What AI Can Never Understand: Futurist Jonathan Brill Explains

With all the AI hype, is there still a place for humans in organizations? Today on Digital Disruption, we’re joined by Jonathan Brill, the world’s top-ranked futurist by Forbes, advisor to Amazon, HP, Samsung, and an author. Jonathan helps executives and audiences spot, prioritize, and act on the forces shaping the next five years — from AI to geopolitical disruption. As the former Global Futurist at HP and a board member of one of the world’s largest private intelligence agencies, he brings unique insights from decades of work in innovation, strategy, and emerging tech. His invention firms have developed over 325 products, generating more than $27 billion in revenue for clients like HP, Samsung, and Verizon. Jonathan is the author of Rogue Waves, praised by The Economist and Adam Grant, offering a practical framework for thriving through disruption. He shares his insights globally on stages like TED, at institutions like Harvard and CERN, and with media outlets including ABC, CNBC, and HBR. Jonathan sits down with Geoff Nielson to explore what leaders need to do to survive and thrive through the next decade of accelerating technological disruption. They discuss why the traditional organizational model introduced in the railroad era is no longer equipped to handle the complexity of AI-powered transformation. Jonathan speaks on the concept of the "octopus organization," where intelligence, decision-making, and adaptability are distributed rather than centralized. He breaks down AI’s biggest shift not just in task automation, but in decision-making and organizational design and emphasizes the importance of psychological safety in successful AI adoption. In this episode 0:00 Intro 1:14 Enterprise AI 2:47 Code and complexity 6:07 From Railroad Model to Octopus Organization 9:35 AI isn’t just automating work 12:03 Why CIOs must lead cultural change 18:28 Human intuition is still important 20:16 Four leadership traits for the AI era 25:32 Executional vs. strategic thinking in IT 29:39 The real value of coding in the future 35:16 AI’s superpowers 38:57 Human vs. machine 41:21 Specialists vs. generalists in an AI world 47:02 Optimism despite disruption 49:48 Governments will shape the pace of change 53:04 What’s the hype and what’s real? 58:19 Tech adoption is inevitable Connect with Jonathan: Website: https://www.jonathanbrill.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanbrill1/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@brill_jonathan Visit our website: https://www.infotech.com/Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@InfoTechRG

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

• 0:00Geoff Nielson?

  Hey everyone, I'm so excited today to be sitting down with business futurist Jonathan Brill. Forbes has named him the number one futurist in the world, and he's been a futurist for organizations like HP, he's been a board advisor for Frost and Sullivan, and a strategic advisor from everyone from Amazon to IBM, to Samsung, to Pepsi. I want to ask him what organizations need to do to rewire themselves to be more resilient in the face of the coming wave of disruptions, whether it's AI, or even disruptions that we can't predict. It should be a great conversation. Let's jump right into it.

• 0:36Geoff Nielson?

  Jonathan, I, thanks so much for being here. I wanted to jump right into it, and you know, I'm really interested in getting your perspective and just, you know, what you see as being, you know, the current state of, you know, technology, especially in an enterprise sense in 2025. And I guess, like, maybe I'll preface that by saying, one of the things I'm seeing from my perspective and just hearing is that the world we're seeing right now in 2025 in this space is just fundamentally different than we were seeing even in 2023, 2022. And I wanted to get your perspective on that. Do you agree? And what do you see as kind of being the, the big differences?

• 1:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think obviously AI is the, the big talk of the town. I think that, that the real enterprise plays are probably another 18 months out. But that's, that's obviously the big thing. We can talk about what's going to happen, why, what the limits are that cause us to know that. The, the other issues, you know, are that CIOs, CTOs are being asked to move beyond the technology stack to start thinking about how it impacts things like governance, how it impacts things like go to market. And so, technology isn't just about technology anymore. It's about the entire organization, how we structure our firms.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  The third thing that's, I think, going on, and it hasn't quite happened yet for most firms, but we're starting to see AI enable people who don't know how to code, do conversational coding, right? Talk to an interface that writes code for us. It doesn't really work yet, right? But what we're going to see over the next 12, 18 months is that It does. And so much like the early 2000s when we went from, you know, having people with master's degrees writing HTML to all of a sudden, you know, blogger and now Squarespace and WordPress. That those things that used to require technical support suddenly don't.

• 2:43Speaker 01

  That doesn't mean technical support goes away or that it's decreasing. It means that the amount of code that runs our organizations is about to go up geometrically. And that's really exciting to me. So we have complexity. With that complexity, we have security issues that are going to go up geometrically too. We have the, the more strategic nature of IT in organizations. And then we have AI really shifting the game and, and starting to see IT for the first time, maybe in 10 years, 15 years, really start to become central and strategic to the growth trajectory of organizations.

• 3:21Geoff Nielson?

  So, so tell me a little bit more, Jonathan, about that, that 12 to 18 month time horizon. Because if I, if I understand the implication of some of the other trends you're seeing, is it that that's how long it's going to take for these organizations to kind of rewire themselves to get to value here, that, that take into account some of these, you know, low code, no code trends or, you know, expanded role of IT. Is that the case? And, and what is going to separate the winners from the losers here?

• 3:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  So historically, it takes about five years from something to get from research white paper to, you know, software business. Right? So we saw the first round of this 2017. We saw the transformer model in a white paper 2022, 2023, we start seeing that start to build out. Right? Lots of people are talking about AI and they've put in stuff in chatbots in their organization. But looking at, you know, Salesforce, right? Looking at SAP, looking at Oracle. You know, they're starting to put out product. It's still early stage. Right? And it'll take that about 18 more months. And if you're an enterprise buyer, you never want to buy the first version of anything.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  Right? So that's why I'm saying, okay, well, you know, we started building this thing out. There's a strategic priority in putting it in our organizations. These companies are now playing, the, the large players are now playing catch up. And then, you know, in about 18 months, there will be enough maturity there for, for us to start putting this in our organizations and in a deep way. You were talking about change, right? So here's the reality, you know, what's going to happen? And I talked to senior leaders, I talked to operational leaders, I talked to executional leaders. And everybody thinks the other ones are going to be impacted.

