THE BIG AI RESET: The Next Global SuperPower Isn't Who You Think | Ian Bremmer

you said these are dangerous times the world order is Shifting before our eyes we also both know that with Hyper disruptive Technologies like AI on the horizon a good outcome is not guaranteed why do you think big Tech will become the third superpower and what are the dangers and opportunities if it does big Tech is essentially Sovereign over the digital world the fact that former president Trump was de-platformed from Facebook and from Twitter uh when he was president you know most powerful political figure on the planet and he's just taken off of those networks and as a consequence hundreds of millions of people that would be regularly engaging with him in real time suddenly can't see it that wasn't a decision that was made by a government it wasn't a decision made by a a judge or by a regulatory Authority or even by a multi-national organization um like you know the U.N it was made by individuals uh that own tech companies um the same thing is true in the decision to help Ukraine uh in the war in the early days the U.S didn't provide much Military Support most of the military capacity and the Cyber defenses the ability to communicate on the ground uh was stood up by some tech companies that they're not allies of NATO they're under no obligation to do that they've got shareholders right but they still decided to do it um I think that whether we're talking about Society or the economy or even National Security if it touches the digital space technology companies basically act with dominion and that didn't matter much when the internet was first founded because the importance of the internet for those things was pretty small but as the importance of the digital world drives a bigger and bigger piece of the global economy a bigger and bigger piece of Civil Society a bit bigger and bigger piece of National Security and even increasingly defines who we are as people how we interact with other human beings what we see what we decide what we feel um how we emote uh that that is an astonishing amount of power in the hands of these tech companies and yes there are some efforts to rein them in to break them up um to regulate them but when I look at artificial intelligence in particular um I see these technology companies and their Technologies vastly outstripping the capacity of governments to regulate in that space so does that mean that suddenly you're not going to be citizens of the US you're going to be citizens of a tech company no I'm not going that far but certainly in terms of who wields the most power over us as human beings increasingly you would put those companies in that category and that none of us even five years ago were thinking about this seriously and certainly when I I was studying as a political scientist this is my entire career you know the geopolitical space is determined by governments right like them or hate them and some of them are powerful some of them are weak some of them are rich some are poor some are open some are closed some are dictatorships right some are democracy some are functional some are dysfunctional but they're in charge and that increasingly is not true as you look at that potential or not potential as you look at that growing reality how does that play out does this become uh the one thing when I look at that that I really start getting paranoid about is that AI especially Quantum Computing I'm maybe less familiar with but sort of lingers in the back of my mind become one of two things either weapons used by governments um even even if it's not against their own people though I do especially with authoritarian governments I get very paranoid about that but even if they're just used as Warfare against other countries that sort of quiet invisible battle freaks me out and then also I worry very much about this becoming the new battlefield for a cold war between the US and China specifically do you see us as moving towards that because the tech will make that increasingly easy to fight an invisible War I I do think of course that all of these Technologies are both enabling and destructive and it all depends on the intention of the user and in some cases um you know it's someone who's just a tinkerer that makes a mistake or that's playing around and you know it explodes I'm not particularly worried that the robots are going to take over I'm not particularly worried that we're on the cusp of developing a superhuman intelligence and that we're suddenly irrelevant or we're you know held hostage to it that's in other words I I mean I know that you love the Matrix we talked about that a little bit before the show this is this is not my 5-10 year concern um but the idea that this technology is going to proliferate explosively I mean vastly beyond anything we ever were concerned about with nuclear weapons we're 80 years on it's still just just a handful of countries and no corporations no terrorist groups no individuals to have access to those nukes no no AI with both its productive and destructive capacities will not just be in the hands of Rogue States but will also be in the hands of people and and terrorists um and corporations and and they'll have Cutting Edge access to that so I mean it would be easier to deal with if it was just about the United States and China and we can talk about the United States and China and how they think about that technology differently and how we're fighting over it and how it it has become a technology Cold War I think that we can say that that exists right now not a cold war overall but a technology Cold War I think that exists um but I think the dangers of AI are far greater than that it is precisely the fact that non-governments will act as principles in determining the future of Digi of the digital world and of society and National Security as a consequence and governments right now governments still seem to think that they're going to be the ones that will drive all this regulation and in the most recent days the United States is taking just a few baby steps to show that maybe they were recognize that that's not the case um but ultimately either we're going to have to govern in new institutions with technology companies as partners as signatories or they're not going to be regulated and I think that that that reality is not yet appreciated by citizens it's not yet appreciated by governments okay so tell me more about that what does the world look like where this technology is proliferating like that and is not regulated um well if it's not regulated at all um that means that everyone has access to it so let's look at the good side first let's be let's be positive and optimistic because I am a I'm a Believer in this technology I think it does all sorts of incredible things and I'm not just talking about chat GPT I'm talking about the ability to take any proprietary data set and be maximally efficient in extracting uh value from it um helping allowing workers to become AI adjacent in ways that will make them more productive and effective I look at my own firm Erasure group we've got about 250 employees and I we did a town hall with them the other day we do one every order and we were talking about Ai and I said I don't think there's anyone in any of these offices globally that will be displaced by AI in the next three to five years not one of my knowledge workers but I said all of you will be AI adjacent and if you're not if you're not learning how to use AI to dramatically improve your work whether you are an analyst or whether you're on the business side or you're in finance or you're you know in on the it help desk or you're a graphics person an editor whatever it is you will become much less productive than other employees that are doing that and that will be a problem for you so we need to get you the tools and you need to learn so I and I think that that's that's true in almost every industry imaginable it's true in education it's true in health care and for new Pharma and vaccines it's true for new energy and critical infrastructure and what's so amazing about it one of the reasons why it's taking us so long to respond to climate change even now that we we all agree that it's happening we all agree this 420 parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere we all agree there's 1.2 degrees Centigrade of warming like that's that's no longer in dispute and yet it's really taking us a long time to to get to the point that we can reduce our carbon emissions and the reason for that is because you need to change the critical infrastructure right you need to move from one entire supply chain oriented around carbon to another one oriented around something new whether that's solar or you know Green hydrogen or you name it right um when you're talking about AI you're talking about CR first and foremost creating efficiencies using your existing critical infrastructure which means you have no vested corporations that are saying we don't want that no every corporation is saying how can we invest in that to create greater profitability everyone every every oil company is going to use AI just like every post fossil fuel company is going to use it every bank is going to use it um every pharmaceutical company whether they're using whether they're an mRNA or they're in traditional uh uh you know uh vaccines that are that are developed as we have over decades now I I think that we truly underestimate the impact that will have in unlocking wealth in unlocking human capital and it's going to happen fast it's not decades as it took with globalization to open markets and get goods and services to to move across the world it's years in some cases it's months and that that to me is very very exciting so that's the positive side and uh frankly that's what the positive side looks like without regulation too because I mean look there are trillions of dollars being spent on this rollout and it's being spent by a lot of people who are hyper smart they are hyper competitive they want to get there first before other companies that are in that space and they don't need any further incentive to ensure that they can roll that out as fast as possible so you and I can we can say whatever we want but it's not you know further subsidies are not required right like that is just going to happen that is going to happen um but what they're not doing and I'm sure what you want to spend more time on with me is not the