"Taking the Anxiety out of AI" with Sameer Rawjee

Our guest on this episode of The Podcast is Sameer Rawjee, author of 'Taking the Anxiety out of AI". 

Sameer Rawjee  is the founder of the Life Design Movement at Google, a programme for exploring purpose at work which has served over 10 000 Google employees globally, and has also been taught at INSEAD, Trinity College and the London Business School. Sameer is a serial venture builder via O School Ventures, where he partners with companies like Meta, Salesforce and TikTok to help young professionals prepare for new futures. He has been invited to speak at Standard Bank, ENS and Investec on how to be intelligent in a new world, and has shared his thoughts on the future of education and business with the Investec Private Wealth community across South Africa. Previously Sameer started an EdTech venture to bring universities online. His work has been featured on CNN, in the Sunday Times  and in Real Leaders  magazine.   SOURCE: Penguin Random House Struik 

Nongcebo McKenzie: The Podcast 
Contact: info@nvmckenzie.co.za 

The Podcast:
Camera: Mluleki Dlamini & Siyabonga Meyiwa
Sound: Sibusiso 'Dust' Nkosi
Editing: Mluleki Dlamini & Kwenza Trevor Masinga
Co-ordinator: Phumelele Khambule
Host: Nongcebo Vukile McKenzie

Contact: info@nvmckenzie.co.za
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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:21

Our guest on this episode of the podcast is Samir Roji. He's the founder of the Life Design Movement at Google, a program for exploring purpose at work. This program has served over 10,000 Google employees globally and has also been taught at places like Trinity College and the London Business School. He partners with companies to help young professionals prepare for new futures. And he joins us on this episode of the podcast. My name is Nongaebo Vukile-McKenzie. Welcome to Gwamgil. The title of the book is Taking the Anxiety Out of AI, Humans, Economies and Jobs in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, written by Sameer Roji and he is our guest on this episode of the podcast. Good morning and welcome, Sameer.

SPEAKER_01: 1:18

Good morning. Thanks so much for having me.

SPEAKER_00: 1:20

I must say, I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed your book. I'll actually send you a picture of what it looks like after I'm done with it because it's now littered with post-it notes and markers everywhere because I love the way it's written I love the breakdown and I love the summaries also, but we'll get into that. Let's talk about your background at Google.

SPEAKER_01: 1:40

Okay, so long story short is I've been in education technology for the longest time. Started my first company when I was 19. Then I thought I was going to run a venture with my four friends at UCT. We raised like, I don't know, 500,000 rands from SAB Miller. But when you're 19, 500,000 rands feels like$5 million. You don't realize that money is going to run out very quickly. So when I told my parents that I'm dropping out of university to start a company, they said, you're not Mark Zuckerberg. You need to finish your school. And that was it. So I suppose when, yeah. Entrepreneurial kids get a job, it's mainly to pay their parents back. And either in status or in money. And I guess that's what Indian parents expect sometimes. So that's what took me to Google. I applied to about 100 jobs. That was the only one I got. It was very unenjoyable. I don't do well in structure. As far as corporates go, it's the most flexible you can be in. But I suppose looking back, it was definitely the best experience I could have had. It's what we have got about business, about culture, about technology, and just how to think about how the future unfolds.

SPEAKER_00: 2:57

And now you are busy with O-School Ventures. Share with us a little bit more about that.

SPEAKER_01: 3:01

So yeah, after I left Google, I kind of made my way back to education.

SPEAKER_00: 3:06

Google

SPEAKER_01: 3:07

turned out to be a great place to learn how the smartest people in the world are thinking. That's obviously like the sort of watering ground for... students who graduate from the top Ivy League schools or who leave some of the top companies in the world to spend at least some of their career at Google. And so I thought I would test out how people are thinking about new ideas. And so I started something called the Life Design Lab. And that was to help people think about how to apply their talents and their interests towards solving important problems in the world. And the insights from that led to O School Ventures because I thought whatever I'm learning here in Silicon Valley about developing education for the future, I should definitely be taught in schools. The dream was always to start a school, but I came back to South Africa and started running these short-term programs at other schools across Cape Town, Pretoria, Joburg, Durban, Grahamstown. And the idea is mainly to teach young people about the future of work, about technologies, systems thinking, problem solving, all the skills we say young people should learn. I actually work with a group of really amazing people, really amazing friends to develop courses on those topics and then deliver them in some short-term way, whether over the weekends or three weeks in the summer.

SPEAKER_00: 4:29

So looking at the title of the book, Taking the Anxiety Out of AI, what is it about AI that makes people so anxious in your view?