• 5:15Geoff Nielson?

  Huh, interesting.

• 5:18Speaker 01

  So the answer is probably all of the above. But what we look at when there, there's a recent meta-analysis by the National Academy of Sciences led by Eric Brynjolfsson. And it said, you know, about 14% of the tasks in professional services will be automated by, by existing AI tools. I think that's about right. You know, what I'm hearing, you know, when I talk to people who are selling this stuff is, hey, we're getting 50 to 70% efficiency bumps for our software developers. And then I talk to my manufacturing clients and they're like, yeah, we're getting 15 or 20% efficiency bumps. Well, that's like, that's nothing.

• 5:55Geoff Nielson?

  That's not nothing.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. I, I, that's, that's investable. But we're, we're seeing

• 6:07Speaker 01

  changes at the scale that will shift the nature of firms into what I'm starting to call an octopus organization. And when you think about the way that organizations are structured today, we built them, the, the current architecture in the 1850s and 60s, based on the railroad. And there were several problems with railroads. One is you needed to get, you know, some box from this place to that place across a couple of different rail lines. And all of this stuff needed to be synchronized. And the tools that you had to do, to, to do that were a pocket watch and a telegraph that went one direction.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  Right, so you didn't have telephones.

• 6:48Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  You didn't have bidirectional, right? And when you take a look at Thomas Edison, right? His big breakthrough was the bidirectional telegraph. The reason that he invented that was he was involved early on in his career, working in a telegraph station. And because someone's pocket watch was off by four minutes, two trains, I believe, collided. There was a train accident of some sort. And so I said, okay, this, I see an opportunity. And, and the, the kind of multiplexing is, uh, was, was a result, was invented as a result of that. So my point being, we, in, we, we had that going on.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  And we also had, you know, high levels of, of illiteracy, you know, and, and like almost no one going to college and no one having good decision-making skills. Right, so that's why we built the organization like it is today. You had to have a, a leader who didn't know what was going on on the ground. Right, and people on the grounds who weren't capable of making good decisions and had no context for what was going on up here. When we think about what's going on today, right?

• 8:01Speaker 01

  Large language models are sucking up all of the information in the world. You know, I, you know, all of us have Otter or a transcription tool, hopefully, in, in our businesses. As a result, you know, we can build models and we can build agents that are looking at all of the new information every day and giving it to exactly the right people across a 50,000-person organization. So that context problem goes away. The second thing, and I think that we're, we're getting where chatbots are going to be useful all wrong, which is, we think we're asking these things to answer questions for us.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  And they're pretty good at it. And the new stuff like, you know, you look at O1 Pro and you look at the, the new version of Gemini 2.5 that came out like 48 hours ago or something, you know, and, and they're, they're pretty good, you know, compared to two years ago.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  But what they're all really good at and better than most humans at is empathy, creativity, right? And frameworks. They have every business framework that has ever been developed. They have access to every code library and every, every code pattern that's ever been developed, right? And so

• 9:22Speaker 01

  they're going to be better, not necessarily, I believe eventually, at making decisions than humans. But they're going to already be better at helping us make better decisions, at coaching us. And so we're using these things, I think, for the wrong paradigm right now. They can dramatically improve our executive judgment instead of us trying to offload our executive judgment.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  That's massive, right? Because we have this situation where all of a sudden, every person in your organization, every intern in your organization has context of a CEO or better today.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  And executive judgment of a senior leader today that radically shifts the nature of an effective and innovative and agile firm. Because information, knowledge, decisions, governance doesn't have to come from the bot, from the top down, can start to come from the bottom up. And that transformation is profound. And it looks much less like the railroad and it looks more like the neurology of an octopus. Where instead of having one big brain, it actually has nine. It has a big brain that deals with executive function. And then for each tentacle, it has a smaller neural cluster

• 10:43Speaker 01

  that looks at, that, that looks at that tentacle directs it, gets all that information. And then a neural necklace that communicates with all of those smaller clusters to figure out what's going on, to come up with an idea, to take action faster than the big brain can even comprehend what's going on. And so I think we're moving into this world of what I'm calling the octopus organization. It's a radically different place. And the reason this is important for IT professionals and for CIOs in particular, is all of a sudden, we're being asked not just how to rack and stack servers and how to implement some SAP instance, but why?

• 11:24Speaker 01

  Why are we doing this? How does this impact our human resources? So on and so forth. And as the leaders of code capability and organizations, we are going to get flattened first and we are going to build the culture first. We are going to make the change first. And culture change, independent of what people might say, you know, it takes five to seven years, an entire shift of a leadership team. And so if you are a year or two early in that shift,

• 11:55Speaker 01

  your potential to be a leader goes through the roof.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  We're moving into a radically different world, like you said, than 2022 or 2023. And it's not just technology. It's that CIOs are being asked about the architecture of firms, about the processes of firms and having to lead the culture change of firms. And this isn't what we've been trained to do historically.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  But it's our opportunity to lead now.

• 12:27Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 12:29Geoff Nielson?

  Right. So lots of, lots of things I want to, that's, that's super interesting. And there's a lot of places I want to take that. I love the octopus model. And if I'm hearing you correctly,

• 12:42Geoff Nielson?

  we need to change, if I can call it this, the physiology of the organization.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:47Geoff Nielson?

  We need to.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  We need to evolve.

• 12:49Geoff Nielson?

  We need to evolve.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  Evolve the physiology.

• 12:51Geoff Nielson?

  We need to evolve the physiology. And it sounds like that, that re-architecting, that, that CIOs, that, that, you know, what we previously have called the technology organization, we're going to be at the vanguard of that. Is that, is that necessarily true? Is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing?

• 13:08Speaker 01

  I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing. It is necessarily true.

• 13:11Geoff Nielson?

  Sure.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  Because you're, you're, the, the, the demands on you are going to be far greater than, than, than the number of people you have. So you're going to have to automate first.

• 13:20Geoff Nielson?

