Pod Insights Big Technology Podcast Will AI Really Take Our Jobs? And If So, Then What? — With Albert Wenger About this episode Albert Wenger is a partner at Union Square Ventures, and author of The World After Capital. He joins Big Technology Podcast for a frank conversation about whether AI will lead to job loss and what to do about it. In an unusual setup, the journalist in this conversation (Alex) argues that we have less to worry about AI automating jobs than the popular narrative, and the VC (Wenger) makes the case that it will definitely happen and how we should adjust. Stay tuned for the second half where we discuss Wenger's five year experiment with UBI.
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0:00 Alex Kantrowitz? Let's discuss or debate whether AI will lead to job loss and what to do about it. All that coming up right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put Agentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large scale Agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade offs and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today.
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1:12 Alex Kantrowitz? Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We have a great show for you today. We're going to talk about whether AI will actually create job loss, whether we need UBI, and what's coming down the pipe in that world. We're joined by a terrific guest, someone I got a chance to meet last year, and I'm so happy to bring on the show. Albert Wenger is here with us. He's a partner at Union Square Ventures and the author of The World After Capital. Albert, welcome to the show.
1:39 Speaker 01 It's good to be here, Alex.
1:41 Alex Kantrowitz? One broad question to begin with. Do you believe that the current state of AI is going to displace people from jobs? And then, I guess, looking down the road, you know, do you think the next wave is really going to start doing that?
1:54 Speaker 01 I don't like the framing of this question. We want automation. And when I say we want, who's the we and why do we want it? We, I think, is humanity. And why do we want it? It's because automation's been good to us, right? If we hadn't really brought a lot of machinery to bear on agriculture, we would all still be working in agriculture.
2:17 Speaker 01 It's not that long ago that eighty percent of the population was working in agriculture, so that twenty percent of the population produced in the Alps. So historically, it's been good for us to use technology to do things that we needed humans to do. The question is different. The question is, how can we create a society, a social system, an economy, that takes the benefits that this creates and distributes them broadly so that people are excited about these prospects as opposed to being fearful?
2:48 Alex Kantrowitz? I strongly disagree with you here, and I think this is where we're going to have our point of disagreement, but maybe not from the place that you think, because, you know, what your answer... So my question was, do you think we're going to see AI job loss? And your answer effectively is yes, and, and this is what we should do about it. And what my counterpoint would be is, you know, maybe we don't see the job loss, and I don't think we have. I think a lot of companies talk about how they're going to replace people with AI, but they're not. They're weak companies, they're laying people off, and they're trying to tell a story to the market about how they're going to use AI for those jobs. And if you... And I think you've spoken about this, and we should talk about this, but if you look
3:31 Alex Kantrowitz? at how AI is introduced into workflows, it doesn't necessarily replace people, it might augment what they do and make them more effective, give them more time to do things that they are not doing in their day-to-day job. But what my point here is, is that we've yet to see evidence that this wave of AI is going to take jobs in any large-scale way, and I haven't even really seen much practical evidence of it doing it at all yet.
3:57 Speaker 01 Well, first of all, I think...
4:00 Alex Kantrowitz? And that's a conversation worth having.
4:01 Speaker 01 First of all, I think, I think it sort of depends on what evidence, it depends on what evidence you look at, right? So the FT publishes an interesting study of the wages people are getting in freelance marketplaces for copy editing, and they looked at it, and since the release of ChatGPT, there's been a market downturn in wages for people in jobs like copy editing in freelance marketplaces.
4:25 Speaker 01 I think there's always two separate discussions here, right? There's the discussion of what happens in the long term, you know? And then there's the discussion, what does the transition look like? And I think the transition will be harsh because we're unprepared. And I do think this wave is completely different from the waves that have preceded it. By the way, I would also point out the following.
4:49 Speaker 01 People were like, oh, automation doesn't seem to have any impact so far. Why are we not seeing it in the data?
