Zack Kass: Should You Be Scared of AI? Former OpenAI Leader Reveals the Truth | Artificial Intelligence | E405

Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)

Zack Kass, former OpenAI leader, discusses why people fear AI despite its potential. He highlights how fear stems from cognitive biases, past technological disappointments, and unequal access to benefits. The conversation explores AI's role in reshaping work, society, and human values.

Key takeaways

• AI fear comes from cognitive biases like negativity and nostalgia
• Most people fear AI for others' jobs, not their own
• Historical tech shifts (printing press, internet) mirror today’s AI moment

Transcript preview

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My guest today, Zach Kass, wants us to ask a much better question. What could AI make possible? Most people are really excited for everyone else's jobs to automate just not their own. Everyone wants stuff to arrive a little bit faster, a little bit cheaper on Amazon without realizing it means automating the ports. I heard Elon Musk say something recently that work one day will be more like a hobby. How do you feel about the future of work? First, the future of work? The future of work is. The future of work is because none of the economists understand AI and none of the technologists understand labor economics. The second problem and no one's really talking about this is... Why are communities pushing back against data centers? There's lots of people who are really upset about the environmental impact of AI. If you really care about the environment, the most environmentally efficient thing you can do is... So I was reading your book and a big premise of it is that people are scared of AI and not just because AI is dangerous but because we're wired to be scared of change and things that are new. So help us understand why it's our natural instinct to just be afraid of AI. That is a good question that not enough people ask about everything that they're afraid of actually. We are wired as humans and and the disclose. I'm not a behavioral psychologist but I'm going to tell you what a many behavioral psychologists would say. Most of what any human believes is they are predisposed to believe. So most of actually what you experienced and this is a little controversial actually comes from genetic predispositions. Your ancestors passed you a bunch of beliefs and biases that are inherent in your DNA and then you have lived experiences that compound those things. And a lot of people, and a lot of people, and a lot of people actually from a very, a lot of people, actually from a very, a lot of people. young age their lived experiences either confirm or slightly tweak what it is their predispose to believe but of the 180 cognitive biases that we have there are a few that are really powerful one of them is a confirmation bias so we often are see things that we already believed and they reinforce what we what we believe so they confirm or reinforce our ideas one of them is a negativity bias and the negativity bias served us a long long time ago and actually to some extent can still serve some people today especially those like under constant physical threat. The negativity bias tells us to look at something as though it you know it can harm you even if the chances are low and the negativity bias is the thing that plagues a lot of the people who are most cynical in your life as it is or most pessimistic and then we have a bias that we call Rosie Retrospection which is one of these really incredible biases we tell ourselves that the past was way better than it actually was and we tell ourselves these really romantic stories of a bygone time with a sense of a sense of a sense of a sense of a sense of a sense of a sense of a sense of a sense of We've now created the sepia lens that our brains view the past through and I don't know if you're a 90s baby I was a 90s baby and they you know all the Instagram is filled with these like sort of nostalgic images and videos of what it was like as a 90s baby and of course what those videos do not remind us is that being a child was far more dangerous in the 90s than it was today because of kidnapping and other forms of violence and also that the 90s themselves were plagued with all sorts of other problems today but we remember them fondly. And so we do this and it compounds in these interesting ways. Now that in and of itself makes us afraid of change, it makes us afraid of sudden movements, and it generally makes us wary of things that feel like we can't shape them. AI presents a whole other slew of issues and we'll get to these. But the principal issues that I call out in the book, I think, are born from a context window of anyone's most recent relationship with technology. And so in places like the United States, and in particular in cities in the United States that have been hauled out economically or spiritually, there is incredible negativity bend in views towards AI. And you don't have to really try to figure out why, right? The internet and the digital economy promised to make everyone's lives better and a lot of lives got better, but if you live in in the rust belt or if you live in a city that was forgotten in a digital economy you're going to look at this with an enormous amount of skepticism and trepidation. Moreover if you are a young person and you were told that the world would continue to get better and instead you were fed unmetered pornography gambling comparison violence outrage. Jonathan Hight writes about all this in the anxious generation. that housing, health care and education have gotten 280% more expensive over the last 30 years, you're going to look at AI and go, great, a whole lot more of that garbage. And so we sit in this incredible moment where humans have this incredibly proud relationship with technology for so much of our history, the history of human progress has been told as the history of technology. Outside of the good guys winning the important wars, everything we celebrate is us discovering something, basically. You don't hate air conditioning. You don't hate electricity. You don't hate refrigeration. You don't hate antibiotics or planes, trains and automobiles. You hate your relationship with the screen often and you hate the fact that technology has not made housing, health care and education less expensive over the last 30 years. And so many people look at this moment with AI and they go, cool. The tech giants are going to make my lives worse as they did for the last 30 years. And the best comparison and the reason why not everyone hates AI, you go to China. 