Superagency: The Bull Case for AI | Reid Hoffman

In this episode of Bankless, Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and author of Super Agency, explores how AI is set to transform humanity and amplify individual potential. We dive into Hoffman’s vision of “super agency,” We examine AI's potential to democratize technology and reshape society, along with an analysis of four distinct perspectives on its impact: pessimistic, cautious, ambitious, and balanced. Hoffman shares lessons from past tech revolutions, the risks of AI misuse, and how innovation can unlock a more optimistic future. ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙 FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax 🦄UNISWAP | BUG BOUNTY PROGRAM https://bankless.cc/Uniswap-Bug-Bounty ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM ⁠https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🌐 CELO | BUILD TOGETHER AND PROSPER https://bankless.cc/Celo 🎮RONIN | THE FUTURE OF WEB3 GAMING https://bankless.cc/Ronin ------ ✨ Mint the episode on Zora ✨ https://zora.co/collect/base:0x4be6cd4d402fed49eb2de95fbc8e737e8ffd3e7f/22?referrer=0x077Fe9e96Aa9b20Bd36F1C6290f54F8717C5674E ------ TIMESTAMPS 00:00:00 Intro 00:09:10 Is superagency a superpower? 00:11:09 How to identify a humanoid AI agent? 00:13:28 Which people will get this AI superpower? 00:17:22 Propagation of AI 00:18:47 AI religions 00:24:31 Zoomers are e/acc? 00:25:56 Thoughts on Gloomers 00:29:09 Mainframe computers' relation with today's AI 00:37:03 Negative and positive impacts of AI 00:50:28 Benefits of AI to the average citizen 00:52:58 What if AI misuses/sells our data? 00:59:31 How AI will deliver value worth millions 01:02:17 Why innovation is safety 01:05:59 AI choices shaping our freedom? 01:10:07 America’s approach towards AI 01:12:27 Is AI overhyped? 01:14:05 Closing & Disclaimers ------ RESOURCES Reid Hoffman https://x.com/reidhoffman Blitzscaling https://www.blitzscaling.com/ Super Agency https://www.superagency.ai/ ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Can you guarantee me that killer robots will never be built? The only existential risk for human beings is not killer robots. There's pandemics, there's asteroids, there's nuclear weapons, there's climate change, and the list kind of goes on. And so you have to look at existential risk as a portfolio, namely, it's not just one thing, it's a set of things. And so when you look at any particular intervention, you say, well, how does this affect the portfolio? My very vigorous and strong contention is that AI, even unmodified at all, is not, I think, very positive on the existential risk portfolio.

• 0:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Welcome to Bankless, where today we explore the frontier of AI. This is Ryan Chon Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. The question for today: will AI give us super agency? Or will it be used to enslave us? We have Reid Hoffman on the podcast today. He gives his bull case for AI, why it's good, why we should accelerate AI into the future, and how it will turn each of us into super agents. And to him, that equals more freedom for everyone. I think the Bankless journey is all about becoming a more sovereign individual. That's what David and I have talked about since inception. And it's increasingly hard to imagine being a sovereign individual without crypto,

• 1:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  which we've talked a lot about, but also without AI. Like crypto gives you the ability to own things, but AI seems to be the ability to control your own destiny. And that's why we're doing an AI episode today with Reid Hoffman to help stay ahead of the AI curve. A few things we discuss: super agency, doomers, bloomers, and zoomers? What could go right? How to use AI? American superintelligence? And finally, we end with a question to Reid: what if this whole AI thing is overhyped? Stay tuned for that answer.

• 1:52David Hoffman?

  Super Agency is the title of Reid Hoffman's book, which is coming out this week, if you are listening to it at the time of release. And so this is all on the backs of that. Ryan, of the two co-hosts of Bankless, read the book. I did not. And so I'm more along for the ride. I'm in listening mode, asking a few questions here or there. But it's really Ryan in the driver's seat for this episode. So I hope you guys enjoy the episode with Reid Hoffman. But first, before we get there, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Uniswap Labs is making history with the largest bug bounty ever. $15.5 million for critical bugs found in Uniswap V4. This isn't just any update. Uniswap V4 is built with hundreds of contributions from community developers and has already undergone nine independent audits,

• 2:35David Hoffman?

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• 3:18David Hoffman?

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• 3:58David Hoffman?

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• 4:41David Hoffman?

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• 4:57Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation, very excited to introduce you to Reid Hoffman. He is a founder investor. He co-founded LinkedIn, which I'm sure many of you have used in the past. He's extremely active in Silicon Valley, particularly over the last couple of decades. And more recently, he's been very close to what we would call the epicenter of this whole AI thing. So he was serving on the Board of OpenAI, starting in 2018. Notably, I should mention, because whenever someone talks about the Board of OpenAI, a lot of things, you'll come up. But he actually left to go focus on AI investing before Sam Altman and the ousting drama, and you guys remember all of that. He's also a gifted writer, a communicator. I've read several of his books. I think one of the canonical books for tech founders is this book called Blitzscaling,

• 5:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  which is just phenomenal on how to grow an internet-scale business. And now, all of this preamble to say, now he's written a book on AI called Superagency. And I'd pretty much describe this as maybe Reid Hoffman's thesis for artificial intelligence and how it will impact us in the decades to come. Reid Hoffman, welcome to Bankless.

• 6:00Speaker 00

  It's great to be here. And I look forward to not only this conversation, but future ones as well.

• 6:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I mean, I think we're going to really focus on AI, because that's the subject matter of your book. But maybe in a future episode, we get into crypto, because I know you have a lot of thoughts on that.

• 6:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I actually think I bought my first Bitcoin in 2014. A little late, but you know.

• 6:24David Hoffman?

  It's earlier than most.

• 6:26Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, that's a good seasoning of a time to buy Bitcoin for sure. So let's talk about this book. Let's talk about your thesis for artificial intelligence. And when I heard that you were writing a book called Super Agency, my first question, without reading anything further, was like, okay, super agency, who is Reid talking about? Like, who are the super agents? Is this the humans? Do they become the super agents? Or is he talking about the AIs themselves? Do the robots become the super agents? So maybe you could kind of start there. Could you define what you even mean by super agency and like, who gets it?

• 7:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, so let's actually start even a little bit earlier with agency and then get to your excellent question, which is, what is agency? Agency is the ability to kind of make plans, do things in the world, you know, kind of make parts of the world, you know, according to your intentions and desires and to kind of, you know, kind of express yourself in the kind of the ordering of the world around you. And obviously, nobody has perfect agency. You know, that's, you know, kind of theoretical, deistic, like creatures.

• 7:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like God has that, maybe.

• 7:33Speaker 00

  Perhaps, and it depends even on what your particular theology is. So that's the reason I was being a little bit more vague.

• 7:40Ryan Sean Adams?

  Not denominational today in this podcast.

• 7:42Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly. And so, super agency is, the precise term is kind of when millions of human beings get access to the kind of an elevating technology, a transformative technology. What kind of the superpowers, not only they get as individuals, but society gets transformed. And so, for example, a canonical example is cars. So you go, well, it gives me superpowers because I can go farther. I can drive. I can get to farther distances. But as other people in this in society also get cars, you know, like suddenly you'd had to go down to the doctor's office to get an appointment. Now the doctor can come to you.

