Is AI killing jobs or are CEOs using it as an excuse?

Speaker A: So I had to do an episode about AI and layoffs. It's kind of all we see these days, so. And so company is laying off 10,000, 2,300 and AI is the reason. AI is the cause, AI gets blamed. Is that really true? The worst thing about so many of the situations is that uh, it comes right after a company announces amazing quarterly results, record quarterly results, billions of dollars in profit. Super annoying that they take that opportunity to lay off people. Each and every one of those layoffs is an actual person, probably with dependents, maybe kids, maybe a spouse, maybe others who depend on him or her. Really, really annoying. But is AI really at fault here? I've been chatting with somebody who says maybe m not actually. His name is Mike Elgin. He's a long time tech journalist, columnist, author, editor, podcaster. He was the editor in chief of Windows magazine, longtime columnist for Computer World, Forbes, PC World, eWeek, Datamation. His name is Mike Elgin. And we're going to have a pretty wide ranging conversation that's pretty fun but centered around AI jobs and careers. Enjoy.

Speaker B: So we're going to get into all this stuff. AI is causing job loss. Is it going to cause overall job loss or sections of the economy will have job loss all itself? Maybe. Let's start with who the heck are you?

Speaker C: My name is Mike Elgin. I'm a tech writer. And um, I've been uh, in the technology journalism space for, since the 90s.

Speaker B: That's a while.

Speaker C: Yeah, it's a while. And uh, so I write opinion columns about technology and um, the higher the better in terms of the high tech uh, stuff. So right now I'm focusing on AI, robots, R V R, visual computing. And then I get in all kinds of obscure high tech stuff like you know, brain implants, all that, everything that was the tropes of late 20th century Cyberpunk fiction that's coming real now that I'm into it.

Speaker B: Very cool. So we'll see you in as part of the Borg soon, I guess. Maybe. Absolutely.

Speaker C: Existence is futile.

Speaker B: Exactly. I know, I know. So the reason I wanted to have a chat with you is I saw one of your opinion columns and you were saying, hey, AI is not going to cause mass job loss. And I want you to explain that the way that you explain that and the way that you see that. Because of course there's lots of instances where we see companies saying hey, we're laying off this many thousand people, this many hundred people, and it's because of AI Just haven't seen one. I'm in the layoffs subreddit. I don't know why, but just happen to see it. It's big these days and there's this one company in digital, uh, tech for, for uh, medical, dental stuff and they say we're laying off 500 people. Our AI systems have fundamentally changed how work gets done at Innovacker Innovacer to the point where entire workflows that once required teams now run autonomously. We have built systems that automate complex end to end processes, blah, blah, blah, blah. So give me your perspective that you shared in your column.

Speaker C: Okay, so basically the reason we believe that AI ah, will cause mass layoffs is because people say that out loud. I mean, you know, uh, who says this? Basically it's the people trying to sell you AI mostly. And what they're, what they're really saying. The subtext is that we'll, we're going to make you or company way more efficient. And all those pesky employees that are so problematic and uh, expensive, you can have fewer of those and get even more done with AI. And so that's, that's one set. The other set are the people like you mentioned who, who literally announce layoffs and say that the reason they're laying people off is because they're so much more efficient with AI. This is a phenomenon that I believe is mostly uh, something they call AI washing. So somebody like Jack Dorsey, right, Who, who's the CEO of Block, former, formerly of Twitter, laid off a ton of people, right? It was like the third massive layoff that he's done at that company. But the first two happened before the LLM revolution was really going. And the most recent one, he chimed in and said the same thing that many of them say, which is this time it's because of AI, uh, efficiencies and basically what, what are uh, CEOs, what are their challenges? Who are their constituencies? Their constituencies are investors, the board of directors mainly and to a certain extent their ego is at play. Their peers in the industry. And it's, you know, companies do layoffs all the time and it's terrible to. Basically when you announce huge layoffs as a CEO, you're announcing your failure, right? Your failure to grow. You hired people with intentions to use those people and not lay them off. And then you have to lay them off to save money. And so AI has offered this wonderful fig leaf. Basically you can say we're not laying people off because I failed. We're laying people off because I'm a genius and have figured out how to use AI to get the Same amount of work done with fewer people. Okay? And this is a great story because you, you, you get to cut all these people and look like a hero instead of a, instead of a failure. So that, that's the, the, that's the second, uh, part of it. The third one is the sort of this techno utopians who say that. And you know, sometimes they're in industry, sometimes they're science fiction writers, sometimes they're other people who say that in the future AI is going to be so,

