AI for Humanity: Understanding the Next Industrial Revolution
Matt, welcome back to the show once again. Happy to have you here.
Speaker 2:Man, Ari, I am so glad to be back.
Speaker 1:One of the things that that struck me as incredibly interesting is this idea of the industrial revolutions and there's been quite a few of them so far. Where did this start? These are
Speaker 2:called K waves. Okay. And K waves are named after the Russian economist, I believe Nikolay Kantrytiv and they are long, they are essentially like long wave economic cycles, sometimes around forty to sixty years and they follow technology. So these are technological cycles that essentially just repeat over time and have really been going since early eighteen hundreds with, naval power, which, you know, you have Great Britain. I believe that was the first one.
Speaker 2:If you look at history and you look at our shared human global economic history and you can really carve it out into some chunks there, they're marked by several, you know, substantial events, right? One, the emergence of a brand new technology, whether that be nuclear energy, whether that be, you know, the discovery of the applications of oil, right. You know, through chemistry and physics, information communication technologies. Society has had to change, right. In order to acclimate those technological advances.
Speaker 2:That's just we're human. That's how it works. Right. So you see, and, oh, and they're also technically dominated by usually by one hegemonic power. Say like, you know, with the, the Industrial Revolution and steam, it was Great Britain.
Speaker 2:You know, we're coming out of ICT, which, you know, there was the American hegemon. And what that hegemon does is it's really the king of the hill, right? As far as the technological advancement of the human race. And so, you know, the owner or discoverer, the proliferator of that technology essentially sets the norms, industrially, commercially, socially, you know, which is really, and we're coming out of one of those waves, the ICT wave, and we're starting on the AI wave.
Speaker 1:Basically, we're setting up this narrative to say that where we are right now, it's happened before. It's happened before many times, right? When Henry Ford came and invented the moving line, that was an industrial revolution. When we kind of figured out how to use coal and more specifically where we figured out how to use engines, that was a revolution. In each of these phases, each of these changes, it had massive impact on mankind.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. And at each of these stages, there was incredible concern and risk associated. We might not think about this today, but when the trains came along, there were massive demonstrations against the trains. It wasn't necessarily something everybody wanted. So there's lessons to be learned this historical record.
Speaker 1:Question is, I think we all know where this is going. AI is this big innovation that is kind of yet again, resetting history. And the question is, you know, what can we learn from history and where might this go? But this story for you starts at a much more personal level.
Speaker 2:Why did you even write this book? So is the simple question of when is AI going to take my job? When? Because guess what? You're talking to a guy has seen that happen in real life.
Speaker 2:Right? You know, to him, to my coworkers, to my subordinates. You know, I've seen it happen to friends, family, you know, with these, you know, AI centric layoffs.
Speaker 1:There are maybe a dozen dystopian versions of the future that we're concerned about. So, so let's talk about one of these dystopian futures, which you allude to in the book. You're a millennial like myself, so you've probably seen the show sliders. Yeah. There's this one episode where basically this gentleman works in a mall, gets his health insurance, his health care, his salary from the mall.
Speaker 1:The mall is also where he lives. I mean, this really old from the nineties show isn't isn't just a TV show. It sounds like a possible dystopian future. Draw the line between AI, this industrial revolution that we're going through now and all of these other parameters that could contribute to that future before we jump into how to prevent it. How could this happen?
Speaker 1:It sounds unimaginable.
Speaker 2:Well, it's not unimaginable because the example that you just gave of that of that guy living and working at the mall, getting his health insurance from the mall, we've already been down that path. Those are called company towns. Right? Like, you know, you you would go to work in a in an Appalachian coal mine. You know, you would get paid in company script.
Speaker 2:Right? You would have to buy all your supplies from the company store. And what it amounted to is just indentured servitude.
Speaker 1:This indentured servitude. It's not because of the setup. It's because of where power lies and how they can change costing and value. Talk about that for a second. How does this turn into indentured servitude?
Speaker 2:Well, so take for example, those factories in China, right? Like that you just described. Those are the same factories that had to install suicide nets because the workers kept killing themselves. Flat out. Right?
