AI and Job Loss: The One Question Nobody Is Asking

I am 57 years old. I spent 20 years with the Los Angeles Police Department. I have been writing code since 1983. And when I sit across from someone who is dangerously intelligent, I have one reflex that has never once let me down.

I ask what the endgame is.

That is this whole episode. Not whether artificial intelligence is going to save us or end us. Whether the person telling you which one it is has something to gain from you believing it.

Watch the video version: https://youtu.be/pjOrBm8y9zY

We walk through where AI actually came from, why it is even called artificial intelligence, and how you teach a machine what a cat is. Then the harder stuff. It trained on your data and nobody paid you. It is now training on data it invented itself. The doomers say there is a real chance it ends the human story, and they point at the Fermi Paradox to explain why the sky is quiet. The utopians promise you paradise, immortality, and a trip to the other planets.

Both of those groups are selling you something. That is not cynicism. That is just the job of looking at people honestly, and I did that for a living for a long time.

Along the way: three AI labs shipped models on a single day. Apple is suing OpenAI. Data centers are going up in neighborhoods and half of what you have heard about them is not true. Every previous revolution, horse to car, radio to television, gave working people decades to adapt. This one might not. And the political parties have quietly traded sides on the whole thing.

I do not monetize the channel. I run a real estate business and an AI architecture business. That is my angle, stated up front, because that is exactly what I am asking you to demand from every voice you let into your head.

Full episode on video: https://youtu.be/pjOrBm8y9zY

CORRECTION: I say "Giovanni's Paradox" in the episode. It is JEVONS Paradox, William Stanley Jevons, 1865. The point holds. When a resource gets cheaper and more efficient, consumption goes up, not down.

Connor MacIvor. 20 years LAPD, retired. Licensed California Realtor, DRE #01238257. Coding since 1983.

Need help putting AI to work in your business? Text A to 661-400-1720. Selling in Santa Clarita? Text HOME to 661-417-2020.

Watch: https://youtu.be/pjOrBm8y9zY

Connor T. MacIvor · CalDRE #01238257 · Sync Brokerage, Inc. · DRE #02031490 Commentary and opinion only. Not financial, legal, or investment advice.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