Speaker B: um,

Speaker C: good at replacing the jobs that people do that people won't have to work. We'll all get like, you know, uh, universal basic income and we'll just sit back and go to the beach and AI will do all the work. Okay? So all these people seem to agree on this basic, uh, idea. The problem with it is that there are many problems with it. So one of them is that there's no evidence for this. Like people say, wow, uh, we've been using ChatGPT and it's like super amazing and it can do all this stuff. Therefore we'll be able to like build entire companies based on agentic AI. In the cases where people have tried to do this, it hasn't worked out well. Companies that have done big layoffs and tried to, in earnest to replace people with AI, what they found, and there's actually been a lot of research published since I wrote that column that you mentioned, basically pointed out that like, it went really badly. Like you need, you need people to, to run AI. The second problem is a problem of logic. So when people like Jack Dorsey and Meta and all the people who say that they're going to cut people because they're more efficient with AI, this doesn't pass the test of reasonableness because what companies are trying to do, if you, if you, uh, if you're Mark, Mark Zuckerberg's entire career since he was at Harvard was to take a small company and make it a big company and take a big company and make it a gigantic company.

Speaker B: Right?

Speaker C: In terms of what you can accomplish, how dominant you are in the industry and all that sort of thing, they're all trying to grow and become more dominant in the industry. If you have a technology that, let's say it doubles the productivity of every employee, okay, you use that technology to double the productivity of the company. You don't say, yeah, we're just going to keep doing the same amount of productivity. We like where we're at. We don't want to grow, we just want to stay where we're at and save a lot of money on employees, okay. Suddenly they have an entirely different program, entirely different goal in life which uh, is not to grow as fast as they can. Right? So that makes no sense. And so I just, and, and then, and then the, the big one of the biggest reasons of all is we've been here a million times. When cars were replacing horses, when electricity electrified all the things that used to be manual, when farm equipment meant we met, we uh, needed fewer farmers. When, when the computer revolution happened, when, you know, when the mobile revolution. Every single time there's a huge leap in technology where we can't, it's so new and moving so fast, we can't tell where it's going. We say, well everybody's gonna lose their jobs. And it usually the opposite happens. There are a lot more jobs, better paying jobs associated with the new technology. Right? The buggy whip manufacturers went out of business when cars came in, but man, were a lot of new jobs in the car industry.

Speaker B: Cool. On your second point there on the failure and not admitting failure, there's a big proof point for what you said in Jack Dorsey's own company Walk, that five months before he did the layoffs, he held a single party, one party for the entire company that cost $68 million. September 2025, $8 million party. They had stars out. They had, it was, it was, it was insane. Five months later, laid off 4,000 people, 40% of their workforce. Another point I'll say is nothing burns me more than something that's pretty common these days where you see company announces, great financials, they grew, profit grew. It was some enormous number, some multiple billions. And they laid off, right? And they're just pandering to shareholders, stock market, whatever it might be. That, that annoys me. I will say this, however, actually one more point in your favor. I was talking to a CEO probably about two months ago and I was talking about this topic and he's saying companies that lay off people because of AI lack imagination. That resonates with your third, which was, you know what? We can be more productive, we can do more things, we can do better things. Um, if you look at software, there's a lot of shitty software out there and there's no excuse for it anymore. With AI helping you to code stuff way quicker and way better and test it and all that stuff. There's no excuse for that. So there's a lack of imagination about more to do, being more productive, getting more done adjacent markets, whatever it might be. If you have this talent and you have new resources from AI. Okay, all points in your favor. A counterpoint. There just are cases where there's inefficiencies where people paper was pushed around and we digitized companies 20, 30 years ago and that changed things. I don't think that affected employment that much, but it affected certain types of employment. Maybe that's a point in your favor. There are cases today where we're using AI and that uh, enables some workflows and that probably changes, if not eliminates some people's jobs. And uh, that might be the case in this medical dental one. Right. Where they're just automatically ingesting forms and other things like that. So I'm sure you probably can see there's places where we'll lose jobs. I think your overall point is overall we're going to grow the pie. Is that correct?