4:56 Speaker 01 But oftentimes, what happens is that companies can afford a huge amount of load because they're doing really well. And it's only in downturns that companies go, oh, we really got to tighten the belt. And so a lot of the stuff that has happened in the past in terms of automation
5:17 Speaker 01 didn't play itself out during good times. It played itself out during belt tightening times for companies. The other point is, I think this wave is very, very different from the prior waves. And I still think this particular way of framing the discussion, have we seen it? Or is like, I think labor may be getting too cheap very rapidly, which might then not lead you to a lot of automation.
5:46 Speaker 01 If you look at what happened in the first go around with machines, so meaning the industrialization. If you look at countries, you know, like Europe or European countries, especially a country like Germany, that had a strong union movement. Wages went up quite rapidly. Working conditions got better quite rapidly. That required the formation of capital. You could only compete globally or even regionally if you were able to build machines. Then you look at countries that had a complete surplus of labor for a long time and wages stayed super low. There was very little capital formation in those places. So I think there's sort of this weird cause and effect thing that people really have confused here, which is
6:33 Speaker 01 Why would I, if I'm McDonald's, put a robot into the kitchen if I can pay somebody minimum wage to do it? Right? It's just not as incentive. Why would I build a toilet cleaning robot if I can pay somebody minimum wage to go do it? So I think, this is why I'm saying, I think we are more likely to be stuck in a low automation trap because we have too many people who have to take jobs that aren't in any way, shape or form, that kind of thinks where people go, oh, this provides meaning and purpose in my life. It's like, this is so I can pay rent. This is so I can feed my children. Right? So I think we're much more likely to be stuck there.
7:13 Speaker 01 And then the final point I want to say is this whole augmentation versus replacement debate is also, I think, super misleading. Because let's say, in fact, that I'm augmented and I can now do whatever, you know, I'm a lawyer and I can read contracts faster because I've an AI summarizing for me. Like, yes, I am still that lawyer, but I may have, you know, instead of having three young lawyers working with me, I may have one young lawyer working with me. Right? So this idea that augmentation doesn't put pressure on the job market is also wrong. So I just think what we have done over time, and this has happened already over the last 20 years,
7:57 Speaker 01 is we've made the wealthy wealthier and the poor poorer, and we've created essentially a precariat. And companies like Uber have effectively sucked up this precariat into these jobs. And companies that have, you know, job scheduling systems that are like, you have to show up here at this time. I don't care whether your child is sick. I don't care whether you have to go to the doctor. You have to show up or we may fire you because guess what? I can hire other people. All of those things are kind of intermingling in weird ways to, I think, give us not the level of automation that we want and to give us weird automation and to give us weird social results. So my point is,
8:40 Speaker 01 I think we're just not set up to get good social results out of this coming wave of automation. We're just not set up for it at all.
8:47 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, no, look, I appreciate what you're saying, and we had like a little bit of this discussion privately before. And I was like, okay, we should do this on the podcast. So it's actually really valuable to hear your thoughts, and I appreciate you sharing them here. But let's press forward a little bit more because I think we should talk about this with some more concrete examples. I mean, looking at the industry that you invest in in technology. So we now have these co-pilots that can work side by side with engineers to help them code faster. Now, first of all, I'm not 100% sure how effective these are. I've yet to hear a CEO talk about how it's revolutionized their engineering force or a CTO talk about it. Most of them say, yeah, it's useful. We use it. We have a seat on GitHub Copilot for people and we're figuring it out.
9:29 Alex Kantrowitz? But let's say it is effective at making engineers three or four times better. So if you look about, if you look at it from a perspective of a CEO, are they going to then say, you know, we actually need less engineers? Or are they going to say, we're now capable to build more? And we're in a war with other companies who are building new products and features and services. And now we can just build more like no CEO says we are not, we're building just at the right pace on our roadmap. Every CEO says, we wish we could build our roadmap faster. And this might just speed that up. So where do you stand on that? Because that might.
