The Societal and Global Implications of AI
Welcome back to the SENT thought leadership series, where we bring you insights from pioneers in technology and innovation. In the second part of this series, SENT Fellow Mike Bianco—an entrepreneur and technologist who sold his bootstrapped SaaS business, SuiteSync, to Stripe and is now working on his new startup, Knolbe—continues to explore the transformative potential of AI. Building on the first part, which focused on AI's impact on privacy and societal norms, this second part dives deeper into the global implications of AI, including its effect on jobs, decision-making, and much more. Whether you're an entrepreneur, technologist, or simply curious about the future, Mike's perspectives provide a thoughtful analysis of how AI will shape our world.
Impact on Jobs
The biggest change that AI will introduce to society that I am worried about is the displacement of jobs by AI. Yes, every technological revolution in the past predicted this change, and so far, it has not happened. There have always been more than enough jobs for people, and especially in the current age, we can't find enough workers to do the jobs that we need done as a society.
Although I could be proven wrong, and history is against me, I do believe that jobs will be displaced by AI in a way that is truly different. Think about these categories:
Self-driving cars/trucks
It's hard to even imagine the number of jobs that will be displaced by some of these technologies being partially deployed. For instance, take AI self-driving cars. If they take off in a big way (which doesn't require new cars on the road), there won’t be a need for insurance companies, car dealerships, or mechanics. Demand for cars will decrease if you can "rent" a robotaxi by the hour, which will then reduce the need for car servicing companies. The cost of real estate will fundamentally change as you can have a low-cost taxi drive you to work. Parking lots will become useless, which will open up critical real estate in cities across the country. The cost of delivery will drop, and delivery drivers won't be needed anymore. With significantly decreased costs on delivery, goods from other countries will only become cheaper and cheaper, and supply chains will fundamentally change.
And this is just thinking about self-driving cars, never mind a humanoid robot paired with a self-driving vehicle.
Here's another way to think about it: after the industrial revolution, humans could move into roles to leverage our intelligence over our muscles/dexterity. When AI beats us at intelligence (and dexterity via humanoid robots), there’s not a clear characteristic where AI or existing machines do not have an advantage. Cars did not create new jobs for horses. At some point, we may not have anything to offer that mechanical minds/muscles can't do for cheaper.
Global high interest rates, combined with labor regulations (like increased hourly wages), will accelerate the adoption of these technologies. The relative cost of buildout will decrease as the cost and negative quality of human labor, especially on the low-end, continues to increase. Companies are motivated by profit and have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders: they will deploy these technologies quickly.
What Can AI Do That Humans Can’t?
Humans can only hold a certain number of variables in our heads. Extracting trends and conclusions from a massive data set is not something we are good at.
Increased computing power and model parameter counts will only increase AI's ability to be fed massive amounts of structured data and extract trends to answer questions that humans could never have answered before. Yes, this will definitely create privacy concerns and generally cause chaos, but there's also a huge potential for a positive impact on humanity.
This will have an incredible impact on critical fields like medical diagnosis and pharmaceutical research. We'll be able to uncover trends and find new ways of detecting and eliminating diseases that would have never been possible before.
An interesting question here is: what is the difference between analysis and creativity? Can AI truly create, invent new ideas, and develop mental models? Or is it limited to analyzing existing data and patterns? What type of thinking truly makes humans unique?
How Will Countries React?
Many think that AI needs strong regulation and control, like nuclear weapons, and requires detailed regulation and government intervention. We've even seen some initial regulation attempts.
I fundamentally don’t agree with the AI nuclear analogy that many make. Nuclear weapons require expensive, hard-to-refine materials that can only be sourced from a few specific places on Earth.
AI can run on a consumer MacBook. Training costs will only continue to drop as new chips come online and more efficient computing structures are created.
Additionally, AI will benefit everyone. Nuclear bombs mostly (only?) benefit state actors. There's a massive profit incentive for companies and individuals to understand and implement AI as quickly as they can. Companies do not have a universal incentive to leverage nuclear bombs.
Attempting to regulate AI or create treaties across nations won’t work. If just one country, company, or powerful enough actor doesn’t follow along, they will have a structural advantage against everyone else. Additionally, open-source is a bit of a Pandora's box: once open-source software (like Llama) is published, it will continue to evolve on its own, and it’s very hard to shut down.
Crypto is a good analogy here: it’s possible to regulate crypto in specific countries, but you can't "shut down crypto" using regulation, and whatever governments make it hard to leverage crypto will miss out on any potential gains the new technology could bring to their economy.
How Will Scaled Transparency Change Decision-Making?