  Right, right. And, and technology.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  And it's not a bad, like you said, it's not, it's not a bad thing. Coders are freaked out. Like every, every professional services, you know, code integration shop I talked to was freaked out. The amount of code we are going to have to produce and qualify

• 13:39Speaker 01

  is, is going to go up geometrically. I am not concerned about the future of coders. Um, I am concerned about the security implications. I'm concerned about the efficiency. I'm concerned about the amount of legacy code we're going to, to produce and making sure that, that we're able to either take it out of our organizations or, or, or figure out how to just not keep it running because the energy cost is going to be massive.

• 14:07Geoff Nielson?

  Right. One of the things you said a couple of times now is that this five to seven year time horizon to really see cultural change and see this take off. Um, I'm, I'm sure you're very aware, like one of the buzzwords we're hearing, you know, now more than ever is accelerated pace of change. Right? Like, oh, things are moving faster than ever. Can large organizations afford five to seven years here? Is there, is there an existential risk that organizations that are wired from day one with an octopus model are going to come in and, you know, eat their lunch and, you know, or, or is that an overblown risk?

• 14:46Speaker 01

  I, I think it's highly likely. The question is how quickly you can move. So in 2012, I got a call from the Yellow Pages. And the Yellow Pages wanted to build a search engine that they could put local advertising on because they had, you know,

• 15:03Geoff Nielson?

  it's what they do.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Access to, they, they had 10,000 salespeople across the country that could go and, and sell advertising to your mother's hairdresser.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  And they thought this was a really great plan. Um, the only problem was this was a really great plan in eighteen ninety six or maybe two thousand and six. Uh, but in two thousand and twelve, it was too late. And so there, there are two things going on here. One is certainly, you know, in two thousand and two, two thousand and three, uh, the Yellow Pages could have caught up. They could have maybe bought Google, right? Or at least, you know, and also ran and had the capability they could have, you know, and, and, and done something. Um, they didn't. They continued doing what made the money today. And so that's the bigger risk is that we look at what our investors are asking of us instead of remembering that what our investors really want

• 15:57Speaker 01

  is to know that our company will be worth more five years from now than today. Right? And so there's this incentive misalignment, often at the C level or the board level, um, that causes these, these challenges that, you know, if no one's being paid out ten years in advance, right? Which is what Tim Cooks, I believe, his at Apple, his, his big payout was, was after ten years after, after jobs, right? Um, well, there's a reason Apple's done what it's done. Right? It's never been concerned about this quarter. Right. And

• 16:31Speaker 01

  that's a rarity, you know? So, so I think it's a big issue for, for large firms. I think the second question is, uh, you know, what moats do you have, right? So if you are a law firm, guess what? Um, you know, three quarters of the Senate or something are lawyers. They'd really love to have law firms when they leave the law, you know, when they, when they leave Congress, right? There, there are these moats that, that companies have that will slow the pace of change. Um, there is, you know, within law, um, the, the, uh, the, the bar, uh, the American Bar Association has said that you can't, uh, you know, that the AI can't provide opinions

• 17:16Speaker 01

  for customers. They said it is an ethical issue. Independent of the fact that I, I think at this point, it might be almost as good as my lawyer, uh, uh, giving me advice. Yeah. I also want to ask my lawyer, you know, it's just like, it's just like, you know, intuitive surgical, you know, they make the surgical robots for brain surgery. Well, the reality is the robots are doing the brain surgery, the, the surgeons there just to, for, for the liability. And in case something goes bad.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  I'm totally glad to pay for that surgeon.

• 17:49Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  Right?

• 17:51Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  May not make sense, just like I'm totally glad to pay for my financial advisor for the three weeks a decade.

• 17:58Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  That he provides value.

• 17:59Geoff Nielson?

  Right. It's plus AI. It's not instead of, it's not.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. And so, and so it's, it's really where's the value and what we're going to see is the, the question moves from, what are the tasks that I do to where is the value that I provide?

• 18:16Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  Right. So the, one of the things I like to think about is, in the last election cycle, presidential election cycle, Andrew Yang was talking going on about how, truck drivers were going to go away. And what he forgot was we used to have stagecoach drivers and they did the same thing. Right? It wasn't that they spent 12 hours a day turning a steering wheel instead of a horse. It's that they protected the gear, the people, the material and back. When something went wrong.

• 18:44Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 18:45Speaker 01

  The value has nothing to do with how you spend your time.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  And so what we're going to become really clear about, in the next five years is where's that value? So as a coder, right, your value isn't encoded.

• 19:02Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  It's in understanding the unspoken challenges that your customer faces. Surfacing those and turning those into code. AI will not necessarily understand the unspoken challenges because guess what? There is by definition, no data.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  So.

• 19:27Geoff Nielson?

  Again, lots, lots to think about there. But as we think about finding that value, as we think about rethinking our business models in terms of how we get ahead versus trying to play catch up. You know, you started to answer the question of what, what do we as leaders need to be doing differently? What do organizations need to be thinking about? And as you were answering that, you know, I was thinking about the kind of adjacencies with, with Rogue Waves, you know, some of the guidance in the book you wrote on this a few years ago. Is it the same playbook? Is it a similar playbook? And, and you know, for those who haven't gone through the book, you know, what do you kind of recommend are kind of the big elements here?

• 20:09Speaker 01

  Unexpected plug.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I, I think there are a couple of things to be thinking about. You know, the first and most important thing is that for any of this technology change to work, there will have to be deep psychological safety on your team.

• 20:37Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  Right? Like what we know about transformations is people get freaked out, people don't use the tools.

• 20:43Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  Right? It's like you spend the money and you get none of the value. So how do we create a situation where we, where we make sure that people feel safe enough using the tools to create the value? So I was talking to the, the CTO of a big four consulting firm. And he said, yeah, I had to just make my people use AI. I said, you know, in your 360 reviews, you know, you're going, you know, in your annual review, you're going to tell me how you used AI in your thing where you will not have a job.

• 21:18Geoff Nielson?

