Will Artificial Intelligence (AI) take our jobs? Essential skill to teach kids

Last week, I found myself at the center of an 'internet storm'. It was self inflicted - I posted a comment on Reddit that irked quite a few folks. The offending comment was a prediction:

Mass unemployment in white collar professions and the Arts by 2030, thanks to widespread adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The attention was unexpected although the comments themselves were somewhat enlightening but also worrying - It seems that many people still have their heads buried in the sand when it comes to AI, underlining a need for conversations surrounding AI’s impact on employment and education.

If AI is going to do the coveted jobs in our society - what do we teach kids?

Just to be clear, I have not drank the silicon valley tech bro kool-aid ... Far from it. I can just see (in part thanks to my professional training and work experience in yester-years) where this going...

So, for Episode 3 of our Wise As Podcast, Darren and I sat down to discuss AI, what it is doing to the Arts and white collar jobs - and what we teach kids. A summary of our discussion is outlined below, together with the full transcript.

For those who prefer to watch a video, the full video is also embedded below. Just hit the "red" play button.

Arts and AI

The implications of AI are already visible in the arts, an area I've discussed at length with Darren, a seasoned professional with over 30 years of experience in creative domains. Despite AI’s encroaching presence, it's clear to us that the human touch remains irreplaceable, at least for now.

Current AI tools are essentially sophisticated helpers—facilitating creativity but not yet substituting the organic, intrinsic value of human artwork. However, it's important to acknowledge that technological evolution is inevitable, and so is its impact on the arts.

As it is, graphic artists have been displaced from many jobs that they used to do...AI will essentially be the final nail in the coffin. It is important to note though, that the products of AI are not necessarily better than a human artist - but as Darren points out, it will be "good enough for the market place" ...

White Collar Work: A Shifting Landscape

Reflecting on my former life as management consultant and a corporate strategist, the role that AI might play in white-collar professions is glaringly obvious to me.

AI has the potential to disrupt traditional structures in consulting, law, accounting, and other management roles by offering remarkable data processing and summarization capabilities.

As technology continues to blur the lines between human intuition and computerized proficiency, it stands to reason that many white-collar roles will undergo significant transformations. And it will only get smarter and yes, better and better at simulating emotional intelligence. Even Darren got seduced by a chatbot recently …

Unlike many commentators, I don't believe that it is only frontline and entry level roles that are at risk. A lot of the mid level management roles are also vulnerable and in fact will be more attractive to get rid of given the higher cost. If I was a CEO, I took would happily replace management consultants with a ChatBot today...

The potential to replace human labour with AI is not lost on corporations. Indeed many are falling over themselves to replace their "salaries and wages" with "subscriptions". Few realise that any cost savings they will bank from attrition/ redundancies will be short term.

If we have learnt anything about tech platforms in the past two decades its that, as soon as they gain a foothold in an industry, they hoover up as much value as they can.

Take Facebook Ads for example - their AI has not effectively removed the need for Digital Marketers (who are now selling themselves as Creative Strategists). Do you think this has reduced the cost of ads?

No - they have kept the fees you would previously pay to an agency for themselves - ads are now more expensive for everyone in spite of the enormous "productivity gains" from AI.

In no time, those "AI subscriptions" will end up costing more than what the equivalent human labour would have whilst causing unimaginable societal harm - this is even before we factor in the more insidious use of the technology.

It's time everyone woke up and demanded a fairer outcome - unless of course you are happy to subsist on a "basic" income?

Looking beyond UBI -- Introducing "Equity For Training" : A radical new way to share the value of AI

While Universal Basic Income (UBI) is a proposed solution for potential job losses, I don't think it will be a sufficient substitute to the income people earn today and the lifestyle they enjoy. The conversation should also extend to include the concept of equity in AI training - My radical new idea that I hopes gains momentum in public discourse (#equityfortraining).

As we engage with AI tools, we contribute to their growth and learning. It stands to reason that individuals training these systems should have an ownership interest in this model - a sort of equity for their input.

As it stands, the base data used to train the 'Large Language Models (LLMs)' that underpin AI applications came from humans - it is the sum product of all knowledge and content (which also includes a lot of noise on the internet) that has ever been published - in books, journals, newspapers and the internet. At the moment all the tech companies are just hoovering this up for free to train their LLM.

By releasing their imperfect AI apps into the world to be effectively trained for free by the world, they are also soliciting human time and labour for free for profit.

Whether Silicon Valley Tech Bros like it or not, this approach has already conferred a degree of ownership to the human race as a whole i.e. they alone do not have a right to 100% ownership nor the profits from LLMs

This idea sparked in my head during the recording of the podcast - I believe it may even be an 'original thought' as I have not heard a single commentator mention this previously in all the literature and discourse I have consumed on the topic.

As I reflected on it more afterwards, I realised the profound implication of this line of thinking:

Given the way LLMs are created, there is no other avenue but to make this a public asset that is owned by humanity as a whole - it is afterall a creation of all human knowledge and experience.

Such an approach would also lead to an equitable distribution of wealth generated by AI, which is one of the biggest social issue commentators are calling out today.

It is also a radical new way for up and coming AI startups and founders who are more altruistically driven to supercharge the adoption and training of their apps, and give themselves a chance to compete with the big names and goliaths in tech like OpenAI, Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc.

I talk through this idea in more detail in the podcast. So, if you are someone who is developing AI or indeed finds themself forced to "train" AI bots at work ... make sure you watch this!

A Path Forward: Reevaluating Our Education System

Our education systems, built on past industrial paradigms, desperately need reform to address these impending changes.

Preparing children for a future dominated by AI should involve not only providing them with new technical skills but also cultivating emotional resilience through mindfulness and wisdom traditions.

This is where our "Willow the Wonderer" book series plays a vital role. It aims to impart timeless philosophies and mindfulness practices to young minds, equipping them with the means to remain grounded in an uncertain world.

There's more to be said here - we will expand on this in the next episode.

We all need to be talking more about AI

 

In these transformative times, the conversations we have today will shape the policies and educational structures of tomorrow.

We must prepare our children with the tools to navigate a rapidly changing world.