Speaker C: Yeah. And specifically the industries that do the replacing tend to be much more job intensive than the thing they're replacing. So for example, if you look at, you know, I grew up in the state of California. California is a financial powerhouse globally. It just passed Japan. If it was a country it would be richer than Japan. Japan has a population million people.

Speaker B: 140 I believe.

Speaker C: 140, that sounds about right. And, and um, and California has a population of under 40 million. And yet California is richer than Japan, richer than Italy, richer than France, richer than. So ah, every country except the U.S. china and Germany, uh, I think, or Britain, I don't know one of them. And um, and, and why is that? Well one of the reasons is uh, some of it is inflation, inflated uh, net worth from the AI startups. Okay. But a lot of it is technology and things related to techn. Computer technology, including aerospace, a bunch of other things. A um, lot of his agriculture and other things as well. But my point is that, that when the computer revolution, because I'm the computer, the PC, let's call it the PC revolution, when we went from only specialists using computers to everybody using computers, that was a big transition in human culture and that was one that everybody is afraid, okay, everybody's going to lose their jobs because fewer, you know, a fewer number of people can do more work with these computers. Well it's actually the computer industry that's driving. Everybody wants their own Silicon Valley. Everybody in the world would kill to have Silicon Valley. Why? Because this industry that replaced the analog way of doing things in business is the most lucrative thing on the planet. And that was true of the automobile industry. Less of today. But like when the automobile, when you know, Henry Ford and all that stuff. In the, in the, in the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s, the auto industry was a major, major industry. Okay. And way bigger than horse and buggy industry and the horse and carriage industry and all the other things that uh, and, and the pedestrian industry, whatever that is. And so um, these new industries that, that, that threatened to take away all the jobs actually end up creating massive amounts of jobs. And by the way, this is true of energy as well. If, if you, from you know, fossil fuel energy to clean energy involves an energy where there's a lot of people employed to uh, to, to an energy type that, where tons of people employ. Yes. And so you know, it's just you talked about a lack of imagination. Like we, nobody can see the future, uh, of where uh, it's going in terms of where technology will lead us. It always leads us in strange places. And I'll give you an example. You know I, I mentioned I started in technology in the 90s. Well, cell phones were like a brand new thing back then. Nobody imagined when we had these like Nokia phones and when we went from pagers to, to cell phones. Nobody imagines sort of the live streaming industry, the influencer industry, all these um, gazillions of things that result. We know, realize that militaries would use cell phones for communication.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: A thousand things nobody even thought of, not even science fiction writers. And so when you talk about AI, AI is a particularly colossal event in the, in the history of human technology. 90% of what happened, you know, that's not a real number based on anything, but I would guess that about 90, you know, more than 90% of the things that will happen as the result of AI, nobody has ever predicted. And so there, so it's one thing to say for somebody to claim that AI won't cut like you know, increase unemployment, let's say. So that's a, that's a unreliable statement, but it's a very reliable statement to say there's no reason to believe that's going to happen.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: There's no good reason to believe that's going to happen. And the people who have made that claim don't have, they don't have anything to stand on because basically they're talking about the future. You know, where AI will take us in three years.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: Where has it taken us in the last three years? How much has changed things.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: Uh, in the next three years, 10 years, 30 years. This is impossible to predict. And to predict that the result will be nobody will be have, you know, have Jobs, you, you just don't have the data on that. And so I, that, that's a, that's a stronger. I think that's a more solid claim to make to say that the people who are predicting this stuff don't have. It's not based on, on good evidence.

Speaker B: The interesting thing about the changes that you're talking about here is the speed, right? You talked about a number of different revolutions, right? The car revolution was 50, 60 years in the making, right? The, the PC revolution 20 years in the making, right? As, as the first micro PCs came out and they started, you know, not. It wasn't this big thing in a machine, in a room. It was a thing you carry around, right? And then the mobile revolution was just maybe a decade, maybe a little bit longer than that, right? Maybe two decades, if you really want to stretch it to the Nokias and everything. The cont. Tractor bricks. But the AI revolution, albeit there's been energy directed towards that since the 1950s, right? Theoretical largely, but there's some work that's been done there. But the massive cultural shift and change, like you said, last three years, right, it's insanely fast. That's probably adding to the angst, the generalized angst, right? We're not in control. We don't know what's going to happen and it's happening so quickly. It's very worrisome. You mentioned as well, uh, right off the top, things that you're interested in, something that I'm interested, I'm writing about a lot is robotics as well. And that's tied into AI, physical AI. And you know, you have the sense that AI is coming for the white collar work and the robots are coming for the blue collar work and what will be left for the humans. It's an uncertain future. So you can understand fear and doubt for sure.

