EP 281: Elon Musk says AI will make jobs 'optional' – Crazy or correct?

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Elon Musk just said that AI is going to make human jobs optional. That got me thinking, is this just another crazy hot take from Elon Musk or is there a bit of truth to what he said? So we're going to be going over that today and more on Everyday AI. What's going on, y'? All? My name is Jordan. I'm the host and Everyday AI, it's for you. We are your daily guide to understanding and leveraging generative AI to grow your company and to grow your career. So if you're new here, thank you for joining us. We do this literally every single weekday, you know, bringing you insights from expert guests, sometimes just myself on what's going on in the world of AI. So I'm excited to, you know, talk about this today. Elon Musk, I think, grabbed a lot of attention and a lot of headlines when he said that, hey, human jobs are going to be optional in the future because AI is going to be so good. So we're going to talk about that and also look at, you know, Elon Musk's kind of track record when it comes to these type of statements. But before we do that, we're going to start as we do every day, by going over the AI news. So if you are joining us maybe for the first time or if you haven't already, make sure to go to your everydayai.com Sign up for our free daily newsletter. There's always that link in the show notes as well. There's so much going on in AI news, not just today, but every day. So make sure if you haven't already, to check out the newsletter for that. All right, so here's what we have going on in the world of AI news. Well, speaking of Elon Musk and his companies, so Xai has raised $6 billion in funding. So XAI is founded by Elon Musk and it secured a massive $6 billion in funding according to reports, to propel its various AI projects forward. Projects forward. So the funding will be used to bring xai's first product to market, enhance their infrastructure and advance future technologies. So grok, which is xai's newest chatbot, the new version was just released a couple of weeks ago, is positioned as a more cutting edge vers OpenAI's chat GPT accessible through an X premium subscription. Yes, X, I still call it Twitter but you know, I'm reading the news here, so we're going to call it X. So some key investors in this six billion dollar round include Anderson Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and Saudi Arabia Prince Al Waleed Bin Talal probably got that name wrong. But Hardware costs for AI development are significant with Nvidia's upcoming Blackwell B200AI graphics card priced between 30,000 to $40,000 a piece. Speaking of chips, Xai plans to deploy 100,000, yes, 100,000 of Nvidia's H100 chips to power not just its upgraded version of Grok, but to hope what it or to launch what it hopes is a giga computer factory, more or less. All right, so Mosque is obviously a funding member of OpenAI, a founding member of OpenAI and is currently in a legal battle with the company alleging a deviation from its original mission after investing a couple million dollars in it. All right, next in AI news, a new report is detailing Apple's upcoming AI features codenamed Project Gray Matter. So according to reports from Bloomberg, we have some new details on what Apple is set to introduce at its upcoming WWDC conference June10. So about just less than two weeks away now. So these new AI features are obviously focusing on practical tools for everyday use. So this kind of internal code name, Project Gray Matter is to integrate AI tools into core apps like Safari, like photos, like notes, so kind of in Apple's everyday apps, quote unquote. So some of these new AI capabilities include voice memo transcription, AI powered photo retouching and enhanced search functions. Also Siri will presumably be getting upgrades with more natural interactions and generative AI technologies. So iOS 18 and Mac OS 15 are set to include some of these updates. And of course, you know, presumably according to previous reporting, this will be all done through Apple officially announcing a partnership with OpenAI, which again is not official, but that's where all current reporting is pointing to. So pretty, pretty significant updates here. And now we are less than two weeks away and you know, we've talked about this before. Apple is the last to the AI party. A lot of these features that we just talked about there have already been available in different, you know, Google Android smartphones for nearly a year now. So Apple obviously late to the party, so we'll see if they're the coolest kid there. Speaking of OpenAI and our last piece of AI news for the day, OpenAI has announced it is training its next model. Yes, some pretty, pretty breaking news here. You know, I think less than, less than a couple hours old. So OpenAI has just announced that they've officially started training their next frontier model. So OpenAI just said on its website they are anticipating that the resulting system will enhance their capabilities on the path to AGI or Artificial General Intelligence. OpenAI aims to develop and release models that excel in both industry leading capabilities and safety. OpenAI to do this or and as, as part of doing this, OpenAI has formed a Safety and Security Committee to make critical decisions and recommendations regarding their projects and operations. That committee is composed of leaders and different experts, including its CEO Sam Altman, and they hope to evaluate and improve OpenAI's processes and safeguards within 90 days and publicly share adopted recommendations. So that does put them kind of on the path of what, you know, Sam Altman had alluded to previously that