10:05 Speaker 01 It's never one or the other. It's silly to have a debate over whether it's one or the other. But it's also silly to have a debate over whether or not it's going to put pressure on engineering salaries. It is definitely going to put pressure on engineering salaries like 100%. And it's already doing that. Like, and at our portfolio company summit, we had this discussion and people were like, oh, I, you know, a lot of it had to do with, did the CEO say, I'm going to work with my VP of engineering and we're going to use this technology and we're going to lean into using this technology. And we're going to basically say, if you're not using it, like you're doing it wrong. Or are they like, I'm going to let things run exactly the way they've run before. So.
10:47 Speaker 01 So I just think it's silly to think that when you have a machine that can do part of the work at basically the cost of energy, let's call it, that that's not going to put some pressure on what humans can earn doing this. And so for a while, we had this idea that everybody can just get themselves out of poverty by learning how to code. And for years, I've been saying, no, most code in the future is going to get written by machines. And people were kind of laughing at this, and that's what we're going to get. So I just, both can be true. Companies can be building more, and they can also be paying engineers less. And some, by the way, it'll always look weird because they'll pay some engineers even more. Because now you have this sort of hyper productivity of some engineers,
11:31 Speaker 01 and those engineers will get paid more than they were paid before. And you know, look, there are these studies out. There's this great study where, you know, when ATM machines first came out, and people were like, oh, it's going to, you know, get rid of tellers. Well, it turned out there was an early phase of ATM machines where actually banking became more accessible. So people banked more, people had used more cash, people had more interaction with the bank. Actually, the number of tellers went up. And this study became very famous, and it gets cited frequently by people saying, oh, you know, look, we introduced ATMs, and actually, the number of bank tellers went up. Guess what? The number of bank tellers eventually went way down.
12:08 Speaker 01 So it's like, the early phases of this can look like a total head fake. And I think there will be engineers who will get paid more because they'll be more productive. Yes, that is not the question. The question is not, will some engineers be paid more? The question is not, will some companies ship more? The question is, what happens to software engineering as a way of earning a living across the board? And I think there, the answer is unequivocal in one direction.
12:35 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, so you're saying that your portfolio companies are starting to pay their software engineers less because they're using Copilot?
12:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, absolutely. Some companies are, have used this as an opportunity to go. One of the interesting things that happens is when you get a new technology like this, a lot of people are like, well, I'm not using it because the code it produces is worse than what I can do. And that's true for a few engineers. For the vast bulk of engineers, that's not actually true. And so what companies are doing is companies are like, okay, I can use more remote engineers. I can use more code generation. And yes, Tying it back to our earlier conversation, there's companies that can't raise, right? And those companies aren't interested in shipping more features on their roadmap. They're just interested in getting to break even because they can't raise. They're trying to get to cash flow positive.
13:26 Speaker 01 So yes, they're obviously going to lean into this. And again, the discussion is you always have to look at this as distributions, right? So there'll be some companies that are like, oh my God, this is amazing. I'm getting so much better. I can ship more. I'm in a market where I have great margins. I'm like, I'm crushing it. So of course I'm going to do more. But if you zoom out and you look at it, you know, people love to say people are Luddites. But what happened to people who actually manually operating these things, manually doing these things? Their jobs went away. So in some ways, the Luddites were right. They weren't right about is technology good for humanity or not? But they were right, that was bad for their specific jobs.
14:09 Alex Kantrowitz? Right. Look, I have to stand on the table for this line of questioning. I mean, I, I understand, you know, in your seat, it might seem silly, but I also think that like for people on the front lines, they are going to want to see what signals there are and what they should be looking at. And it matters very much to them. So I'll be done with it in a moment and we can.
14:30 Speaker 01 No, we, we should stay with it. It's good. I'm liking this.
14:35 Alex Kantrowitz? So then, okay, so, all right, let's keep going then. So explain this one to me. We've had all of these, you know, revolutions. You would say, I would say that we have more AI in the workplace now. I mean, it's sort of obvious than we ever have before. Yet we're looking at near full employment, basically full employment in the U.S. So how do you respond to that?
14:55 Speaker 01 Well, there's a couple of things. First of all, LLMs are a very recent thing and we are early in this, right? I think people are always like, well, look, I'm using chat GPT every day. Why is it not in the labor statistics yet? You know, when I was at MIT, my thesis advisor was a guy named Eric Bryne Nelson. And Eric wrote the definitive paper on the effect of IT.