Speaker C: And people don't like change. It's very culturally upsetting because like you say, this is the fastest changing. It's the technology that's changing culture much faster than anything that's, uh, previously come around. And you and I cover change really is what we're talking about. When you talk about technology, you're talking about tools that change the way everything works, how everything, which means we're super

Speaker B: annoying people because we like change.

Speaker C: We like change and we expect it. And people don't like change. And it's especially, um, problematic generate generationally. It's very difficult for older people. I remember, um, my grandmother lived to be a hundred and um, you know, and I think she died probably about I don't know, 12 years ago, 13, 14 years ago at the age of 100. And she, so that was in the, in the aughts and she still had, she thought her AOL dial up connection was like science fiction. She was alive. Yeah, she was alive before, before there was television before that. And so she saw uh, you know, airplanes, you name it. You, you know, she saw so much change in her life and she just like, I can't even, I can't even deal with the stuff you're talking about even back then. So, so then you have the, the kids who are basically have AI. Uh, you know, there's a generation of kids. If you're, if you're, let's, let's say you're 15 years old. Okay. Or let's say you know, 10, 11, 12. I'm, I'm 2010. So it's 20. That's uh, 16 years since the Amazon Echo came out. Okay? So if you're 16 years old, if you're 18 years old today, you don't remember a time when there wasn't a voice in your house that would give you information when you asked for it. Okay? So not everybody had Amazon Echoes and so on. But my point is that everybody's aware that they exist and stuff like that. It was a normal thing to have this Star Trek voice.

Speaker B: Still ask me when the map talks in the car, who's talking?

Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. Where's that coming from? And so, and so you, you see that, you see that, you see the AI natives. Most big culture happens by people dying and new people being born into, into a world that, you know, where their baseline assumptions, you know, there are kids who, you know, who don't understand the concept of a magazine. They try to, they think it's a touchscreen. You know, it's like they're, they're, they're completely readjusted to it and they'll come up with ways of using it that are uh, very different. But yeah, the change is really fast and it's really upsetting. And there, there are going to be many, many, many problems with AI culturally for sure, because it's really, we're not designed, we. A human being's brain is hardwired to understand the truth that if something is talking to you, it's another person. Like there is nothing else that talks to you. And so when AI talks to us, there is a huge percentage and that percentage will increase greatly who believe it's really a person with a mind, with uh, thoughts, with feelings and so on. It's an incredible illusion. And it works because we are hardwired to, to expect that anything that talks is a person. And so.

Speaker B: And that's going to get more and more. That's going to get more and more. We see that already with chatbots, we see that with relationship bots that are explicitly designed for that. Uh, and that's going to get better and better and more and more believable. The her reality. Right. All that stuff. It kind of blows my mind a little bit what you just mentioned that there's people growing up today, young people who it's utterly normal that if they have a question they can ask some electronic genie in the cloud and they can get an answer and it's fairly reliable. We know it's not perfect, we know it's getting better. All those things. It's fairly, it's the Star Trek Reality, 1870s. Right. Computer calculate, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. We have that. And that's just baseline normal. Uh, for you and I growing up, if you needed truth, wow, you could ask a few people. You could check an encyclopedia, maybe you could go to a CD ROM encyclopedia. You had all the knowledge of the world on this little disc. And, um. It's a different place.

Speaker C: Yeah. I mean, if you, if you were a farmer in, you know, the year 1900 and, you know, one of your kids wanted to go to college or wanted to be educated or whatever, there's no other concept about what education is, then there is all this knowledge out there and it's contained within books and you need to memorize all this knowledge. And once you have the knowledge from those books transferred into your brain, okay, now you're educated. Okay, that's not really what education is, but that's what it seems like it is to, to sort of a, uh, an outside observer. We're, we're in a world now where, you know, where knowledge, you know, facts are just always just there. You know, it's just easy. They're easy to get. It's of no monetary value to, you know, the facts. The ability to know what to do with facts, the ability to discern good facts from bad facts, good information, all that stuff is super valuable. And the ability to be creative is super valuable. And the, the ability to set priorities and, and bring ethics and bring sensibilities that only humans have to, to your work, whatever that work is, that's super valuable. The idea that you don't need to know anything anymore. Uh, you don't need to know how to write. You know, there's the other Thing that's happening, like, right now as we speak, which is that we've. I mean, I don't know if you, you're capable of writing cursive anymore.

