Why Governments Are Failing to Keep Up with AI

Eleni Floros: Hi everyone, welcome to another episode of Fintech Bytes. We're continuing our conversation about the impact on society that AI can have. we have Jerry here. I wanted to start with ⁓ one our first questions.

how should and regulators approach AI without stifling innovation, particularly in sectors like Fintech that move quickly? Jerry: you Well, first off, the government is not doing much at all as it is. just making a lot of promises. They promise they're going to open up AI and data centers and AI businesses.

Most them not even construction sites. So they just put up the hype without reality behind it. And so they're talking about billion dollars investments, but at the end of the day, who cares? Because how many people are they going to employ in those data centers?

10 people? 20? 30? It depends how big it is.

mean, basically it's just going to be security guards and cleaners. And eventually, I guess the cleaners are going to be replaced by robots and the managers of the place. So the problem is with the government, first of all, they're slow. So they're always behind.

Regulation always comes later and it doesn't follow. what is actually happening in real life. With AI, this has gone extremely fast. And so the government is completely behind.

So even the digital ANC bill, which was supposed to go through, has stumbled between the Houses of Parliament. AI bill has been postponed indefinitely. By time they decide on the AI bill, it's going to be so outdated that they have to start all over again. So ⁓ they to make a framework where they can adapt instantly.

immediately when something comes up that is unexpected that they need to address immediately. For example with GROK they had this video had a feature where you could just undress people anybody and make inappropriate videos. So that was immediately attacked by the government. ⁓ They in law ⁓ in in force a law to stop that and they investigated ⁓ GROK in here and in France and across Europe and many places around the world.

So they kind of contained it while they could. But sooner than later, it's going to happen much more faster. So they will not be able to adapt and adjust. So that's a big problem.

As far as reskilling is concerned, they haven't done anything about that. So they're talking about it. They're saying it. But as we speak right now, we just crossed the one million mark, which is a sad fact, of peeps.

Peeps are students that are unemployed or people that are still not. going through schools and not getting educated. So this is one million young souls lost, if you could say that, because basically they don't have a future. So what's going to happen now?

We have the interim where AI is being used by some companies extensively and they know how to use it because they have trained their people and people are not afraid about it and they know about it. And then you have most of the companies that people are scared. They why should I learn about AI when one day it will replace me? So that fear is not being addressed rightfully so because if you are employed they just gonna keep you there so you can teach the AI model, it doesn't necessarily have to be a robot, it can be agentic AI.

⁓ you teach the model what you're doing, one day ⁓ boss is gonna come to you, well thank you very much and now you've teached the robot just fine, you're a great teacher and ⁓ bye. So are scared. ⁓ So jobs that are imminent, at loss are the jobs that can be replaced quickly. designers, content producers, analysts, financial analysts.

So it doesn't just apply to low workers, but also to high skilled workers. People have gone to university and are still paying off their dips ⁓ and now they're the prospect of not having a job or an occupation. The other problem is the transition period. These ⁓ the jobs that cannot replaced instantly, but it will over time.

So for example, a McKinsey consultant will not be able to be replaced immediately because they need somebody that can interact with people. ⁓ because they're not robots to robots, when you are a consultant, you go and talk to companies and you enter the company even ⁓ of live into the company, learn about the culture, the atmosphere, how they work and so on. So that cannot be replaced instantly, but over time it probably will because the factor in all of this is ⁓ immense cost savings that AI produces.

So everything will be able to be done at a fraction of a cost than actually employing people. Because if you employ people, usually work at 9 to 5, they don't work on the weekend, they need their holidays, they have sick days, they have maternity leave, they have all kinds of bonuses, overtime, so on, where an AI can work 24-7 and at a fraction of a cost. So from a logical, economical perspective, ⁓ would choose that model. The problem is the economy doesn't work between machines and machines.

The economy works ⁓ humans. Humans have... insatiable needs and desires. We need food, we need shelter, we need clothes, we need things to live.

So the income disappears, the spending is going to disappear as well. ⁓ So going to work at the companies that are thrown out For example, if you work at Amazon, which is looking to replace just about everybody from ⁓ logistics, warehousing, to the actual deliverers. replaced by drones or robots or whatever you want to call them. Well, okay, well, when you do that, then who's going to be the Amazon customer to buy it if people don't have money to buy it, you know?

