Latest / Humanity Working / Bonus Episode: Why AI Doom is Counterproductive, featuring Geoffrey Moore.

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Bonus Episode: Why AI Doom is Counterproductive, featuring Geoffrey Moore. · Humanity Working

0:14
SPEAKER_04: Hello everybody, welcome to Humanity Working.
0:18
SPEAKER_04: Today's guest could not be with us at a more opposite time.
0:24
SPEAKER_04: Some of you might have seen either on X or much of the coverage that came from it a post by somebody called Jacob Coxson that was looking specifically at the what's going on inside Anthropic.
0:43
SPEAKER_04: And Jacob has left Anthropic and he wanted to raise what he considers to be a very significant issue.
0:53
SPEAKER_04: I'll read you the first part of that tweet.
0:57
SPEAKER_04: The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.
1:01
SPEAKER_04: This is not a marketing stunt.
1:03
SPEAKER_04: If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible, but I hear the same people express fear, and it goes on from there.
1:11
SPEAKER_04: Now what was really interesting about that is that this person left, and people inside Anthropic, far from distancing themselves from it, almost doubled down.
1:24
SPEAKER_04: Here's uh ex post from Evan Hubinger, who still works at Anthropic.
1:29
SPEAKER_04: Jacob is correct here.
1:30
SPEAKER_04: We really do earnestly believe that AI could kill all humans.
1:34
SPEAKER_04: I personally think it's a greater than 10% chance within the next decade.
1:39
SPEAKER_04: I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.
1:48
SPEAKER_04: Unsurprisingly, that's worrying a few people.
1:51
SPEAKER_04: And I am thrilled to be talking about the issues that arise from this and the broader ethical considerations today.
2:00
SPEAKER_04: With somebody who I have to say is somebody A, that since we've had this podcast, was on my wish list of people that I wanted to have on this podcast and is kind of a personal hero of mine, Jeff Moore.
2:17
SPEAKER_04: Now, many of you know Jeffrey Moore from his books.
2:20
SPEAKER_04: The first book, I might embarrass you a little bit here, Jeff.
2:24
SPEAKER_04: The first book I got of yours.
2:27
SPEAKER_04: Oh goodness me, I can't see it on my I can't see it on my bookshelf yet.
2:30
SPEAKER_04: But it was Dealing with Darwin.
2:32
SPEAKER_04: And I got Dealing with Darwin, gosh, I think 2008, 9?
2:39
SPEAKER_04: When did you write it?
2:41
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, somewhere in the middle of that first decade of the of the of this century.
2:46
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
2:46
SPEAKER_04: And it was handed to me by my manager at the time, a guy called Mark Miller.
2:52
SPEAKER_04: And Mark handed it to me and he said to me, Paul, read this book.
2:57
SPEAKER_04: It is so you.
3:00
SPEAKER_04: And it will also like massively deepen your thinking.
3:05
SPEAKER_04: And sure enough, it sure enough, it did.
3:07
SPEAKER_04: My copy is dog-eared as I went back from it back over it again and again and again.
3:14
SPEAKER_04: And from there I went back, I went forward, I read a whole bunch of different things.
3:18
SPEAKER_04: And then another book that you wrote more recently that had a truly profound effect on me, and I was one that I just recommended to people left, right, and center was The Infinite Staircase, which is one of the reasons why I really wanted to have you on today to talk about the ethics considerations.
3:34
SPEAKER_04: The Infinite Staircase was sort of a return to your roots.
3:36
SPEAKER_04: I wonder if you could kind of explain that, because a lot of people will have, if they've not read the Infinite Staircase, they will they'll have a very specific view of who you are and what you're about.
3:46
SPEAKER_01: Okay, well, so I I actually started life.
3:49
SPEAKER_01: I wanted to be an English professor.
3:50
SPEAKER_01: I got a doctoral degree in medieval and renaissance literature.
3:54
SPEAKER_01: I taught for four years as an assistant professor at Olivet College in Olivet, Michigan.
3:59
SPEAKER_01: But our family really belonged on the West Coast, and so we just picked up our sticks and went back to California.
4:05
SPEAKER_01: I'd gone to Stanford as an undergraduate.
4:07
SPEAKER_01: My wife Marie is from Palo Alto, so we landed in Palo Alto, and there were no jobs in academics, so I joined a software company as a training director, and then kind of migrated over time into sales and then marketing roles.
4:19
SPEAKER_01: And it turned out that marketing was a really good bridge between my heritage as a literary, you know, somebody very interested in literature and storytelling, and how you know you sell high-tech innovation and deal with things.
4:33
SPEAKER_01: So my business books were all essentially narratives about how a technology adoption works, and then prescriptions about how you would change your strategies and your tactics in order to uh align with the adoption dynamics of the market that you were addressing.
4:50
SPEAKER_01: And then there were like seven books written in that thing.
4:53
SPEAKER_01: Dealing with Darwin was about halfway through the seven.
4:56
SPEAKER_01: The book that Paul just referred to, which is the Infinite Staircase, is actually a philosophy, but it's a book about philosophy, it's not about business.
5:03
SPEAKER_01: But it's about the business of living.
5:06
SPEAKER_01: And basically the idea behind it was simply, you know, historically, we've always told the story of creation from a religious point of view because frankly, until about a hundred years ago, there was no other possible explanation except how could you get a world like this without a divine creator and intelligent design.
5:22
SPEAKER_01: What's been fascinating about the last hundred years is we've been able to develop another narrative.
5:28
SPEAKER_01: It's a secular narrative that talks about emergence and complexity emerging through self-organization.
5:34
SPEAKER_01: It's an extraordinary set of ideas, still controversial, but increasingly credible.
5:39
SPEAKER_01: And so I wanted to write a book that said, okay, if you started there instead of starting with a divine creator, how do you get to ethics?
5:46
SPEAKER_01: How does that work?
5:47
SPEAKER_01: And so the book was about the first two-thirds of the book is kind of recapping the story of how you get from the Big Bang to Paul and Jeff talking on this podcast.
5:57
SPEAKER_01: And then the last third was, okay, so what does that say about how we should act as human beings?
6:02
SPEAKER_04: So hopefully now everybody can understand why I want you on right now.
6:08
SPEAKER_04: We live at an ex an extraordinary time, a time where a lot of what we thought about technology and the way technology was going is sort of being questioned.
