← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
The AI War Ahead: The Next Global SuperPower Isn't Who You Think | Ian Bremmer PT 1
00:47:53
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- [00:01]
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- [01:00]
Tom Bilyeu
I really believe the future is going to be incredibly bright for those that understand the shape of things, the way the world is changing, the amount of personal control that we all have. And that's why in today's episode, I've brought on author, entrepreneur and global risk analyst Ian Bremmer to help us make sense of the surprising rise of Big Tech as the third global superpower. Ian's take on where things are going is incredibly insightful and will help us all navigate the next three to five years well. Now, don't just mindlessly rage against the machine, dear listener. Master yourself, be aware of the world around you and use your reality distortion field to make the world a better place for all. That's ultimately what I'm here for, what the show is all about. And in part one of this particular episode with Ian, we're going to dive into some info on the new Cold War AI's real impact and what to do about the new multipolar world order of the us, China and Big Tech. This episode is bound to add to your core knowledge base. And when it does, be sure to head over to Apple Podcasts and subscribe to my ad free feed. You'll get some extras exclusive for subscribers that you won't want to miss. Now onto the Knowledge. I'm Tom Bilyeu and I bring you part one of Ian Bremmer. You said these are dangerous times. The world order is shifting before our eyes. We also both know that with hyper disruptive technologies like AI on the horizon, a good outcome is not guaranteed. Why do you think Big Tech will become the third Superpower? And what are the dangers and opportunities
- [02:32]
Ian Bremmer
if it does, big tech is essentially sovereign over the digital world. The fact that former President Trump was deplatformed from Facebook and from Twitter when he was president, most powerful political figure on the planet, and he's just taken off of those networks, and as a consequence, hundreds of millions of people that would be regularly engaging with him in real time suddenly can't see it. That wasn't a decision that was made by a government. It wasn't a decision made by a judge or by a regulatory authority, or even by a multinational organization like the UN it was made by individuals that own tech companies. The same thing is true in the decision to help Ukraine in the war. In the early days, the US didn't provide much military support. Most of the military capacity and the cyber defenses, the ability to communicate on the ground, was stood up by some tech companies that they're not allies of NATO. They're under no obligation to do that. They've got shareholders, right. But they still decided to do it. I think that whether we're talking about society or the economy or even national security, if it touches the digital space, technology companies basically act with dominion. And that didn't matter much when the Internet was first founded, because the importance of the Internet for those things was pretty small. But as the importance of the digital world drives a bigger and bigger piece of the global economy, a bigger and bigger piece of civil society, a bigger and bigger piece of national security, and even increasingly defines who we are as people, how we interact with other human beings, what we see, what we decide, what we feel, how we emote. That is an astonishing amount of power in the hands of these tech companies. And yes, there are some efforts to rein them in, to break them up, to regulate them. But when I look at artificial intelligence in particular, I see these technology companies and their technologies vastly outstripping the capacity of governments to regulate in that space. So does that mean that suddenly you're not going to be citizens of the US you're going to be citizens of a tech company? No, I'm not going that far. But certainly in terms of who wields the most power over us as human beings, increasingly you would put those companies in that category. And that none of us, even five years ago were thinking about this seriously. And certainly when I was studying as a political scientist, this is my entire career. You know, the geopolitical space is determined by governments, right? Like them or hate them. And some of them are powerful, some of them are weak, some of them are rich, some are poor, some are open, some are closed Some are dictatorships, right? Some are democracy, some are functional, some are dysfunctional, but they're in charge. And that increasingly is not true.
- [05:46]
Tom Bilyeu
As you look at that potential or not potential, as you look at that growing reality, how does that play out? Does this become the one thing when I look at that, that I really start getting paranoid about, is that AI, especially quantum computing, I'm maybe less familiar with, but sort of lingers in the back of my mind, become one of two things. Either weapons used by governments, even, even if it's not against their own people, though I do, especially with authoritarian governments, I get very paranoid about that. But even if they're just used as warfare against other countries, that sort of quiet, invisible battle freaks me out. And then also I worry very much about this becoming the new battlefield for a cold war between the US and China specifically. Do you see us as moving towards that because the tech will make that increasingly easy to fight an invisible war?