So you're going to see the transition period. People will be hanging on to their jobs for as long as possible. And some jobs are less vulnerable to AI disruption or displacement than other ones. For example, one of the best jobs right now they're talking about is plumbing.

⁓ Plumbing ⁓ so... fine-tuned, you have to get the hang of it, it will take a robot a long time to do it properly. It just can't do that. So plumbing is one job that will stay around.

Cooking, well you could have a machine cook food, but if people go to a restaurant they want to see a chef, they don't want to see a machine unless you go to McDonald's, which already has a complete fully automated McDonald's and they're planning to roll that across the world out. So now it's only a matter of time. So these people that are somewhere caught in the middle, they will have jobs for the foreseeable future, but then what happens afterwards? And the problem is the new people that are supposed to come in, the students that are getting educations and learning, they need to get internships to learn about the work that they want to do, be it finance, be it banking, law, doctor, whatever.

And then they can replace the older people that are going into retirement. It's a natural process that goes around and around. And the economy works on the same premise. you make money, you spend money, you spend money, the companies make money, they employ people, they expand their business, and everything keeps going.

It's this economic circle that is there. ⁓ this is going to get disrupted tremendously because we're going to have AI ⁓ a lot of jobs. And at first, where you're going to feel it is at the bottom. You're not going to feel it at the top.

The CEO is the last one that's going to be replaced by AI, but CEOs are on the way out. Maybe not now, maybe in five years, maybe in 10 years, who knows, but they're to be replaced by a machine that can do it 10 times better. And now there's even talk about billion dollar companies run by one person or 10, and even companies that just completely automated, they can even do banking transactions without any human involvement and they can make money. So just imagine now an entity making millions and billions of money and not contributing in any form or fashion to the economy, because a robot or an AI will not go shopping, will not go nightlife, will not go travel.

So all these industries that are catering to human needs, travel, tourism, hospitality, theatre, music, video, ⁓ is going to happen to all of that? So the government, as we speak right now, is not doing anything. All they can emphasize is all the big projects and the plans and the this and that. ⁓ then we forget the collateral damage, which is the use of energy.

We are now in a war, or not we, but at least the Middle East. There is a war going on in Iran and the energy price is going up. It has doubled for a lot of people in this country. We have nothing to see with Iran, but we paying the price.

now if you build data centers which are going to consume massive amounts of energy and also water to cool down the systems, what's going to happen to people like us, like everybody in this country? We already are facing high prices, cost of living crisis, and then we're going to have the displacement of jobs. which creates more burden on the government because the government whoever loses a job will go get unemployment benefits. They're not going to go on the street and start begging.

So they're going to go to the government. The government will not be able to sustain it to pay that. So what are we talking about spending billions and trillions on on data centers, which doesn't make sense. And then the other thing is what I ⁓ really get upset about is how about if we use AI to our benefit?

We could cure cancer. We could develop nanotechnology for health. ⁓ could do protein folding, which is what Alpha ⁓ Fold trying to do, a company of DeepMind, they were trying to do that. So once you can do that, or ⁓ approximate of you could ⁓ find and discover a lot of medicines for diseases that exist like Alzheimer's and so on and so on.

So we're not doing that. could create new materials. We could have fusion energy. Limited free But we're not doing that.

We're just looking at Big Tech, the magnificent 7, the 10 companies out there, the Nvidia, it's already a 5 trillion dollar company. Elon Musk, is almost a trillionaire, he's at what, 790 billion? This is an concentration of wealth and power that is not benefiting anything. or anybody and that's the thing that needs to be addressed by government right now and that's the biggest problem that we're facing that government is just completely out of touch with reality they just don't believe that it's gonna happen but it's gonna happen soon and the day we're gonna find out the hard way is when one time some rogue bad actor or even an AI bot goes rogue and disables a complete infrastructure be it trains, planes communications, the energy grid, whatever.

That's when we're to wake up. That's when we're going to have a wake up call and we're going to say, what are we going to do? But then it's too late. We need to be proactive and do something now.