• 8:25Speaker 00

  And obviously later instantiations of this is you can get, you know, Instacart deliveries and, you know, all the rest. And so super agency is kind of how we all get superpowers. And so to your opening question about are humans the super agents? Or are AIs the super agents? To some degree, it's both. But it's but the important emphasis is that rather than us as human beings and humanity losing our agency, we are gaining agency. And by the way, in a very similar pattern to the way that I gain agency, when you guys also get cars, right? It's it's it's not just me that gains agency with my own car. I gain agency when you guys get cars. And so that's the elevation of agency and hence super agency.

• 9:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  I was almost thinking about your like book title. If you used a different synonym besides super agency, if you just titled the book superpowers, right? And like, and like, who gets them? That's almost the same discussion. Like, or maybe, maybe when we get into this term agency, is the term superpower and super agency, are they kind of synonyms? Is the short form version of this to just like, we get all of this additional choice surface area. We have new abilities to do things that previous generations could not have imagined. That feels like a superpower to me. Is it kind of one in the same in your mind?

• 9:45Speaker 00

  Well, superpower, it's it's it's deeply related. The Venn diagrams have a high overlap. Because the the kind of the elevation of capabilities are superpowers. And every, you know, kind of new major technology gives us new kinds of superpowers. Now, some of it is with a superpower, and as lots of people get superpowers, you know, individuals, institutions, societies, governments, etc. Your agency changes some. So it isn't like, for example, like, like, like the agency of people who are kind of driving horse and buggy carriages, that changed with cars. Because it was like, well, no longer are the streets set up for you. No longer can you be doing this thing that

• 10:29Speaker 00

  you were, you know, you had been doing and were planning on doing. You know, no longer, for example, was the, you know, the, the, the horse as transport industry, you know, kind of as kind of central. And so these, and by the way, even like earlier technologies like trains, those changed in the kind of the ways that people would express their agency and be able to work on it. So superpowers are a way that you get the, you way you extend your agency. But when it happens in a super agency context, it also transforms it and changes it. So that's the reason why it's not 100% the same, but, but, but, but closely related.

• 11:07David Hoffman?

  Read something that we share in common is we actually both have podcasts. You have a podcast called Possible. And I think we, Ryan and I stumbled on your podcast and we noticed that you did an episode, an interview with yourself. But yourself was, we would might call it in the, in the crypto world, an AI agent. Now, maybe, maybe this illustrates what you mean by super agency. And maybe you can take that metaphor all the way home. But how do we know that we are actually talking to the real Reid Hoffman and not your AI co-host bot that now is with us actually, and the real human Reid Hoffman is somewhere else doing work in a different direction? How do we know? How do we know you're the real Reid Hoffman?

• 11:48Speaker 00

  Well, that will get to be a more and more complicated question. At the moment, the video avatars are not actually in fact, real time. So the, the, the, the Reid AI discussion has to be a little bit scripted, even though it looks like it's on a podcast and it's a completely real time thing. There's actually in fact, you know, kind of running it through the chat GPT instance that's trained on 20 years of my writing. And then more specifically, getting the audio and video produced with the right kind of quality. Doesn't really, you know, enable that for kind of a a a full real time stack today. But, you know, part of the reason, of course, you know, I did it, put it on possible because

• 12:32Speaker 00

  what could possibly go right was to start getting people familiar with the future universe, just just as you guys are doing, you know, in the kind of, you know, all of the technology broadly, but also around, of course, crypto and what is sovereignty and identity and all the rest of that mean. It's it's it's kind of like, here, here's a lens into the future. And we don't know exactly where the future is going, but we're trying to get everyone, you know, kind of participating, ready, navigating well, etc. And that was part of the reason why doing read AI. But there is, you know, obviously, at some point, one could get to that is an interesting question. And, you know, my own, you know, hazard of an answer here is something a little bit

• 13:15Speaker 00

  more like, you know, well, crypto signatures and identity as to what's happening. But of course, you know, given that I'll probably have both the crypto signatures for me and for read AI, you know, that might still even be a live question.

• 13:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's it's really interesting, though. There's something very empowering about the experiment that you're running with with read AI, because it it leads to a promising future of like, if individuals are sovereign over their own kind of AI agent twin, maybe that AI agent twin could go do work while they're like goofing off. They're going like doing something that they enjoy. Maybe they're watching a movie, they're doing art, they're like working out, something like that. And then there's read AI doing podcasts like while all of this goes on and, you know, the real Reid Hoffman sort of has ownership over that and somehow like that feels very democratizing. I I want to get back to the through line of this conversation, though, when we when we talk about super agency, though. So your your thesis is we understand what what a super agents or a super agency is

• 14:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  and how that's similar versus different to superpowers. And you said very emphatically that it's not the robots that get it, the AIs do get it, but also the humans get it, right? Your your view here is that it's going to be humans amplified by AI. That's the real unlock here. But like, I have a question within that subset of humans who get it. Which humans are we talking about, Reid? Are we talking about the Silicon Valley elite in your thesis? Are we talking about, you know, the the 1%? Those that control most of the capital in society? Are we talking about governments? Or are we talking about individuals? Because the distribution of this seems incredibly relevant to how we actually view whether this is a good thing or not.

• 14:57Speaker 00

  So I think the pattern, the path we're already on, you know, with, you know, hundreds of millions of people using ChatGPT and, you know, exposure to, you know, agents in other contexts, whether it's, you know, Anthropic, Gemini, Copilot, et cetera. So I think we're already seeing hundreds of millions of what you're referring to as individuals. But, you know, kind of call it access from, you know, kind of the a bulk of at least middle class Western folks. Although like one of the things that I was very cool that I had heard about from a friend who was traveling in Morocco recently

• 15:36Speaker 00

  is that the taxi driver was using ChatGPT as the translator for, you know, like, where do you want to go for the tourists? And so, you know, it's it's very broad indeed. Now, that being said, I don't want to paper over the fact that we live in a human society that has, you know, kind of differences of wealth, differences of power, differences of position, not just between nations, but within nations. And, you know, that's not going to go away. And so it wouldn't surprise me, you know, if you said, well, but actually the kind of AI that the that the that the

• 16:16Speaker 00

  the wealthy have access to has some improvements and betterness than, you know, maybe real time, you know, responsiveness, maybe, you know, number of GPUs available, et cetera, et cetera, than, you know, kind of a a lower income person. Now that being said, part of the reason I'm really optimistic is a little bit like, you know, kind of smartphones, which is, you know, three quarters of the world today has mobile phones. But the smartphone that, you know, that, you know, kind of Tim Cook has, or Jeff Bezos has, or Sundar Pichai has, is the same smartphone that, you know, the Uber driver has. And, and so I think that the, you know, the kind of the, the, the, the natural drive

• 16:59Speaker 00

  in technology, which includes AI, is, is building it for the very mass market, you know, the billions. And so I, I, I think that I can confidently assert that superpowers will be available very, very broadly, even if, you know, there's also some differences in, in superpowers based on, you know, country and wealth and, you know, kind of access. But, but I think democratizing will be, um, will be the, the name of the game.

• 17:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  So in your world, AI is really a democratizing technology. It's pretty like, you know, of course, you know, uh, if you're in the early adopter curve, maybe you get things a little bit sooner, but generally it's going to take the form of the way cell phones did, where in the 1980s was a larger, you know, big brick, it cost thousands of dollars, and then the technology democratized, or the way the internet has kind of democratized things. It's not because there is this fear out there, Reid, that AI is kind of a, uh, going to be controlled by superpowers, let's say, governments, uh, or a small cabal maybe in, in Silicon Valley, that they're going to have the technology and kind of the rest of us plebs, like, maybe won't.

