Extra: America's Anxiety Over Artificial Intelligence — The Fox News Rundown

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This is the Fox News Rundown Extra. Elisa Brady. Artificial intelligence and its rapid rise are giving a lot of people anxiety these days. It's already transforming the way we live and work. The concern is particularly high with white-collar workers and young generations wondering how it'll change the labor market in the coming decades and for parents who have to navigate the threats of deepfakes, sextortion schemes, and the influence chatbots may have over their children. We recently spoke with Jamie Metzl, a technology futurist and author of Superconvergence: How the Genetics, Biotech, and AI Revolutions Will Transform Our Lives, Work, and World. To discuss how the AI revolution is already impacting our lives, and in some cases, in invasive ways. Metzl talks about ways we can find balance between innovation and self-preservation as we enter this new era. Also delving into the good AI can do, especially when it comes to fighting cancer. We made some edits for time and thought you might like to hear the whole thing. Thanks for listening, and please subscribe to the weekday Fox News Rundown podcast. Now here's tech futurist Jamie Metzl on the Fox News Rundown Extra.

So I wanted to start out a little big picture. I know artificial intelligence has actually been years in the making. It feels like it exploded only recently, though, and the result has been, you know, very quickly there's been some best and worst-case examples of the way it can go horribly wrong or make our lives better. Why does it feel so sudden?

The history of artificial intelligence goes back many decades, if not longer, at least to the 1950s. But over recent years, particularly with the release of our large language models, particularly ChatGPT in 2022, both the capacity of our AI systems and the usefulness of the consumer interfaces have gotten a lot— excuse me, have gotten a lot better. And so now what we're seeing are the models are accelerating and they're just getting better, stronger, faster. And there's a lot of pressure on companies and individuals to figure out how to best use these technologies to do things, to become more productive, to accomplish certain tasks. And right now, we as a society are in the process of absorbing these new technologies and capabilities. And it's a very important story for not just our businesses, but for our societies and civilization. So if it feels like we're entering an AI age, it's because we're entering an AI age.

Yeah. And I guess the sudden part is really just all of a sudden it feels and is useful at the consumer level on a day-to-day basis. One of the most frequent AI warnings, though, is that it will eliminate jobs, especially white-collar jobs. Some of the big companies have been making some moves lately. So far, not all of the layoffs are blamed on technology. Are we about to see a lot more jobs lost, though?

AI will transform most jobs. There certainly will be some, some jobs that will be lost. There certainly will be some new jobs that will be gained, and most every job will be changed. And that's the same with every past technology. The issue here is that this revolution is unfolding very, very quickly. And so, as always in this kind of situation, there will be disruptions. And what And one of the benefits of living in a society like America, where we have a relatively open economic capitalist system, is that we can have those kinds of adaptations. You can just look at the number of people now who are working in one way or another in social media, whether as influencers or technologists or working with social media companies or selling things through social media. So this is a massive industry that didn't exist that long ago. And the challenge is when we're in a destructive phase, the people who are losing opportunities are very well aware of the opportunities that they're lost. If you're one of the people at Amazon or UPS who were recently fired, regardless of whether that's entirely connected to AI or only partly connected to AI, that loss to you is acute. But you, maybe you or somebody else don't have a way of seeing what may be just around the corner of new opportunities or even new entire industries that will emerge as a result of these transformations.

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Should we be more concerned though about a disconnect between what companies are doing, these moves they're making, and maybe the lack of awareness in the general public? Because it seems like there's the potential for a real economic shock. To happen?

We should be concerned. And that's true for every technology, that change happens quickly. And even industrialization happened relatively quickly where most people were farmers in a relatively short number of decades. The way that we'd been societally organized for many hundreds, if not thousands of years, began to shift. So we absolutely— we collectively need to be engaging with people, educating people, investing in job retraining, helping people skill up. It's not my view that the future belongs to AI at all. As a matter of fact, I tell everyone who will listen to me that AGI is BS— artificial general intelligence. When people say that artificial intelligence will be able to do everything that humans can do, it's preposterous. Humans, we've evolved for 3.8 billion years. We have all of these amazing skills and capabilities and even magical powers. And so AI is not going to be doing everything that humans do. But it's going— AIs and other technological systems are going to be doing some pretty incredible things. They'll be able to do some things that we're currently doing far better than we are. And so the key for at the industry level, at the individual level, is to think about what are the things that humans will be doing much better than our machines and to really invest and over-index on those, on those things.

So that sounds like good advice for as a society, but also for individuals if they're wondering, you know, what can I do to be better prepared for whatever is coming next?