Speaker 2:This equals indentured servitude is this the removal of choice and agency from the individual. You are deserving of certain things, right? Like in America, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. In the United Nations, you have the, you know, the list of human rights. So the human bill of rights.
Speaker 2:So it's really the lack of choice. Okay. So this, this imaginary scenario that we're talking about with the mall, those people in company towns, they had no choice of where to get their groceries. They had no choice of what to buy. Right.
Speaker 2:Or what was stock. They didn't have anywhere else to go because they were trapped within the economic system that that, you know, was constructed around them to keep them working that job. Right. Because the only reason that these, that the factory towns exist or like with that episode of sliders exists is because the level of wealth extraction that the organization can get out of you is greater than these goods, services, and sustainment that they are supplying you. So that power dynamic will always be in balance in those instances.
Speaker 1:So, so we, we kind of understand this situation where our employer is paying our wages, but can also increase the cost of our housing. It's the same person. All power is controlled by one person. There's a good chance that within human nature, they're going to abuse that. So is that, is that the path to where we get to this dystopian future?
Speaker 2:We get there by going on the same path that we're going on. Right? By, by the continuous wealth extraction, by, by the obscene wealth inequality that's I believe, one of the greatest points in human history. So how do we change it? We change it by understanding how artificial intelligence affects the systems of our society and also understanding how those systems are, because that's something that humanity really never did was actually sit back and think about how did we really get this and how do we reorganize it?
Speaker 2:Let me case in point. Okay. So our the way we do time. Okay. The daylight savings time, all this other stuff, man, that that's for World War I munitions manufacturing.
Speaker 2:Right? Our eight hours a day, five days a week, that's for a Henry Ford assembly line. We're not stamping dies anymore. Right? Like, we're not sitting there pulling levers and pushing buttons like the good old days when you do forty years in a factory, get your gold watch and, you know, claim victory in life.
Speaker 2:You know, like that's not happening anymore. Why? Because the way artificial intelligence affects the systems of our society.
Speaker 1:One of these really concerning pathways is just this consolidation of power, right?
Speaker 2:We as individuals and we as, as, as a society, we have agency. The simple thing of, hey, not going down this path is to sit down as a society and discuss this. Our society, because of this, just this extreme, like end stage capitalism, We're just in this consume, consume, consume mode to where we've completely denigrated our global society. Right? Like, I mean, we we have Earth Overshoot Day now where we consume more resources than our planet can regenerate.
Speaker 2:We've got climate change. I mean, we're literally destroying ourselves and we're throwing away our grandchildren and children's future. Right? For what? For what?
Speaker 2:Hey, hi. It's not a mystery. It's a mirror. Okay. If you point artificial intelligence at our best impulses, the charitable giving, the taking care of others, the service to the greater good and the general welfare of our society, then that's exactly what we're going to get because we're going to proliferate those governance practices and principles.
Speaker 2:But if you pointed at the extraction, if you pointed at the mass surveillance that we're currently walking down now, if you pointed at all of that, then all of that energy and all of that productivity, it's going go to those activities. And then that's what we'll pull up proliferate throughout our society. So, you know, how do we avoid it? Honestly, look in a mirror and that mirror is how you, as a citizen of this world decide to meet the day. Okay.
Speaker 2:It's in the kindness that you display. It is in the conduct because your conduct is your character. And we as a society have to understand that again, AI is a mirror and wherever we point that mirror is what we will get. We pointed it at greed is good. We pointed it at deregulation.
Speaker 2:We pointed it at all of these, all of these essentially negative things because quite frankly, the political leadership of The United States Of America over the past forty years hasn't been able to see more than six inches in front of that face. And we're going to use artificial intelligence for the betterment of all of humanity. Because other than that, I mean, we're just, we are shirking our duty to ourselves, to our children, our grandchildren ad infinitum.
Speaker 1:In order for all kinds of people to be successful with AI, because if I think about just one person controlling AI, then that could be incredibly bad. But if I think about all these good things happening with AI, meaning new drugs coming out that cure all kinds of illnesses, economic value created across the board. The only way that I can think to get it there is to make sure that AI doesn't fall into one person's control because otherwise, you know, it should be of the people and for the people. So, so to me, the first thing is that AI should kind of be almost like a utility. It's almost like water in your taps, but more as a service utility that's actually regulated.