• 18:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  But you're saying it'll be more similar to, I guess, the propagation of the internet or the cellphone in that it will be fairly widely distributed and actually be like a, a technology that's available to the general public?

• 18:26Speaker 00

  Yes, in short, and part of that's also because, you know, the same, you know, kind of call it Silicon Valley ecosystem that built smartphones, that built the internet, you know, and obviously that's not just Silicon Valley, but there's a lot of Silicon Valley contribution is also very similarly building, you know, kind of AI, both in the hyperscalers and the large models, but also, you know, at this point, there's so many thousands of startups that, you know, they kind of, you know, you could start mapping various cryptocurrencies per per startup, there's similar numbers of orders of magnitude.

• 19:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's talk about the AI religions that exist, because I think this was a fairly fantastic framing in your book and one of my chief takeaways. So you talk about, and I'm using the term religion, you could say ideology, you could say philosophy, but just the point is that each of these categories, I think all of them have an expected outcome or an article of faith, because of course, the future is unknown. But anyway, so the four categories on your book, in your book of, you know, people with thoughts about AI, and it's useful, I think, to categorize them to sort of understand the worldview a bit better. One is the doomer. Okay. The second is the gloomer. The third is the bloomer. And the

• 19:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  fourth is the zoomer. Okay. Now, these are four different categories, subsets of groups with different perspectives on AI. Could you just define those four categories for us?

• 20:04Speaker 00

  Absolutely. I'll go through them in that order, which is doomers basically are like, AI is the destruction of humanity. And, you know, it's, you know, very much like the Terminator robot, or other kinds of, you know, kind of popular Hollywood thieves argued in a way that's kind of like, well, it'll be more intelligent than us. It'll kind of want to run the earth, you know, it'll look at human beings as either hostile or, you know, kind of, you know, ants or a kind of equivalent. And so AI should just be stopped. Bloomers are essentially, look, I don't think the AI future is going to be particularly

• 20:46Speaker 00

  good. I think it'll, you know, take away a whole bunch of jobs and kind of disorder society. It may lead to much more misinformation and kind of unbalanced democracies. It'll have a whole bunch of kind of more information, you know, kind of surveillance. And so their privacy will be worse. And so like, I don't think it's stoppable because, you know, multiple countries and multiple, you know, companies around the world are building it. And, you know, that's the way that humanity rolls. And, you know, companies are going to become a lot more productive for this. But I think it'll be a unfortunate outcome. And it's bloomers, bloomers, by the way, because they only see the gloomy side if that helps people.

• 21:29Speaker 00

  Exactly. And actually, I'll do zoomers for bloomers because I want to spend a little bit more time on bloomers since I self identify there. Zoomers are essentially like, no, no, this technology is great. It's like the absolute, it's the opposite of doomers. And it's like, everything that we're going to build with it is going to be really amazing. You know, the sky isn't even the limit in terms of what kinds of things could be made. Or, you know, maybe AI is going to invent fusion rather than us inventing fusion. And everything that comes out of this is just spectacular. And zoomer, zoom refers to just hitting the gas pedal. Just go forward, go fast. Exactly. Yeah.

• 22:13Speaker 00

  And then bloomers, which I describe myself as, is kind of a zoomer, but exposed to just like maximally hitting the gas pedal in all circumstances. You go, well, drive intelligently, like avoid the potholes, slow down at the curve, you know, be looking at kind of like, oh, look, this is a little bit of a dangerous area. Let's, let's go through with this with a little bit more care. Still accelerationist, that the kinds of things that we can build in the future, whether they're medical outcomes, or, or climate change outcomes, or, you know, kind of human enablement with, with, with work and with education.

• 22:49Speaker 00

  All of that stuff is super important to get to. But, you know, let's kind of make sure that we're not enabling rogue states or terrorists or unbalancing, you know, kind of, you know, crime waves or other kinds of things as ways of doing this. And let's make sure that we don't, for example, inadvertently create Terminators. You know, because it's a little bit of a question of how we drive. It's not, it's not inevitable. And so, um, so that's the bloomer category and that's, that's the category I'm in. And obviously if you said, well, you can't pick bloomer, I'd be closer to zoomer, uh, much closer to zoomer than gloomer or doomer. But it's also part of the reason why the subtitle of super agency, which parallels

• 23:32Speaker 00

  the podcast is what could possibly go right is because we always, as human beings, encounter new technologies with that, oh my God, the world's coming to an end. I mean, remember all those discussions around crypto? Maybe we're still having them. Right. And, and, and also, you know, by the way, the internet and by the way, cars and by the way, the printing press, it always starts with, oh my God, this is the end of society. And then when we start navigating, we go, oh, wait, if we do that this way, we, we make society a whole lot better. And by the way, we have in every technological instance in history so far, made that happen and gotten super agency through all of them.

• 24:13Speaker 00

  One can argue whether or not the AI technology is, uh, it is new and unique, whether it's new and unique in that characteristic or not. And that's of course why to write the book and go out and talk to people and so forth to show, actually, in fact, the only way you can create a positive future is by imagining it and steering towards it. And so that's, that's what we should be doing.

• 24:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's make sure we understand the, these examples of these four categories, uh, you like maybe by wave example, actually. So somebody on the zoomer side of things, and again, this is not, we're not referring to Gen Z here, we're talking about zoomers. I, I was thinking in my head, another term that bankless listeners might be familiar with is EAC, if you've heard that term, effective accelerationist, of which we've had Beth Jaisos on the podcast, who's, he's basically like full, full speed ahead, like let's harness energy, let's harness AI and like conquer the universe, full speed ahead. Marc Andreessen, you know, put together a techno optimist manifesto that has some EAC characteristics. Zoomer is basically the EAC group, is that right?

• 25:16Speaker 00

  Uh huh. Exactly, although I think you might say that the zoomers and bloomers are kind of two variants of the EAC group. One of them, you know, where I would characterize it is the, because I also, by the way, I think, you know, I started using the term techno optimism some number of years ago, like, EJ, I'm a techno optimist, not techno utopian, which is, you can build great things with technology. Doesn't mean everything you do with technology is great, right? So, so do it, you know, do it with some care. I'd say it's, it's, the zoomers are, hey, anything that anyone's doing with this, it'll end up good. And the bloomer is, hey, most of the stuff is gonna end up really good. Let's try to like steer a little bit.

• 26:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's, it's hard for me too, to actually put people in boxes, like somebody like Marc Andreessen. I don't know if he's full, like, kind of, everything techno, technological, technical is good, or how much of this is sort of, you know, a personal choice to just amplify this extreme position.

• 26:17Speaker 00

  He might need to plant a flag in order to shift the Overton window.

• 26:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Move the Overton window, right? And like, I think that's part of the, the meme games that, that people like Beth Jayzus and maybe Andreessen are doing, but it's hard to speculate on. Okay, so that's the zoomer. Now, the doomer is pretty easy. I think we've also had guests on Ben Gliss, Eli Yerkeski, he very much clearly thinks that, like, everything that we're doing right now in AI, like, basically, we only have years, maybe decades, to kind of live before AI actually supplants us. Like, he genuinely thinks that. That's the, that's the doomer category. So you don't have to go into more detail there. But how about the, the gloomer category a little bit more? It seemed to me that this is sort of the mainstream

• 26:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  media type of take on things. It might even be the popular narrative around AI. Like, if you ask the average American, what do they think about AI? I think in like the 2020s, with the current spirit of the age, I think there'd be some cynicism about AI. There'd be some pessimism about AI. It would definitely be the, the glass, you know, half-full type of outlook. And I think that's the, the popular idea. But who are some archetypes for this, this gloomer category?