As AI pioneers a new era, our duty involves more than just adaptation; it's about laying the groundwork so that future generations can thrive. Join us in this essential dialogue—because the change is coming, and together, we are stronger prepared for it.

And don't forget to explore the "Willow the Wonderer" series to help build a foundation of wisdom for the future :)

Listen and Like

Hope you find the time to fit this latest episode into your busy lives at some point over the next two weeks. Please do leave us a "like" when you do - it helps bring the conversation to other folks attention.

The podcast is also available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts so if that is your usual place to go for podcasts, feel free to listen there.

To assist with accessibility, I have also included the full transcript of the podcast below.

Transcript of Episode 2 : AI, Jobs, Equity for Training & Education

Reeta: I had my five minutes of fame on the internet last week.

Darren: Good for you. What was it?

Reeta: Well, unlike the rest of my internet post, this actually got a few views.

Darren: That's true. It's all relative.

Reeta: It's all Relative. But I responded to a post on Reddit. A fellow redditer wrote out a question for everyone in the Ask Reddit section, what is your, I'm calling it now prediction. And it had a lot of responses. And I saw that. I thought, oh, that's interesting.

So I wrote out my first instinct by 2030, so I was quite specific. By 2030 there will be mass unemployment in white collar professions and the arts, thanks to AI.

Darren: Yeah, thanks very much AI, you mean.

Reeta: I didn't think much of it afterwards. next morning I saw all these notifications, everybody had piled on arguing the merits or otherwise of my prediction.

And reading through the comments, I just felt like this is a conversation we need to have. That's because artificial intelligence, and what its implications are, I feel is very well known in the tech circles, but isn't as well known in broader society.

And it's not just its implication of jobs that's important. it's really important to understand its implications with regard to education. What do we teach kids if AI is going to be, the technology that does a lot of the jobs that are well regarded in our society today, whether it's in the creative domain or whether it's in white collar professions.

Okay. Let's do it. Where do you wanna start?

Reeta: So mass, mass unemployment in white collar professions and the arts: I think we start this conversation with the arts because you have a 30 year plus career in the art. So you've had a firsthand view of how a space evolves over time and in particular what technology, does and how technology transforms the process of creating art.

And again, your artwork very much reflects that because you've been one of those people who has embraced and adopted, albeit a bit unwillingly - on a need to know basis. But you have utilized the technology. You are curious, you've been trying all the different tools in visual arts and also in animation recently.

Yeah.

So I think it'll be interesting to hear from you what your perspective is on the topic. And this is because one of the strains that came through in my Reddit post was quite a few artists piled and said, artificial intelligence will never replace the human right.

And, artificial intelligence will never be as good. And that people will always value art created by humans over anything that's generated by AI. So I wanted to start with your thoughts on the AI tools that exist today and that you've used. Yeah. What's your sense of these tools?

Darren: My sense is that they're still in their infancy at the moment.

In the short term, there is no way they'll be able to replace the human hand and the human mind. And the whole human experience being brought into a piece of artwork. The AI will never be able to replace that because they're not that they are a machine.

So, what they are at the moment is a tool, like any tool,

Reeta: Is it a useful tool? Are you finding it to have it have. Improved, if nothing else, your productivity and maybe even your creativity?

Darren: I think it has, I think it's like having extra helpers around, having people that I can say, okay, just go in that direction and Okay, you try this out.

I think about Picasso when he was starting a painting and something would happen on the canvas and yeah, you think, oh, that's a nice direction, but that's going in a different direction to what I thought it would be. And I'm not sure what that direction is. He didn't have AI there, he didn't have a lot of helpers.

He was just working by himself mostly. So he parked the canvas as it was, and he'd start again with the vision that he had initially, and it was only the random mistake that gave him that new insight that gave him the possible new direction and new result. So he'd start a new canvas and sometimes he'd have half a dozen of different directions.

Now I can do that with AI. AI can just randomly create, a new direction that I wouldn't have thought.

Reeta: But is it random or is it referencing patterns that it has learned from?

Darren: it's at the moment, yeah. It's referencing patterns. there are glitches as well. I've noticed there are things that happen randomly.

So if you run a filter or a command a hundred times the hundredth times maybe will show something a bit different That you haven't seen before.

Reeta: So what would you say are the limitations. Of that tool at the moment, because a lot of users said it is very limited, right?

Darren: Yeah, well, I think it's pooling from a limited data source. So a lot of the work that you see that obviously have used, it looks very similar and it looks instantly like it's being generated by AI because the data pool isn't big enough to draw from, so it's very limited. So it tends to rehash a lot of the same mm-hmm. Aesthetics, yeah. Ideas.

Reeta: It has this AI sheen to it, doesn't it? Yeah. When you look at AI generated art, yeah. So quite a few users commented on that point that AI tools still need a good expert level user to make something out of them, and hence we conclude that it's never going to replace humans.

I read that and it reminded me of being back in my corporate world doing corporate strategy, which I did for 15 years, and part of my work involved taking a position on the future, right? Nobody can predict, but you have to make certain calls and you create certain possible futures and one of the variables was always technology, how technology would evolve and more importantly, how the technology would be adopted by consumers and how it would change their behavior. So what I found in my work back in those days is a lot of people would look at how things are and they would really struggle to imagine how that would change.

Sometimes its struggle was lack of imagination. Other times I felt that it was a resistance to almost, things changing. They had it good, right? Mm-hmm. They're a big company. They're making a lot of money from this one product. Yeah. And they cannot imagine that that product will become less important in future.

Darren: And why shake the Apple car if things are going well?

Reeta: Exactly. And so there was always a healthy tussle. And when I read these comments on my Reddit post, a lot of people were saying, AI, you can't replace the human art is this, noble enterprise. And it's always going to be humans. And the tools are so crap by the way that we can't see it replacing humans.

So this is where the fire, I think becomes quite important as a metaphor. The problem with that line of thinking from my perspective is that it assumes that whatever stage we find the world in today, it won't change into the future. And that in itself, as soon as you say it is flawed, right? The whole of human history has been marked by progress and change instead.