15:20 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, he's been on the show before. We had a great conversation.
15:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, and so, you know, there was all this thing where people like, well, it's not showing up in the macro statistics. But the macro statistics were the wrong place to look. Okay. And you can be at full employment and yet have terrible social dynamics. The two are not mutually exclusive because most people have to work to live, right? So eventually they go have to find a job. It's not like they cannot have a job. And so, yes, you can be near full employment and you can also be in a situation at the same time where the income and wealth distribution gets ever further apart. And that's the place we've been for quite a number of years. Now, in recent, very recently in the economy, there's been an uplift in wages.
16:08 Speaker 01 And some of that has come through raising minimal wages. Some of it has come through some areas that are having relatively high demand and having a hard time finding people. Some of that was because during COVID, when people got stimulus checks, they exited the labor market. So, but people looking at these short term things and making long term extrapolations from them, I just think is really, really bad practice. To think about the long term, you have to think about the fundamentals and you have to think about first principles, not about short term. The second argument that's, I think, also not intellectually honest is saying it's never happened before, so it'll not happen now.
16:44 Speaker 01 It has happened before, has happened before when we had the transition from the agrarian age to the industrial age. The, that transition was absolutely brutal. It was horrific. Living conditions in cities were terrible. Working conditions were terrible. Working hours were terrible. There was child labor. It was just bad. It was a bad, bad transition. And so, if you believe, as I do, that this technology, digital technology and AI in particular, is bringing a big transition, then right now, we're seeing the beginnings of a bad transition. Again, yes, you can have full employment. And by the way, full employment is measured by people who are seeking jobs. It doesn't include anybody who stopped looking, right? So we have given ourselves a big leg up on how we've defined that statistic.
17:29 Speaker 01 And then we also don't have much about like, what is it actually doing to people's? Wealth, can people afford a house? Can people afford an apartment? Where are people living? You know, can they afford to eat food that is healthy as opposed to food that makes them obese? Like, there's a lot of factors that go beyond looking at the top level job number. And if we're not willing to do that work, we're going to have the same terrible transition because we're not looking at the conditions that people are actually experiencing.
18:02 Alex Kantrowitz? Okay, so let's do that work. We'll talk a little bit about, well, more than a little bit. We'll talk about what you think needs to be done and how this might play out. And your views on UBI, which I find pretty interesting. You're running an experiment. We'll talk about that. All that and more coming up on the other side of this break. This episode is brought to you by Avpoint. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data. And most teams have no single way to see it, secure it, and prove it's under control. That's exactly what Avpoint does. For 25 years, they've been the trusted layer beneath the world's most demanding data,
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20:15 Alex Kantrowitz? in the show notes. And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Albert Wenger, who is the partner at Union Square Ventures and the author of The World After Capital. It's a pretty funny discussion that we're having. I think in one way, because usually the journalist and the venture capitalists are on the other side of these conversations. You're the one that's, the VC is usually the one who's like, don't worry, everything's going to be fine. And the journalist is like, but, but, and I mean, that's why we do these conversations.
20:47 Speaker 01 It's a good inversion. I like it.
20:49 Alex Kantrowitz? We like to have the nuanced conversations on the show. So, and I think by sort of poking at the arguments, we can sort of get to, get to the truth. So, let me ask you this to start our discussion about what to do. Do you feel like any conflict here as a venture capitalist who's investing in this AI technology, knowing that there's going to be disruption in the economy because of it?