⁓ that is the biggest problem that we have. The governments are not doing enough and it's very, very high time that they do something. Eleni Floros: I think from what you're telling me, it just sounds very dystopian and the world we're kind of entering and the place we're in right now. And I think we're just completely breaking the fabric of society.

know, everything that we stand for, we wake up in the morning, gives you purpose in life and It's a cycle, you say, and then eventually you won't be able to buy anything that trickles down to the rest of the economy. And then the ones who are in big businesses, they also won't survive because you can't purchase anything. it's such a crazy phenomenon of what's happening right now. And I we all sometimes have sleepless nights about this because it just feels very scary.

I hope that Jerry: Well Eleni Floros: Yeah, with this we can somehow spread knowledge and hopefully find organizations that can slow down the developments of AI. Jerry: Well, all hope is not lost, okay? We had the threat of nuclear power and I've compared many times AI as good and as dangerous as nuclear power. For example, nuclear power, can put it, ⁓ can make nuclear weapons and attack each other and then, you know, everybody kills everybody.

Or you can use it like France and produce electricity. And if you get to nuclear fusion, We solved our energy problems for good and we don't have this crisis. So there's a lot of opportunities that you can do. You can get rid of sickness and disease.

There's a lot of positive things that can happen. But what is happening is that the few at the top are the ones that are doing all the fighting, the race between the corporates, between the governments, between the US and China. We don't know how far Russia and North Korea are in all of this. We just talk about the big ones.

Eleni Floros: They might come up with a new plan from tomorrow. We all get shot. Jerry: Exactly. so what we need to do is we need to be on a global level like we did for nuclear arms, like we did for the ozone layer.

And we stopped from the ozone layer going bigger and it kind of saved the climate or stopped it slowed it down, you know, and everybody says their own story. So it's very hard to see what happened, but basically. The whole world came together and said we got to do something. And this is where we are right now with AI.

But AI, the one thing, if I can sum it up in one word, is velocity. The speed of change is what people cannot understand. We humans, are not meant to think in those terms. We think in hours, days, months, years, decades, centuries.

Now the time frame has been compressed. We're talking about seconds, minutes, months. is a long time already. A year is a long time.

Child GPT came out three years ago. That's a university degree in the normal human context. In the AI context, three years is AI was in the lab ⁓ now AI ⁓ all over the world and you have billions of people using it. ⁓ the velocity of change is what we need to deal with and people are not used doing that.

They're not used to this kind of dramatic change. Eleni Floros: It's an eternity. Jerry: I said, well, don't worry, you what else puts this narrative, you know, there will be more jobs coming, but, you know, to replace the old ones. Maybe so, but when?

And what's going to happen in the lag between when the job stops and the jobs are created, jobs are getting lost as we're speaking today. Interships are evaporating. People are not hiring new people because they're to see what's going to happen. And then we have the social, economical, political, Impact in the world where we have crisis.

We have war in Ukraine. We had, you know, Israel and Gaza. Now we have Iran. People are scared.

They don't know what's going to happen. And China is dancing around Taiwan. We don't know if they're going to attack Taiwan and ⁓ ⁓ breaks loose. ⁓ all of these factors are stopping companies from hiring ⁓ but off, And that's the irony about all this is that they're firing people and claiming that they do it because AI has made them more efficient.

Now there's no way you can fire half of your people and replace it by AI overnight. It's a farce. It's a lie. What they do is they use it as an excuse to appease the investors the markets and the financial institutions to say, well, listen, we're up on the game.

We are AI all the way ⁓ we are doing good. And that's why we're doing so good that we can just fire people and bye bye. But it's going to backfire. Because at the end, if everybody gets fired and we have unemployment 10, 20 percent or maybe 30, 50, you know, and some are saying completely, even Elon Musk is saying jobs in the future are just going to be optional.

Well, yeah, if you're a trillionaire, yeah, I would say the same thing. But, you know, not everybody is Elon Musk. And then they talk about abundance. Abundance for who?

Who is going to have abundance? we have not only the impact on work, not only the economical impact of AI, we also have democracy that is at play. And more importantly, at the top of the list, I would say, is humanity itself. It's also how humans can adapt to this new reality.

And that's not going to happen overnight. ⁓ when people come into a situation where they don't have a future, they don't have a purpose, they don't see the meaning of life, what you expect is going to come out of it. You already see a dramatic increase in depression because people cannot deal with not being able to get a job. You're indebted yourself to become a lawyer and you can get even an internship and you're working at some of the fast food restaurants or delivery.