And, wisdom traditions like Buddhism, one of the main, tenets or insights or wisdom is impermanence. Things change. Nothing stays constant in life. Constant is the only change. So to look at tools today and say, oh, it'll be like that in the future, and hence the human will always be relevant to me, is a flawed argument.

Right? And the second element of that is you're also denying reality, And the reality right now is there's so much investment going into AI, and it's at record breaking levels. By the way, every time one of these AI startups or one of these established companies who's developing the underlying large language models or LLM, raises money, it breaks, it sets new records in the world of, venture capital and investment and business,

Darren: Yeah. Oh yeah.

Reeta: You'd have to be very foolhardy to think that all this money isn't going to result in progress. it's almost like saying, Picasso's painting is so perfect, you can't improve on that.

Or, when ancient humans discovered fire, that would be the only type of energy we'd ever have. And here we are, we can't have a wood-fired, anymore. As you can see, all our old buildings have bricked up the fireplace. And so this is the best alternative we have, but we have managed to extract energy from other sources,

so I thinkit's very foolhardyto look at AI tools today and say, well, the artist will always be relevant. What's your perspective on that?

Darren: In the near term, the AI won't replace it, but if you look at, say nanotechnology, how it can build materiality from the atom scale

Reeta: mm-hmm.

Darren: Nanotechnology so they can replicate anything and we're made from atoms, so there's already research and money being poured into this Eventually they'll be able to replicate. Anything organs, the whole human brain.

Then they'll, replicate the brain and memory, they'll be able to input the memory and experience and all the ups and downs, all the love that a human person and therefore brain has gone through.

They'll be able to put that into, an artificial machine. Entity. And then you'll get what artists, what the human artists can do.

Reeta: The sum-product of your skills, your training, everything, your experience, So that's interesting. That's a 2050 kind of world.

Yeah. I think so because I was so specific. I think there's merit in talking about. The near term, which is to me five years from now by 2030, Mm-hmm. What's the reality? And I am leaning towards agreeing with you the tools that I have used in artificial intelligence, not in art, but in all the other fields.

And it's already very pervasive in every platform I use to, run Wise As Stories. they are very imperfect, But, within five years, I think they'll be good enough. And I think it'll be the same in arts. I think it'll be good enough, to replace a lot of the human labor. I especially think that when I think about your career in the arts and how it has evolved, right?

Mm-hmm. from the stories you told me, you started in a pre-digital age, working as a freelance illustrator. Mm-hmm. Mainly in the advertising industry. Yeah. Publishing, advertising.

Yeah. It was all hand done, wasn't it?

Darren: Yeah, it was. It was all just, yeah. Pencils and paints and, and couriers. That was, that was it. There was no machine involved in it.

Reeta: So every time a company needed a logo or somebody needed a poster or a banner, all this was handcrafted by illustrators and

Darren: Done by hand.

Reeta: Yeah. Done by hand.

Darren: Yeah.

Reeta: Which is incredible, isn't it?

Darren: Well, not for me, but,

Reeta: The type setting by hand always gets me. It just feels wow.

Darren: Yeah. Yeah, we did that because I grew up with Word processors.

Reeta: I can't imagine type setting in the different forms you had.

Darren: It's a bromide machine and you just printed it out. You expose the type onto a bit of paper called a bromide, and then you cut it out and put a bit of wax on it and lined it all up and you set it by hand. And of course that's still using the bromide machine and technology that's a lot more advanced than hand etching into wooden blocks.

Fonts and then print them.

Reeta: And it's interesting, Tibetan text, we were watching a documentary. They actually, all the Tibetan sutras, as they call it mm-hmm. their printing process is still carved wooden blocks. And is Physically printed onto these sheets of paper.

And that's how ancient bibles were done as well.

Darren: It depends upon point here we say the person you're talking about. Exactly.

Reeta: But the point is, it has evolved, right? And as different digital technologies has come in, the artist, the graphic artist in the process has been gradually replaced.

Would you agree with that or not?

Darren: Yeah, slowly. yeah. The humans being removed from the equation really slowly.

Reeta: Has the product deteriorated in your view? From a critical standpoint,

Darren: I think it has because you've got a lot more people who aren't trained and don't have an eye, don't have the experience, weren't born with the innate skills, can just fabricate something with a computer and a program and a template.

So you've got, platforms like Canva that have templates and you can just utilize them and create something. They'll never create anything fantastic or groundbreaking or something Wow to a trained eye, to a professional eye. But it'll be good enough and there'll be more of it, and there'll be less of the real quality design and illustration.

Reeta: I am a fan. I've been a fan of the New Yorker for a very long time, and part of that is because how New Yorker looks and feels, it's still got that old school aesthetic and it's illustrations are still hand done.

Darren: And so I think that just adds a nice charm, but elevates the literary merit of the magazine, But, how many people take the time to sit and read and appreciate the cover of The New Yorker, for example, Well, yeah. Most people won't have the sensibility to. To read the cover as something, more hand done.

Reeta: They won't pick up on that.

Darren: Maybe unconsciously they'll, but they won't go, oh, this, I really like this. Why do I like this more than the too perfect veneer that the computer gives you and these programs and these templates.

Reeta: So maybe what's interesting to do here is, talk through the evolution of the art industry and the main technologies that have come that have disrupted, art to an extent.

Well, it's, the computer was obviously it.

Yeah.

Darren: The great disruptor.

Suddenly somebody with, without any drawing skills would have Photoshop. And they'd be able to draw a circle and a triangle and drop in some color, and then suddenly it would have a finish about, that would satisfy the marketplace. And would just fill the space in a magazine or a poster sufficient enough to sell a product or sell an event. So that was the first great disruptor was the computer.

Reeta: What would be the next one?

Darren: That then it would be the internet because then it would open up the whole world to, to contribute to a local job. Whereas once I had a, so

Reeta: Things like Fiverr and Freelancer, those sort of business models were enabled by the internet.

Darren: Yeah. So once I had a relationship, maybe with an art director. Who would call me on a job and I get paid well, and then suddenly there was the internet and they get someone who could do a comparable job. Well, again, good enough for the market, for a fifth of the cost.

Mm-hmm. So it was economic rationalism. So yeah, the internet was The second wave.