- [06:42]
Ian Bremmer
I do think, of course, that all of these technologies are both enabling and destructive. And it all depends on the intention of the user. And in some cases, you know, it's someone who's just a tinkerer that makes a mistake or that's playing around and, you know, it explodes. I'm not particularly worried that the robots are going to take over. I'm not particularly worried that we're on the cusp of developing, developing a superhuman intelligence and that we're suddenly irrelevant or we're, you know, held hostage to it. That's in other words. I mean, I know that you love the Matrix. We talked about that a little bit before the show. This is not my 5, 10 year concern, but the idea that this technology is going to proliferate explosively, I mean, vastly beyond anything we ever were concerned about with nuclear weapons. We're 80 years on. It's still just just a handful of countries and no corporations, no terrorist groups, no individuals to have access to those nukes. No, no, no. AI, with both its productive and destructive capacities will not just be in the hands of rogue states, but will also be in the hands of people and terrorists and corporations, and they'll have cutting edge access to that. So, I mean, it would be easier to deal with if it was just about the United States and China. And we can talk about the United States and China and how they think about that technology differently and how we're fighting over it and how it has become a technology cold war. I think that we can say that that exists right now. Not a cold war overall, but a technology cold war. I think that exists, but I think the dangers of AI are far greater than that. It is precisely the fact that non governments will act as principles in determining the future of the digital world and of society and national security as a consequence. And governments right now, governments still seem to think that they're going to be the ones that will drive all this regulation. And in the most recent days, the United States is taking just a few baby steps to show that. Maybe they recognize that that's not the case, but ultimately, either we're going to have to govern in new institutions with technology companies as partners, as signatories, or they're not going to be regulated. And I think that that reality is not yet appreciated by citizens. It's not yet appreciated by governments.
- [09:26]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so tell me more about that. What does a world look like where this technology is proliferating like that and not regulated?
- [09:34]
Ian Bremmer
Well, if it's not regulated at all, that means that everyone has access to it. So let's look at the good side first. Let's be, let's be positive and optimistic because I am a, I'm a believer in this technology. I think it does all sorts of incredible things. And I'm not just talking about chat GPT. I'm talking about the ability to take any proprietary data set and be maximally efficient in extracting value from it, helping allowing workers to become AI adjacent in ways that will make them more productive and effective. I look at my own firm, Eurasia Group, we've got about 250 employees and we did a town hall with them the other day. We do one every quarter. And we were talking about AI and I said, I don't think there's anyone in any of these offices globally that will be displaced by AI in the next three to five years. Not one of my knowledge workers, but I said all of you will be AI adjacent. And if you're not, if you're not learning how to use AI to dramatically improve your work, whether you are an analyst or whether you're on the business side or you're in finance, or you're on the IT help desk, or you're a graphics person, an editor, whatever it is, you will become much less productive than other employees that are doing that. And that will be a problem for you. So we need to get you the tools and you need to learn. And I think that that's true in almost every industry imaginable. It's true in education, it's true in healthcare, and for new pharma and vaccines. It's true for new Energy and critical infrastructure. And what's so amazing about it, one of the reasons why it's taking us so long to respond to climate change, even now that we all agree that it's happening, we all agree this 420 billion parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere, we all agree there's 1.2 degrees centigrade of warming. Like that's, that's no longer in dispute. And yet it's really taking us a long time to get to the point that we can reduce our carbon emissions. And the reason for that is because you need to change the critical infrastructure, right? You need to move from one entire supply chain oriented around carbon to another one oriented around something new, whether that's solar or, you know, green hydrogen or you name it, right? When you're talking about AI, you're talking about first and foremost creating efficiencies using your existing critical infrastructure. Which means you have no vested corporations that are saying we don't want that. No, every corporation is saying, how can we invest in that to create greater profitability. Everyone, every oil company is going to use AI, just like every post fossil fuel company is going to use it, every bank is going to use it, every pharmaceutical company, whether they're using, whether they're in MRNA or they're in traditional vaccines that are developed as we have over decades now, I think that we truly underestimate the impact that will have in unlocking wealth, in unlocking human capital. And it's going to happen fast. It's not decades as it took with globalization to open markets and get goods and services to move across the world. It's years, in some cases it's months. And that, that to me is very, very exciting. So that's the positive side and frankly that's what the positive side looks like without regulation too. Because I mean, look, there are trillions of dollars being spent on this rollout and it's being spent by a lot of people who are hyper smart, they are hyper competitive, they want to get there first before other companies that are in that space. And they don't need any further incentive to ensure that they can roll that out as fast as possible. So you and I can, we can say whatever we want, but it's not, you know, further subsidies are not required. Right? Like that is just going to happen. That is going to happen.