80% that AI is going to be better for them or make their lives better. And you don't have to do a lot of research to figure out why. They have an incredibly healthy recent relationship with technology. The average life for the average Chinese person has improved meaningfully over the last 30 years because of very, very explicit efforts by the CCP to diffuse the value of electricity in the internet to the benefit of the average person. Yeah. And that explains it and it actually isn't much more complicated. And so the book basically. tries to spell out why this moment is not that unlike other technological moments and also what we need to do and reconcile the fact that the kids have every right to be pissed because they're staring down the barrel of prohibitive living and addiction to some of the worst vices we've ever invented. But wouldn't you say that's recency bias if we're kind of comparing how life has transformed over the last 30 years and when we step back the arc of human progress has actually been exceptional? Well now you're you could write the forward the forward. book. I mean, yeah, totally. And also, typically a recency bias, you know, you and I would, we could go to a nix game and suddenly we're a nix fan, we're in spurs territory. We could go to a spurs game and then suddenly we're spurs fans. That's a recency bias, most people can make sense of. At some point you actually have to consider something a bit of a trend. And it's true that we should look at the arc of human history to actually examine, which is the case I make, that I make that I think that I think that I think that I think this will It's also true that we should acknowledge why some people have every right to be really wary in this moment. Yeah. And especially those who feel like they are, and I say this quite freely, wealthier in so many ways than all of their ancestors combined and yet spiritually depraved. And for whom hope has never felt further in grasp, despite all of the promises that have been made by by by by by all of the technology companies for the last 30 years, that's not a recency bias. That's an honest, very reasonable concern and something that we have to acknowledge as we talk about the world that is going to get better. Yeah, fam, I'll admit it. The first time I heard somebody explain Bitcoin, I felt like I had accidentally walked into a finance bro, TED Talk. 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So you've read the chapter the chapter is called Welcome to the Late Middle Ages and it's kind of tongue in cheek like I don't actually propose that we are in a late Middle Ages what I propose is that if you had lived during the late Middle Ages you would have had every right to think that the world was ending. Half of the human population was decimated by disease and some more during the late Middle Ages we basically stagnated on a technology. we started to observe the average life expectancy decline for a couple hundred years so people stopped inventing things because they didn't have time to actually invent stuff and they had to simply survive and a lot of the people who were inventing things died while they were inventing them so progress was halted for a couple generations and at the end of the late Middle Ages you have got in Gootenberg's printing press so you have this you have this invention that actually then sparks the Renaissance now I have someone in all of my walk of life that tells me with a straight face they'd rather live during the late middle ages than now and actually I've only met a few people that can confidently tell me they'd rather live at another point in history and I've never met a woman who actually thinks that they'd rather be alive at any other point than today for all sorts of obvious reasons well you say that but a lot of people are willing to tell me very straight face that it's that were that were fucked a lot of people were willing to tell me very or actually we peaked sometime ago. People go, oh I missed the 90s. Wow, let's talk about that. But my whole argument is if you actually believe that this is a bad period of time, let me remind you how bad it once was, and also what came from that, that actually hard times do produce a bunch of incredible moments. And I'll look at all the stuff that's fundamentally broken with you and stare at it and also say, here are all the reasons why I think a lot of these things can get a whole lot better. And you couldn't have really done that in the late middle ages. You needed a lot of hope. And you know what else? A lot of those people died without it. And I say this to people, so much of the world we live in today with truly unmetered information is you just know too much. And a lot of people have a window to the world that is actually too big. I really think the cross that especially the young people bear today is that we gave them access to all the horrors, all the horrors, all the atrocities, all the attacks to