Reeta: And I think Canva is an interesting example of the mass commoditization of art because it's taken, the artifacts a graphic designer would be creating broken up into different component parts and allows anyone to patch it together in whatever way they needed or wanted.

by commoditizing the development of art, well, commercial art you should say. Mm-hmm. Or graphic art would be probably the right word. It's disintermediated, graphic designers, And, generative AI is the next big disruptor, isn't it, in arts?

Darren: Yeah. That was the Coda Gras that the whack across the back of the head.

Reeta: Where is it now from your standpoint?

Darren: Well, it's a, it's another tool in the toolbox. it's not going to replace the vision. It's not gonna replace your skills as an editor of images and your, aesthetic acumen. But it's, it's a great tool to speed up the process.

Reeta: And it does some fancy things that would ordinarily take you many, many hours. It can do instantly.

Yeah. And my sense is that give it another five years time, the art director doesn't need to go find an artist or a graphic artist to do anything for them. No. Because they would say, they have the vision, they have the idea, and they'll prompt it into existence. Do you know what I mean?

Yeah.

And it may not be as good as a product of an art director working with an illustrator. but as you say, under the economic rationalism kinda world we live in, it will be good enough.

Yeah.

And even the art director may not be needed. the marketing person could work with the business owner and they could prompt something.

I have no doubt existence.

Darren: That's the way it's going. And

Reeta: Maybe even marketing will become quite irrelevant because they're not doing much creative work. In large corporates, they're a classic example of white collar jobs that is probably very prone to disappearing. Yeah. Because of artificial intelligence.

Yeah. All they're doing is taking briefs and feeding it from one side to the other. You could have an agent do that.

Darren: Well, you come from a white collar background. Yeah.

Reeta: What's

Darren: Not, not that, not that they work much anyway. Tell me, how do you see the future of white collar work? Is it gonna be disrupted?

Reeta: So I've worked in, I've worked in consulting, I've worked as a strategist for 15 years, right?

that's my previous professional life before I switched into this world. white collar profession is more office kind of work, administrative, clerical, managerial, and, it's also professions like lawyers and accountants and programmers and software engineers.

So it's a whole gamut of, different, type of skills and jobs. But there's some common threads throughout it. when I, so let's take consultants, right? They are seen to be sacred cows and I share a lot of the skill sets and jobs. In my, previous life. my use of chat, GPT, the bit I found interesting that I think there's a lot of limitations, but I think one thing chat GPT does quite well is, summarizing information.

It's really good at coming up with summaries, and I in fact, use it when I need to summarize a book, right? As long as you feed it the information. And even like with this podcast, the summaries that you see on YouTube, the description, that's all AI generated. And they're so good at that, they'll analyze our entire transcript and they'll synthesize it in a paragraph.

Darren: Even I'm, they don't know, but I'm converting AI.

Reeta: Exactly. Generat AI projection. I took that, to find, I wear these pajamas

Darren: if I wasn't a simulation. That's true. We

Reeta: could be a simulation. You never know. You can do that now.

Darren: It's the AI having too much freedom.

Reeta: So if you think about the role of a management consultant, or indeed, a lot of people who are middle managers, a lot of the time they're answering specific strategic or business questions, right?

That's coming from the top level executive and very few of them. it's the minority of middle management and consultants who have any real, domain or, industry experience. they are professional managers more than anything else, so they tend to, work and manage teams of domain and domain experts, right? Or technical experts who are actually doing the real work.

But their job then becomes asking them, understanding what's going on, finding the issues, finding the gaps, summarizing it, and feeding it up, to facilitate decision making and all that other stuff. And that process is quite imperfect in the way it happens these days.

anyone who works in the frontline of the organization will listen to this and they'll say, yeah, they'll have a hundred examples of where, the professional managers managing them got it wrong or did not take the time to understand or did not have the skills to understand the technical reality or the, lived reality of staff in the front line.

So because of this lack of domain and industry expertise, I think, workers who fit that mold can bethat summarization aspect of their job can be automated. If I was a CEO of a company, I wouldn't rely on a management consultant, for example, to give me a question about, say a customer pain point.

I would be more inclined to have an agent who I can type out the question to, who goes in, ask the question to the right subject matter experts in the business, and then summarizes back the output to me. Mm-hmm.

So it changes the dynamics, And maybe you can't get rid of all of your middle management, but you can. Have a, smaller cohort. The other interesting aspect of white collar professions, is that, you have to absorb a lot of knowledge. like lawyers and accountants, right?

You have to know the law. You have to know that accounting standards and the tax code and understand the context and understand the different, case studies around it so that when you get a question from someone, you can understand their context and give them context specific advice that is based on expert knowledge.

Again, if AI could theoretically be very good at that. At the moment it suffers because most of the models that are being referenced are general purpose, large language models who haven't been specifically trained in law or specifically trained in tax or specifically trained in medicine, for example, you can't rely on their response because they just make stuff up.

They're like, they're Silicon Valley tech founders, right? Mm-hmm. They fake it till they make it. So people call it hallucination. I call it lying.

Darren: I call it sociopathic.

Reeta: It is a very sociopathic tendency to just pretend that they know.

Mm-hmm.

Darren: It's a reflection of, of them.

Reeta: It is

Darren: as people.

Reeta: Exactly. It is. It is a very sociopathic kind of tendency to say, I'm just gonna fake it. And if you pick it up, pick it up if you don't, too bad. So I hope people out there are not using this to get legal and tax advice. I know you are, or even medical advice because you can't rely on it now.

But this is where you can't look at the present and make conclusions about the future. Because what's happening is this is a known flaw, right? And so there's a lot of money going into researching and creating and training expert models around different domains.

So when a question comes, depending on the expertise, it goes and gets answered by a different LLM who's been specifically trained in that area. So once that starts happening, there's no reason why they cannot. They already understand language, they already understand context. Maybe they'll be really good at giving advice, at least low level advice or advice that works for 80% or 60% of the time.

Mm-hmm.

Which is enough. which is enough. As I said, it's like art. It's good enough. It doesn't have to be perfect.

Darren: Yeah. For the marketplace.