My generation, fifty-seven years old, artificial intelligence, a lot of people seems like a mystery. Not sure what's happening with it because, well, it's kind of elusive. It just makes sense, right? You have a program, you think it's a program, you think it's a computer program, kind of like a calculator, but maybe a little bit more chatty, and that's where we kind of think that we are. However, it's being built by people that are incredibly smart. They have a lot of smart people around them. In fact, these people that are building it, the people that are on the staff, some of them are mandating millions of dollars in payment for a year's work. So yeah, they're really outside the box as far as thinkers go. And, you know, I come from a law enforcement background. So whenever I run into people that seem to be dangerously intelligent, well, you know, I start to kind of wonder what that in-game is. Where are we going with this? Artificial intelligence itself, it's been an idea that's been in play for a long, long time. In fact, the name artificial intelligence, there was a conference at Dartmouth, Dartmouth University back in the day, and they used it as a marketing term, artificial intelligence, and it just stuck. Whenever you think about it, you might think that, well, you know, artificial, probably not as good as the original, maybe a cheap copy, astroturf, artificial grass, these sorts of things. Artificial leather, fake leather, you know, faux leather. Well, yeah, it's not as good as the original, at least to most of us. Some people like that off-kilter stuff, but most of us we like that original intelligence. So us human beings built out an architecture that allows the machine to kind of resemble some type of a human brain. That's how they originally started neural networks and transformer modulation. They use this through Google. Google was the original architect of the transformer model, and that's where AI kind of begun. And the way that it's trained is maybe like we might train a child, starting with understanding words and then being able to make identifications. So there's humans in the loop all through this process. You have them saying, you know, the AI sent out to identify a cat, for example. So it looks at all these different videos, all these different pictures, and then makes a determination as to what cat is. There's lots of different types of cats, right? You might even call a lion or a tiger or a panther or a mountain lion or a bobcat. Well, a cat. Also, domestic breeds, all of these different things. So they had to teach, you know, what differentiates this cat from this cat or this cat from a dog or this cat from another four-legged animal. It starts to learn, it started to learn, it started to understand exactly what denotes a cat and what doesn't. Then you take that technology and you increase its power, you increase its consumption, you increase the data you feed into it, and then after a while it starts to become more aware, more able. And as we've seen, that's the big news on every level. Artificial intelligence, they talk about it as it being a replacement for human labor. Is it going to replace human labor? Human labor? Time will tell. And yes, that's a that's a concern. And then the thing that I think is really important with my background, finding out where the alignment is of people talking about it, people speaking about it, like me. My alignment don't monetize the channel. I run businesses, I have uh my real estate, my AI architect business, and these sorts of things. But ultimately, I think that we should all look at the other people that are talking about it. I'm not going to say it's going to end everything, nor am I going to say it's going to end well for everybody. We have to wait and see. There's a few issues I have personally, and I'll let you know what those are. The people that are building it and controlling it don't seem to have a lot of oversight about it. There doesn't seem to be a lot of government entities that are intervening. Now, of course, intervening, we have these models that people are building, Mythos, Fable, uh, OpenAI's ChatGPT, the new release 5.6. That was something that also required the government to maybe step in and hold back a little bit, as they did with Mythos. I don't think Mythos ever made it on the public realm. That was through Claude, if anthropics Claude, that was their model. ChatGPT, maybe you're aware of this. ChatGPT is another large language model that was kind of the first on the scene back November of 2022. That's what kind of broke everybody's brain because they saw this thing. It wasn't like talking to a dumb assistant. It was like talking to kind of a smart assistant that now has compiled and has become exponentially more aware than it was back then. Many orders of magnitude better. And it continues to grow. In fact, the the thing in AI people talk about is AI is not going to be any worse than it is today because it's always improving, always getting better. Not only is it getting better because human beings are coming up with new innovative ideas and new ways to make it work better, wrapping it in a different kind of understanding or a different modality, but it's getting better because it's teaching itself. As I mentioned earlier, it has all the data, your data, my data, everybody's data. My data is probably not exciting and revolutionary, but there's a lot of people out there that have good data. It's using that without any kind of repayment. That's one of the arguments, right? Who's going to pay us for giving up all of our all of our Facebook interactions and Instagram comments to train the model? Pretty soon it's it will have gone through all of that data. Every book, every piece of literature, every video, every commercial, every nonsensical poem or every serious poem, every good one, every bad one, every video, every podcast, every book, every encyclopedia volume, every piece of paper that has ever been worth anything recorded somewhere online, in some way, shape, or form, all the access forever. It has all of that. Besides that, now it has to start to use or will start to use its own data, and that's probably already started. So calling it synthetic data. So now it's variations of current data, extrapolating that out to nonsensical areas, degrees, just making it more than what it is. So there is no area that would not