77: AI and the New Economic Landscape: Live from the Aspen Ideas Festival

What about the workplace? How do you talk to your, you have 30,000 employees, how do you talk to them about AI? I'm sure they're nervous as many people are.

Not really, I mean, because it's, like I said, you gotta get beyond the technology.

How does this help you do your job better? What solutions does it provide to the work that you do, whether it's call center work, whether it's the line crews that are going out replacing transformers and fuses, how this gives them more information to restore that service, but also how we use it to help them be safer.

So there are just so many values and benefits and speed that comes along with this technology.

Yes, we have to govern it properly, but I just think it's a wonderful opportunity in terms of using this technology to provide incredible solutions in terms of how we do our business and run our company.

Well, what about workplace? I mean, we've seen the tech companies lay off a lot of folks.

Sometimes they say it's AI.

Sometimes they don't.

But there's no question it's the biggest fear on AI, on data centers.

And if you talk about the industry side, they're not investing because they're not sure where the technology is going.

Well, how do you look at the workplace situation? Look,

I think this is a massive, important conversation that our political leaders should be taking on today and should be working with labor leaders, with business leaders, with heads of AI companies to really chart a path forward.

Yeah, but how do you do that? I mean,

you've got the tech companies, right? They're not really, they're competing, right? We've got these situations where they're competing directly.

So are you suggesting that they come together? Well, this administration is definitely not going to bring them together for workplace issues, or at least not yet.

How do you think that works?

Well, let's step back and just ask, what are people worried about? And if you look at what they're worried about, the tech leaders themselves have been extremely apocalyptic in terms of how many jobs are likely to be wiped out, wiped out.

That's those are the kinds of words that they've used to talk about AI.

Now, most of the kinds of head of frontier companies know a lot about the speed of their models and how quickly they're reaching milestones.

They are not economists, they are not historians.

And most people who look at general purpose technologies, which this clearly is, think electricity, think the railroads, information technology, it takes time for the whole economy to reorient, to really optimize around new technologies.

So it's going to be a period of transition And when I think about the China shock, which I think is the right frame to think about, leaders just did not respond.

And we saw a million people wiped out in factory towns, very concentrated, with really no transition plans.

That's not what should happen this time.

I think there's loads of good solutions out there.