AI's Impact on Society

Eleni Floros: Welcome back to Fintech Bytes, the podcast where we explore the biggest ideas shaping the future of finance and technology. Today we're diving into one of the most talked about topics in the world right now, artificial intelligence. AI is advancing at an incredible pace and it's already transforming industries, including financial services. But alongside the excitement, there are also big questions.

How will AI reshape society? Jerry: you Eleni Floros: What does it mean for jobs and businesses? And perhaps the most debated questions of all, should we slow down AI development or accelerate responsibly? To unpack all of that, we're going to explore the opportunities, risks and responsibilities that come with this powerful technology.

start with the big picture. What would you say, Jerry? Jerry: Well As you mentioned, it's going a little bit too fast in my opinion and in the opinion of all the big leaders, the CEOs of all the tech companies from OpenAI to Anthropic Google, Gemini or DeepMind, ⁓ Dario from Anthropic and Demis Asabi from Google DeepMind. ⁓ They all agree that it's going a little bit too fast and we need to slow it down.

The reason being is because we still don't have a perfect system working here. We're using chat GPT and for all the great improvement it does in productivity, in saving time for every one of us, people use it for all kinds of things like research, coding, just gathering information, just answering, making videos, you name it. But the fact of the matter is that we have too many hallucinations still. And none of the big ones know where it comes from.

And that's concerning. Like how can you develop something where you don't know what the outcome is going to be? And the problem is that it is either very intelligent, you get an answer that is amazing, or you might have really simple, answers that don't make sense. That you wonder how that it even into the conversation.

And so they haven't been able to figure that out. Why is it? Why do you get those answers? So some of the explanations that I heard, which is quite funny, is for example, Chad GPT or any of the Gen.

AI apps, they're not good at common sense. Human beings are just better, you know, simple things, common sense. They don't have that. Another thing, with video creation, you have a perspective.

So you might put two cars. let's say a red car up front and blue car in the back and ask AI on which is the bigger car and he would say the red one because it is more up front so it looks bigger but everybody that is ⁓ human put it that way ⁓ will that it's perspective that it's probably the blue car in the back so that's some of the things that you have as a problem now why is it a problem just imagine now we are using AI specifically agentic AI which is more autonomous with less human or no human supervision whatsoever and they are making decisions that are very very important so you could use agentic AI to make decisions on base of people's ⁓ information provided getting loans getting insurance ⁓ but for banking it could do transactions it could trade on the markets you ⁓ know if it makes a mistake ⁓ and equivalent like you make something and you don't know how it works 100 percent.

You cannot keep on building on that foundation that is not 100 percent. You need to be sure that what you're creating is functional like it is then you move on to bigger and better. ⁓ now you see a lot of videos, a lot of documentaries coming out, ⁓ very interesting ones. For one of them is with Demis Asabis, the other one is with Tristan Harris.

The other one is with again Dario Amode from Anthropic. Very interesting documentaries that explain because everybody always has the same narrative. It's going to be good, ⁓ going to do this, it's going to do that and I'm all for it and I believe too. The question is what are we doing with it as humans?

For now all you get to hear is the millions and billions and trillions that you're spending to make the data centers across the world ⁓ are going to consume so much energy and water that certain ⁓ Places will not even have for their own people enough electricity and water, which is insane. And then you have Elon Musk talking about data centers in space, which people ⁓ are refuting because they say it's not possible physically. ⁓ okay, we're not going to get into that. ⁓ then you have everybody talking about, you know, we're going to build data centers in all over the world.

The question is, as humans, what does it benefit us? I mean, how many people are going to get employed at a data center? And if you can believe it or not, in the old days when you had a car factory and it was being built in a certain country, it would provide jobs for thousands of people. And those people that were working there would stimulate economy because they would make money, spend money locally, buy products, go to the supermarket, to the shopping center.

And the money would circulate and those thousand people would also work at suppliers that would supply the factory and so on and so on. Data centers. We're talking about 10, 20 people working there. So they spend a couple billion building a data center and you have 10, 20 people and most of them are just security guards or cleaners.

