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I mentioned my optimism a minute ago and we should definitely talk about that because I think there's so many people who are afraid that AI is going to take their job. I think that there's going to be a labor shortage uh as a result. So let's go there then. I wanted to stay in space, but let's go to that because we can come back. We can be in space too, whatever you want. No, but that's No, but that's fascinating because I don't know if you saw Eric Schmidt gave a commencement address over the weekend. Yeah. And the students were booing because they every time he mentioned AI, they were booing because I think they're
deeply fearful and worried about whether they're going to have a job. Yeah. Well, and the reason they're afraid of that is because all these smart people keep saying that. So there are so many smart people and they are smart and they are saying oh my god you know there going to be no more radiologists because you know AI can read X-rays better than a radiologist can and there going to be no more software engineers because AI can program better than a software engineer can. These people are wrong. So what's really going to happen is that it's going to elevate all of these people and there going to it's like it's it's like you've been digging. Let's say you're a software engineer, right? What it's the analogy I can
give you is you've been uh digging out a basement for your house with a shovel and somebody's about to hand you a bulldozer, you're you're so you should be so happy if you're digging the basement to your house and somebody says, "Hey, how about this? I have a tool here that's gonna and there what's really going to happen is we're going to have so much productivity in our economy that uh for example this is this just one effect a lot of people who have uh two earner income households right one of the people is going to drop out of the workforce that's why we're going to have a labor shortage people because of the uh productivity gains you're going to be able to afford things we're gonna have I predict we'll actually have deflation
of certain core uh assuming we let this technology play out and don't you know hamstring it with regulation too early um we will actually have you know everything will get food will get cheaper and housing construction will get cheaper and so on is there a transition cost I mean we can even solve the permitting problem I was talking about earlier for housing like it should take when you if you are a builder why does it take you 6 months, nine months, two years, five years depending on what municipality you live in to get a building permit. AI should be able to do it. AI should do that in 10 seconds and not and it should give you a yes or no in 10 seconds. And then you should have your
authority to build. And by the way, if it says no, it should give you the six reasons why. And then you go change those things and resubmit and you start building tomorrow instead of two years from now. But how do you answer? I mean, Amazon's laid a whole bunch of people off. You heard uh Mark Zuckerberg. Not because of AI, but Mark Zuckerberg recently laid a bunch of people off. Is that because of AI? Jack Dorsey ascribes it directly to AI. Well, you'd have to talk to Jack about that. I don't know. He must have had a lot of extra people.
The reason we're not seeing those same kinds of things, but the reason that people are talking about this is in the context of coding right now and also in the context that for these companies to have the extraordinary valuation I think that we're talking about, they have to create extraordinary productivity. Let can I give you a different lens to view this? So you if I'm a software engineer, I need to uplevel and think to myself what's my what am I really doing? What does a software a good you know uh computer scientist software do? What we really do is we identify problems and we help solve them and the code is almost just a it's a piece of execution that helps with that, right? But the real job is going to be
identifying problems and helping to solve them. Does that make sense? Totally. And that's not going to go away because it's going to that's the kind of thing that humans are going to be good at is figuring out okay we want this and they're going to work with that tool to build the system but we humans are never going to run out of problems and we're never going to run out of the need for solutions and it's just that the work is going to be done at a higher level. It's going to be done with a bulldozer instead of a shovel.