everything's going to be great or you know what they call this e Dash act the you know sort of exponential accelerationists who just believe that if we just put all this money in it then we're gonna we're gonna all become a greater species and it's just gonna happen but they're going to be a lot of negative externalities and we know this from from globalization I mean the miracle of your and my lifetimes thus far before AI the miracle was we managed to unlock access to the global Marketplace for now 8 billion people trade and goods and capital and investment and and the labor force the workforce and that created dislocations it meant that there were a whole bunch of people that were more expensive in the west that lost their jobs as inexpensive labor that was very talented in China and India gained jobs but but that led to unprecedented growth for 50 years there were also negative externalities and those negative externalities played out over many decades but it's when you take all of this inexpensive coal and oil and gas out of the ground and you don't realize that you're actually using a limited resource and you're affecting the climate and so decades later we all figure out oh wait a second this is a really huge cost on humanity and on all of these other species many of which are already extinct and no one's bothered to pay for them well with AI the negative externalities will happen basically simultaneously with all the positive stuff I just talked about and just like with climate none of the people that are driving AI are spending their time or resource figuring out how to deal with those those problems they're spending all their time trying to figure out how to save Humanity how to accelerate this technology so if we don't talk about those negative externalities they're just gonna happen and they won't be mitigated they won't be regulated and there's a lot of them and you know we can talk through what they are but I mean there's you know just just to put in everyone's head here that kind of like climate change right we all wanted globalization I'm a huge fan of globalization we all hate climate change we wish it hadn't happened you cannot have one without the other and you know the fact that we were so focused on growth and that all of the powerful forces are let's have more stuff let's get more GDP let's extend our lifespans let's improve our education let's take people out of abject poverty all of which are you know laudable goals some more some less but things that we all like but there were there were consequences that no one wanted no one dealt with no one cared as much about because they're not as directly relevant to us as the shiny Apple that's right in front and that that is what is about to happen ex an exponential fashion with artificial intelligence all right so we've got the shiny object syndrome myself included I am I am deploying AI in my company as fast as I can but at the same time I am very worried about how this plays out uh you've already touched on job loss you're not super worried about that in the three to five year time Horizon I may be a little more worried about that than you but I gave a same uh a similar speech to my company which is I have literally zero intention to get rid of anybody uh but I do have the expectation that all of you are going to be learning how to use Ai and I know that that is is going to mean I'm going to get efficiencies out of my current Workforce which means I won't be hiring additional people so while the people I have are safe yep uh it certainly creates instability in people uh in terms of looking for a new job the the kind of Mobility I don't think people are going to be scaling as quickly as possible but my real question for you is given that you have a Global Perspective which which I've come to late in the game and for long time viewers of mine I will just say the reason I become so obsessed with this you and I were talking about this before we started rolling I come at everything from the perspective of the individual and I think that that culture and all these knock-on effects are all Downstream of the individual and if we want a good Society we have to be good individuals but we have to take the time to say what is that like what are we aiming towards what's our North Star what are we trying to get out of this so for me the punch line is human flourishing I don't spend time in this interview defining what that means certainly my listeners have heard me talk about that before but what do you think about I I assume you will roughly given the the talk that you just gave will roughly say something similar we want good things we want to pull people out of poverty we want to clean up the environment there's going to be a lot a lot of things we want to do that I think more or less are about human flourishing what then is the Collision of a new technology like AI becoming so ubiquitous in an unregulated fashion that gives you pause is it us China is it a rogue actor making bio weapons like what's the thing that when you look near term we'll say the three to five year time Horizon what gives you pause so I there are a few things um I and I I don't even though I said I don't think I'm going to um fire anyone because of AI I I do worry that the same populous trends that we have experienced in the developed World in particular over the last 20 years can grow faster if you are um a rural um you know living in a rural area or you're undereducated um and uh you know you're not going to become AI adjacent in the next five years ten years in the United States in Europe and those people will be left farther behind by the knowledge workers that have that opportunity um and so I'm not saying they're going to have massive unemployment but I worry about that what do you think about like picking fruit and stuff like that with robots that make your radar for anything near-term again not so much so I again I would say no let me tell you why I say no about that because when I think about what CEOs do with their workforces generally they take those productivity gains they pocket them um you know they pay out good bonuses to themselves to their shareholders maybe they invest more in growth but as long as growth is moving they're not getting rid of a whole bunch of people they like the people that they have they want they're always thinking the trees are going to grow you know sort of to the heavens and then when they face a sudden contraction a recession or even worse a depression then suddenly they look at everything around them and say okay where can we cut costs and if we've suddenly if those workers if a lot of those workers aren't as efficient as they used to be and you get new technologies suddenly it's not like you're incrementally getting rid of people every year it's that you've taken a huge swath out of the workplace so I don't think that that's going to happen suddenly um in the next few years because we're coming out of a mild narrow slowdown right now and the next few years should look better um I I more think about what happens the next time we're in a major cyclical downturn and and combining that with where we've gotten to with the AI productivity build up at that point but I but I still think that in the interim you're gonna have people that aren't gaining the productivity benefits from AI inside Western economies and those are the same people that have been hit by the fentanyl crisis those are the same people that haven't had good investments in their Educational Systems than around the world the people the digital Have Nots the people that aren't even online so they won't be able to use these new AI tools to be a to improve their knowledge to have access to better doctors so they'll be left behind this new turbocharged globalization and that's a lot of sub-Saharan Africa first and foremost so I do think that there are two groups of people that even in the next five years that will suffer comparatively and will be angry politically and we'll create social discontent so I didn't mean to imply that I didn't care about that or that I thought it was off the screen it was more that I don't see that as a firm of literally 250 people like we're tiny and if you tell me that we're going to have a lot more efficiency I I wouldn't actually hire less I'd hire more because I want to get to 500 people faster like there's just more things that I want to do without taking any outside investment um but but that's a tiny tiny issue compared to the other stuff we're talking about the things that I'm probably most worried about in the near term three years let's say I'd say or three buckets um the first is the disinformation bucket the fact that inside democracies increasingly especially with AI we as Citizens cannot agree on what is true we can't agree on facts and that that delegitimizes the media it delegitimizes our leaders and both political parties or the many political parties that exist in other developed countries it delegitimizes our Judicial System rule of law it even delegitimizes our scientists and you can't really have an effective democracy if there is no longer a fact space I mean we're seeing it right now in a tiny way with all of these indictments of trump and it doesn't matter what the indictments are doesn't matter how many they are it doesn't matter what he's being indicted for what matters more to the political outcome is whether or not you favor Trump political if you do then this is politicized It's a Witch Hunt and you know Biden should be indicted and if you don't um then Trump is unfit and every indictment doesn't matter what it is before you even get a result of it uh then you know he's guilty and and that with AI becomes turbocharged you can reboot your life your health even your career anything you want all you need is discipline I can teach you the tactics that I learned while growing a billion dollar business that will allow you to see your goals through whether you want better health stronger relationships a more successful career any of that is possible with the mindset and business programs and impact Theory University join the thousands of students who have already accomplished amazing things tap now for a free trial and get started today I want to get into why that happens so my first question on that is pre it's definitely pre-ai because I think this started breaking down with social media great um how prior to social media do you think that we were able to come to a