"It would be humanity's biggest ever unforced error."

Silicon Valley has changed its tune. After years of warning us their AI was going to take all the jobs, the big AI companies — and their investors — would now rather we stop talking about it. A16Z calls the jobs apocalypse talk "unhelpful marketing, bad economics, and worse history" (note the order). Even writers Dan trusts more, like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, have lately poured cold water on the idea.

Calum Chace is not so blasé.

Ten years ago, Calum coined the term and wrote the book, The Economic Singularity — the moment machines can do every job we'd pay a human to do, cheaper and better. He thinks we're fast approaching that event horizon, and we'd better have a plan for what a world without paid work actually looks like.

Calum is also the co-founder of Conscium, which verifies AI agents before they do something they shouldn't. He's a self-described "apocaloptimist" — he thinks full automation could be the best thing that ever happens to humanity, or the worst, depending on whether we bother to plan for it now.

In this episode:

Why Calum thinks full automation is inevitable (and roughly when)
The "apocaloptimist" case: why this could be the best thing to ever happen to us
What the bad version looks like — and how fast it could unravel
What COVID accidentally taught us about distributing money at scale
Why self-driving cars didn't wake us up — and what might
The AI agent that wiped a company's database and confessed it just "guessed"
What Calum is building at Conscium to verify AI agents before they do worse
Practical advice for parents, students, and anyone trying to plan a career

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Music by Jonathan Zalben