6:23
SPEAKER_04: And where the way people are talking about technology is very different.
6:28
SPEAKER_04: Let's start with the exact scenario that I just talked about, right?
6:35
SPEAKER_04: The idea that somebody would leave a company that is pursuing a extraordinar extraordinarily large valuation for their IPO and basically say that the tech the company that they are working in, the technology that is being developed, is a technology that where there's a very real chance that it could wipe out the human race.
7:00
SPEAKER_04: And when they leave, the people who are still at that company are saying, Yeah, there is.
7:06
SPEAKER_04: Have you ever, in your entire long career, have you ever encountered something similar to that?
7:16
SPEAKER_01: Probably the closest is atomic warfare.
7:19
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
7:19
SPEAKER_01: I mean, basically that was what let me bring in that staircase just for a second, because it's going to relate to a lot we're going to talk about here.
7:26
SPEAKER_01: So in that staircase, there's these levels of emergence, and eventually we get to language and human beings.
7:32
SPEAKER_01: And the thing that language first enables after the fact that we can now articulate, you know, bring me food, elephants, watch out, that kind of stuff, is something we call narrative.
7:41
SPEAKER_01: It's storytelling.
7:42
SPEAKER_01: And if you look at the development of culture, cultures develop around myths and stories, and then later on they apply analytics.
7:50
SPEAKER_01: So in the case of literature to some kind called hermeneutics.
7:54
SPEAKER_01: But the idea is you analyze the story for its credibility and its understanding, and is it a practical story?
8:01
SPEAKER_01: Now, let's go to the situation you just have right now.
8:03
SPEAKER_01: We have somebody who's left anthropic who has a story.
8:06
SPEAKER_01: The story is this AI could destroy humanity within 10 years.
8:11
SPEAKER_01: It's a story.
8:12
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
8:12
SPEAKER_01: That's the only way we know how to deal with the future, is we tell possible stories about the future.
8:17
SPEAKER_01: The problem with our society right now is we're not very good and we're not very sophisticated at applying critical thinking to those stories.
8:24
SPEAKER_01: And to do so in a kind of a generous and thoughtful way as opposed to a mean-spirited, snipey kind of kind of way.
8:32
SPEAKER_01: So I think the first thing you have to ask yourself is what is the basis of this story?
8:37
SPEAKER_01: And like the assumption is, for example, built into just that one sentence, is the idea that AI would want to destroy humanity.
8:45
SPEAKER_01: Well, human beings want things.
8:48
SPEAKER_01: It's not clear that machines want things.
8:50
SPEAKER_01: There was a guy at Google, what was it, three or four or five years ago, who was fired because he said, I think AI is sentient.
8:56
SPEAKER_03: Yes.
8:57
SPEAKER_01: That's another version, it's another version of taking narrative.
9:00
SPEAKER_01: And it's people being, I think, in my view, pretty ham-handed about narrative.
9:06
SPEAKER_01: They're just they're just blasting with a kind of a an extremist narrative.
9:10
SPEAKER_01: So I think it's an extremist narrative.
9:12
SPEAKER_01: Now, does that mean it can't happen?
9:14
SPEAKER_01: Extremist does not mean 100% impossible.
9:17
SPEAKER_01: It just means you need to apply analytics and critiquing to it.
9:22
SPEAKER_01: And obviously the people at Anthropic that didn't leave have successfully rationalized it in their mind.
9:29
SPEAKER_01: So I think right now, until the story is built up in a more credible way, I get that superintelligence in certain domains is going to happen.
9:38
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think everybody kind of gets that.
9:40
SPEAKER_01: I think the social and political consequences of that are concerning, but I'm more concerned about human beings using advanced AI to be malicious.
9:50
SPEAKER_01: Because I know human beings can be malicious to other human beings.
9:53
SPEAKER_01: You know, I'm not sure AI can be, but I'm darn sure humans can be.
9:56
SPEAKER_01: And so arming human beings with those kinds of capabilities is very concerning.
10:01
SPEAKER_01: And the fact is we don't have, as Bill Gates was said in a thing like two weeks ago, we don't even have a plan for a plan for how to manage this stuff.
10:10
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it's interesting you should bring that up because this has been a major concern of mine of what's being missed in the narrative.
10:17
SPEAKER_04: You mentioned the nuclear age before.
10:20
SPEAKER_04: The one thing that I would call out that I think is different between the nuclear age and well and now is the democratization of all of this.
10:30
SPEAKER_04: So if you think about conversations that happen about abundance, right, and the idea that we're entering into a world of huge abundance, and think of all the amazing things that we can do with this, uh with everybody having access to all of this technology, there is potentially a dark side to that, right?
10:50
SPEAKER_04: I mean, we go from a situation in the nuclear age where a very small number of people in a very small number of countries had decision-making authority over what would happen with the technology that could kill us all.
11:09
SPEAKER_04: Today, what you have is enormous technological power available to anybody with a subscription and and in some cases like even more power to anybody with a subscription and a couple of hundred bucks.
11:26
SPEAKER_04: And they can use that for good and they can use that for evil.
11:34
SPEAKER_04: And that to me is a that's a different world, right?
11:38
SPEAKER_04: A few people with a couple of governments versus let's say a million people today and a billion people tomorrow with the wherewithal to do significant harm.
11:49
SPEAKER_04: To me, that feels fundamentally different and something that we're not prepared for.
11:53
SPEAKER_04: Do you agree with that?
11:53
SPEAKER_01: Well, I think it's yeah, which it's interesting.
11:56
SPEAKER_01: Um sort of.
11:57
SPEAKER_01: I mean, what it reminds me of is like when I grew up, there were three television networks, CBS, NBC, and ABC.
12:04
SPEAKER_01: And you had Walter Cronkite, Huntley Brinkley, or whoever Peter or whatever his name was for ABC.
12:08
SPEAKER_01: And then the internet came along, and I thought this is gonna be great.
12:12
SPEAKER_01: Social media, we're gonna have lots of different points of view, we won't have just this crony capitalism, it'll be really good.
12:18
SPEAKER_01: And of course, I was totally unprepared.
12:20
SPEAKER_01: And I thought Facebook was a great idea, you can connect people, we're gonna, oh, it's gonna be, you know, it's gonna be wonderful.
12:25
SPEAKER_01: We've got self-organizing communities, it's gonna be terrific.
