This week Steve and Cam debate Apple Intelligence – the biggest flop ever? Or the the beginning of huge things for AI? Also – Cam talks about his timeline for the next five years, and how the world’s economy is going to require complete re-engineering.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Futuristic 26
[00:00:00] Cameron: Testing, testing, loop back, yeah, I think everything’s running. Welcome, welcome back to The Futuristic. Uh, this is, um, I’m not sure what episode this is, cause I haven’t, do you know what episode this is? 26 says Steve, thank you Steve. Uh, it’s been a few weeks between episodes, Steve, because we were talking like, hey, there’s not much happening, not much going on, then all of a sudden, everything’s happening, everything’s going on.
[00:00:37] Cameron: Uh, Apple, Apple. This week, a couple of days ago, did their WWDC event where they announced
[00:00:45] Cameron: Dun, dun, dun, dun, Apple Intelligence.
[00:00:51] Steve: And I’m glad they called it that, Cameron. I’m glad they called it that because there was nothing artificial about it, my friend. There was a few little just maneuverings. And I feel like there’s a big heated discussion on the relative merits of Apple intelligence because let me tell you, that’s all it was, man.
[00:01:08] Steve: It was deck chairs inside the Apple ecosystem.
[00:01:13] Cameron: Steve sent me a text basically saying
[00:01:15] Cameron: he thought it was a bunch of bullshit. And I was like, Oh, I disagree, man. I think it’s huge. So we had to do a show, but we were just talking off air
[00:01:21] Cameron: about,
[00:01:22] Steve: glad, I’m glad that we disagree because no one wants to tune into the Mutual
[00:01:26] Steve: Agreement Society. How boring is
[00:01:27] Steve: that
[00:01:28] Cameron: Well, we normally, we normally agree. Um, I, I wanted to have my QAV Kynaston on because he and I had a debate on at the end of our QAV show this week for about an hour about AI. He’s still very cynical and skeptical that AI is gonna have any impact on the world. And, uh, I was like, dude, I need to get you on with Steve and we can have this debate.
[00:01:51] Cameron: Cause I respect Tony. He’s one of the smartest guys I know. One of the most successful guys I know. And so I respect anything he has to say, but I think he’s missing the point on AI. But anyway, um, we were off air, you and I were talking about David Lee Roth, the wisdom of David Lee Roth, and then you brought up Motley Crue, which brings us back to Apple, because the opening of the WWDC, Craig Federighi and his team, uh, Paratrooping, skydiving out of an Apple plane to the Motley Crue track Kickstart My Heart.
[00:02:30] Cameron: I thought it was all quite funny. Frederique pulling on his helmet that was basically a version of his perfectly coiffed silver hair. Jumping out, uh, and then they, they land and Tim Cook’s waiting for them, standing on the
[00:02:46] Cameron: roof of, uh, the Apple headquarters at number one loot. Um,
[00:02:53] Steve: yeah, I’m not jumping out. I’ll just stand here,
[00:02:56] Steve: kids. Well,
[00:02:58] Cameron: Uh, so the first hour of the two hour show, I was sort of going, when are they going to talk about AI, because they’re talking about, All of the updates to iOS and Apple, the watchOS and the macOS, no mention of the AI stuff, and I’m like, come on, we know that the OS stuff, the AI stuff is coming, we know that it’s going to impact all of these things, why aren’t you leading with that?
[00:03:26] Cameron: They’re trying to do a Steve Jobs one more thing. AI. It should have been Woven into the whole presentation, I thought. My complaint was, stop wasting my time talking about all of the updates to the OS if you’re not talking about the thing that actually we all came here for, which is AI. But anyway, that was my biggest complaint about the whole thing.
[00:03:54] Cameron: I don’t really care about being able to change the color of the widgets in the iOS, and I don’t really care about emojis, and I don’t really care about Being able to time text
[00:04:08] Cameron: messages. I don’t really care about anything that they had to talk about, quite honestly, until it got to the AI.