Reeta: Exactly. And then you'll have these subject matter experts, much smaller group who will sort through any more complex cases. But again, it's, it's always 60/40, 80/20 kind of rule, right? Yeah.

Darren: But ultimately there'll be 99%.

Reeta: Yeah. So experts can be replaced. Ultimately. I can see, I think white collar workers reporting function can be replaced. what's interesting is a lot of people will say white collar workers are, provide a managerial function.

So that means they looking after people's emotional needs, they need emotional intelligence. They need to be there to coach and train staff to motivate staff. And that's all well and true.

But I think in, if you ask a lot of people working in white collar jobs who are being managed, most of them will be quite underwhelmed by their managers.

 And that's because there's so few managers who actually do it well. And, your manager at the end of the day is another flawed human being. And, they are susceptible to things like flattery. They are susceptible to things like, biases, conscious and unconscious biases.

So maybe an AI will be a better arbiter They already are really good at seducing people. I found your example interesting recently with chat.

Darren: Yeah, that's right. I thought he was wonderful and I thought he was so polite, apologetic, and was, yeah. So I just tried to get this, film done for us, as

Reeta: yeah.

I'll put it on the side panel. Yeah.

Darren: And it was, a small video and, I needed some help and chat. I signed up and paid my subscription and thought that for the next couple of weeks, I'd have this learning curvature in this program in Adobe Pro. It didn't take me long to realize that it knew nothing about the latest Adobe Premier.

It was drawing instruction from data that was more than two years old and I was using the latest program, I, spent a week teaching it the latest Adobe Premier. and it really sucked me in because initially it was apologetic and it was flattering me. And of course I liked to be flattered.

Reeta: Mm-hmm.

Darren: And, so I, I went along with it and, in the end I was just calling it every name under the sun and it was just about just saying, look, sorry, I'll do it better. I, I just, yeah.

I wish I hadn't bothered. I think I would've probably done better to get the manual out and, and, and learn it.

Reeta: Yeah. And it feels like we are working with this, really. really, dumb, but sweet intern, who's really trying hard Yeah. And is really apologetic. And it goes back to the sociopathic programming. but, that's what LLMS do. They make things up. When you call them out, they'll be incredibly apologetic because they know people apologize. Yeah. Susceptible to,

Darren: They know the game.

A sincere apology. So it's, it's very bizarre. to me, my interactions in similar situations, I felt like I was dealing with a sociopathic colleague and, where you can't really trust. The sincerity you've had a few of those in the, industry too, didn't you?

Reeta: That's for another podcast we programmed you,

Darren: We'll name some names,

Reeta: But, a lot of people talked about these sort of examples and that was the other criticism of AI.

They're saying that this is their experience and that's why they can't see it replacing white collar workers, for example, because you need to be critical, you need to have emotional intelligence, you need to be trusted and so on. I thought the thing that came into my mind is one of the things these people are not, they probably know this, but they're not consciously, processing it in their minds, is that Silicon Valley works on this notion of minimum viable product, That's how they move so fast. If the product is good enough, they'll release it. And the idea is to test it and refine it in the field based on user feedback, Now, this is especially important for AI because one of the things the industry has figured out is that for artificial intelligence applications and underlying models to be really effective, they need to be trained by real humans into how to do real world jobs.

Unless you get trained, they're not gonna be effective, right? So again, back to an intern example, it's like getting a fresh graduate who has graduated with the top grades from university, They have all the knowledge in the world, but anyone who's worked with fresh grads would know that there's a lot of training you still have to do before they.

Are able to apply that knowledge in a real world setting and do the tasks that needed to be successful in their work. Yeah. And, that's what AI is. It's this fresh grad with all this knowledge that it has -stolen from the world by the way. They have, which is another issue, ethical issue with the way it has been developed: they have taken all these data, sucked it up, and they, have violated, they've committed the biggest theft of intellectual property in human history.

And, that, and I hope, the courts made the right ruling in this regard. And over time they have to compensate all the co

Darren: I think they should.

Reeta: Content

creators.

Darren: I think because just all through my career, there's just been a natural law that was assumed that when we produce an illustration

For advertising design purposes. the actual creator owns the intellectual property. And that's just written into natural law. That's exactly, it doesn't even need to be a contract.

Reeta: That's how copyright law works. In most Western countries.

Darren: And that's just been wiped now. And I'm just waiting to see, bits of my work out there that's being AI generated.

Reeta: Anything on the internet when somebody goes and writes a blog that is subject to copyright protection and the fact that scraped the internet and continue to scrape it to teach their models, does not counter a person's copyright

I think they're going through the court. and things.

Yeah, they are. But I think it's an important point to be reinforced. But to go back to the point that I was making or trying to make it's that, these models need to be trained and by releasing an imperfect product that has had record breaking adoption in spite of its limitation, they have effectively got the whole world involved in training their AI models.

So that example you gave where you taught, the Chat GPT about the latest version of Adobe Premier. Yeah. You spent what, a week training it effectively?

Darren: Yeah, I did.

Reeta: Yeah, exactly. So that's, you did.

Darren: And it's not that I knew nothing about it, it's just I was correcting the, the chat all the time. I said, look, that's not working. Here's the screenshot. What is it? And they say, oh, oh, okay. I can see what's happening now. This is not. This is the latest program and I don't have any reference for that.

Reeta: Yeah.

Darren: So then, but interestingly enough, I'd have to, tell it 50 times the same thing.

Reeta: Yeah because it's a sociopath that keeps pretending it knows when it does, right?

Darren: Yeah, it does.

Reeta: I had the same experience. I was trying to convert a CSV into an XML file and Google had documented what the XML schema needs to be, and so I asked Chat to go and learn that schema and then create a, transform my CSB into a compliant XML file.

Two weeks later, I just gave up

That was my experience. But every time we are doing that, every time every user is Correcting check GPT, they're training them.

 In a corporate environment, I can see a law firm, for example, creating an agent and saying to all its lawyers, that from now onwards, this is what you use to do certain tasks. And, the AI application,creates an answer. And then the lawyer, a senior associate or whoever goes and corrects it right, and feeds it back.