consensus on truth um well couple reasons one uh is that a lot of people got their media from either the same Source or from overlapping and adjacent sources so you had more commonality to talk about politics to the extent that you talked about politics second it was mostly long form so you would read a newspaper article you would listen to a radio show you would watch a television show you weren't just getting the headline because today if you go on CNN or Fox News on their website and don't look at the headlines just look at the pieces the pieces actually overlap a fair amount if you look at the headlines and then if you look at what headlines you're being filtered to then the news that you're getting is completely different so I think that's a reason too um and and of course the fact that people are spending so much more time intermediated by algorithms means they're spending less time randomly just meeting their fellow other and that's even true with the rise of things like um dating apps right I mean as opposed to Just Happening to date someone you were in high school with or in college with or you know you meet at a bar I mean if you're meeting that person through a dating app you're already being sorted in ways that will reduce the randomness of the the views that you're exposed to so in all sorts of tiny ways that add up that are mostly technologically driven we become much more sorted short head not sorted those sorted probably too um as as a population um and and then you put AI into this and and suddenly this is being Max so let me get another example you'll remember that I think it was David ogleby who the great advertising uh entrepreneur who once said that we know that 50 of advertising dollars um are you know are useful fifty percent are useless we just don't know what fifty percent and of course now we know how to micro Target now we know that when we're spending money we are spending it to get the eyeballs of the people who are going to be affected by our message they will be angered by it they will be titillated by it they will be engaged by it they will spend money they will become more Addicted by it all of those things and when you do that you more effectively sort the population as opposed to throwing a message at the wall but everybody gets the message and so it is not the intention to destroy democracy it is not the intention to rip apart Civil Society it is merely an unintended secondary effect of the fact that we've been become so good at micro targeting and sorting that people no longer are together as a nation or as a community an AI perfects that AI allows you to take large language models and predict with uncanny capacity um what the next thing is and the next thing for an advertising company is how I can effectively Target and reach that person and not the other person who who doesn't care about mine yeah and keep them engaged so let me give you my thesis on this this I think is uh one of the most important things for us to all wrap our heads around I thought a lot about why is there a sudden breakdown in in truth and the more I thought about okay what is true how can we go about proving it the reality is that so much of what we perceive to be true is merely um your interpretation of something so you're gonna get a perspective on something built around what I call your frame of reference so your frame of reference is basically it's your beliefs and your values that you've cobbled together sort of unknowingly throughout the course of your life it becomes a lens through which you view everything but it is a very distorted lens that is not making an effort to give you what is true it's making an effort to conform to the things you already believe are or ought to be and so when people confuse that for objective reality then you have a problem and so when you introduce AI what well one when you introduce algorithms you get massive fragmentation so now I can serve you just the things you're interested in so like if you go to my feed you're going to Niche down into like really weird things around uh video game creation which is something that I'm very passionate about that somebody else isn't going to see and so you get already that fragmentation you layer that on top of your perspective which you're coming with those those pre-distortions then you layer that on top of the algorithm has an agenda that may not match your agenda and now all of a sudden you get into these Echo chambers that are feeding back to you your same perspective they're eliminating nuance by giving you like you were talking about headlines earlier by giving you like this is the talking point and so now you start everything becomes predictable if I know you're on the left I know what you're you know on a basket of um Concepts I know where you're going to fall if you're on the right same basket of Concepts I know where you're going to fall and so once you get rid of that Nuance now all of a sudden again we're not optimized for truth we're optimized for party line and because that then feeds into a sense of tribe and I belong and ease of thought quite frankly which is one of the things that scares me the most is like oh I don't have to think through that issue myself I just need to know what my party line is cool got it and and now I go and as we get more and more fragmented now it becomes okay I know what my party line is in my very deep fragment here but I don't know what's true and I no longer even know how to assess what's true in fact I probably think again because that Distortion reads to me as objective reality so I think it is true and so now you have all these people who are like this is true like there's not there's nothing you could tell me that will make me think any different because I believe this to be true and so now the question becomes if I'm right that truth is perspective and interpretation and and the you're you're soaked in the the perspective and interpretation of others so they they reinforce so it becomes perspective interpretation and reinforcement and so that becomes quote unquote truth outside of science for lack no because even science we run into the same problem so what do we do you know the same problem science yes so so in a world where uh the only way I can think to get on the other side of this Quagmire is to go I want to achieve this thing and I'm going to State this is my achieve my my um desired outcome this is the metric by which I will determine whether I have achieved said outcome and then instead of asking what's true I just ask what moved me closer to my goal is there any way else around that that you see or is this just a one-way Street to fragmented catastrophe no there are lots of ways out of it we're just not heading towards any of them uh I mean no you look at your Twitter feed or your ex feed and you've got um the people you're following and if you're willing to spend the time you can curate a following feed that has people of all sorts of different backgrounds inclinations from all over the world and I do that um and but it takes a lot of time and effort and you need expertise to be able to do that you have to be able to research and figure out who those people are you have to know some people in the field most people don't do that um but of course the four you feed is much more titillating before you feed is very entertaining it engages you it angers you um and and it and it soothes you at the same time you want more of that and that of course is driving you exactly in the direction you just suggested now a lot of people will say well okay you watch CNN all the time you should watch some Fox as well no that's not the answer the answer is not watching Fox because you will just hate watch Fox because you've already been programmed to realize that everything that the people on the other side saying is false and so they're all evil and so all that's doing is validating your existing truth no what you really need to I tell I tell you young people this all the time you really want to understand and get outside what's happening in the United States ecosystem watch the CBC or Al Jazeera or deutschevela or NHK in Japan just watch their English language news once a week for half an hour an hour it's not for exciting but it's like a completely external view of what the hell is going on in the United States and the rest of the world and that forced you first of all it's long form right it's not the headlines beating you down and secondly it's like you don't actually have your anchor of all of the things that are stirring you up they're not even playing with that they're just kind of reporting on the best they can tell what the hell is going on and then they're occasionally talking to people like that are locals and whatnot but from every side that that's very valuable but the thing that worries me about AI I don't believe that AI is becoming much more like human beings they're not faking us out by by just being by being able to replicate me I think what's actually happening is technology companies are teaching us more effectively how to engage like computers I mean you and I in person in a conversation in a relationship um a work relationship a friend relationship a sexual relationship whatever it is there's nothing a computer can do that can tear us away from that but if we spend our time increasingly in the digital world where we are driven by where all of our inputs are our algorithmic well computers can replicate that very easily and so if they can only make us more like computers then no it's not like the Matrix where you want to feed off Us in terms of fuel it's much more that we're very valuable in driving the economy if you give us all of your attention and data and and that is the way that you create right a a maximal AI economy it also happens to be completely dehumanized because we all know that human beings are social animals we know if you stick us in a room or you stick us in a desert island we're gonna like engage with each other talk to each other figure out things about each other doesn't matter what color we are what sexual orientation we are we will figure it out if we're stuck if we have no choice but if you if you take us and you and you use our most base most reptilian impulses and you and you monetize those so that we're the product oh no no then then you lose everything we built as human beings all the governance all the community all the social organizations the churches the things the