all the of the world without the brain that could metabolize it. And so of course they graduate college thinking that the world is ending because when we graduated college we were like, I mean I remember exactly what I was thinking about when I graduated college and it wasn't the world ending, right? It was trying to find a job and find a girlfriend and party and become a man, which is probably what a male brain at 21 should be thinking about in a developed world. Like we solved a bunch of problems so that I had that opportunity. young people are have lost that so I remind everyone if you really want to be really despondent let me tell you all the other times in human history where people were despondent and actually hope was very clearly on the horizon yeah well you're actually an AI optimist would you say that I've stopped using that term I used to use the term because it like told people what they should expect and now I actually just say now I describe myself as something entirely differently which is I work in the I work in the arena of the stuff with AI. I'm an advisor. I've been in over 500 boardrooms and I'm at this point probably best described as an AI advisor. But I also having studied history and computer science and having studied this technology very closely consider myself a very accomplished and credible realist. Yeah. And it just so happens that it's very hard to refute a lot of progress that is currently being made. Well talk to us about some of the progress, health care progress, education progress. What are some of the things that yet that is really cool in the AI world. Well I think before we talk about the progress in AI which we can I think we should just talk about sort of like we should set the stage for what we think what I think actually is most broken and needs to be fixed. Sure. Because there's a really remarkable thing about the world we live in which is you know this TV screen was once ten thousand dollars now it's a hundred bucks. Yeah. And like this is like a very nice dress that would have been prohibitively expensive for any of your grandparents to own, for example. And there are almost everything in our lives that can come down in cost, has plummeted in cost. And then there are sort of three exceptions to that, housing, health care, and education. And not only have they gotten more expensive over the last 30 years by about 280%, they've gotten worse, right? The actual outcomes are worse. And I have to remind everyone that these three things are not technological failures. They're not expensive because they must be. It's not that we haven't figured out They're expensive because we've chosen to make them that way. Yeah, corruption basically. Bluntly and actually plainly. We are governed by a pernicious antisocial geriatric group of parasites. They're all really excited to watch us fight with each other and blame the technologist. Now look, I think that Mark Zuckerberg might be a public enemy at this point. Like I'm actually, I watched the congressional hearings. I watch the congressional hearings. I watch the him in the head of Instagram tell American households that being that a child staring at Instagram for nine hours a day doesn't actually constitute addiction and if it is addiction it's okay because they're learning and I in that moment decided that like both of them could be tried in the Hague as far as I'm concerned like that's probably if you profiteer when my child stares at a screen I probably don't want you to do well and actually I probably want you to do poorly. But we should also acknowledge that on the whole the technologists are trying really hard to move stuff forward. Yeah. And that it continues to be the politicians and the policy makers who have not. And the reason we can observe this is that that TV screen was $10,000 and now it's 100 bucks thanks to the technologists. Yeah. And thanks to the technologists, you can drive across Los Angeles for 15 dollars in an autonomous vehicle. Thanks to the politicians, a trip five blocks away in an ambulance might actually bankrupt you. That's crazy. The kids have every right to be pissed. I just think they're pissed with the wrong people. In California in particular, we you know our governor is a hero. I don't know why among among so many people I can't figure it out I don't know why any of them are heroes like I don't know why any politician except those who are talking about cost of living and the ability for technology to deflate that cost are heroes because everything else is a lie. Your national policy makers are not your heroes they will never be and only the ones who and best way to make your life less expensive is by inventing tools to do so. Everyone else is lying to you. Yeah. So with that table set, what I basically acknowledge is that there's only so much the technology can do. Right, we've created a world where actually technology has made so much dirt cheap. You need a gas station sushi. Like, it's kind of wild. Truly a delicacy. Like, you can now go to a gas station and get half decent sushi for like six bucks. Why? Why? the hell do you have to work till you're 80 to afford your parents house? That's housing policy. It's not because the building materials are too expensive. It's not because we haven't figured out robotics. In fairness, we haven't really done a lot with robotics, but we would have done a lot more. We would have done what China has done by now, which is how to figure out how to autonomously build a lot of infrastructure if we were building more infrastructure. We built 18 million new homes in the 1990s in the 1990s. We built 2000s. Nimbly policy. Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer took power and they said let's keep it just the way it did. Let's pass a bunch of policy to our exclusive benefit and then let's blame everyone else and they've shot us all in the foot and they're holding a smoking gun being like who did this. Yeah. So all that being said there are huge problems in the society that almost no amount of technology can fix. there are some exceptions and some of those exceptions include drug discoveries. So I tell everyone that AI could truly save itself if it can figure out how to cure cancer or neurodegenerative disease because even the policy makers can't stop that and the conspiracy theorists will pile on they'll say they'll stop it they can't. If a drug manufacturer actually figures out the cure for these diseases they will they will sell them they will ship them and you cannot stand in the way of that politically speaking. hard to think of a technology that will change the current course of our cost of living given the political restrictions and I say this because we actually could observe a world where AI continues to improve at a breakneck speed where the frontier as it has continues and you can show a chart continues to improve logarithmically and it won't matter and I'm actually about to publish a paper called the diminishing model returns theory which says at some point the frontier will not matter the next great model because we're too busy digesting the last model or the one before it and a lot of that digestion is going to be political a lot of that digestion is going to be it's not going to be enterprise updating it's actually going to be the policymaker saying you can automate this I wrote another paper that's very unpopular called illegal automation which documents the 1.5 million jobs in the United States that you cannot legally automate there are seven million in Europe by the way now when we talk about illegal automation people people It's the policy makers protecting workers. Yeah. Totally fair. Except they're protecting jobs to a collective detriment. Like everyone gets their cut until you turn around and you go wait a second we've passed so much antisocial policy that do you wear glasses or contacts? I do, yeah. Okay. If you've ever wondered why your contacts are so expensive and you've ever wondered by going and getting a new eye prescription is so expensive it's because the optomologist want it that way. And they have passed incredible amount. a cartel that has passed a ton of policy that makes it really hard to automate a lot of these procedures and therefore drive down the cost. And they did it to protect their jobs and they did it to protect their little unit and then you look and you go everyone else is trying to do it. And there's this collective bargaining that is actually antisocial inherently. So all this is to say the models are getting a lot better and they will continue to get better. There is a really upside down world where in two years and I think it's quite possible. exceptionally high quality videos of Donald Trump making out with Taylor Swift and still no great drug discoveries. For what it's worth I don't think this would be the case. For what it's worth I think what's going to happen is we're going to start to diffuse the value of this technology to the benefit of the average person. And we're seeing it in education. So in Austin, Texas, Mackenzie Price, Alpha School, is building a private education system where kids can do two hours of very, very high quality quality quality quality quality quality. basically one-on-one tutoring with the machine and then they spend the other six hours a day outside and it's having exceptional benefit. It's too expensive for most people to do but she's proving a model and that model as long as the teachers unions allow it will diffuse to a public school within two years is my bet and we will see a massive rebound in our current degradation in literacy and motor function. You know the average Gen Z is less likely to read, write a bike and swim than a millennial. I did not know that I didn't know they were and so then you look and you're like yeah we did you dirty like we gave you a phone and we said go hang out in your room you don't need to do anything we took you out of schools during COVID and we said figure it out and they did nothing in many cases so there is a huge bounce back coming and some of it is going to be that the technology itself gets a lot better and some of it is going to be that the policy makers die and we elect new ones the other thing that and they're like oh it's an app no it's it's cognitive infrastructure and the sooner that people are going to realize its benefits because today you have to stare at this thing and it actually just automates a little bit but it in many cases it has this insatiable appetite for more of your attention I mean the really messed up thing about Chatchy BT and Claude is you actually have to stare at it to use it. What we want is a more agenticentic world where all of the activity happens in the background and that also is moving in a pretty interesting direction. underneath we'll actually start to automate because we're powering it like we did with with electricity. Yap gang do you want to look and feel your best this summer and I don't just mean looking good on the outside I mean feeling amazing from the inside all the way down to your cells. Yep your cells. If you do I'm gonna put you on to a reset that I've been absolutely obsessed with it's Prolon's five day fasting mimicking diet. is a plant-based nutrition program with soup, snacks, and beverages that keep your body in a fasting state while still nourishing you. It is the only nutrition program clinically proven to trigger atophagy, your body's natural cellular cleanup mechanism. And atophagy can support longevity and it can even reverse your biological age. 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