Future of AI and Why China Will Win the AI War｜Kai-Fu Lee

in terms of the new jobs that could potentially be created like have you envisioned or thought about what are some of these things that could potentially come up as we get into 2041 uh yes and and i think the book describes some of those uh possibilities uh one obviously is um in a world full of robots we're gonna need robot repair we're gonna need people who program the ai on the other side with people having more time on their hands and with goods becoming produced by robots and becoming cheaper people will want to spend their money on more on services [Music] hello kai food thanks so much for joining us on the show here oh thanks for inviting me well congrats on the new book um of course ai 2041 am very excited to dig into it i pre-ordered it uh sorry i ordered it a couple of days ago and started to read a few of the chapters i mean definitely uh is a interesting perspective and i love the way you took the fiction route to really get people to really think about and visualize the potentials of what we're going to see in the next 20 years um before we jump into the book i mean one of the things that i've heard is that barack obama was one of your classmates in colombia is that right yes we were we graduated the same year 1983. yes oh wow did you get to meet him or connect with him while you were there i i did not i was a computer science major and he was political science so yeah i never met him during my period there in fact he's not in you know he's actually not in the uh uh the school book so i'm not not sure what happened but his picture is not even in there no he's not but he's definitely graduated he didn't go show up for his uh class photos or something oh got it okay so he's in the record but he just isn't in the photo that's right yeah okay okay this isn't like trump going back to like him claiming that he's from kenya or something like that and being born there no no not a conspiracy theory you're saying not at all just couldn't find his photo for some reason interesting all right well i'm sure the internet's gonna go crazy for that one um cool well i uh wanted to give you an introduction of course we do these beforehand but just to get people up to speed some of the key things that uh you've done before you know now at cento ventures is you've developed a speaker independent continuous speech recognition system for your phd you were the founder and managing director for microsoft research asia and then you became the president for google china before and before you got into cineventures uh tell us a little bit about what you're up to as an adventurers actually get your own take on it uh sure we are investors in deep tech so that includes artificial intelligence healthcare life sciences semiconductor etc it leverages my own background in technology and we are in early stage investor in startup companies and we will accompany them all the way to ipo so we're very similar to the likes of andreas and horowitz or greylock or benchmark in the silicon valley and is the is the idea because you guys are primarily focused on let's say ai uh to be focused on companies in china and the u.s knowing that they're going to be the duopoly winners in this race that we'll talk about yeah we are mostly investing in china we had earlier efforts to look expand globally and including the us but that became impractical due to recent geopolitical issues so we're more focused on china now we do occasionally make an investment abroad we invest in a french company two months ago but that's uh by exception got it by impossible you mean there are regulations set in the u.s that forbids chinese investors from investing in the us completely or you're just saying it's harder now it's harder is there's no specific regulation but um there is cepheus which means people who take quote-unquote chinese money have to disclose and that's a hassle to some people uh and and you know we're honestly not chinese money by any means where our investors are almost half u.s investors but but nevertheless because of our primary location we have been labeled that way and it's just not not convenient for entrepreneurs to take money that requires extra disclosures you know entrepreneurs want to build a business not to spend their life doing disclosures right right especially with this unpredictability of what will happen in the next five to ten years like we just don't know there might be further turmoil or further restrictions so it's kind of a marriage right when you're taking that money so i can see why that's the case um exactly is the case the reverse as well where chinese companies that take com that may take capital from u.s investors will also face a lot of scrutiny and challenges uh not not at present there are some listing requirements uh but they're fairly minimal i think the chinese government currently has very few regulations on the the investor base in fact uh some of the top chinese ipos have been largely invested in by us capital and and it's still welcome although obviously there's tension both ways now got it got it huh yeah i can i can see why that would complicate things um well i guess in this topic i you know we wanted to dig into artificial intelligence it's what the book was about it's what your previous book was about ai super powers and um would just love to give people some overview background for maybe someone that you know hears ai and headlines but they're not really sure what ai exists is exactly what is the history behind it and what are the phases that we've gone through to get to where we are now and where we're going so before we talk about where we're going which is ai 2041 would love to kind of go through what are some of the phases from the beginning until now meaning what was the first time the term ai or artificial intelligence was coined and uh what is like the first known ai that uh people have talked about like i've heard that it was the laundry mat like the uh like the laundry machine was like the first ai um but we'd love to get your take on this right uh i think it was in the 1950s at a conference in dartmouth the term ai was coined by john mccarthy who was my phd advisor's ph.d advisor and he coined the phrase and at the time it was very much about can we get machines to do anything that exhibits human intelligence and um for the next 50 years or so every time something that appears to exhibit intelligence whether it's the telephone switchboard or the