- One of the dangers of last year was that people started to lose their faith in technology, and technology is what does provide prosperity.

And we need to have more grown-up conversations, more civil conversations, more moderate conversations about what that reality is.

[mellow reflective music] [logo whooshes] - Hello, and welcome to "GZERO World."

I'm Ian Bremmer, and today we are talking about this exciting and anxiety-inducing new era of generative AI.

Just a year ago on this very show, I predicted that 2023 would be the year that AI passes the Turing test, a machine's ability to mimic conversation indistinguishable from a human once and for all.

And with the benefit of hindsight, that prediction now seems quaint.

AI is advancing faster, with more powerful tools, than any other technology in human history.

Consider the staggering pace of adoption.

Took 37 years for the world to reach mass use of electricity, smartphones, 21 years, the internet, 17, but in only the last 12 months, 1 year, 55% of people globally have integrated artificial intelligence into their work.

That's astounding.

And it's just the tip of the iceberg.

What will this technological explosion mean for the future of our working lives?

Will generative AI be the unprecedented productivity tool that experts are predicting?

Or will our worst fears about human obsolescence be realized?

To find out, I spoke to two big thinkers on the sidelines of The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, tech expert Azeem Azhar and organizational psychologist Adam Grant.

Don't worry, I've also got your Puppet Regime.

- Blaming things that you don't like on shadowy, foreign conspiracies is my material, okay?

I should sue you.

- But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

- [Announcer] Funding for "GZERO World" is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

[bright music] - [Narrator] Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint [bright music continues] and scale their supply chains, [bright music continues] with a portfolio of logistics in real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com [bright music continues] - [Announcer] And by Cox Enterprises is proud to support GZERO.

We're working to improve lives in the areas of communications, automotive, clean tech, sustainable agriculture, and more.

Learn more at cox.career/news.

Additional funding provided by Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and... [upbeat music] [logo whooshes] [funky upbeat music] - For as long as humans have been inventing technology, we've worried that it's gonna replace our jobs.

Ancient Greece, Aristotle theorized that machines could replace human labor.

In the 16th century, Queen Elizabeth I refused to grant a patent to William Lee for his automated knitting machine, fearing job loss among the, quote, "Young maidens who obtain their daily bread by knitting."

And here I was thinking they were knitting sweaters.

200 years later, Lee's invention, still vilified as a job killer, was destroyed during the Industrial Revolution in a violent protest by the Luddites, a labor movement that opposed machines in textile factories replacing skilled artisans.

Fast-forward another 200 years and the same conversation is happening, this time around artificial intelligence.

But maybe the discussion feels so urgent right now because of just how much our working lives have changed in the past few years, largely by the pandemic.

Just as we get used to that new normal, along comes the most powerful technology to hit the workplace since the personal computer, maybe ever, generative AI, that can do things like write legal briefs or diagnose diseases or fake you as a human being.

And whether that will be a net good or bad for our working lives really depends on who you're talking to.

CEOs and tech execs are optimistic.

Shocker.

Here's OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at last month's World Economic Forum.

- This is a tool that magnifies what humans do, lets people do their jobs better, lets the AI do parts of jobs, and it'll change the world much less than we all think.

It'll change jobs much less than we all think.

- AI will undoubtedly lead to previously unimaginable advances in productivity, so much that Goldman Sachs predicts a $7 trillion increase in global GDP over the next decade.

But just as Altman was speaking at Davos, the International Monetary Fund released a report predicting that 40% of all jobs, all jobs everywhere, will be negatively impacted by AI, 60% of jobs in advanced economies.

AI is cheap, it's easy to scale.

When the next financial crisis hits and companies are pressured to reduce costs, AI displacing workers is gonna feel like a no-brainer.

And when it comes to governance, regulators are playing catch-up in a field that moves much more quickly than they can keep pace with.

That means it's the tech companies that are largely deciding what the future of AI will look like, shaping how we think about the state of work and the world.

Just like Lee's knitting machine, the impact of AI on workers will be a mixed bag.

Automated looms created four times more jobs for factory weavers by the end of the Industrial Revolution, and also wage stagnation, unsafe working conditions, and rising inequality.

But that rapid pace of change also birthed the modern labor movement, which lifted millions of workers into the middle class.

So maybe this AI moment won't mean the end of work at all, but the beginning of a new era in rethinking the value of human capital.