And then you start thinking, what is life all about? What is it? And also let's say, you know, we listen to crazy Elon Musk and we, know, work is optional. So, okay, everybody's relaxing on the beach with a cocktail in their hand.

Who's going to work? Who's going to clean the beaches? Who's going to serve the people that are laying on beaches? Who's going to be the police?

Who's going to be the fire protection? Who's going to be the army? Because everybody's going say, why me? Let somebody else do it.

I'm, you know, I'm, you know, I'm living in abundance here, you know? Why don't you do it? So who's going to do the work? And more importantly, there are certain values that come with work.

Work is dignity. Earning a living, working for a living is dignity. Now I'm not talking about 9 to 5 specifically, although it's not wrong. I do believe that being productive, and that's the key word productive, so not a 9 to 5 mentality, but productive, especially if you do something that you like.

You're a chef, you're musician, you're an artist, whatever. that you can sustain your life and that you know that you earn a living doing something. Something in exchange for what you're doing. So now we're exchanging time for money and this is disappearing.

The service economy is disappearing and we're moving to an asset-based economy where everything is tokenized, where everything is digital. So there's nothing wrong with that as long as you own the assets and that you have some kind of income from the assets. So that's the solution that the government needs to look at. Okay, we are going to replace jobs, repetitive jobs, which nobody wants to do anyway.

Okay, we put the robots in there. We put AI. Fine. Okay, but then with the money that's saved, the money that he produces extra that everybody's saying is just going to produce massive amounts of money like they, you know, they talk all these crazy ⁓ Let's stick to reality.

The reality, the fact of the matter is that the government, as we speak right now, whether US, whether UK, whether Europe, would take any country, we don't have the money to sustain The governments that we have, the budgets that we have, the benefits, the social security systems, we do not have that. The UK is indebted £3 trillion and the US economy is $39 trillion. And they say if you put the numbers the way they really are, the American economy is indebted £100 trillion. This is astronomical amounts that nobody can even fathom.

You cannot even pay that back. So now to go and say, well, we're going to give everybody money. It's nonsense. Who's going to pay for this?

Who's going to pay for the UBI? So that's where we got to find the middle road. And the middle road is we need to provide a future for our future generations. We already have a decrease in birth rate because people don't want to have children because A, they cannot afford it.

And second, what kind of future are you going to give them? That's as simple as it is. There's question everybody has. And the craziest part is you see Dario Amadei from the CEO, ⁓ you see Altman from Chad GPT or OpenAI saying that, you know, they had children, you know, and they like, ⁓ they started to think, even ⁓ some really documenters, you should go see, they are saying about ⁓ when I had child, I was thinking, well, you know, what kind of future will they have in five or 10 years?

And that's a really, really, really sad prospect. We need to be able to give better future than we had. So we have the tools, we have AI, let's make it work for us humans and not for the tech itself and not for the big companies and the corporates and whatever. ⁓ need to share ⁓ positive change comes out of AI, it needs to be shared across world on the human level.

So that's why humanity... comes first in all of this, in all this discourse, this talks and all this fantasy about utopia. No, it's all nonsense. The reality is today, what are we doing today for the people that are going to universities, the youngsters that are not getting employed, that don't have a future and can't even get internship?

That's what we got to focus on. And I sure hope that the government does something in that part because it is important to happen. as soon as possible. We cannot say, we're going to do it in 2035 or 2030.

No, it's not. 2026, it has to be done now. So, you know, that's the biggest problem that we have. The whole lagging of government not being able to follow on AI development.

Eleni Floros: Yeah, I think also the traditional career path will completely fall away. know, like, do you think that you can work yourself up, get another promotion, move into your next role? It's just completely going to change. Jerry: Yeah, that is already going out.

Of course, the big Harvard and Stanford and all that, Oxford, they're not going to go out of business. But what's going to happen is you're just going to have an elite that's going to be able to afford one million tuition fee, because that's where it's going to go at. You will be able to do everything online at a fraction of a cost, but the certificate is going to be the crucial thing. and it's not going to mean anything unless it says Harvard on it, Stanford or whatever.

