The Human Edge

Matt, what advice would you give to people who are grappling with AI today.

Clearly, you have, just in today's headlines, you basically have Dario of Anthropic basically saying this thing should be legislated and there'll be hundreds of thousands of millions of people out of jobs.

You have Jeff Bezos saying, forget about job loss.

This is the golden ages of all time.

Depending on where you are, there are people at Meta who have lost their jobs, other people who believe they're training people.

They've got a couple of years and people are watching their keystrokes and will replace them.

So this whole idea of AI and work, what advice do you give? There's a whole bunch of people who are saying, is this good? Is this bad? Is this horrible? What is it?

It's really challenging and it's again one of those important questions to ask but very difficult to answer.

When I spoke at Davos in January, which is my first Davos, my keynote I gave at the collaboration house, I started with the Dickens quote, which is, it's the best of times and the worst of times.

I said it's the best time ever in the history of humanity to be alive, primarily because technology like AI makes the things that for a long time, the mundane, annoying, really fucking painful things that we've just grown up with, an easy thing to just like delegate and push off to something else, freeing our time to focus on abundance and prosperity and joy and wonder.

But it's unfortunately, it's not an equal distribution.

And as a result, a lot of people are still suffering in many parts of the world.

And even in the US, a lot of people are being kind of like, feeling the effects of AI for reasons not of their own making.

It's like an unequal transformation, if you will, both here in our country as well as globally, and it pains me truly to see it.

Earlier today in Atlanta, I was at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in downtown Atlanta, and I picked up a copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that Eleanor Roosevelt authored with a number of other co-authors about 80 years ago.

There's a little section in there about the core fundamental human rights in the workplace.

I don't know if you've ever seen this or maybe referenced in one of your books, but it's true what she states and the author state about having a workplace that is free from harm and remuneration that's appropriate and all the rest.

But I think truly that a bunch of us need to band together and update this for the 2020s and 2030s because there is not a single mention of anything technological in the declaration.

And it doesn't talk about flourishing, happiness, joy, and what it means sustainably to work even in the 2030s because to your point, books points and all the work you do, what work even means in 2030 is so different than when people had a factory job in the 1940s, that it's almost like obsolete almost at this point.

So I think the biggest contribution to the economic agenda could be like a true human rights update for AI that advocates for like the humanist, human-centered consideration of like, when I go to work, whatever that is, whether it's like a string of, you know, gig-type jobs, consulting, or I have an employer pay my primary thing, whatever the fuck it is, what are my rights as a human, and how do I show up so that when I go home, I want to come back to work and I can treat my loved ones with respect, and I love what I do.

I think that is critical.

You know, one of the...