• 27:29Speaker 00

  So, I do think that it's kind of, generally speaking,

• 27:35Speaker 00

  The, you know, kind of the, the, the discourse, because the discourse now, just like earlier times in history with earlier technologies, tends to focus around like all the things that could possibly go wrong. And so many journalists, definitely the vast majority of people in Hollywood, who are like, oh, my God, this is the destruction of the content production industry. And, you know, when Sora and Vio are going, you know, all of our jobs are going. A lot of it's focused around job displacement. So worries and concerns about job displacement.

• 28:16Speaker 00

  So, you know, I think it's, it's more or less kind of like, if you can't put the person clearly in another bucket, they're probably in the gloom bucket. It's probably the, the, and that's a little bit like mainstream media. It's the everyone else bucket.

• 28:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  How about from a political landscape perspective? Would you look at the axis that way here? Because I think a lot of people listening would be like, okay, Democrats are a bit more on the gloomer side of things and Republicans are a bit more on the, maybe not the zoomer side of things, but the bloomer side of things. Do you think that's an axis at play as well?

• 28:49Speaker 00

  Well, I think it depends, right? Because there's also a lot of modern Republican that's kind of anti-big tech, you know, thinks that big tech is too big for its britches and, and should conform. So, you know, I think that, that there's kind of, as we're gloomers in both sides. I think the Democratic side tends to be a little bit more, we should be regulating. And the, and the Republican side tends to be the, no, no, we should be allowing, you know, industry to do what industry does.

• 29:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  So, Reid, I think for the rest of this podcast, I think we want you to make the case for bloomerism here. Like, why, why, why is AI going to go really well for, for humanity? This, this idea of, of humans really amplified by artificial intelligence and it kind of leads to, to really positive outcomes. One of the early chapters in your book, talk about some history I actually wasn't familiar with, and maybe this is an analog that will be helpful for some, it was helpful for me. So, this is the history of the mainframe computer. And you go back to 1960s, and apparently, I did not know this, maybe some Bankless listeners also don't know this, during the 1960s, when the mainframe computer kind

• 30:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  of entered the cultural public scene as a new technology, we had computers that could do incredible things for the time, there was a media hysteria that broke out, okay? And there was concerns about this new computer that had the ability to recall in a few seconds every pertinent action, including all of your failures, your embarrassments, or incriminating acts from a lifetime of every citizen. There were many comparisons to 1984, the book, of course, that's in Western canon by George Orwell, just like this Orwellian society that would be built out by these mainframe computers. There were even congressional hearings, guys. So, one lawmaker warned of the danger of the computerized man, which is a citizen that

• 30:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  would lose all of their individuality, their privacy, basically their agency, and they'd be reduced to magnetic tape. That, of course, was the technology to program computers at the time, it's like literal magnetic tape. So, give us the history of the mainframe computer and this hysteria, and why do you think this is analogous to what's happening today?

• 31:06Speaker 00

  So, well, you've covered it pretty well. Thank you for actually reading the book, that doesn't happen that often these days. And so, you know, I think that the question is, any time that we encounter a new technology, and in this case, the mainframe, we're like looking at like, okay, what could possibly go wrong? And they think about, well, actually, in fact, this could, you know, track everything, make all the decisions, take away the agency of people by putting it into kind of government centralized control, you know, little bit of the discussion of what's happening with, you know, AI in some circles today.

• 31:48Speaker 00

  And and then make, you know, kind of, you know, us as as human beings, essentially powerless and agencyless. And that's, you know, of course, you know, part of the, you know, a lot of the, and we we talk about this in super agency a bunch, because, you know, a lot of it was the 1984 George Orwell worries, where that kind of centralizing technology became a control over individuals and individuals through this kind of control of information, control of power, become, you know, almost irrelevant cogs in a machine. And, you know, this is, you know, if you look at it the same way, I think it's like, whoa, what, you know, what's AI doing with my data?

• 32:31Speaker 00

  Oh, am I going to be able to make decisions because AI is going to be so, you know, persuasive and manipulative and advertising systems and information systems? You know, am I going to be able to, you know, control my life and work? Or is AI going to be doing all the work? All of those are very parallel, not just, obviously, to the mainframe discussions, which are, you know, relevant and close and, you know, the kind of, we at least gotten through, I think, punch cards, the magnetic tape before we started having all the worries. So we're not, we're magnetic tape, not punch cards. That's that's meant to be a joke. And so, anyway, that was, that was essentially what the dialogue was going. And people forget it now because it seems absurd, looking back on it.

• 33:16Speaker 00

  I mean, it's kind of like, well, yeah, I don't know why those people thought that. I mean, look at all the computers we have now and look at, you know, the, the smartphone that that everyone has in their pocket is, is, you know, thousands of times more powerful than those mainframes, right? And, you know, kind of everyone has one and and and and it's kind of, you know, working, you know, throughout the entire place. And by the way, I think everyone's going to have an agent too, and, you know, with AI. And so I think that's why the parallel of the discussion to to say, Look, we're all, we're going through all this energy to imagine like every possible bad outcome, when a lot more of the energy is better put into what are the good outcomes

• 34:00Speaker 00

  that we should be steering towards and which specific bad outcomes, you know, that are, that are not ones that are easily correctable as we get into it. So for example, you can put a car on the road without bumpers. It's good to build bumpers later. You can put a car on the road without seatbelts. It's good to put in seatbelts later. But you don't try to imagine all 10,000 things that could go wrong before you will put the car on the road. You gotta put the car on the road and start learning as you're going. And that's what the, the AI thing. And so for most bloomers to kind of persuade them to switch from, call it AI skeptical to AI curious, um, within the kind of the bloomer category is to say, start using it and start using it not just for, hey, um, you know, what, uh, you know,

• 34:45Speaker 00

  what, I have these ingredients in my refrigerator, what can I cook? Totally good use case. Or my, my, my relative is having a birthday party and I want to create a sonnet for them. Great. But for real things, for things like, like for example, um, and I'll actually I'll give a personal example because I think this might be useful in particular to the, the bankless community. So when I first got access to GBD4, I sat down and said, how would Reid Hoffman make money by, uh, investing in AI? Um, you know, cause with a, as a proxy for, you know, what, what degree of job replacement do I have with GBD4? And it gave me back an answer that was powerfully written, compelling and completely wrong. Because it gave me back

• 35:28Speaker 00

  the answer that a business school professor who was very smart, doesn't understand venture capital would say is like, first you'll, you know, you analyze which markets have the largest hand. Then you analyze, you know, kind of what the substitute products might be. Then you go find teams that could possibly build those substitute products and stand them up in order to invest in them. And you're like, yeah, that's not the way any- Capable venture, any venture capitalist who's successful does not operate that way. Yeah, it's like business school slop, I guess, right? Yes, exactly. And so it's like, OK. But then you say, well, then is it completely irrelevant to investing? And the answer is no, actually, in fact, one of the things that AI, I like, I figured this out by the next day was, hey, I can feed in the PowerPoint deck or feed in the

• 36:10Speaker 00

  business plan and I say, what are the top questions for answering in due diligence? And while I, as an experienced investor, I might have known all those questions and gotten to them all. It got, it helped me go, oh, yeah, question number three, I would have figured that out is the right question to ask three days from now. And it's useful to have it now while kind of composing a due diligence plan. And so that kind of acceleration or that kind of amplification, you know, or that kind of agency, super agency is part of the kind of human agency. And so all of this is a personal story to go back to, you know, kind of the, you know, the bankless community and say, well, start using it for things that matter to you. And even if the first one, like, how do you invest in, you know, cryptocurrency doesn't

• 36:53Speaker 00

  give you anything useful, keep trying in different things and you may find something go, oh, this helps me with how I can operate at speed and with accuracy. And then that gives you a wedge to start learning, you know, kind of how you can be kind of superpower enabled.