21:11 Speaker 01 No, I feel very good about the kind of things that we have invested in at the USV over the years, you know, like a big part of our thesis has been about broadening access. So it's taking things that historically were accessible to only a few people or not at all, and making them broadly accessible. I mean, if you look at our learning portfolio, a company like Duolingo, for example, right? Language learning, suddenly at least the beginnings of it, unless, until you get to a certain level of proficiency, you can have it for free. So I believe that a big part of the USV portfolio, and also now the climate portfolio, is all about the building blocks of this new world. And it can be a
21:52 Speaker 01 really beautiful and wonderful world, right? I think we've got to get away from this fear-driven narrative. It's the fear of job loss. We have to look at what can a world look like where machines can do a lot of things, where we can have time to take care of family, time to make art and music, time to restore nature, which needs a lot of work. Like there are all these incredible things. We will never run out of amazing things to do. The question is one, do you have to do them so that you can live? Like, is it mandatory? Is the social system set up in a way where that's the only way you can survive?
22:36 Speaker 01 And I think, given all the progress we're making, we should allow ourselves to envision a world where that doesn't have to be the case. By the way, the beauty of shifting from the existing totally badly broken social system to something like UBI is that today, people face a very large disincentive from working. If you're on any of the programs, the second you start making money, you get kicked out of the program, which tends to have the effect that you're essentially facing 100% tax rate. You're getting some new money in over here from work, and you're losing all the benefits. So like, why would you start working? So in our trial in the city of Hudson, where 128 people are getting $500 a month.
23:17 Speaker 01 By the way, that's a small sum, some people might think, but you look at a lot of Americans, they don't have $500 in their bank account. Something like 50% of Americans don't have $500 of savings. It's an extraordinary, mind-boggling situation, right? What has happened? Employment has gone up. More people are working in this cohort. In fact, it's gone up 3X. Why? Because unlike the existing social system, which puts a huge disincentive to work, there's no disincentive to work in a UBI world. Now, it's not a silver bullet. You can't just introduce UBI without also changing the tax code, without changing other things. Like, it's not in and of itself some magic thing, but the existing social system is badly, badly, badly broken.
24:00 Speaker 01 And one way it's broken is that it's a huge disincentive to work, like massive disincentive to work.
24:07 Speaker 01 And I find it so funny that a lot of VCs and other rich people complain about taxes and have never looked at what the effective tax situation for a poor person is who is getting some amount of social assistance. Because that tax situation, nobody would work. None of those people who complain about their taxes would work if they lost literally their entire benefit the second they started working.
24:26 Alex Kantrowitz? And it's interesting that the employment went up in the experiment that you're running. So if you think about universal basic income, the broad idea is to give a stipend to people and use that as sort of maybe a hedge against some of the technological displacement that we might be seeing in the future. And it's interesting to me because we also ran, I know, effectively a UBI experiment in the US instead of having technological displacement, we had a virus-based displacement. And we did the CARES Act where we gave a lot of money to people, you know, monthly to get them through COVID. And then what followed was the Great Resignation. So I'm curious what you think about that, where this was played out on a much larger scale and you actually did have people say, I don't want to work anymore.
25:11 Speaker 01 I think it's great. I think the Great Resignation was absolutely fantastic. And we need more of it, not less of it. We need fewer people wanting to work in shit jobs for shit wages because that will lead to technological innovation. Innovation will come when people are like, no, I'm not doing this for this amount of money. That is a driver of technological innovation that we shouldn't deprive ourselves of. We shouldn't be like, oh, we can just pay somebody like a terrible wage and we can have the computer tell them when they need to show up for work. We can fire them if we're, you know, whatever infraction we deem because we, you know, like, no, like technological innovation will come from something like the Great Resignation. By the way, I think COVID is such terrible experiment, right? On so many levels.
25:56 Speaker 01 First of all, we made large one-time transfers to people. The history of people being good with one-time transfers is very low, right? It's like a windfall and a lot of people will take the windfall and not spend it wisely. So our pilot, the one that Susan and I have been funding, is $500 a month for five years. It is the longest pilot of any of the pilots out there. And why is that? To get any sense of what people will really do, you have to give them some serious time on this, not a, here's money once, like here's like a lottery winning. Like, we know from lotteries that people don't do very well with one-time transfers that are like a windfall essentially. And so.
26:41 Speaker 01 All of this is to say, if we want to look at this not through a fear lens, but through a lens of what is this amazing world that we can create? We need to allow ourselves to think broadly, not narrowly.