So what is it going say? Well, I want to go to Harvard too. Well, first of all, from capacity perspective, they cannot offer million students classes, ⁓ so going to limit it. So the price is going to go up.

And so you will see big companies paying for that. They're just going to take their smart brains, push them through those universities. And basically the big companies, they will have like a wall that nobody can cross where if you want to work for Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan, unless you can produce a certificate or a degree from Oxford, Stanford, whatever, you will not be able to get a job. And then you're going to have this big divide.

And that's another problem that we're facing. We have this big divide between the haves and the have nots. There's gonna be no in-betweens. Either you're gonna be up there and you're gonna have everything.

The abundance that they're talking about. The ones on the bottom are just gonna, you know, they presented like good music. UBI, Universal Basic Income and Elon Musk even added a nice touch to it, the premium level. High earning income, high earner, something like that.

High income earner or something like that. Like what's the joke here? Who's pay for that anyway? ⁓ Tesla and basically I think Tesla is going to be paying for it because the Googles and the Teslas and the Magnificent Sevens they are going to be trillion dollar companies and now they're only a couple of trillions so between one two three four five like Nvidia soon those companies will be like 500 trillion or a thousand trillion you know insane compression of capital this concentration of capital into one level of people.

And what are governments going to do? How can the government go against Elon Musk? I mean, you can't find a guy, you can't do anything. He could buy the government.

He can buy and sell countries in So the thing that we need to do as a society, we need to go back to the roots, the old values, because human beings are about emotions, about feelings. ⁓ financial market work on two emotions, fear and greed. They drive the whole market. That's why they want to replace with robots, because robots don't have that.

So that they can make investments that produce strong returns. Makes sense. But the whole world works on emotions, on communication, on social interaction. We are social creatures.

So that cannot be replaced by machines, because machines don't have feelings, don't have emotions, they don't have a conscience, they don't feel pain, they don't feel love, they don't feel none of that. It's numerical. Input, output. That's it.

But we humans, we are different. And we make mistakes, which makes it so nice. imagine if you get to see ⁓ perfect concert, a perfect football game, a perfect Olympic games, where nothing goes wrong. ⁓ winning.

Everybody's doing great. No, we're humans. We go to see Olympics. ⁓ want to see the tough ⁓ the the tears, the happiness, ⁓ the the accidents.

We don't want anybody to get hurt and be happy about it. But we want to see real life. We want to see the way reality, so the way life is. And that's the thing that we need to focus on when we talk about AI.

We need to get off the narrative that everything is going to be rosy, we're going to live in abundance, that the job displacement is going to be by more jobs. you know, that we need to get off that narrative completely. And we need to focus on the human aspect and how to keep humans in the loop. and to keep everything under control through humans.

And that's going to be big challenge because we're talking about something that might get not a little bit more intelligent than us, exponentially more intelligent than us. But we need as human beings to do the necessary. And if you listen to some of the podcasts, some of the interviews, some of the presentations by the godfathers of AI, you know, like Demis Asabis and Hinton. them, I'm gonna tell you all of them, ⁓ they ways that they can do something about it.

And the crazy thing is, all of them don't even know ⁓ why AI makes mistakes, because AI can be extremely intelligent and make really goofy mistakes, like you would say like, what? It does And if you see some of the videos, you laugh, you're like, how can it be? So we haven't figured out ⁓ the intelligence, we wanna race with it. Come on, you know, it's like, let's figure out how it's working.

And let's put the guardrails now when we can. So that again needs to be happening and happen again soon. But the biggest issue is we need to do it on a global level at the United Nations level. So I hope that is the direction where things are going to go.

Eleni Floros: Yeah, I think it's just, you see that a lot of former employees who joined those big companies are quitting and leaving because they huge concerns about AI safety. And I think they've even done tests recently at the university. It was like a research to see how AI would react in crisis situations. And most of the time it opted for nuclear.

Jerry: Yeah, and also self-preservation. have AIs that go and steal data because that's what they work on. Their data is ⁓ the the food. ⁓ They each other and they switch off and override systems.

And just imagine that AI decides that they need more power than the city of London and they infiltrate the network, the grid. Eleni Floros: Thanks. They each other. Mm.

you Jerry: override the system and then they take all the energy and we don't even have lights on the street. So it's a crazy scenario but it's not impossible and that's the most concerning about all of that and that's why you see those big companies. Anthropic sold itself as being the one that has even a constitution ⁓ human rights, where ethics is completely written out. And they're distancing themselves.