they will be, you know, releasing new models by the year end. So you might be saying, okay, didn't they already announce a new model? Yes, they did. So they did just announce GPT4O about, about two weeks ago now. However, talked about this on the show. I don't believe that is going to be their last model that they release. I do believe that ChatGPT plus paid subscribers will be getting access to a newer, more improved model before the end of the year. All right, so that's it for the AI news. So make sure to go to your everydayai.com for more. So let's just get straight to it. Elon Musk actually said this. Yes, he actually said that AI will make jobs optional. And I think a lot of people, when they think of Elon Musk and they think of AI, they think of him as a leading voice, right? And it is, it is hot Take Tuesday. So I'm gonna, well before I go there, I'm gonna just skip to the end. Okay. So you don't have to listen for another 30 minutes if you don't want to. So Elon Musk was a featured guest speaker at VIVA Technologies Conference, I believe this was on Friday. And obviously he grabbed a lot of headlines. So he said a lot of things. He even, you know, joked around that he was an alien. You know, all the, you know, Elon Musk is always kind of saying off the wall comments, but the thing that, you know, immediately grabbed headlines was him saying that human jobs are going to be optional. Right. So we're going to break this down and we're going to go over a little bit of a track record. But there's the end. I'm not going to, you know, make you, make you wait to kind of Hear what he said. But now we're going to break down if that is a little crazy or if it might be correct. All right. And we're going to play a couple of clips both from Elon Musk and some from some others on this topic. And I think it's an important topic to explore. Right. We've heard that 2024 is kind of the year of generative AI implementation. And as companies start to see and record and observe positive return on their investment in AI, you know, there's, there's, it's, it's natural to start to think about the future of work. What does work mean? You know, that's obviously a much larger conversation than we can cover in one kind of kind of show here on everyday AI. But I think it's important think about this and you know, when someone like Elon Musk, yes, as off the wall as sometimes his comments are when he says something like this, it, I don't think it's, it's an off the cuff statement. I think it's obviously something that, you know, he's probably thought a lot about. He probably having a lot of these conversations, you know, and whether regardless of what your, your viewpoint is on Elon Musk, you know, he is probably one of dozen or so, you know, people who have the most authority in this area. Right. So he was original co founder of OpenAI. He obviously has his company XAI. We just talked about it, 6 billion dollar raise that they just completed. He has a large language model that's not good at all in Grok. Sorry, just throwing that out there, you know. But you know, obviously he has all these other companies. He has, he has Tesla, he has SpaceX, they're working on a humanoid robot. So he's I think in a, in a very unique position, as off the wall as he is to offer insights on this that maybe a lot of us don't, don't have and maybe that we can't understand his viewpoint. So let's, but let's though, hey, it is, it is hot take Tuesday. But I think in the end this one might be more correct than crazy. Although I don't agree because how can you make jobs optional? And I'm going to dig into that here in a second. I don't totally agree but I have to say there's probably a little more truth in that statement than crazy. Right? So this is hot take Tuesday. Yes, we are doing this live. So I want to hear from you, I want to hear from our audience. Let me know because I Got, I got some hot takes on this, right? So let me know. Drop a, drop a, maybe one flame emoji, three flame emojis. How hot should I, should I come in here? Because I do have hot takes. Yeah. Dr. Dr. Scott Dell saying Elon grabbing headlines. Surprise, surprise. All humor has an element of truth, as do Elon's musings. Yeah, so we're gonna, we're gonna jump into that today. But yeah, I wanna, I wanna hear from our audience. You know, first of all, what is your take? So Dr. Scott just, just kind of told us his take on what Elon said. Is that even possible? Right. Harold, you know, our first commenter of the day. So shout out to Harold Said, you know, saying good morning but also saying, can't wait to find out how my job is going to be optional. Lol. Yeah, I agree. But I do think, you know, when we talk about, you know, hundreds of millions of jobs, especially here in the US is there going to be meaning behind them in a couple of years as these AI systems get smarter and more capable? Are we going to need every single job? Are all humans going to need to work? Yes, we need to work. And you know, I think that it's problematic that, you know, a lot of the future of our society right now is, is being determined or steered by people like Elon Musk, by people like Sam Altman, by people like Mark Zuckerberg. Yes, they, they are definitely, you know, some of the most capable minds maybe that humanity has ever seen, but they also have some wild thoughts. Right. And I think that's also problematic when we kind of have, you know, the future of our society largely being impacted by people who are mega wealthy and who are, you know, billionaires with, with crazy ideas. And unfortunately, fortunately or unfortunately, their crazy ideas are shaping our society, especially here in the U.S. right. Like if I would have said to you, you know, three years ago that