SPEAKER_01: 4:39

Look, I mean, the main thing that I think I read something that said all of our problems come from two things, feeling like we're not enough and feeling like we don't have enough. And so that's always been a theme across all the decades and centuries. It's just that now it's exacerbated. Like, now you really feel like you're not enough. And you really feel like there isn't enough. Because you're being told stories every day about how your job might be taken. How you don't have the right skills. And I think advertising is always won through either motivating from love or fear. Desire or fear.

UNKNOWN: 5:19

And fear seems to be like the greater...

SPEAKER_01: 5:22

percentage of what advertising is being emphasized on right now, emphasized through right now as far as AI is concerned. So yeah, every day you're waking up and someone is saying, oh my God, I'm going to lose my job. Of course, it's going to make you anxious. And that's a little bit sad considering how much opportunity there is actually on the other side of this conversation and how we could actually be devoting more of our thought and attention to actually talking about what the next economies look like, what the next jobs look like. And so Those were some of the topics I really wanted to get into.

SPEAKER_00: 5:51

Yeah, and you talk about that towards the end of the book where you talk about post-money economy and the post-job economy. But at the beginning of your book, I must say, I really had the Terminator movies playing in my head. They were big in my day, the Terminator movies. And you said, because I want to read it exactly, the future in three lines. AI takes jobs. Customers want new experiences. Humans prevail again. For some reason, that brought the imagery of Terminator 1, 2, and 3 to my mind. But expand on that.

SPEAKER_01: 6:25

Yeah, I think, you know, I don't think universities did us a good job or a good... I think universities more or less did us a disservice the way they taught us about economics. Everything seems to be about supply and demand, and if there isn't enough of a commodity, then demand outweighs supply, and you kind of look at the world through that lens. But nobody tells you that that only exists within a certain context or a certain frame. And that... Actually, if you look at the economy from a more abundant lens, you realize that money just is a medium of exchange for things that come out of the ground. And there's an unlimited number of things that are coming out of the ground, materials, resources, et cetera, that turns into products and services and houses and cars. And so at the end of the day, it's not that money is limited. well, sorry, it may be that money is limited in a context, but it's not that things are limited. So there's enough things. It's just a matter of how they're distributed. And then the second thing is that the world is also designed around human desire and human imagination. We buy what we want. We buy what we're dreaming about. And so if all the existing companies in the world don't need humans anymore to provide their products and services, and robots take those things over, then maybe we'll start to have new dreams about new products and services. Maybe we'll start to think about things that we want that don't exist yet. And I think that's the part that we don't really understand so much. We kind of have an opportunity now to ask new questions about what humans want. Maybe producers and inventors and creatives will come up with new and interesting things that we haven't yet thought about.

SPEAKER_00: 8:23

You say this will be the first time in secular society that people will talk about the human soul at work as a way to differentiate who we are from algorithms and hardware. The soul, which would have been considered a soft topic, now becomes an urgent topic. Why do you say that?

SPEAKER_01: 8:41

So I'd be curious to hear what you think and then I'll tell you my version.

SPEAKER_00: 8:44

For me, let's talk about something that impacts us all, mortality, right? When you go into a financial services company and you go into somebody in your family has passed and you go in to put in that claim for the burial, for the funeral, and depending which culture you're in, you're part of rather, that can be something that's immediate as in tomorrow, or that could be a lengthy drawn out seven day process of people coming to mourn with you, to grieve with you leading up to the burial and then the week thereafter. And you've also got the administrative processes. And I struggle with the fact that is being done without soul. So when you say, born live die That's all our journey. Born, live, die. And to think that at birth, if you're a mother and you have to claim for medical aid, there isn't a sole kind of involvement in the decision that's made when you're going into that delivery room to get this processed against your medical aid for your procedure. Your child needs an emergency procedure. There isn't some soul involved in that decision already. It's only now going to happen. You live your life. You have an accident or you lose your job or whatever happens and you need to claim against whatever cover or protection that you have there isn't some soul already involved in that your parent dies your husband dies your wife dies heaven forbid something happens to you know a loved one and you need to put in a claim for that that you've been paying for these services and a decision is made and there isn't soul already involved in that that's scary that only now the soul is going to become relevant

SPEAKER_01: 11:01

Yeah, that sounds like a very, like what you described sounds like a very like beautiful practical explanation of what I'm talking about. Because I think, I was afraid that the start of my book might have sounded like too philosophical and like in a way impractical for the everyday reader. But I tend to think that like if we don't talk about the soul at work or in business or finance or economics, like what is life really for?

SPEAKER_00: 11:24

Yes.