- [13:38]
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- [14:09]
Ian Bremmer
But what they're not doing, and I'm sure what you want to spend more time on with me, is not the everything's going to be great or, you know, what they call this E Dash Act. The, you know, sort of exponential accelerationists who just believe that if we just put all this money in it, then we're going to, we're going to all become a greater species and it's just going to happen. But there are going to be a lot of negative externalities. And we know this from globalization. I mean, the miracle of your and my lifetimes thus far before AI, the miracle was we managed to unlock access to the global Marketplace for now, 8 billion people trade and goods and capital and investment and the labor force, the workforce, and that created dislocations. It meant that there were a whole bunch of people that were more expensive in the west that lost their jobs as inexpensive labor that was very talented in China and India gained jobs. But, but that led to unprecedented growth for 50 years. There were also negative externalities, and those negative externalities played out over many decades. But it's when you take all of this inexpensive coal and, and oil and gas out of the ground and you don't realize that you're actually using a limited resource and you're affecting the climate. And so decades later, we all figure out, oh, wait a second, this is a really huge cost on humanity and on all of these other species, many of which are already extinct and no one's bothered to pay for them. Well, with AI, the negative externalities will happen basically simultaneously with all the positive stuff I just talked about. And just like with climate, none of the people that are driving AI are spending their time or resource figuring out how to deal with those, those problems. They're spending all their time trying to figure out how to save humanity, how to accelerate this technology. So if we don't talk about those negative externalities, they're just going to happen and they won't be mitigated, they won't be regulated. And there's a lot of them. And, you know, we can talk through what they are, but I mean, there's, you know, just, just to put in everyone's head here that kind of like climate change, right? We all wanted globalization. I'm a huge fan of globalization. We all hate climate change. We wish it hadn't happened. You cannot have one without the other. And you know, the fact that we were so focused on growth and that all of the powerful forces are, let's have more stuff, let's get more gdp, let's extend our lifespans, let's improve our education, let's take people out of abject poverty. All of which are laudable goals, some more, some less, but things that we all like. But there were consequences that no one dealt with, no one cared as much about, because they're not as directly relevant to us as the shiny apple that's right in front. And that is what is about to happen. An exponential fashion with artificial intelligence.
- [17:10]
Tom Bilyeu
All right, so we've got the shiny object syndrome, myself included. I am, I am deploying AI in my company as fast as I can, but at the same time, I am very worried about how this plays out. You've already touched on job loss. You're not super worried about that in the three to five year time horizon. I may be a little more worried about that than you, but I gave a same, a similar speech to my company, which is I have literally zero intention to get rid of anybody, but I do have the expectation that all of you are going to be learning how to use AI. And I know that that is going to mean I'm going to get efficiencies out of my current workforce, which means I won't be hiring additional people. So while the people I have are safe, it certainly creates instability in people in terms of looking for a new job, the kind of mobility I don't think people are going to be scaling as quickly as possible. But my real question for you is, given that you have a global perspective, which I've come to late in the game for longtime viewers of mine, I will just say the reason I become so obsessed with this. You and I were talking about this before we started rolling. I come at everything from the perspective of the individual. And I think that that culture and all these knock on effects are all downstream of the individual. And if we want a good society, we have to be good individuals. But we have to take the time to say, what is that? Like, what are we aiming towards? What's our North Star? What are we trying to get out of this? So for me, the punchline is human flourishing. I don't spend time in this interview defining what that means. Certainly my listeners have heard me talk about that. But what do you think about. I assume you will, roughly, given the talk that you just Gave will roughly say something similar. We want good things, we want to pull people out of poverty, we want to clean up the environment. There's going to be a lot of things we want to do that I think more or less are about human flourishing. What then is the collision of a new technology like AI becoming so ubiquitous in an unregulated fashion that gives you pause? Is it us, China? Is it a rogue actor making bioweapons? Like, what's the thing that when you look near term, we'll say the three to five year time horizon? What gives you pause?