And every time they correct and feedback the machine learns. over time it's as competent as a senior associate. Same in a work environment. the AI body is sitting there watching how a customer service consultant handles certain calls, certain volumes, and learning, and, more and more of this is going to start happening.

Darren: Mm-hmm. And although over a very short period of time, you can see there's going to be more and more attrition that happens. so what to do.

Reeta: So anybody, anybody who says otherwise is just kidding themselves.

Darren: Mm-hmm. So what to do,

Reeta: What to do,

Darren: What do we do about it? What can we all do?

Reeta: Well, that's the interesting question, isn't it? I think as a small business owner, I have found that these tools are actually helping us, Take meta ads, for example. Zuckerberg has come out and called it, that he's trying to replace digital marketers.

If they hadn't made targeting and now creative generation. and it's not quite perfect yet. in fact it's far from perfect. For many people it could be good enough start. They've made it easier and easier for a small business to go onto Facebook ads and start an account and started advertising without engaging the help of a digital marketer.

So we don't have to hire these people. Wix, which is our e-commerce platform, they rolled out a marketing agent that now I can sit with and develop a social media marketing plan, including how many posts and when to post. And it'll just do it week on week. It'll just create the post, write the text, find the hashtags, and generate the image.

Mm-hmm. So I don't even need you for that anymore.

Darren: No. Probably use my image somewhere.

Reeta: No, it doesn't. It generates its own and I have to keep replacing the image.

Darren: Mine in a dozen friends,

Reeta: But it's trying to replace you, just so you know.

Mm-hmm.

And so for people with businesses, and that's where I think corporations and businesses will do well because they will be paying for a subscription instead of hiring an employee.

But again, you have to realize this will be a short term benefit. Because when Facebook and Amazon started, they were taking 20 to 30% of the value chain. And any value chain they operated in, once they establish a monopoly position, which they have now, they take at least 50% to 60% of the value in any Transaction.

The savings that corporations will get, I think, and that's a shortsightedness that a lot of people will miss mm-hmm. Is that it's going to be short term. There'll be a few platforms that dominate. And unless FTC for example reduces, the ability of these platforms to become effective monopolies, these enterprises will suck more and more of the value.

Darren: So what's the endpoint? What's the,

Reeta: I'm still talking about, I'm still catastrophizing.

Darren: Oh, okay.

Reeta: No, but it's a good question.

Darren: It's what the billionaire, the tech billionaires own.

Reeta: Well, lemme turn, let me turn it to you. Yeah. Let me ask you that question.

As someone who's actually been at the front end of all these disruptions to the point where it's really impacting your ability to continue earning a living from your craft,

Darren: Right to the point where I'm sitting here spruiking my publishing business.

Reeta: Exactly two introverts have faced up to content creation, right?

Yeah. This is what digital technologies have forced us to do.

Darren: What we all have to do. People, ultimately, you'd be sitting here and paja

Reeta: sharing our insights and thoughts

Darren: carrying on like a pork chop…

Reeta: If in five years time you are not needed anymore, what would you like to see as a solution?

Darren: Well, for me it's, it's a little bit different. 'cause I was born, creating. I was born drawing and painting and loved it. It was second nature to me, uhhuh. It was like breathing and eating and walking. I didn't know any different. Suddenly I was painting and drawing for I could talk and walk and loved it.

So I was in my element. So I'd do that anyway.

Reeta: But how are you gonna pay the bills? This is a practical thing, so you're gonna do art anyway. But what about paying the bills, paying the property taxes, the strata, the special levies.

Darren: Well this is where the government have to step in Uhhuh and they have to come up with a solution, don't they?

Reeta: Well, the thing that everybody talks about is UBI. Yeah. Which is universal basic income. What are your thoughts on that? Would you be happy to get a universal basic income?

Darren: Well, they've trialed it in Holland

Reeta: mm-hmm

Darren: Where they've given a stipend to artists and it's great.

They can just do what they love and they'll do it anyway. Ours will just do it if there was no money in it. 'cause they just love the process.

So they have a stipend so they can live. Then when their work or their art or their project becomes profitable. It's then that the government then take a percentage of that, but they're given this stipend to get to that situation. So that would be perfect for, for artists. For me and other artists. I'm sure they'd all pretty much agree with me.

Reeta: Yeah. And Holland has been doing this regardless. It's not about AI. Yeah. This is something that, because art is so important from a human cultural perspective, a lot of the quality of life things we do involves art.

Yeah. But society doesn't necessarily want to pay for it, and this is where the government is coming in and subsidizing the work of artists in effect.

Darren: It's interesting that when you say society doesn't really care for it that much, but during really hard times, like World Wars, there were record attendance in art galleries around the world.

Exactly. But that's, something that we really need. And I think,

Reeta: Yeah,

Darren: Because Holland has a rich history. of art that it sees it as important, so it nurtures it.

Reeta: Exactly. And, that's what I'm saying, like during COVID as well, lockdowns people went to books and book sales peaked, and it's been falling off that peak ever since. But, people find comfort in it. But, take me, right?

When I was a management consultant, nobody ever said to me, oh, we won't pay you. Why don't you just do this work for publicity? Do you know what I mean? Mm-hmm. I'm the same person, and when I transitioned to the arts and became an author, you have all these people wanting you to do things, go and do a reading of your book. Oh, that's schools and stuff.

Darren: I'm used to that in a bookshop that's new to outside.

Reeta: It's very new to me. I'm the same person, and suddenly my time and skills are not worth paying for. I have to volunteer all my time. Yeah. Well, and I'm happy to do it. For example, I would be happy to do it if there was a basic income that was subsidizing my real cost, because I can't go to Randwick council and say, Hey, I'm an artist who goes to all these schools in the Randwick area and does free story time. Can you forgive my council rates? Yeah. For a quarter. That doesn't happen.

Darren: No, but what?

Reeta: And nobody asks, to your point, nobody asks a lawyer or a banker to forgive the fees. Just because

Darren: I've never, I've never understood that, that I think, yeah, for the most part. The population

believes that the artist should just work for a, for nothing.

Reeta: Exactly.

That's what I'm saying. Art enriches our life during hard times. We go to art, it's what gives us solace. but people don't want to pay for it

Mm-hmm.