SPEAKER_01: 11:26

Because, yeah, you will accumulate wealth, you will win all your goals, and then you just, you know, the great decline begins, and then you get sick, and then you die. So I think we haven't reflected enough around how the great... you know we can call them quote-unquote spiritual principles applied to everyday life spirituality doesn't necessarily have to link with the religion but many religions teach a form of spirituality which is can also just be reduced to um what you think of as good human values you know what does it mean to live in a compassionate society yes in an ethical society you know with a heart to you know to have a good heart when you make business decisions And I think that we're all kind of go through, I would refer to it as a spiritual reckoning or a human reckoning. We ask ourselves these bigger questions. What should our businesses be designed around? If I can cut all these people and save these costs, is that the right decision to make? Sure, you know, ROI matters, but to what degree? And if I'm going to yield ROI or return on investment by saving labor costs in Department A, can I create a new Department B and upscale my people and send them there? You know, you talked about, like, for example, this burial service industry, which is huge in South Africa. Yes. But I think it's largely, like, tied to, like, faith and culture, right? And like needing to make sure that the deceased passes on very well. And so people are like, I think companies are also like playing on

SPEAKER_02: 13:06

these feelings of people. And I think, you

SPEAKER_01: 13:11

know, the question is, yeah, how do you bring people towards the light versus, you know, sell to them in the dark? I think those are some of the questions that I'm really interested in. How do you run more transparent companies? How do you... think about growing wealth, but also sharing that. How do you uplift the rest of the world with you as you grow? How much money do you actually need? But also, what is the purpose of being human? It can't just be to excel in your material life. What does it mean to excel in your spiritual life? And I think if one gets too sort of uncomfortable with that topic, then the next question that I ask in the book is, you know you're not a body because you say you have one. You know you're not a mind, right? Because you also use your mind like as though it were a tool. And so if you're not the mind and you're not the body, then what are you?

SPEAKER_00: 14:09

You know, you said something about selling to people in the dark. And again, after reading your book, One of the questions that I was left with was, and you mentioned it earlier, marketing is based on desire or fear, right? You aspire to be something or you're scared of not being something, right? So deodorant, they sell you the ideal of smelling wonderful, 48-hour protection, or having... you know and not so great smell so obviously by choosing the deodorant you have 48 hour protection regardless of the fact that you are going to bath in the morning or in the evening but you've got 48 hour protection and what troubled me was the realization that we now need to actually move from where we're being sold from an emotional point of view our emotions are being tugged at with whatever it is you're being sold with from bread an advert for bread or an advert for a car whatever the case might be but then the decision about that the decision is literally made on how many crosses and ticks the system will accept the system will accept but how you got to interact with the system was because something was tugged at in your heart But then when the decision needs to be made about whether you get that or you don't get that, it is then about the system. Do you tick this box? No. Okay. Do you tick that box? Yes. How many boxes have got ticks? How many boxes have got crosses? And then you don't get that. Whatever it is that you're aspiring to get, be it a house, be it a car, whatever the case might be. And you talk about this so succinctly in the rise of the emotional economy. Let's talk about the emotional economy.

SPEAKER_01: 16:00

I'm just trying to recall what I said in that part of the book. Do you remember what the key ideas were?

SPEAKER_00: 16:04

Yes. Tell me

SPEAKER_01: 16:05

then I can get into

SPEAKER_00: 16:07

it. Yeah. So now more than ever, people need help with emotional matters. As technology advances, humans are also in a major physiological decline. It's as if things are getting better and worse at the same time. You carry on and then you say, you talk about the emotional evolution. One of the things that you say there, what we will soon come to realize is that so much about how we run and do business is based on how we relate to each other versus I love this what we are exchanging with each other and it ties in about something that you talked about in the book I'm not quoting verbatim but you talked about how we need to bring what we value into decision making versus what we are trading with or trading for into business decision making.

SPEAKER_01: 16:54

Yeah I know look so basically there's a few threads on this I think one is like it's kind of crazy that like a Everyone knows somebody that has cancer right now,

SPEAKER_00: 17:02

isn't it?

SPEAKER_01: 17:03

Yeah. Yeah, so I watched this documentary called Heal that said cancer is the new flu. And a lot of research shows that... A lot of research shows that heavy diseases come from deeply long-term suppressed emotions. And so... So if cancer has become now mainstream and it used to be just an anomaly for a couple of people, small percentage of the population, it would mean that like we have sort of like far exceeded what the average was in anxiety and in

SPEAKER_02: 17:40

stress and

SPEAKER_01: 17:42

hormonal imbalance. Also, it seems also like lately I've been experiencing the emotion of anger. I didn't experience that growing up. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. You know, like, there's this philosopher called Eckhart Tolle, and he said, you know, in Germany, if you're smiling too much, you might get pulled over

SPEAKER_02: 18:20

because the cops think that it's

SPEAKER_01: 18:23

right.

