Latest / Connor with Honor: AI, Real Estate and Real Life / AI With Honor: The Fear Gap, And What The August Jobs Report Actually Said

Transcript

AI With Honor: The Fear Gap, And What The August Jobs Report Actually Said · Connor with Honor: AI, Real Estate and Real Life

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: On Wednesday morning, about 2,000 people walked off the job at the University of Sydney and stood out in the road.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Not over pay, and not mostly at least.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: They walked out over a sentence and a discussion paper that their own employer had written.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: Management had put down on paper a future where artificial intelligence gives students personalized learning support.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: And staff to student contract hours, contact hours go down.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: So 2,000 people read that sentence and understood exactly what it meant and stopped working.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, whatever you happen to be tuning in.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: This is the daily download brought to you by Santa Clara Artificial Intelligence.com, the practical AI portal for Santa Clita business owners.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: So hold one number for me today.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: I do this at every show, 23,000.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: I'll come back to it, and when I do, it's going to settle an argument with a lot of very loud people getting paid to keep unsettled.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: Now let's start on Tuesday, September 1st in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, at the G20 Innovation Ministerial.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the United States bought a framework and it's calling the Carolina Principles, pushed by the White House Science and Technology Advisor Michael Crastios.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure I messed that up.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: The agreement asks countries to reserve new regulation from genuinely novel problems.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: Handle AI sector by sector unless under rules that already exist, avoid creating new AI regulatory agencies, and work more closely with private industry.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said all 20 members signed on, China included.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm labeling that.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I've not seen a signed document.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Now here's the part the headlines skipped.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: It has no enforcement mechanism.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: It's a political committee, the same shape as the G20's AI principles back in 2019.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: And 30 days before that meeting on August 2nd, the European Union's AI Act hit its biggest deadline yet, with the obligation on high-risk systems actually became enforceable.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: So the two largest economic blocks on earth spent the same month walking in opposite directions.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: And only one of them brought handcuffs to the party.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: Now, do the thing, I do the thing the show, the show does every day.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: I ask who benefits.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: The California principles benefit the companies building the models because a new agency is the one thing on earth that can tell them no.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: European approach benefits Europe, which doesn't have a frontier lab worth protecting and does have a very large market, it can charge admission to.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: Now neither one of those is evil.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: Neither of those is about you.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: They're two business models wearing policy clothing.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: And your job is not to pick a jersey.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: Your job is to notice nobody in either room was asked what happens to a six-person shop in Santa Clarita.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: Back to Sydney because of the best story in AI all this week, and it barely got covered.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: So the National Tritari Education Union pulled about 2,000 members out for 24 hours on September 2nd.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: What they're asking for is not a ban.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: So read the actual demands.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: They want legally binding protections written into the enterprise agreement, a guarantee that AI will not be used to cut jobs, a guarantee that it will not replace human interaction and teaching.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the university's answer is on its own website, and I read it there.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: Their words, we agree using AI ethically requires a human-centered approach.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: And then this the use of AI is best governed through policies and frameworks that can be updated as needed to respond to this rapidly changing technology rather than set for the three-year term of the enterprise agreement.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: Now look at the shape of that argument.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: Not the words, but the actual shape.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: Management is saying the technology moves too fast to make promises about.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: The workers are saying that it's exactly what we want.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's why we want that promise in writing.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: And they're both right, which is what makes it a real fight instead of a headline.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: A contract clause written in 2026 about a technology that changed twice this summer will be wrong about something.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: And that's true.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: But here's what the union understands that the university's argument quietly walks past.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: A policy that management can update whenever it likes is not protection at all.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's a preference.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: The entire point of putting something in a contract is that it survives the moment the person who wrote it changes their mind.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: So this is not workers against robots.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: There's no robot anywhere in this story.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: This is a group of human beings who wrote down what they intend to do.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: And another group who read it and said, put your name on it.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: Now every AI fight for the next 10 years looks like this one, not a monster.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's a negotiation.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: Which brings me back to number, the number that I asked you to hold on to.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: So there are two industries selling you fear right now, and they're not the ones you think.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: The first one's the lab side.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's escaping, it's smarter than you.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's going to reshape everything.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: So get on the plan, buy the seat, hire the consultant.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: That fear sells subscription and raises rounds.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: The second is the pulpit and the podcast and the podium.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's coming for your children.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's the end of work.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's the end of truth.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's the end of meaning.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: So subscribe, donate, and vote for me.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: Now that fear sells attention and wins elections.