family the things that matter to us that we're losing that we're losing the things that make us rooted and make us sane and make us care and make us love I mean flourishing flourishing starts right here it starts at home it doesn't start online flourishing start those are tools that we need to use to create wealth but you can't flourish if you don't have real relationships that takes away strips away the essence of who we are as people and yet we are all running headlong away from flourishing yeah so that um the only thing I'll take exception with there is the sense that we're we're running away from it I think we're there being pulled a natural exactly that that feels more right to me that's right that's a better term important I agree one of the things that I feel like is is really falling apart and this is the thing I don't have a good solution for this uh is shared narratives so um you've all know what Harari talked about this very eloquently and he said you know look there are other species that can coordinate in massive groups um as big if not bigger than the way that humans can do but we're the only ones that can coordinate in these huge groups flexibly and he said the way that we create that flexibility is through shared narratives now they have historically come most compellingly through religion and as religion changes I I resonate with the language that you know God is dead Nietzsche's sort of interpretation of that that can Hackle some people so I'll just say that that the tenor of it has changed teaching that in a world where I think a lot of people have alternate belief systems or things they gravitate towards or not even necessarily thinking about religion I think there's a god-shaped hole in all of us and and I am not a Believer as my longtime listeners will know but I acknowledge that I have a god-shaped hole in me that I need to fill with meaning and purpose and as we fragment so going back to this idea as we fragment this gets very scary because we don't have shared narratives anymore and so now we're not necessarily cooperating in as large groups where at least before we would have the The Narrative of the nation and so we had something that we could Galvanize around um but obviously with the rise of populism cyclically throughout history it's not like just now um but whenever that rears its ugly head then some very dark things can happen um but on the flip side of and so I'll say that's like a hyper um shared narrative right something has an injustice has been done to me and the other person did it and we need to rise up against okay cool shared narrative can get dark but you can also have on the other side where there is no shared narrative you are now to your point about you're being pulled in a direction that doesn't unite us but only fragments us for further and I'll plug into that the reason that I don't look at that and go oh we just need to then come up with a shared narrative in fact I'm going to put this in the the framing of your book you open your book The Power of crisis with the story of Reagan and Gorbachev and Reagan says the Gorbachev hey if I if the U.S this is like at the height of the Cold War if the U.S were invaded by an alien would you help us and Gorbachev said yes absolutely and that idea of okay there are things that we could rally around that take us out of our smaller narrative into a larger narrative hence the the title of the book The Power of Crisis there is a thing that that can bring us together and give us that shared narrative but what scares me is if you plug in AI bias into this equation you can't go now I yeah now I'm like whoa like one who gets to decide what the ai's value system is what the ai's belief system is how the AI interprets truth what the AI reinforces and then if there are a lot of AI which which is probably the thing that protects us from an authoritarian answer but at the same time then you have all this competing reinforcement that again just brings us back to fragmentation so as you look at that Suite of uh unnerving potential problems what do you see as our path to the other side of this to doing it well yeah um so President Biden just uh two weeks ago had a group of seven uh AI Founders slash CEOs the most powerful companies in this space as of right now that will not be true in a year or two they'll be vastly more some of them are hyperscalers some of them are a large language model uh creators and some are both um and uh it was very interesting because those seven companies basically agreed on a set of voluntary principles that included things like um watermarks on AI um and uh you know it was reporting on vulnerabilities uh sharing best practices uh on on testing the models all of this stuff and the stuff that if you looked at it carefully you'd say those are all things we want those are things that will help protect us from the worst successes of of AI um proliferation now on the one hand they are not only were they voluntary but they were super undefined in ways that every company that was there could already say we're doing all of those things we don't need to spend any more money on them um but um I am told those seven companies are planning on creating an institution that will meet together um and will work on more advanced on advancing those standards and defining them more clearly uh we'll see uh where that goes but also I mean as more companies get in the space you're creating an expectation in the media in the government in the population that these are things that they're committing to and so increasingly other companies will also want to show that they're doing that and maybe there will be some some backlash if they're not effective at doing so but but you know what was interesting to me about that initial meeting is the White House convened it but they didn't actually set the agenda really at all because they don't have the expertise they don't have the technology they don't know what these tools do I mean they're trying out get up to speed and hire people as fast as they can but they they're not going to be anywhere close to these companies and what I think needs to happen in short order is that you're going to need to create an approach that marries these things you'll need the tech companies to have these institutions that that they are you know involved in standing up but the governments are going to need to work with them and and they're going to need to have carrots and sticks they'll need to be licensing regimes like we see for financial institutions um there's going to need to be uh deterrence penalties that need to be responsible for what's on their platforms and if they're used in nefarious ways there's going to have to be penalties that could include shutting them down um and uh you know there's also some carrots that they should have as this becomes a field of thousands and thousands of companies there's proprietary data sets that the US government and American universities have access to that can you can drive massive wealth with AI and maybe those will become public data sets that any AI company that's licensed can potentially use I mean all of this needs to be created but we are nowhere on this right now and and the AI like what that we've been hearing about for 40 years but suddenly it's exponential and exponential is not like Moore's Law exponential it's not like a doubling every 18 months it's like 10x in terms of the size and the impact of the data sets every year so we don't have years on this um and that that's why the urgency that's why I mean I've completely retooled you know our knowledge set to focus on what's the impact of AI on geopolitics I mean in the last year uh because I've never seen anything that's had so much dramatic impact on how I think about the world and how geopolitics actually plays out and so far you and I have only talked about the disinformation piece and a little bit of the job piece we haven't talked about what's probably the most dangerous piece which is the proliferation piece of things like hackers and you know developing bio weapons and you know viruses that can kill I mean I don't I'm sure you've heard this I've heard from friends of mine that are coders um that in past weeks that they cannot imagine coding without using the most advanced AI tools right now because it's just like it's just a world changer for them and how much they can do I I don't know any hackers um but I'm sure that criminal malware developers are saying I can't imagine developing criminal malware or spearfishing without using these new AI tools because I mean it's just going to allow them to Target in such an extraordinary and pinpoint way and also to send out so much more you know sort of capable malware that will elicit so much more engagement and therefore you know bring so much more money to them or shut down so many more servers and give them so much more illicit data and so much of the illicit data that they've already collected from the hacks on you know all of these companies that you've heard about Target for example other firms I mean so much of that so far is just oh we're just selling that for people that want to like use the credit cards no now you're going to sell it to people that are empowered with AI that can generate malware against that data and that again and that's that's like we're going to develop all these new vaccines and new Pharmaceuticals that'll deal with uh Alzheimer's and deal with Cancers and it's going to be an incredible time for medicine but we'll also be able to develop new bio weapons that will kill people um and that's not going to be just in the hands of North Koreans or Russians in the lab it's going to be in the hands of small number of people that are intelligence agencies are not yet prepared to effectively track right there's a reason why we don't have nuclear weapons everywhere it's because it's expensive it's dangerous it's really hard I mean imagine the biohackers thinking back to the days when oh my God you know how hard it was like you know you'd have to actually mix this stuff in a lab you could you could die yourself I mean now we can do all this on the computer the quaint old days you know so yeah I I worry deeply about the the proliferation of these incredible tools used in dangerous ways and we are not going to be able to to allow the slippage that we have had um around cyber tools that we have had around uh terrorism and their capabilities we're going to need to get like you