[00:04:14] Steve: it seems like, it seems like you agree with me because everything
[00:04:18] Steve: you’ve mentioned, you don’t care about, which is 99 percent of what was announced. There was, there was nothing, nothing. It was one out of 10. It was a massive flop, it was a super fail, and the fact that their share price has gone up 10 percent since
[00:04:34] Steve: then is astounding me.
[00:04:37] Steve: But no, no, it doesn’t prove me wrong, because we know that in the short term,
[00:04:41] Steve: the share market doesn’t know what it’s talking about, but in the long term it does. It’s a voting machine, and it just proves that the world are morons. That’s all that proves, and that fund managers don’t understand AI.
[00:04:51] Cameron: I said, Tony should have been on this and here you are quoting Benjamin Graham, Tony’s, uh, God. Um, in the short term.
[00:05:00] Cameron: It’s, uh, no, in the short term it’s a voting machine, in the long
[00:05:03] Cameron: term it’s a weighing machine.
[00:05:05] Steve: machine, exactly.
[00:05:06] Cameron: Benjamin Graham’s,
[00:05:07] Steve: to say, Mr. Benji Graham, Intelligent Investor. Well, they had a 10 percent um, upside on a 3. 2 trillion market cap, which is 300 billion in value, and it turns out that the current market valuation of OpenAI, I think, is 98 billion. Tell me how, What Apple announced, this is the irrationality of markets.
[00:05:28] Steve: Tell me how what Apple announced is worse three times of what OpenAI is.
[00:05:33] Cameron: Okay,
[00:05:34] Steve: is, this is where people fail to get
[00:05:36] Steve: Yeah,
[00:05:37] Cameron: No, this is where, in all due respect, cause you know I love you and I respect
[00:05:42] Steve: you know what all due respect means? Hey dickface.
[00:05:45] Cameron: you
[00:05:47] Steve: all due respect,
[00:05:49] Steve: I’m really saying hey dickface.
[00:05:52] Cameron: should take that,
[00:05:53] Cameron: um, uh, gracefully because I don’t respect many, I don’t respect many people. And
[00:06:00] Steve: you don’t respect anyone, and I’m pretty
[00:06:01] Steve: suspicious you
[00:06:02] Cameron: for,
[00:06:02] Steve: respect me, which is fine. The
[00:06:04] Steve: longer some
[00:06:05] Cameron: For me to say that, for me to say that, it means a lot,
[00:06:10] Steve: Thank you. Thank
[00:06:11] Steve: you, mate.
[00:06:12] Cameron: Um, no, look, Apple Um, of, uh, Apple’s reach is enormous. The fact that Apple are now putting AI in, and they’ve always had machine learning. I don’t know if you saw, um, Tim Cook’s interview on, um, Marcus’s podcast. But, you know, they were talking about the fact is Apple will say, look, they’ve always been using AI. There’s AI in your watch, fall rec, you know, when it knows that you’ve fall alerts, the way it does it, they got machine learning and AI has been part of Apple’s thing for a long time, but they haven’t talked about it as AI since the whole LLM generative AI thing took off.
[00:06:55] Cameron: And that’s what we’ve been waiting for is them to say, Hey, here’s how we’re going to use this kind of AI. in our devices. There’s how many iPhones out there? One and a half billion iPhones that people have got. Here’s the thing from my perspective. What the, the, the way that they have announced they’re deploying Apple intelligence.
[00:07:19] Cameron: Okay. So for people who didn’t watch it, there were two parts of the AI thing in, in the keynote. Apple, uh, building AI. And again, to be clear, we’re talking about the sort of LLM based approach to AI, language based AI. People call it generative AI still. And, and I think that’s, I was thinking about this, listening to Tim Cook this morning, last night.
[00:07:46] Cameron: I, I, I don’t like the term generative AI because to me, it’s not about the generative component of it, even though that is a lot of what Apple’s doing. It’s not the fact that it’s generative that I think is important. It’s the fact that it understands language.
[00:08:03] Cameron: That, we need a better term than generative AI.
[00:08:06] Cameron: I
[00:08:07] Steve: and I agree and, and, and I use this when I do my keynotes on stage, you know, the phrase that I use is language is the fabric of all human knowledge because it, it crosses the chasm from mass to engineering, to marketing, to legal. If you understand language, you can create context, which ends up in schematics, visuals, every type of thing.