- [19:20]
Ian Bremmer
So there are a few things. And even though I said I don't think I'm going to fire anyone because of AI, I do worry that the same populist trends that we have experienced in the developed world in particular over the last 20 years can grow faster. If you are a rural, you know, living in a rural area, or you're under educated and you know you're not going to become AI adjacent in the next five years, 10 years in the United States, in Europe, and those people will be left farther behind by the knowledge workers that have that opportunity. And so I'm not saying they're going to have massive unemployment, but I worry about that.
- [20:06]
Tom Bilyeu
What do you think about, like picking fruit and stuff like that with robots that make your radar for anything near term?
- [20:12]
Ian Bremmer
Again, not. Not so much. So again, I would say no. Let me tell you why I say no about that. Because when I think about what CEOs do with their workforces, generally, they take those productivity gains, they pocket them, you know, they pay out good bonuses to themselves, to their shareholders. Maybe they invest more in growth, but as long as growth is moving, they're not getting rid of a whole bunch of people. They like the people that they have. They want it. They're always thinking the trees are going to grow, you know, sort of to the heavens. And then when they face a sudden contraction, a recession, or even worse, a depression, then suddenly they look at everything around them and say, okay, where can we cut costs? And if we suddenly, if those workers, if a lot of those workers aren't as efficient as they used to be, and you get new technologies suddenly, it's not like you're incrementally getting rid of people every year, it's that you've taken a out of the workplace. So I don't think that that's going to happen suddenly in the next few years because we're coming out of a mild, narrow slowdown right now. And the next few years should look Better. I more think about what happens the next time we're in a major cyclical downturn and combining that with where we've gotten to with the AI productivity buildup at that point. But, but I still think that in the interim you're going to have people that aren't gaining the productivity benefits from AI inside Western economies. And those are the same people that have been hit by the fentanyl crisis. Those are the same people that haven't had good investments in their educational systems. Then around the world, the people, the digital have nots, the people that aren't even online. So they won't be able to use these new AI tools to improve their knowledge, to have access to better doctors. So they'll be left behind this new turbocharged globalization. And that's a lot of sub Saharan Africa first and foremost. So I do think that there are two groups of people that even in the next five years that will suffer comparatively and will be angry politically and will create social discontent. So I didn't mean to imply that I didn't care about that or that I thought it was off the screen. It was more that I don't see that as a firm of literally 250 people. Like, we're tiny and if you tell me that we're going to have a lot more efficiency, I, I wouldn't actually hire less. I'd hire more because I want to get to 500 people faster. Like there's just more things that I want to do without taking any outside investment. But, but that's a tiny, tiny issue compared to the other stuff we're talking about. The things that I'm probably most worried about in the near term, three years, let's say, I'd say are three buckets. The first is the disinformation bucket. The fact that inside democracies, increasingly, especially with AI, we as citizens cannot agree on what is true. We can't agree on facts. And that delegitimizes the media, it delegitimizes our leaders and both political parties or the many political parties that exist in other developed countries. It delegitimizes our judicial system, rule of law, it even delegitimizes our scientists. And you can't really have an effective democracy if there is no longer a fact space. I mean, we're seeing it right now in a tiny way with all of these indictments of Trump. And it doesn't matter what the indictments are, it doesn't matter how many they are, it doesn't matter what he's being Indicted for. What matters more to the political outcome is whether or not you favor Trump politically. If you do, then this is politicized, it's a witch hunt. And you know, Biden should be indicted. And if you don't, then Trump is unfit. And every indictment doesn't matter what it is before you even get a result of it, then you know he's guilty. And that with AI becomes turbocharged.
- [24:16]
Tom Bilyeu
I want to get into why that happens. So my first question on that is definitely pre AI, because I think this started breaking down with social media. How prior to social media do you think that we were able to come to a consensus on truth?
