Technology has always displaced jobs but created new ones. The speaker warns that generative AI poses real risks like deepfakes and threats to democracy, and uses Blockbuster's failure to show how short-term thinking can prevent necessary adaptation.
You know what's so fascinating about this, which is we've seen this before and it was blue collar manual labor that was the most threatened by advances in technology over the industrial revolution and beyond. And.
You know, if memory serves.
They have suffered more over the course of time, losing their jobs to automation, etc. Etc. And what's fascinating now is the knowledge economy.
Is now going through the same thing.
Don't worry, we'll get through it. Will some jobs be lost? 100%, absolutely. Will some jobs change? Yes. And as people and technologists are big into this, you know, people love to say, you know, 80% of jobs these days didn't exist 30 years ago. Okay, well, let's go 30 years from now. I bet you 80% of the jobs that exist didn't exist now. And so we're freaking out because we're only looking at it in the paradigm that we know. We don't know what the future is going to be. Will there be pain? Of course, there's always pain with new technology. There's going to be. Will there be opportunity? Absolutely. But the things that scare me about Gen AI are less about the workforce, believe it or not, in the workplace, it's more about like deep fakes and democracy. And that scares me way, way more. And we saw with the Internet, the Internet offered all these amazing things and we know the detriments that came with it. You know, the Facebook offered all these amazing things they never expected. No one ever, when they built Facebook, did they think that Facebook would be used to undermine a democracy. You know, I mean, it just didn't have occurred to anybody. They weren't prepared for it. Some of that stuff I think it would be. Behoove us to start thinking that through now, but I think that if you rage against the machine, you're going to be on the losing side because it's changing. But if you learn to embrace it and sort of treat it as a creative opportunity, you'll be on the cutting edge of it and it'll do less damage.
The sort of. The example.
Would be best Blockbuster. Back in the day, Blockbuster was the only significant national DVD rental chain in the country.
And there was this upstart little company called Netflix that was experimenting with a new business model called subscription. Remember, you can get the DVDs in the mail. And we knew streaming was coming. Just the technology wasn't there yet, but we knew what they were doing, which is they were laying the foundation for a model for streaming. Everybody knew that it was open. And the CEO of Blockbuster at the time went to the board and said, I think we need to look into the subscription model thing. The world is changing. There's a new technology called the interwebs, and I think we need to adapt. And the board would not let him change the business model because the company made 12% of its revenues from late fees.
Blockbuster doesn't exist anymore. And so it's that kind of protectionist status quo. We got to make the quarter, save the money. Now, with new technology, you might see a dip in that adjustment, you might have to experiment, but it's actually existential. And Netflix became the 800 pound gorilla. And blockbusters doesn't exist anymore simply because of that one tiny little. That one tiny little line item. I find that fascinating.
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