we would be at the position we are today where companies are literally handing over their entire operations to artificial intelligence. You would probably tell me I'm crazy, but that's not, that's, that's the world that we're living in right now. So hey, couple, couple of y' all said said, bring the heat here. So Brian and Rolando and Woozy Said said, bring it. Danielle did as well. All right, so I will sometimes, you know, sometimes I don't want to go full hot take, even though it's hot. Take Tuesday. But I guess we'll do it today. So let's, let's first go up some Some background. Right. Because yes, we all know that Elon Musk is a polarizing figure, but I think it's, you know, especially when he says statements like this, that saying, you know, jobs in the future will be optional. Like, hey, you don't, you don't have to work if you need to because, you know, AI and robots will be much better than humans at work. So work is going to be optional. Our jobs are going to be optional. So I think it's important, you know, yes. That we dissect that statement a little bit more and we're going to play some of his comments here. But I think it's also important to look at his track record. Right. Because I think some people take what in Elon Musk? Or, you know, you can swap in the name of who you want, you know, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Zuckerberg. Right. But today we're talking about Elon Musk. Some people just think of whatever Elon Musk says as truth. Some people think that whatever he says is crazy and you shouldn't pay attention to it. So I wanted to first kind of look at his track record and talk about, okay, is he a genius or is he simply just throwing a bunch of spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks? It's probably somewhere in between. Right. I'm, I'm one to try to not speak in absolutes, but I don't think that he's a, a genius by, by any means personally. Right. But I also don't think that he's completely just throwing random ideas and seeing what sticks. Although it might seem like that sometimes. So let's break down his track record before we break down his statement even further. There's no denying that Elon Musk, even though he didn't start Tesla from scratch, there's no denying that he has turned Tesla from a relatively unknown into not just a US superpower, but a global superpower. All right, so at about two years ago, two and a half years ago, Tesla was one of the five most valuable companies in the United States by market cap. It still usually is a top 10 company, you know, with a. At that point, I believe they were the fifth most valuable company in terms of market cap. So he did take Tesla from a relatively unknown company a decade ago to now a household name to a company that is undoubtedly shaping the future of how we live our lives. Right. Not just Tesla, but I think that there's a lot of AI systems that Tesla is working with. You know, they have their humanoid robot, SpaceX, etc, so Elon Musk through Tesla and his other companies definitely have a huge impact on how we all live and work, whether we, you want to think about it or not. So just looking at Tesla as an example, you have to give him his credit, right? Even if it was his, his wild ideas on the future of, of auto, a lot of it came True, right? 10 years ago there weren't a lot of players in the, in, in the ev, in the electric vehicle space, there weren't a lot of players working on, you know, self, self driving or full self driving capabilities, autonomous vehicles. Now there are. Now every single large automaker in the US is working on this, right? Every single one. Would we be there if it wasn't For Elon Musk 10 years ago pitching this crazy idea? I don't know, but probably not, right? So he has kind of shaped that fact that, that, that sector of our lives, right? Travel, pretty big piece, right? And I think a lot of times people only think about Tesla as a success story, but you gotta look at the other side too, right? You gotta look at the other side because as an example, technically, Tesla has had one of the biggest losses of a US company ever. All right, so yeah, if you're not listening to this on the podcast, have this up here on, on my screen for our live stream viewers. So Tesla's stock price was 400 a share in 2021. And now, you know, at least the market's gonna open here in a couple minutes. But it was $179 I believe on Friday, right? So when you look at a market cap loss, that is a 700 plus billion dollar loss in market cap, one of the biggest and quickest losses for a US company ever, right? So again, you have to take everything you see with a grain of salt and you have to look at the facts behind this because I think people only look at Tesla as this resounding success story, which yes, partially it is. But look, over the past two plus years, right, there hasn't been a single company in the US that has lost as much market cap as Tesla, right? Is that partially a victim of its own kind of quote unquote, overnight success? You know, it wasn't overnight, but you know, obviously Tesla, you know, came from essentially obscurity and you know, kind of blew up over the course of two to three years at least when it comes to its stock price. So was a lot of it, you know, kind of investor sentiment was a lot of that, you know, their initial climb to being the fifth highest company rated by market cap. Was a lot of that officially or initially because of people's kind of belief in, in Musk's vision of the future? Sure. But you can't take away the fact that that's one of the largest single losses the US Company has ever gone through. Another example, Twitter, or X whatever you want to call it now, I guess, I don't know, am I the only one that struggles