UNKNOWN: 18:25

The cops think that maybe you're, like, suffering from some kind of delirium because it's unusual to be happy.

SPEAKER_01: 18:31

Isn't that crazy? It's unusual to smile. At least in South Africa, we have, like, an easygoing culture. But for the most part, if you see people standing in queues, et cetera, you know, they got their arms crossed up, you know, if you had an FNB or an Home Affairs or whatever it is, or even traffic, it'll always stop. Yeah, you know, they're pulled up facing. So that means it's like everyone's cup is full. So we're all walking around with a full cup, not emptying it out anywhere. So, and that leads to a variety of things. It leads to sickness. It leads to violence. Abuse is rife in this country. I was shocked to hear the numbers. what women are going through and then what kids are going through. If it's not happening in your home today, right now, it's like not a reality for you, but this is like the effects of the system. So in that case, we have emotional imbalance in society, which then leads to a triple effect of emotion imbalance in the economy. And so we need to then start asking new questions about like, how do we deal with these things? Where is it important to deal with them? So I think a few things will happen. One is the players in the game, which are mainly companies and they influence governments and society and economies, don't really have an interest in solving these problems. They want you to turn up and be perfect at work.

UNKNOWN: 19:54

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_01: 19:55

So all of a sudden, if we start merging into a new economy called the robot AI economy, and all of a sudden you don't have to deal with emotions, it might be quick to say, hey, listen, we don't need you to come here anymore because now we don't have to deal with your brain fog. We don't have to deal with your sick child. We don't have to deal with the day that you're sad because your husband argued with you. We don't have to deal with any of that stuff because we can just get pure product to get out of the machine every single day. This machine will make the transaction. We'll send the email. We'll file the customer complaint. We'll create the code for this particular software that we're building. So you kind of get rid of that. And then I believe a new economy starts evolving. And that's that. I was just reading today about a company called Klarna. They were like one of those companies that said, yeah, now we're firing everybody and we don't need a workforce and we're going to just deal with AI. Now, a year later, hundreds of millions of dollars investment later they're saying it seems like some percentage of our customers still expect to speak to a real human and then that made me think of something a lot of customer service is more than just about the transaction like you call your banker to tell him about your life you speak to the lady on the phone about your bank transaction you end up talking about like you know the worries that you're having in school about your kids and you have a shared moment of connection You know, you're sitting in a shop and maybe you're there to buy some food, but then all of a sudden, you know, you start talking about your family life and your dreams. In a way, if everybody had enough money at home, we would never have a reason to leave our houses and connect as humans. So maybe the way economies are designed forces us to connect as humans. And then when that is taken away from us, maybe we realize we actually want it and need it, right? Maybe I realize that going to work every day is not just about getting the paycheck, but it's about being with a group of people who I resonate with, who I enjoy seeing. Our work lives are like an extension of our family lives. Managers and bosses will never say that. Their philosophy is, I would never fire my kid. That's a very narrow view of an extension of family life. You spend more time in your life with people at work than you do with... your partner or your kids, you know? So I think these types of questions will start to pop up. And I think that as new human-centered products and services come into demand again, and all of a sudden companies need humans again, I believe humans will want to be a part of firms where they can actually, like... Explore their well-being, heal themselves. The experience of work will become a healing experience where relationships will matter, where the value proposition of work will be about getting stuff done, but also being your best self as a human. And some of this stuff sounds a little bit like, I don't know, maybe, I don't know if this sounds to you like almost too fictional, but I think I already see this in small snippets. I think... Gen Z borderline expects this. And I can't see economies and companies surviving without paying attention to this in any meaningful way.

SPEAKER_00: 23:23

Looking at it as a South African, looking at it as a South African from a small town, looking at it as a South African who grew up in a rural area and who still spends a great amount of time in that rural area where I grew up, this makes perfect sense for me. Because one, we have the language thing in South Africa. That's the first thing. Secondly, being from a small rural town, just your outlook and your approach is completely different. I mean, I get the number of people in my immediate surroundings when I'm back home. How many of them have smartphones? Nah. The phone is for when you need to call and reach me. And if you called and didn't reach me, well, then you'll call again. And you might not reach me for three days and I'm perfectly fine and I'm perfectly healthy. But you also

SPEAKER_01: 24:19

find...