smart elevator or uh laundromat i don't know i haven't heard that one before people very much uh just say okay that's no longer ai that's uh engineering that's a product so the the pursuit of ai has been a very challenging one when i worked in ai in the 80s and 90s people would look at this as a failure as a pursuit that uh is not likely to ever yield uh a result and also continues to write papers but with no workable product so that's uh that's been a development for the probably the first 50 years or so there are things that have come out my phd thesis was the first speech recognition system that worked for any speaker and companies that licensed the technology began to put it into you might recall in the you know 2000s late 90s people who called their stock broker or airline were able to reserve an airline reservation or perhaps buy or sell stock by merely using voice on the phone so that at the time was probably an example of of ai but something really big happened about five to ten years ago and that's deep learning and deep learning is arguably invented 30 years ago but it didn't really work until around 10 years ago and it's a technology that says well let's not worry about replicating you know human thinking exactly but let's be inspired by the architecture of the human brain and build something that um inspired by the human brain with neurons and connections and numbers connecting them but the way this type of deep learning works is you present many examples of data and then you tell it what the answer should be and it will learn uh to separate the the positive and from the negative exemplars so if you show it pictures of a cat and a dog and label each one cat or dog it'll learn to separate cats and dogs and and that in fact was a google paper uh that became quite surprising to people because prior to deep learning people assumed the human would have to program something like cats have whiskers they have pointy ears and things like that but it turns out the the when you make a deep neural network with a lot of data feeding into a network of many many layers up to thousands of layers it can create its own way of separating dogs from cats and that can be now extended into uh by facebook uh by amazon to separate people who are likely to watch this video from people who are not likely then that's why when we see videos on youtube or tick tock we like watching more because it already uh computed and figured out for the someone like myself this is a video that i would likely watch for the whole duration and similarly amazon would compute what products i'm likely to buy insurance companies and loan companies would figure out to whom the the loan should be made credit card companies are figuring out which transactions are frauds and then this list goes on and ai becomes more and more powerful it has since gained the capability to recognize objects understand language and autonomous vehicle is beginning to work in constrained environments so i think we are now at a stage when we have not at all answered the question how does the human intelligence work but we have created a set of technologies that are growing very rapidly year after year that can not only do things that we can do that exhibit intelligence but things that are beyond what we can do things that we can't imagine us doing so i think it's created a very powerful growth engine the power of deep learning rests on the fact that if you just throw more data and more compute it improves itself so this is very very powerful that said it hasn't really answered the question how does the human creativity happen why do we have self-awareness uh and why do we have emotions and desires and can ai have these things if that remains too unknown and perhaps that's what separates us from a computed ai do you feel that similar to the way people didn't really understand what ai was or just refuted the fact and made it into more just an engineering solution that it wasn't really ai do you think we'll look in 10 20 years from now and potentially see that ai also has consciousness and has these emotions and will look back and say oh like we just didn't have enough data or we just didn't have enough foresight to to even think that there would be a situation like this most people think to really go deeply into true intelligence human-like capabilities and with understanding of creativity and self-consciousness will require further breakthroughs cannot just be extensions of deep learning and throwing more data at it and i i would fall into that camp um but that said we are seeing uh ai mimicking people very quite well and it's improving rapidly deep fakes and fake voices of people generating uh you know conversations between uh questions you can ask einstein and and can be answered in dr seuss style with some of the demos are seeing uncanny behavior that is improving so i wouldn't rule out at some point it really fools people into thinking that it's not only a human but someone exhibiting emotion creativity but but probably to truly replicate the human process and become a superset that will remain elusive at least in the next 20 years well particularly around consciousness i mean it's i can self-claim that i have consciousness i feel it but it's hard for me to know from the other person's you know for yourself or from from my friends whether they have consciousness there's really only perspective of myself is that ever something we'll ever know from robots or ai in general that they'll have consciousness like how would we ever prove that well the problem is the the brain science is still at very formative stages so people who study brain science can't yet answer the question of what is consciousness and there's still quite a bit of debate so i think first we have to study our brains and we have to first understand what the question is then we can question if ai can exhibit it and i would think um you know right now based on current set of technologies ai can fake a lot of things faking visual audio is easier faking understanding is harder but happens sometimes faking creativity and consciousness i think will be extremely hard so so we'll we'll we'll have many decades to keep working on the one side but ai scientists will try to fake it and then the brain scientists we're trying to figure out what what it is that we should fake right right and it's just everything is moving so fast and as you mentioned it seems like it just kind of snuck up on us in the last five to ten years from