Speaker 2:Yeah. All right. So as far as the utility, as far as a public good, I completely agree with you. Right? Because guess what?
Speaker 2:Our public data was used to train those models flat out. So I don't understand in in what world is is the the data of our society, like my information, your information, social media, all of our academic institutions utilize to train a private sector asset. And then the private sector then turns around and charges me money to use the thing that it chart that it built off of my own data. Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 2:Get out of here with that. So yeah. And it should be a public utility flat out. And and that is actually what you've described and illuminated is one of the foundation, foundational principles of sovereign AI. Right?
Speaker 2:Like, hey, each country wants its AI because look, what you've just talked about, this can benefit everybody and everyone can use this to discover and improve their lives is is absolutely legitimate. And that's why we need publicly owned artificial intelligence instances. The closest that we have, and as far as I know right now, is you have a couple of sovereign models being developed, right? But you know, they're not state of the art.
Speaker 1:Let's say AI is now a, you know, a public service, right. Sure. They take their margin just like the electric company takes their margin, but then you started to talk about a different problem. You're saying, well, is also sucking up all this or creating all this productivity, sucking it away from the employees. So now all that revenue is going upwards to the shareholders.
Speaker 1:So that creates a system that's no longer sustainable for the general public. What do you think would be pro capitalism version of a solution that could facilitate a fair and equitable version for AI to the masses?
Speaker 2:That question starts from the premise that, you know, like that capitalism is going to continue to exist in its current form in which I don't think that's going to happen. Right. So in my estimation and in my professional and personal opinion, if capitalism is to survive in any form at all, needs to be entirely reworked. Right. Because you're absolutely correct about the current, the current organization of the federal government does not do a good job of responding to the needs of its citizenry.
Speaker 2:That is a 100% correct. And the reason is, is because we're trying to govern a twenty first century technology off of twentieth century federal institutions that were never meant to cross state lines. The implementation of artificial intelligence throughout our society will cause our society to change fundamentally in ways commensurate with agriculture and husbandry, fire, the wheel, the nuclear age, right? Like think think about what happened, you know, with nuclear power. We had to have the, you know, Bretton Woods agreement, you know, United Nations, like all this level of coordination.
Speaker 2:And, and then you have the, the emergence of the emergence of the current capitalist system at that time, right? Like the system as it functions now did not function like this in the 1970s, sixties, fifties, forties, it's gradually evolved and it needs to continue to evolve. It's a rearchitecture of the entire system. It's a rethinking of what success means. It's a rethinking of what is capitalism.
Speaker 2:And that's what my book is about. One of the main blockers to that, we lack a national narrative. Eddie lack a national narrative of what artificial intelligence is for. So how are we as a society going to even discuss how to begin to deploy AI in a more capitalistic, a more socialistic, a more whatever, democrat, liberal, whatever, when we can't even agree on what the destination is? Right?
Speaker 2:To some AI is this, Oh my God, existential threat. We're going to destroy humanity in the world. Right? That's one, that's one narrative to others. It's a system of economic destruction that, you know, the oligarchs will suck up all the money and leave us all destitute.
Speaker 2:That's another. Okay. And then you have this, oh, this is going to be so beautiful. Everyone's going to have, you know, like bespoke medication and three d printed robot AI limbs and stuff like that. Right.
Speaker 2:That's enough. But they're all competing. There is no single narrative. And until the state, local, federal governments finally align within our society, there won't be.
Speaker 1:So I think you're, you're hitting on a really important point. We are talking about a technology that is going to change the underlying fundamentals of how capitalism works. And within this possible future, we can see a couple ways in which capitalism can fail us. Right. And that's what economists call market failures.
Speaker 1:Now these market failures could be extreme and catastrophic. You know, human beings being relatively simplistic creatures, if something is not good, then we think about the opposite of that. That must be good. Now the opposite of capitalism is socialism. But we've never seen any entirely socialistic countries be successful.