Yeah, I lecture on this to all kinds of corporations and industry associations, and when I am asked that exact question, what I say is, Yes, there will be some jobs that will go away. There will be some new jobs that now we maybe can't imagine that will be created. But for most jobs, the way to think about it is to say, well, whatever my job is, I can break it down into 10 essential subtasks. And for each one of those subtasks, 10 years from now, do I think that subtask will be more likely carried out by a machine, a human, or some kind of mix. If it's a machine task, you should be thinking about how can I have a machine start doing that task? Because there's no sense for a human to be functioning as a second-rate machine. If it's a human task, the question is, how can I invest in doing that human task as well as possible so I can be the best possible human? And if it's a hybrid task, to really do a lot of thinking and even experimenting on what's the best human-machine interface? What's the best form of collaboration to do that, that subtask? So that's why every job is going to change and every person doing any job now needs to be thinking about how to prepare for that future.

On the dark side of things, if you will.

Yes.

The pitfalls of some of this new technology. There are parents right now suing tech companies over chatbot interactions they blame for their teens' suicides. When it comes to the risks of AI, is it a case of the more advanced it gets, the more dangerous it gets?

It depends. These technologies don't come with their own built-in value systems. It's up to us to infuse our best values into the— how these technologies are applied and released. For broadcast media, we have governance, we have regulations that in many that significantly influence what is and isn't possible. I mean, we're having this conversation that will, I know, be shared on radio. There's a reason why we have regulations in radio and television, not least because the earlier generations of Americans saw what happened in Nazi Germany when radio was abused to whip everybody into a genocide frenzy. We have so far made a decision for these newer technologies to have an extremely light touch. And that's why in our social media, it's really a wild west. And we have social media algorithms that are essentially pitting Americans against each other and causing a lot of destruction. So if we don't have any kind of governance systems and any kind of regulation, and we just tell these AI companies do whatever you want, abuse people's data however you want, we're going to get certainly suboptimal and bad outcomes. And you can see it now when Grok came out on its home page of Grok, where all these, you know, young kids went, you could— they just had these pictures of people and you could just press one button from the home page, spicy. And just turn to get pornographic videos on the home page available to every high school boy in America. So obviously these kids are going to go and, and do that. So even if we have effective governance and regulation, every technology can be abused. Every technology in history has been abused in, in one way or another. But I'm certainly a techno optimist. I believe that the positive sides of this story, as I write about in my new book, Super Convergence, the ability to transform for the better healthcare and agriculture and advanced materials and energy, data storage, so many, so many different areas. It's really, really exciting. And the downsides— I was deeply involved in issues of the CRISPR babies born in China in 2018 and 2019, which was an abuse of these technologies. I was deeply involved in the issue of COVID-19 origins, which I believe stems from a research accident in Wuhan, again, connected to these, these technologies. So the name of the game for all of us is how do we optimize the stuff that we want and decrease the odds of the things that we, that we don't want. So the answer to your question is that it's not embedded in the technologies themselves. The answer of will, will we use these technologies wisely, um, has to be a question that we ask ourselves every day. And then to say, well, how are we building and trying to structure this ecosystem so it leads towards the more desirable outcomes.

Yeah, the humans still need to control our machines, basically.

Yeah, I mean, whether we can completely control or partly control, we need to guide how they're applied. We need to set parameters for what is and isn't permissible. We need to articulate what are the goals that we are seeking to achieve. Because again, if we just think that this technology will govern itself or there's some inherent value system that's just embedded in the technology itself, that's going to lead to some very bad outcomes.

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Let's talk about the potentially sweeping benefits on the healthcare side for a minute. Cancer research just springs to mind.

Yes.

I mean, can AI come up with a cure for cancer? And if it— does come up with something like that, can we trust it? Is it a trust but verify? Because right now, if you Google something and you get an AI answer, it's not always right.

Right. So the future of technology-assisted healthcare is extremely exciting. I write about that at great length in Superconvergence. But the AI and other technologies are going to help us transition from our world of generalized healthcare based on population averages to our newer world of precision or personalized healthcare based on a much deeper understanding of who everybody, everybody is on a molecular level, which we'll do through whole genome sequencing and collecting other biological data from lots and lots of people. And we have these massive datasets of high-quality data and we have more computing power and stronger algorithms. We're going to put those things together and we'll be able to understand complex patterns in human in biology and frankly in all of biology. And that's going to transition our healthcare systems. I talked about generalized to precision. And the next step is from precision to predictive and preventive. And that's going to be great. And at the forefront of this will be oncology because we are so concerned with cancer. And cancer is a huge problem. We're never going to solve cancer completely. Because cancer isn't any one thing. There are just many, many different things that are within cancer. But I have a major piece coming out in the December issue of AARP Magazine, which is on the future of precision oncology and describing how we are already in the field of oncology using the tools of AI, of genome sequencing, and other capabilities to develop new ways of precisely targeting cancer cells, unlike chemotherapy, which is kind of big and broad. And that's why people going, going through particularly intravenous chemotherapy have a lot of very negative side effects. This is going specifically after cancers by finding vulnerabilities in a person's individualized cancer cells. And so that's really exciting. The incredible innovations in cancer immunotherapy called CAR-T therapy, incredible innovations in targeted agent cancer, cancer therapy. So I think we're going to see continuous progress. And that's the challenge here, because the exciting stuff is really exciting and the scary stuff is really scary. So the name of the game is not how do we stop these technologies? That would be self-defeating. The name of the game is how do we increase the odds that these technologies will be used in support of things that we want and not used to bring things that we don't want.