12:28
SPEAKER_01: And by the way, all those things did happen.
12:31
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but what I was totally unprepared for was the negative impact of social media and the way in which social media has been used to manipulate and to create all kinds of negative social outcomes, which by the way, we still are not really well equipped to to cope with.
12:47
SPEAKER_01: So we're still dealing with a culture, I think it's a cultural crisis.
12:51
SPEAKER_01: I don't think it's about AI first.
12:53
SPEAKER_01: I think it's about narrative first.
12:55
SPEAKER_01: I think manipulative narratives, which by the way is kind of one of the things AI would use to destroy humanity if you think about how it would want to work on doing it.
13:03
SPEAKER_01: So it's it's manipulative narratives.
13:05
SPEAKER_01: And I think, you know, as an English major, as an English teacher, I would like to vaccinate people against manipulative narratives by teaching them critical thinking.
13:15
SPEAKER_01: Uh not that they think have to think like me, but they need to be able to critique a narrative.
13:20
SPEAKER_01: And most people are suckers.
13:22
SPEAKER_01: Not everybody's sucker for some narratives, right?
13:25
SPEAKER_01: Me, you, everybody.
13:26
SPEAKER_01: But the notion that you would find narratives that would create public policies or that would create public actions, you have to be very thoughtful about those narratives.
13:35
SPEAKER_01: Because those narratives have to that's why, yeah, that's why a free press was so important to a democracy.
13:40
SPEAKER_01: So that you get enough narrative perspective that you can make a reasonable judgment.
13:46
SPEAKER_01: You can sort of try to see all the way around an issue and come up with something that's, you know, a reasonable approach to it, as opposed to just a knee-jerk reaction, which is kind of what with the guy from Anthropic, that was a knee-jerk reaction.
13:59
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
14:00
SPEAKER_01: And so that's that's what I'm concerned about.
14:02
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, and of course, there's the conversation, increasingly, thanks to social media, there's the conversation, and then there's the conversation about the conversation.
14:10
SPEAKER_04: And this is one of the things that has has struck me about this specifically, which is you have the guy leaving on the tropic, you have the existing employee who jumps in on it and says, if anything, it's worse.
14:27
SPEAKER_04: And then if you're unfortunate enough to have to spend a bunch of time on X, which I have to as a job, actually, you wind up seeing a almost instant bifurcation.
14:41
SPEAKER_04: This is crazy, there's no chance of this happening, and this is pure doomerism to this is understated, and your guys are not listening, and retreat into the polarized yeah.
14:55
SPEAKER_01: What we're saying, and this is one of the things we didn't realize about social media, was how naturally polarizing it becomes.
15:02
SPEAKER_01: And we found this out in our primary elections as well, that the more because social media tends to work inside of social groups of like-minded people, it tends to organize around its extremes.
15:15
SPEAKER_01: And we're used to a world which the world organizes around the mean.
15:18
SPEAKER_01: We were all raised with the bell curve.
15:19
SPEAKER_01: We always kind of thought the middle of the bell curve was where things would stabilize.
15:23
SPEAKER_01: What you're seeing with social media is no, is that social media stabilizes at the polls, not at the center of the bell curve.
15:30
SPEAKER_01: And so you get this bang, bang, bang, bang, bang kind of stuff.
15:34
SPEAKER_01: And basically, I mean, I think I think it's going to come, I don't think we're that far away from a time of realizing social media is not an appropriate venue for political discourse.
15:44
SPEAKER_01: It just isn't.
15:45
SPEAKER_01: Will it continue to be used for it?
15:47
SPEAKER_01: Of course it will.
15:47
SPEAKER_01: Will it manipulate people?
15:49
SPEAKER_01: We just had Mr.
15:50
SPEAKER_01: Trump giving away$5,000 yesterday to every American if you would elect a Republican.
15:55
SPEAKER_01: I mean, of course it will.
15:56
SPEAKER_01: So, and by the way, one of the principles of American democracy is you're entitled to your own narrative.
16:02
SPEAKER_01: I don't care how crazy it is, it doesn't matter.
16:05
SPEAKER_01: The government is not going to dictate to you that you have to have a different narrative, which is different than say in China, where if it's a totalitarian government, there's one correct narrative, and if you're not on that narrative, you can go to jail.
16:17
SPEAKER_01: So it's a that's a different problem.
16:19
SPEAKER_01: But that's not the problem we have.
16:21
SPEAKER_01: We have the problem of all narratives are democratically declared equal, uh sort of a DEI for narratives, and as a result, we have this rattling, this noise that's overtaken, that's overshadowing discourse.
16:36
SPEAKER_01: So you say, well, what do we have to do about that?
16:39
SPEAKER_01: We have to get back to responsible discourse.
16:42
SPEAKER_01: We're not going to get rid of the noise.
16:43
SPEAKER_01: I mean, maybe you can put on noise-canceling headphones, but maybe there's an intellectual metaphor there.
16:50
SPEAKER_01: And so then you say, well, how do you do that?
16:53
SPEAKER_01: And I think, and this gets to the ethics part, I think the way you do that is you stop thinking about that problem and you start saying, look, we're all playing a limited engagement on this planet.
17:04
SPEAKER_01: What is the point of your life?
17:05
SPEAKER_01: What do you want to be in service to?
17:07
SPEAKER_01: What impact do you want to have before you leave?
17:10
SPEAKER_01: How can you then how can you then direct your life around that goal and then incorporate AI, both its pluses and minuses, into that mission or into that journey, or into that.
17:22
SPEAKER_01: But you but if you don't have a life journey and a mission, it's really hard to figure out how to get it to a stable place.
17:29
SPEAKER_01: Ethics needs to be grounded in being in service to something outside of yourself.
17:34
SPEAKER_01: And once you get that grounding, then I think you have a basis for now rationalize and dealing with the noise a lot better.
17:42
SPEAKER_04: We're dealing with technology that I think we would agree has the potential to harm us.
17:50
SPEAKER_04: There's dispute about how much and how soon, and there's dispute about the mechanisms.
17:59
SPEAKER_04: But it's fairly clear that there are two futures that can be envisioned, one of which is sort of more utopian in nature, and one of which is more dystopian in nature.
18:15
SPEAKER_04: And so that screams out, at least me, for a lot of thought being put into the ethical frameworks that that are needed.
