“America Isn’t Ready for What AI Will Do to Jobs”

In the following excerpt, Derek and Josh Tyrangiel address AI skepticism and explore the reasons why some people are hesitant to embrace the technology.

Derek Thompson: You have the cover story this month in The Atlantic, entitled “America Isn’t Ready for What AI Will Do to Jobs.” And I want to start outside the scope of the article and talk a little bit about the debate about artificial intelligence as I see it.

I’m oversimplifying here, but I think there are two groups that are going to come into this episode from very different places. Group one says this technology is going to have a massive impact on the economy, on jobs, on the future of productivity, maybe even on our own sense of who we are and the value that we can provide our families and our companies.

Group two, however, I think, insists that AI is basically vaporware. This is a lot of obsession about basically nothing. This is billionaire-pumped nonsense that hallucinates and doesn’t really help anybody do anything.

We’re going to spend a lot of time talking to group one, the folks who believe that this technology might be revolutionary. But before we do that, I would actually love you to address group two directly. How sure are we that they’re wrong? Why are you convinced that this really is a revolutionary, transformative technology that deserves our very close attention?

Josh Tyrangiel: Yeah, I think you put your finger on it, is that there is this divide. And there’s some people who think AI is going to be a deity, and there are other people who think it’s a parlor trick. And I will tell you, I’m not in between. I actually think that its power is incredible, but I also understand why group two is greeting this skeptically.

And I think a lot of that has to do with the context into which AI has arrived. So, number one, let’s take the biggest possible picture, which is: We are not short on existential risk in our lives right now. Political risk, climate risk, just nationhood risk, or there’s security risk. Everybody is feeling risk from something.

We came out of a pandemic in which we were all just super hunkered down, and that was the logical way to greet the world. It just was. And so right at the end of that, this thing shows up, and I think a lot of people looked at it. They looked at the hair ball of motives behind the people who were creating it and tried to disperse it, which includes massive investment, personal wealth that may come from it.

We’re all now victimized by 15 years of social media bullshit, and our defenses are up. And so they looked at this—they came out of the pandemic, they looked at the Trump administration creating new risk every day—and basically said, “Not for me. I’m out. I don’t want anything to do with this. I don’t like the people making it. I don’t believe in it. I’ve heard these promises before. In the end, it will just sell me ads. I don’t want to do it.”

And I’m actually more than sympathetic to that response. I think it’s actually kind of a logical response.

Here’s the thing: The tech is amazing. And I say this as a person who is skeptical for a living. It’s dazzling. The things that it can do are remarkable. They are compromised in people’s perceptions by the way that this has been marketed. And largely that’s about the way it’s been financialized.

It’s so expensive to make that the labs—and when I say the labs, that means places like OpenAI, Anthropic, the people who are making cutting-edge models—have had to pivot very quickly into the language of money in order to keep chasing new breakthroughs. And so that has colored a lot of, I think, in my neighborhood—I live in the East Village—there’s a lot of people who are dismissive of it because it is this sort of collusion of technology and money.

And if you can imagine the tech without the tech companies, you’ll have a different response. I wrote a book that’s coming out in May that’s basically that. Like, what can we do with this if we can just get away from the bullshit marketing?

So I’m a believer. I’m a believer that the tech is amazing and that it is essentially boundless eventually, and even in the short term, the things that it can do are remarkable. I’m also a believer that it’s entering a fractured system that makes the likelihood of its misuse pretty enormous.

This excerpt has been edited and condensed.

Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Josh Tyrangiel
Producer: Devon Baroldi