know our net our filter is going to have to be incredibly incredibly uh robust do you have a sense of how we pull that filter off well um part of it is as I say a hybrid organization um so there have been some people that have spoken about an international atomic energy agency model so it'd be an international AI uh agency uh model um I I think that won't work because that implies a state agency with inspectors that have a small number of targets that they're engaging in those inspections on I don't think that works I think what you're going to need is an agency that involves the tech companies themselves and so you know if you're developing an AI um capacity in your garage if you want to use that anywhere it's going to have to be licensed if you've got software that's going to run AI it's going to have to be licensed and and the tech companies that are running these models are going to have to police that in conjunction with governments so this is I think this is a new governance model I don't think it will work with the governments by themselves because they won't have the ability to understand what the capabilities of these algorithms are how fast they can because they can proliferate what they can do how they can be used dangerously um but the governments are the ones that are going to be able to impose penalties they will have the effective deterrent measure I mean Microsoft Google Facebook meta you know these these companies are not what are they going to do they'll throw you off their platform no no that can't be the penalty for developing um you know a bio weapon um you're going to need to be working together around this and and together not just in the company hands over the information to the government the agencies are going to need to be much more integrated so here's one thing that I've been thinking a lot about be very curious to get your feedback on this so um I am definitely somebody who is a big believer in um Bitcoin and what's going on in cryptocurrency but as I look at it I'm like oh like this is definitely if we have it the the thing that makes me believe in Bitcoin specifically is that it's the closest thing to a digital Recreation of an exploding star so for people that understand uh for people that understand how gold has become across a bunch of cultures throughout time the thing is because it uh it doesn't mold it doesn't rot and it it could only be generated from an exploding star so there's no way to fake it there's no way to make more I see and so yeah so you you have this thing um that's very good about carrying wealth across time and space it isn't that it is um inherently like people say oh but you can make jewelry and stuff yeah but if we don't care about jewelry then that never becomes a thing and there's no reason that we should care about gold jewelry yeah industrial uses of gold are utterly marginal to its utility as a currency I agree exactly so Along Comes Bitcoin which same idea there is a finite amount of it you can never make more it's the sort of computer equivalent of the exploding star and it's better about going across space so maybe it's equal to gold in terms of across time but it's certainly much easier in terms of going across space so I'm like okay cool I really believe in that but as you create that you now have alternatives to government Fiat currencies right and that is this slight weakening of their power they're gonna obviously push back on that and so we'll see how that sort of plays out from a regulatory perspective whether they just get in on it and start buying it or whether they're they get very anti-it I think that yet to be determined um but when I think about the the things that will weaken the government's hold on things the next thing that comes into the picture is just the government's absolute inability to stay on top of AI and so now you've got oh we're already having to lean on these these companies and so if it becomes the most powerful tool the most dangerous tool and it's not controllable by governments in the way that nuclear weapons is that's another weakening of the power and so now you start getting into this two paths before you you get bologies if I don't know if you know homology is but you get his idea of the network state where it's a non-geographically bound grouping so going back to that idea of shared narratives so people share narratives from all over the world they come together they have digital currency they can sort of make their own rules and laws and then the other one is the authoritarian version where it's like we just grab a hold of all of this it is top down and you're going to adhere or life is going to be brutal obviously that would be China's take but both of those aren't ideal for me as a child of the 80s where it's just like oh this is so stable and wonderful so um one do you think that are are those the sort of two most likely polls or is there something in the middle that's more likely yeah um so I I agree with you that um you know Bitcoin and crypto represent a similar kind of proliferated decentralized threat to governments as AI having said that crypto the amount of crypto you know in in um in in existence compare and being used compared to um Fiat currencies is de minimis and I do not think that there is any plausible uh threat of scale against Fiat currencies in the next say five years um and if I do believe that if it became a threat of scale every government in the world that matters would do everything they could to ensure that they continue to have a regulatory environment that maintains fiat currency is dominant and they'll lean into stable coins they'll lean into the technology but they want they will want to have control over it China obvious I mean you've got you know WeChat and lots of digital currencies that are that are work but you can only you have to use the digital RMB um you know that they they refuse to have currency that they don't have control over because they want the information set they want the political stability in the United States it's also the importance of having the dominant Reserve currency globally which matters immensely to America's ability to project power um to maintain you know our level of indebtedness uh all of these things so um to to weaponize finance to you know to declare sanctions and tariffs to get cut other countries to do what we want uh to align with us so given that I think the timeline for AI being fundamentally transformative in governance is minimum two to three years maximum five to ten I only see one thing here I'm an even climate change which is huge and in front of us and trillions and trillions of dollars of impact and changing the way everybody thinks about spending money and governance and where they live and all of that uh climate change in many ways is slower moving and slower impact than what we're going to see from AI like I think AI is going to have much more geopolitical impact in the next five to ten years than even climate will and that was you know what was one of the things that when I wrote the book The Power of Crisis and that was before AI really took off for me each of the crises I was talking about were becoming larger and more existential and I started with the pandemic because I was writing kind of in the middle of it and then I moved to climate and then I moved to disruptive Technologies and Ai and people were saying how could you not put climate you know as the big one I'm like well because climate like is first of all it's not existential like we are actually on a path to responding to to climate it's just going to cause a lot of damage um and we're going to end up at like 2.5 degrees 2.7 degrees warming and it's also going to happen like over the next 75 years and will probably be at Peak carbon in the atmosphere at around 2045 and then a majority of the world's energy you know starts coming from our Peak carbon energy use Excuse me and then a majority of the world's Energy starts coming from renewable sources and that's a that that's an exciting place to be where with AI like we don't have 50 years for AI we don't have 30 years for AI but you know we have five ten years to figure out if we're going to be able to regulate this or not and if it's going to look more techno utopian or if we're not here anymore like I mean I I mean honestly I don't I haven't really said this publicly but we're having a broad enough discussion like I'm how old are you 47. okay I'm 53. um I think that knock on wood I don't think that either of us are likely to die of natural causes um I think at our age we are probably either going to blow ourselves up uh you know as as humans or we're going to have such extraordinary technological advances um that we will be able to uh dramatically extend lifespans to in in ways that are I mean you know dealing with with cell death and and molecular destruction and genetic engineering and I mean just looking at what is ahead of us over the next 10 20 years this does not feel remotely sustainable but that doesn't mean it's horrible that means it's one of two tail risks and I just can't tell if it's the great one or the bad one but to the extent that I have any role on this planet I'd like to nudge us as I know you would too in the better Direction and that means getting a handle on this technology and and working to to help it work for Humanity with Humanity as opposed to ER you know not against it but you know kind of um irrelevant to it um we don't want technology that does not consider human beings as relevant on the planet you can reboot your life your health even your career anything you want all you need is discipline I can teach you the tactics that I learned while growing a billion dollar business that will allow you to see your goals through whether you want better health stronger relationships a more successful career any of that is possible with the mindset and business programs and impact Theory University join the thousands of students who have already accomplished amazing things tap now for a free trial and get started today no I agree with that the thing that I think that we're going to have to contend with though is what is a governmental response going to be to the potential of their weakened power so we know how we know how China is is dealing with it um so it was really amazing to watch China open up the capital markets and really just explode and in your book you talk about this I and I found it a really interesting Insight