• 37:12David Hoffman?

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• 37:55David Hoffman?

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• 38:40David Hoffman?

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• 38:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  I completely agree. And my lived experience of using tools like ChatGPT is that it does amplify my productivity when I use it in the right way. And I have to spend time to figure out how exactly to apply this to my own amplification of what I do. I guess when I was reading this section about the 1960s and the mainframe computer, I was sort of putting my like putting my head in the minds of people at that time. And you could kind of see at that time, the way compute was sort of playing out. It was really controlled by a small number of companies and governments. It was sort of like, I mean, the computers were the size of buildings, right? And so you can sort of take a 1960s mindset and extrapolate that and get very scared.

• 39:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  What ended up happening was, of course, the personal computer revolution, where everybody got those building-sized computers in their own home as an amplifier for their own productivity. And society completely forgot the 1960s hysteria around mainframe. But I can't help but also wonder if some of the criticisms were sort of right. Okay, you go back to the 1960s and they talked about surveillance and kind of the lack of privacy. And they weren't completely wrong. And this is the, you know, we didn't get the worst case scenario of what they were projecting, but we did get a lot of good and then some bad outcomes. And this is why I sort of want to ask you about your framing of like, do you actually

• 40:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  think the doomers and the gloomers are completely wrong? Or do you think that there's some probability of like a doomer style of outcome or even a gloomer style outcome where AI is like not so sunshiny rainbows? That it actually is kind of negative for society? Like what? You think about that from a probability distribution perspective? And do they have a point?

• 40:51Speaker 00

  So I think smart people always have a point. And so I think it's, the question's good because it's always to listen to what is the thing that they're thinking about? Let me, I think the two answers are very different between doomers and gloomers. Let's start with doomers who, you know, another thing you're, you know, the bankless community may be familiar with is, you know, X risk. And so they tend to be existential risk predominantly, you know, especially Yudkowsky and others. Now, one of the mistakes, so it starts, the thinking starts like this. It says, can you guarantee me that you, that killer robots will never be built either in the hands of humans or autonomously?

• 41:37Speaker 00

  You say, well, you can't guarantee that. There's lots of things you can't guarantee. You say, ah, so then we have an existential risk that's being added and we should, we should, we should stop that existential risk because why should you add any existential risk? QED, my argument's over. Like, well, until you consider the fact that existential risk is not one thing, like the only existential risk for human beings is not killer robots. There's pandemics, there's asteroids, there's nuclear weapons, there's climate change, and the list kind of goes on. And so you have to look at existential risk as a portfolio, namely, it's not just one thing, it's a set of things. And so when you look at any particular intervention, you say, well, how does this affect the portfolio?

• 42:22Speaker 00

  Now, my very vigorous and strong contention is that AI even unmodified, and we'll get to why steering is good, but unmodified at all is net, I think, very positive on the existential risk portfolio. Because when you get to, for example, pandemics, one of the things we've experienced in our lifetimes. And, you know, obviously, if it was a lot more fatal and everything else, it could have been substantially worse than the, you know, many thousands who died. The question is to say, well, how do you see it? You know, detect it? How do you analyze it? And how do you both do therapeutics and preventive vaccines at speed in order to navigate that?

• 43:06Speaker 00

  And AI is the primary answer to that. Like, none of that can work without the speed of AI. And then you get to, oh, well, how about asteroids? Well, identifying which asteroids might get to us, being able to intervene on them early. You get to, like, for example, climate change. You go, well, actually, in fact, whether it's anything from accelerating the invention of fusion to how do we manage our electric grids better? There's positive contributions across all this. So you go, OK. Given all of that, I think AI even, like, unmodified, just let the industry know exactly what it's going to do, is going to be strongly positive in the existential risk bucket. And I'll pause there in case you have a contention on that before I get to the gloom or category.

• 43:51David Hoffman?

  No, I'll just say it in another way, where you're just saying the most fully zoomer, the fastest engine going into the AI revolution, it drives every, it hits every single pothole. It's on two wheels as it's going around the corners. Even under that situation, the solutions that it provides to all alternative existential risks is still net positive, in your opinion.

• 44:13Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 44:14David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 44:17Speaker 00

  So that's the reason why I'm very far away from doomers.

• 44:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, well, how about the gloomers? Do they have a point?

• 44:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, no. And by the way, I thought the doomers have a point, too, which is you say, "Hey, by the way, we should try to minimize the killer robot risk." Yes, that is something we should be doing. And we can get back to that.

• 44:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  I guess your answer would be like through use of AI to help us also.

• 44:39Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly.

• 44:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay.

• 44:40Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly.

• 44:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  That feels a little recursive, but.

• 44:43Speaker 00

  Hey, whenever technology is part of the problem, it's almost always the best part of the solution, too.

• 44:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, okay. That's the optimist, that's the EA can you talking, I think. Okay. How about the gloomers?

• 44:55Speaker 00

  But I think I have history on my side, which is good. And we can get back to the privacy, you know, thread from the mainframe things as well. So on the gloomer side,

• 45:04Speaker 00

  the primary thing where I think I'm very sympathetic to the gloomers is that if you look at, and we cover this some in super agencies, you know, if you look at the transitions for human societies in these technologies, we as human beings adapt, adopt and adapt new technologies very painfully, like the disruption. So you go, ah, the printing press, we could not have anything of the modern world without the printing press. You can't have science, scientific method, you can't have literacy, you can't have, you know, kind of a robust middle class. Yet, there was a century of religious war because of the printing press. When we as human beings come to this, we, the transition period's almost always very painful.

• 45:49Speaker 00

  And I think even with AI, we're going to have pain in the process. I don't think there's any way, unfortunately, around it. Part of the reason I'm writing super agency and doing these conversations say, well, let's try to be smarter about it than the times we've done it before. Let's try to make the transition as easy and kind of

• 46:07Speaker 00

  more graceful. But it will still be painful, like in terms of, even if you say, hey, most human jobs will be placed by humans using AI. That process itself is still painful. People have to learn AI. Maybe it's new humans. Maybe the human who couldn't learn AI feels out of place. You know, is kind of is, is, is, is suffering because of it. And, and that's the kind of thing that I think the gloomers are kind of putting, as an intuitive finger on, which is, hey, look, all this kind of transition, they'll, they'll project it to infinity. But all this kind of transition, boy, this is going to be difficult. And you're like, yes, it is. Right? It's not, no, it's not. And we're going to try to make it as good as possible. And that's, again, part of the reason why I'm arguing about,

• 46:51Speaker 00

  we should be intentional here about what could possibly go right is you say, well, and this gets back to the technology being the solution. It's like, well, okay. So we're going to have some, some, some job transitions. We're going to have in transformations. We're going to have information flows and misinformation flow transformations. And we're going to have some, some expectations of privacy transformations. What should we do? And the answer is, well, I actually think AI can be, can be helpful in all of these cases. And like one of them, part of the reason why, you know, inflection and pie was, you know, kind of, you know, something that I helped getting as, as an agent for every human being that's on your side, that's for you, you know, and by you, is one of the things that can help you then navigate.