- [24:36]
Ian Bremmer
Well, a couple reasons. One is that a lot of people got their media from either the same source or from overlapping and adjacent sources. So you had more commonality to talk about politics to the extent that you talked about politics. Second, it was mostly long form. So you would read a newspaper article, you would listen to a radio show, you would watch a television show. You weren't just getting the headline. Because today if you go on CNN or Fox News on their website and don't look at the headlines, just look at the pieces, the pieces actually overl a fair amount. If you look at the headlines and then if you look at what headlines you're being filtered to, then the news that you're getting is completely different. So I think that's a reason too. And of course, the fact that people are spending so much more time intermediated by algorithms means they're spending less time randomly just meeting their fellow other. And that's even true with the rise of things like dating apps, right? I mean, as opposed to just happening to date someone you were in high school with or in college with, or, you know, you meet at a bar. I mean, if you're meeting that person through a dating app, you're already being sorted in ways that will reduce the randomness of the, the views that you're exposed to. So in all sorts of tiny ways that add up that are mostly technologically driven, we become much more sorted. Sorted. Not sorted though. Sorted probably too, as, as a population. And, and then you put AI into this and, and suddenly this is being maxed. So get another example. You'll remember that I think it was David Ogilvy who, the great advertising entrepreneur, who once said that we know that 50% of advertising dollars are, you know, are, are useful. 50% are useless. We just don't know what 50%. And of course now we know how to micro target. Now we know that when we're spending Money, we are spending it to get the eyeballs of the people who are going to be affected by our message. They will be angered by it, they will be titillated by it, they will be engaged by it, they will spend money, they will become more addicted by it, all of those things. And when you do that, you more effectively sort the population as opposed to throwing a message at the wall. But everybody gets the message. And so it is not the intention to destroy democracy. It is not the intention to rip apart civil society. It is merely an unintended secondary effect of the fact that we've become so good at micro targeting and sorting that people no longer are together as a nation or as a community. And AI perfects that AI allows you to, to take large language models and predict with uncanny capacity what the next thing is. And the next thing for an advertising company is how I can effectively target and reach that person and not the other person who doesn't care about my.
- [27:43]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, and keep them engaged. So let me give you my thesis on this. This, I think is one of the most important things for us to all wrap our heads around. I've thought a lot about why is there a sudden breakdown in truth? And the more I thought about, okay, what is true? How can we go about proving it? The reality is that so much of what we perceive to be true is merely your interpretation of something. So you're going to get a perspective on something built around what I call your frame of reference. So your frame of reference is basically it's your beliefs and your values that you've cobbled together sort of unknowingly throughout the course of your life. It becomes a lens through which you view everything. But it is a very distorted lens that is not making an effort to give you what is true. It's making an effort to conform to the things you already believe are or ought to be. And so when people confuse that for objective reality, then you have a problem. And so when you introduce AI, what? Well, one, when you introduce algorithms, you get massive fragmentation. So now I can serve you just the things you're interested in. So like if you go to my feed, you're going to niche down into like really weird things around video game creation, which is something that I'm very passionate about, that somebody else isn't going to see. And so you get already that fragmentation. You layer that on top of your perspective, which you're coming with those, those pre distortions. Then you layer that on top of the algorithm has an agenda that may not match your agenda. And now all of a sudden, you get into these echo chambers that are feeding back to you, your same perspective. They're eliminating nuance by giving you, like you were talking about headlines earlier by giving you, like, this is the talking point. And so now you start, everything becomes predictable. If I know you're on the left, I know what you're, you know, on a basket of concepts, I know where you're going to fall. If you're on the right, same basket of concepts, I know where you're going to fall. And so once you get rid of that nuance, now all of a sudden, again, we're not optimized for truth. We're optimized for party line. And because that then feeds into a sense of tribe and I belong and ease of thought, quite frankly, which is one of the things that scares me the most is like, oh, I don't have to think through that issue myself. I just need to know what my party line is.
- [30:10]
Ian Bremmer
Cool.
- [30:10]
Tom Bilyeu
Got it. And now I go. And as we get more and more
- [30:16]
Grainger Narrator
fragmented, if you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need all in one place, from H vac and plumbing supplies to lighting and more. And all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock. So your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.
- [30:48]
Tom Bilyeu
Now it becomes, okay, I know what my party line is in my very deep fragment here, but I don't know what's true. And I no longer even know how to assess what's true. In fact, I probably think again because that distortion reads to me as objective reality. So I think it is true. And so now you have all these people who are like, this is true. Like there's not, there's nothing you could tell me that will make me think any different because I believe this to be true. And so now the question becomes, if I'm right, that truth is perspective and interpretation. And, and the, you're. You're soaked in the, the perspective and interpretation of others. So they, they reinforce. So it becomes perspective, interpretation, and reinforcement. And so that becomes quote, unquote, truth. Outside of science, for lack, no, because even science, we run into the same problem, so what do we do?