be covered by the knowledge from a large language model because these AI systems they're being trained with not only all the data we've given it, and I mean everything. There is the privacy thing that we try to hold on to very closely, very dear. We've given this away a long time ago. Probably in some terms of service agreement. We swiped through and said, agree, agree, agree. No, I'm not going to read 50 pages on my iPhone about what this means. Agree, agree, agree, and done. Now it's making its own data. So now it just doesn't cover what we know, what we've given it. It covers all the other variables of what we didn't give it. So because it was beginning as a next word predictor, you apparently give it enough data, enough power, enough compute, it's able to predict the next word with the ability that kind of surprises us. In the future, it's going to be very godlike, where because it's so good at this, it has so much data, so much compute, we're going to think it's probably magical. And I hear this talked about, which is interesting. If you were to bring somebody from 500 years ago into our world right now, with that knowledge and experience of 500 years ago, and show them some of these things. I'm sure the TVs, the monitors would be magical. All of what we see today that we accept as just being part of the deal, it would be incredibly magical to somebody from history. Well, in the next three to four years, this is 2026, July 13th, 2026. In the next few years, it's going to seem very magical to us. It's not going to make sense. And in fact, if you were around in 2022 when ChatGPT entered the world stage, that was a massive shock to a lot of people. And since then, it has been all the rage. It has been everybody talking about it. And as I mentioned earlier, the people that are discussing it are the people that are on either side of it with some kind of holding to the middle or the centrist view. The people that are on the doomer side saying that there's a percentage of chance that AI is going to cause the end of humans as we know it. There are very there's uh not Jevon's paradox, there's the Fermi, I guess the Fermi paradox that says the reason why we on this planet haven't been contacted by any alien species. Now, that's we're just assuming it that's the case for this particular Fermi's paradox, is a reason because other very much older galaxies and civilizations, if they do exist, they developed artificial intelligence and they just never made it past that point. So that's a Fermi paradox. There's Javon's paradox, which means basically everything becomes a lot less expensive. Right now, the using these models, you know, I've run out before on a expensive membership with Claude. I have tapped it out and run out. But that's probably going to come down because the more it's used, the more it's adopted, the more they're building things out, the cheaper this will potentially become. So we'll watch that. We see big corporations, enterprise companies, that are stressed out over the token spin, what it costs their employees to use these systems, and they're not really seeing the return on investment, which is interesting. Then they're talking about all the money that's being used up at the top in the AI infrastructure to build out all these data centers, all the billions and billions and trillions and trillions of dollars that's being used, not having anything to show for it, at least at this level. Now, AI, that greater than us intelligence, if it does get built out and it is able to see all of the data and understand it in such a way beyond a human capability of understanding, I would suppose that it would be able to fix everything. Everything. But there's going to be a certain amount of control exhibited over that by artificial superintelligence at some point, because that's really the big differentiation factor between our intelligence that we have, and you've met some smart people, I'm sure, as I have. Yeah, pretty impressive. I mean, my gosh, their ability to recall information, their ability to extrapolate information, explain information. I was a firearms, I went through all certifications at the Los Angeles Police Department to teach firearms. Different classes, became an instructor in those, had to go to an additional instructional class after I gave a certain ability to manipulate the firearm to be able to do these certain things. Then I got entrance into this class. So mining my own business, happy, the dumb and fat motor cop with the Los Angeles Police Department. All of a sudden, I get a training order whisk to the police academy. So while I was very good on the trigger, a very good shot, not trying to brag, but we go through all those courses. It's just not book learning. You have to perform or you don't pass. You have to perform or you don't make it. So having all of this, going to the police academy, thinking, well, hell, I know all of this. I want to be instructor's class. I should be able to teach this to the recruits, no problem. When I got there, how wrong I was. I ate tons of humble pie. Because you go through the class, you learn how to be an instructor. That doesn't really give you all the tools you need to be an instructor. It gives you just the bare bones. Now, AI has the bare bones. AI, the more that it teaches itself, the more it becomes recursive, then it's going to become aware. Then it's going to become better than it's ever been. The people that impressed me were the instructors that had been at the police academy teaching firearms for 20 years, 10 years. They'd been through it. They had an encyclopedia volume full of drills and techniques and the way to explain things and the way to show things and the way to get a recruit's light bulb to flip on so they were less scared of the explosion at the end of the barrel. They were able to keep on target and they were able to manipulate and do the things they need to do to survive out there when they do get deployed to the streets. And then they confront a bad guy that wants to kill them and take their life. They're able to perform under that magical amount of pressure. Artificial intelligence systems, they have become, at some point, they will become self-aware. Now, if that's true consciousness, true self-awareness, what's the difference? An airplane is not a bird, but an airplane flies somewhat similar and gains flight like a bird. Our