SPEAKER_00: 24:22

But also you find that... I'm from Guamaglala, by the way. It's a rural area just outside of Pochepston. I mean, yeah, it's very raw. And it's easier to go walk and look for somebody at home unannounced versus phoning them because you're just going to walk across and go look for them. So now that makes perfect sense to me when you say the human connection because a lot of us and a lot of South Africans would resonate with this. And so for me, again, this is, again, because I also economically exist in Durban, which is obviously nothing like existing in Joburg or Cape Town or in, you know, the US and the biggest cities of the US and all of that. But, you know, modernity will require that you operate differently. You can't just rock up at somebody's house and say, I just wanted to check up on you. No, you call first. I mean, chances are you might not see somebody for an entire year, but you're talking to them like every week on WhatsApp. And, you know, so I can understand both worlds. But I then ask myself again, when these systems are being introduced in the workplace, Again, I'll go back to the language thing. I'm Isizulu speaking. And there are certain things that you can explain to me as much as you want in English. And I have a decent grasp of the English language. But I hear you. But there's a little teeny wee little part that just does not hear you until you tell me in Isizulu. I think of the elderly. The elderly still want the hard copy newspaper. They want that. The elderly still want to go and talk to them. They play crossword puzzles on paper, not on the phone. And look, that's nothing compared to what AI can do. And I wonder, are those people considered? Are we not creating a different kind of marginalization when we are excluding complete sectors of the economy because we want things literally at the touch of a widget not even a button at the touch of a widget we're excluding people we are yeah and that again troubles me and this is why your book makes sense to me because you talk about returning to that. You talked about returning to feeling, to touching, to connecting, to, you know, seeing, engaging the five senses in business.

SPEAKER_01: 26:43

Hey, I'm so happy you picked that up. I'm really, there's a few thoughts that are coming to me as you're speaking. Like, I don't know, sometimes I sit in meetings and sense and big institutions, and I say some things, and I think it just goes over people's heads. And I sometimes feel a little bit sad, and I think, damn, like, am I in the wrong economy? Like, I don't understand. And sometimes I leave those meetings, and people say to me, you know, we in South Africa, we've got basic things to deal with. I love the accent. And then I'm like, okay, but I don't get this. And now I realize... hearing you speak, it's a few thoughts for me that I'm not so much talking about like some open who created chat GPT. Well, he didn't create it, but he's running it. And open AI said this may not so much be a revolution as much as it is a renaissance. I don't think I'm talking about the future as much as I'm talking about going back to the basics of tribes and villages and human connection. I think maybe What we're really talking about here is getting back to the basics again as a people. And we don't have to discover what that is because we already know what that is. I think some economies are not developed so far that they've lost touch with that. Because I saw some of what you're talking about when I crossed the border at Mozambique in 2KZN. I can't remember the name of the border. Oh yeah, it's Bontadora border. And I saw some of that village life. It looked pretty pristine and nice and luxurious in a way that I think people in very high-tech cities and economies will be aspiring for in the future. In many ways, if those people are being excluded to a large degree, if they have food on the table and a place to sleep at night, maybe that exclusion is a blessing because they are then the future that we have to preserve. This is what Europe meant when they said we are not going to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into the EU like China and America because, I don't know, in some degree, I don't know what words they use, but it's like we believe in the sanctity of being human and therefore maintaining some access to ancient civilization keeps us rooted with who we are. And I spoke to another woman from Rome, and I kind of quoted her at the end of my book, because she said it so beautifully, and I think she said something along the lines of, we don't all dream of this Elon Musk-esque futuristic flying car future as maybe we dream of living in the Garden of Eden. And Maybe the future we want is like a combination of the two. Yes. Maybe it's fun to come to Joburg in 50 years' time or 30 years' time and be in sort of like an expensive flying car that takes you across the city or, you know... do any number of the fancy sort of technology oriented things that that that excite you and make life fun because those things are exciting i love technology as well you know um but at the same time you can you can drive like just an hour out and also connect with your roots you know and be with people who are still connected to the indigenous cultures indigenous cultures becoming now like a new theme of the times um you know every every every for the last like i don't know maybe 20 years or so there's been like different themes that have been emphasized in global culture in order to restore balance it was like lgbtq people who are queer gay then it was black people and black lives matter and and now we're kind of moving into indigenous cultures people who are from the land and who's livelihood was taken away from them when colonials came, whether that was in South America or in North America. This is something that, you know, truth and reconciliation is something that Canada is dealing with right now. Like very like brand new, like stuff Mandela were talking about 30 years ago, they're talking about it like 30 days ago. They are so lost because they realize they're not as sort of a pluralistic country as they had hoped to be. But I think The main thing is that in reviving or restoring or creating space for those cultures to coexist against these very technocentric futures is going to become critical. And I think, at least for me, ironically,

