00:00Bill Gates published an op-ed last week, really being very critical of AI in a way that was
00:07surprising, I think. Did you read it? I've read parts of it. I haven't read the whole thing. It
00:11was like 6,000 words. It's quite long, but it was very splashy. He really came out saying,
00:15we're not prepared for this. This is going to be potentially really catastrophic. It was quite
00:19something. It was quite something. And Gautam Akunda, lecturer at Yale School of Management,
00:24as well as a Bloomberg opinion contributor, has also read it and, you know, thought about it in
00:29the context of what Silicon Valley's leadership has been doing or not been doing. Gautam, I think
00:34back to the early days of, you know, when people were excited about the internet, Google had this
00:39motto, don't be evil. And everyone was trying to make the world a better place. There was that HBO
00:44show, Silicon Valley, where, you know, they kind of openly mocked that idea of, you know, we're trying
00:48to make the world a better place. And it feels like Silicon Valley in 2026 is very, very different from
00:54that. Yeah, it really is. And that there's been a generational transition. There's been a transition
01:00from people who are primarily technologists to people whose motivations are primarily financial.
01:06There's just been a, but there's been a set of behaviors where AI, I think of, is a capstone,
01:14not the trigger for what's going on, not the root of the problem, where, you know, like if we were
01:19to do
01:19the list of Facebook scandals, we would kind of be here for a few days, right? Like, like this,
01:24it's not a short list. There are any number of others. And I think AI just finally became a place
01:29where the public pushed back and said, you know, this is a chance for us to sit to put limits
01:35on
01:35these people. In one of my earlier columns, I said, you know, in the United States, every data
01:39center is a referendum. And Silicon Valley is losing that referendum about as decisively as I've ever
01:44seen anyone lose one. Well, one of the big concerns that Gates brought up, and I think that a lot
01:49of
01:49people have is about jobs and AI potentially replacing jobs. Bill Gates called for something
01:54called human-reserved jobs within companies. Can you talk a little bit about that and maybe a
01:59little bit about what kind of a threat AI poses to jobs right now? Yeah, so he set out, he
02:06said that
02:06there should be categories of jobs that only humans are allowed to do. And he gave a couple of examples.
02:12I'll say I personally am kind of skeptical about that one as a solution. He himself said that those
02:17categories are going to change over time. And there'd just be, you know, there's just going
02:20to be a huge amount of dispute about what people, what categories would that be? How do we assign
02:24them? And market pressures where companies will sort of find ways around those circles. But the large,
02:31the fascinating thing about AI is we've had an enormous amount of discussion about like AI's job
02:37creating devastating jobs. And it just isn't showing up in the data, right? It just is not.
02:41I mean, it is early days. There's actually not any dispute about that. Nobody's going,
02:44oh, we're seeing it in the data. Why we're not seeing it in the data is a really interesting
02:48question, but we definitely aren't. So I guess to follow on that, at some point,
02:56it's going to start showing up in the data. And right now, data centers has become the issue that
03:02people have really gathered around. We're seeing it from elected officials in places like Texas,
03:07where you don't really expect it because it's such a deep red state. And I believe Greg Abbott even
03:11called Texas, the epicenter of AI development. Yet, when we talk to political analysts like
03:17Henrietta Trays of VETA Partners, she points out that yes, it's a big deal now. But post election,
03:22post midterm election, the big tech companies are just going to give money to whoever comes out ahead,
03:28including Democrats and Republicans. And all that, you know, jawboning about data centers,
03:33and we don't want this in our backyard is going to die down. And they're going to move towards like,
03:37let's create more things to build more jobs once again. How do you think about the political impact
03:42there? So they are. And that process has already started, where Facebook is cutting $10 million
03:44checks to both Democrats and Republicans in this cycle. I am totally confident that that is what
03:51the leaders of Silicon Valley are trying to do, because it is way easier to write checks than it
03:56is to engage in some introspection and actually think about why people are, you know, actually sort of
04:01honestly trying to answer the question, why do people hate us? But I'm pretty skeptical it's
04:06going to work. And that's just for a very simple reason. As far as I can tell, in the history
04:13of
04:13polling, the issue on which liberals and conservatives are most strongly in agreement is they both hate
04:20data centers, right? Like we are a country united by only one thing right now. We all hate data centers.
04:27Now, you may think that's right. You may think that's wrong. I'm not making an argument that
04:31that belief is correct. I'm just telling you that is the facts on the ground. And however rich Silicon
04:36Valley is, it's not clear to me you can buy your way out of that. Well, I mean, Gates did
04:42talk a lot
04:42about the impact that AI is going to have on all aspects of our culture and our economy, including
04:49jobs. I mean, he compared it at one point to 9-11, saying it would affect national security, education,
04:55taxation, elections, all of that. Do you think that's true? I mean, are we unprepared? And he said
05:00governments were unprepared for this change. Do you think that's true? Do you think this is
05:04something governments need to really jump on and start really preparing for a pretty catastrophic
05:09level change? So I don't know, right? There's going to be a huge, there's definitely going to be
05:15change. My very strong suspicion is that change is not going to look that much like we think it does,
05:20right? So there's the whole wave of, you know, hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars of
05:26investment that are sort of driving the frontier of these models forward and trying to do that.
05:31From using them and from like sort of watching how other businesses use them, it strikes me that
05:37that may not actually be where the impact comes from. That the impact may be much more likely to be
05:41sort of low-end services that aren't frontier models, but that provide things that people
05:46didn't have before. So if you can't afford a lawyer, and Claude is a better option for you than
05:52doing things on your own. If you can afford a lawyer, then you definitely should be using,
05:56you definitely should be using a lawyer. But for most Americans, having an AI is better than having
06:01nothing. And better than nothing is pretty powerful. That's something we really need to get a handle,
06:07get a handle on very quickly, because you're going to start to see, as for example, in elections,
06:11we're going to see that the ability to generate infinite amounts of semi-plausible text freely
06:18is already changing internet discourse and sort of political discourse in ways that we're just
06:22beginning to think about. Is there anyone in Silicon Valley, any corporate executive that
06:28you admire right now that you think is kind of standing up and doing what you believe is the
06:32right thing? So I think even when I don't agree with him, I will say that I think Dario Amidai
06:39is
06:39completely sincere in his belief that this is a huge problem and that we need to get ahead of it
06:44and
06:44try to do that. There are lots of other people who seem to be primarily financially motivated and
06:48they're talking their book. I have never met him. I have never personally interacted with him. But
06:53every everything he does sort of tells a consistent story that he thinks this is, one, the most
06:58important thing happening in the world right now, which, again, I'm not sure he's right about that.
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