Speaker B: I haven't been for, like, two decades. I always print.

Speaker C: Yeah, okay. Yeah, uh, me too.

Speaker B: But I learned it in school, elementary school.

Speaker C: And kids nowadays, uh, many kids nowadays don't learn it. And not only can't they write it, they can't read it. So they get a birthday card from grandma and they're like, I don't know. I don't know what this is. Looks like Arabic. And so just as we've allowed that to atrophy, the. The skill of typing is about to atrophy very, very quickly because AI speech to text is so good and there's so many applications for it that all of a sudden everybody's talking instead. Where they used to tap on their phone, they just talk into their phone. Instead of typing on their laptop, they just talk at their laptop.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: And so now, you know, a lot of reports coming out and you get

Speaker B: the last results because you give AI longer prompts and it has more context to give you more information. The right information.

Speaker C: Yes. And also turns out, I mean, that is what language is. Um, originally it wasn't this abstract coding system that we developed. And then later in the Industrial Revolution came up with these contraptions, typewriters, to encode it with a machine. And then we came up with computers to sort of mimic the process of a typewriter. And now we're going back to Paleolithic, you know, humankind, where we're talking around a campfire. And so it, So I, I don't, you know, I don't think that's, that's actually coming, bringing us around to a more natural state. However, that typing skill will atrophy and people will say, why do I have to learn this? Yeah, and it's a good question.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: But the. There's certain critical skills that are going to be more valuable in the age of AI, and those have to be taught in the education system.

Speaker B: So as I look to the future, I was just interviewed yesterday by Gotti Swartz for NBC News now, and we're talking about humanoid robots in the home. And there are some in homes right now. There's some challenges and some problems with them, but they're doing some things in three to five years, my opinion, they're going to be good enough in most scenarios to do most of what you want. And that is a game changer. My kind of vision as we see AI develop, as we see robotics develop in tandem, is that we will have more jobs for the kinds of things that you just mentioned are valuable. Creativity. What facts matter? What facts are relevant? Which are good facts versus bad facts. Where should I go? What should more human things? We waste so much human potential by putting people in boxes and forcing them to do things that machines ought to do. The big question. The big question is whether we can build the societal and economic and financial changes that will reward the kinds of work that will be human work and enable people to enjoy and make a living there. That's an open question. And it's the future we don't know. I have concerns. I'm glad to hear that. There's some reasons to be optimistic and I hope that actually transpires.

Speaker C: Yeah, um, I have a bunch to say about all of that. But you know, there's so many changes that happen with the evolution of culture and technology goes along with that that you can't really predict. You talk about jobs, right? So think of how many jobs exist now that didn't exist before and has nothing. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with technology. Um, give you an example. People used to make their own coffee and now it's a norm for people to go to Starbucks or something like that globally, basically. And now there, there, there's like a million people employed in the making coffee industry that didn't exist. Right, and where did that come from? Well, did. Somebody innovated and you know, it was a thing people wanted and it turns out was a culture changing thing. It really didn't have that much to do with technology. Yoga instructors didn't exist in 1950. Like you go on and on, there's a million of these things. So, you know, people and new ways of doing things often require humans the more. And there's always a backlash from things. Whenever something happens that's not the end of it. There's always a reaction to what happens. And so the more we interact with machines, the more high demand and, and, and monetarily valuable human contact will be. The more people like you and me are challenged by avatars and AI podcasters, the more people will crave podcasters who keep it real, who are really real, who are flawed and you know, and so this is, this is what I'm doing as a podcaster. Like, um, I have a podcast called Super Intelligent. My co host and I, we just have a conversation. It's, it's a lot like this, but we, we don't have a Rundown. We don't barely have a topic, and we let ourselves just wander into things, and it's just two people having a conversation. And then my wife and I, uh, have a podcast that we just rebooted, and that thing, we. We make sure that. That you can hear the place where we are. So we did one that was a pub in Stratford Upon Avon. You can hear people chattering in the background.

Speaker B: Nice.