SPEAKER_02: 31:31

and

SPEAKER_01: 31:32

all my friends who work in technology, we are the ones that do not use technology that much. We are the ones that want to live in the forest. We are the ones that want to hide in the mountains. We want to come to the city, do a meeting, make a deal, then leave quickly. You collect your cash and you run. We don't want to be here in the smog, in the city and all of this. And yet, systemically, maybe we're also all contributing to it. So you see, this is the reckoning that we need to explore and talk about. And I

SPEAKER_02: 32:01

think, yeah,

SPEAKER_01: 32:04

we need to just ask if this is it. aren't there a variety of ways to be as a people? Yes. To know as a people. And yeah, I just, it just doesn't make sense. Some of the things that I see in South Africa just don't make sense to me because we are just a very resource rich and culture rich country. There's no need for us to consider ourselves as a poor people intellectually, emotionally and financially. You know, and that's kind of the story of the day. So, yeah, I'm trying to shift the needle on that while still, I don't know, being open to hearing what people's sort of deeply rooted beliefs are, whether true or false.

SPEAKER_00: 32:57

I think you bring this through in the book also, where you talk about strategically implementing AI and embracing the duality. Look, AI is brilliant in terms of the solutions that it brings. And you also talk about how maybe if we shifted the focus on AI freeing our time, and again, taking the anxiety out of AI, AI allowing us to live in Right. I don't view the book as a rejection of AI. I don't view the book as, you know, because somebody listening saying, oh, let's go back to, you know, the emotions of business and, you know, the values. It might come across as though it's a rejection of AI. To the contrary, it's about how do we leverage AI and strategically implement AI in various functional areas across businesses to lessen the load because people are pulling 18-hour days and that's not sustainable for family structure, for your own physical being, for your spiritual being, for your soul, it's not sustainable. And if we can, as you suggest in the book, strategically implement AI in various key sectors of the economy to take care of the basic decisions that need to be taken, the design, the feedback, customer feedback to feed into new design and all of that, it then frees up some of the human resource to go back to self. That is how I understood it. And you talk about this again when you talk about the spiritual future let's talk about that

SPEAKER_01: 34:45

so yeah look so if you look the world is just one giant village right and then you can you can organize it however you want and if like a hundred people living in a village quite some people are living in a village and they're able to like fend for each other and get food together and live in harmony then surely you can do that at scale right yeah So I think AI is a good, I would say, response to a world that's designed around everybody, I think, gunning for themselves or what we think of as a capitalist system. And to a large degree, it's going to just help us get things done that humans don't need to do. And that is typically positioned as a negative affair, but I do think it pushes smart people to think about what comes next and how to create jobs that are more meaningful. But in that gap between machines taking our jobs and people getting new jobs, well, you're going to have a lot of different experiences, right? You'll have some people who... don't have any money because they don't have a job and they won't have a job for a long time life will be very difficult for them you may have um middle class people who uh maybe have you know a decent undergrad education and they can upskill and they can find themselves in a new role or in a variety of what we can think of as um they call them now um what's the word fractional roles where you drop in and you do something like one day a week at a different firm so you might you might for example find that your entire job is reduced to strategy because everything tactical is taken care of by ai and so you could do strategy one day a week at five different firms based on a specific skill set that you have and that now becomes also a better use of your time or you find people who have found ways to not have to work and now you They basically have increasingly more free time and they can focus on things that really matter to them. What you really hope will happen is that those people will then create space or opportunity or time for other people to level up with them. And so there are a variety of ways it can unfold, but it is largely due to the consciousness of humans. What degree are humans willing to help each other? And I think that is the part that's uncertain. I think it would unfold in different ways in different countries. I think some countries will have the resources and the mindset to create what you think of as these universal basic incomes. And that means as AI starts to take up a decent part of jobs in the economy, then for every job that is taken, perhaps a 10 or a 20 or a 30% tax is applied against that job was replaced. that was replaced and then that money that typically that 30% of that salary that would have gone to a person will now go to the government and then otherwise be used to distribute throughout the rest of the economy to people who have lost their jobs. Almost like a social welfare but for every person. And so the idea of that would mean that everybody has a basic pay and they don't have to turn up to work or have to look for work in a very urgent way. Then there's another view which is what we think of as the abundant economy and that is that technology will make things increasingly cheaper over time. If you have machines that are highly optimized to pull resources out of the ground and to produce goods and service the goods in factories and to distribute them efficiently and no humans are part of that value chain whatsoever, then goods become increasingly cheaper. Maybe if something costed$10 because there were humans involved in putting the units together and shipping them and producing them and mining them and now it's only machines, then that unit becomes$1. And so what that might mean is that basic things that we need like housing and cars and hospitals become cheaper. All that machinery becomes cheaper, tools become cheaper and therefore everybody can start to have their basics. So I think you then start moving towards an economy where If everybody has a house and everybody has food and everybody has healthcare, then you basically have what we can think of as, you know, a baseline comfortable life for everyone in the economy. And then you're now forced to rethink how the economy is designed when people don't have to work anymore. And maybe that's when thoughts start to shift. But yeah, I guess... human psychology, fear, doubt, desire, all of the things that make us human will also determine how and in which way and to what degree any or all of the ideas I've just said will unfold. And I think it will look different in every city. It will look different in every country. It will be based on the government and its willingness to ease regulations. It will be based on businesses. It will be based on entrepreneurs and their willingness to share. And I think we will see it unfolding in a variety of ways over the next 10, 20, 30 years. And I suppose as a global society, we will all just glean ideas from each other to figure out, you know, how to make which decision when and how to move forward with all of this.