Whatever happens, this AI moment will need humans to make sure it is deployed safely and effectively, and I spoke with two very smart ones, tech expert Azeem Azhar, and organizational psychologist Adam Grant, on the sidelines of The World Economic Forum in Switzerland.

We talked about AI's impact and what it will mean for the future of work.

[air whooshes] Azeem Azhar, thanks so much for joining me today.

- I'm so happy to be here.

- So we're gonna have an AI conversation, but that's all we've had is AI conversations, right?

I mean, you walk around Davos this week and it's as if everyone is an AI expert.

- There is so much AI in the promenade.

There's very little crypto, so AI has taken all of the crypto and the blockchain stuff, and each company has come out with some form of enterprise AI tool.

It's where we are.

- What's the most ridiculous expression of AI that has manifested itself in front of you this week?

- Oh, this week.

That's a good one.

I think the thing that has surprised me the most has been, actually, where I felt ridiculous, was how well CEOs were articulating generative AI.

So the biggest manifestation was my shock to be in front of bosses with 50, 100, 200,000 employees, and hear them talk with a level of detail about this technology that's only, you know, been public for a year or so.

I've never experienced that in my life, and I had to go off and check my own assumptions and say, "How did I not realize how quickly they've moved?"

- And how quickly the technology has moved, of course.

But one of the things that has startled me is that the top experts in the field 10 years ago thought it would take decades.

- Mm-hmm.

Right.

- Even five years ago, thought it would take decades to get to where we are today, just with GPT-4, which is about to be exceeded massively in a matter of a few months.

- Right.

Yeah, it's really, really shocking.

I mean, what happened?

What happened was that we figured out this new architecture called the Transformer a few years ago, developed in Google.

They didn't pick up on it, and that team disappeared off to other places.

And in fact, even OpenAI didn't pick up on it, and then they did.

And the real surprise was when ChatGPT came out, we could just talk to it as humans and it would talk back to us as humans.

And that has created this cascade of innovation and investment.

And last year, 2023, the rate of progression was quite staggering.

And when we think about what GPT-5 will do, I think we'll be surprised again.

It will be better at every way compared to GPT-4, and that will be another moment of awakening.

- Now, when the top experts were so wrong about how fast this could explode, it does sort of lend the question of what else they're telling us now they might be so incredibly wrong about.

- Well, I think that's very true.

I'll give you one thing that I think some of the top experts have got wrong.

I think they worried too much about the existential risk problem that dominated the narrative around AI in 2023.

It dominated the AI Safety Summit that was hosted in the UK in November.

- [Ian] The Bletchley summit, yeah.

- The Bletchley summit.

And you start to see people walk back those comments and those remarks.

And what's been fantastic at the annual meeting of The World Economic Forum has been to see grown up conversations take place between the top AI experts.

We haven't heard so much about existential risk.

We've heard about practical things relating to copyright, to regulation, to the workforce, to employment, the things that really matter.

So... - The boring applications that actually move the economy, that actually change how we live our lives.

- Change how people live their lives, and I think also start to rebuild trust.

One of the dangers of last year was that people started to lose their faith in technology.

I mean, ordinary voters would start to dislike this path of what is quite a helpful technology, and technology is what does provide prosperity.

And we need to have more grown up conversations, more civil conversations, more moderate conversations about what that reality is.

- Now, there were, you're right, a lot of experts that came out, fathers of the field- - That's right.

- That said this could be the end of humanity within a matter of decades.

I mean, our lifetimes- - Yes, that's right.

- Essentially.

- Yeah.

- And were calling for pauses for, for example, the sorts of you know, speed of these foundational models, right?

Why would you say they've backed away from it?

Because it's not like they know what the trajectory is gonna be in 5 or 10 years today, any better than they did a year ago, really?

- Yeah, and I don't think all of them have backed away from it, but you do start to see that the wording's shifted, they're paying attention to other types of harms.

I suspect they've started to back away from it because it requires so many fantastical assumptions to get to AI taking over the world.

And as they've started to speak to people who understand the world in other ways, political scientists, sociologists, historians, business leaders, they've started to realize that perhaps those paths of improbability are even more improbable.

I mean, that's my hypothesis.

I think we'll need to talk to some of them directly to say, you know, "What's helped you change your opinion?"