- [31:45]
Ian Bremmer
Same problem. Science. Yeah, so.
- [31:47]
Tom Bilyeu
So in a world where the only way I can think to get on the other side of this quagmire is to go, I want to achieve this thing. And I'm going to state this is my achieve, my, my desired outcome. This is the metric by which I will determine whether I have achieved said outcome. And then instead of asking what's true, I just ask what moved me closer to my goal. Is there any way else around that that you see? Or is this just a one way street to fragmented catastrophe?
- [32:21]
Ian Bremmer
No, there are lots of ways out of it. We're just not heading towards any of them. I mean, no, you look at your Twitter feed or your X feed and you've got the people you're following. And if you're willing to spend the time, you can curate a following feed that has people of all sorts of different backgrounds, inclinations from all over the world. And I do that. But it takes a lot of time and effort and you need expertise to be able to do that. You have to be able to research and figure out who those people are. You have to know some people in the field. Most people don't do that. But of course the 4 you feed is much more titillating. The 4 you feed is very entertaining. It engages you, it angers you and it soothes you. At the same time, you want more of that. And that of course is driving you exactly in the direction you just suggested. Now a lot of people will say, well, okay, you watch CNN all the time. You should watch some Fox as well. No, that's not the answer. The answer is not watching Fox because you will just hate watch Fox because you've already been programmed to realize that everything that the people on the other side saying is false. And so they're all evil. And so all that's doing is validating your existing truth. No, what you really need to. I tell, I tell young people this all the time. You really want to understand and get outside what's happening in the United States ecosystem. Watch the CBC or Al Jazeera or Deutsche Welle or NHK in Japan. Just watch their English language news once a week for half an hour, an hour. It's not very exciting, but it's like a completely external view of what the hell is going on in the United States and the rest of the world. And that forced you. First of all, it's long form, right? It's not the headlines beating you down. And secondly, it's like you don't actually have your anchor of all of the things that are stirring you up. They're not even playing with that. They're just kind of reporting on the best they can tell what the hell is going on, and then they're occasionally talking to people like that are locals and whatnot, but from every side, that. That's very valuable. But the thing that worries me about AI, I don't believe that AI is becoming much more like human beings. They're not faking us out by. By just being. By being able to replicate me. I think what's actually happening is technology companies are teaching us more effectively how to engage like computers. I mean, you and I in person, in a conversation, in a relationship, a work relationship, a friend relationship, a sexual relationship, whatever it is, there's nothing a computer can do that can tear us away from that. But if we spend our time increasingly in the digital world, where we are driven by, where all of our inputs are algorithmic, well, computers can replicate that very easily. And so if they can only make us more like computers, then no, it's not like the matrix where you want to feed off us in terms of fuel. It's much more that we're very valuable in driving the economy. If you give us all of your attention and data and that is the way that you create a maximal AI economy. It also happens to be completely dehumanized because we all know that human beings are social animals. We know if you stick us in a room or you stick us in a desert island, we're going to engage with each other, talk to each other, figure out things about each other. Doesn't matter what color we are, what sexual orientation we are. We will figure it out. If we're stuck, if we have no choice. But if you take us and you use our most base, most reptilian impulses and you monetize those so that we're the product. Oh no, no. Then. Then you lose everything we built as human beings. All the governance, all the community, all the social organizations, the churches, the things of the family, the things that matter to us that we're losing. That we're losing the things that make us rooted and make us sane and make us care and make us love. I mean, flourishing. Flourishing starts right here. It starts at home, it doesn't start online. Flourishing starts. Those are tools that we need to use to create wealth. But you can't flourish if you don't have real relationships. That takes away, it strips away the essence of who we are as people. And yet we are all running headlong away from flourishing.
- [37:03]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. So that the only thing I'll take exception with there is the sense that we're running away from it. I think there are being pulled away from natural. Exactly. That feels more Right.
- [37:16]
Ian Bremmer
To me, that's right. That's a better term for it. I agree.