from the recent paths and one of the things that you talk about and i think you're the perfect person to talk about it because obviously you also went to school in the us and you're very familiar with the culture and and everything that's going on around here and from my understanding is in terms of the ai you know race us was in the lead for quite a while until maybe in the recent five years ago what was that transition and what how can you kind of explain what happened there like how do we lose the lead in the us well i don't think u.s has lost the lead uh it's just that china has become very good very quickly and each country is still quite strong in areas that they're strong and this was captured in my last book published in 2018 called ai superpowers and i think some of the key factors of how china rose up so soon partly it was the sputnik moment from the moment that deep mind a european technology that beat china chinese top master player at china's own game that claimed to require intelligence and i think that made the entrepreneurs the vcs the large companies and the government say hey we should rapidly get up to speed on this and at the time china already had companies that possessed a lot of data and are in a good position to make use of that data so these are companies building the super apps uh tencent alibaba byte dance for some examples so so china has a lot of data and to to become very good at ai one needs to collect data uh in high quality and high large quantities and structure it and make use of it and connect it to to a business metric and uh the chinese super apps are even bigger than the american apps so uh tencent's wechat is much more powerful than say facebook or instagram i spent 80 percent of my time in it so you can imagine how much data wechat has for me as well as for all the other pretty much everyone i know and that data becomes really energy and and oil to power ai for chinese companies that probably is a very important area that the chinese entrepreneurs were tenacious and develop super apps with a huge amount of data the second is that chinese engineering classes are excellent research has been rising up rapidly and actually i found that microsoft research as you mentioned in 1998 and that became really the source of a lot of ai talent who've written a lot of papers and have become quite good and is also catching up with the us and then the entrepreneurial ecosystem with epcs funding tenacious entrepreneurs as well as favorable chinese government policies to advance ai and key technologies so all all of these combined together and also the fact that deep learning really isn't rocket science for a good computer science student they can grasp enough deep learning to become a good ai engineer within weeks at most months because you don't need everybody to be a deep scientist who writes papers and china has all these engineers and they see the wonders of ai and frankly ai engineer paid a lot more than computer engineering so people were learning everything on their own and gravitated towards that very very rapidly so all of these i think played an important role in china becoming very good in ai technologies for the uses in internet and financial domains and more recently in autonomous vehicles and factory automation these are some areas where china leads also drones um are china's strengths in the u.s i think use of ai in enterprise and cloud technologies is well ahead of china and i think in terms of deep research u.s is still ahead at least in the top 1 of the research china has caught up in the top maybe 10 to 50 top 10 or 50 or 100 of the research so that so i think these two countries lead the world it's not strictly a a race because you know companies serve their own sets of customers researchers still work together but if you want to measure what is the market cap of all ai related companies in two countries or how many people are filing patents or papers if you want to use those metrics no doubt china has rapidly cut up got it got it and particularly just going back to the super apps and the way that it's structured in china because it's fascinating for me how wechat is the only app that you can use really to go through your regular daily lives and i would imagine like the average number of apps that a american person has is probably exceeding by double the number of you know that someone in you know in china may need on a regular basis and [Music] how did it get that way is that just like a do you feel that's just is it almost just a cultural thing to have designed a super app like one simple app that allows you to to do everything um because from an american perspective i guess like there is the product stance of keeping everything minimal and separate and you know in its own use case but what's kind of your take in terms of how the differentiation happened i i think the american top tech companies follow the silicon valley approach which is um it's um it's a more gentlemanly kind of competition so you become very deep very good in what you do and then there's an ecosystem where everyone works together so that grubhub uh doordash and opentable and yelp and groupon all have their strengths and they kind of see each other as creating ecosystem uh of competition and cooperation in china the entrepreneurial ecosystem has been more of a gladiatorial tenacious competition winner take all and as a result one single company took all of the spaces in food called meituan and it's it's the leader in the the the rating the reservations the coupons uh the delivery the groceries and it's going into ride sharing now so there is a strong desire to expand your empire leveraging what you have and of course the other factor is antitrust laws i think they were much stronger in the us due to historically seeing the likes of atnt and microsoft and google sort of getting into trouble and getting checked by the government i think has given the us government more of um tougher stance against monopolies and i think china is now realizing that it too needs to regulate these large companies but but in the early stages it didn't do so as much as the the us government yeah so is it just like this killer culture mentality in china of wanting to want to really dominate and that really drives this monopolistic you know super apps that that exists today yeah um i think the on if you want to go deeper it's about the culture uh that has uh has has many families that were poor for 10 or 20 generations and now the