26:56 Alex Kantrowitz? So I'm curious, like, from your perspective, from a venture capitalist, like, there is an imperative to grow and to sort of work intensely to make something happen. How do you sort of square that with this UBI world where, you know, people don't necessarily have to work and can pursue other interests?
27:15 Speaker 01 Look, math to me is one of those amazing examples, right? So we've made such extraordinary progress in math that the math you learn when you go to high school is math that was all invented by like 18th year, 1800. And even you go to college and you start studying math, like, it's really hard to come up to speed to all the math that we know. Now, people don't actually become wealthy as mathematicians unless they wind up going off to Wall Street. You can't patent math. Math works entirely on a recognition system, mathematicians recognizing each other, and a price system, there's some famous mathematical prices.
27:56 Speaker 01 And in one of the more exciting things, one of the mathematicians who won one of the prizes said, "I don't even want it. I just wanted to have solved the problem." So there is a huge amount of intrinsic motivation in humans to work on interesting things. What we have done is we have over-rotated on extrinsic motivation. We've over-rotated markets because markets work. I'm a big fan of markets. But now, we have, like, everything can be solved by markets. Everything needs to be monetarily incentivized. And there's a ton of work that shows, academic work that shows, once you introduce explicit monetary incentives, you have literally drowned out all the other incentives.
28:38 Speaker 01 Money is so powerful that it overrides such things as recognition and prices and so forth. So all this is to say, this idea that we can't have enough human motivation to go and do things if we do away with everybody needing to work to earn a living, I think that's a complete mistaken idea of how humans actually work. And I'll add one more thing to this.
29:08 Speaker 01 Again, UBI cannot be something we do in isolation. We need to, I mentioned, we need to change the tax code. We also need to change education. So much of the education system that we have today, it's no longer working as we realize. Teachers are quitting, teachers are dissatisfied. Students, like, one of the more interesting studies that came out of COVID was that kids were happier when school was up. And kids are more depressed now that school's back. So why is this? Because the school system we have today is an industrialized system. And it arranges kids by manufacturing date, right? I mean, that's what it does. So people sort of wonder if, you know, we can be, have energy and motivation.
29:53 Speaker 01 But look at little kids. Little kids want to discover the world. They're super curious. They ask tons of questions, usually to the annoyance of their parents, right? We need a school system that leans into that as opposed to seeing that as a bug that needs to be eradicated. So all of this is to say, if we want the awesomeness that this technology enables, we're going to need to change a lot of things, not just one thing. And this discussion of UBI in a vacuum is just not a very productive discussion.
30:23 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, the point of agreement for us here. I do think that this, the education system has definitely been taught, structured for people who are meant to take orders and jobs, not to have the ability to create.
30:36 Speaker 01 Yeah. And again, also the ability to create, you know, like, I believe that we are going to value human art very highly, in part because there'll be so much non-human art. But getting the transition period right is really, really difficult. And so in the world after capital, I write about something I call human qua human jobs. And I started referring to this earlier, but it's really important to return to this. I mentioned that we had recorded music for a long time, yet people go to concerts. You could have a perfectly high-quality cooking robot, and that could actually bring down the price of high-quality meals.
31:21 Speaker 01 We could have high-quality, even a serving robot. And yet, that might actually, over time, increase people's desire to have a personal experience, to have a meal cooked for them by somebody. It's just getting from here to there, that's the really hard part. So, we can imagine an economy of the future where you have enough UBI, so you don't have to work. But you're like, "I love cooking, and I'm gonna create these great culinary experiences." And people are gonna be like, "And I love coming to your place, and I will happily pay you." Right? So, nothing here says that people aren't gonna work in the future.
32:01 Speaker 01 Nothing here says that people can't have fulfilling, actual, meaningful work opportunities in the future. That is not the statement at all I'm making. What I'm saying is, the transition is gonna be absolutely awful, because we're not prepared for it, and we're not taking it seriously. We're not making the necessary changes. It is very eerily similar of how hard it was to get out of the agrarian age into the industrial age. We could see what industry was doing, but what did we do? We were like, "Oh, this is great. We can have more guns, and more battleships, and more tanks, so we can have more land." And we didn't really give up on that as an idea until the end of World War II. And now, we're making the same mistake. We're like, "These computers are great.