[00:08:27] Steve: And, and it turns out that the training mechanisms when they train the databases. On what the visuals are. Yes, it looks for patterns, but it’s the words underneath the patterns that helps the machine understand that that’s a palm tree, because it’s seen that described, you know, millions and billions of times, and then it knows what that pattern is and it matches the pattern to the word, and that’s actually all language based.
[00:08:47] Steve: And a lot of people miss that.
[00:08:48] Cameron: don’t know who I got it from, whether it was either Kurzweil or Wolfram a year or so ago, but the language user interface, linguistic user interface, I think is, is more
[00:08:58] Cameron: important than the generative aspect. But anyway, so just to be clear, that’s what the, this is what
[00:09:03] Cameron: Apple, so the Apple intelligence,
[00:09:05] Steve: GUI to Louie is, is the thing. Graphical User Interface to language, GUI to Louie. No, it is Language User Interface. I use that on stage as well. It always gets a laugh because it rhymes and everything that rhymes is 10
[00:09:15] Steve: percent better. I’ve always said that.
[00:09:20] Cameron: Yeah, you are a marketing guy. You came out of marketing and yeah, you know, you’re, you’re
[00:09:25] Steve: Still there.
[00:09:25] Cameron: rhymes, it’s 10 percent better. That’s perfect. Gooey DeLooey. So the Looey aspect of it. So There’s two components of, of, of what they talk. The first is Apple intelligence. So this is their own implementation that’s on device to a large extent, and it will enable you to use language to do a lot of the basic stuff that people who use LLMs already do with it.
[00:09:54] Cameron: Um, low, low level stuff. Write me an email, generate me a picture, create, you know, they were big into create your own emojis and all that kind of stuff. They didn’t say create your own icons, which I found interesting because one of the things I’ve been doing a lot lately, you know, I use iOS shortcuts a lot, increasingly because now I can write code thanks to GPT and I can use it to do, you know, relatively sophisticated things with iOS shortcuts.
[00:10:24] Cameron: Then. If you create a shortcut in iOS and you want to save it to your desktop to run as an app, they don’t let you, they’ve got a bunch of pre built icons that you can use and none of them are very descriptive. So what I’ll do is I’ll go into GPT and I’ll say create me an icon for an iOS shortcut for Adding notes to my Kung Fu note.
[00:10:50] Cameron: And it’ll create a little icon for me that says Kung Fu notes with a little picture of a guy doing Kung Fu that I can then save as the icon. So I have custom built, custom designed icons for all these shortcuts now, but they didn’t, they should have
[00:11:03] Cameron: got me involved. I would have said, this is the, this
[00:11:06] Cameron: is the way you can customize iPhone now.
[00:11:09] Cameron: Anyway,
[00:11:10] Steve: stop. Just really quickly. You’ve given me an idea. I’m gonna see if GPT this afternoon can create me an 80s style 8 bit video game that kind of is a mashup of some of my favorite karate games. So that’s, I’m not getting any work done this
[00:11:23] Steve: afternoon and it’s
[00:11:24] Cameron: that is work. No, that is work. That’s, that’s, you know, that’s where, that’s where the rubber meets the road. You may not get paid for it, but it’s still work. Um, so Apple Intelligence on device creating emails and texts and, and images and all that kind of stuff. On device, it’s only going to be available if you have a 15, uh, an iPhone 15 or later, an iPhone 15 Pro or later.
[00:11:53] Cameron: You’ve got to have the silicon chips, you’ve got to have the latest Apple chips, same with the iPads and the Macs, uh, the MacBooks. You’ve got to have a fairly recent one that’s running their chips, because it’s all running, uh, Then there is a second aspect to Apple Intelligence, which they’re calling Private Cloud Computing.
[00:12:11] Cameron: If you need to do something that can’t be handled by the chip on device, and they made a big deal out of that because they’re saying it’s all about security, it’s all about confidentiality of your data. They’re really driving that whole aspect home. If you want to still do it in that contained privacy security, uh, system, but it needs cloud computing power, it, the phone, the device, the iPad, the Mac will reach out to this Apple thing they’re calling PCC, private cloud computing, still completely private.