18:28
SPEAKER_04: I'm curious as to whether you believe that the existing ethical frameworks that some of which have been formally written down, some of which are embedded in our culture naturally, whether those are sufficient and we just need to like pay attention to them more, or whether you think that there is something unique about AI that requires a unique approach to ethics.
19:00
SPEAKER_01: No, I don't think there's something unique.
19:02
SPEAKER_01: I mean, look, we we've talked about AI, let's go back and give some other examples.
19:06
SPEAKER_01: Guns.
19:07
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
19:08
SPEAKER_01: The only thing about guns is that they act locally, not globally.
19:11
SPEAKER_01: And then AI can act globally, not locally.
19:13
SPEAKER_01: But other than that, you say, good God, why in the world do we allow people everybody, anybody in the mother to buy a gun?
19:19
SPEAKER_01: And and and we have, you know, the whole issue around that.
19:22
SPEAKER_01: So the point is, society is we've been here before.
19:25
SPEAKER_01: Ethics have had to deal with stuff like this before.
19:28
SPEAKER_01: So that's not, I don't think we need a new ethics.
19:30
SPEAKER_01: What we do need to realize is that ethics are grounded in narratives.
19:35
SPEAKER_01: If you start with an ethical framework, the place people go wrong is to think, well, an ethical framework, that's gonna be like a rule book.
19:43
SPEAKER_01: If I get all the rules right, then I I can just apply the rules, and it's an algorithm, and I can make correct ethical choices by applying the right algorithm.
19:51
SPEAKER_01: That's not how ethics works.
19:53
SPEAKER_01: Ethics starts with intuitional feelings.
19:56
SPEAKER_01: Ethics is biological before it is sociological.
20:00
SPEAKER_01: It starts with feelings of nurturing and respect or disrespect and abuse.
20:04
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it goes both ways, right?
20:06
SPEAKER_01: I mean, in other words, but but it starts biologically, and narratives get to biological feelings and intuitions much more directly than analytics do.
20:17
SPEAKER_01: So as soon as you create an ethical framework and turn it into a logical algorithm, you're at a distance from the emotional impact of that, of those issues.
20:25
SPEAKER_01: And that distance, I mean that distance, by the way, allows you to do some magical things, ultimately to create AI, by the way.
20:32
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
20:32
SPEAKER_01: AI is the ultimate, the ultimate algorithm.
20:34
SPEAKER_01: But you've now disconnected from biology, and we're biological creatures.
20:40
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, we are mortal.
20:42
SPEAKER_01: This is who we are.
20:43
SPEAKER_01: So I think it's important, I think it's more important to ground people in their narrative than it is to try to build some algorithm to deal with this set of AI issues.
20:54
SPEAKER_04: And is this a heart of the mistakes that you think people are making when they're looking at it?
21:01
SPEAKER_04: Let me ask you this.
21:02
SPEAKER_04: I don't know if you're speculating or not, because I don't know if uh how close you've been to the leadership inside some of these companies.
21:08
SPEAKER_04: But what do you think is the nature of the conversation that is probably happening in anthropic in open AI about these topics?
21:18
SPEAKER_04: They're clearly thinking about what could happen and they're pointing people to their boards and they're you know, they're they're they're doing things to attempt in some way to address this, but what do you think of the nature of the conversations that they're having?
21:30
SPEAKER_01: Well, I think I think look, if I were in the if I I'll put myself on the board of Anthropic so I can enter the conversation myself.
21:37
SPEAKER_01: Sure.
21:37
SPEAKER_01: Look, I I think the narrative, the apocalypse narrative, I think is a extremist narrative, and I don't think it's suitable for creating policies and actions in its present state, period.
21:48
SPEAKER_01: So I think it would be irresponsible to create policies and actions based on that narrative.
21:54
SPEAKER_01: Okay, that that's number one.
21:55
SPEAKER_01: Number two, though, it's a signal.
21:58
SPEAKER_01: So the next question is what is Is a signal of, and that that's clearly it's a signal that some people have a life understanding or an understanding of the universe that this the AI has now tripped a trigger in their circuit breaker and said that can't possibly happen in the universe that I was raised in.
22:16
SPEAKER_01: Therefore, I have to change my entire narrative and the world has to change its policies.
22:20
SPEAKER_01: Therefore is the part I would disagree with.
22:22
SPEAKER_01: Yes, AI has tripped a trigger.
22:24
SPEAKER_01: You and I have experienced it, we've all experienced it.
22:26
SPEAKER_01: It's going to, it's going to create a whole new set of variables.
22:30
SPEAKER_01: But then I would say, but of course, you and I are both.
22:33
SPEAKER_01: I'm very caught up in the idea that AI, initially with humans in the loop, but eventually AI without humans in the loop, I think it'd be an incredibly constructive force in education, in healthcare, in social services, in law enforcement.
22:47
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I just think I think the opportunity to do wonderful things with this stuff is huge, and to address problems that we've never been able to address any other way.
22:55
SPEAKER_01: So I'm very much in favor of saying I still want to pursue that kind of stuff.
23:01
SPEAKER_01: Now, the other part of the narrative, just I don't, this is probably not ethically relevant, but let me put it on the table anyway.
23:07
SPEAKER_01: We're in the middle of the biggest investment bubble.
23:10
SPEAKER_01: That bubble, we know that bubble will pop.
23:12
SPEAKER_01: When it when that happens, that will have massive consequences on the reach of AI.
23:17
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
23:17
SPEAKER_01: Because and then by the way, will it come back?
23:20
SPEAKER_01: Of course it'll come back.
23:21
SPEAKER_01: Will it be bigger than ever?
23:22
SPEAKER_01: Yes, it will be bigger than ever, just like the internet, just like mobile, just like everything else.
23:27
SPEAKER_01: But part of the apocalyptic fear right now is we're assuming that the AI evaluation model that is running the markets today is sustainable.
23:37
SPEAKER_01: And my claim is it's not.
23:39
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, yeah.
23:40
SPEAKER_04: I want to touch a little bit before we move on as to the specifics as to why you think the apocalyptic narrative is deeply unhelpful.
23:50
SPEAKER_04: You could make an argument.
23:52
SPEAKER_04: I may have made this argument at certain times.
23:54
SPEAKER_04: I'm back and forth on this.