But I suspect it's the contact they've had with real people who live in the real world.

- Now of course, when you come to a meeting like this, you are in front of a lot of very smart, very powerful people who are very, very invested in you believing their story.

- Yes.

- Right?

And so I mean, they are selling a business model.

They're selling their company.

They're selling, you know, anything they need you to do.

That does not necessarily drive trust.

So what are the things that you are hearing that are aligned with interests of technologists that you don't necessarily buy?

- Well, I think one of the biggest is this discussion of closed proprietary systems compared to open source systems, which anyone can download- - Which is a civil war right now.

- That is a civil war, right, with Meta on the open source side.

I mean, Meta has pulled off an incredible repositioning exercise from being really the bete noire of the big tech firms to the one that we all love.

And we're so grateful to Yann LeCun, who's Meta's chief scientist, standing up for open source.

But that is a civil war.

And you have on the other hand someone like Demis Hassabis, who believes it's far too risky for these models.

- And The founder of DeepMind.

- The founder of DeepMind.

There's another moment of self-serving, which is how will these models, these AI models, actually find their way into companies?

And someone like OpenAI will say you do this through what's known as an API.

In other words, OpenAI runs the engine for you and every time you need a request, you send it to OpenAI and you get charged.

And there are others in the industry who are saying, "Well, no, we don't want to do that."

And I think companies are saying that.

They're saying, "It's our model, it's our data, it's our business, we want to run this ourselves."

So I think there is a schism emerging there and there will be a battle.

And the challenge I think we face as OpenAI is so far ahead, its technology is the best, GPT-5 will probably set a new benchmark.

They are supported by Microsoft, so there's a lot of momentum behind their approach.

- So in other words, the closed model you think right now is winning?

- Well, I think the closed model will provide the better performance for companies and for customers, so we'll drift towards it, but I actually believe it, Ian, that we will see a society of AI.

We will see hundreds and thousands of different types of models with different capabilities being used by consumers and businesses and governments in much the same way that we have millions of people with different capabilities who interact with each other in our economies.

- Now, usually I ask about concepts and ideas and not so much about people, but at this Davos, Sam Altman- - Oh, wow.

- Is the person who's driving.

He's the highest ticket, right, as everyone wants to see.

What do we make of him?

I mean, you know, there's a lot of news around, "He's there, he's fired, he's back."

I don't want you to talk about that.

I want to talk about what he means and represents.

Why is it that he has become the poster child for AI?

- Well, he's so polished in his presentation.

I like to think of him as someone who has been fine-tuned to absolute perfection.

Now, fine-tuning is what you do to an AI model to get it to go from spewing out garbage to being as wonderful as ChatGPT is.

And I think that Sam has sort of gone in through the same process because he's really polished.

It's really hard for great interviewers, even like you, to get a chink in the armor and get in there.

And I think he tells very good stories.

He's got one communication technique, which I think is brilliant, so I hope to learn from myself.

Sam gives you the prize at the beginning of his response, and then he explains the buildup to it.

And it's really clever because you know what you're gonna get, and then the explanation comes.

And I mean, just the polish and the refinement and the sense that he has been asked almost every question before, but he still gives you quite a fresh answer.

It's quite tricky in that respect 'cause at some point we want to get underneath that layer and see what's really there, and I don't think people have been able to.

- Fair enough.

Azeem Azhar, wonderful to see you.

- Thank you so much, Ian.

Great.

[air whooshes] [bright tonal music] - That was Azeem Azhar on advances in generative AI tools.

But to learn more about how they could be deployed and what that's going to mean for jobs, I sat down with organizational psychologist Adam Grant, and here's our conversation.

[air whooshes] Adam Grant, thanks so much for joining us today.

- Don't thank me yet, Ian Bremmer.

- Okay, I'll thank you to start.

Just a little bit, a little bit.

So you and I always kibitz constantly during these meetings.

We rarely actually talk publicly.

In the background has been AI all the time, a lot of which feels like it is overdone, not the technology, but the people talking about it.

- [Adam] The hype, yeah.

- [Ian] The hype, the hype.

What are the couple of myths that you'd like to dispel about AI?

- I think the first myth is that it's gonna replace people's jobs immediately.

Most of the CEOs I've talked to have no idea even how it's affecting their workforces yet and aren't really planning more than a year ahead.