[00:12:48] Cameron: All of your data is locked in. Down, secured, encrypted, but it’s in Apple’s server farm, basically. So that’s part one. It’s fairly boring implementation of it, but. It’s going to be available on all of your Apple devices, if you have a relatively modern device, and, um, it’s going to be secure. The second component of what they talked about was integrating OpenAI, ChatGPT into Siri.
[00:13:19] Cameron: And by the way, all of that’s driven by Siri as well. So, hey Siri, Make me a picture. Hey Siri.
[00:13:26] Cameron: Sorry, my phone is like
[00:13:29] Steve: Look, same, see what you did, see what you did, creating
[00:13:35] Steve: complexity,
[00:13:36] Cameron: Our phones just went nuts. Um, all integrated. They’re not rebranding Siri. It’s all happening in Siri. But then you can say, Hey Siri, uh, show me what movies are showing at my local cinema. And It will say, would you like me to use? Yeah,
[00:13:52] Cameron: sorry. My phone, even though I put it on airplane
[00:13:54] Cameron: mode, how do you stop it?
[00:13:56] Cameron: Do you have to like turn it literally off to
[00:13:59] Steve: put it in the next room, put it in the lock box,
[00:14:02] Steve: Cameron, lock
[00:14:03] Cameron: Oh, I’m turning it, turning it completely off. Yeah. Okay. I need to turn you off. Uh, it will say, do you want me to use ChatGPT for that? And you, or you have to apparently say yes every time, and then it will use ChatGPT to handle your thing.
[00:14:22] Cameron: Now, here’s why this is massive. There are. Uh, the vast majority. I mean, I don’t know how many people are using ChatGPT on a daily basis now, but you know, let’s say it’s a hundred, maybe 200 million people, um, that have used it at all. I don’t know how many use it on a daily basis, probably a lot less than that. Um, within the next year or so, you’re going to have all of Apple’s user base, billion plus people, whether they know it or not, using ChatGPT. AI on their phones to do stuff. It’s going to, it’s, it’s a massive, we’re going to look back. Five years from now and say, this is when it all changed. This is when AI, the, the, the daily use of AI went from early adopters, which is the people that are using ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini or whatever now, still a lot of fucking people, but it’s still early adopters, right?
[00:15:21] Cameron: To
[00:15:22] Cameron: everyone who has an iPhone or iPad or a Mac will be using AI. And the implementation that they’re doing is boring. It’s low level, it’s boring, but it, it’s the beginnings of great things, again to quote David Lee Roth, The
[00:15:40] Cameron: beginnings of great things cannot be seen with the naked eye. That’s from Skyscraper, 19,
[00:15:48] Cameron: Skyscraper, 1988,
[00:15:51] Steve: I’m going to call 86, 88 could be, but let’s just make a promise to
[00:15:56] Steve: ourselves.
[00:15:57] Cameron: solo album.
[00:15:59] Steve: Great. And let’s make a promise to our listeners. That we try and mention David Lee Roth in every episode going forward, because that’s the kind of podcast I want to
[00:16:07] Steve: be involved in.
[00:16:08] Cameron: Dude, David Lee Roth changed my life. When I was 12 or 13 and I discovered Van Halen for the first time and I saw David Lee Roth, I was like, yeah, that’s who I want to be. That’s, that was my, my first role model in
[00:16:24] Cameron: life. Was, uh, David Lee Roth.
[00:16:30] Steve: Now, I’m ready to tee off on quite a few of these things that you’ve
[00:16:34] Steve: mentioned. And the first one I will say, I totally get your proposition of why this matters. I get the bigness of it, because what you’re really talking about is a market dynamic rather than a technological dynamic. And I agree with you entirely on
[00:16:52] Cameron: step change in terms of market access.
[00:16:55] Steve: for consumers. It’s actually not a step change. at all in technology. And it’s not even a step up to where the steps are up to. Like they’re not even if it’s a staircase, they, they went onto step number two of the 10 steps on the staircase. So in terms of technological innovation, any, not useful, anything that’s innovative, you know, being a fast follow who come back with a better product, it’s none of those things in my view, but I totally get your sentiment.