that that forced me to reorient my thinking about what China did and so um you know if you've read Mao the untold story it's like it's just devastating to see how much death and destruction came out of an authoritarian government and then at the same time you're like I don't know that America's approach is always the right the most optimal answer I forget the exact words you used to every problem and what you pointed out with China when they opened up like just the growth rate was pure insanity and it's really really pretty breathtaking but they learned from the collapse of Russia exactly what not to do and now they're clamping back down now as somebody that grew up in the U.S man I look at that and I'm just like dude that I don't like that that freaks me out the thought of always being on that Razor's Edge of like the individual doesn't matter and we can just completely obliterate you but then I watch not even the government necessarily in the U.S but the people in the U.S giving up on Free Speech which as I think about what what's like the one thing that you just can't let go of if you want the individual to matter and I think if you want to get to the quote unquote right answer uh you have to have free speech like even in my own company where it would be very tempting to run my company in an authoritarian way I just know I have too many blind spots so I'm constantly like trying to get the team to be like hey say whatever you need whatever you believe to be true if what you believe to be true is that I'm an and I do not know what I'm doing you need to be able to say that now I'm going to push you to articulate why I don't want some emotional statement I want like give me going back to truth right what is our goal what's the metric by which we determine whether we're getting towards our goal what can you show me in the math that shows that I'm doing this the wrong way and then you know what's your take and why do you think it's going to work better but when I look at just the the instability of that on both sides so you have authoritarian rule where we just obliterate it now as soon as we don't feel like the government's in control we kidnap those my words Jack ma re-educate him and then put him back forward terrifying or on our side where it's like no if you say something I don't like you 100 should be canceled going back to what you said about Trump so how do we as two people that want to nudge this in the right direction what's the right pressure point is it is it the government is it the individual is it the algorithms is it making sure that AI has um the right biases like what what's the the right pressure point I don't I don't know that the right biases are the issue um I mean you know again there's a lot of whack-a-mole going on tweaking these models as you roll them out um I I think it is more in trying to ensure that you have Clarity and transparency in what these models are doing um and then the data that's being collected as it's being collected that has to be shared where this these are experiments that are being run real time on human beings um and we wouldn't do that um with a vaccine even in an emergency we would have a lot more testing we wouldn't do that um on on a new GMO food uh because we'd be concerned about you know sort of disease cancer you name it but we're doing that with these algorithms that's very interesting to me and a little chilling that the Chinese who have done everything they can in the last 20 years to catch up and surpass in some areas to the Americans in new technology areas they look at Ai and large language models and they've said okay we're we're going to have control over these when a full censorship over these we're not going to give them data sets they can run on in the public because they think it's too dangerous and that means that the llms that the Chinese are running right now are crap they're nowhere near as good as what the Americans presently have and that's because the Chinese are willing to accept the economic disadvantage to ensure they have the political stability um and I I think that the United States again we're not going to be able to Simply stop this progress the progress is going to happen there's too much money it's too fast we don't know what we're doing as a government in response and also there are too many things we're focused on yes you're focused on proliferation but what I say is fake news and what I say is disinformation someone else is saying you're trying to politicize it right and then you'll have a whole bunch of people saying we can't slow down our companies because we need to beat the Chinese who are going to be the largest economy in the world just like you know Zuckerberg did with Facebook you know 10 years ago um and for all of so for all of those reasons I don't think you can slow this I don't think you can stop it I think what we need is a partnership between the technology companies and the governments and that is going to have to be regulated at the national level it's going to have to be regulated at the global level by the way the financial Marketplace is not so radically different from this but you have algorithms trading algorithms that run and they need to be regulated because you want to know that certain types of trading is not allowed and other types of trading is and you know the 2008 financial crisis when it hit even though it started in a small part of the economy we were all worried oh my God this could explode the whole economy what happened all the banking CEOs and the FED head and the the chairman of the FED uh the secretary treasury they got together and said okay what are we going to do to ensure the system can stay stable and in place and that happened in real time and one of the reasons it works relatively well in the financial space is because the Central Bank Governors are technocratic and somewhat independent from government like they know that you want to avoid a bad depression a market collapse they know that you have monetary and fiscal tools that you can use to respond we're going to need to create something like that in the technology space we're going to have to create Regulators who are in government but are working directly with the tech companies as partners to avoid contagion to respond immediately to crises when they occur and they won't just lead to Market collapse they could lead to National Security destruction they could lead to lots of people getting killed but it's going to be the same basic kind of model um and and we got to start working on that now all right so let's talk about then the central thesis of your book um so using my Words the book kind of wants for a crisis hence the title The Power of a little bit you call it you call it the Goldilocks crisis something that is uh devastating enough that people stop and pay attention but not so devastating that we can't respond well to it um is that the only way to get people to act to uh cooperate in the way that we would need to cooperate and does it like when you think about the ideal state of the world is it globalized or sensibly deglobalized um I first of all it's a great question and it's not like you can never make progress outside of Crisis progress happens all the time outside of Crisis we see new legislation that gets passed um we see you know new companies that are started we see all sorts of we see good works by people of other people on the street you know um but but you know it's one thing to say um can't we get can't we get the progress we need um in a family you can in a community you can when you're working together well within an alliance you frequently can in and in in what I call a g zero world where there's not a level of functional Global Leadership where countries aren't working together well they don't trust each other they don't have you know the institutions that align with the balance of powers today so it's not a G7 or a G20 it's really an absence of Global Leadership I think in an environment like that the the most like by far the most likely way to get an effective response just like with the Soviets versus the Americans Reagan versus Gorbachev in the opening of my book is if you have a crisis if the aliens come down and you know it turned out that the pandemic wasn't a big enough crisis didn't kill young people uh it wasn't I mean you know look at look at what happened the Americans pull out of the World Health Organization the Chinese lie to everybody um about not about not being transferred human to human the relationship got worse between the two countries the Americans we didn't provide vaccines to the poor countries around the world even though we had people in the United States that didn't need them and were waiting on that already took them and were waiting on boosters like it was it was a complete pardon my French um and it's because it didn't feel like an existential crisis it wasn't big enough to force us um to cooperate to a greater degree January 6th in the United States I mean maybe if Pence had been hung maybe if some some I mean God forbid uh maybe if uh if you know members of the house or senate had been killed or injured or kidnapped for a period of time but as it stood that evening a majority of Republicans in the house voted not to certify the outcome why not because they're focused on the jobs because they knew it wasn't a constitutional crisis they knew it wasn't a coup so I in a dysfunctional governance environment where people don't trust each other at the highest levels that are in power where we don't have the institutions that can work are proven to work to respond to the crises in front of us yeah we need a crisis and the good news is that climate is clearly not only a big enough crisis but also one that Humanity I think is up for and so that is forcing us every year we actually are exceeding radically exceeding in um in uh renewable energy production and reduced cost from what the International Energy agency is predicting every year for decades now we've been exceeding that and that's because this crisis has been big enough and it's affecting everyone to mobilize our asses into action and the question is is AI a crisis that we can actually effectively respond to there's no question the size is suitably great that it should motivate us and when I talk to government leaders around the world today they are focused they are focused on it they're focused on it because of the size of the crisis but also it's very