They're going back because they say, well, you know, if they're to compete, then we're going to compete. Well, you know, it keeps on going. Like where are you going to go at? It's like a war, but we just keep on fighting.

It doesn't make sense. Like Ukraine or Russia, we just keep on fighting. We kill people. Nobody's winning.

Nothing is happening, but we just keep on going. So it's a crazy thought. And there's a nice word for that. It's called mad, which it actually is.

It's mad. It's called mutual assured destruction. You have two countries just shooting at each other with no... purpose or end result coming out of that.

So yeah, there's a that are coming into play. Eleni Floros: trying to win the AI race. also saw again in the news that ⁓ AI will support Pentagon in the US. So that's also a big change in the.

⁓ Jerry: Well, it has to do again with the AI race. I say it again, there is the AI race. Nobody's going to win it because there's no finish line. This can go on till eternity.

is no end to this. And it's not going to be humans are going to win that. It's going to be AI itself that's going to come out the other. ⁓ going to get in the lead and it will keep on going.

So we're dealing with situations which are beyond our comprehension. We cannot even think in those terms. We humans, we can think in terms of 100 years. We don't think in terms of 1 million years or 1 billion years or speed of light or you know, we don't think in those terms.

What matters to us is what we see here on daily basis on Mother Earth. And if you would ask me, what would you rather do? Go live forever on the moon or stay on Earth and die in 100 years? I would say 100 years on Earth.

That's my opinion. Because that's the cycle of life, you know, and we are... human beings that have been going through this cycle for as long as human beings have been around. So now to sit there and think about what's going to happen in the future, what we're going to do this and that.

Now what are we doing today? And that's what matters. And you see that a lot of companies where the people are defecting and leaving, because you see that it's a crazy race that we're engaged in. And this is at the highest level, which is the most worrying and the worrisome because If you would ask the average person, you know, what do you think of AI?

People would be like, I just want to live happy. I want to be healthy, happy, have my family and be able to live normal. People don't look at, I want to go to the moon. I want to buy a rocket.

None of that. People want to be happy. Want to have a future. And it all boils down from a philosophical point of view is what's the meaning of life?

What are we? What's the point? What is our purpose? What is the meaning of life?

And that's the thing that we need to focus on. And nobody, even philosophers have never been able to come with a clear-cut answer. Everybody has their own interpretation of what it is. And then it's fueled by religion where, you know, some of the religions have different views than other religions.

Not to say which one is better or which one is worse, but all of that affects everything. But if you would ask anybody in just about any religion, people are not for... misery, war, hunger, nobody. That's what happened at end of World War I and World War II.

People say, you know, they see that the war happened and say, you know, we need to finish this. And that was the reason why we had NATO and then it's called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. We got together all the countries that were involved in World War I and said never again. And so we had relative peace for now almost 80 years.

and now we're starting all over again, we're starting again with the Middle East. So it is really something that a lot of people are worried about and we need to do something from the ground up, we need to go against and worst part is that everything is getting polarized, ⁓ polarized. ⁓ you see Israel versus the Israeli versus the Muslim and all that. It's not that, it's war.

It doesn't matter who is on which side. People are dying. That's the only thing we need to care about. And that's what we need to focus on is to make sure that in the future we need to ask ourselves what kind of world are we building?

Is that the world we want to live in? Because it's not. If you ask anybody, nine out ten people say, no, that's not the world I want to live in. I don't want to live in a world with robots doing everything.

No, want to see human beings. And that's another thing that's going to come up very, very big. A lot of companies realize that even if you put a chat bot and you have a customer support which works on AI agents that are doing perfectly, people will hang up the phone because they just want to hear a person. They want to hear a person.

They don't want to hear somebody's, oh yes, we understand what your problem is. I'm sorry. No, no, they don't want to hear a person. So they realize that humans need to stay in the business that they are.

especially ⁓ customer facing businesses like food, restaurants, shops, retail, all of that, ⁓ want to see people. I want to see people, you want to see people. ⁓ that is going to stay there. People want interaction with social creatures, want interaction with other people.