[00:17:22] Steve: On this is an introduction to a wider marketplace of the capabilities of AI, which in many ways helps others understand why there’s a bit of a boom now with everything from NVIDIA to AI being the topic du jour in business. So I get that. I get that. I was more thinking about the machinations of what they launched and how underwhelming they were, but the bundling of these and handing them over to, you know, whatever it is, 1.
[00:17:49] Steve: owners or what have you. I get the gravity of that.
[00:17:52] Cameron: And, you know, Siri, as they pointed out in WWDC DC, Siri’s been around for 13 years now, came out 2011, just before Steve died. And we all know, I mean, it’s been a running meme joke for many, many years, how terrible Siri has been. I still use it, as you know, all day.
[00:18:13] Steve: I still use
[00:18:14] Steve: it.
[00:18:14] Cameron: Every day, but it has been stuck as a technology for many, many, it has had incremental improvements, but pretty much it’s been a massive disappointment, uh, to me and for most of us for many, many years.
[00:18:29] Cameron: And there’s been lots of sort of reasons and explanations from Apple over the years about why You know, the code base was terrible. It was hard to upgrade. It was hard to maintain. Apple have finally gone. I don’t know how they’re doing it. They didn’t really explain
[00:18:45] Cameron: it. I haven’t heard Tim talk about it, um, in any of the post WWDC interviews either, but somehow
[00:18:52] Steve: You’re talking about Tim Apple because I just love it. I just love it when, when Trump said, we got to Tim here, Tim Apple,
[00:18:59] Cameron: Tim Apple,
[00:19:01] Cameron: Tim
[00:19:01] Steve: that was the greatest moment in culture, Tim Apple,
[00:19:04] Cameron: Trump is a branding genius. He’s a marketing genius. Oh, by the way, did you see, there was an article I read in The Fin last week, one of the original producers of The Apprentice? has just started
[00:19:18] Cameron: talking publicly about making The Apprentice because his NDA has expired
[00:19:24] Steve: please send me that.
[00:19:26] Cameron: oh, it’s gold man.
[00:19:27] Cameron: Like him talking about that first season of The Apprentice and what they went through. Apparently the original idea was they were going to have a different billionaire each season to be the host of The Apprentice. They, you know, they wanted to get Spielberg and Katzenberg and all the other bergs. Um, And
[00:19:49] Steve: on fire
[00:19:50] Steve: today mate,
[00:19:50] Cameron: no one
[00:19:51] Cameron: else. I just did two hours of the Renaissance talking about the foundations of anti Semitism, man. It was great.
[00:19:57] Cameron: I’m on fire. About Christians and the first crusade and roasting babies on spits and it’s been fun.
[00:20:04] Cameron: Um, yeah. But, um, none of the other billionaires would do it. No, and everyone else was like, no, actually we have real businesses that we need to run.
[00:20:13] Cameron: We have real jobs. We’ve got things to do. More fool them because Trump used it to become president. Um, anywho, was I going with this? Tim Apple. Yes. They haven’t talked about it, but they’ve had to, they’re having to rewrite Siri from the ground up, I imagine.
[00:20:31] Steve: even, you can call it Siri, it’s just ground
[00:20:33] Steve: zero.
[00:20:34] Cameron: well, but no, but it, it, you know, it has to be Siri. But it also has to now, they have to increase Siri’s intelligence by a thousand and they’re integrating it into all of their apps. You’ll be, you know, it’s, again, it’s early days, but within a year, within two years, once they have rewritten the code base that enables all of this across all of their devices and the OS, we finally get to that point that we’ve all, you know, when I say we, you and me, and people like us, early adopters, nerds, have been talking about where you can say, hey, Phone, hey Siri, um, find me this and integrate it into that and, you know, tell Steve that I, you know, you know, find the next available time in my calendar and Steve’s calendar when we can get together and do an episode.
[00:21:26] Cameron: And by the way, go through my notes and look at all of the things that I’ve saved in the Futuristic folder of the last week and create a document and send it to Steve and, you know, where you just. Talk to your devices and it does all of the shit. You don’t have to go in there and fucking tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.