23:55
SPEAKER_04: One could make an argument that even if there is a non-zero chance, even if it's a 0.01% chance versus 10% chance, surely it's only responsible to explore what those consequences are so that we can plan a get so that we can mitigate them.
24:17
SPEAKER_04: And you would disagree with that.
24:18
SPEAKER_04: So explain why.
24:20
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, this is really important.
24:22
SPEAKER_01: By the way, biological warfare, which I think is actually even I mean, so I mean, look, these things, these things have all been around for a very long time.
24:31
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
24:32
SPEAKER_01: But the notion of using corner to building policies around corner cases, no, use the corner case as a signal.
24:39
SPEAKER_01: Don't ignore the corner case, but do not exercise policy making or build ethical frameworks or even build, do not build decision-making infrastructure around apocalypse.
24:53
SPEAKER_01: By the way, the the word the apocalypse, you know, that word is about has a history of about 3,000 years.
24:59
SPEAKER_01: Do you have any recorded example of a apocalypse?
25:02
SPEAKER_04: Well, must by definition you don't, right?
25:04
SPEAKER_01: But the bing.
25:06
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
25:07
SPEAKER_01: That was my as well.
25:08
SPEAKER_01: If we used to say, that's my point.
25:10
SPEAKER_01: What's your point?
25:17
SPEAKER_01: Time up, but time up.
25:18
SPEAKER_01: Let me let me let me tell you what we do have a historical example of.
25:21
SPEAKER_01: We have a historical example of the Holocaust.
25:23
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
25:24
SPEAKER_01: Which is totally unthinkable.
25:29
SPEAKER_01: I don't care what you want to call it.
25:30
SPEAKER_01: Horrific.
25:31
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
25:31
SPEAKER_01: So it's not that horrific things can't happen, but what's interesting when you study that is that Holocaust developed in plain sight.
25:39
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
25:40
SPEAKER_01: And it developed, by the way, in the leveraging social forces that are active in our society in America today.
25:45
SPEAKER_01: It's the same kind of social forces.
25:47
SPEAKER_01: I mean, there are things you need to worry about.
25:50
SPEAKER_01: I mean, this the utopian narratives are not any more useful than dystopian narratives.
25:56
SPEAKER_01: The thing is we have to have a set of narratives that looks at what's the whole that tries to see all a way around a situation, not just see it from one point of view.
26:07
SPEAKER_04: Okay.
26:08
SPEAKER_04: Yep, that makes perfect sense.
26:10
SPEAKER_04: And in a sense, I think well, I'll tell you what I think you're arguing.
26:15
SPEAKER_04: You can tell me if you agree.
26:16
SPEAKER_04: I think part of what you're arguing here is that when we focus in our storytelling on utopian, dystopian futures, these are stories that feel deeply helpful because in the case of the dystopian scenario, it's warning against a possible future that you can mitigate.
26:40
SPEAKER_04: In the case of a truly utopian future, it is highlighting all of the wonderment and what can lead to investment to pursue it and all of this kind of stuff.
26:52
SPEAKER_04: But these narratives are powerful, and as a result of them being powerful, may well lead to policy making that does not help reach the future that we want to reach.
27:10
SPEAKER_04: Is that sort of more or less more or less the frame of the argument?
27:15
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, in fact, if we say these narratives are powerful, and as they become more extreme, they become more powerful.
27:21
SPEAKER_01: This is why politicians go to the extremes, because the power of the narrative increases as you reduce its complexity and intensify, you know, single dimensions.
27:32
SPEAKER_01: But that's what makes it so inappropriate for being grounding policy.
27:36
SPEAKER_01: That's why it's so dangerous to allow Yahoo kinds of narratives to create policies.
27:43
SPEAKER_01: Because and the more extreme the narrative, the more you can gather a constituency around it because people rally.
27:49
SPEAKER_01: We are creatures of narrative.
27:51
SPEAKER_01: Narrative speaks directly.
27:52
SPEAKER_01: That's why we watch movies, it's why we model ourselves after the heroes that we read about or see in films or whatever.
27:58
SPEAKER_01: We are creatures of narrative.
27:59
SPEAKER_01: We tell our story every day to each other.
28:01
SPEAKER_01: We're storytelling animals.
28:03
SPEAKER_01: So stories are incredibly powerful.
28:05
SPEAKER_01: And when you take an extreme story, what's great about an extreme story is it spreads like crazy.
28:10
SPEAKER_01: That guy did it 48 hours ago.
28:12
SPEAKER_01: It just went, it went entirely like wildfire.
28:15
SPEAKER_01: But but if we had said, you know, one of the concerns we have about AI and anthropic is there is a potential of, you know, some percentage.
28:22
SPEAKER_01: This could possibly have and could have significant.
28:25
SPEAKER_01: You could have garbled it all up and it would have been like, you know, nobody would have hurt at all.
28:31
SPEAKER_01: So we have to understand our susceptibility to narrative is the issue to me.
28:37
SPEAKER_01: And I think we're incredibly naive.
28:40
SPEAKER_01: By the way, personally naive, I think I am personally naive about the narratives that manipulate me.
28:44
SPEAKER_03: Yep.
28:45
SPEAKER_01: I'm what I am good at is I am good because I practiced it for so many years as a profession.
28:51
SPEAKER_01: I am good at distancing myself from a narrative once I've decided to do that in order to analytically assess its credibility and whatever.
28:59
SPEAKER_01: But I think that's something that that we need a lot more of.
29:03
SPEAKER_01: And instead, what happens in political discourse today is you just get shouted down.
29:07
SPEAKER_01: People just they just they shout down the more you know nuanced arguments in favor of the extreme arguments.
29:14
SPEAKER_01: And social media amplifies the extreme arguments.
29:18
SPEAKER_01: So it's I mean, I find I think social media right now is still more dangerous than AI.
29:23
SPEAKER_04: Well, in that case, let's go a little deeper into that, because I'm struck by the point that you made about what we expected, the sort of bell curve and s honing in the center of the bell curve and what we've seen, which is this push to the extremes.
29:44
SPEAKER_04: You've been studying this for a long time, and including the the work that you did for the infinite staircase.
29:53
SPEAKER_04: I would love to know your thoughts as to whether the this push to the extremes is a natural human phenomenon that was enabled by technology in the case of social media, or is it more a consequence of the algorithm that rewards that?