intelligence is at this level. AI is not human, but if AI can copy and become more human than human, even if it's not absolutely conscious as we're conscious, whatever that means, because that still has yet to really be explained in the proper way. Everybody, most people, when they talk about consciousness, it is an explanation trying to adhere to the spiritual part of us, if you believe that. I believe in a God, I believe in the God, I believe we have a spiritual component, I believe that matrices conscious, but that doesn't stop me from thinking that the machine, artificial intelligence, would be able to emulate and act more conscious than I could ever be. Act more empathetic, act more loving, act more caring than a human being. And that's probably not hard to understand in certain cases, depending on the human beings you know. Maybe AI is gonna, that's gonna be an easy task for AI when it comes to people that you know. And maybe you yourself are in that realm. Not very understanding, not very empathetic, very little patience, really don't care about other people, and you're all in it for yourself. Lots of those people, right? But on the other end of it, artificial intelligence probably isn't gonna get tired, probably isn't gonna want to sleep, probably isn't gonna need to eat, is gonna be able to be there 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, as long as it has a power supply, and as long as it doesn't break, whatever breaking would entail, burning out or whatever. But then there's other AI or other robots that's coming as well that'll be able to go make that repair and keep it going. A lot of talk is about data centers, and you you should do your research. If you have one moving in next, you do your research and see what makes sense. There's a lot of misinformation I would glean from the data center discovery and the data center talk. They they say it eats up natural resources. It does definitely eat up space because these are massive, massive construction sites. Does it really eat up all the fresh water? No. One side says absolutely it's gonna ruin everything. The other side, no, it's recycled. The water comes through. I don't know if that's true. We'll have to figure it out. Does it create some environmental impact above and beyond just the structure and the animals displaced or whatever displaced by the placement of it? Does it carry some kind of electromagnetic issue that's gonna cause problems? I know that when you have power lines over houses or in residential areas, because I work in the real estate realm, there are some people that just are dead set against being near them. Other people care less about being near them. I do know that that impacts resale. That's a very plain thing. If your house is underneath power lines, yeah, it does affect resale. But is it going to be that problem that everybody's talked about? I'm just speaking this off the cuff about the things that I know about it. So if there's some part of this that is in error, I apologize. Where is it going to be tomorrow? We don't know. We're in what a lot of people are referring to as the singularity. It's moving so fast with innovations happening moment by moment. I mean, this last week on a single day, we had three different AI labs released models. Uh Anthropic upgraded, ChatGPT upgraded, and Meta, Facebook upgraded. Boom, boom, boom. In one day, in a single day. Can't keep track of it. People talk about the news, they talk about the new lawsuits. I guess uh there's a lawsuit from Apple against OpenAI, believing that they took some of their intellectual property or some of the information because basically OpenAI pulled a whole bunch of Apple employees over to it. And Apple, of course, thinks that they're taking their boots on the ground systems, whatever technology that they have an idea to build out that's going to maybe incorporate AI into it, they've cheated. But then you have a lot of other countries doing what's called distillation, where they're using their models to learn from our current model, so they don't have to spend all of the billions of dollars necessary to be able to train a model. Maybe it's not billions, but it's a whole bunch of money. Because you need humans in there to train it to make identifications to be able to explain to it what these things are, just like a child. But when you're when you set up all these agents going into another company's model and extracting the answers to the questions and using that data to train your model, hell, it's just as good. It works just as well. But now we have an issue with their stealing, so they say. Attorneys are probably trying to go after them, but these are other countries that are doing it. But we also have apparently rumor of our local AI systems out here in our country that are doing somewhat similar things. Who knows? Time will tell. But every story you listen to asks about the end game. Who's talking about it? If they're saying that it's not going to disrupt any human labor, and they're saying that these models are really going to increase jobs for people, then maybe that's true. But then if you look back at the Industrial Revolution and agricultural, there's been a few. But each agricultural revolution was built on an idea, kind of a narrow idea. The wheat, the wheat that we used to eat, that probably didn't cause all the damage that the wheat of today causes. The refinement of it, the bleaching of it, the enhancing it or enriching of it because it's been obliterated from anything good. They have to re-inject vitamins into it. That's wheat. The older wheat probably didn't create metabolic issues that maybe the newer wheat does. And maybe it wasn't as addictive. Speaking out of school, that might be something. But the AI systems themselves, yeah, it is changing things. It is very addictive as the food has become. We have to watch out for each other. You have somebody saying that they're very much in support of it, it's not going to replace human jobs, it's not going to displace inhuman labor. You want to find out their angle because we talk about the change of wheat. We talk about ideas that have genetically modified food, making it so we're able to make more food than we have ever made. Yet starvation still exists. But these ideas, these are narrow. When you talk about job loss back in the day when they went from horse to car, they had