  Wow.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  Right? I don't recommend that, but he wasn't able to get people using the tools.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  So there's, there's kind of that, that stick part, but then there's the carrot part. And we did, we recently worked with the Harrison assessment on a survey of 2.7 million managers to figure out why some are dramatically more effective in times of uncertainty than others. And these are going to sound relatively obvious when I say them, but they, they were dramatically better at leveraging help from their peers than their peers. They made unexpected connections. They had much broader social networks than their peers, both inside and outside of the organization. So when they needed some informal advice, when they needed a new way of thinking about something,

• 22:07Speaker 01

  when they needed to shortcut red tape, right, they were able to do it. In a world of optimization, neither of these things sound like things we want to be doing, but they're critical in the age of AI. The third piece was, is about controlling chaos. And this is really what Rogue Waves is about. It's about when the world changes, how do you turn that into leverage? And the reality is that we build these standard operating procedures in our organization to manage risk, you know, for one of two reasons. One is the people in the organization don't have the context or the executive judgment.

• 22:45Speaker 01

  Or two, we're just too lazy to manage it ourselves. And in a world of significant change, when the rule set changes, right? When the playing field changes, standard operating procedures will often kill us.

• 23:02Geoff Nielson?

  Right?

• 23:03Speaker 01

  Right?

• 23:05Geoff Nielson?

  It's bureaucracy, right? It's, it's what holds us back.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so, and so how do you get to the situation where you're teaching people to think in from a first principles perspective about their challenges, about their risk and how to resolve it, right? AI is going to be critical in helping people do that, right? It's going to be critical in helping us overcome our decision biases, overcoming our lack of knowledge of the situation, our lack of history, our lack of contextual awareness, our lack of understanding of who else is impacted by our decisions. It's going to be incredibly important. And then the last piece, you know, is about taking the time to know what's missing. Right? We spend so much time, right? Like looking at what's right in front of us and solving for that instead of taking back and saying, okay, well, what's causing this?

• 23:54Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  Right? How do I solve for that?

• 23:59Speaker 01

  Am I still creating value by doing the thing I'm doing? Because the world's changed. So when you take this time to leverage help to create those unexpected connections, to control chaos and to know what's missing, you have this really nifty consultant acronym, luck.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  But you also have a tool to rapidly teach your people how to create more in your organization. Because in a world of probability, if you can shift possibility,

• 24:34Speaker 01

  you create dramatically more luck for yourself, for your organization, in your business, in your life.

• 24:40Geoff Nielson?

  Right. And that list, that list is so interesting to me because everything on it is things that are just, they're not replaceable by AI today. And I feel like even the things we talk about AI doing five years from now, don't come close to that. And so it's interesting, it, to me, it's so interesting that that's what the study came up with. Because it, yeah, it highlights what's indispensable about us, right? And about what we add to the equation.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. That's what, if it's in the database, you don't need to know it.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  Right? In five years, if it's in the database, you don't need to know it. And this is all about dealing with stuff that's not in the database.

• 25:24Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  Dealing with stuff that's not in the system. And when you look at, you know, I get to teach once in a while at the Army War College, and they have this great model where they talk about executional, operational and strategic leaders. Right? There are three levels of leadership and the things you need to know are essentially different. And when we were talking earlier about, you know, the new role of the CIO, right? It's historically been a relatively executional or operational role. What I'm suggesting is it's suddenly a strategic role. And that is, you know, in layers below the CIO, right?

• 25:58Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Are suddenly strategic roles because we're dealing with architecture, we're dealing with process, right? We're dealing with culture. How do we put that, those new methods of governance in place to shape the firm, to shape its agility instead of just taking orders? And so that's a very exciting time, but it requires this stuff that is not, you know, kind of traditional project management, scientific management, you know, PMI type of stuff.

• 26:27Geoff Nielson?

  So I'm curious in your mind, Jonathan, when we, when we traditionally talk about like, you know, even in the realm of CIO, what's strategic and we say, oh, they're going to put together a technology strategy for the organization. We've talked about that cascading down from the high level business strategy. Is that going away? Is it just now it is the business strategy?

• 26:48Speaker 01

  Technology strategy is the business strategy.

• 26:50Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And certainly in five years.

• 26:54Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  You know, like the, the, the snarky thing people like to say is, you know, every, every, every leader is now a technology leader and every company is now a technology company. I don't know if that's true today.

• 27:07Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  Right? But I take a look at, you know, we were talking about law firms, law firms in five years, right? Like the, I have a real strong question about is Westlaw, which, you know, owns the databases and the software side of things, uh, the law firm in the law firm is simply a sales mechanism for, for Westlaw? Or, or what's the value add there? Cause it's not the paralegals.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  It's the relationship.

• 27:34Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  And it's that ability to deal with the things that aren't in the database.

• 27:39Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah. And it, it's really interesting to me that you brought up, um, you know, the, the, the snarky one line about like every, the, every company is a technology company. Because as we're talking, like to me, it's almost become the inverse. It's every technologist is now a business person.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  That absolutely.

• 27:57Geoff Nielson?

  Right? Like, like, because when you talk about those, those, you know, big four traits, my, one of the places my mind went, and we talked about it is like, what's the inverse? What are now the commoditized skills? And are those the technology skills? Like is the, what's traditionally the technical skills being commoditized? And what does that mean for what's today or yesterday are, you know, technical organization?

• 28:22Speaker 01

  I think that's absolutely true. You know, the thing that, you know, and I think it was a mistake for Jensen Huang at Nvidia to say that the coatings are relevant. And the same way it was a mistake for, for, you know, Jeff Hinton, the kind of the creator of the transformer model and deep learning or really deep learning. To say that radiologists were irrelevant because, you know, machine learning is going to solve this.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  Over, I think, you know, your average medical doctor does, I think, radiologist does over 40 tasks. One of them is looking at

• 29:07Speaker 01

  at radiology images.

• 29:08Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 29:09Speaker 01

  The reality, I think, of learning to code is it's learning how to make really good lists. Really, really, really precise directions that get you from one place to another. That skill is going to become incredibly valuable moving forward. Because we're going to have to direct, you know, a thousand agents, a thousand chatbots, a thousand AIs to do something. And that ability to make a really good task list.