Speaker C: And that used to be unprofessional.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker C: And now that's. The unprofessionality of that is what's so appealing about it, because people are engaging with chatbots all day. So, anyway, there's always a reaction. But let me go back to the humanoid robot thing. There's an assumption that humanoid robots are this desirable thing, and they're an inevitability in the home and so on. And I think there will be. Obviously, there are and will be humanoid robots in the home, but it's a dumb idea. It's like a parlor trick. There's no reason to base this functional tool on the physiology of a Paleolithic primate. Like, there's no advantage of that. And what people will tell you is that our homes and cars and stuff are designed for our bodies. And so a robot can sit and stand and do this, can function. This. That's mostly bs. Humanoid robots and chatbots designed to sound human are there to trick us into believing and caring more about the product. Because if we. If there's tons of.

Speaker B: Make it look like a spider, we'll make it look like a spider with eight legs and huge.

Speaker C: Well, exactly. I mean, that's fine. But, I mean, Elon Musk said, oh, there's going to be more, you know, optimist robots than there are people. And they're going to do everything. They're going to babysit your kids, they're going to mow your lawn. So he envisions a future where a ridiculous humanoid robot is in your front yard pushing a mower, instead of what has existed for 20 years, which is a Toro lawn mowing robot. It's like a Roomba that mows a lawn. I'm in Italy right now. It's an Italian. Toro's Italian company. They're everywhere in Italy. Like, the contraption that's vaguely shaped like a person pushing a mower is. Is more efficient than an automated thing that charges itself and just mows the lawn. It's like everything will be robotic. Right? That's. That's a good thing. Like, you talk about, you know, people, they always say, oh, you know, the, uh, you know, the robot can like fold your laundry and then you see the video and it takes them like two minutes to fold one pair of underwear.

Speaker B: Yeah. Not very well either.

Speaker C: Yeah. And of course that'll be. Get faster and better.

Speaker B: More faster and better.

Speaker C: But what's much more likely is, you know, a Westinghouse will come out with a washing machine and a dryer thing that will fold your laundry internally and just spit out folded laundry. That makes a lot of sense. This thing walking around, uh, you have to get out of its way when it's walking down the kitchen or whatever. This is this kind of person that talks in your house. Like, like I would want one right now. Like that. That would be like, so cool. Like, um, you know, my friends would want to see it. Like it's a parlor trick. It's a parlor trick. But I don't think this is a, um, I don't think this is a great idea at all other than just the novelty. And of course geeks like it, and of course science fiction fans like it. Science fiction has these robots, but it's just, it's just really a dumb idea.

Speaker B: Ultimately, I'm sympathetic to what you're saying. I really am, because it's true. You can have a lawn mowing robot, you can have a Roomba that vacuums your floor. You can have all these different things. Absolutely 100% true. The flip side of that equation is I need 15 robots or I need one robot. That said, the truth is somewhere in between the, the, the vacuum cleaners and the lawnmowers of the future are going to be robotic. They just are. Right?

Speaker C: Absolutely. Yeah.

Speaker B: But a cooking robot, that's probably the same expense almost as having a humanoid. That is a. Fewer things. So I think I see things both ways there.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: Funny enough, I just interviewed the former CEO of, uh, Roomba, Colin Angle, and he started a new company.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: And it's not a humanoid robot. It is a human robot, but it's a pet and. Exactly. And he's the only person who's sold, made a billion dollar company in sales for home robots. So he, uh, probably knows a few things.

Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. So. So I'm writing a book called the Attachment Economy. And uh, it's. I have an associated substack. So I'm basically writing the book as a series of subs.

Speaker B: Like it. Like it. Smart way.