to call it X? Like how are you supposed to say when you tweet something, you X something? Sounds weird, but I guess, you know, Twitter did or X just did officially swap over the domain name about a week ago. So I should probably start calling it X. However, you have to look at Twitter's valuation decline. So you know, Elon Musk famously purchased Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022. And as of, you know, this is reporting, but as of January 2024, some of the most recent reporting, it's estimated that the value of the company has dropped 72% and it's now estimated to be worth $12.5 billion. So pretty huge drop there, right? Again, we're just looking at Elon's track record here, right? So when we are talking about and looking at the validity behind a statement such as, you know, hey, jobs are going to be optional in the future, you got to look at his track record, right? And then you have some failed promises from Tesla and SpaceX, right? So he promised, you know, a while ago, promised 1 million Tesla robo taxis by 2020, that was obviously not achieved. Promised a 10 kilometer hyperloop tunnel by 2020, that was not achieved. Promised full self driving Teslas by 2017. Then he kept changing the date, obviously that was still not available, you know, until now. Essentially right now we're finally seeing some of those fully self driving capabilities being rolled out. So a lot of promises, a lot of overhype under delivered. So could this statement be the same right, when he's saying AI is going to be so good and robots are going to be so good that human jobs are going to be optional. Well, let's take a look at even his own AI system, Grok. It's off to a shaky start. So originally, right, originally Grok was on its own premium tier. You had to pay just to get access to Grok, nothing else. And then eventually the company decided, okay, well actually if you're just on our, you know, paid tier of Twitter platform, you know, you can get the Grok, you know, you don't have to pay an extra fee. And also like we talked about at the top of the show, some, some recent news. Not only do you have this XAI company, which Grok is, you know, its main, you know, customer facing product right now, you know, they just did raise six billion dollars and they're going to be using a hundred thousand Nvidia H100 GPUs for training the next kind of Grok version three. So it's off. Even his own AI system is off to a pretty shaky start. It's not that great. You know, I had some, some hot takes back in December kind of forecasting 2024 and one of mine is, you know, GROK is going to be an AI system that no one cares about, no one uses. And I'd say that was pretty much true. I don't really know anyone that uses Grok, but maybe we will in the future, you know, if this kind of vision of XAI comes true from Elon Musk where he's, you know, raised $6 billion and he wants to just kind of build this gigafactory of compute. All right, so now let's get to some of Elon Musk's actual comments and back to the original kind of premise of this episode where he says that AI will make jobs optional. And if it's more crazy or correct. So again, this was from the Viva Tech conference, I believe this. He spoke on Friday. So just, just a couple, couple hours, couple hours you know, into this. So let's go ahead and take a listen to what Elon Musk said. So, uh, hopefully, uh, live stream audience. I never, I, I feel I'm not very good at this. So let me know if you can hear this. So let's listen to some of the comments here from Elon Musk at this conference. So let's go ahead and take a listen.

In a benign scenario, in a benign scenario, we probably none of us will have a job.

There will be.

But in that benign scenario there will be universal high income, not universal basic income, universal high income. There will be no shortage of goods or services. And I think the benign scenario is the most likely scenario. Probably, I don't know, 80% likely to ask, in my opinion.

All right, 80%. 80. Y' all hear that? He said it's 80% likely in his opinion that our jobs are going to be optional. Right. And I'm kind of smiling and chuckling at this because, you know, part of it just seems so far fetched and so unlikely. But Elon Musk was so confident that he put a number on it. He said he is 80% sure that AI, that jobs are going to be optional in the future because of AI, because of how good AI will be and how good, you know, these AI systems will be. So yeah, everyone, I'm chuckling because it does seem so far fetched, but there has to be some piece of truth in there, right? Again, I asked you all to imagine, you know, if, if I would have told you where we're at today. Three years ago, right before anyone had heard of chat gbt, but now you have the largest companies in the entire world going all in on AI. Literally the largest companies, right? We talk about them a lot here on the everyday AI show the Magnificent Seven. So, you know, we're talking about, we're talking about Amazon, we're talking about Meta, we're talking about Microsoft, we're talking about Google, we're talking about Tesla, right? All of these companies are investing tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars or more into AI and at the same time they're laying off humans, right? So, yes, although it is easy to chuckle than to say, oh, that's funny, you know, good luck with that one, tech billionaire. But is there a little bit of truth to that? All right, we're gonna, we're gonna keep, keep going here. I want to listen to one more part, one more part of this, of this interview here. So let's just go ahead and listen to, to this piece here. Again, this is Elon Musk speaking at the VIVA conference. Here's another part of his statements.