• 29:46Speaker 01

  That's the future.

• 29:47Geoff Nielson?

  So when you say task list, I just want to make sure I understand correctly. This is like sort of like operational parameters or guidelines, like what's the objective and what are the things you need to do to get there? Or do you see it differently?

• 29:58Speaker 01

  Sure. Well, I think, I think it's being clear about the right level of

• 30:06Speaker 01

  you're digging a little deeper than, than I've, I've, I've thought about it. It's a great way to think about it. So in, in the military, they have a thing called an op-ord. And it's, you know, it's, it's basically says, hey, here's what we understand about the situation. Here's what we think might not be true. Here's what we think might change. Here's the outcome that we want you to deliver on. Here are the limits that we are giving you that you can fire upon, if fired upon or whatever. Here's what to do if things go wrong, right? And here's what to do if they don't come back. Right? Like that list is incredibly powerful because you give people all of the information to be successful without telling them what to do.

• 30:45Geoff Nielson?

  Right. Got it.

• 30:47Speaker 01

  Right?

• 30:47Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  And so that's one level of abstraction, but the next level down is, okay, well, we want to put the processes in place. Why be that operational leader, right? That's the strategically, we want to be that operational leader. Okay, how am I going to execute this? Right? And what types of software, what types of AI do I need to execute this? What, what amount of data center access, what network bandwidth, what, you know, whatever do I need to execute this? And then, you know, getting down to the next level, right? About the executional leadership, I think that's increasingly going to go away. Outside of the, you know, like the, the stuff about like, how do we get access to the, to the software? How do we get access to the material? How do we get access to the data? Or how do we get access to the energy?

• 31:32Speaker 01

  How do we get access to the data? How do we get access to the electricity? That's still a human problem and it will be as we understand that those are increasingly valuable things.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  But you're gonna still need all of those skills, but I think that ability to say, okay, well, what is this person really asking for?

• 31:51Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 31:53Speaker 01

  And then figuring out how to make a really impossible to go wrong list of how parameters, as you were saying, how to deliver on this?

• 32:10Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Hey, that's, that's still a rare skill, man.

• 32:14Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  And it's, it's the thing we teach you as developers.

• 32:18Geoff Nielson?

  Well, and that's exactly it, right? Like in, you know, having done a bit of development and worked with developers. I mean, my perspective is that's been the value of developers from the dawn of time, right? Like if I think about your, your trucker analogy, if you think that a coder's job is to hands on keyboard, write lines of code. Like, yeah, you're going to think it's completely disrupted. If you think their job is to structure a problem and understand a scenario. Right? That's, that's not necessarily going anywhere.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  Well, and, and, and I think that this problem structuring.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  May start to go away.

• 32:59Geoff Nielson?

  Okay.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  But the elicitation and the looking at information that's not being given.

• 33:07Geoff Nielson?

  Hmm.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  I think that.

• 33:09Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  That

• 33:13Speaker 01

  will continue. You know, I think about the, the, you know, the, the, the big game that the AI kiddies are playing right now is, you know, competitive programming. It's really good at competitive programming. It's like, well, yeah, but there was a really clear objective.

• 33:28Geoff Nielson?

  Right, right.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  So that we could judge whether you did it or not.

• 33:36Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah. What happens when there is no objective or the objective is unknown?

• 33:39Speaker 01

  What happens when there is no, yeah, what happens when there is no objective? And so I think there are two things here that we need to kind of keep in mind. One, you know, we've gone from, you know, a year or two ago, you know, chat GPT three or three point five was, you know, in the sixtieth percentile of programmers at, at competitive programming. And then oh, one pro, I think if you give it a million dollars of, of, of, of tokens, you know, is at, you know, in the top point two percent, right? We can argue the economics of that, right? But let's ignore that for a second.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  What we have seen is that the software has gotten

• 34:20Speaker 01

  effectively better than most humans at this task. And the question is, did it in fact get dramatically better or just better than humans? You know, it's, it's, it's one of the things I think about a lot is there are, there are cognitive limitations, right? So if I ask you to remember three numbers, you know, two hundred, one hundred and twenty-three, six hundred and twenty-four. You can maybe do that. Now, one hundred, two hundred and forty-three, six hundred and twenty-four, seven hundred and thirty-seven, two hundred sixty-three thousand.

• 34:56Speaker 01

  You probably lost the first one or two numbers. The reality is we can remember three, maybe four numbers at a time. You know, that, that we remember seven digits is actually not true. Whole bunch of psychology, psychological testing around that. We remember three to four and we can block that into chunks of, you know, a couple of chunks. And that's how we do it. My point being that there are cognitive mechanics, right? Just neurological mechanics that limit how well we can do. And so as these tools get just, you know, 1% or 2% better than us at some of these cognitive mechanics, they become dramatically better than us at whatever the downstream task is.

• 35:39Speaker 01

  And so what we're going to see over the next couple of years, that's just really exciting to me, is that there are these things that seem like, yeah, only humans can do that. And these tools aren't going to get 100 times better on an absolute scale than us. They're going to get 1% better than on an absolute scale. But on a relative scale, you know, they're going to move from, you know, a, a, you know, 60th percentile programmer to, you know, whatever, 99.98% percentile programmer.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  Just by getting a little better.

• 36:14Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah. You mentioned, you mentioned coding specifically for that. Are there, are there other use cases you've seen or you're starting to see emerge where this is the case where AI is starting to enter that 99th percentile of, of human capability?

• 36:28Speaker 01

  I, I think with prompting, you know, it's, it's getting pretty good at some things, you know, and, and I think that there, there are a number of domains that we can judge that on, right? Is it faster? You know, can it do 40 hours of work? You know, at the 80th percentile in five minutes? Well, that's economically really, really valuable, right? Better than my intern in five minutes. Economically really valuable, right? So, um.

