Dave on co-pilots versus agent swarms, and why the white-collar disruption did not happen

Dave, what are you seeing [in] all your companies? I mean, you're chair and on the board and founder of so many companies. Growing, hiring?

Yeah, I mean I think hiring, and I want to be really careful to say, you know, you have a million AI-related jobs and rising, but within that there's a lot of co-pilot type jobs where you're basically twice as efficient as you were using a co-pilot. But there's another subset that are using 10, 100 and soon a thousand agents and managing them as if they were employees. That's where you want to be. You want to try and get to that group as quickly as you can, because, you know, just using a co-pilot — you know, the bar is rising fast. That's not good enough. You need to move on and manage swarms.

And uh, interestingly, I met my first hire who does all of his work through voice. So he's managing, you know, agents — many agents. He's not using a QWERTY keyboard.

Alex, he has — this is a young guy at 20 — really transcended history there. So much for his —

But I really think, you know, you mentioned Erik Brynjolfsson, white collar drudgery. A lot of that stems from being in a chair for many — two hours. It's bad for your back, looking at a screen, going blind. That's all going to move over to standing up, moving your hands around, à la Minority Report, and controlling the agents in a much more dynamic environment. I think it's a much, much happier place for humans to exist. It's very much like Iron Man. You're Robert Downey Jr. and you're just building together with your Jarvis. That's actually where we're really going in the next year. And so the amount of awesomeness in that job function is just incomprehensible.

Yeah. The amount of work I do with Skippy while I'm driving and just having a conversation — say, do this work, write this report, get me the answer. It's incredible, right? Every moment — crap — every moment becomes capable.

Go back to the automation days, right? One concrete mixing truck replaces about a hundred workers with shovels shoveling concrete. Okay? Nobody wants to go back to shoveling concrete. Like, what are we thinking about? Just let's move forward, please.

Yeah. You know, the other thing that's really clear to me is that we were predicting massive white collar job disruption just a year ago. The choice to not do that was an active choice by the big AI labs under pressure from the White House, and also in China, you know, lawsuits — if you just wantonly fire people you have to actually try to retrain them to become an AI person and you have to pay either way. So the governments got involved and said we don't want massive voter disruption. The AI companies are saying it just doesn't matter that much. We're on this abundance curve that's so steep that working within AI to create new drugs, to create new physics, to create new math is so much more important than disrupting everyone's life, that we're just going to do it the easy way and do it with the cooperation of the White House. And so I think that's what's actually happened and likely to continue. So, as long as you're part of that rising wave and you're not, you know, sitting in legacy land, you're going to do really, really, really well and there isn't going to be massive job disruption.