Speaker C: And the attachment economy is the thing that comes after the attention economy. The attention economy is where you see it most. It, it actually. The attention economy. The attention economy. Goes back to like mid 20th century advertising and found its ultimate expression in social media algorithms that are optimized for attention. So when Facebook talks about the progress they've made, they talk about the percentage of the person's day that they've taken away from other activities. Netflix, Netflix says that their biggest competitor for customers is sleeping.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: So if they take, if they can get people to sleep less and watch TV more then, then their shareholders reward them with more investment and so on. And so that's the attention economy like we, we understand it. That's why there's outrage politics, that's why our politics is so miserable, is because attention uh, economy metrics has divided societies, has destroyed democracies and made a few people extremely rich. The attachment economy is that times 10. What the attachment economy is, is, is to get hyper attention from people by using AI to trick people into have actually having emotions and feelings and like and love for these AI based products. And so the only reason to make a humanoid chatbot or a humanoid robot or a pet like robot that, you know, Casio, I'm, I'm less familiar with the, with the Rumageist robot. More uh, written about the Casio robot. It's like a tribble, you know, it's like a hedgehog sized thing that purrs and has hundred and you know, thousand something personality traits and it evolves as you take care of it and it makes hurt, you know, body language when you don't feed it and give it attention. So like the idea is that you give it a lot of tension and feed it. So basically what they're doing there is that you're human. Humans have this wonderful capacity to form loving bonding attachment relationships to other people and also pets. So when you have a, when you have a dog and you pet your dog and you take care of it and make sure it isn't harmed and you're not abusive toward that dog and you feed it and make sure it has clean water and a clean place and you wash it every once on you're taking care of this pet. Okay. That's a two way relationship. You are feeling very gratified that you're taking care of this being. And there's a being who's very happy that it's being taken care of. It's two way. What attention economy hardware is trying to do is they're trying to intervene into that relationship. Forget the dog. You can have this Casio triple thing and you can have the gratification of taking care of something but there's nothing Being taken care of. You're by yourself and it's not a relationship. And same thing, same thing with relationship AI, uh, it's the same thing. Like you have all the gratification of having a loving relationship with somebody, but

Speaker B: it's an illusion there.

Speaker C: You're by yourself. But it's a business model. The attachment economy is a business model, like the attention economy. And so I think before I sound too negative on this thing, let me just give this caveat I'm into. I believe in human freedom. I think adults should be able to do anything they want. And people, people want to have a relationship with a chatbot or have a robot pet or a humanoid robot in their house and sort of, uh, play, you know, have a fantasy life with it and pretend like it's a real person and stuff. I think it's fantastic and I encourage people to do it. I think it's really cool, actually. That's, it's really cool. As soon as they step over the line and start to believe that these things have inner, an inner world and their life, thoughts, feelings and stuff. Okay, now I cannot condone that kind of delusion. And I, I feel like I'm in a position to warn people, uh, to avoid that. I don't think it's a good idea to be deluded about it. And there's another, just very quickly, there's another thing that's interesting about this whole phenomenon. So people think that LLM based chatbots, which are designed to have personalities to make jokes and sometimes and to do surprising things that make you think it's kind of like a person or like a thinking organism. And there are actual, you know, computer scientists and others who think, well, I think it has consciousness. I think it's actually okay. But nobody ever thinks that. Yeah, exactly. But nobody ever thinks that about equally sophisticated AI Things that fold proteins or do certain types of research don't have a, an interface. That chit is chit chatty. It's the chit chattiness that have been programmed into these things that give us the delusion that it's thinking. We don't think that about other things. We don't think that about the chess robots that just tell you what the move is.

Speaker B: Ah.

Speaker C: And so, and so this is a little, this is a little objective glimpse into, into, into. Have you ever seen those, that, that optical illusion where the person has two sets of eyes here and two sets of eyes here and a mouth here and a mouth here?

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker C: Your brain cannot focus on it. It's upsetting. To look at. This is a. This is a similar glimpse into how the human mind is constructed. We cannot accept that a human face would have four eyes and two mouths. Our brains will not accept it in the same. By the same token, our brains cannot accept the thing that we're having a conversation with isn't a entity with a.

Speaker A: With.

Speaker C: With inner, uh, thoughts and feelings. We cannot accept it. And we should be aware of that and sort of be cautious as we go forward into this weird future that we're facing.

Speaker B: It's the ultimate addiction, right? I mean, it's digital addiction. And there's immense power in what you just talked about. The attachment economy. Have to dive into that later, another time. This has been fascinating and fun. Thank you so much for taking time. I'm pretty sure it's late. You're in Venice, Italy.

Speaker C: It's like 6:00pm Almost.

Speaker B: Uh, okay, yeah. Dinner's at 9. And you're in. You're. You're in Italy, so.

Speaker C: That's right. That's right. That's right.

Speaker B: Mike, this has been such a pleasure. You have a wealth of knowledge and experience and I appreciate you sharing here.

Speaker C: Thank you, John. Thank you for having me on.

Speaker B: Have a great day.