• 36:57Speaker 01

  That I think is happening really quickly. So I'm working on a research for forging, for the forging industry, right? These guys have giant, you know, 2,000 ton hammers that just bang massive pieces of metal. And they're trying to figure out, okay, well, what does AI mean for them? And, you know, I could have gone and read, you know, hunted down

• 37:27Speaker 01

  and read, you know, 5,000 pages of papers. Or I could have AI go and hunt down 80% of those and point me to exactly the sentence that matters. And then I can make a judge.

• 37:40Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  Right? That's super valuable. And is it better than me? It's better than me that in that I would never do that work.

• 37:49Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 37:50Speaker 01

  Like economically, economically, I could, I could never do that work. And so it makes me dramatically better.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  I think there, the, the other thing we need to think about here is like the, the AI kitties, and sorry if as a listener, you're one of them. But the AI kitties are obsessed with trying to create artificial general intelligence. And I think that's a really bad idea to try and mimic humans. I think we should find the things that humans are terrible at.

• 38:21Speaker 01

  Right? Or humans don't pay attention to and get better than nothing at those.

• 38:28Speaker 01

  Right? That's the easy way to get superhuman.

• 38:31Geoff Nielson?

  Right. The, yeah, that kind of the negative space around humans versus just competing directly with them.

• 38:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think to me, that's, that's where the real power is. You know, we have all of these cognitive, you know, even within the things we're able to do. We have all of these cognitive biases. Right? Like if it just checks those biases for us, totally able to do that today. Totally able to say like, hey, research Daniel did it. Here's my paper. Where am I biased?

• 39:04Speaker 01

  Like it's able to do that counterfactual thinking because there's a framework.

• 39:08Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 39:10Speaker 01

  Right? Stuff we're terrible at. And by the way, I can do it for you. You can do it for me. But I can't do it for myself.

• 39:19Speaker 01

  Right? Because of the, it's in my, because it's already in my brain. I am the system.

• 39:25Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 39:25Speaker 01

  So, so I can't, I can't look at it.

• 39:27Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 39:28Speaker 01

  So that kind of thing, I think is going to be incredibly powerful.

• 39:32Geoff Nielson?

  So, so on that note, you know, I'm thinking again about the interplay between AI and people. And we, we've talked about this an awful lot. And, you know,

• 39:42Geoff Nielson?

  there's, there's some conflicting opinions here and I've heard, we've almost talked through implicitly both sides of it. But you know, I've talked to a number of futurists in this space, Jonathan, and one of the, one of the prevailing schools of thought is we're going to see the rise of the generalist. And the technical skills are going to go away and it's rise of the generalist. Now you've got, I, I think I'm hearing a little bit of a different perspective.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  I just, I just made a face.

• 40:06Geoff Nielson?

  For anyone who's only listening.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  For those in our radio audience.

• 40:11Geoff Nielson?

  So, well, so, so why don't, you know, why, why don't we respond to that before I even, you know, add any more color?

• 40:17Speaker 01

  So, I, kind of everybody cooks a little bit, right? And what we discover when you read a recipe is that there is so much information that is tacit and never in a recipe.

• 40:29Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah.

• 40:30Speaker 01

  Right? About like, if you're baking, what's the humidity today? How does that impact my pie? The way my bread rises, right? And so, the question here is the, the generalist will be able to do a lot more. But they will never bake a great pie. Because they don't have the feeling.

• 40:55Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 40:56Speaker 01

  Of what's going on.

• 40:57Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  And I think that's incredibly important to understand that, that, having depth, intuitive depth, in what you do is incredibly important. You know, when you take a look at biology papers, right? What's, what's the replication rate, right? Like, right? 50%, 30% of them can be replicated? Right? The, the, I, either everybody's lying.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  Or there's parts of the recipe that aren't written down.

• 41:32Speaker 01

  And it's going to be some time before the whole recipe gets written down. And so I think that's true for almost everything. And so I don't know that the power of the specialist is going to go away. But it's in, and it may be that once you get become a specialist in one thing, then you can move that way of thinking to other things. But I don't know that just being a dilettante will

• 42:04Speaker 01

  create outsized value in the future because everyone can do it.

• 42:08Geoff Nielson?

  Right. So it's not, it's not necessarily AI is turning everyone into a great baker. It's AI is making the great bakers that much better.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  Well, it's making everybody into a good enough baker.

• 42:21Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  So, so I think about PowerPoint. Right. So up until the early 1990s, you know, you had in many cases, you know, some guy who, who would literally cut up graphics and, and paste them, he was called a paste up artist.

• 42:40Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah.

• 42:40Speaker 01

  And paste them up. And then you had another guy who would shoot film of that thing. And then you had someone who would run the printer and maybe someone who would run the ink in the printer. And then you had a graphic designer.

• 42:55Speaker 01

  Right. And then you had the customer.

• 43:00Speaker 01

  Today, you're doing your own PowerPoint.

• 43:02Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 43:02Speaker 01

  Now, are you as good as all of those craftsmen stacked up? No, you, you just aren't. You, you will never be Saul Bass. You will never be one of the great graphic designers in the world and your graphics will never be uh, in the Museum of Modern Art. I guarantee you this. But is it damn good? Yeah. So, so I, I think the question here about the specialist is where is that needed? Right. Graphic designers, right? We all, we were becoming an information economy. We were all pumping out text for a living and all of a sudden like good enough graphic design became fine.

• 43:48Speaker 01

  But, you know, do I want a good enough brain surgeon? Do I want a good enough, you know, uh, car mechanic? Do I want a good enough, you know, uh, truck driver? Probably not, like, good enough truck driver that doesn't run into the, the, the, the, the bridge embankment, big bridge embankment 99% of the time ain't good enough.

• 44:09Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  So I, I think there's that, that need for specialization and that need to have a, a cognitive intuition about the subject is, is gonna continue to be important.

• 44:23Geoff Nielson?