I do think that long term, in a benign scenario, any job that somebody does will be optional. Like if you, if you, if you want to do a job as kind of like a hobby, you can do a job, but, but Otherwise, the, the AI and the robots will provide any goods and services that you want.

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We'll help you stop running in those AI circles and help get your team ahead and build a straight path to ROI on gen. Jobs as a hobby. Interesting. You know, and he talked about something that a lot of these, you know, tech billionaires are talking about. Whether it's, you know, universal basic income or you know, what Elon Musk said there is universe universal high income. So I think we have to talk about that as well. So you know, universal high income is essentially, you know, universal basic income. That's hey, a little more. Right? It's not basic, it's, it's high income. So I, I am not a, a UBI expert or a UHI expert, but I don't know. I, I also find that whole concept concerning, right, of when AI systems are so good that we have to talk about ubi, we have to talk about uhi, right? And you know, obviously Sam Altman has been talking about this for years, but then you have to think if the people building the AI systems of the future, right? So the Zuckerbergs, the Sam Altmans, the Elon Musk, if they are heavily leaning into whether it's universal basic income, universal high income, is there merit there? It sounds wild, right? Essentially, you know, everyone getting a piece in income because there's going to be so few jobs available for humans or so much like, so fewer jobs available for humans because, you know, AI and humanoid robots are getting better and better and more capable, right? And again, I'm not trying to tiptoe down this meandering path of a dystopian future. And you know, what happens when we have artificial general intelligence or artificial, you know, super intelligence, right? And what happens when you know, these AI systems can self heal and self improve and build themselves and if they don't need us anymore? And again, it does sound wild, right? It sounds Terminator, it sounds not possible. But you have to think, will something like this be possible? Is this just a crazy, crazy musing from Elon Musk to grab headlines to make sure people are talking about xai to make sure people are talking about Grok. Partially right. But again, 10 years ago if you would have heard Elon Musk talk about the future of, of driving, maybe you would have scoffed and said, ah, there's no way we're gonna see, you know, fully self driving cars in 10 years. But here we are, we're about there, right? Those capabilities are starting to roll out in Tesla and other vehicles. Not fully autonomous, but pretty close. Pretty close, right? So is this going to be one of those points where we look back in 3 years, 5 years, 10 years at Elon Musk's comments, and we're either going to scoff and say how wrong he was, or we're going to say, wow, who would have thought, who would have thought that off the wall statement at the time had some truth to it? All right? And so I wanted to balance this out here. I wanted to balance this out. All right, so here is a little bit more. So speaking of purpose, right? So Elon Musk there talking about kind of what, what will be the purpose and you know, in his interview, and we'll link that in our newsletter today, so make sure if you haven't, go to your everydayai.com to subscribe to that newsletter. But he kind of talked about maybe our purpose as humans will just be adding value to AI systems. Crazy concept, but you have to think about purpose as AI systems become more and more capable, right? And you know, people are saying now that we'll look back at the AI of today and laugh at how bad it is in a couple of years, right? Which you could say the same thing about. Look at GPT4O or look at, you know, Google Gemini, or look at Claude, you know, Claude 3 opus, as an example, and look at the original models and look at how much better they are now than they were when they kind of first came out, right? If you look at GPT4O and maybe look at GPT3, you know, our team's been using GPT3, the GPT3 technology, since it came out in late 2020. So, you know, two years before kind of the world was introduced and the capabilities that GPT4O has now. And we've seen these, these new announcements from OpenAI kind of with their, we call it Live Omni, or if you want to call it her, or whatever you want to call it, but where essentially an AI can see what's going on live, right? We've shared these demos both from OpenAI and Google's Project Astra. But essentially they do the same thing, right? Where on your smartphone they can see in real time, they can process in real time. So you can show it, you know, a math problem on the board and you can work your way through it and ask it questions, how do I solve this problem? Right? Could probably just solve it for you. Or you could, you know, show it a leaky faucet and say, what's going on here? And it can see and understand and walk you through it, right? So it's almost like having a smart, expert human on demand at any time. That's a far cry from where we were four years ago with GPT3. Right. So I think the same thing. I think where we're going to be in four years, we're going to look back at Project Astra, we're going to look back at GPT4O and we're going to laugh at how silly and how dumb those models seem. Right? Sam Altman had said the same. He said it's, you know, it's embarrassing how bad that the model is right now, GPT4, even though it's the most capable model. All right, so speaking of purpose and speaking of smart billionaires who are shaping our future, let's listen to one more thing because I think what a lot of people, you know, a lot of people just discount, discount what