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: Both need the exact same thing to survive.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: Distance between what you feel and what anyone can actually measure.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to call that the fear gap.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: So every profitable person in this conversation is standing inside of it, and frightened people need a savior.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: And saviors get paid.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: So let us measure it.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: Now, on Friday, September 4th, the Bureau of Labor Statistics published the August Employment Report, a government figure collected the same way every single month.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: And both camps have to live with it.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: The economy added 162,000 jobs in August.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: Unemployment held at 4.1%.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: Forecasters guessed around 53,000.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: So it came in roughly three times what the professionals expected.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: Food services added 59,000, local governments, education added 42,000, construction 22,000, manufacturing 16,000, healthcare 13,000, and exactly one sector lost jobs.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: Information, down 23,000.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's computing infrastructure providers, publishing, and broadcasting.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: There's your number.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: Now hold it up against what people say they feel.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: Mercer surveyed 12,000 workers, and 40% said they fear losing their job to AI.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: That's up 20 up from 28% in 2024.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: The Justice Research Group surveyed over 2,500 working class American voters.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: 73% were worried AI is going to cost jobs in this country.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: Gallup has nearly eight in 10 saying AI is going to slash jobs over the next decade.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: And those are surveys.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: They measure what people feel.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: The 23,000 is a count.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: It measures what happened.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: The distance between 4 and 10 people afraid and one sector down 23,000 in a month that added 162,000.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: That's a fear gap, and it's enormous.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: Now I have to be fair because it would be cheap to stop there and tell you the fear is fake.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: It's not fake.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: 23,000 is not zero.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: Information is priced precisely with a sector where these models are genuinely good.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: And it's the only sector that shrank publishing, broadcasting, writing, and editing and producing.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: That's not coincidence, and I'm not going to pretend it is.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: A survey measuring fear measures something real because a person afraid of losing a job spends differently.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: They negotiate differently and they vote differently.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: So whether or not the layoff ever shows up.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: There's research out last month saying the people who understand AI best are the most afraid of losing their jobs, and reporting this year that American workers get more disillusioned the more they use these tools.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: Put those two together and you get something neither camp will say out loud.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: The people closest to the technology, they're less impressed and more worried at the same time.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: Less impressed and more worried.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: That combination doesn't fit on either team sign, but and which is usually a sign it's true.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: So when a company puts out a memo saying we're reducing headcount because of AI, there are always three things that could be true.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: And usually more than one of them is.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: One, the machine actually does the real work now.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a real productivity event.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_00: Now, number two, the company needed to cut anyway.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: And artificial intelligence is, of course, the respectable word for it because the market punishes we overhired and rewards we are AI forward.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: Now, number three, they're cutting people to pay for AI.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: Now, because the compute bill is real and it comes out of somebody's payroll line, you'll almost never be told which one it actually is.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: The information sector losing$23,000 in a month is consistent with all three, and a press release is not evidence for the first one.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not handing you the other lazy line either, that productivity always creates more jobs than it destroys.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't always.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: And this is a story about the past being told you as if it were a law of physics.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: What's actually true is that productivity creates a choice.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: So when the same work takes half the time, an owner can pocket the savings or spin them on faster service or a new product or move people into the judgment work the machine cannot do.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: And that's four different companies and four different towns.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: And the difference between them is not the technology, it's what one person decided on a Tuesday.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: I love that phrase.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: Let me give you something good because I've been heavy on it for a while now.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: On September 3rd, Google DeepMind published Weather Next 3.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: The headline on their own blog calls it the most advanced and accurate global weather AI model.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: The specifics going around the press, higher resolution, hourly forecast, better rain prediction a day out, and the company's own numbers, and I could not check myself.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: Now, company claim, but the directions were 30 seconds of your morning.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: Better rain forecasting is not a chatbot.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's a farmer deciding whether to harvest.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's a roofer deciding whether to tear off tomorrow.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's somebody with a wedding on Saturday.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: And it's the part that disappears when we argue about whether the machine is coming for the jobs.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: Some of this is just good weather models, protein folding, reading a scan faster than a tired human being at two o'clock in the morning.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's also artificial intelligence, and it's not competing with anybody's paycheck at your local shop.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: The model releases kept coming this week too.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: Anthropic put out Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 on September 1st, and there was a new Frontier model out of OpenAI on the 3rd.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: None of that changed a single thing about how plumbing companies answer the phone.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: So what do you do with any of this on a Sunday in Santa Clarita?
