A lot of people are saying, "Oh, what is AI going to do to us?" And the question that I think is a little bit more life-affirming and interesting is what do we want AI to do for us? What is the civilizational tech tree that we want to build? And for the problems that we think are really urgent, is there anything that is preventing us from using AI and machine learning in combination with other computational and experimental tools from solving that problem? So, here at this moment, you know, we're sitting in San Francisco.
It's March 2026, and I I don't think that we have crossed the Rubicon. I don't think that we are beyond the event horizon. If we are comfortable as a culture with eroding privacy or the absence of privacy, with surveillance technology, if we're comfortable with machines and defense tech, right, and making those decisions. If we're comfortable with all of that and we're cheering it on and we're not paying attention, not having those kinds of conversations, then AI's downstream of that for me. People are kind of getting comfortable with automation.
You hop into a a robotic car, it takes you where you want to go, you don't think much, you know, you're on your phone the whole time anyway doing other stuff. And so this idea that we can just delegate authority to these systems that perhaps no one's done the work to verify these systems will work in all use cases is a major major risk for society, right? So this idea of being able to delegate capabilities without delegating authority is going to be incredibly important. When we talk about automation, I want to talk a bit about the idea of job loss. Job loss isn't just oh we do a little bit of displacement.
The goal of the last couple of years of automation has been AGI. The idea behind that being all meaningful economic work gets automated by a single system. And so that's not a world where we automate some tasks and then other tasks are left alone. It's not a world where we automate a little bit of work over time and then we automate some other work later. The goal of something like a trillion dollars in capital has been aimed at automating everything.
And automating everything doesn't just mean you lose your job. I'm a programmer. I lost my job, but I have a new job. I just babysit AI programmers all day. And it's addictive.
It's like crazy addictive cuz I have like incredible superpowers. Problem is that nobody else really wants to buy my stuff because like what am I selling them is something that they could also make themselves and they didn't enjoy making. Like it would be fun for them. So what I have to make has to be something deeper. It has to be like community.
It has to be movement. So small communities mean all know each other. We trust each other. We also feel judged a little bit by by each other's neighbors. So we keep ourselves to our highest standards.
When that sense of trust and familiarity breaks down, Ostrom's rules of designing and governing commons, that's when they break down, too. And I think AI and the new technologies that we're living in this intelligent age is a groundbreaking way to expand Elinor Ostrom's ideas to much larger numbers than 150 by creating a digital twin of you, by having them talk and take that cognitive load of you, and then you come back and you do the final decision-making. And so if we get this right, if we can actually get this transition correct, we can wake up in a world where we aren't automated out of a job forever. We don't do anything. We don't end up in like UBI utopia where nobody ever works again.
We end up in a world where your work matters. And I think that's a promise worth racing towards.
Automatic transcript — names and jargon may be misspelled.