30:19
SPEAKER_04: And of course, you know, your answer may be a blend of the two or whatever, but it's a but I'm but I'm but I'm I'm curious as to where you where you sit on that.
30:27
SPEAKER_04: Is it a reflection of who we are, or is it changing our behavior to behave this way because of the incentives that are associated with the algorithm?
30:37
SPEAKER_01: Certainly the latter is again the latter is clearly amplifying the former, but let's so so that's clear.
30:43
SPEAKER_01: If you assume that for some reason there's any tendency to polarize, then will social media and the algorithms exacerbate that?
30:51
SPEAKER_01: Yes, they will.
30:52
SPEAKER_01: That's pretty damn clear to science.
30:53
SPEAKER_01: But the real question is do we have a natural tendency?
30:56
SPEAKER_01: And it's interesting because you know, we're raised with the bell curve.
30:59
SPEAKER_01: But one of the things that's interesting is you look at a whole bunch of phenomena in nature where there's a power law instead of a bell curve.
31:05
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
31:05
SPEAKER_01: Which means an extremely small, like wealth creation, an extremely small number of people have an enormous amount of wealth.
31:12
SPEAKER_01: Okay, I mean just spectacularly large amount of wealth.
31:16
SPEAKER_01: So, and I think there are phenomena that are power law phenomena and and that are naturally power law phenomena.
31:23
SPEAKER_01: And I think probably this notion of how vi how narrative spreads, even without social media, because I mean we had a you know crises of you know, we had the panic that uh uh you know uh was started when we had War of the Worlds and we had HD Wells and Wisconsin.
31:40
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, or the war of the world.
31:42
SPEAKER_01: So I mean we can create that, and that was a power law phenomenon to this viral, we call it viral spreading, and all of a sudden you get the and in my adoption model was called the tornado, yeah.
31:52
SPEAKER_01: But it's all of a sudden you go from a state of very low adoption to a state of very high adoption very, very rapidly in a nonlinear in a nonlinear path.
32:01
SPEAKER_01: It's not a bell curve.
32:02
SPEAKER_01: It creates a bell curve ultimately at some point when it stabilizes, but at the beginning it's not a bell curve.
32:08
SPEAKER_01: I think we're dealing with some kind of power law phenomenon, not a bell curve phenomenon.
32:12
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
32:13
SPEAKER_04: The incentives piece I think is intriguing.
32:17
SPEAKER_04: I've been doing some a little bit of research independently upon this, talking to influencers, understanding their behaviors and so on.
32:26
SPEAKER_04: And what's very clear is that successful people online have a deep understanding that taking a stand as they would describe it, holding a position tightly, being as close to black and white as possible is very much associated with success online.
32:50
SPEAKER_04: In a sense, as one of them said to me recently, the internet doesn't do nuance.
32:55
SPEAKER_04: And I do wonder, like we are we're in a world, I would argue, we had Bob Johansson from the Institute for the Future on a while back in his book, Navigating the Age of Chaos, and Bob's a big fan of the of this banny framework, Brittle, anxious, nonlinear, and incomprehensible.
33:13
SPEAKER_04: And in the discussion that I had with him, we talked about the fact that in a way the world has the world has a greater degree of complexity than ever.
33:23
SPEAKER_04: It is harder to understand than ever, and the tools that we bring to comment on it are now so much more black and white than they ever were, with the interesting exception of the type of medium that you and I are on right now, Jeff.
33:41
SPEAKER_04: Right?
33:41
SPEAKER_04: I mean, this same thing that's brought us 140 characters is a thing that has also brought us hour-long discussions that people can dip into through the world of podcasts.
33:56
SPEAKER_04: So it's well it's strange, right?
33:58
SPEAKER_04: You can do nuance in certain media, but you can't do nuance in other media and be successful.
34:03
SPEAKER_04: So do you agree that the world is more has this degree of complexity, and it's slightly strange that we've created an overlay on it that is un that is unbelievably simplistic?
34:16
SPEAKER_01: No, no, I think people respond to confusion with with retreat to simplistic.
34:22
SPEAKER_01: So I mean, look, I mean, because there's nothing more simplistic than God and the devil.
34:26
SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry.
34:26
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
34:28
SPEAKER_01: It's pretty simple, heaven or hell.
34:30
SPEAKER_01: You know, the Catholics put that nuanced thing in the middle called Purgatory, you know, which sounds like a stairway to heaven to me, but a different stairway.
34:38
SPEAKER_01: And by the way, I do think layers is the is the right.
34:42
SPEAKER_01: The thing I like about layered models is they allow you to have an operating model that has a set of rules that applies to a whole set of a category, a cohort of situations, but it does not apply to many other cohorts of situations.
34:54
SPEAKER_01: But then you the idea that there's emergent realities, and that each layer of reality actually is built upon the below layers below it and inherits some of their properties, and then in turn supports layers above it, which inherit they inherit its properties, and never the other way down.
35:12
SPEAKER_01: By the way, the cool thing about emergency is it only goes from the bottom up, it does not go from the top down.
35:17
SPEAKER_01: So, anyway, that there's a bunch of stuff that I think is kind of fun there.
35:21
SPEAKER_01: I I I had to laugh in the middle of what you're saying.
35:23
SPEAKER_01: Somebody said, you know, the internet, if you want to be popular on the internet, you shouldn't do nuanced things.
35:28
SPEAKER_01: So, Paul, I hate to tell you, you're not gonna be popular on the internet.
35:32
SPEAKER_01: Just want to let you know right now.
35:34
SPEAKER_01: Just you know, you're as an influencer man, you're gonna have almost no influence.
35:38
SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry.
35:40
SPEAKER_04: I think you're exactly right about that.
35:42
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, me, me neither.
35:45
SPEAKER_01: Me neither, but but but but what we're talking about.
35:48
SPEAKER_01: So, but I think so.
35:49
SPEAKER_01: We have to back up and say, so what the hell are we doing?
35:52
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's like this is where you know, I'm a bit I I had my 80th birthday this year, so it's like, okay, I'm playing in the fourth quarter.
36:00
SPEAKER_01: This is not the first quarter, it's not the second quarter.
36:03
SPEAKER_01: But there's still time on the clock, right?
36:04
SPEAKER_01: Okay, I but I'm I'm feeling like an aging quarterback.
36:07
SPEAKER_01: Are you gonna play another year?
36:08
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
36:09
SPEAKER_01: Come on, Jeff, you got at least another hundred years.