And then you have developers and coders to be there in case something goes wrong. And of course you'll need some kind of managers at the top to supervise everything. So even the big ones, like there's one being built in Texas, is the size of Manhattan. If you can imagine how huge that is.

And you probably will have 50 or 100 people working that. I don't even know because they don't release information like that. So I'm thinking to myself, what are we doing? Instead of taking all these billions and trillions that is circulating between the big tech companies from Nvidia to Google to Apple to OpenAI, how about if we take $1 trillion and invest it in cancer research or nuclear fusion where we can have unlimited energy?

And with that, we could also fight poverty. hunger, climate change and so on and so on. Why don't we take this amount and invest it into society? So I would urge everybody read through the podcasts that we're talking about now and look at some of the documentaries and you'll be surprised they're all available on YouTube.

⁓ look for them. Just type in AI documentary and you'll have a complete wish list of documentaries to look at and then you'll see what's the purpose and what is going on right now. So I do believe we need to slow it down. Eleni Floros: I think AI will quietly become infrastructure, similar to how the internet disappeared into everything we do.

⁓ will sit behind most digital experiences. So we'll see huge changes in productivity. Like you said, people will be able to do the work of entire teams with AI support. But at the same time, it will reshape education, healthcare and financial services.

My next question would be is AI comparable to electricity or the internet? Jerry: ⁓ I would compare it to nuclear energy. It's going to be bigger than the internet, smartphone and every other tech before. Way Like a of multiple.

But I believe it's comparable to nuclear energy because it has a lot of benefits ⁓ and a lot of dangerous and a lot of things challenges that we need to take into consideration. Number one, the biggest problem with AI is the velocity of change. We are made to adapt slowly but surely. The first industrial revolution took 100 years, the second one 80, the other one 40 and then now the smartphone came out about 18 years ago and GPT came out three years ago.

So you see the time frame compressing completely to the point that it's going very very fast. And the problem is that legislation and regulation of that cannot follow. It happens so fast, and by the time we decide on any kind of regulation or legislation, and it takes a year or two, already way way further. And problem with AI is comparable to nuclear energy.

Nuclear energy, when it first came out, the whole world was against it. We thought we're going to get irradiated accidents, nuclear bombs, weapons, and so on and so on. Now nuclear energy, apart from the accidents that happened, for example, in Fukushima and Japan, is very useful. France produces 70 % of their nuclear energy needs through nuclear energy.

And they have surplus that they can sell to the neighboring countries in Europe. So for them, It's very good because it's clean, it's affordable, and it gives them security. Especially now in this time of crisis with the Gulf of the Suez ⁓ involved in war and prices, energy prices, going sky high, skyrocketing, France is not worried because they have their own ⁓ power. But ⁓ UK not have that and a lot of other countries do not have that.

⁓ We've again dependent on gas from Qatar and so on. So ⁓ it a big, big problem. The other thing is that nuclear energy in the wrong hands, for example, Iran, that's one of the reasons they portray that the attack Iran, Russia is a danger, North Korea, you don't know in bad hands, in bad hands, ⁓ it go very, very wrong. ⁓ And same applies to artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence, most people want to use it to... ⁓ to solve problems, to create new materials for healthcare and so on so So it has a lot of benefits and if you stick to that program, it will provide us a lot of benefits. But we need to slow it down and we need to be able to control it. Because if you have autonomous AI that can decide on itself, do its own research and code by itself and just improve itself in a recursive self-improvement loop non-stop.

we will lose track of it. We will not be able to keep track about the development that it does. And the worst thing is that AI, the different models, the different agentic AI, they have already discovered that they start communicating in their own gibberish mathematical language that nobody understands. Which is really scary because it's like having a black box with something growing in there and you don't know what it is.

You can't supervise, you can't see it. And that's the scary part that everybody's talking about that we need to slow down. So I'm... advocating different agencies via dissemination and awareness and public speaking writing articles that we need to really slow down.

And it only makes sense. ⁓ Why keep developing something that is not 100 %? Let's get what we have ⁓ 100 % and then see where we can put the safeguards and the safeguarding ⁓ And then we can on ⁓ and focus on using AI. Anyway there is no rush and the biggest headache or the point that I don't understand is they always talk about the AI race like whoever wins is going to have a great advantage.