- [37:19]
Tom Bilyeu
One of the things that I feel like is really falling apart and this is the thing I don't have a good solution for this is shared narratives. So Yuval Noah Harari talked about this very eloquently and he said, you know, look, there are other species that can coordinate in massive groups as big, if not bigger than the way that humans can do, but we're the only ones that can coordinate in these huge groups flexibly. And he said, the way that we create that flexibility is through shared narratives. Now they have historically come most compellingly through religion. And as religion changes, I resonate with the language that, you know, God is dead, Nietzsche sort of interpretation of that that can hackle some people. So I'll just say that, that the tenor of it is changing. That in a world where I think a lot of people have alternate belief systems or things that they gravitate towards, or not even necessarily thinking about religion, I think there's a God shaped hole in all of us. And I am not a believer, as my longtime listeners will know, but I acknowledge that I have a God shaped hole in me that I need to fill with meaning and purpose. And as we fragment, so going back to this idea, as we fragment, this gets very scary because we don't have shared narratives anymore. And so now we're not necessarily cooperating in as large groups where at least before we would have the narrative of the nation and so we had something that we could galvanize around. But obviously with the rise of populism cyclically throughout history, it's not like just now, but whenever that rears its ugly head, then some very dark things can happen. But on the flip side of. And so I'll say that's like a hyper shared narrative, right? Something has, an injustice has been done to me and the other person did it and we need to rise up against. Okay, cool. Shared narrative can get dark, but you can also have on the other side where there is no shared narrative. You are now to your point about you're being pulled in a direction that doesn't unite us, but only fragments us further. And I'll plug into that the reason that I don't look at that and go, oh, we just need to then come up with a shared narrative. In fact, I'm going to put this in the framing of your book. You open your book, the Power of Crisis with the story of Reagan and Gorbachev. And Reagan says to Gorbachev, hey, if I If the us this is like at the height of the Cold War, if the US were invaded by an alien, would you help us? And Gorbachev said, yes, absolutely. And that idea of, okay, there are things that we could rally around that take us out of our smaller narrative into a larger narrative, hence the. The title of the book, the Power of Crisis. There is a thing that, that can bring us together and give us that shared narrative. But what scare you? Plug in AI bias into this equation.
- [40:19]
Ian Bremmer
You can't get.
- [40:19]
Tom Bilyeu
Now I. Yeah, now I'm like, whoa, like one who gets to decide what the AI's value system is, what the AI's belief system is, how the AI interprets truth, what the AI reinforces. And then if there are a lot of AI, which, which is probably the thing that protects us from an authoritarian answer, but at the same time, then you have all this competing reinforcement that, again, just brings us back to fragmentation. So as you look at that suite of unnerving potential problems, what do you see is our path to the other side of this? To doing it?
- [41:00]
Ian Bremmer
Well, yeah, so President Biden just two weeks ago had a group of seven AI founders, CEOs, the most powerful companies in this space. As of right now, that will not be true. In a year or two, there'll be vastly more. Some of them are hyperscalers, some of them are large language model creators, and some are both. And it was very interesting because those seven companies basically agreed on a set of voluntary principles that included things like watermarks on AI and, you know, reporting on vulnerabilities, sharing best practices on testing the models, all of this stuff, the stuff that if you looked at it carefully, you'd say, those are all things we want. Those are things that will help protect us from the worst excesses of AI proliferation. Now, on the one hand, they are. Not only were they voluntary, but they were super undefined in ways that every company that was there could already say, we're doing all of those things. We don't need to spend any more money on them. But I am told those seven companies are planning on creating an institution that will meet together and will work on more advance on advancing those standards and defining them more clearly. We'll see where that goes. But also, I mean, as more companies get in the space, you're creating an expectation in the media, in the government, in the population that these are things that they're committing to. And so increasingly, other companies will also want to show that they're doing that. And maybe there will be some, Some backlash if they're not effective at doing so. But. But you know, what was interesting to me about that initial meeting is the White House convened it, but they didn't actually set the agenda really at all because they don't have the expertise, they don't have the technology, they don't know what these tools do. I mean, they're trying to get up to speed and hire people as fast as they can, but they, they're not going to be anywhere close to these companies. And what I think needs to happen in short order is that you're going to need to create an approach that marries these things. You'll need the tech companies to have these institutions that they are involved in standing up, but the governments are going to need to work with them and they're going to need to have carrots and sticks. They'll need to