The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
AI AGENTS EMERGENCY DEBATE: These Jobs Won't Exist In 24 Months! Containment Has Failed, We Must Prepare For What's Coming!
Mon, 12 May 2025
Will AI replace God, steal your job, and change your future? Amjad Masad, Bret Weinstein, and Daniel Priestley debate the terrifying warning signs, and why you need to understand them now. Amjad Masad is the founder and CEO of Replit, the world's leading online programming environment and community. Daniel Priestley is a serial entrepreneur and advises fast-growing companies on innovation, marketing, and the future of work in the age of AI. Bret Weinstein is an evolutionary biologist, expert in complex systems and host of the DarkHorse Podcast. In this debate, they explain: Why AI threatens 50% of the global workforce. How AI agents are already replacing millions of jobs and how to use them to your advantage. How AI will disrupt creative industries and hijack human consciousness. The critical skills that will matter most in the AI-powered future. What parents must teach their kids now to survive the AI age. How to harness AI’s power ethically. 00:00 Intro 07:14 What Is an AI Agent? 09:11 Who Is Bret and What Are His Views on AI? 12:58 Who Is Dan? 14:42 Where Are the Boundaries? 15:56 What Could AI Potentially Do? 17:01 Bret's Concerns: AI and a New Species 19:33 The Disruptive Potential of AI in Its Current Form 20:33 Is AI Just a Tool? 21:38 Those Who Leverage AI Will Be the Winners 25:15 What Abuse Are We Currently Seeing? 30:57 The Collateral Damage of AI 39:08 What Will Happen to Humans? 42:15 Which Jobs Will Be Replaced by AI? 45:34 Could AI Development Affect Western Economies? 49:00 Is AI Removing Our Agency? 57:39 Will Authenticity Be More Valued in the AI Era? 59:16 Will Markets Become Fairer or More Unbalanced? 1:03:45 The Economic Displacement 1:05:45 Worldcoin and the Case for Universal Basic Income 1:11:47 Are We Losing Meaning and Purpose? 1:14:44 AI's Impact on Loneliness, Relationships, and Connection 1:18:57 Can Education Adapt to the AI Era? 1:26:07 What Should AI Teach Our Children? 1:31:19 Ads 1:32:20 Is This Inevitable? 1:38:18 Will We Start Living Like House Cats? 1:44:44 Hyper-Changing World: Are We Designed for It? 1:50:25 The 5 Key Threats of AI 1:51:51 Deepfakes and AI Scams 1:59:43 An Optimistic Take on the AI Era 2:03:37 AI for Business Opportunities 2:08:34 Ads 2:10:32 AI Autonomous Weapons 2:17:59 Do We Live Among Aliens or in a Simulation? 2:21:31 How to Live a Good Life in the AI Era 📣 100 CEOs: Ready to think like a CEO? Gain access to the 100 CEOs newsletter here: https://bit.ly/100-ceos-megaphone Follow Amjad: X - https://bit.ly/3SsT92D Website - https://bit.ly/44y7YIO Follow Daniel: X - https://bit.ly/4jZRa1S Instagram - https://bit.ly/3F2Q8mK Website - https://bit.ly/3Ssg6mG Follow Bret: X - https://bit.ly/3EVAHwH You can purchase Daniel’s book, ‘Scorecard Marketing: The four-step playbook for getting better leads and bigger profits’, here: https://amzn.to/45aByEa You can purchase Bret’s book, ‘A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life’, here: https://amzn.to/4dcJoPU The 1% Diary is back - limited time only: https://bit.ly/3YFbJbt The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards (Second Edition): https://g2ul0.app.link/f31dsUttKKb Get email updates: https://bit.ly/diary-of-a-ceo-yt Follow Steven: https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb Sponsors: Vivobarefoot - https://vivobarefoot.com/DOAC with code DIARY20 for 20% offShopify - https://shopify.com/bartlett Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who are the experts debating AI and what are their backgrounds?
And they're answering the questions you're most scared about.
This technology is going to get so much more powerful. And yes, we're going to go through a period of disruption. But at the other end, we're going to create a fair world. It's enabling people to run their businesses, make a lot of money.
And you can solve meaningful problems such as the breakthroughs in global health care and education will be phenomenal. And you can live an incredibly fulfilling existence.
Well, I would just say on that front, this has always been a fantasy of technologists to do marvelous things with our spare time. But we end up doomscrolling.
loneliness epidemic right following birth rates so the potential for good here is infinite and the potential for bad is 10 times for example there's war undetectable beat fakes and scams so people don't understand how many different ways they are going to be robbed look i don't think blaming technology for all of it is the right thing all these issues they're already here they're all fathers here so what are you saying to your children well first of all
I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of Spotify and Apple and our audio channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast haven't yet hit the follow button or the subscribe button, wherever you're listening to this. I would like to make a deal with you.
If you could do me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly from now until forever to make the show better and better and better and better. I can't tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button. The show gets bigger, which means we can expand the production, bring in all the guests you want to see and continue to do in this thing we love.
If you could do me that small favor and hit the follow button, wherever you're listening to this, that would mean the world to me. That is the only favor I will ever ask you. Thank you so much for your time. The reason why I wanted to have this conversation with all of you is because the subject matter of AI, but more specifically AI agents, has occupied my free time for several weeks in a row.
And actually, Amjad, when I started using Replit, for me, It was a paradigm shift. There was two paradigm shifts in a row that happened about a week apart. ChatGPT released that image generation model where you could create any image. It was incredibly detailed with text and all those things. That was a huge paradigm shift.