• 47:35Speaker 00

  Because it can be like, okay, how, how do you help me navigate this new world? And I think it's one of the things that's really important for us to provision early. That goes all the way back to your democratization question. And one of the reasons why I think that's an important thing to make sure that there's very broad access to.

• 47:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, can, let's underscore this point because I, I think some of the reason why the gloomers sort of are winning right now in the narrative war is because like, of course, fear is a bit more viral and it's easier to imagine. It's much easier to imagine an Orwellian future in the 1960s or the 2020s than it is to imagine a more optimistic future. And as soon as you start talking about this optimistic future, it sounds like too utopian. It just doesn't even sound real, right? But we are limited in terms of our imagination. But that, that question, that prompt that, that you just raised is like a, a chapter in your book, is the question of what could go right? And the gloomers rarely ask what could go right. And I think maybe it's, to be fair to them, they have some limitations on their imagination.

• 48:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  So I want to ask you as a kind of a techno visionary, like, How would you answer that question? So if if human beings, if every citizen in the United States had an AI agent that amplified what they what they do, and we have this across society, this technology was widely deployed, what could go right? Like, what are the benefits for the average American here?

• 48:53Speaker 00

  So line of sight, namely, no technological innovation. It's just a question of how we get it built and deployed. A medical assistant that's better than your average doctor, that's available 24 by 7 in every pocket. So you have a health concern, it's 11:00 PM, you have a health concern for your kid, your parent, your grandparent, your, you know, pet, anything, that's in your, you know, you can begin to address it. And it can help you, including going, oh, for that, you should go to the emergency room right now. Right? And so that's buildable. A tutor on every subject for every age, anything from two-year-old to 82-year-old. Like, hey, you've got, you would like to learn this, you'd like to to understand more, you'd like to, and by the way, there's obviously economic implications to that.

• 49:38Speaker 00

  That's, I think, another thing that's that's available. Then, for, you know, the, to your democratization point, there's a lot of services, not just medical and access to doctors, you know, some people have concierge doctors, most people have to go through, you know, kind of their medical plan, and some people don't even have medical insurance. Even in, even in the US, there's a bunch of people who are uninsured. You know, what what other kinds of things could be? It's like, well, actually, in fact, like, I'm, I'm, I'm reading the lease for my rental. Like, how do I understand that? What what's important to know about it? Well, the agent can help you with that, too. And that's all line of sight today. That's not even getting to, hey, how can it help you, like, code better?

• 50:21Speaker 00

  How could it help you, you know, create marketing plans better? How could it help you sell better? How could it help you? Like, all of that stuff is also coming, but like, those three basics for everybody is, you know, life transforming.

• 50:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  What about the societal level? So when those things for individuals kind of aggregate and compound, we have better healthcare, we have better kind of like learning capabilities, we have better things in all areas of our life. Like, what does that amount to from the United States from a societal perspective? Do we have like more free time as a society? Does our happiness increase? Does our GDP like double or triple? Do we get those things as well?

• 51:00Speaker 00

  Well, I definitely think the equivalent of what GDP is supposed to be measuring should be increased. Now GDP has this challenge that it's measured in kind of an industrial dollar for things way. So like, for example, all the benefits you get from Wikipedia are actually deflationary in GDP. And so, but the quality of that. I do think that, you know, another thing that people worry about with AIs is, oh, I'm not going to spend time talking to people, I'm going to spend all my time talking to agents. And so loneliness will be increased or this is decreased. I think that to some degree, that's a design, you know, kind of choice. And I think what we want to both see, and I hope we'll get, and we want to nudge towards

• 51:43Speaker 00

  is, you know, like when you ask, you know, inflections pie, hey, you're my best friend. It says, no, no, I'm not your friend, I'm your AI companion. Let's talk about your friends. Have you seen them recently? How would you like to talk to them? You know, maybe you could set up a lunch date, you know, that kind of thing. And I think that could lead to a much greater happiness for this. And I do think that actually, you know, part of what I love about, you know, the Bhutan, you know, evangelical concept is I actually think measuring, you know, kind of gross national happiness is also a good thing that we should be, you know, aspiring to as a society. And I think that could be, you know, increased with this.

• 52:20Speaker 00

  But I think that the place where we'll see it is in being much more like kind of fulfilling lives. And the fulfilling life might be, you know, kind of like, hey, I get more time to do my hobby. You know, I love fishing, I'm going to have more time to fishing because I can do my work in a shorter amount of time. Or for people who, because, you know, American society tends to like to work, is like, oh, I can, I can accomplish a lot more in my work. I may be still working the same amount, but as opposed to putting a whole bunch of time into form entry, I can now do the parts that are not just like form entry and do the other parts of the work in, in much more kind of fulfilling and capable and productive ways.

• 53:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, one way I think about it is like 100 years from now, will it like, will the average person in the United States or wherever this technology is like have a better quality of life? I think of, you know, the 2020s and I compare that to the 1920s. And I would like hands down, you like prefer to live in the 2020s for all of its problems than in 1920s. But before the advent of antibiotics, like, you know, look at kind of mortality rates from that time, look at kind of the amount of society that had to basically like do a grueling agrarian type farm job in order to just to get by, right? And it's like much better for most people now than it was previously. And there's lots of stats we could get into

• 53:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  on that. But let's just pause and go back to kind of the another gloomer objection. So they would say, read, everything you're saying, you're saying sounds so amazing. But like, yeah, we've heard it before. This is another bait and switch from Silicon Valley. Okay. They promised, remember the 2020s, the advent of Facebook, not to mention LinkedIn. They promised that we would connect the world. And what ended up happening, Silicon Valley got rich, they extracted our attention. There's, you know, the term extraction is, you know, used a lot about this. They sold us products. They sold us as products that are like the highest bidder. And now I'm thinking about even the time I spent with ChatGPT. And it feels really good right now. Like, it's amazing. I spend more time with

• 54:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  ChatGPT than I do with like Google. And, you know, as a result, I think ChatGPT knows me even better than Google. I mean, a lot about me could be revealed by my search history. But like even more so with ChatGPT. And I'm getting to the point of daily use where it's like, who knows me better than ChatGPT? Like, maybe my wife, maybe a handful of other individuals. But like, it knows me. And that all feels good because it's amplifying what I do. Okay. But what happens if things go dark? If we get this kind of like bait and switch? If suddenly OpenAI or whatever, insert your Silicon Valley like corporation here, starts saying, oh, you know, all this AI stuff is pretty expensive. We're gonna have to start

• 55:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  harnessing all this data we know about Ryan to like do something and sell it to the highest bidder.

• 55:15David Hoffman?

  Cambridge Analytica 2.0.

• 55:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, or I lose, or maybe they sell it out to the government or something, or they control me in all of these subtle ways by recommending things that aren't in my best interest. It's in their best interest, or some government's best interest, okay? This is the crux of the bait and switch. And so, address that head on, Reid. Like, how do we know this isn't a Silicon Valley bait and switch? Because it feels like that's happened previously with social media.