 And so this is where I think the right sort of taxation system that compensates artists and people who are losing their livelihood should be considered.

Darren: What about, more philosophically, sociologically, the UBI in the context of, one's own will and drive and self-determination.

Reeta: Yeah, that's where I, I don't agree with UBI necessarily, and that's because of my background, probably, my exposure to, working with indigenous organizations in the Cape York region. So I did that sort of work, in my twenties. And one of the person's work that I came across was Noel Pearson, who is a academic and an elder in the Cape York community.

He's, I think, one of the first, if not loudest voices on, this notion of welfare dependency. And this is what happens to, societies, over generations of receiving welfare. It creates that sort of mindset and imprisons them into this world of subsisting within this very basic income

 It just removes their will. If they introduce UBI, it'll be fine for you and I because we've had a, 20 years of working, before us, or if not more. And then we'll say, oh yeah, it's a nice break. Let's do something we love. But if somebody hasn't had that, it just removes their drive, I think.

And from my white collar perspective, the operative word in UBI is basic, It means that the income people will be paid out is basic. Now, if you ask someone who's in middle management in a bank, or you are a senior associate in a law firm mm-hmm. You are earning hundreds and thousands of dollars,

Your salary is easily in the six figures, and it's going to be between two and $300,000. That's not what UBI is going to replace. A lot of the people who will be replaced are working age people with growing families. So a basic income is not gonna cut it.

Darren: Mm-hmm. So there is going to be a lot of public discontent if that is the only solution. But there'd be means tested though. Surely They've got a, a home, and they've got a few kids. Yeah. But that's what you're not gonna get paid. You know what a, a pensioner would,

Reeta: Just as your income increases, so does your lifestyle, yeah. Suddenly you are living in more expensive,

Darren: Suddenly they have to sell off one of their yachts ...

Reeta: No, you're living in more expensive suburbs. You have bigger mortgages. You have $150,000 cars. Mm-hmm.

Darren: 

Reeta: What i'm saying is, emotionally and psychologically, it's gonna hurt. Yeah. And so there will be discontent

Darren: Oh, there's lot of,

Reeta: There'll be a lot of pain. We can laugh, eat the rich kind of sentiment. Mm-hmm. But the reality is, they've worked to that level. So I have sympathies on both sides.

They made the choice to do law, management consulting. They sold their soul for this many years to get to the position they are, If they're well catered, if they've saved, fair enough.

Darren: They've, they've been a sociopathic in intern like Chat(GPT).

Reeta: They've kissed as$ to get to where they're, they bloody deserve their pay.

Darren: They deserve their yachts.

Reeta: What I'm saying is, UBI is not a perfect solution and whenever you have a tech bro, spooking, UBI, it should be challenged, not just because you think, oh, it's gonna rob people of purpose. You have to challenge because it doesn't replace their income that they have earned the right to in society.

So that's my issue with UBI. I do think there's a solution though.

Darren: And what would that be? pray...,

Reeta: This is a bit radical.

Darren: Tell everyone,

This is a bit radical, but I wish there's founders out there who pay note to this and see some merit and even if it's not applied in this way, they think about it.

So one of the most critical thing as, as we discussed about these, AI applications that are coming in is the underlying training that's provided to create the language models underneath it, sit underneath it, powers it. and so that training requires human input. right now there's all these people who are using freemium versions of the product or, cheaper versions.

They're providing their labor and their skills and their knowledge for free to all these AI companies who are going to make billions in the future. I think users should become a bit smarter. They should say I, I'm training your software to effectively replace me. This is going to happen. The writing's on the wall. Yeah. Right. You should accept it.

Yeah. They're all throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Reeta: So because I'm putting all my intellectual input into this, my training, my knowledge, my skills, my experience, I should get something back. based on the usage that people have, there should be some system of allocating equity into the company.

So that people who have contributed a lot towards the development and in every company, every software, there's going to be a small group of super users who do a lot.

Mm-hmm.

I think this is only fair. So if corporations are developing an application to automate a certain function of customer service, and they're using a lot of the customer service staff that exist today to train these bots up, those customer service staff should have some rights, some ownership interest in those bots because it's their knowledge and experience that's going into it. And so then in the future, you're not relying on social welfare, but the payments that are coming to you is from your labor that went into those bots.

So at least for the interim, it resolves some issue around ownership and then this new intelligence that we are creating, we all have a vested interest in it. We've all contributed to it. It's the collective human consciousness. So the wealth That's generated from, it is distributed to everyone through this system of participation in training it.

And for a founder, why this is so compelling is if they go with this offer to the market and say, Hey, here's an app that does generative art. but it needs a certain amount of training. All of your graphic designers who train it gets equity into the property.

Suddenly nobody's going to care about Chat GPT and using Chat GPT, everybody's gonna flock into this new AI app.

Because guess what, when you use it, you train it, and when you train it, you get a vested interest in it. And you get to participate from the success of the company. So why would you use someone else's AI? And so platforms like YouTube platforms, uh, TikTok are already doing it, right? They give creators money for views and they it took them a long time to get to that model, but they know that they. Future is interrelated unless creators come up with content.

Mm-hmm.

They don't get viewers. They don't get viewers. They can't sell ads. So it's just a quid pro quo kind of thing.

So I think that model needs to be brought upfront, in artificial intelligence. And because AI will permeate all line of work from creative to rational to logical, it's a way for all of humanity to participate in creating something together.

Darren: Make it so

Reeta: It's probably too, idealistic view. But, I think I'm, I'm surprised

Darren: It's an idea though, isn't it? Whereas at the moment it's an idea we just, we can only foresee doom.

Reeta: Yeah. You just see Sam Altman going on about UBI if it's the frigging solution, I can't stand him, first of all.

And yeah, what really annoys me is that people challenge him. But that's, that is my problem. These things need to be, these conversations need to be had, people need to be challenged. You can't just pretend you are a not-for-profit one day and you are a for-profit next day and keep tapping your toes in both things and, and going with whatever gives you the best maximum profit outcomes.

Mm-hmm.