the young the younger generation see that this they are the first opportunity in 20 generations to become rich to become successful there's high expectations from their families right so that's why everything's competitive getting into a top school joining a good company building a great company winning um so that that i think is part of the hunger and the desire that comes naturally from having quickly risen from a poor country and poor families into a chance to really change all that and and we've seen that in other cultures in the in the u.s it was perhaps in the early 20th century and we've also seen that in japan korea and other countries so it's a it's a period of time where people see wow i can do better than the last 10 generations in my family i gotta grasp this opportunity and give it my all yeah and this definitely rings true for immigrants coming into the us or canada from places like china korea japan or anywhere else india and um even with china you guys have this thing called 996. can you explain to what 996 means for people that or 997 rather i guess in maybe in many startups in china yeah in the early phases um i think the entre the entrepreneurs encouraged a hard-working environment because people were striving for success and willing to work hard so 996 means working 9 a.m to 9 p.m six days a week although that is a little bit frowned upon uh in china now about oh is it i didn't know that too hard yeah it's it's frowned upon uh yeah i think the society is saying wait a minute this group of entrepreneurs are pushing people too hard there have been sudden deaths heart attacks and and i think there are some efforts um in the media and government messaging that pushing people this hard may not be good for their well-being we'll see how it works out but certainly it's an element that has driven the the environment for the last uh 30 plus years which after china opened up what are the things that they're doing to reduce these number of hours because 996 is like 9 a.m 9 p.m six days a week but 997 which is seven days a week is was also very common back in the day are they just are they adopting like 995 or 965 to make that like a cultural thing in china yeah roughly you know for example in some large internet companies that used to require working uh six days every other week is now going to five days every week so that would be uh a change in uh in this direction yeah how do you feel about that do you feel like the younger generation is a little bit uh you know falling behind in that sense well i think millennials globally are a little bit similar you know chinese china is getting wealthier so the middle so this so i think the middle class is uh growing and there are more people in the millennials born into uh well-to-do families or middle class and i think they want the same things that as other millennials so yeah i think you know so as i mentioned this 996 tenacity hunger for success uh would eventually fade away as the country becomes so it becomes wealthier right right and i guess like nowadays people can see what other people across the country and what their what their lifestyle is and kind of there's this global culture right although obviously everyone has its own independent culture but with information age everyone is so connected that i would imagine with yeah people they're just learning to adapt to you know how other millennials are are going through here in this case right i think yeah what defines millennials throughout the world is that they have their own voice and own ways of doing things and they don't conform and they don't listen to a message and say that's what i want to be too and that that's individualism at a certain level and and i think the uh the the 20 years ago i think people would say hey work hard and you'll succeed so work incredibly hard and people just listen but nowadays i i don't think people do that not just in china but but perhaps globally got it got it and kind of getting back to the you know the the differences like one one of the things that at least from what i've heard is that like engineering background is something that's emphasized for people that are working in the chinese government is that right like is there a lot of people with engineering backgrounds that work in the government in china that support more adoption in terms of you know ai and advancements in technology uh i'm not an expert on the demographics of government officials i obviously there have been a few top level leaders that have had engineering degrees so certainly a degree that's highly respected uh if your question is more about why does the chinese government emphasize tech so much i think the number one reason is that we're in the fourth industrial revolution and china kind of missed out on the first and the second and a little bit of the third right the first was the steam engine the uk's rise to the top second was electricity and other things us rose to the top third the u.s led the world again in pc and internet uh china caught a little bit of that and and and got a good taste of it's good to have your control your own destiny so now at the fourth industrial revolution which is ai automation um i think china feels like uh missing out the first three has caused china to pay a dear price of being uh becoming china did quite well having missed the three revolutions right being the outsourcing factory of the world was not a bad outcome it's the envy of the developing countries of course but still it became clear there would be the big winners would be those who are leading in technology and not only inventing them but putting them to good use first use that i think is a a very pervasive understanding in the chinese government that we should not miss out and it's important and that's why there are these policies and basically promoting uh technologies and and for kids to study science etc so yeah i wanted to dig into more about you know ai 2041 now at this point and um you know really just go through some of the stories that you're telling in the book itself i mean we can talk about the high level opportunities starting off and one of the things that you know we're you're talking about is just the amount of wealth that it could potentially create but i think this is a debate that people are having where you know the the opportunities that could come from ai could is also going to be some of the jobs that are going to be replaced from that so i want to dig into that a little bit um in