• 55:43Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, it a little bit depends on what you mean by bait and switch. Because I think, for example, let's take your example with Google and AdWords. Yes, Google gets a bunch of data from you and can advertise to you, you know, better. And, you know, by the way, hopefully that means that the products that you're seeing, you know, are actually things that might interest you, which I actually think is a feature, not a bug,

• 56:06Speaker 00

  in terms of things you might want to buy, and actually has, so far, the best business model that's been invented, certainly in the media world, maybe in any, you know, part of the world today. And they say, well, what do you get for your data? Well, you get a panoply of amazing free services. You know, free search, you know, free email, a bunch of other things. And so, it's not a, it's not a, you know, kind of, it's a voluntary, you know, something you participate in, you know, because you get a bunch of value, you know, kind of transaction. And by the way, you'd probably rather be having it figure out how to monetize off your data than saying, oh, in order to get our ARPU, you got to pay us, you know, 50 bucks a month, right?

• 56:51Speaker 00

  For this, like, no, no, I'd rather, I'd rather, you know, get the advertising right and give me all this stuff for free. And so, it's possible that, you know, the kind of AI agents will end up in a similar kind of thing, where they say, well, hey, look, we could charge you 50 bucks a month, like Google could for our search. But actually, in fact, figuring out a way that is kind of, you know, transparent and voluntary and engages with you, because it shouldn't be deceptive. It should be with your, with kind of your awareness in engaging and using it, that this becomes a positive, you know, kind of economic transaction for you. And so, but it could be other things, too. It could be, you know, kind of, it could be a subscription model.

• 57:33Speaker 00

  It could be integrated into the various productivity apps that you're using. It could be any number of things for that. But I don't think that the, I think that the dialogue That's kind of, you know, kind of very well capital captured in this compelling slogan, surveillance capitalism is misleading because it's like, well, but like I for one like surveillance medicine. I like, you know, the fact that my, you know, watch is tracking my sleep and health things for me and it helps me and it's part of that positive thing. And a lot of the uses of these data in these internet systems are as a way of making it free for you, where they

• 58:12Speaker 00

  have the economics for expanding and improving the free product. And so, you know, I think that the, I think I would challenge the bait and switch kind of methodology. And, you know, the last thing I guess I would tell you is like, for example, you say, well, whether it's a social network, you know, and I obviously think LinkedIn has handled this, you know, the best of, you know, all of them, whether it's Google, whether it's these things, these are all voluntary participation questions. You might say, well, it's very hard for me to participate in modern society without being informed in the way that I could be informed this way. And it's like, okay, you know, like, yes, I myself use search a lot,

• 58:56Speaker 00

  but I think I can do it in a, in a way that is, you know, you know, maybe, maybe you should say, hey, Google should offer a paid alternative. On the other hand, you know, for that to be economically viable, at least two or three percent of the audience would have to opt for it. Right. And I'm not even sure two or three percent of the people would opt for it. Right. I mean, you'll get individuals that I would do it, but like, that might not be, you know, economically relevant unless at least two or three percent of the people were doing it. So anyway, so I think it's a challenge to the challenge, as it were.

• 59:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think the bloomer take on this was sort of interesting, right? Which is like acknowledging that there are some potholes and there's some costs, right? Maybe to society and to individuals, but also saying that the benefit far exceeds the cost. One way you underscored this was like, you said this, I wanted to get you to justify this because it kind of blew my mind and like when I was reading it. Even if LLMs get no better, that is no better than today, the consumer surplus to the average 20 year old living today is millions of dollars over their lifetime.

• 1:00:03Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:00:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so what you're effectively saying is for an actual zoomer, so somebody in Gen Z, do you know, uh, somebody in that age demographic, they're going to be able to harness LLMs and it's going to deliver millions of dollars in value to them. And that's not even talking about the LLMs and AI of the future, I was talking about the AI of today. How? Some people think about that and they're like, how does that deliver someone millions of dollars in their lifetime?

• 1:00:30Speaker 00

  Well, let's just start with something that's really simple, which is, you know, legal assistance. So you're going to encounter all, you're going to encounter employment contracts, you're going to rental contracts, you're going to have, you know, products and services you might be in, you know, kind of, you know, kind of engaging in. And today, your average person just basically can't afford to pay a lawyer, right? Because a lawyer is hundreds of dollars an hour. Well, now, even today, with GBD4 today, you can put it in there and get useful analysis, useful kind of participation. So if you just took, take every single contract that you're potentially engaging in and use

• 1:01:09Speaker 00

  that now, that gets you a lot of dollars towards your millions of dollars. Then you say, well, what about like medical stuff, right? Like consulting medical or other kinds of things, or especially if I like, you know, in the periods where since, you know, in this country, we tend to do, you know, insurance. In kind of challenging ways, mostly through employers. You know, like, okay, so getting medical advice. Well, that's another area where you can get a bunch. Then you say, okay, well, how about amplifying my ability to find and do economic work? That's another place. And so when you add all that up and you add it up for hopefully what is even the longer

• 1:01:51Speaker 00

  life, because if you're getting, you know, kind of call it pre-critical medical advice about how to to preventively stay healthy and preventively avoid certain kinds of, you know, catastrophic health conditions or navigate like early signs in ways that you can you can do it before you're in critical condition. Not only is that hugely economic, but that should also lead to longer lifespans. And so all of that is part of how, you know, we get to, hey, it's going to be today, it's already worth millions to you.

• 1:02:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Reed, this, I'm just doing a quick narrative pause and a time check. So do we have five more minutes or do we have 10 more minutes?

• 1:02:30Speaker 00

  10 is fine.

• 1:02:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, amazing. So we have an opportunity, I think, to talk about one more of these objections and I want to talk about AI America and then and I think we're good. Okay.

• 1:02:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Reed, this gets us to kind of regulations and I think the the gloomer camp has one take on how we regulate AI and like the the EAX and the bloomers and the zoomers have a have a different case take on this. But generally, what I'm seeing coming from the establishment government is like brakes. It's no gasoline on this thing. It's all brakes. They have this precautionary principle, which is like they think about what could go wrong and how to prevent all of the things that that could go wrong. You make a different argument. I think that your argument is that innovation is actual safety. So you're making the argument, and I want to hear how this makes sense, but you're

• 1:03:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  making the argument, I think, that actually hitting the accelerator on AI is how we make this thing safe. And that feels very counterintuitive. What's that claim based on? Why do you think innovation is safety?

• 1:03:38Speaker 00

  So part of the thing, like, for example, When you get to like, how are modern cars able to go these speeds and able to go them much safer than earlier cars were doing them? Is that as you iterate and deploy them, you realize it's like, oh, actually, in fact, we could put in anti-lock brakes. Oh, we can put in seatbelts. Oh, we can have crumple zones. Oh, we can have bumpers. And that's an innovative path to making the car safer. And the car can then go faster and navigate circumstances because you've innovated safety into the car as part of the innovation with the car. And the parallel with that is essentially doing, you know, kind of like, well, what

• 1:04:23Speaker 00

  are the future features of AI? And what are the things that we could be doing that make them much safer from these kind of aligned circumstances? So you're like, okay, so can we make the AI really enable, you know, people who are who are trying to figure out stuff with like their health and other kinds of things, but also make, you know, any efforts at terrorism, you know, kind of much more difficult and much harder. And by the way, this is of course what, you know, red teams and safety and alignment groups are already doing at Microsoft and OpenAI and Tropic and others, you know, for doing this because they're aware of these kinds of safety things.