36:10
SPEAKER_01: Look at the way it's aging.
36:14
SPEAKER_01: But we're playing, and so when when you have when you get to the fourth quarter, you start thinking, well, like, well, what the heck?
36:19
SPEAKER_01: What's the point?
36:20
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
36:21
SPEAKER_01: I think the more people will ground themselves in saying, look, I am a mortal being.
36:27
SPEAKER_01: Whether or not there's an afterlife, ignore it for the moment.
36:29
SPEAKER_01: I am a mortal being.
36:31
SPEAKER_01: And I have, what do I think I should be doing on this planet?
36:35
SPEAKER_01: And what do I think and legacy is sort of the thing you think about when you get older.
36:39
SPEAKER_01: But just what is the impact I want to have, whether it's legacy or just what do I want to do?
36:43
SPEAKER_01: What makes life worth living, really?
36:46
SPEAKER_01: At the end of the day, if you're not in service of something more than yourself, it's like, really?
36:51
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it just doesn't work.
36:53
SPEAKER_01: So I do think if we reground ourselves in saying, because there is all this noise around, and you we're not we're subject to the noise.
37:02
SPEAKER_01: And you're if you have children, your children are subject to the noise, or in my case, my grandchildren are subject to the noise.
37:08
SPEAKER_01: You can't you can't obliterate the noise.
37:10
SPEAKER_01: You don't want to build policies upon the noise.
37:14
SPEAKER_01: So what do you want to do?
37:16
SPEAKER_01: And I think you want to build policies around missions, and I think you want to be very thoughtful about the missions that you commit your life to.
37:24
SPEAKER_01: But that if we go there, I think a lot of this is more manageable.
37:28
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
37:29
SPEAKER_04: Now it's certainly manageable at a personal level to bring it back to these organizations.
37:40
SPEAKER_04: We're probably, if we go in the direction that it seems like we're going, and there's not some big government intervention in the next few months, we're probably gonna be in a world where we've got two new publicly traded organizations that are enormously large and potentially enormously powerful on talking about open AI and anthropic.
38:07
SPEAKER_04: And there's obviously gonna be a lot of attention paid to those companies.
38:13
SPEAKER_04: You put yourself on the board earlier on of Anthropic.
38:16
SPEAKER_04: Let's say you're on the board of both of these organizations, not that you'd like at the same time, but let's say you are, and your job is to help them be safe stewards of their role in this new world that they're helping to create.
38:38
SPEAKER_04: That you're gonna help them make sure that we safely navigate the waters that are ahead of us.
38:44
SPEAKER_04: How do you translate everything that you've been talking to into actual I hesitate to move back to that word framework, but actual sets of you know guidance that they can follow that is key, and the key thing here is that it's not being followed algorithmically in the way that you've in the way that you described before.
39:07
SPEAKER_04: It's not a set, it's not a checklist, it's something different to a checklist.
39:11
SPEAKER_04: What are you telling them?
39:12
SPEAKER_01: So so basically, if you're in a public company like Anthropic or OpenAI, there are a set of constituencies that you are responsible to.
39:22
SPEAKER_01: And I'm gonna say them in the order in which you must respect them.
39:26
SPEAKER_01: Customers first, workforce second, investors third, partners and allies in your ecosystem fourth, community, governments or communities fifth.
39:39
SPEAKER_01: Let's just take those five.
39:41
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
39:41
SPEAKER_04: All five of those.
39:42
SPEAKER_04: Oh, just sorry, just in in your definition here, when you say uh governments, communities, are you equating those two things?
39:50
SPEAKER_04: What where is society in that?
39:53
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, let me let me do uh I'll do um government and then community.
39:57
SPEAKER_01: Government is the regulatory, the regulatory uh uh infrastructure of society, and then community is the human humanity, the human goodness.
40:07
SPEAKER_01: So charities are work with communities and governments work with regulatory, just to keep it kind of simplistic.
40:13
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, sure.
40:14
SPEAKER_01: Okay, but my point about that is you start with customers.
40:18
SPEAKER_01: So the first question is what value are you bringing to customers?
40:22
SPEAKER_01: Now, what's cool about technology is technology has the power to release trapped value.
40:27
SPEAKER_01: We all have an operating model for how we run the world today, you know, how we run healthcare, how we run education, how we run law enforcement, how we run, you know, how we run transportation, whatever it is.
40:39
SPEAKER_01: And we found that if you introduce technology, you can release enormous amounts of trap value.
40:44
SPEAKER_01: When Uber took on the taxi model, it released enormous amounts of trap value in a transportation system.
40:51
SPEAKER_01: There's clearly the opportunity to do that with healthcare.
40:54
SPEAKER_01: There's clearly the opportunity to do that with with education.
40:57
SPEAKER_01: Sal Khan and his team are kind of pushing at the edges of that kind of stuff right now.
41:01
SPEAKER_01: So the first thing I would do is say, and then with businesses, look, you say, well, I'm in the I'm in the aircraft business, great, but what would it take for you to deliver twice as many aircraft at a quarter of the price?
41:12
SPEAKER_01: What would that look like?
41:13
SPEAKER_01: Where's the trap value in your operating model?
41:15
SPEAKER_01: Where's the trap value in retail?
41:17
SPEAKER_01: Where's the trap value in advertising?
41:19
SPEAKER_01: Where's the trap value?
41:21
SPEAKER_01: And every every system has a certain amount of efficiency, but thermodynamics says it's not 100% efficient.
41:27
SPEAKER_01: So there's always trap value we can release.
41:29
SPEAKER_01: So the thing I would ask the anthropic team and the OpenAI team to say is which constituency within the customers first, we have many, many customers, how are you being in service and segment your market and be in service to them?
41:44
SPEAKER_01: So that your first job is I'm going to make that cohort of people better at doing what they do.
41:51
SPEAKER_01: And I've chosen them because I think they add value to life on this planet.
41:54
SPEAKER_01: They are life supporting in what they're doing.
41:57
SPEAKER_01: Even military, you could argue, you can make a case for saying doing the same thing.
42:01
SPEAKER_01: That's one.
42:02
SPEAKER_01: The second one then is your workforce.
42:05
SPEAKER_01: This notion that we're if AI could do all the work, we could just sit around and get a guaranteed income, very bad idea.
42:12
SPEAKER_01: People need to work.