terms of the wealth that it will create like what are some of the opportunities that you're seeing or is it going to be one of these things where it's going to be like the top few that are able to leverage these things like ai or the people that are creating the companies leveraging ai that are going to be claiming the rewards of this how do you look at that so ai is an optimizing technology that takes a lot of data and is capable of basically doing tasks at a better way than people because it can learn from data and from watching people from being trained on data etc so so a lot of routine jobs and routine tasks will be replaced by ai both at a white collar and a blue collar level and that will lead to some job displacement as well as wealth inequality so that's one of the topics throughout the book ai 2041 it keeps coming up and i think people will eventually adapt but we need to be aware of how and why things are happening so people so so ai will be used by uh top companies to create a lot of wealth and they will displace jobs and then it'll take away jobs from people at the entry and routine levels who may have a hard time finding another job so there needs to be mechanisms in society that that bridges the gap of wealth inequality for example through taxation and universal basic income can give people a second chance to create a buffer for the people whose jobs may have been taken by ai secondly there needs to be retraining in place to help people to find a new job that they can continue again because it's not just important from making a salary standpoint but also people's jobs are an important part of the meaning of their lives and when the jobs are gone people may become depressed fall to substance abuse etc and also education needs to be revamped to help people with help the kids learn skill sets that are not replaceable by ai whether it's creativity or teamwork or compassion or human to human connections so those things need all need to be built up and i think we can get over these problems of job displacement and also even look forward to ai creating new jobs although we don't exactly know which they will be but we do know they will not be routine jobs so the blessing for us as a human race is that once we get over the hump of job displacements wealth inequality adjustments policies needed etc we can look forward to first ai creating a lot of wealth for for the world for society because no longer do we need routine human labor to create uh products and secondly uh we as a human race are then liberated from having to do routine work so we can do things that we enjoy or we're good at so it's a tough intermediary period once we get over it we can look forward to a much better environment and world got it so when you say wealth you don't necessarily just mean the financial side of things you're talking about the time you're talking about you know allowing people to be more creative and having more access like just overall those benefits that come from that process got it and in terms of the new jobs that could potentially be created like have you envisioned or thought about what are some of these things that could potentially come up as we get into 2041 uh yes and and i think the book describes some of those possibilities one obviously is in a world full of robots we're going to need robot repair we're going to need people who program the ai on the other side with people having more time on their hands and with goods becoming produced by robots and becoming cheaper people will want to spend their money on more on services so the services sector should undergo a substantial increase both in number of employment and number of innovative services that people can have imagine if you make a a lot of money from ai or technologies and then you want to spend you know more maybe a a more curated vacation with your family or a concierge that gets you the the food the wine the experience the massage whatever it is that you like or a tour guide who gives you a personalized journey or maybe for people who are in need maybe elderly or people in hospitals there can be volunteers and and also paid people who are providing their time taking care of the elderly donating their time to to foster homes and there will be parents who want to spend do homeschooling for their kids both to help their kids to have the attention they need in an ai economy but also that may be the best time spent for parents as opposed to getting uh getting getting a service job so i think these things will likely blossom as well there will be many other jobs that will be very hard to to predict and the reason is that we we can't exactly predict every new type of services just like when we began the internet revolution uh i or any other expert could not possibly have 20 years ago predict the kind of jobs and economy that has come through let's say an app called name uber right uber's created many jobs disrupt disrupted the way transportation worked and created lots of opportunities and hurt some right taxi drivers moving to uber drivers changing the way of life etc that could not have been predicted 20 years ago for the same so for the same reason i can't really give a complete roadmap of what new jobs will be enabled by ai but there should be sure there should be many as history would tell us every technological revolution has eventually provided more jobs than it decimated and the same thing i believe will be true for ai but we have to probably wait 15 20 25 years just as we did for the internet for for let's say using uber again as an example uh to to see jobs blossom in this area yeah i i do i do agree with it um in terms of you know these technologies it's always a double-edged sword right so the older people that kind of really adapt to you know let's say the taxi medallions are going to be displaced and uber opens up more jobs but you're also getting into a situation now where uber drivers are also going to be replaced now in the next probably five years or 10 years which means there's going to be it almost seems like as ai gets more advanced you are going to create more jobs but it's if it gets so advanced those jobs that the ai created at that level is also going to be replaced again as the ai gets smarter and smarter so is it always just going to be this cycle where ai can potentially create new wealth but it ends up replacing it and that opens up another layer that we just can't foresee right now yes i think so that's why in one of the stories in