someone like Elon Musk says, because they're like, oh, okay, well, Elon Musk is, is kind of wild, right? And they just write off what someone like Elon Musk says. So now I'm going to play and we covered this when it first came out, but maybe as a reminder to everyone, I'm going to play a quick little, quick little snippet from Bill Gates interview. And this is back from about four months ago. Just had to check the date with Sam Altman. Okay? So let's just listen to what they're talking about. So let me preface, you know, about five minutes into, you know, 30 seconds here. So Bill Gates here is talking about things that he worries about when it comes to AI and artificial general intelligence specifically, right? So that's when, you know, AI becomes so smart, doesn't really need humans, it's smarter than the smartest human at everything, which I think we're actually getting pretty close, right? Which is what, you know, Elon Musk was talking about as well. So the three things that, you know, Bill Gates talked about in this interview here, specifically about AGI and we're going to listen to. Third is first, he worries about if the quote, unquote, bad guys, you know, use AGI for bad purposes. Then he worries about AGI systems kind of taking control. So kind of the, you know, Terminator, the rise of the machine. And then the third thing that Bill Gates worried about when it comes to AGI, which is where we're close to, right. We just talked about. OpenAI just released a blog post today. Saying, yeah, we're working on our newest model. We're officially training it. They're, you know, putting that official stamp out there, and they're saying, hey, this is a huge step toward AGI. The third thing he talks about Bill Gates in this, in his interview with Sam Altman on Bill Gates podcast, is human purpose. So let's just listen to what Bill Gates is talking about when it comes to AGI and human purpose.

The one that, that sort of befuddles me is human purpose. I get a lot of excitement that, hey, I'm good at working on malaria and malaria eradication and getting smart people and applying resources to that. When the machine says to me, bill, go play pickleball. I've got malaria eradication, you're just a slow thinker. Then, you know, it is a philosophically confusing thing and how you organize society, yes, we're going to improve education, but education to do what? If you get to this extreme, which we still have a big uncertainty, but for the first time, the chance that might come in the next 20 years is, is not zero.

All right? So it's, it's not just, you know, it's not just Elon Musk, you know, going off on a, on a random tangent here. You know, you just heard there, Bill Gates and Sam Altman. Well, you didn't hear Sam Altman, but it was from that interview talking kind of about the same thing, right? So they're talking, you know, Bill Gates dropped in. You know, it's not a zero percent chance, and he dropped in, oh, 20 years. I personally think it's much shorter window than that. But he's talking literally about human purpose. What are we going to do when AI goes up to Bill Gates and says, hey, you're too slow of a thinker. We've got malaria, right? We'll, we'll take care of eradicating malaria, you know, AGI or ASI or whatever it is at that point, right? But you have to think, is that day coming? Is that day coming? You know, if you get the 10 smartest people in your field in a room, are we still needed? What is our value as humans? Right? You have to think of it. And again, before you say, ah, Jordan, you're, you're just drinking the AI Kool Aid here, you know that that day will never come. I think that day is going to come, right? It is going to come. And I think, you know, if, if you pay close attention to AI advancements, you've probably already seen glimmers of it, right? When maybe an AI system, whether we're talking about a GPT4O or we're talking about, you know, something from Google or Claude, when you see something, maybe it's a domain specific AI that is developed in your field. When you see something, when an AI system, even with 90, 95 accuracy can do something in a couple of seconds or a couple of minutes, that used to take you many, many hours or maybe a day plus to do, you have to have that thought, right? If you haven't had that thought yet of human purpose or what is my job going to be in five to 10 years, then this should be a wake up call for you, right? Yes. Is it, is it a little concerning that most of the people talking about this are people like, you know, obviously the world's ultra elite and wealthy, you know, and sometimes crazy thinkers, you know, yeah, you're Zuckerberg, Altman's musks. But you know, Bill Gates just said something similar, right? And think of it this way, I think a lot of jobs, and I've talked about this on the show before, I think of a lot of jobs over the next one to two years are going to be the smartest experts in every single field are unfortunately going to be losing their jobs, right? We've seen this in the front half of 2024. Huge job loss, especially at big tech companies, right? Job loss in 2024 in tech companies is far outpacing previous years. And so what's happening, right, all of the money, all of the investment money is going into AI, is going into improving large language models, is going into building smarter and more capable small language models. I actually think working with many small language models that are built around a domain expertise is actually the future of work, not large language models. But that's another show for another day. But you have now these people who are 20, 30 year industry vets who are losing their jobs. And what's happening, companies are hiring them to come and train models on their specific domain expertise. Yeah, that's happening. Go look on job boards, right? Go look in your