The Economic Impact of AI with Matthew Pines & Chester Ney - WBD728

Matthew Pines is the Director of Intelligence at Krebs
Stamos Group and a Fellow at Bitcoin Policy Institute.
Chester Ney is IT Director for environmental consulting
firm ALL4. In this interview, we discuss the disruptive
impact of AI technology on various industries, the
potential risks it poses and the geopolitical implications
of AI development. We also talk about the use of AI in
cybersecurity and its potential use as a tool to
communicate with non-human intelligence.


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ChatGPT, the AI chatbot built on top of OpenAI's developing
large language models (LLMs), was launched in November
2022. It was a realisation of a theoretical advancement
that some had imagined would forever remain elusively out
of reach. The software was debatedly the most explicit
illustration of Arthur C Clarke’s famous quote that “Any
sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from
magic.” The response to the launch went inevitably viral.


However, the awe and wonder were quickly replaced by
concerns about the real-world impacts. In terms of coding,
ChatGPT could automate and improve on numerous human-based
coding tasks. With the upcoming release of the GPT-5 LLM,
and competitor products, there is the potential that human
software developers could be replaced entirely. And this is
just the impact on coding. In reality, AI is and will
increasingly have massively disruptive impacts on all jobs.


Job roles in the future may still have the same titles, but
the day-to-day tasks involved in their fulfilment are
likely to be radically different. AI will enable a tighter
feedback loop between ideation, testing, and generation,
such that development cycles will see rapid acceleration
with huge resultant gains in productivity. Jobs may shift
towards designing products and user interfaces. Plus, there
will be new jobs involved in curating and securing AI
systems.


The jury is out on whether AI may not pose a world-ending
risk. It is more probable that AI will lead to problematic
socioeconomic and cybersecurity issues. It will undoubtedly
increase volatility in the labour market, and, improve
tools for malign actors in the digital space. Nevertheless,
it is hard to predict the impact of the expected advance of
AI systems becoming capable of self-improvement. This could
lead to a utopian takeoff or an existential crisis.


Then there are the known unknowns: it is inevitable that AI
will enable civilisation to do incredible things in the
future and at increasingly rapid speed. This will then lead
to the unknown unknowns: the unimaginable impacts of the
race towards a singularity. What will the impact be on
society? Will AI intersect with a disclosure of non-human
intelligence? Will AI enable us to communicate with such
entities? Will AI fundamentally change what it is to be
human? Sleep well!!!





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Show notes:
https://www.whatbitcoindid.com/podcast/the-economic-impact-of-ai


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