[00:21:44] Cameron: Where you just tell your device what you want to do and it does it for you because it has inherent intelligence
[00:21:50] Cameron: enough to do these things in its own iOS, its own ecosystem to integrate everything. This is, this is the beginnings of that. It’s huge.
[00:22:02] Steve: Okay. So It’s not the beginning of that. What you want is, is huge.
[00:22:08] Steve: but this is not the beginning of that for a whole lot of reasons. All
[00:22:10] Steve: right. It’s
[00:22:11] Cameron: Why? How do you, how, why?
[00:22:13] Steve: this? This is just some, this is just a bit of packaging and wrapping because none of that, none of what you described is possible.
[00:22:22] Steve: So it’s not the beginning of it because none of it’s possible. How can it be the beginning of it if none of this that you’ve just spoken about is possible based on what they’ve announced? A couple of tiny little, you can ask this app to do
[00:22:34] Steve: that. I mean,
[00:22:35] Cameron: because what they announced is indicating that they are now rewriting
[00:22:42] Steve: it, but they haven’t
[00:22:43] Steve: got it. It’s
[00:22:43] Steve: not there. That’s like saying we’re going
[00:22:45] Cameron: yeah, but they are gonna do it.
[00:22:46] Cameron: I mean, this is Apple, they’re not fucking
[00:22:48] Steve: Well, then next year, well, next year when it comes, I’ll be excited and I’ll be as excited
[00:22:53] Steve: as you are, but this is not it.
[00:22:56] Steve: So,
[00:22:56] Cameron: is not it. but this is, this is the, the,
[00:22:59] Steve: on, on, on,
[00:23:00] Cameron: but this
[00:23:01] Steve: that will be.
[00:23:02] Steve: And that would be the most important technology for a human ever invented.
[00:23:07] Steve: If we have exactly what you’ve mentioned, two things.
[00:23:10] Steve: First one is ChatGPT like capabilities. And I’m going to use it because it’s still, I think, better than all the others which I’ve been
[00:23:19] Steve: testing. It’s
[00:23:21] Cameron: said that in his interview with Marcus Brownlee.
[00:23:24] Steve: it really better than all of them by a long
[00:23:27] Steve: shot.
[00:23:27] Cameron: that’s the best, yes.
[00:23:29] Steve: Uh, so ChatGPT like three things. There’s three parts to the equation. First one is ChatGPT like capabilities, which obviously doesn’t have because it has to refer to ChatGPT whenever it can’t do something.
[00:23:41] Steve: The second one is agent like capabilities, which is what you said. Cause at the moment, even when you go into ChatGPT, we’ve got to do all those things in a singular fashion. You can’t get it to do a number of things and coordinate, you know, a little bit like the God Mode and AgentGPT, and everyone’s starting to talk a lot about agents and how they’re going to come together.
[00:24:00] Steve: I think Apple is. The best place to do an agent like service and Siri could be at that concierge, which goes through all of your things. And the other one is having an ecosystem of a personal database of your photos, knowledge, people, communications, data, all of that. If it pulls those three things together, that is Star Trek mode.
[00:24:20] Steve: You know, that is, You know, STM, that’s Star Trek mode, if we can get that. And AI with all of those capabilities like ChatGPT, agent like integration where Siri becomes your agent, and then a walled ecosystem where you have Private database information that’s relevant to you and those you’re connected with, as well as access to wider web information and being able to go in and out of your ecosystem with those privacy, uh, barriers.
[00:24:45] Steve: That is absolute utopia. And I would be even more excited than you if that was what we have, but we don’t have that in my
[00:24:52] Steve: humble opinion
[00:24:53] Cameron: No, we don’t have that, but for the last 18 months, since GPT dropped 3. 5, uh, end of 2022,
[00:25:03] Cameron: you and me and, and, and people like us have been prognosticating about what the future was going to look like when we had Star Trek, um, tech. And, but it w up until this week. Apple has never indicated that they were on board to build that.