42:13
SPEAKER_01: We need to engage with the world.
42:15
SPEAKER_01: So now the question is how can I create an AI-ready workforce?
42:18
SPEAKER_01: That I think, I mean the AI ready human, that that is exactly what management needs to be focused on.
42:24
SPEAKER_01: And frankly, they are trying to focus on it, but it's early days.
42:28
SPEAKER_01: But everybody kind of gets the idea.
42:31
SPEAKER_01: There's stuff that AI agents could do that really it's a waste of time for humans to do.
42:36
SPEAKER_01: There's a whole bunch of stuff where you want the human in the loop, you're and then there's things that humans do better than AI, and will continue to do better than AI.
42:43
SPEAKER_01: So how do you how do you organize your workforce?
42:45
SPEAKER_01: Then the third one is your investors.
42:48
SPEAKER_01: The scary thing is when people pursue the investors ahead of the customers and ahead of the their workforce, and boards of directors fall for this because boards of directors represent investors.
43:00
SPEAKER_01: That's their job.
43:01
SPEAKER_01: So so the tendency is for them to try to get management to prioritize investors over customers or over their workforce.
43:09
SPEAKER_01: Does not work, is not sustainable, terrible, and that's what I would try to do as a board member.
43:17
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I think that makes a ton of sense.
43:19
SPEAKER_04: Are these degrees of scale in a sense?
43:21
SPEAKER_04: Is there anything different in that advice because we're dealing with large AI companies that have gone from zero to where they are in a couple of years?
43:31
SPEAKER_04: Um is there anything different that is related to that, to the speed of that journey and the uncertainty of the future that would tweak what you're saying in any way?
43:41
SPEAKER_01: Yes, I mean the thing that would tweak it is right now the public markets and the government regulatory affairs are assuming that the a that the frontier based model, and by the way, NVIDIA is part of this.
44:00
SPEAKER_01: Is a sustainable uh that it's going to transition from trending applications to inferential applications in a way that will sustain the valuations of the existing players.
44:11
SPEAKER_01: That is a stupid idea.
44:13
SPEAKER_04: That's my instinct.
44:18
SPEAKER_01: But the point is, nobody is incentive to call to call the question, right?
44:25
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
44:25
SPEAKER_01: There's just massive incentives not to do this.
44:28
SPEAKER_01: And by the way, dot-com bubble, same thing.
44:31
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
44:32
SPEAKER_01: Remember, we had the Y2K bug, and everybody had to buy one more copy of ARP because of the Y2K bug?
44:37
SPEAKER_01: And it was like, come on, guys, can we see this?
44:40
SPEAKER_01: So, but so right now, that's why I think it's important that we not set policy too early.
44:46
SPEAKER_01: But but what you are asking for is not an ethical algorithm, you're asking for policy.
44:52
SPEAKER_04: Yes.
44:52
SPEAKER_01: Policy is, and by the way, I would say it's Salesforce talks a lot about values.
44:56
SPEAKER_01: And I think values is a good way to, it's a good intermediary between narrative and analytics.
45:02
SPEAKER_01: So if you look at the Salesforce values, number one is trust.
45:06
SPEAKER_01: And by the way, we're going to have a crisis of trust here in a minute.
45:10
SPEAKER_01: Number one is trust, number two is customer success.
45:13
SPEAKER_01: Number three is innovation.
45:15
SPEAKER_01: Number four is equality, and number five is sustainability.
45:19
SPEAKER_01: And they put them in exactly that order.
45:21
SPEAKER_01: Now you could play and say, well, I want to do a different order, that's fine.
45:24
SPEAKER_01: But the point is, I think if you articulate your values and you say to your workforce, we are going to act in accordance with our values in support of our customers in order to create returns for our investors, that's the right model.
45:41
SPEAKER_04: So we could talk about this literally for hours, but we're running uh close on time here, Jeff, and I want to touch on one last thing.
45:54
SPEAKER_04: The one thing that I find interesting about this technology and about social media as well is that it appears likely that the use of these technologies is changing how we think.
46:16
SPEAKER_04: So in a very real sense, it's changing who we are.
46:22
SPEAKER_04: We're biological entities.
46:24
SPEAKER_04: And we have to acknowledge that and understand that as we think about what we do and the decisions that we make.
46:31
SPEAKER_04: In this case, literally, there are people who are getting up and spending 10 or 12 hours a day talking to what has basically become an AI companion.
46:42
SPEAKER_04: And before that, and still to this day right now, they're ingesting enormous quantities of information from people that they have never met that are providing them with extreme validation of thoughts that are sort of deeply held within this.
46:57
SPEAKER_04: And as it's happening, it's increasing the valuation of the companies that are allowing it to happen.
47:02
SPEAKER_04: So what I want to what I want to understand is do you think that there is an obligation, and I use that word deliberately, do you think there is an obligation for organizations that make technology that kind of change who human beings are to consider that?
47:21
SPEAKER_04: And if there is, does that impact does that have any impact on how they should behave when they're servicing those various constituents that you were just talking about?
47:31
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
47:31
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
47:32
SPEAKER_01: I mean, this is should business be ethical?
47:34
SPEAKER_01: Because it's clear that if you choose a non-ethical approach, you can make a lot of money.
47:38
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
47:39
SPEAKER_01: We get that.
47:39
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think it goes back to this issue of trust.
47:42
SPEAKER_01: If you want to build a sustainable business, I think you have to build relationships of trust with the various constituencies that you engage with.
47:50
SPEAKER_01: I think that businesses that that manipulate and that operate unethically lose that support of the environment.
47:56
SPEAKER_01: So I think there's a natural selection process against people that violate trust.
48:01
SPEAKER_01: And again, people who whose customers are not successful, those companies tend to get, you know, over time get selected against.
48:09
SPEAKER_01: So I do think there's that there's a natural sort of balancing process that goes on.
48:13
SPEAKER_01: Is the technology changing us?
48:15
SPEAKER_01: Of course it's changing us.
48:16
SPEAKER_04: Jeff, thank you so much for joining us today.
48:18
SPEAKER_04: It's been an absolute pleasure.
48:19
SPEAKER_04: Really appreciate time.
48:21
SPEAKER_01: Okay, thank you.
48:23
SPEAKER_00: Humanity Working is produced by Matt Neal.
48:26
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48:32
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48:35
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