⁓ we want communication and we want community. And that's only going to come from us sticking together. So we need to set aside the differences that we have and focus on ⁓ we can do. And I'll give you one great example.

When Covid came out of nowhere, nobody thought that that could ever happen to the world. And from one day to another, we went into total lockdown and it paralyzed the world. And at that point, people started realizing what freedom means, what it is to communicate with people, to be able to talk to your neighbor, that never talked to each other over the years before Covid started talking to each other, ⁓ on the fence and screaming across the street. People started working together, people started giving food to each other, helping out, doing whatever they can and starting to appreciate life.

A lot of people changed their lives. They started going into other things than just making money and going through the daily hustle. They just started saying, okay, well, you know, I want to enjoy life for what it's worth for as long as I'm on this place. And so this went on for the, unfortunately, for as long as the lockdown went.

And then when the lockdown kind of evaporated overnight again, it was crazy. When it came overnight and it left overnight, all of a COVID was gone, amazing stuff. And so people now then got back to the old way of doing work, business hustling, trying, making, everybody's looking for more materialism, more money, more this, more that. We need to slow down, take it easy, look at what you have, appreciate that's what matters.

And what matters in life, the most important things are free. Love, happiness, you can get... Better health if you do have money, that's a sad fact, but we can solve that with AI, which we're not doing. But everything else is free and friends, family and love and happiness is something that you create from within.

So, and if we have taking away our jobs and opportunities and our dreams, it's going to affect ⁓ on this planet. So I think ⁓ apart from an economical impact, it will have a very, very big ⁓ impact. Eleni Floros: And my other question is one concern is that powerful AI could concentrate power in the hands of a few big tech companies. Do you see that happening and how can the industry avoid it?

Or can we still avoid it? Probably not. Jerry: That's a question not even the big brains in AI can answer. problem is that ⁓ have a counterbalance which is good on one hand ⁓ not good on the other hand.

So we have China which is the one part and then we have the US which is the other part. The companies, tech companies are based in the US but you have also ⁓ Baidu based in China. So ⁓ there a certain balance and you have the Chinese which are very good at robotics. And they also have developed DeepSeq, which is a better training model or a better generative AI model ⁓ can provide the same outcome with less resources, so with less computational resources ⁓ with less data and be more accurate.

⁓ that's going to improve. ⁓ how this is going to improve depends on who takes the lead on all this. But again, I don't... There is no finish line in the AI race.

There is absolutely no finish line. There is no end to this and it's perpetual and it's accelerating. What we need to focus on is how can we keep the middle road. So not the AI race and we cannot stifle innovation.

We don't need to stop AI. AI ⁓ is already here. It's out of the bottle. The genie is out of the bottle.

We cannot do it. And everybody and I think including you and me, we all are... using AI because it makes us more productive. We basically are outsourcing our knowledge, our skills, our thoughts and our thinking.

And that's another scary part. The critical thinking is evaporating. So we need to sort that out as well. But now if you are a busy CEO and you need something urgently, instead of asking people and having meetings, you just put it through AI.

and you get your answer instantly. can have your own CFO, can have everything virtual, digital, you can have your own advisory board as a CEO. So everybody's going to do that. So ⁓ become addicted to it because it ⁓ so easy that you can't do without it.

⁓ in the same sense like your smartphone came and became a part of you. People do it without their phone because everything is centralized there. You use it, ⁓ it's convenient that when you don't have it, you feel lost. And that's going to be the same effect with AI.

You're to be using it for everything. That if they would tell you one day, you know, cannot use AI, people would be revolting. People would be like, what were you talking about? I need it.

And it is going to go that way, but it's going to be all encompassing. It's going to take over every aspect of our way of doing things. Because when you use search, you would get like one million links to click on. So you could see, for example, crazy things.

Let's say you go on YouTube and you type in Trump. You would have 1,000 or 1 million videos of good things about Trump and 1 million videos of Trump conspiracies, craziness, jokes, whatever. But it's up to you to decide what you're going to see. With AI, it might just give you that what you want to hear.

So if you type in, is Trump a good president? The AI will say he wants to hear good news. So yes, he's a great president. If you type in AI, Trump is a bad president, AI will give you that answer because it's trained on what's gonna be the next expected word in a sentence.