  Well, and I, I think that's, I think that's incredibly powerful and, and really interesting to me. And the reason I asked is because, you know, you said something earlier about actually implementing this organizational change and the importance of psychological safety, about bringing employees along with you. And, you know, my sense is there's still an awful lot of angst about, you know, are we being replaced by AI? Do I still have a job? What is my value? Is this, you know, is AI gonna prevent food being on the table for my family? And, you know, my sense is as leaders, if we're gonna move our organizations forward, we need to be able to, you know, address some of these questions and probably be truthful about it. But I mean, do you buy that?

• 45:07Geoff Nielson?

  Or is, or is there a key piece of the conversation that we haven't touched on yet?

• 45:13Speaker 01

  I, so what, what you're asking about, you know, foundationally is how fast will this happen?

• 45:19Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  And, uh, the kind of standard line is, well, these are generational shifts and they happen slower than you expect and everybody does fine and the economy grows. And, uh, the reality of the 1980s and early 1990s is that this happens slow enough. The 50-year-old plus all retired out and it was all right.

• 45:42Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  So if this shift happens in 10 years, that will not be true.

• 45:47Geoff Nielson?

  Hmm.

• 45:48Speaker 01

  Um, the second thing to think about is that unlike the 1980s and 1990s, we are not in a population boom, we are in a population bust. Right? So when we take a look in the next five years, I forget, uh,

• 46:03Speaker 01

  what the boomer population dropping out of the workforce is, but it's like 75%, 80%. So, you know, we're going to see that this generational knowledge, this generational way of working.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  Happen goes away at a much faster pace than it did in seventies and eighties. So that's happening. There will be a dislocation. These demographics will help us. The next piece is like, what do we do? And that's kind of the question. And part of my answer is, you know, our economy is so overproductive at this point. That I have a person who makes my coffee.

• 46:47Speaker 01

  I go to Starbucks and I have a person who makes my coffee. And the hundred year, thousand year historical perspective, think about that.

• 46:57Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  I have a person in Jamaica that grows my beans. I have a person who puts that on a boat. I have a person who roasts that coffee for me. And then I have, then I drive down in my car with 5,000 parts in it. Yeah, that was made in Germany to go and get my coffee every morning from my person. That makes my coffee. And if I'm really lazy, that person, there's another person who will bring my coffee and my croissant to me. I don't do that very often because that's snotty. But my point being, you know, we will come up with new things to do. I'm not concerned about that.

• 47:37Speaker 01

  In the US, where we are strategically trying to bring technology and manufacturing back to the US for, I think, some pretty good reasons. You know, there will be transferability into other industries and other roles. Moving forward. Like I said, in tech, I don't think those roles are going away. I think we're going to figure out that there's value here. I think, like I said, in professional services, we're going to see a 15% or so efficiency bump in the next few years here. That's pretty massive in an industry that doesn't really see efficiency bumps.

• 48:17Speaker 01

  And that's, you know, that's, that's an outlier, but we're going to see that in a bunch of other industries too. You know, we are going to see dislocation and we're going to see that the job roles shift as, as, you know, one person is able to do one point, you know. You know.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  Whatever, 1.7, 1.07 jobs. But I think it's gonna take a little longer than people think and a little longer than the CFOs are dreaming.

• 48:44Geoff Nielson?

  Right. So I, I want to ask you a slightly different question about that, which is, you know, you're, you're, I, I think very, doing something very important, which is you're debunking some of the, some of the hype around, you know, oh, this is gonna change everything, you know, overnight, or some of the, you know, some of the hot air that comes with AI.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  It will repeatedly change everything overnight. It's, it's just that the scale at which organ, large organizations can absorb that.

• 49:11Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  Is, is in the scale at which governments will allow that to happen because of the implications for their tax base and the monetary system.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  You know, there are governors beyond the technology.

• 49:24Geoff Nielson?

  Right. Right, there's the human pace of absorption and the societal and the, yeah, yeah, I guess the organizational pace of absorption. But is like, can we control that or is the pace of change at some point just gonna, you know, run us over and as consumers become, you know, more impressed with what this can do, even if it's not quite as good. You know, it just, you know.

• 49:49Speaker 01

  I mean, it's changed my life. You know, I mean, I was, I was doing, I was doing econometrics on this in 2018 and 2019 and I saw, you know, and we were in 2016, 2017, building transformer models or what came to be called transformer models. So, you know, I've been at this for a while and I knew exactly what was going to happen from, you know, a, a task efficiency perspective and, and by the way, this is not a surprise. It's kind of like tracked exactly what we thought in 2018, 2019. So it's not magical, like this was all very knowable. But it still blows my mind every time I'm suddenly able to do, you know, 40 hours of work in five minutes.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  You know, it's, it's, it's pretty magical. So I'm not saying that's going away. What, what I am saying. Is that, uh, you know, when COVID hit, I pulled all my money out of the stock market. I said, hey, you know, I don't believe this, this, this, uh,

• 50:52Speaker 01

  White House is going to be able to, to, to, to deal with this quickly enough. Things are going to go to heck. And I pulled all my money out of the stock market. And what I didn't understand was that the government and the Fed can just change the rules.

• 51:05Geoff Nielson?

  Hmm.

• 51:08Speaker 01

  Right?

• 51:10Speaker 01

  Right? Like, every company in the United States should have gone out of business and they just changed the rules.

• 51:14Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah.

• 51:15Speaker 01

  Uh, and, and this is not the first time that's happened. They did it in the 1970s, uh, when we got off, you know, the late 60s, 70s, when they started getting off the gold standard, they did it, uh, you know, in Bretton Woods in, in, in the 40s. Right? We can literally just change the rules.

• 51:31Geoff Nielson?

  Yes.

• 51:31Speaker 01

  And the Trump administration is actively just changing the rules right now.

• 51:35Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 51:35Speaker 01

  Right? That's what this is all about. Um, is like, you know, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, J D Vance, people who actually understand technology, saying, hey, we need to kind of change some of these rules. Right? You might agree with them or not. You might think that they're good, that this is the right answer or not, but that's what's going on.

• 51:54Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 51:55Speaker 01

  And so what we need to understand is that

• 52:01Speaker 01

  the game, the playing field will shift along with the technology.

• 52:04Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 52:07Speaker 01

  And so this isn't all going to blow up on Tuesday.