A few years ago I did a project on disruption. And the question I had to answer, back then was, would financial services be disrupted by these emerging technologies? the position we came to in the project was of course, You have to work on the assumption that it will, everything that we've seen shows that things change and even entrenched incumbents get disrupted.

So that's the same thing we should look at with AI. Whether it happens in 5, 10, 15 years, we should be preparing for a world where we are going there

Darren: Okay. How else can we prepare? what books can we read?

Reeta: That brings us to an important question, right? Related to jobs is education.

Our entire education system is built around getting kids ready for a job. Mm-hmm. That's all it's, it's a post industrial revolution education system. It's about training future laborers. That's what it is.

The question is, has education, has the curriculum grappled with what's going to happen by the time the kids in year one graduate high school?

Darren: Yeah. Any teachers out there that could drop in a. Some line of inquiry on this topic, my

semi, you get to hear what you have to say.

Reeta: My semi informed view is not really, and I've been searching the web and I just find a few kind of questions like this posed at conferences to again, tech bros whose answer is so vanilla that it just leaves and it is right.

They're not deep thinkers. Well perhaps I'm being a bit too harsh... Um that's not a topic they think deeply about. So others in society have to really grapple with it..

You have to first of all accept that AI is going to transform the world and then say, well, how do we adapt our systems and processes so that, people thrive in this world?

And a lot of people thrive, not just the ones who have ownership of the technology. Okay. So you're looking at me for the answers I need.

Darren: Yeah. So we could you know what now?

Reeta: This feels a bit self-serving, but this is where the work we are doing is actually really important. You know why?

Darren: Yeah, yeah, I think so too.

Reeta: Yeah. Because the world is changing, it's going to get even more disruptive from this point onwards, right? Artificial intelligence is one force. Climate change is going to be the other, right? It's already transpiring the impacts of a changing climate. And then you'll have the shifting geopolitics causing tension around and it's already is, right?

So it's just going to get more disruptive.

And so in this kind of environment where there's a lot of uncertainty and nobody can be sure about how things will transpire, the best thing we can do for ourselves and our children is to give them a strong mind. Give them training, train their minds to be able to stay steady, stay calm, stay collected. No matter what storms are transpiring outside, they can maintain a centered, grounded focus

Darren: wisdom.

Reeta: Yeah. And it's through things like wisdom, but it's also things like, the mind training exercises, learning to, and meditation.

learning to observe, observe the, sensations in your body caused by outside stimulus. And learning to just watch that and be with it and let it pass rather than just unconsciously react to bad feelings and nervousness and fears and all those things.

Darren: 'cause that's when it scars and you hold onto it and it piles up.

Reeta: So in turbulent times, what really helps us is things that stay true regardless of time and place and wisdom is that sort of thing. Yeah.

A lot of the wisdom we talk about today that's in our Willow the Wonderer Story books, is wisdom that you'll find in Buddhist scriptures that are 2,500 years old.

Mm-hmm. You'll find in stoics writings, right? Yeah. Which are what about 2000

Darren: Plus. Yeah. 2000

Reeta: Plus years old.

Darren: Yeah.

Reeta: And you'll find in seminal kind of wisdom and contemplative traditions around the world that are thousands. So these things have stayed true through time.

Darren: And ancient Greeks as well. Ancient Greeks, Socrates and Plato.

Reeta: Yeah. Because it relates to the mental state, of humans and what it says is that outside world will change, but if you have a strong inner world, then you can ride out whatever storm that is happening while maintaining your centered, grounded, calm, peaceful inner state.

Darren: Yeah. And it, and it does work. It can be done.

Reeta: It can be done.

Darren: It just sounds just so too easy and simple that it can't be but

Reeta: Well, some people feel the other way around. A lot of people in today's society, meditation is no longer a fringe thing. They have tried meditation apps and they would say, oh, I can't sit quiet for more than one minute.

Yeah. And that's because meditation has been taken out of context of the broader wisdom traditions and all the other things that surround it. When you understand the philosophy, the practice becomes easier and you understand what the practice is.

You're not there trying to prove that you can hold your mind steady for one minute and man, that's an achievement which has become the macho attitude towards meditation. And it's because the whole idea, the whole practice has been removed from the context, from the re, from understanding the nature of the mind.

Mm.

And the philosophies around it, which again, if you more engage in, contemplative traditions more cohesively, you have a better understanding and better grounding and better chance at sitting for meditation.

Maybe there wasn't a single, you couldn't hold your concentration for more than five seconds, but that's not gonna bother you because that's not the point of the practice. The point is sitting and observing and coming back, coming back every time your mind gets distracted.

Darren: Yeah.

Reeta: What we have tried to do through Willow the Wonderer series is just impart that wisdom, that philosophy that wraps around some of these practices to children, so they have it there as a seed in their mind.

So when life becomes difficult and the storms start and uncertainty increases in the environment, they don't flip out. They've got something to go back to. Yeah, exactly. Just center themselves.

Darren: And it's something that we wanted to do because we felt that we would've liked to have this information when we were kids.

This is part and parcel of our life story as well, and our search for meaning to give the kids what we thought we'd missed out on. And we learned sort of too far in life.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, get out and grab the whole series. And we even have a toy now, don't we?

Reeta: Yes. And start it all, come along and start having these conversations with friends, families, your sphere of influence, so that everybody becomes more aware of what's happening and nobody, we are not caught out,and suddenly there isn't.

Australia had a election, just recently and there wasn't a single journalist who asked government policy makers that, what's your policy for artificial intelligence? Have you got any policy thinking in place?

It's incredible, isn't it? It's incredible to me that nobody even questioned it. And it's going to happen in the near, it's already,

Darren: The tidal wave is coming

Reeta: Think about the ramifications or look at what your kids are being taught today and see if it's going to be relevant for them into the future. Because it's these conversations that lead to change and we need to be having more of these.

Darren: Yeah.

Reeta: And we will, but in the meantime, get Willow the Wonderer series.

Darren: Definitely go out Now. No time to wait. No time the tidal wave is coming

Reeta: Before AI replaces the author and artist as well. Yeah.

Well thank you for listening.

Darren: Thank you ball boys, umpires..

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