teamzuby.com