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: Well, here's the audit I run.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: You can run it on yourself in about an hour.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: Walk your own business like a stranger.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: How does a lead come in?
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: What happens in that first 10 minutes?
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: Who touches it next?
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: Where does it sit and where does it go cold?
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: And then you find the leak.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: And be specific about what kind it is because this is where everybody wastes money.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: Most leaks do not need artificial intelligence at all.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: They need a switch or a lever.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: A switch is a thing that just turns on.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: The text that fires when a form gets submitted at nine at night.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: The voicemail that lands in an inbox a human being actually reads.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: A lever is a rule.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: Anybody who has not been answered in five minutes gets called.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: Every quote over a certain side gets a size gets a follow-up on day three.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: A switch and liver have no judgment in them.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's why they never surprise or embarrass you in front of a customer.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: An agent belongs in one place only, where judgment is genuinely required, and you don't get to put one there until you've written down your philosophy, your positioning, and the lines it's not allowed to cross.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: So in your words on paper, before it ever speaks to a human being, then you supervise it for 30 days like it's a new hire because, well, that's what it is.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: Now the fantasy where you call an agent into existence, describe your business to it in a paragraph, and then go fishing, is not here today.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: And it may never arrive in the shape people are picturing.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: Now, anybody telling you it definitely will, and anybody telling you it definitely will not, well, they're selling something.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's the last respectable position left in this conversation.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: One guard rail before I let you go.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: And boring, the boring one that actually costs people money.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: Watch what you type into the free tools, clients' names, addresses, medical details, even the paid for open-ended systems that you can get from OpenAI and Anthropic.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: Any of them.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: Be careful.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: The contract you're about to negotiate, don't do it.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: Your pricing, I wouldn't either.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: So the question is not whether the vendor is evil.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: The question is the one sentence is one sentence long.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: What's their retention policy?
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: How private is your interaction with them?
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: And you can find all of that in under a couple minutes.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't find it in two minutes, well, that answered it.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: And the other one, these models will tell you your idea is excellent.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: Nearly all of them, nearly every time.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a product decision somebody made because agreeable software gets used more.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: If it's pretty and shiny, we're there all the time.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a verdict on your business.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you want real opinion, tell it to argue the other side and make it bring evidence to you.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: And here's where I land, and this is why I'm not scared for the shop owners here in the Santa Clarita Valley.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: The advantage right now belongs to small.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: You can spot a leak on Tuesday and have it fixed by Thursday.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: The company with 4,000 employees needs 40 signatures to change a phone script.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: The gap has never been this wide and it will not stay this wide, so the windows open right now.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: And look at what those same surveys said people want.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: 84% supported free training for workers displaced by AI.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: 79% supported rules making companies share their productivity gains with their workers.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: And that's not a country that's given up.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: That's a country asking to be brought along.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: Whoever brings people along owns the next 10 years.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: And that can be a six-person shop on Soledad Canyon, just as easy as it can be a lab.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: So your one move this week is to take a piece of paper, write down the three questions your customers ask most, and then answer and the answer you would give them if you were standing right there in front of them.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: Not an agent, not a subscription, a piece of paper.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: Because that paper is the thing that you would have to write anyway before any tool on earth could speak for you.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: And nine times out of ten, by the time you finish, you find the actual fix was a switch.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: It takes about 20 minutes.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: And the machine didn't vote on any of this.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: Every decision that scares you has a human name attached to it.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: And the name is something you can negotiate with.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: AI for everyone, not just the wealthy.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Connor with honor.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: Be safe out there.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: I'll see you tomorrow.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: Santa Clarita, Artificial Intelligence.com.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: Let me know if I can help you.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: Be well.