WSJ: “Our research suggests you can help your employees gain—and share—that insight by asking them smarter, sometimes uncomfortable questions during periodic check-ins. Here are the four that are most effective…1. When was the last time you almost quit? 2. When was the most recent time that work didn’t feel like work? 3. What trade-offs are you making to stay in this role? 4. If this job disappeared tomorrow, what would you choose to do next?”
NYTimes: “I got a glimpse of a post-labor future at an event held in San Francisco by Mechanize, a new A.I. start-up that has an audacious goal of automating all jobs — yours, mine, those of our doctors and lawyers, the people who write our software and design our buildings and care for our children. “Our goal is to fully automate work,” said Tamay Besiroglu, 29, one of Mechanize’s founders. “We want to get to a fully automated economy, and make that happen as fast as possible…Mechanize’s approach to automating jobs using A.I. is focused on a technique known as reinforcement learning — the same method that was used to train a computer to play the board game Go at a superhuman level nearly a decade ago.”
Sam Altman: “In the 2030s, intelligence and energy—ideas, and the ability to make ideas happen—are going to become wildly abundant. These two have been the fundamental limiters on human progress for a long time; with abundant intelligence and energy (and good governance), we can theoretically have anything else. Already we live with incredible digital intelligence, and after some initial shock, most of us are pretty used to it. Very quickly we go from being amazed that AI can generate a beautifully-written paragraph to wondering when it can generate a beautifully-written novel; or from being amazed that it can make live-saving medical diagnoses to wondering when it can develop the cures; or from being amazed it can create a small computer program to wondering when it can create an entire new company. This is how the singularity goes: wonders become routine, and then table stakes.”
Russ Roberts: “The people who said Google is now going to rule the world, because: we have to have search, and they’ve managed to embed search and our need for search into everything; and we’re the customer. And that was somewhat worrisome. We’ve done a ton of episodes on that. All of a sudden AI [artificial intelligence] comes along and there’s competition in that space that was unimagined a few years ago, and it’s remarkably competitive. When the AI started, ChatGPT [Generative Pre-trained Transformer] started, I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, the amount’–and people said this, and I don’t know how it got solved, maybe you know, but–‘the amount of capital it’s going to take to create an AI going through all the data in the world, it’s going to mean that only a handful of places will have it, and they can exploit us.’ All of a sudden, there’s–I have five different ones on my computer. It’s kind of amazing. It’s–you know, they’re losing money. It will get more expensive, probably. It may get cheaper because of technology improving it, but it’s–all of a sudden Google’s market powers suddenly much diminished.”