the book we created a new type of company called job reallocation companies and what they will do is on an individual basis if if your job were displaced by ai it would find something that's individually more suitable for you to gain the retraining and take that on and there are characters in the story who have been job reallocated uh two three four times in uh in two decades and we should expect that that to happen um but if if society and the government and companies will provide that cushion and retrain people we will stop looking at a job as something you do for life but as as a new experience new skills that you learn um and as long as the the danger of unemployment and the loss of subsistence is removed by social welfare then i think people might look forward to the retraining as opposed to being uh you know painted into a corner yeah and how does that look for the way society is going to be made up are we just going to have a massive middle class particularly with things like you but ubi and taxation systems where people that aren't able to find jobs or or make a lot of income are able to survive with these basic necessities of being able to pay for their stuff is that just going to lead to like a one big middle class and then maybe like a percentage of people that are just insanely wealthy meaning like there's just not going to be a lower class anymore well this is something we can all speculate but i believe a one of the likely outcomes would be as you described that is large larger numbers of people who are no longer fearful of losing their jobs and they get the retraining they need and then they rotate jobs as society technologies change and and also in addition i think some number of people may choose to go into a type of work that isn't just generating economic value but generates societal value you know health going into health care services working in elderly home homeschooling your children would all fall into that category so that would somehow fit of course the society needs to accept uh these jobs and these people who who are i think adding value to the society and not not be looked down upon nor to be economically discriminated that is they need to make earn a good living doing these things so that requires some adjustment in the society and then i think the ultra rich there the question needs to be asked does there really need to be some uh form of equalizing taxation that's been proposed in the u.s by elizabeth warren and others uh the rich tax basically uh yeah obviously what are your thoughts on that obviously who's your very rich man of course well obviously the um i think the uh the rich people will fight back against that yeah but and i think if there were a better way maybe we can find it but if not that might be a last resort that we need to accept because what's the what's the point of having one person possess one trillion dollars they can never use it up it's not a it's not a economic or from a whole society standpoint it doesn't it doesn't help the society so so putting some taxation for the ultra-rich corporations and people seems like an approach that we the human race understand how to put forward regulate um if if there were clever ways great i mean people talk about ubi but ubi needs to be funded somehow unless you have this ultra rich taxation i don't see how ubi can be funded so it seems to me it's probably unavoidable because uh the likelihood for for the human race to invent another mechanism to rebalance uh the wealth inequality seems so unlikely people have talked about death and taxation are the two unavoidable things in life and taxation has a lot of we have a lot of practice throughout the years doing taxation so time to just use that um use that from our arsenal to uh as a necessary step yeah there must be something that is in between where if someone that is at that top 0.1 percent can deploy the capital in an efficient way that gives back some sort of value to society which is hard to quantify or hard to classify i guess i guess one example is like jeff bezos obviously he gets a lot of you know knack for being the wealthiest person in the world but there is something to be said i feel that the person that ended up unless it was nepotism but someone that actually ended up making their own wealth and was self-made is in somewhat deserving of like being able to deploy that capital in the most effective way for society like jeff bezos can do what he does now which is with blue origin because he has the capabilities and the reason why he got to you know uh the billions of dollars that he has is because he just has those capabilities the work ethic you know the knowledge the experience to do that and i think there is some sense in terms of someone that has that amount of capital as long as they're deploying it into something that can push society forward um you know deserves to keep that capital and continue to deploy it because that person can make better decisions in some sense than the average person certainly better than me so um yeah i don't know it's uh it seems like it's a hard thing to quantify but i feel like there's in between there rather than just taxating for the sake of taxation you know yeah like the gates foundation is another example that's right yes yeah with the dedication and the research they do uh deploying the money uh in the most efficient way it's the money that you made so you care more about it than than the government and there's something just to be said about that but of course if you start creating all kinds of different ways you can quote unquote contribute to society without being taxed then the tax the loopholes will emerge as well so you have to balance these yeah yeah and then you know just just in terms of the job displacement i mean i think what's inevitable is that ai will accelerate continuously um and kind of as brash as it sounds like the people like when i have kids those kids will just grow up in a generation that is built around learning these skill sets that they need to thrive in this new world and there's just going to be this temporary step that we have to go through where the existing generations that grew up without ai are gonna have a little bit of trouble but like the world's going to move on right eventually and our kids and their grandchildren they're just gonna be able to thrive in this world [Music] which is yeah i mean for this generation it's scary because you're saying in 15 years 40 to 4 40 to 50 of jobs will be