industry, in your niche, in your level of expertise. There is some company out there that is hiring someone like you with 10, 20, 30 years of experience to come train their models on replacing you. That's what it is. Hey, it's hot. Take Tuesday. Y' all wanted the fire. There it is, right? People are losing their jobs because of AI. Sorry, right? That's the reality. And now companies are paying these experts to essentially come in and train their models and saying, hey, you are, you are One of the top 1% in your field come help us fine tune our model for your domain expertise. That's happening, it's been happening for more than a year, right? So I think early on in the days of, you know, early large language models, the people training large language models were just, you know, general, you know, knowledgeable people, right? They were smart, they were technical, they were knowledgeable. But I don't think, you know, let's just say that there's, you know, there's obviously more than this, but let's just say that there's you know, 1000 very specific skill sets in today's workforce. Right? You didn't have experts in all of those 1000 fields training AI systems. That's why AI systems seem kind of sometimes dumb. But now what we're seeing is we're seeing kind of small models fine tuned or models getting better and better at these specific domain level expertise. That's what's happening. So let's just get to the end here. Our take our AI or sorry, our job is going to be optional, sorry, ultra billionaires. But until something like Universal Basic Income or Universal high Income become more than a, than a daydream in an actual reality, that is not an option. It's not an option for jobs to be optional. I don't foresee, at least in the next five years, I don't foresee something like Universal Basic Income or what Elon Musk was talking about here. Uhi, I don't see anything like that happening. See one of the problems, one of the problems I think is you have these ultra rich and wealthy people building the future of AI who are so disconnected from the average everyday person, they don't know. But even people who are working white collar jobs, even your, you know, middle upper class person in the U.S. so many people are living paycheck to paycheck. So when we talk about AI systems coming in and quote unquote taking our jobs and your job will be optional. The people unfortunately driving the future of, of tech and AI forward have no clue what the average American is going through. Yes, I know we have an international audience here, but you know, specifically I'm talking about here in the US because things are a little different. We don't have a lot of actual real legislation with teeth. Right. And I think unfortunately, I think unfortunately the US economy is driven by profit, it's not driven by humans. Right? So, so here's, here's kind of our breakdown here. You know, I don't, like I said, I don't have Any hot takes on, you know, universal basic income or universal high income, that's not my level of expertise. We've talked about that here in the show before, so I'll leave that to the experts. But here's something I think that I'm, I feel fairly confident in when we talk about the future. And will jobs be optional? Well, AI will kill more jobs than it creates, period. It will. Right. Go, go listen to our One year, One Year anniversary episode. I'll make sure to link it in the show notes here. We talked about that in depth, so I'm not going to do that now. So will AI create millions of new jobs that don't exist today? Absolutely. I think ultimately AI kills more jobs than it will create. And if you have an opposite view on that, I don't think that you're being realistic. And mainly the reason of that is greed. Right. Yeah. All these companies are already laying off thousands or tens of thousands employees. Fortune 100 companies that have kind of quote unquote figured out AI and they're saying, hey, we're not hiring these jobs because of AI. If they cut 10,000, 12,000, 30,000 jobs. Yeah, they're going to create more jobs once they find new use cases for AI and how humans can help fill those roles. But they're not going to nearly create as many jobs because Wall street hates employees. Did a whole segment on that. Wall street hates employees. The more companies invest in AI, the more jobs they cut, the more their stock price goes up. So would I love to say that we're going to live in this fairy tale society where, you know, we have universal basic income or universal high income and, you know, oh, AI is going to create more jobs than it kills. That's, that's a, that's not a realistic future because. Right. At least here in the US the economy is driven by greed. Look at CEO pay over the last couple of decades. Look at the average worker pay over the last couple of decades. Right. We've broken that down before. It's not going to happen. Number two, I think skills and expertise will not be valued the same way in the future. Yeah. For decades that's how it's been. I don't think it's going to be like that anymore. And I'd say. And then in less than five years, most of us will mainly be working with or around AI. Yeah, that's a hot take. But it's hot take Tuesday and y' all said to bring the flame emojis. Right. So I'm not saying that you're going to be working at OpenAI or at Google or you're going to be training an AI model. But I think within five years, probably less the majority of work if you are a knowledge worker, right? So that means you are getting paid for your domain specific expertise. If you're sitting in front of a computer and interfacing with the Internet. Right? Which is what a lot of us are. A lot of, you know, let's say you have a, a quote unquote desk job, nine to five in less than five years. I think the majority of what all of us are going to be doing is going