Speaker 1:When I say entirely, I mean to the level of communism. That has never worked in no country from Russia to Venezuela, never ever. So what we need to do is figure out one of two things, how to revamp our capitalistic society so it continues to work. And that's what a Republican would say, I would argue. I, that's why
Speaker 2:I developed the labor formulas for exactly that purpose.
Speaker 1:Or alternatively, what a Democrat would say is, well, if the capitalistic equations are not working, then we need to lean more towards the socialistic equations. I can tell you just one thing. Any extreme of either of those solutions doesn't work. We know communism doesn't work. We know that extreme capitalism doesn't work.
Speaker 1:So my question to you, and this is, I don't know that you have an answer to this, but To bring it out of What this, is that mix? What is the, let's say the fundamentals of that future mix where we don't completely neglect capitalism because at the end of the day, capitalism is the thing that makes you want to get out of debt and actually do work. Because when we look at communism where everybody gets a free ride, nobody goes and does work and then everybody is hungry. And that's the thing that we forget about extreme socialism, AKA communism. So we need a mix of the two.
Speaker 1:What does that mix look like?
Speaker 2:It looks like exactly what I outlined in my book. It's Star Trek. It is absolutely Star Trek. Right? Like, I mean, you have the the federation.
Speaker 2:There is intergalactic, interplanetary trade. There are market economies for goods and services. However, it is more egalitarian, more equal, and more democratic and more representative of the cohesive whole. And that's exactly what it is. It's it's a reorganization of what could be and what we can achieve.
Speaker 2:And then that's why I wrote the book AI for Humanity, Architecting a Better Future. Right? Because it starts off, you know, with examining the situation as it is now between what I've identified as four AI hegemons. Okay. Then we go into the K wave and also the crossing of planetary boundaries.
Speaker 2:And then I explain agentic AI, right, and artificial intelligence as the new fundamental organizing logic of our global society. Right. And that's when I developed the labor formulas. The labor formulas that I developed, I believe again, can take us and allow society to capture those productivity gains and measure them. Right.
Speaker 2:And that's when we can then have the discussion as a society of where do these gains from AI go? Where does the productivity go? Hey, it's going all to the shareholders, but that's not sustainable. Hey, it's going all to the employees, but that's not sustainable. It'll collapse both ends.
Speaker 2:You're absolutely right. So we need to mitigate and we need to do that transition. If we take a step back and look at our global society, look at all of humanity, right? We sit down, we talk through the reorganization of our society of what is better, what is more egalitarian, what is the best possible outcome for everybody, Right. Which is that golden age, that panacea, that, that discovery, those, those sovereign LLMs, but also publicly owned available, you know, citizens using them.
Speaker 2:Like that's the future. That's the future that I believe will yield the greatest returns. And that future is resembles Star Trek. So again, we need the formulas to measure the work. Well, how do we incorporate them?
Speaker 2:Well, guess what? I've got four chapters of playbooks, buddy. I've got them for policymakers, regulators, tech workers, every average day citizens and workers, right? So literally you can be anywhere on the planet in, in theory of what I've attempted to do. It will gradually move that window over to a more egalitarian and equitable society, as far as the financial productivity gains.
Speaker 2:Now, again, where those gains go, that's the discussion. That's the back and forth. But until we understand what's really at stake, until we understand how AI takes our job, we'll never be able to measure how much of our job is really worth.
Speaker 1:If you could, you know, wave a magic wand and make one law, what would that be? What would you put into law tomorrow?
Speaker 2:I would overturn Citizens United. I would get the money out of American politics that's currently polluting the system. I would I would eliminate the the political corruption.
Speaker 1:If you are, you know, forty years into the future from today, what is the piece of advice that you would give yourself to Matt Work harder. In 2026? Matt, think you're already working way too hard. There's gotta be something better than that.
Speaker 2:Go harder. Do it. You only live one life. Why not? He who dares wins.
Speaker 2:Let's go work harder.
Speaker 1:Matt, thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate you joining
Speaker 2:Yeah, man. As always, Hey,
Speaker 1:find
Speaker 2:a book.