One specific function that AI has made possible is the cheap, fast, and incredibly accurate transcription of audio. This doesn't require special hardware; you can run this on your consumer MacBook—just check out this awesome macOS tool for accurate text-to-speech on your Mac.
Right now, the standard in many high-performance organizations is to record and distribute detailed meeting notes for every meeting. This is incredibly tedious when employees are disciplined enough to execute on this, not to mention the bias that makes its way into the notes and any follow-up.
With AI, all meetings can be recorded, transcribed, and indexed. You’ll have the ability to quickly ask the question, "What did we conclude six months ago at our strategy meeting about topic X?" and retrieve a summary and word-for-word transcription of the conversation.
Email transparency and recording every meeting have been attempted in the past, but it’s hard to pull the right information at the right time from this mound of data. AI is going to change this and make it easy to extract the right information from your company’s archive in real time.
That’s going to change how organizations make decisions and hold themselves accountable.
How Will Cheap Transcription Impact Evangelization?
This is an application of AI that I’m really excited about for the Church.
Audio transcription, coupled with lip dubbing, is going to make it very easy to cheaply edit and then translate audio and video content into multiple languages.
Imagine if the content (text, audio, and video!) of every evangelist (think Jason Evert, Chris Stefanick, Fr. Mike Schmitz, etc.) could be translated into every language on earth.
What if stories about the saints, like Triumph of the Heart, could be translated and perfectly lip-dubbed for less than $10k? What if sweeping B-roll for these videos could be generated for $100s instead of $10-100k and weeks of shooting? This is all going to be possible very soon.
And then imagine if this could be done in less than a day. How much wider could the impact of any of these efforts in the Church be? The cost of this sort of transcription and video editing is going to drop very quickly over the next months and years.
What About AGI?
I think we are a long way from true AGI—Matrix-like sentient systems that can operate, think, and evolve on their own without input from the human creators of the systems. Right now, I’m struggling to get ChatGPT to reason about computer code longer than a couple of hundred lines—and that hasn’t improved much in the last year.
If it does come, which it may (and probably sooner than we think, if it ever does!), it will change everything. I’m not smart enough to understand all of the follow-on effects, so I largely ignore the fact that this is a possibility. If it does come, there will be lots of changes to work through.
Megatrend Convergence
Multiple massive technology revolutions are happening simultaneously. This is truly unique, and it’s hard to understand how all of these megatrends will interact. Here are a couple that I’ve been thinking about:
Crypto and Monitoring: Peter Thiel said "Crypto Is Libertarian, AI Is Communist". If AI hands additional power to the state, crypto hands power back to the people. Governments can close the "exit doors" of the monetary aspect of crypto via regulation, but it is not possible to regulate crypto out of existence. Many crypto technologies are not related to money transfer (Diode, IPFS, ENS) and enable a "new internet" that is not dependent on any one entity and cannot be monitored like the existing internet substrate.
Crypto and "Proof of Humanity": The crypto community has done a lot of work creating systems to validate real-world data points in a secure, decentralized way. These are called "oracles" in crypto speak—a bridge from the decentralized universe to reality.
One of these inventions is the ability to validate various components of your life without actually transmitting the details. For instance:
Answering the question "Is this person real?" without revealing who they are
Generating tax documents without transmitting your name, social, etc.
Allowing computation to run on data sets without exposing the data sets themselves (homomorphic encryption)
This is going to be really important in a world where it's hard to determine what's AI-generated and what's not.
Crypto and Content Signatures: AI models make it easy to generate content that can be impossible to discern from reality. Lawn Care Planner is an interesting example. Most of the content and images on the site are AI-generated. The entire site was basically built by one person as a side project.
Crypto enables signed content to verify that it was created by a real person at a specific time, at a specific place. These two forces will compete with each other.
In other words, it's not obvious that other technology won't be quickly developed to combat the disruption of our traditional models of understanding what's real and what's not.
Virtual Reality and AI: Apple just launched the virtual reality revolution (If you haven't tried the Vision Pro, book a demo in an Apple Store and experience it). It's still early days, but it's easy to imagine AI video models combining with AR experiences to generate infinite, compelling worlds.
For many, virtual reality may be more interesting, comfortable, and compelling than their actual life. I think this has an extreme ability to disrupt social norms and cause incredible harm to humanity. All sin is, in some way, divorcing yourself from reality: focusing on yourself and your needs instead of the wider reality around you.
Mike Bianco is a husband, father, entrepreneur, and technologist. He sold his bootstrapped SaaS business (SuiteSync) to Stripe, worked there for a couple of years, and is now working on a new startup (Knolbe). He loves building software businesses, there’s nothing more exciting and enjoyable for him. Outside of work, he enjoys spending time outside with my family and deep conversations with good friends.