SPEAKER_00: 40:26

Just picking on what you've said, picking up on what you've said, let's look at something that's really practical, like 3D printing of houses. look at south africa look at the shortage in urban areas for proper decent housing and if you look at the cost also of housing and if you look at yeah look at the various perspectives on that and if you think how that could be used to solve the housing crisis in in urban areas because I think of the floods that we had in KZN, was it two years ago? And if you think if people had had proper structured adequate housing and the length that AI could go towards solving that but we tend to look at it from how it would obliterate industries versus how it could create other industries and as you say then human resources could be leveraged to focus on other things and I'll talk about that just now because you outline it so beautifully in your book and on an individual level we look at this is a skill that I've honed over X number of years throughout the span of my career and I will now be dispensable because of AI but you bring it in so nicely page 118 and 119 where you talk about how AI will affect my role and you take it from tasks to machine involvement to human involvement and you essentially break it down into how a human is still needed human at some point it's just the degree of involvement and I love how you talked about fractional work because if your degree of involvement is not as high in this organisation imagine the wealth of experience that you are then able to get because you are now moving between organisations and different industries rendering the same skill but in different contexts because you are now not tied down with the low order functions of things that need to be done but you also bring it in so nicely in page 124 And I'll go to the very last one, surgery, autonomous robotic surgeries. I love this because when we talk about healthcare and we talk about how overloaded the healthcare system is, especially in South Africa, it's very... Often that you find, you know, the complaints about how this wasn't picked up and this wasn't picked up and it wasn't picked up because there wasn't time. I'm not justifying this, but there wasn't time and there weren't enough resources to make sure that every person gets individualized care. And you say robotic systems could take over routine surgeries, allowing for faster and safer procedures. Surgeons would focus on complex cases and emotional care, guiding patients before and after surgery. This could make healthcare more efficient and accessible. Right. Which then shifts the new responsibility. Again, we're not eliminating the human. We're shifting the focus of the human. Managing complex surgical cases, handling patient relationships and making critical decisions during unforeseen events. Because when somebody comes, let's go back to the cancer example. When somebody comes and they've been diagnosed with whatever form of cancer. Yes, you're dealing with the cancer. Yes, you're dealing with the treatment process. Yes, you are dealing with all of the clinical issues related to their cancer diagnosis. But you're also dealing with the scared mother. Whether the mother is 60 and this is their 40-year-old son or whether the mother is 40 and this is their 8-year-old son or daughter, you're dealing with this person's children. You're dealing with this person's close friends. You're dealing with their fears. And it often is not dealt with simply because there isn't enough of the human to go around after doing the clinical stuff. And if we just reroute it and we shift the focus of the human to focus on the more human stuff, the emotional evolution that you talked about in the earlier part of the book.