I think the second thing is a lot of people are thinking it's gonna augment skills for people who are already really successful.

Most of the evidence says the exact opposite, that it's a skill leveler, that the worse you are at your job, the more you benefit from AI tools.

- At the same time that I've heard a lot about AI, I haven't heard a lot about DEI, and I guess there are only so many acronyms that we can use in one year.

But I mean, how much is this anti-woke backlash?

How much of this not as relevant to global elites who are doing just fine in the marketplace?

What do you think is driving it?

- It's been a major conversation privately.

I haven't seen a lot of public sessions about it.

But I've talked to a lot of CEOs who have said, "I'm getting pushback on everything except for gender and disability.

So race, ethnicity, LGBTQ, huge challenges with the divided workforce, And I don't know what to do.

I wanna create opportunities for everyone.

I want everyone to be respected and included.

I also don't wanna reverse discriminate against anybody who historically has been advantaged but may not be today and I don't know what to do."

- What are a couple of things that are useful for them to think about as they try to navigate what's a very toxic, very tribal landscape?

- Well, I think the place to start is we've gotta expand opportunity right at the gate.

So I've been recommending Textio, I don't know if you've seen them.

- No.

- They're a tool that audits job descriptions for inclusive language.

So this is gonna shock you, Ian, but if you post a job description for a software engineer and you say we're looking for ninjas and rock stars, women don't apply.

Who would have thought?

[chuckles] You apply the tool, you get rid of that kind of biased language, and not only do you get a more diverse applicant pool, you actually fill your jobs better with faster turnaround time.

And I think that's a great example of something that doesn't hurt anyone that opens doors.

- You know, what I like about that is it's a concrete, small suggestion of something that people can actually do, because so much of the AI discussion, so much of the DEI discussion, is about lofty principles that are not helping people respond to the problem.

Now, when you're in an environment where you have this many crises that you can't fix, my landscape, the geopolitics, same thing, right?

I mean, it feels like leaders are being less strategic.

They're being buffeted, as you say, they're thinking forward maybe a year if they're lucky, but they're not really thinking about the long-term futures of their organization.

Am I just making that up or is that reflected in your reality?

- I'm seeing the same thing.

And it's ironic because you come to Davos and you think this is the power center of the world and yet for me, the overwhelming feeling is powerlessness.

That, you know, you talk to CEOs who say, "I'm powerless to save democracy.

I'm powerless to prevent climate change.

I'm powerless to do anything about the AI changes that are about to transform my work in ways that I can't anticipate."

And I think a lot of them don't know what to do in the long term, and so they're focused on quarterly returns and problems that are immediately solvable.

- CEO is a job that is very highly compensated, but they don't last very long.

They're working incredibly hard hours.

They're increasingly not liked in their workforce.

And as you say, they're running for, like, very, very short-term gains.

Is there any sense that maybe they should be trying to change some of those incentives, some of those motivations?

- I've heard more discussion about it this year than ever in the past.

So CEO burnout rates have gone up.

We've also seen a growing disinterest in leadership jobs from Gen Z and a little bit millennials too, saying, "Why would I wanna do that?

It's a ton of responsibility.

It's not clear how much good I can do.

It's gonna wreak havoc on my life.

And yeah, I'm getting more and more hate from pretty much any corner of the world when I make a big decision."

I don't think anybody's thought systematically about how we change that dynamic, but I think one thing I would love to see is I'd love to see more co-CEO structures, which is not that common, but there's- - It's very uncommon.

What's one of the best examples that people might have heard of?

- Warby Parker is an easy one.

- Mm-hmm.

The eyeglass company?

- Yeah.

Neil and Dave co-founded the company together.

They've been co-CEOs from day one.

And there's actually some research showing that if you look at matched pairs of companies that are in similar industries with similar financial positions, co-CEO structures actually outperform when you look at their financial returns.

And I think the job is just so big and so complex that it's hard for one person to have all the skills that you need.

And this is a little more in your world, but I've wondered if we're gonna have co-presidents, co-prime ministers one day.

- I don't see any move towards that, in part because in political power, things are so much more zero-sum, right?

It's hard to do coalitions in that environment.

Is it better or worse that you have a country like Japan that still has people that are committed to organizations for decades and decades?

We know that it doesn't necessarily foster massive innovation and change, but it also makes people more comfortable where they are and who they are.