• 52:09Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  Just because, you know, there's, there's, there's some AGI thing that wins Nobel prizes every 30 minutes.

• 52:16Geoff Nielson?

  Right? So I, I did want to ask you, Jonathan, you know, before I lose sight of it, one of the things you do in your role as, as a futurist is you, you separate kind of the signal from the noise, if I can call it that.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:27Geoff Nielson?

  What is some of the noise you're hearing right now? What, what is some of the hype that you're like, that is BS? That is not going to come to pass. Um, that's on your radar as like, we should be tuning out.

• 52:39Speaker 01

  We're starting to see some reality testing happening in the market. So the first thing that was happening was, hey, this is all gonna just explode and it's gonna be great. And that because we're seeing, you know, a thousand times increase in efficiency gain over, you know, 18 months or whatever it is, that this thing is just gonna run. And, and the reality is, because we're talking to a mildly technical audience, so, you know, a technical audience, I'll get mildly technical. You know, we were looking at transformer models. Now we're looking at reasoning on top of transformers. Now we're looking at, at multiple shot on goal, right? Like, running the thing 10 times and finding the middle ground, right?

• 53:24Speaker 01

  Every time you do that, energy use goes through the roof. But what we're still doing is basically, and we've gussied it up, but this is a database search tool. Right? And searching a database. The second you get into agentic AI and deep research, right? Now you have an agentic tool that's doing all of this stuff with its database. And, you know, pretty quickly going to another agentic tool that's doing the same thing. And maybe those two agents say, hey, there's another database with some other information. And doing that again, you can see how the energy use goes geometric here. And no matter how efficient we get,

• 54:05Speaker 01

  we're going to see a dramatic increase in energy use. And that's gonna be a massive limiter. And the reason it's a massive limiter is that A, we hadn't planned on this in the US electric grid or anybody else's electric grid. B, the gas turbines that, you know, people like Elon Musk are using, he bought, he rented half of them in the country just to run his, his, his new data center. And I guess in Nashville, I guess Kentucky, Tennessee. But, you know, he took half of the stock just to run one data center. And then you look at those turbines or that class of turbine,

• 54:50Speaker 01

  and there's a 90-month lead time to buy another one.

• 54:54Geoff Nielson?

  Wow.

• 54:55Speaker 01

  So we have some real limits. We have some real limits to how quickly we can increase energy use. And so that's a governor on what we can do and what's cheap.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  So you go out to 2035. Yes, problem starts to be solved. We have small modular nuclear reactors coming online. We have a 10 year backlog of purchases of those things. You know, but up until 2030 or 2032, you know, it's gonna kind of look a lot like what we're, what's at the leading edge now in the enterprise space. Right now, what we're doing in the enterprise space, but you take, you know, you, you take three instances of, of O1 and you get them talking to each other, or you take, you know, Sonnet 3.7 and O1 and Gemini and you get them talking to each other with different databases. You know, that, that's about where we're going to be for the next five years.

• 55:53Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 55:53Speaker 01

  You know, and there will be government stuff and there will be, you know, hedge fund traders and, you know, like whatever that want to spend, you know, a hundred thousand dollars a month and that'll be different. But for you and I, that, that's the outer edge.

• 56:08Geoff Nielson?

  So, you know, my, my natural response to that, Jonathan, is, and I've heard people say this before, that as,

• 56:16Geoff Nielson?

  as the need for energy grows and it becomes, you know, a more and more valued commodity, sure, you can increase the supply of it, which you're talking about as being, you know, kind of tennis years out. But it could potentially also drive a race for efficiency within these models that, you know, can become, you know, not, not geometrically more efficient, but exponentially more efficient. I- is that on the table?

• 56:40Speaker 01

  Absolutely. What we're seeing, according to Sachin Adella, and, you know, certainly one of the bubble blowers in this whole thing, but the, the, the least, the least smoke blowing of the bubble blowers. You know, he's saying, hey, you know, WEF, if you multiply out what he said, he says, hey, I think there's about a hundred thousand times increase in energy efficiency between now and 2030. And, you know, when you just calculate out, you know, in terms of performance improvement, that's about a 10 times increase in performance improvement between now and 2030, or a hundred thousand times decrease in energy efficiency. So in that, you know, is, is, is the range of math.

• 57:23Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 57:24Speaker 01

  Right. So we'll, we'll see things that are stunningly efficient. There are ChatGPT 3.5 that will be free. Uh, or ChatGPT four, maybe that will be free. And then we'll see more advanced tools that, that I, you know,

• 57:39Speaker 01

  I would actually use to do work.

• 57:42Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 57:43Speaker 01

  Uh, that will be not free.

• 57:45Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 57:45Speaker 01

  And, and that, that, the, the cost of those will go up on a geometric curve.

• 57:49Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 57:49Speaker 01

  Um, how long will, you know, ChatGPT is, or, you know, OpenAI has been threatening to put out a $20,000, uh, a month tool. How long will that stay? $20,000 a month? That's a really good question. You know, I think, I think looking at how quickly, you know, everybody's nipping on their heels, you know, six months.

• 58:11Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah.

• 58:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then it's 2,000 and then it's, you know, 200 in a year. I mean, that's pretty incredible.

• 58:19Geoff Nielson?

  Oh, absolutely. It's a, yeah, it's, it's, it's exponential, right?

• 58:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. But, but the demand for that tool will go through the roof. And so the, you'll be limited in your ability to, to access it.

• 58:33Geoff Nielson?

  Right.

• 58:34Speaker 01

  Because, because the value will, I think, the value of the tools I'm using now are so high. You know, and I'm spending, you know, hundreds of dollars a month. And they'll get easier to use. You know, and, and every executive will insist on it. I mean, it's just kind of how it's going to work. And every technician, the technical person's going to insist on it.

• 58:55Geoff Nielson?

  Right. Jonathan, I wanted to say a big thank you for joining us today. I really appreciated your insight and this has been a great conversation.

• 59:02Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Thank you, Jeff. It's wonderful to meet you.