Script
Hi, all curious minds! I planned to create a different video. I still have a couple of days before my next assignment. And the time I’m waiting, I do what I usually do. Geek-out. Diablo 4 is out, and I was watching tutorials about the different builds, and the YouTube algorithm suggested a video about the eminent dangers of AI.
I’m a fan of sci-fi, but I’m kind of worried and concerned about the future. So I watched it. I will leave links to it in the description. It was a podcast with Mo Gawdat and Steven Bartlett. It was quite eye-opening, and If you want, you can share the ideas which it can teach you.
Our world relies on supply and need. What are the values I can bring to a company? I can code, and I can quickly find gaps and suggest solutions. I have a ton of experience, but experience is just knowledge. I know there are areas of fields I did not touch yet, but if I need, I can adapt to them quickly.
I talked about AI with a lot of my friends and colleagues. I said I was not afraid of it. It will improve our lives in ways we cannot even imagine yet. And it is already doing so. I use Grammarly to improve the way I write. I use Google to help me find the information I need. I watch Youtube to improve my knowledge base. There are personalized Ads that can help you to find the tool you are looking for. There are self-driving cars. So there are great values we should be grateful to AI.
So why am I concerned? Many of my friends asked whether you fear losing your job because of AI. And I told them a little sorry, which I plan to discuss in more detail. So recently, I’ve created an Estonian company. I need to have a business email account associated with it. In the beginning, it was just a simple solution. And if you may guess, it received a lot of spam. It was kind of funny. I can distinguish a valid email from spam without a spam filter, and a matter of fact, I can even trace it back if I want to.
I received an email saying I will have an FBI audit because they noticed unusual activities on my account. My company was only a few months old, and basically, it had no bank transactions till that time. I’ve checked the raw email and looked up the sender. It was from Japan. Why would somebody send me an email from Japan? So I’ve checked the domain and the IP address of the server. It was a shared hosting server, and the site was a WordPress site selling stuff for babies.
So we have agile, we have DevOps, all these security best practices, and all the cloud infrastructure has been making business activities almost effortless for decades now… And I still receive spam from a hacked WordPress webshop. So I’m not. I’m not afraid that I will not have opportunities to contribute to society.
Many times, when one asks me about security, development, or even business, I say we should improve our agility. We need to respond to changes quickly, not in months or days. We should respond in almost real-time. But how can we achieve it?
Well, we need to improve the way we approach problems. And to do so, we need to observe, learn and adapt new techniques we learned on the way. And AI is already better than us, at least in the observation and the learning part. The adaptation is up to us… For now.
For adaptation, we need to have a way to introduce a change, a policy. This policy is in place to save guard us from harmful events. But there are most of the time outdated, and they will not allow us to improve as fast as how urgent the need is.
The biggest policymakers in the world are countries. They help us to live in an existentially safe environment. All we need to do is earn enough money to buy food, clothes, a place we can stay, or time on things we like.
And now we are going back to supply and need. So I need to eat. I need to sleep. To do so, I supply my time to exchange it for money. I know there are ways how can you have a side hustle or “passive income”, but in reality, they are just ways how you can improve the exchange rate of your time.
Now imagine your time is not needed anymore. Because everything you think you want to do is automated, and it’s doing its job more faster and more efficiently than you, and you have all the time enjoying it. But you still need to pay money in exchange for your existential safety. This is the future that scares the hell out of me.
So what can we do about it? AI is here right now; we still have time to make our world a safer place. We just need to find a way to make it happen. To do so, we need to observe, learn and adapt new ways how we can achieve our goals in a fast and agile way. And the catch of the 22 is that we will need AI for assistance.
I need to thank you, Steven, for your podcast. I found many interesting topics already. And I need to thank you, Mo for your book Scary Smart. I’m listening to it on Audible, and I also bought your other books as well. I will leave links to them in the description.
Thank you all for watching, and see you next time.
The podcast episodes influenced me:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bk-nQ7HF6k4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csA9YhzYvmk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yVP1cCM4AU
Mo Gawdat:
https://www.mogawdat.com
https://www.youtube.com/@MoGawdatOfficial
https://www.audible.com.au/author/Mo-Gawdat/B01N15BIBQ
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Mo+Gawdat
Steven Bartlett:
https://stevenbartlett.com
https://www.youtube.com/@TheDiaryOfACEO
Thoughts
I was wondering whether I should or should not talk about AI. I believe we need to evolve, and what sci-fi taught us is there are risks, but there are wonders ahead of us. I could not summarise our challenges in the clear way that I heard in those podcasts.