32:46 Speaker 01 We're gonna have, you know, more industry. We're gonna be stuck in the industrial age." And by the way, I love industry. I want more power, I want more nuclear power, I want more... But let's have robots build this stuff. Like, no human should be anywhere close to radioactive material, right?
33:04 Speaker 01 We have so much cleaning up to do. Let's let robots do this. Like, why do we think that humans need to do this?
33:11 Alex Kantrowitz? Okay, so, you know, as we come toward a landing, you mentioned art and sort of started sparked in my mind that I need to read this tweet that you sent and ask you about it. So, you said, uh, let's see, NFTs, uh, okay, you said, "Big innovations come with financial bubbles. When the bubble pops, people mistakenly write off the innovation entirely. NFTs are a case in point." I have to say, we were talking about on the show on Friday about all the grift and scams and how many people have been hurt by crypto up until this point. And I can't think of anything more than NFTs that have done that to people. But you really believe that we're going to see a revival in NFTs? It's hard for me to imagine people believing these things again.
33:56 Speaker 01 100%. 100%. I believe that's 100%. You know, we've had lots of grifts in lots of areas. Crypto has been easier and more attractive for grifters than other things because it is effectively money in some ways. And so that makes it easier to have grift. But that doesn't do at all away with this amazing innovation that you can have digital art that is collectible and where somebody can say, "I was early," or "I own this." And yes, it's a slightly different meaning of ownership. It's not like classic art where ownership lets you exclude the public, right? Because you can't exclude the public. But it's still ownership in the sense of bragging rights, which have always also turned out
34:41 Speaker 01 to be an important part of ownership. And so this idea that people don't want to sort of have these bragging rights in collecting art, uh, which they've always wanted. Um, people always wanted to be early to discovering music, always wanted to be early to discovering visual artists, et cetera. Um, I think that's going to turn out to, um, be an important part of the overall landscape. By the way, I think NFTs are going to represent other things other than art as well, uh, in the future. I mean, that's just a way of saying, "Here's a digital piece that has a unique ID to it." Um, and that is a fun-
35:20 Alex Kantrowitz? But don't you really just own like the link pointing to something and not the actual thing? And there've been so many instances of people owning the link and then the art going away, like-
35:28 Speaker 01 Well, no, I mean, look- Early NFTs were a lot of stupid NFTs where the art was some hot link. I mean, that's stupid. I mean, like, you know, like, modern NFTs put the art on chain. So the art exists on chain along with the thing. By the way, I think this is going to be interesting, too, for things like title. Right? I mean, if you think of real estate titles, they can easily be represented by NFTs. But the title information needs to sit on chain as well. It needs to not be a pointer to some document. Right? And so this is a fundamental innovation in the digital realm. Something we simply didn't have before blockchain technology came along was the ability
36:11 Speaker 01 to sort of have a decentralized consensus on a state of a digital database. And NFTs are a capability that arises from that, and they are not going away.
36:24 Alex Kantrowitz? Albert Vanger, thanks so much for joining us.
36:27 Speaker 01 Pleasure to be here, Alex.
36:29 Alex Kantrowitz? Okay, everybody, thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this conversation, the book is called The World After Capital. You can pick it up on your bookstore of choice. There's also a brand new audio version that Albert narrated, so make sure to check that out if you're into audiobooks. We might imagine that you are because you're here listening to a podcast. All right, thanks, everybody, for listening. Thanks to you again. Thank you again, Albert, for being here, and we'll see you on Friday, where Ron John and I will be back talking about the week's news. We have plenty to discuss. Thanks again, and we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.
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Previous Generative AI Might Just A Be Feature, Crypto is Back, Substack’s Nazi Problem Next Bill Ackman’s Crusade, A Rabbit Wins CES, Apple Boosts Meta Page updated October 12, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