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Chapter 2: What is an AI agent and how does it work?
is effectively infinite but i would say that the harm is probably 10 times it's a bigger infinity and the question of how we are going to get to a place where we can leverage the obvious power that is here to do good and dodge the worst harms i have no idea i know we're not prepared so i i
hear you talking about agents and i think that's marvelous we can all use such a thing right away and the more powerful it is the better the idea of something that can solve problems on your behalf while you're doing something else is marvelous but of course That is the precondition for absolute devastation to arise out of a miscommunication, right?
To have something acting autonomously to accomplish a goal, you damn well better understand what the goal really is and how to how to pull back the reins in the event that it starts accomplishing something that wasn't the goal. The potential for abuse is also utterly profound.
You know, you can imagine just pick your, your dark mirror, uh, fantasy dystopia where something has been told to hunt you down until you're dead. And it sees that as a, you know, a technical challenge. So I, I don't know quite how to balance a discussion about all of the things that can clearly come from this that are utterly transcendent.
I mean, I do think it is not inappropriate to be invoking God or biblical metaphors here. You know, you're producing water seemingly from thin air. I believe that does have an exact biblical parallel. So any case, the power is here. But so too is the need for cautionary tales, which we don't have.
That's the problem, is that there's no body of myth that will warn us properly of this tool because we've just crossed a threshold that is similar in its capacity to alter the world as... the invention of writing, I really think that's where we are. We're talking about something that is going to fundamentally alter what humans are with no plan.
Writing alters the world slowly because the number of people who can do it is tiny at first and remains so for thousands of years. This is changing things weekly. And that's an awful lot of power to just simply have dumped on a system that wasn't well regulated to begin with.
Dan? Yeah, so I'm an entrepreneur. I've been building businesses for the last 20 plus years. I'm completely well positioned between the two of you here, the excitement of the opportunity and the terror of what could go on. There's this image that I saw of New York City in 1900, and every single vehicle on the street is a horse and cart.
And then 13 years later, the same photo from the same vantage point and every single vehicle on the street is a car. And in 13 years, all the horses had been removed and cars had been put in place. And if you had have interviewed the horses... in 1900 and said, how do you feel about your level of confidence in the world?
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Chapter 3: What are the potential risks and ethical concerns of AI agents?
They're able to simulate what a human can do. So the reason you were able to order the water there is because it was trained NSF data. That includes clicking on DoorDash and ordering water.
I applaud your optimism, and I like the way you think about these puzzles, but I think I see you making a mistake that we are about to discover is very commonplace. So we have several different categories of systems. We have simple systems. We have complicated systems. We have complex systems. And then we have complex adaptive systems. Mm-hmm.
To most of us, a highly complicated system appears like a complex system. We don't understand the distinction. Technologists often master highly complicated systems and they know, you know, for example, a computer. It's a perfectly predictable system inside. It's deterministic. But to most of us, it functions, it is mysterious enough that it feels like a complex system.
And if you're in the position of having mastered highly complicated systems and you look at complex systems and you think it's a natural extension, you fail to anticipate just how unpredictable they are. So even if it is true that today there are limits to what these machines can do based on their training data, I think the problem is you
To see what's going to happen, you really want to start thinking of this as the evolution of a new species that will continue to evolve. It will partially be shaped by what we ask it to do, the direction we lead it. And it will partially be shaped by things we don't understand. So... How does this computer that we have work? Well, one of the things that it does is we plug them into each other.
Using language, it's almost as if you've plugged an Ethernet cable in between human minds. And that means that the cognitive potential exceeds the sum of the individual minds in question.
Mm-hmm.
Your AIs are going to do that. And that means that our ability to say what they are capable of does not come down to, well, we didn't train it on that data. As they begin to interact, that feedback is going to take them to capabilities we don't anticipate and may not even recognize once they become present. That's one of my fears. This is an evolving creature and... It's not even an animal.
If it were an animal, you could say something about what the limits of that capability are. But this is a new type of biological creature, and it will become capable of things that we don't even have names for.
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Chapter 4: How will AI agents disrupt jobs and the global workforce?
I think it's much more likely that we will squander the wealth dividend that will be produced by AI.
Interestingly, you also see in Western countries that when we get more abundance, we start having less kids. And we're already seeing this sort of population decline in the Western world, which is kind of scary. I think it's often associated with affluence. The more money someone makes, the less likely they are to want to have children, the more they try and protect their freedoms.
But also on this point of AI, relationships are hard, you know? My girlfriend is happy sometimes and not happy other times. And I have to like, you know, go through that struggle with her of like working on the relationship. Children are hard.
And if we are optimizing ourselves and, you know, much of the reason that I sustain the struggle with my girlfriend is I'm sure from some evolutionary reason because I want to reproduce and I want to have kin. But if I didn't have to deal with the struggle that comes with human relationships, romantic or platonic, There's going to be a proportion of people that actually choose that outcome.
And I wonder what's going to happen to birth rates in such a scenario, because we're already struggling. We're already in a situation where we used to be having five children per woman in the 1950s to about two in 2021. And we're seeing a decline. If you look at South Korea, their fertility rate has fallen to 0.72, the lowest recorded globally.
And if this trend continues, the country's population could half by 2,100. So yeah, relationships, connections. And also, I guess we've got to overlay that with the loneliness epidemic, which is They promised us social connection when social media came about. When we got Wi-Fi connections, the promise was that we would become more connected.
But it's so clear that because we spend so long alone, isolated, having our needs met by Uber Eats drivers and social media and TikTok and the internet, that we're investing less in the very difficult thing of like going and making a friend and like going and finding a girlfriend. Young people are having sex less than ever before.
Everything that is associated with the difficult job of making friends in real life connection seems to be falling away.
I'll make the case that everything that we've discussed here, all the negative things around loneliness, around meaning, they're already here. And I don't think blaming technology for all of it is the right thing. I think there are a lot of things that happened because of existing human impulses and motivations.
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