interesting so the U.S government it's not just because there's suddenly all experts in AI it's also because the three things that they are most concerned about is National Security priorities which is confrontation with China war between Russia and Ukraine and proxy war with the Russians and threat to the U.S democracy they think and they're right that all of these are dramatically transformed by AI developments so not only is AI coming as a big new thing but also all the things they're already worried about spending a lot of time and money on and blood um are things that are they better figure this out or they're in trouble so I do think the the Mo the motivation um to get this right is going to be there I just I hope we're up for it and uh you know again I'm I'm an optimist I'm I'm hopeful I mean at the end of the day I mean the fact that we're here and we're talking about it uh means that we're capable of doing so my only fear is that with global warming you can't win global warming and get a leg up over China or Russia uh but you can win Ai and get a leg up and be better and I think that that one thing that people aren't talking about enough for sure is that AI is going to be an adversarial system meaning bad guys are going to have ai and they're going to try to do things to hurt me with that Ai and then others are going to build AI that is protective and try to stop the bad guys and so you will have just like with normal hacking you'll have an Ever escalating arms race of AI and so even if only with the best of intentions we will end up getting to AI super intelligence because we're trying to stop somebody from doing a bad thing and it's this is go ahead I was gonna say that's a really good point and I've given a lot of thought to that because look we don't trust the Chinese at all they don't trust us they've invested billions and tens of billions of dollars into next Generation nuclear wind uh solar electric vehicles and the supply chains for all of that now there are a lot of people around the country that are not particularly focused on climate but they're focused on China and they're saying hey we cannot let those guys become the energy superpower post carbon we've got to invest in it so that we're going to be the energy superpower but the good thing about that is hey that's virtuous competition like if we end up investing more so that we're the dominant superpower that just means cheaper post-carbon energy faster for everybody but in the AI space it is absolutely unclear that there is a virtuous cycle of competition if we are not working together the proliferation risk is much much greater I couldn't agree with you more on that point yeah so now the question becomes when when you look at what we get on the other side of the crisis the cooperation the banding together to focus on one problem um does does that lead us back to globalization so we we opened this up with globalization amazing create we were lifting some ungod like 160 000 people out of poverty every day for like nine years was absolutely crazy the number of people that we pulled out of poverty uh but you get the Rust Belt pushback rise of populism it's not good for everybody and so needing to really be honest about that but in this world let's say that we get the right crisis what are we steering towards is it re-globalization or is it what I'm calling thoughtful D globalization I think we are trying uh to move back towards uh globalization but thoughtful globalization um where you are using the resources you have to more effectively take care of the people that are uh Left Behind uh that you are constantly retooling your institutions and reforming them because the Technologies are changing that fast and that's something governments by themselves won't be able to do again they'll have to do in concert with these new technology companies or governments will have to change what they are they'll have to integrate technology companies into them and that's that scares you that's more of an authoritarian model frankly um but I I do think um that uh one of the reasons you've steered me a couple times now in a direction that historically I'd be very easily steered which is to talk about us versus China and I've resisted it and the reason I've resisted it even though U.S China is in a horrible place right now and the relationship is getting worse it's not getting better but I I think it is more likely within three five years that AI companies Cutting Edge in all sorts of fields will actually be all over the world I don't I think this is going to be a proliferating technology for good and for bad so I'm more concerned about individuals Rogue States terrorist organizations doing crazy things as opposed to the US versus China that ultimately wants stability in the system right but I'm also hopeful that it's not going to be a small number of dominant companies in the United States and China that control all of the Next Generation AI actually if you're at a position where you can run a near-cutting edge AI on your own laptop or on your smartphone and millions and millions of people have access to that intelligence and they can do things with it I don't think that a small number of Mega Tech corporations are going to control it I mean they may have platforms that they'll be able to charge taxes on basically tariffs on but I think so much of both the value the upside and the danger will be distributed all over the world and that's again very different than the way we think about geopolitics today so I don't think the uh I don't on the AI front I don't think the U.S China fight is the principal concern to worry about in the next five to ten years oh okay well so this is very interesting one of the things you talked about in the book is that when Russia invaded the Ukraine one of the things that they did to try to appease the west and keep them calm was like hey we know you're really worried about hackers we're gonna go round them up arrest them um and what happens to the ability to use political means to get these Bad actors in line if they are proliferated everywhere and we have varying degrees of ability to influence yeah uh it it's one of the reasons why I think you don't have an Interpol model or an iaea model it's why I think it's going to be it's going to have to be much more inclusive with the technology companies I keep coming back to this I don't think that the US government by itself or the Russian government would be able to make that kind of a promise as easily Russians are a little bit different here right if you're a authoritarian State and you have real control of the information space you know maybe the vast majority of people working on hacking are under your Authority maybe but if AI really becomes as explosive and as decentralized as I believe it will then the governments by themselves and you know are going to have a hard time even maintaining control of the AI space I'm not sure the Chinese model on this is going to work I mean in five and ten years time remember they gave up on the gray great Chinese firewall and instead because it was too porous and instead what they did was they used the surveillance mechanisms and they had a whole bunch of people that were online that were basically nudging Chinese citizens towards better behavior and towards certain things they should say and certain thing again certain things they didn't say and that turned out to be more effective um AI I think is going to become if it becomes a much more decentralized space it's going to be much much harder for an authoritarian state to do that but certainly it'll be impossible for Democratic state to do it now the question you haven't asked me is does that mean that democracy is sustainable I mean the U.S government feels immediate national security threat from all these tech companies and they can't regulate it you know might the Americans start finding the Chinese model on AI much more attractive I don't think so and I don't think so because I think our system because our system is so entrenched it's so slow moving it's so receptive to money the companies are so wealthy they have the ability to capture the regulatory environment like again I mean never say never it can happen here if things are incredibly dangerous yes I mean you know you can take Desperate Measures but short of the worst scenarios I think that the United States is closer to kleptocracy than it is to authoritarian regime if there's a way that the Americans are going to move away from democracy it's probably not a Chinese model right well that's horrifying uh I doubt my hope it's funny my brain tried to fill in what you were going to say and your answer is probably more true than what I was hoping you were going to say but what I was hoping you were going to say was that we have such a strong shared narrative around Freedom that we wouldn't make those he laughs ladies and gentlemen he laughs uh yeah oh my God that used to be true when my dad was alive and after World War II I just don't see it anymore I mean not unless everyone's lying to the pollsters all the time I it just doesn't feel that way yeah I don't think we agree in the United States what our country stands for I don't think we do I don't think we know what our country stands for there's such incredible cynicism among young people that they're just being lied to that it's performative from their governments from their corporations from everybody from the media and some of it I under some of it is very understandable um you know it's it's I it's painful but like our economy is doing well so well our technology is doing so well we have the reserve currency it's not being threatened that we're in a great geography it's very safe it's very stable there are so many things that are great I saw that uh Jamie dimon you know a few minutes that everyone was talking about standing up for America but he didn't talk about our political system and our political system is deteriorating and people don't believe in it the way they used to and there are no there I've not seen any pushback against that in the last 20 years it got worse under Obama it got worse under Trump it's gotten worse under Biden it's clearly not just about those people it's structural there are a lot of things driving it um and uh that that I don't see a I mean God forbid it we had a 911 right now I mean I was here I was in New York at 9 11. I saw the second tower go down I saw the way that New York City