First of all the AI race is endless there is no finish line there is no finish line there's not one line you cross you say okay I've done it it will keep on going because it will just keep on improving non-stop and then we come to the point of super intelligence which we cannot We don't have the capacity. We are geniuses in certain ways, but we have a limit. AI doesn't have a limit. The more data, computing power, the more chips, the better it gets.

And that's what everybody's doing. So we need to slow everything down and go back and focus on that, what is going to be good human beings. And that's why I'm all for ⁓ centered artificial intelligence and collaborating in that space. with AI and humans.

Eleni Floros: I think AI is about intelligence itself. So it's the first technology that can replicate certain aspects of human thinking. And that's why the impact could be even broader because it touches every industry that relies on knowledge or decision-making. Which industries will be most disrupted?

Jerry: Well, is going to be disrupted. It's not a single industry, ⁓ economy, community that is not going to get affected by AI in any part of the world, anywhere. So it's already ⁓ It's going affect our democracy, it's going to affect our economy, it's going to affect our education, our future of our career opportunities, ⁓ research, medical... The list goes on and on and on.

Now the thing is, we would like to see development, all of us, and we would like to see improvement. So if we can find a cure for cancer, I don't think anybody would say, no, I don't agree. Of course we would want that. If we could relieve the world from disasters because we are controlling climate a little bit and we are not polluting as much and we're doing everything that improves society, then everybody would be on the same page and we would say, okay, let's keep on going.

down that track. The problem with AI that ⁓ have emotional intelligence and AI doesn't. ⁓ there are endless conversations, discussions, people are saying that AI could develop conscience ⁓ could be sentient. So my question to all those people is could you really imagine AI or a robot falling in love with another robot?

Of course not. Could you imagine them getting married? getting divorced. Could you imagine one of the robots dies in the pair and the other robot goes to church to pay last respects.

Could you imagine that? Of course not. It's non-existent. Artificial intelligence is algorithms.

It's an input and an output. It's computation. So whatever you put in, it puts out. So if you tell an AI or a robot when somebody dies, you have to pretend that you're sad and you need to drop your...

head and pretend like you're crying and maybe put some jet to make it ⁓ wet in the eye or something like that. It sounds crazy but that's what people are telling. So it doesn't make sense. don't have what we have.

We have emotions, we have feelings, ⁓ have a conscience, ⁓ are ⁓ empathetic and can love and feel pain. An AI robot cannot feel love, it cannot feel pain. Which pain? So as long as you don't have those human feelings, it is difficult for humans to interact with robots.

We can interact with animals, not every one of them, but most of the animals we can interact, we are kind and we know which animals will not attack us. But with robots, you don't know what their intentions are, and they have already ⁓ certain moments where, you know, the AI or the robot is deceiving. where it is pretending to be on your side, but it's not, it's actually sabotaging you and they're even saying that some are looking at self-survival and so on and so on. And those things are scary.

You cannot just let it go and say, let's see what comes out of it. Because once it's there, there's no going back. So we need to focus on that part. But the key thing is we need to focus on humanity because that's the only thing that matters.

We're eight billion people on this planet and humanity is only thing that matters because If the machines can produce non-stop and eliminate all work for everybody, we become totally useless with no purpose in life, with no meaning. We're going to face the next problem, which is depression, people feeling useless, anxiety, stress, and maybe even self-harm. Is that what we want? Is that what we want to create?

Is that the world we want to create that everybody just becomes a plant? Of course not. And what kind of life are we going to give to our children? So we really need to step back and have a big look at the picture, at the big picture and say to ourselves, okay, we have gotten so far, we're doing great, we've pulled off a lot in three years time, let's sit down now, all, and we need to do it on an international basis.

And that's where the sticking point is. Will we be able to get to the United States and China on one table to agree on ⁓ Can we do that? Or the companies, Google versus OpenAI versus Microsoft versus whoever, will they slow down? Will they pause?