• 1:05:05Speaker 00

  But it's that innovation into the future that is the kind of really important thing. And the way you discover that is by iterative deployment, by actually like, like making it live and then seeing what things needed to be modified. Now, obviously, on really extreme things like, well, okay, terrorists who are creating weapons of mass destruction, we want to make sure that that's as little possible in any field as is as absolutely the case. And, you know, for example, safety groups more or less use as their minimum benchmark, let's make sure that they, these agents are not any more capable of doing that than Google searches today, right?

• 1:05:48Speaker 00

  And obviously, we want to drive both of them to the lowest. But that's what, you know, kind of innovation to safety means. And the kind of historical and easy to understand car example. And what it means in terms of technological features for building future software.

• 1:06:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  Last objection here that I think comes up is that this idea that AI kind of kills human autonomy. Like, this is a control technology. It's not a freedom technology, basically. So like, and in this AI world that we're all moving towards, I mean, where is my agency? I mean, you titled the book, read, you know, super agency, right? It's like, but I feel less, like I have less agency if the AI is making all of the decisions for me. I want you to address that, too, because it kind of ties into this concept of freedom. And I sort of wonder how much of this is also like boiling the frog, like, we just kind of get used to it, and maybe that's OK, but maybe it's not. So if you went back to the 1960s and pulled those same people and you told them, hey, in 2020s,

• 1:06:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  most adults, they would actually meet their future spouse or mate or partner by computer algorithm. It's basically computers decide. That's actually the lived experience of how most people meet and get married today is like they meet via social network of some sort. They meet on like, you know, Tinder or whatever dating site, you know, like, you know, whatever dating site they subscribe to. It's kind of the algorithms that are that are almost matching them. That sounds dystopic in the 1960s. Now, it's like, oh, I've kind of gotten used to it. I've met many couples in healthy relationships and they sort of met online by route of computer. Anyway, back to this, this argument that AI agents making the decisions and outsourcing that part of our intelligence will actually restrict our freedoms?

• 1:07:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  What do you make of this? Or do you think that there's some merit to this argument?

• 1:07:35Speaker 00

  So I think one of the things that I said at the very beginning is agency changes. It isn't just new superpowers, but it also, as you get to super agency, it kind of, it changes some things around. And so, for example, we have different, you know, kind of, think of it as kind of different, kind of tactile perceptions of what it means to be kind of human and human gauge in life. Like, when you first make a technology, it feels kind of alien and then, then, you know, you know, fire and agriculture and, you know, glasses and computers and phones, like, you know, starts feeling like, you know, kind of everyday life, like our grandparents use phones now, too, even though at the beginning of the kind of smartphone era, it was like, oh, this is one of those new fangled things.

• 1:08:19Speaker 00

  I'd rather just, you know, you know, go get on the hard line and, you know, and call my, you know, grandchild or whatever. And so I think that the, the, the kind of the, it does make changes. And part of the iterative deployment and learning about it is, is how do you make those changes such that when we get to the future state, we go, oh yeah, this one's better. And you say, well, is our current state just, just adapting? And actually the fact the previous state judgment was correct? Well, if you kind of look at it, like take your 1920s and 2020s, like, you know, do you actually understand what the world past, you know, kind of penicillin and antibiotics and all the rest of this stuff really fully looks like and what the consequences all

• 1:09:04Speaker 00

  that is and why the portfolio of it is so much better? And so you actually have to take that, that, that state that you learn into. It's kind of like, think about it as, you know, kind of the judgments that you make as a child, the judgments you make as an adult, you go, well, look, there's, there's a certain, you know, kind of innocence to, to the children thing, but like we get wiser as we learn and we get experience and we use that for the viewpoint of, of, of kind of making good judgments. And that's part of the reason why I think, yes, you say, hey, you're me, you're, you're, you're, you're, you're make, you're, you're meeting your life partner now on a internet service. Like, whoa, that seems really alienating.

• 1:09:47Speaker 00

  But actually, in fact, it's the, okay, how do we make that a lot better than the lottery of college or the workplace? Which was very limited. Your hometown. Yeah. And what you had before. And so I think that's the, and again, it's, it's an iterative process. It doesn't mean that there aren't still some things that are broken in the internet, you know, kind of dating things, but it's one of the things that we say, we know how to continually improve it. And that's one of the things that we continue to work on.

• 1:10:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  Reid, as we begin to close this out, I want to ask a question about the United States and America. And, you know, different, based on your different religious preferences for AI, you might decide to kind of regulate this thing in one direction or another. And the question becomes, okay, how do we implement this technology across America, across society? There are some that get to this stage of the conversation and they're like, well, the doomer take and even the gloomer take is not sustainable because we live in a multipolar world with many different actors and this is kind of an AI race. And so if not us, then our adversary doubles their GDP and we kind of stay stagnant and that leads to a world that maybe we don't like. So I want to ask you this question. What do you think America should do here?

• 1:11:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Like, what should our approach for AI be?

• 1:11:05Speaker 00

  Well, one of the things that I started doing is calling artificial intelligence, American intelligence, for precisely this reason, which is it's really important that we embrace this cognitive industrial revolution because the societies that embraced the industrial revolution had prosperity for their communities, their children, their grandchildren, and kind of made, you know, kind of the modern world. And I think the same thing is true for the cognitive industrial revolution with artificial intelligence, or amplification intelligence, or American intelligence. And we want the kind of the spree decor of American values, the American dream, the

• 1:11:46Speaker 00

  empowerment of individuals, the ability to, you know, kind of do your best work and to, you know, kind of make progress from wherever you start in the rungs of society to take more economic control over your destiny. And I think it's one of the reasons why it's particularly important that American values are deeply embedded in this and that it's an empowerment of American society. And it's part of the reason why I think that our regulatory stance needs to be much more, you know, bloomer, zoomer, and accelerationist than it does, you know, putting on the brakes because I think that's part of the future of the world as we can help make it become.

• 1:12:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  As we close this out, then, just a final question. Is there any chance in your mind that all this AI stuff is kind of overhyped? We basically, like, we flatline here that we have ChatGPT-4 and the innovation really slows to a crawl, that, like, none of this matters that much because it'll happen very slowly over time?

• 1:12:53Speaker 00

  I think there's zero chance of that. So I think that already we see enough in these scale compute and learning systems that are just only beginning to get deployed. Like, part of what 2025 is going to be the year there. We see the acceleration of what happens in software coding across the board, and that software coding is both going to enable a bunch of other things, like, all of us as professionals are going to have a coding co-pilot that helps us do our work in various ways. But it's also, it's a template for how you advance a bunch of other functions of all of this work. So I think even if you say, hey, GPT-5 is only going to be like, you know, 10% better

• 1:13:38Speaker 00

  or 20% better, I think it'll be a lot better than GPT-4, and that the progress of that, of the increased cognitive capabilities slows down, I think the implications throughout the cognitive industrial revolution, the technology is already visibly present. It's just a question of how we build it, configure it, deploy it, integrate it. And I think that's, that's part of the reason why, you know, American intelligence.

• 1:14:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  There you go, guys, from Reid Hoffman, 0% chance that all of this stuff slows down, so into the frontier we go. And we're going with you, Bankless Nation. Reid Hoffman, thank you so much for joining us here today. It's been a pleasure.

• 1:14:22Speaker 00

  My pleasure as well. I look forward to the next.

• 1:14:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, we'll have to talk about crypto in the next conversation. So everyone listening, the book is called Super Agency. It is out now. We'll include a link in the show notes. A fantastic book with Reed's entire thesis around this distilled. Got to let you know, of course, crypto is risky. So is AI. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.