replaced by ai um and you you kind of have you kind of have these steps and processes can you actually break down the four quadrant that you have um in terms of you know the repetitive jobs and and the ones that are going to be non-creative and and which what which types of jobs can't be replaced sure yeah in both of my books i used a two dimensions to to create four quadrants and and basically the dimensions are on the horizontal axis is the level of creativity so the more creative the more human involvement is required and the less creative would be more routine work where ai can take over more quickly then on the y-axis would be the trust compassion empathy human to human connection element higher up would be jobs that require a lot of that human connection lower would be the ones that you can do isolated and clearly in these quadrant on the lower left would be the low low compassion low creativity that's likely to be all replaced by ai and that's a good percentage of the tasks that we do on a day-to-day basis but on the high compassion lower creativity level that's where the service jobs will emerge the healthcare services tens of millions of jobs like that also some jobs like teachers and doctors will become more human connection and maybe less using ai as a way of doing uh teaching or diagnosis on that front so jobs will be shifting from the routine uh routine work up to a lot of it will be up to the service work because it's going to be hard to teach a routine worker to become creative or to become a ceo or a scientist but probably becoming someone in the service industry seems more feasible and then on the lower right are the high creativity but jobs that don't require a lot of compassion and human connection jobs like scientists researchers etc so that will continue to be uh human occupied but perhaps using more ai tools in a symbiotic way and then finally the the high compassion height and high creativity jobs maybe a ceo's job or someone running a country requires both of that to do a good job then those will also be using ai tools but that's where the human uh unique qualities of creativity and compassion will come together and shine got it got it so for someone that is about to enter high school or university and their parents that are listening to this to figure out what they should what are some of the skill sets that they should be teaching their children is the focus going to be more on soft skills and that things like i don't know creative arts or philosophy or those things are going to be what or psychology those things are going to be the ones that might be more relevant for adapting into this new world than you know kind of the hard skills that maybe were taught in university traditional system uh yeah directionally what you said is is basically right but i think even more importantly there will need to be new new courses and new learning process to gain the skill sets that really need to be gained for example how do you make someone more creative how do you hone uh critical thinking skills and increase curiosity and how do you increase the level of why and why not in the classroom and less about what's the answer so that shift needs a whole new design of education similarly the soft skills compassion empathy ability to communicate persuade and work in a team and and win people's respect and trust that has always been i think more than 50 of success in any corporate world anyway but classrooms haven't been good at teaching those so how do we pivot the education process and if it's not done in a public school maybe parents will want to provide that so i think that's the most important thing for parents is to make sure that the kids can learn new skills become creative and and have a strong ability to communicate and empathize with other people yeah also i would say it's incredibly important for the for the kids to um to follow their heart follow their passion because you're not just competing with other people but all by the ai that is becoming increasingly good so if you don't do what you love it's hard to become the best in what you do so those are the suggestions we give and in the book ai 2041 we talked about how ai tools can be used to enhance education one example is in the story twin sparrows when ai companions uh are working with each kid trying to make learning fun and trying to watch the kid from all day long and then gain enough understanding so that it knows what what um how to motivate the child what they like and making learning engaging and fun in an individualistic kind of way so that kind of paints a possible technology future for education but of course parents can also need to also do what only a parent and a human can do to help the child grow in this particularly challenging age but also full of technology infusion and opportunities do you see a world where robots and humans can fall in love with each other uh it's quite likely that there will be humans who fall in love with uh robots uh that are maybe software-based maybe chatbot at first then conversational because ai is just getting better and better at it it fakes emotion connection and understanding and then eventually probably beyond 20 years there can be robots that have those capabilities too but i would remind uh people that if you're thinking you might be falling in love with a robot re remember that it doesn't love you back it is merely parroting phrases back that it thinks will gain your attention and love and it is not it doesn't have true feelings so i hope this doesn't become any kind of mainstream phenomena there will always be people who are lonely who feel they found someone who understands uh and robots will be better and better at it but i think that is against our you know human uh culture and intuition and preference that we should love other human beings and not robots and this will remain in a very small fraction of the society yeah it's it's worth debating i think because i mean loneliness is such a pandemic now that it might be worth just letting people fall in love with robots and despite the robot perhaps not liking it but it still might serve their needs in some sense and you know what if there was data to point that people do feel less lonely with robots i mean that could be a business separate business on its own where you have your own companion in some sense or even just a friend or you know it's a caregiver and in in this sense um yeah i wonder if that's something that could potentially come into