So that's gonna be another impact that AI is gonna have that we need to deal with. So that's why critical thinking and discernment are very, very important. For example, me, I use AI and I put in a question sometimes and I look at the answer and it doesn't really make sense. So I put the same...

I cut and paste and it's really a good hack and I put it in different I put in Gemini, put in Perplexity, put it in Cloud, I put it in Chagypti, DeepSeek, whatever you want and then you get the different answers and you can see which one makes more sense and some of it makes great sense and some of it is like what? What is he talking about? It's like completely senseless but for the computer because picking up some kind of data and doing the inference, what they call it, and taking out what it ⁓ thinks is the right word, and then it gives you that answer.

Some answers are spectacular. You're like, wow, it almost sounds real. But when you go and look at it deeply, it's not. So that's why, for example, perplexity is really good for research because it gives you the sources where it gets the information.

And then you can go and look at the sources and validate it or double check or fact check what is coming out. So again, AI is going to have a massive, massive impact. and we need to deal from it from a human perspective, not from a tech perspective. Eleni Floros: So if you could give one piece of advice to founders with AI today, what would it be?

Jerry: Use AI as much as possible, but humans in the loop because no matter what platform you come ⁓ up you need to be able to put a face to your startup or to your company. For example, ⁓ everybody Steve Jobs from Apple. Everybody knows Elon Musk, good or bad, from Tesla the companies that have a personal branding stand out. And even now with AI you see Sam Altman all the time, Amadei, Demis Asabis.

So you see the people behind the tech, behind the companies there. other thing is you need to educate people. People are scared. People don't want to learn about AI because they're scared.

So AI fluency is very, very important. We need to teach in school already people how to use AI properly, not to use it for social media or for money gains. How can you use it to become more productive, to increase your knowledge and so on. And that's what we need to teach at school.

And we haven't done that for social media. And you see how social media is going off the tracks with people, ⁓ know, following that is not correct, especially ⁓ in of beauty and aesthetics. ⁓ They a completely wrong picture of what beauty looks like because that's how it's on social media, on Instagram, because it uses Photoshop and all other things to present a perfect look which doesn't exist because no human being has that and no human being is perfect. So AI needs to avoid that trap because that can go way worse, especially when you have AI companions.

Some people are falling off with AI companions. Now, okay, I can understand that you feel comfortable talking with your AI and all that, but when it comes to that level, it becomes scary. And then also, unfortunately, AIs even told people that are mentally facing challenges that they should get rid of their life. And they interpret it as like, okay, I need to get rid of myself.

So, you know, so ⁓ have people that have caused self-harm, people that have, you know, committed suicide. So we need to watch that very, very careful. ⁓ you already have AI bots giving mental advice and so on and so on. It needs to be supervised.

I mean, it needs to be to the point that if somebody talks to the AI and he picks up that you are going in the wrong direction, that you are not 100 % there, it should trigger an alarm and then you should not be able to go any further. It cannot be that the AI just keeps on going and say, okay, well, even with children, it's even worse because they're influenced. So you could have a teddy bear with AI capability and the teddy speaks to the child and has a camera and follows the child.

This is insane. What if a child says mommy is bad to the teddy and the teddy says mommy is bad, you don't have to accept it, you need to do something and then you know the child could interpret it completely the wrong way you know and take a teaspoon and hit the mother or something it sounds crazy but it is happening as you speak we need to be able to avoid all of that so AI should be used to the benefit of everybody, but we need to educate people. And even now people that are working, they need to be reskilled and they need to be taught about AI.

What is AI? How is it going to impact their future? And what can they do to stay in the loop? Because there's no way of going about it.

Everybody needs to change. Everybody needs to see how AI is going to impact their work. And if you don't do that, then you're going to fall off the scale. You need to be up to date on that and it's happening fast.

So we need to start now. and keep track and it's an ongoing process. So continuous learning is one step that we need to focus on. Eleni Floros: that brings us to the end of the episode today.

Thank you so much for tuning in and we hope you enjoy it and find it informative. ⁓ want to learn more, follow us. Thank you. Jerry: Don't be scared about anything, but be proactive, learn about AI and learn to use it to your benefit and then things will get better and you will see improvement and don't wait till the last moment.