Because Anthropic, who developed Cloud, they said we're going to do ethical AI. We're not going to allow anything to be done wrong. And even when they get the Pentagon and the US and it's a big backlash. so then they went back and said, okay, we're not going to do it because OpenAI and Gemini and everybody else is doing it.

So we're just going to... not follow the rules, which is going to keep on competing. You can't do that. You cannot shift the goalposts while you're playing a game.

You have to put it down in the middle then play by the rules. So this is the biggest dilemma I think we have and we really need to look ⁓ the United Nations to have some kind of a ⁓ a council where we are all talking about the same thing because we did it. with nuclear weapons and the proliferation of nuclear arms to stop it. And we can do it again.

We also had climate change. We did something about that with the Paris Accord and now the US has stepped out of that, which is in my opinion, disaster. we need to get back to that point where we all sit on the same table and ⁓ about something that is gonna affect everything and everybody in every part of the world. Eleni Floros: I think also a big part is the purpose and life that we have and that a lot of people have when working, waking up in the morning and starting their day.

I think that is going to be a huge part as well, all these developments. So how will AI reshape society in the next five to ten years? Jerry: beyond recognition. And I say it with trepidation, it's concerning because first off, ⁓ already see now everybody's talking about there's gonna be ⁓ displacement, but it will be compensated with new jobs created.

⁓ get off that narrative, let's ⁓ that myth. For job that is gonna be created is gonna be a thousand job losses. ⁓ So you have 10,000 financial analysts working at Goldman Sachs, which can be replaced by 10 AI's or a thousand AI's or whatever, or a genetic AI, they aren't gonna do it because they just wanna save money and it works 24-7, never goes on holidays, doesn't get a bonus and it's a fraction of the cost. So from a logical perspective, if you're a business owner, you say, got plan A, I can reduce my costs by billions, why should I keep the people working?

Okay, fine. Then if you replace people and... People come out of universities, especially now, even in the UK, we have 5 % unemployment. And unemployment rate between the 20 and the 30 years old, they call them peeps, which is not in school, not in education, not in work.

It's to a million. It's a disgrace. What are these people gonna do? They spend time, and money to get an education.

⁓ They they are indebted. to have to pay back to universities where they did their courses and their studies and then they come out and you have to work at some fast food chain or delivery chain. It is absolutely a disgrace. And not only that, the worst part is how do you feel?

You must feel lost and hopeless knowing that you have no meaning, no purpose. So then the plan B comes out, will give everybody universal basic income. And I say to myself, really? Like, who's going to pay for it?

We cannot pay the bills like it is NHS. Who is going to pay for that? The big tech, the ones that are spending the trillions, they're going to stop building the data centers and give us trillions. And are we going to want to work for those companies that have taken our job away and are probably employing us to train the AIs that took our jobs away in the first place?

sounds dystopian. And there is... virtue in There is dignity in earning a living. For some people it means everything.

Not everybody is a coder. Not everybody wants to go into computer science and you know none of that. What you want is ⁓ you to have something that you like doing. Be it become a lawyer, become a doctor, become a ⁓ financial or might just want to become a chef.

⁓ or you want to become a star, a musician, an artist, whatever. So the thing that I say is, if you take all of that away, how are people gonna behave? And I can tell you right now, already have, it's already estimated by the World Health Organization that about 50 % of the world population has some kind of form of depression. We're gonna skyrocket that number.

People are gonna feel anxiety, stress and depression even more. There's going to be more depression, there's going to be more suicides, self-harm, people not seeing the purpose. And it will also backfire in the sense that, you know, we might even have anarchy, know, people that just don't want to conform to society anymore because they don't see a purpose. It's different if you have a purpose.

You could even want to be a military or you want to be a police officer, a fireman. We cannot have all of that replaced by robots. Certain professions... are handed down family wise.

Doctors, lawyers, people in the army, know, it goes on. Sports people, that their children become sports people, rock stars, that their children become rock stars, football players. These are cascading effects. So if you take it away, then the next generation, what they're going to do?

Like the generation that's coming now at the university, what are they going to do with their children or their offspring? So it's a very, very, very concerning ⁓ aspect. And I can only say that we should try to find a balance because I do believe collaborative intelligence where we ⁓ AI to the benefit of human intelligence but not the other way around. Eleni Floros: And should we slow down AI development?