- I think, like almost everything in life, it's a double-edged sword.

So you're right, there's a cost of lower innovation if people are stuck in the same job in the same place for too long.

But it is nice to feel like your employer has your back.

And I think that I've watched so many American employers screw this up.

I am so sick of, Ian, hearing CEOs say, "Our company is a family."

No, a company is not a family.

You don't fire your children.

You don't furlough them in tough times.

I think what they mean is that a company is a community, which is a place where you're gonna be treated with respect, valued as a human being, but there are also performance standards, And if you don't meet those standards, you're not gonna stay.

- On a scale of 1 to 10, how broken is capitalism right now?

You're seeing organizational culture, business environment in the United States, scale of 1 to 10, how broken?

- Five.

- Five.

What is the single biggest thing that is most broken right now?

- I'd probably say right now just making sure that people have an opportunity to have a job that supports their life.

- And the thing that can be done that will most address that, in your view?

- You know, I was a skeptic on universal basic income.

The research I've read suggests that at least creating a floor at the minimum wage level is something we ought to consider seriously.

- A floor for everyone.

- For everyone.

- Everyone in the country.

- I think it's an experiment we should run.

- You know, it's interesting.

I mean, for some reason, it never seems to pick up significant political impulse, right?

- No.

- And is that because we don't want a welfare state in the United States, we're too focused on the individual, if you don't have a job, you don't mean anything?

- Yeah, I think work is a source of status in America.

I mean, think about when you meet somebody, the first thing you ask them is, "What do you do?"

- What do you do?

- In the U.S. - Yeah.

- Yeah.

- I mean, that's not true in France at all or in many other countries.

And it's so interesting that you'd define yourself by your job.

I think we're gonna end up in a world, one day, where that doesn't happen anymore.

And at that point, we're gonna have to start thinking seriously about how do we make sure that everybody has access to food, water, shelter, and work may not provide that for everyone.

- So existential question, if we didn't ask people what do you do as the first question, what would you like the first question to be?

- From a psychological standpoint, I would say instead of what do you do, I wanna know what do you love to do?

- And Adam, what do you love to do?

- I love to share ideas.

- Look at that.

And I'm glad I could facilitate that for you.

- Thanks for making it happen.

- Be good, my friend.

[air whooshes] [bright tonal music] [air whooshes] Now, how about a little arti-felt-ial intelligence?

No, it's a horrible joke.

I won't use that.

It's time for Puppet Regime.

Roll that tape.

- Hi, guys.

Vladimir Putin here.

And today, I want to talk about a big problem, plagiarism.

[dramatic music] It's out of control and I will no longer stand for it.

First, celebrities in Moscow throw a huge party with no clothes on.

[upbeat music] [dramatic music continues] Guys, being a rich Russian who is half naked and fully compromised is my beat, okay?

I did that, like, like, 15 years ago already.

Next, I turn on television and see Nancy Pelosi says FBI should investigate Russian support for pro-Palestine protests.

- Some of these protesters are spontaneous and organic and sincere.

Some, I think, are connected to Russia.

See, they're plants.

I think some financing should be investigated.

- Nancy, how dare you?

How dare you?

Blaming things that you don't like on shadowy foreign conspiracies is my material, okay?

I should sue you.

Lastly, Benjamin Netanyahu.

[mouth clicking] Bibi, bibi, bibi.

I invite you over, we break bread.

I even give flowers to your wife.

Next thing I know, you, too, are bombing people indiscriminately and driving millions from their homes.

That's, that's my shtick.

It's an outrage.

You didn't even credit me.

University presidents have lost their jobs for less.

♪ Puppet Regime ♪ - That's our show this week.

Come back next week, and if you like what you see, or even if you don't, but you want robots to take over, we can help you.

Check us out at gzeromedia.com.

[soft music] [energetic music] [energetic music continues] [energetic music continues] [mellow music] - [Announcer] Funding for "GZERO World" is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

- [Narrator] Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint [bright music] and scale their supply chains, [bright music continues] with a portfolio of logistics in real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com.

[bright music continues] - [Announcer] And by Cox Enterprises is proud to support GZERO.

We're working to improve lives in the areas of communications, automotive, clean tech, sustainable agriculture, and more.

Learn more at cox.career/news.

Additional funding provided by Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and... [upbeat music] [lively music] [no audio]