to be interfacing with different AI systems. I think we're going to have, you know, multiple small language models that we're all going to be orchestrating, we're going to have, you know, multiple AI agents that we will be directing and essentially we are going to have to produce a lot more with a lot less. But I do think the future of work is for very many of us, if you are working in front of a computer today at a 9 to 5 job, you're going to be working in and around AI, right? Yeah. Not saying your company is going to be an AI first company, but the work that you're going to be doing kind of like how all the work that most of us do is somehow on the Internet. Almost every single thing that most of us are going to be doing is going to be in or around AI. We are going to be orchestrating, directing different small language models, large language models, AI agents. That's, that's going to be our day to day job. Right. So yes, your skills are still going to be valuable, your domain expertise is still going to be valuable, but it's more of going to be. You are going to be orchestrating and overseeing and directing different large language models and agents and you are essentially going to make sure that they're doing their job right. Work is going to change. And I'll leave with this. I think we've become very used to how quote unquote jobs work now. Right. You find a career, you get a lot of expertise in a certain field and you get paid and rewarded and compensated according to what you know in your head. Right. Someone comes to you and they say, hey, I have this problem. And you get paid for your expertise, for what you know and how you can turn that knowledge into business value. Right. Pretty simple transaction. That's how business works. Right. You're smart, someone pays you to be smart about a certain thing. If you can create business value I don't think that's how it's going to work in the future. Right. It's going to be how much value you can produce with or through AI. Right. So although I'm not going to say, like Elon Musk said, you know, with 80% certainty that jobs are going to be optional, I don't understand how Universal Basic Income or UHI would work. Especially here in the us I don't see it working. I see companies being too greedy. I see our government not understanding the urgency or how to even moderate something like AI when the majority of people in Congress don't even understand the Internet. There hasn't been any meaningful legislation around the Internet since 1996. So I don't see business leaders, especially public companies, making the right decision for employees. I don't see the US Government even understanding what's going on at a high enough level to make sure people are taken care of. So I don't know the future of work. All I know is things are going to change drastically. Jobs are not going to look the same. And even how we as humans are valued is not going to be the same in five years. Right. Why would I pay an expert for some or for something that is in their head when probably a peer of their experts at that point has already trained a model to do exactly what they can do, but a thousand times faster in that scale, 24, 7, without needing a break and being able to, you know, send out thousands or millions of those expertise of those AI agents that have that expertise. So will AI jobs be, or, sorry, will jobs be optional? No, they won't be optional because we, at least here in the US still need money. Right. The average American can't just say, ah, you know what, I, I'm gonna decide not to work. Or if you're from a dual, dual income household, you can't just say, all right, well, let's just have one, one person work and the other one's just gonna go, you know, because of AI, they're gonna go build community. That's a great dream. But when it comes down to the dollars, it doesn't make sense. So there's a lot to figure out. I don't have a solution here about what the future of work looks like. I just know jobs can't be optional. But at the same time, I do think that what Elon Musk said, there's a good amount of truth to it. I don't think that this was some crazy take from him. I don't think that humans are going to be needed in the same way in five or 10 years as they're needed today. What that looks like, I don't know today, but we're going to continue to talk about it almost every day on the future of work and the future of AI here on Everyday AI. So that's it. That's a wrap. We didn't solve the future of work, but I hope that you learned something and if you did, I'd really appreciate you telling someone about it, right? I've heard from so many people and I love hearing from you. So if you're listening on the podcast, check your show notes, drop me an email, connect with me on LinkedIn. If this was helpful, please consider leaving us a review rating on Spotify or Apple, wherever you're listening to your podcast. If you're on the live stream, thank you for tuning in as well. Click that repost button. We spend a lot of time trying to keep you informed for free every single day on how to build your company, grow your grow your career with Generative AI. So we'd appreciate if you shared this. But hey, I'd appreciate it if you go to your everydayai.com Sign up for the free daily newsletter. You know what, when we send this out today, go ahead, reply. Let me know what you think or if you're still listening here on the live stream. What's your take? You know, I want to feature a couple takes from you all in today's newsletter, so leave a comment. What do you think our job is going to be optional in the future? Why or why not? Is that a crazy take or is there some truth to it? So thank you for tuning in. Hope to see you back tomorrow and every day for more Everyday AI. Thanks y'. All.

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