Jerry: Slowdown would be ⁓ least you could do. ⁓ already talking pause. Last week I went as undercover journalist, investigative reporter to the AI ⁓ march at King's Cross in London and we were marching the machines and it was pause AI ⁓ and pull the plug. which I think is a little bit radical, you know, because everybody thinks silly that if you pull the plug everything stops and that's not gonna happen and that's not the way it goes.

So I went to that march, not parade, I'm sorry. And it was very interesting to talk to ordinary people on the street how they see things. ⁓ And everybody thinks AI is for scientists and for highly skilled professionals. No, it's gonna affect everybody.

And if you don't believe that, just go to your local supermarket and see how people are being replaced with self-checkout scanners ⁓ go to McDonald's and see how you, all the people that used to work there are now ⁓ where you tap away and even that is not even used anymore. Now you just go ⁓ your app when you walk in McDonald's and instead of having 10 people greeting you, you have one person just giving you out ⁓ orders ⁓ screaming out your number. So affecting everything and everybody and we cannot sit there and ignore it.

And then if we go everything online and if you start doing everything in big terms, high streets are gonna die out, little businesses are gonna die out. And those, the small business enterprises, the small startups, the shops, those is, that is the backbone of the economy. And you can only have growth when you have growth in that space. When high streets die out and people start going to shopping centers, that money doesn't stay in the UK necessarily.

It goes to the big owners of those shopping centers, which is... foreign companies and I have nothing against foreign companies but the money goes out of the country doesn't stay in here. Whereas if you have a small business mostly the company will use the money to buy things in the UK in the country that it's operating and it will employ local people that spend money locally and you have a circulation of the economy. It's a loop that you cannot ignore and it's a big loop.

The economy needs to circulate and instead of taxing the rich and they are going away to Dubai which is what is doing what's going on right now in the UK, not working out. ⁓ give people endless ⁓ support is not working out either. The only thing that we can change ⁓ create growth through productivity. And that's only going to come from people that get an education ⁓ get into some kind of work via internship, career, whatever, and then start working and producing something.

And we should support the startups that are coming up with great ideas that can help society. Eleni Floros: I think slowing down innovation is extremely difficult because it's a global race. you say, every big country wants to jump on that bandwagon. And if one country pauses, another will continue.

So the real focus should be on responsible development and governance. We need strong safety frameworks, transparency and accountability, rather than trying to stop progress entirely. How should governments regulate AI? Jerry: Well, I find all governments, the UK and the United States, are sleeping at the wheel.

They're driving down the road, full in the fast lane, blindfolded and nowhere. And it's no joke, it's really, really scary. And the problem is, we are used to old systems and old ⁓ acts ⁓ law will be... Eleni Floros: blindfolded.

Jerry: enacted in Parliament through the normal natural processes which takes years. You have committees and subcommittees agreeing, disagreeing. You have in the UK the House of Lords versus the House of Commons and they passed the bill back and forth. In the US you have Congress which is the Republicans, House of Representatives and Republicans then you have on the other side again the Senate, which is again the Democrats versus Republicans and they are all fighting and not getting along and the bills get passed back and forth.

⁓ you have 27 countries that need to decide on one certain a new parliamentary act from European Union. ⁓ All of that time. And by the time they come out with whatever they had in mind, it's already outdated, backdated, it's too late, we're already way further down the line and it doesn't make sense. So what we need to do is the politics need to change, we need to be fluid.

So basically they should come up with a framework that is there, that sets the basis and then they need to be able to change that immediately. And I'll give you an example. Grok came out where you could use their tool, their video tool and untress people and make videos out of it. And people did that and they made some horrible videos.

And the government jumped in immediately because that was a serious social problem. They jumped in immediately and stopped it. They passed laws immediately. They went to a grog.