SPEAKER_01: 44:47

Yeah, I think, well, I think the same would be true. Like, you know, I think across every industry, it's just like, as you get to like complex edge cases, you need more human assistance and wherever you did not need um the human you have time saved and so when we say that we need where we focus on more human tasks i don't think people i don't think the average person knows what that means i think we just throw that sentence around um even for me you know i think a lot around these thoughts of what it means to be human you know philosophically um from anthropology and sociology like what is what does human society mean and i think uh Yeah, I think a lot of people, like, I mean, if you do show up at a hospital and you're getting this treatment, it also turns out that after somebody has done chemo or radiation, after the cancer has disappeared, a large percentage of people's tumors actually return. Because has been no like proper post care a person hasn't been helped afterwards around how to manage themselves and how to possibly deal with the what we can think of as the subconscious emotional traumatic impact of of uh i'm sorry on the body as it is related to cancer So you have all these tough emotions or things that you have not dealt with in your body that led to this. We now surgically removed it because it was an emergency. However, it does not prevent you from not getting it again. And so these are like the sort of, I would say, deeper, more holistic approaches to healthcare that could be taken care of. The second thing is, if you turn up to a hospital, you find that most people... Generally, you just need to talk about what they're feeling

SPEAKER_00: 46:44

and what they're

SPEAKER_01: 46:45

thinking versus being like diagnosed on the spot because, you know, you now become like a widget on an assembly line to a doctor. If he's done with you in 10 minutes, then within an hour he can see, you know, six people. That's not healthcare. I think people, when a five-year-old says, when you ask a five-year-old, what do you want to be? And they say, oh, no, mommy, I want to be a doctor. Why? Because I want to help people. That's fundamentally why people really want to become healthcare practitioners. You want to help people. So if that's the foundation, then you have to ask yourself, what does it mean to help? Of course, You now need to think about that deeply because when you go to, you know, this is another big issue, right? What we're learning at school. And I'm not pulling down any systems because we're all standing on the shoulders of giants, right? We only know what we know because we can criticize where we came from. And we wouldn't be able to get to this place without that. But at the same time, I think when you go to medical school, you're not learning these things. You're being pressured. You're being pushed. I can't understand how a hospital environment, there's a monk called Thich Nhat Hanh and he talks about how healthcare practitioners could learn to create more space to connect and offload their emotions and to heal within themselves. Because if they do that, then there's a trickle effect to the patients. And the patients are more easily healed. And I think the same is true in schools. How can a school be good if the teachers are so stressed out all the time trying to deliver curriculum at this super fast pace? Stuff that could possibly be done by AI or doesn't have to be there at all in the first place. So that as a teacher, you can now spend time with the child and actually just talk to the child. How are you? How was your day? What are you feeling? This is why our society is training on people that are sort of like borderline on edge all the time. Because no one ever asked you how you're feeling or looked you in your eyes and said, are you okay? You know, everything's always in a rush from the time that you leave your mother's womb. Everything's just rush, rush, rush, rush, rush. So, People don't make space for this type of stuff. They don't make space. You can't just hope to have sanctity in your life by spending an hour at church on a Sunday. I mean, that is the least you can do. Or synagogue, or mosque on Friday, or whatever it is. But I think what I want people to see is that What you think of as a more reflective life, as a spiritual life, as a human-oriented life probably needs to be something that becomes more the thread of your everyday life for you to think about that more deeply. Because in that not only lies a more peaceful, joyful life, but I also believe abundant economic opportunity. And That's not always obvious to an anxious society. But just stop and breathe and close your eyes. I think you'll find there are a lot more solutions to whatever you're trying to solve than what you see at the surface.

SPEAKER_00: 49:59

And you give us those basics. Look, you take it, and this is again what I enjoyed about the book. You take it from a human level And then you take it to an organizational level. And then you integrate the human with the organization from an AI point of view. And then you bring it back down again just to the simple things about how to use the very basics of AI. Again, it helps you then realize how it is something that is helpful. I

SPEAKER_01: 50:27

don't know if you've heard of this app, but it helps you to read every book that you want like within five minutes. But the truth is you can only benefit from those summaries if you have a wide base of knowledge. You need to have a general understanding of how the world works to benefit from summaries. And I think ChatGPT is equally a tool that gives you summaries on things, like right at your fingertips. But the wider your base of knowledge, like the more you're actually reading deeply on things outside of technology and all the beautiful books that exist in the world, I would say that the further the degree to which you can actually benefit from ChatGPT. And so I don't think it's something that kind of replaces... the requirement to acquire knowledge or to learn or to develop your mind. Because as far as you can do that is as far as you can actually benefit from it. this tool. And I think that puts us sort of at a really exciting place right now.

SPEAKER_00: 51:23

Samir has a rare ability to see past conventional wisdom to unwrap new perspectives and answers. That's a quote from John Foster Pedley, who's the Dean of the Henley Business School, Africa. I'm reading from the cover of your book. Thank you so much, Samir, for this book, Taking the Anxiety Out of AI, Humans, Economies and Jobs in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Thank you for taking your time and sharing your insights with us. And thank you for joining us for another episode of the podcast. Remember, you can like, rate and share this podcast from the channel you're listening on.