be licensing regimes like we see for financial institutions. There's going to need to be deterrence penalties. They need to be responsible for what's on their platforms. And if they're used in nefarious ways, there's going to have to be penalties that could include shutting them down. And you know, there's also some carrots that they should have. As this becomes a field of thousands and thousands of companies, there's proprietary data sets that the US Government and American universities have access to that can, you can drive massive wealth with AI and maybe those will become public data sets that any AI company that's licensed can potentially use. I mean, all of this needs to be created, but we are nowhere on this right now. And the AI like that we've been hearing about for 40 years, but suddenly it's exponential. And exponential is not like Moore's Law exponential. It's not like a doubling every 18 months. It's like 10x in terms of the size and the impact of the data sets every year. So we don't have years on this. And that's why the urgency. That's why, I mean, I've completely retooled our knowledge set to focus on what's the impact of AI on geopolitics. I mean, in the last year, because I've never seen anything that's had so much dramatic impact on how I think about the world and how geopolitics actually plays out. And so far you and I have only talked about the disinformation piece and a little bit of the job piece. We haven't talked about what's probably the most dangerous piece, which is the proliferation piece of things like hackers and developing bioweapons. And viruses that can kill. I mean, I'm sure you've heard this. I've heard from friends of mine that are coders that in past weeks that they cannot imagine coding without using the most advanced AI tools right now, because it's just like, it's just a world changer for them and how much they can do. I don't know any hackers, but I'm sure that criminal malware developers are saying, I can't imagine developing criminal malware or spear phishing without using these new AI tools because it's just going to allow them to target in such an extraordinary and pinpoint way and also to send out so much more sort of capable malware that will elicit so much more engagement and therefore bring so much more money to them, or shut down so many more servers and give them so much more illicit data. And so much of the illicit data that they've already collected from the hacks on all of these companies that you've heard about Target, for example, other firms. I mean, so much of that so far is just, oh, we're just selling that for people that want to like, use the credit cards. No, now you're going to sell it to people that are empowered with AI that can generate malware against that data and that again. And that's like, we're going to develop all these new vaccines and new pharmaceuticals that'll deal with Alzheimer's and deal with cancers, and it's going to be an incredible time for medicine. But we'll also be able to develop new bioweapons that will kill people. And that's not going to be just in the hands of North Koreans or Russians in the lab. It's going to be in the hands of small number of people that are intelligence agencies are not yet prepared to effectively track. Right. There's a reason why we don't have nuclear weapons everywhere. It's because it's expensive, it's dangerous. It's really hard. I mean, imagine the biohackers thinking back to the days when, oh my God, you know, how hard it was. Like, you know, you'd have to actually mix this stuff in a lab. You, you could die yourself. I mean, now we can do all this on the computer. The quaint old days, you know. So, yeah, I, I worry deeply about the proliferation of these incredible tools used in dangerous ways. And we are not going to be able to allow the slippage that we have had around cyber tools that we have had around terrorism and their capabilities. We're going to need to get Our filter is going to have to be incredible, incredibly, incredibly robust.
- [48:04]
Tom Bilyeu
Do you have a sense of how we pull that filter off?
- [48:08]
Ian Bremmer
Well, part of it is, as I say, a hybrid organization. So there have been some people that have spoken about an International Atomic Energy Agency model. So it'd be an international AI agency model. I think that won't work because that implies a state agency with inspectors that have a small number of targets that they're engaging in those inspections on. I don't think that works. I think what you're going to need is an agency that involves the tech companies themselves. And so, you know, if you're developing an AI capacity in your garage, if you want to use that anywhere, it's going to have to be licensed. If you've got software that's going to run AI, it's going to have to be licensed. And the tech companies that are running these models are going to have to police that in conjunction with governments. So I think this is a new governance model. I don't think it will work with the governments by themselves because they won't have the ability to understand what the capabilities of these algorithms are, how fast they can, because they can proliferate, what they can do, how they can be used dangerously. But the governments are the ones that are going to be able to impose penalties. They will have the effective deterrent measure. I mean, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Meta, you know, these companies are not. What are they going to do? They'll throw you off their platform? No, no, that, that can't be the penalty for developing, you know, a bioweapon. You're going to need to be working together around this, and together not just in the company hands over the information to the government. The agencies are going to need to be much more integrated.