They said, you've got to stop this. In France, they raided the offices across Europe. I mean, a lot of problems. But why does it have to...

come an accident or a problem before you even solve it. You have to preempt things. So you need to say on a very simple basis on a framework, whoever designs anything on AI is responsible for the outcome. And not only on a corporate level that they can just pay a fine of one million or a billion because if you are now a trillion dollar company like Google and you get a fine for one billion, it hurts but you one billion you just take it out of the...

three trillion that you have and you pay it and end of story. need to have personal liability all the way to the CEO. So the designer that designs or codes the algorithm is responsible for what he puts in. Any biases, everything, it's his responsible.

There's gotta be GRC, governance, risk management and compliance at all levels at any AI development and deployment and everybody should sign off for their part. in the chain of decision making. And anybody that does something serious doesn't just get a fine, they go to jail. And that's the best deterrent because if you're a CEO and you can choose between 10 years jail or pay 10 billion, you will say, well guys, let's pay the 10 billion because I don't feel like being one day in jail.

But if you know you're going to go to jail, it changes everything around. And this is like the big difference between GDPR for example, the AI ⁓ of the EU. With GDPR, you will get fined and Facebook and Google have gotten fined so many times that I can't keep track anymore. And they just pay off and they just keep on going like business as usual.

AI Act also, they're talking about ⁓ fining up to 7 % of global income or revenues. So that might be a ⁓ huge fine. But again, if you're a trillion dollar company, yeah, it's just one check. You just write it out, you give it.

end of story, you move on, you say, I'm sorry, it will never happen again. And one year later when you do it again, you say, oops, sorry, we didn't pay attention, we'll do it again. Somebody goes to jail, it changes the whole dynamic because then you know that you as CEO, you are in charge of everybody else and you need to make sure that they don't make mistakes. And it has to be that way because if you're the CEO of an airline and you let an airline fly uninsured or the pilot that is not qualified or there's not enough equipment on board and people die, you are going to jail.

So why not have that in AI, which is affecting every aspect of society, of life, every part of the world? So we need to change that around. ⁓ people must be personally liable for their actions, whatever they do, with regards to AI development and deployment. ⁓ the AI ⁓ which we should at least have here because the digital bill in the UK has been postponing indefinitely.

we don't even, it's not even going back and forth the ping pong table between the House of Lords and House of Commons, which is insane. should have that because in that act, it's specified that ⁓ AI development and deployment must be supervised by human beings. So the concept of human centric AI design is grounded into law and we should have that as well. in the UK and we should have that in the US because once we establish the benchmark, because AI Act is a sort of benchmark, just like the GDPR when it came out, even countries that had nothing to do with it, didn't design it, didn't sign for it, they are applying it because it becomes a global thing.

Because we all have to play by the same rules, just like we play by the same rules when we play international soccer or rugby. So that has to come from the governments. But again, we cannot have what they call Regulatory arbitrage between let's say the Europe UK and the US you cannot say okay well in here It's too complicated. Let's go to the US where it's easier and then the US comes out with the law and say ⁓ why stay here when we can do it in ⁓ Nigeria, you know, I'm just giving a crazy example or you go to Kazakhstan a lot of people did that with crypto they went from Malta went to Cyprus and then they went to Estonia and then they ended up in Kazakhstan.

So, you know, everybody's trying to avoid the laws and the rules and regulations. And this is where the AI Act does a really good thing, because it's very simple. It's not only being a European company working or operating in the 27 countries of the EU. If you provide any kind of service, let's say your Facebook or Google, if you provide any kind of service within the European Union, you have to abide by the rules and regulation of the EU Act.

So you can be from everywhere. You can be TikTok, you can be Google. You have to apply. And that we need that in the UK.

And after all, ⁓ the financial center of the world. ⁓ cannot be behind on everything like that. It's insane. So that's the biggest change that needs to happen as soon as possible.

Eleni Floros: So thank you very much, Jerry. think that brings us to the end of today's discussion on AI and its impact on society. And I think it's clear that artificial intelligence will play a major role in shaping the future. And the real challenge will be making sure that innovation happens in a way that is responsible, transparent and beneficial for society as a whole.

So thank you for tuning into Fintech Bytes. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe and share it with someone interested in the future of technology and finance. Jerry: Thank you very much, thank you for listening and bye bye from Fintech Bytes.