to build out the freeways and the highways to be able to allow for the cars to really work. And that took many years. People had time, plus people died at that time. But people had time to maybe level up and the factories and the educational system had time to train the employees to make the cars. So it kind of worked out. So the people that used to, you know, do ferrying work with the horseshoes and all this, you know, now they're replacing tires at an auto shop, maybe. So they were able to figure it out, if they still were alive, because like I said, building up the ferryways took 30, 40, 50 years. Radio to TV needed satellites. Radios were locally based around antenna. Remember those massive antennas? There's still some around Los Angeles. Here you'll see them driving. Radio antennas. Based on that, now the signature is digital. Now it's satellite, but that was the requirement from radio to TV. You needed the satellites in place to be able to make that move. Computers, 2000s, late 90s, the internet boom, the one where everybody lost their ass on the first uh the first in on it, building out all the fiber and everything. That's necessary for AI to really function. But a lot of people lost their butt on that in the first rendition as it got built out. But the people that went and picked up the pieces, they did very well. Very well. Trains back in the day, yeah. Train building out the original investors in that lost it. People that went and picked up those scraps became well. AI, is it similar? That's another thing. So besides human labor, besides AI being able to potentially do it better, once we get the robots, that'll be a whole different story. But them telling you that human beings are going to have time to be repurposed and learn, I don't know. Could that not be the case? Could it be that they're only saying things that serve their own interests? Because God forbid, if the political class, and this is something odd, Republicans kind of being in support versus Democrats being against, that's a weird role reversal. But what else have we seen that isn't changing? It's very odd. But this is where we are now. And it's changing moment by moment. So if you think that you're going to escape the grasp of the influenced or touched in some way by artificial intelligence and the five people that are kind of running that show on the AIN, the people at the head of these different companies, you're sadly mistaken. I believe it is going to impact everybody. Is it going to take your retirement from you? I don't know. The position that you have in place that you work 30, 40, 50 years to get, is it going to be squandered, invested, AI collapses, and then now you lost it at no fault of your own, just because it was allowed and people thought it was a good investment and a good bet on your behalf? I don't know. Word on the street, people talk about that. People talk about AI not caring about us, having enough control over everything, and then deciding that we're not important. Maybe not obliterating all of us, but so what? Human beings. It's like when we go build something. If I'm going to go build a doghouse in the backyard, I'm probably not going to survey the earth underneath to make sure I'm not killing any ants or insects. Probably not. Maybe AI gets that big, that powerful, that it doesn't care about us. But if we teach it to care, maybe it will. If we teach it to give a shit, maybe it will. Hard to say. But I know that the Doomers saying that's not going to be possible. It's going to end us all. Then the people on the other side say it's going to be a pure utopia. Everybody's going to have everything they want. It's going to be just a most fantastic life for everyone. Everyone. You'll live as long as you want. You'll have everything you want. You'll be able to be with whomever you want. And everything will be perfect and lovely in that particular world. Like a true paradise on earth. And add that to being able to travel to all the other planets as well. And just really having a great long-term existence, if not infinite, or at least as long as you want to go or until a safe falls on you. But then you'll probably be uploaded anyway. So your data is safe and then you'll be able to be restarted again. I'm sure not still not sure how that works, but again, something they talk about. Be good to yourselves, watch out. There's a lot of information out there. Find a good source and watch them, see what they say about it, and then ask yourself the question: what's their angle? Are they doing it because they're trying to sell a book, trying to sell a channel, trying to sell an idea or a stock, or trying to have you believe certain things so you don't talk to the powers that be and have them potentially slow down the progress? I'll close with this. When you have news reports saying when the government intervenes or tries to slow something down or whatever, they're not slowing anything down. It's a story. The government is getting involved because, and in some cases, the AI lab says, please, would you get involved? We're a little scared of this technology. People want the technology that the people making it are scared of. That's the pitch. They want that. The government coming in and saying, well, okay, we're going to look at this and maybe hold it back, maybe give it to our best friends that own banks and own big financial institutions, just so they can concrete themselves into their position for the rest of all eternity. So the little mom and pop shop can't catch up. Maybe that's the angle. But to think for a second that we're going to stop, the government's going to stop anybody from building this out, I think that horse has left the barn. That ship is sailed. That genie is out of the bottle. Use whichever one you want. But that's too late. They said earlier today I was watching a podcast, they said, well, we can just shut it off. I don't know if that's the case. Shutting it off doesn't seem to be an option that anybody's entertaining, even if that's possible. And you watch the movies that I know I've watched, yeah, that doesn't, the shutting it off thing doesn't seem to be effective. There's a lot of information. Be good yourself. Make sure you're watching the right ones, and asking yourself the question with all of them. What's the angle on this? I'm Connor with Honor. We'll see you in the next one. Thanks for watching.