that is that is that a story in the book at all like someone falling in love with the book with the robot no no not something i believe that should happen so we didn't include in the story uh but there were there were companions there were companions they were ai keeping people company uh ai you know uh companion teacher for kids so that there are some of that and and there are also research uh today that shows ai uh can be good and things like us you know even a suicide hotline or people who have psychological problems but could not reach a human psychiatrist for help in time that robot provides a reasonable backup but only only when the human is not available and it seems to show that it's more effective than not having it got it got it i just want to end with some questions here um we talked a bit about work-life balance and um and you know just kind of segmenting this with the leverage that people will have with automation and ai you know in that world of leverage and automation is is working hard is working smarter and making better decisions going to be a more important factor for people to have more success in their careers and just their overall success versus just simply working hard um i think it's a combination of working hard and working smart i i certainly believe in working smart doing things uh in a non-road learning kind of way and developing new skills and spending one's time in a balanced way this is all good but sometimes you know don't work hard work smart become something people say as an excuse not to work hard and and i think um in a in a exciting environment you one should find something people one is excited about that's worth working hard and working smart not to hurt your health but to do things that you love and that you're self-motivated to be thinking about it all the time and to to so that you can become more creative and become more knowledgeable so i think finding something you're passionate about is something i believe in i also believe if you found something you're passionate about you're likely to want to work hard not as a result of people telling you or being forced to compete and survive but out of your own volition to want to do that that i think is uh is a place that if you found yourself to be in in that kind of a work hard and smart but but not hurt your health kind of a combination that would be i think the best combination if if one could find that thing that you're passionate about yeah so let's say someone has found something they're passionate about um if you were to give advice to your 30 year old self looking back where you've clearly found your passion and the things that you want to do what's like a piece of advice that you would share i would tell my the 30 year old version and myself to take more risks because risks should be taken when one's young and once you're older it's um you don't have as much ahead of you the cost you pay could be higher and you become more set in your ways and and i think society in many ways teach more of us to not take risks maybe because the mass law hierarchy does have survival at a very basic level but if you don't take your risks when you're young you may not have a chance to do that and that will be regret when you're older and do you think like the definition of young and older is changing i i know you had a pretty hard health scare with fourth stage lymphoma i don't know how deeper you got into longevity like we've had uh sergey young on the show i'm not sure if you're familiar with him he's got the longevity fund and talks a little bit about longevity as well and this idea that we can live to 200 years old like is that is that an industry apart from ai that's been interesting for you particularly with the events that have happened you know recently uh sure so my last question was referring to you know 30 year old asking a 60 year old uh which i think is what we just did but the but i also believe in longevity the two are not mutually exclusive i think new advances in life science and also using ai can be well combined with longevity we have invested in a company called deep longevity that uses a tool that will take all of your body metrics uh that includes primarily your blood right now but also potentially your full body mri your multi-omics inputs and your wearables input into an ai system that compares you with other people of your own age younger age healthier not so healthy and give you some feedback on how you can improve your lifestyle which includes certainly new types of medicines and nutrients but also your stress management exercise sleep and then and the nutrition as an overall combination to get your metrics to be healthier i i don't think we the human race have ever had a uh complete uh data-centric way to manage ourselves if we believe data-centric ways are better ways to manage companies better ways to make internet companies financial companies more successful then we should use it on us so i am engaged in using this technology right now i do deep measures every every quarter and then some of them every year and then i can see progress so as someone who's data driven and who's uh very competitive uh it becomes kind of a game like for me like a leaderboard or something just competing with myself yes it's private personal data so i can't see anybody else's data but it would show you know your blood looks you know six years younger than it did one year ago which was the number i got and i feel like um you know i've won the game or something congrats yeah that's amazing well a big step in terms of being healthy and longevity is prevention so something like what you're mentioning is uh it's definitely a step forward for for society so well kaifu i really recommend you uh uh really appreciate your time and all the insights that you shared i would highly recommend people to check out ai 2041. uh where else can people learn more about you what you're up to and um are you working on a next book now oh no i'm still uh getting over the promotion for this one but uh there might be another one who knows ai 20 61 or something like that one day uh in 20 years from now right right yeah love it love it well really again appreciate your time highly recommend people to check it out and thanks so much for tuning in guys okay thank you thanks bye

Channel: Sean Kim

Views: 4,144

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Id: j66Ywr-VUOg

Length: 63min 56sec (3836 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 02 2021