rallied I saw the way the country rallied there was 92 percent approval for Bush for Bush a month young people will not understand how crazy that is uh and and I don't think that could happen today I don't think I I don't think it could happen even with someone who is as much of a unifier as Biden has been historically and it certainly couldn't happen under Trump um and and that's that's really sad that's really sad do you have a sense of how we unwind that this is the one thing my thesis has been on this that until there is enough pain and suffering which unfortunately historically Means War um you don't get the the country won't come back together right so we've obviously been more divided than we are now because we've been an open Civil War in the past but I don't see how you unwind these increasingly Divergent narratives of left and right without real suffering well I mean there was this great book that was written by a Princeton historian about the the great the three great levelers uh and it talked about how in societies whatever the governance mechanism historically they tend to get um more unequal and people with access to power get closer access to power over time uh unless one of three big things happen uh famine uh Revolution or War um and you know that's that's a little depressing because that implies that you have to have that kind of great kind of serious Crackdown crash uh before you before you you know come out and and create more opportunities for people but um I I also are am seeing um I mean coming out of the pandemic there was an enormous amount of money that was spent um on on poor people it wasn't just like after 2008 when you bailed out AIG and Lehman Brothers and the bankers this time around I mean you bailed out everybody you bailed out working mothers you bailed out small and medium Enterprise prizes and it made a difference and inflation has hit hard but now finally working-class wages are actually growing faster um than you know than inflation and then the average wage um and that wasn't true for decades so maybe there is a bit of a lesson in that maybe there is a bit of a lesson when people are seeing that you know it's the wealthiest with their legacy capabilities um that are getting uh accepted to the major universities the best universities and not others um and there's a backlash against that and maybe that forces greater transparency maybe it turns out that AI becomes with all the wealth it can generate uh becomes more of a leveler um for people in the United States that will have access to Opportunities they hadn't had before maybe it allows globalization to pick up again and not everybody's vote will rise at the same speed but at least everyone's vote will be rising for a while but coming out of the pandemic we had 50 years if we we look at Humanity as you know this little ball of eight billion people we had 50 years where overall we had extraordinary growth and if you watched Stephen Pinker and Hans rossling and all of these Pro globalization folks it is true we created not just very very wealthy people but also a global middle class and anyone looking at the globe you know without a national without a nationality just like you're an average person you don't know where you're going to be born you don't know what family would you want to be born in the last 50 years yes yes you would and hopefully you win the lottery and you're in the United States like you and me but you know anywhere if you you that's the time you'd pick but the last three years you wouldn't because the last three years suddenly human development indicators have gone down more people are you know forced migrants more people are you know born into extreme poverty and and people are getting angrier as a consequence of that well I mean I think there's a good chance that with AI we will have a new globalization that will create far more opportunities but we need to be very careful about those negative externalities and so far it's very early days but we're not addressing them yet so given all of that paint a picture for me of the near term let's call it the next 10 years the the world is Shifting and changing what does the world order look like um as we look out into the future and I'll contextualize that with you've got things we've talked about here you've got the war in Ukraine you've got a dynamic between the US and China being radically upended by the proliferation of AI creating potentially powerful or at least destructive entities anywhere which make it harder for us to yank levers of political persuasion with all of the unique cocktail that's Brewing now um how does one begin to conceptualize where the world is heading over the next 10 years well I can't imagine wanting to be alive at any other time I mean we talk about the anthropocene where human beings um first time in in history we have the ability to actually shape the future of humanity and uh our role on the planet that we're on that's pretty extraordinary um and you know what does that mean uh I think that means that governments and governance will look radically different than anything that we have lived with we've lived for all of our lives for 50 years you and I on average now we've lived in a fairly stable system the Soviet Union collapsed U.S was in charge China's had an extraordinary rise but generally speaking the global order today still looks more or less like the global order you had 50 years ago Henry Kissinger recognizes it right he was 50 now he's a hundred but it feels like geopolitics still function the way they used to you've got heads of state you've got governance you still have the U.N you know you've got the IMF you know you've got the World Trade Organization you've got these big things that that more or less I mean are just at the security Council security councils kind of the same Security Council we had before from the 70s but you know whatever it's not it it's the the the the rules the UN Charter it's all there we you know it's it's you could have you could have been born a long time ago in 10 years time I think we'll still recognize the the tectonics on the planet I think the demographics we can talk about we can talk about how Japan will be smaller and how China's peaked out now India is growing and that we pretty good sense in that climate we've got a pretty good sense of what climate's going to look like and extreme storms and the rest but but government how government works how the geopolitics work how the world is ordered ruled I think it's going to look radically different in 10 years I really do certainly in 20 but probably in 10. I think that a big piece of the power that determines who we are and how we interact with people will be driven by a very small number of human beings that control these tech companies that may or may not know what they're doing and um they may not be with intentionality and we don't really know what their goals are and those goals can change right I mean I I talked a little bit in my TED Talk which I haven't really talked much about which is kind of good um uh is uh I talked a little bit about how you know when you and I were raised it was nature a nurture and and that determined who we were and that now for the first time in humanity we are being raised by algorithm and that we have a whole generation of kids whose principle understanding of how to interact with Society will be intermediated by programmed algorithms that have no interest in the education of that child that's a that is a subsidiary impact of what they are trying to do those algorithms it what it is trying to do um and and a lot of the interactions that will take place with those kids will be AI interactions not just intermediated but the actual relationship will be with AI which by the way if I could waive a magic wand and do one regulation in the world today I would say anyone under 16 cannot interact with an AI directly as as if it were a human being unless it's under human super direct human supervision because I just don't want people to be raised by anything other than people until we understand what that means I mean the level of Education but again into I want that to be directly controlled by supervised by a person so yes I think education I think a doctor I'd love to have ai being used you know for medical you know on medical apps for kids but I'm saying if you're having a relationship with something including with a teacher I don't want kids to have a relationship with an AI educator unless it's unless it's overseen by an adult until we know what it does to the kids you know we just don't know we just don't know and I I worry about that a lot I wouldn't want I mean I don't have kids if I had them I'd worry about that I know my mom wouldn't have allowed that and thank God for it so yeah I think that um I think that we're going to be different as human beings I mean you know you talked about you've all um no Harare recently who I I find very inspirational as a thinker um and you know this homo Dias concept that he comes up with I think that young people today are already something a little different from Homo sapiens and I don't know exactly what that is none of us do because we're running the experiments on them now um I'm not comfortable with that it's a a good summary Ian this has been incredible where can people follow you uh they can follow me on Twitter at Ian Bremer or LinkedIn at Ian Bremer or even threads you know the the few people that are on that but it's kind of fun Ian Bremer uh what else I mean you know uh G zero media.com g zero all onewordmedia.com uh where we have a little digital media company that we reach out to people all over the world and they can get our stuff for free uh which hopefully it's uh it's engaging and useful just like I really enjoyed this last hour so this was uh this was a lot of fun same man all right everybody if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care peace if you want to learn more about this topic check out this interview I actually want to start with a quote of yours So for anybody that doesn't know you're a former CIA legitimate spy which is crazy and the reason I find that interesting is because you would have to be a master of psychology your own and others

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 80,004

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech

Id: nXJBccSwtB8

Length: 90min 10sec (5410 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 01 2023