A question about the amount of data and the amount of computing power, because when you talk about all of the personalized data that will be needed for some of these breakthroughs, that probably will raise privacy concerns for some people. And then when it comes to all that computing power, I mean, just building the plants for all the— and producing the energy that's needed for that, the power that's needed for that has been controversial in some areas. Right.

Yeah. So for sure, there are and will be privacy concerns because to get these systems to interact with us, they're going to need to know more and more about who we are. That's why societally we need strong privacy protections that can actually help people. Because left to their own devices, these corporations will actively seek to harvest the most intimate data from everybody as they are, as they're doing now. So privacy is certainly something that's extremely important. And it's not— privacy protections aren't going to happen on their own. We're going to have to as a society, as a government, come together and say, how do we want people to be protected? That doesn't mean 100% protection, because part of the deal in all of these systems is we need to share some information about ourselves so that there can be training data to help these systems work better. And whether those systems are in healthcare or self-driving cars or whatever. So it's not that Privacy is the only story, but it needs to be one piece of the bigger story.

And what about those big power plants that are being built? Is that— I mean, are they going to— are they just going to continue to spring up everywhere? What if they can't build enough to run the things they want to know?

Definitely, we're going to need massive amounts of energy to power the AI revolution. But we're also going to need to learn to run these systems in a far more efficient manner. DNA is a million times denser than silicon. And unlike the— our current information, digital information that's stored on magnetic tapes in data centers that last around 30 to 50 years, DNA can store data reliably in the right under the right conditions for 2 to 5 million years. So we know conceptually there are already architectures for, like our brains, for processing information much more efficiently than our computerized systems. So it will simply not be sustainable to fully scale up our AI infrastructures as they exist today because If we do that, we're just going to have to live in a world entirely covered in data centers. So we're not going to do that. And that's why the race is on for making all of these processes more efficient, to have smaller and more focused algorithms like Deepseek in China, to find new types of computer chips that are more effective and than the ones that we have today. So that, that, that is the race. But certainly we're going to need a lot more energy regardless, because even if we do all the things that we're doing more efficiently, our use of these technologies is going to continue to grow exponentially.

One more thing on the sort of the regulation side and the, and the containment side, if you will. Congress is working on some proposals now, for instance, to put more guardrails on things like ChatGPT when it comes to minors. In Massachusetts, though, there's a proposal to put limits on self-checkout kiosks at the grocery store, for instance, and to mandate that there be some human monitors. Can you see a future where maybe legislators take more actions like that to try to protect human jobs?

Oh, I do. And my view is we should protect human jobs where humans doing those jobs provides a societal benefit. I think everybody is familiar. You know, I had an old, an old job many years ago where there was a union member. It was a union position for the guy who was running the film projector. And then the digital revolution happened. And there was no longer a film projector. And so because it was a union job, that guy just sat in the room and pressed play. Like, that was his job. And it didn't really make sense to me because there are— humans are so creative. There are so many different things that we can do, and we shouldn't protect human jobs just because humans are doing them. We should protect human jobs because it makes sense for humans to do that particular job. But having said that, you know, it's anybody who loses their job, including this, this person who was the film projection specialist. It sucks for that person. And that's why we're seeing our government and all governments, frankly, at all levels trying to protect existing jobs. And if we do that too much, our societies and our economies become sclerotic. And that's certainly what we've seen in places like Europe, in India, other, other places where so much emphasis goes on maintaining the current level of jobs that there can't be enough impetus for creating these new industries of the future. And definitely our governments must play a role in making these kinds of transitions more humane. But if our government sees its job as preventing these kinds of transitions from happening, very, very quickly, that's going to show up in and have very negative implications for America's economic growth.

I think it might be very reassuring to people to hear you sounding so optimistic. Are you hoping that more people sort of fall to the side of optimism rather than fear about the downsides of the new technology?

You know, I think it's a balance. There's a reason why evolution has preserved the very human emotion of anxiety, because sometimes we're afraid of things and that fear gets us to act. And if it's a real fear that we're going to be harmed, maybe that action is to try to get appropriate legislation to protect us. If it's fear that my job is going to change, maybe that is a motivation to say, all right, what can I start doing differently now? How can I start thinking a little bit differently about my own future or the future of my industry? I'm certainly very optimistic about what's going to be possible. But there are always trade-offs with every technological revolution. There are trade-offs, and that certainly will be the case here.

Jamie Metzl, technology futurist, and your new book is Super Convergence: How the Genetics, Biotech, and AI Revolutions Will Transform Our Lives, Work, and World. Thank you so much for your time.

My great pleasure.

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