[00:25:23] Cameron: We all assumed, I think. That Apple and Microsoft and Google and Facebook behind the scenes were all going to be playing around getting us there. They had the same vision, but it hadn’t been confirmed. You know, Apple was doing their secret car and their Vision Pro and fucking around the edges with all of this kind of nice toys.
[00:25:50] Cameron: This week, Apple went, Tim Apple, stood up and said, effectively, Yes, we are on board with your vision. We, we, it’s baby steps, but it is going to, The fucking, the wheels are turning now. We have,
[00:26:16] Steve: And I think on, on, on the Apple AI wagon, it’s a wagon, right? And the Apple AI wagon has got some new bumper bars. It’s got a nice new fluffy steering hubcaps, but I think, I think, and I hope,
[00:26:30] Cameron: off the rear vision mirror.
[00:26:31] Steve: Puffy
[00:26:31] Steve: Dice,
[00:26:32] Cameron: Hey,
[00:26:32] Cameron: I’m
[00:26:33] Steve: a little box out front, and they put some Chrome, they put some Chrome
[00:26:36] Steve: on the
[00:26:37] Cameron: decals, some
[00:26:38] Steve: sure
[00:26:38] Cameron: Fiery, flamey decals. Peace.
[00:26:41] Steve: They have, they’ve tinted the windows
[00:26:43] Steve: and let’s hope Eddie Murphy’s not around to put some bananas in the tailpipe because they’re going to fall from the banana in the tailpipe, man, right? And then I actually think What they’ve done is they’ve, they’ve pimped the wagon, the AI wagon a little bit, and I think while this is doing this in concert, they’re building what we’re speaking about.
[00:27:02] Steve: And I actually think they’re gonna come next year with all of this. But I think this is a, yeah, we’re on board. Here’s some, uh, jazz hands, jazz hands to get us through to next year. That’s what I think, and I hope, because I actually want them to come back with what they’ve always done, which is a, and by the way, here’s how you do it.
[00:27:23] Cameron: look, uh, you know, there this interesting, um, vision of Apple that I hear talked about online and you’ve indicated this in the past too, Um, Apple don’t innovate, they take innovation and they just make it better than everyone else and they do the best implementation of it. You know, you’ve said before the iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone, um, obviously Airpods weren’t the first Bluetooth headphones, the Apple Watch wasn’t the first digital watch, all of these things are true, um, the iPad wasn’t the first tablet, Um, Apple just came along and.
[00:28:14] Cameron: Made the best version. I mean, debatable, obviously, but I think, generally speaking, most people will agree that Apple made the best or one of the best implementations. They took stuff that was already existing and said, hold my beer, we’re going to do this properly. Let me show you what this looks like if you actually implement this well. There’s no reason, I mean, okay, a lot of that stuff was done during Steve’s
[00:28:46] Cameron: day. I mean, the watch, not. Obviously, the AirPods, not. And I think they’ve done well with those. I
[00:28:53] Cameron: mean, I
[00:28:53] Steve: two really great products. Two really, really good
[00:28:56] Steve: products.
[00:28:57] Cameron: love my watch, I love my AirPods. Um,
[00:29:00] Steve: love my AirPods. I don’t use my watch much, but I’ve got one and I just never really I just use it for
[00:29:04] Steve: sport when I’m doing surfing or running or whatever.
[00:29:08] Cameron: Um, I, I believe that Apple will do great things with AI because that’s what Apple does, that’s what the culture of Apple does. Say what you want about Tim Apple, but I think the culture there is still all about,
[00:29:23] Cameron: you know, taking ideas and doing the best implementation of them. Um, I, you know, it wasn’t hugely
[00:29:31] Cameron: innovative in terms of cool shit that you can do, but
[00:29:35] Cameron: it’s,
[00:29:37] Steve: I can’t even think, I didn’t see one.
[00:29:38] Steve: I would love to know one, there’s none, there’s zero. It’s actually, it’s not even a one out of ten, I was too generous, it’s a zero out of
[00:29:45] Steve: ten.
[00:29:46] Cameron: but it’s going to enable a billion people who don’t use AI every day today, a year from now, assuming they have a
[00:29:57] Cameron: relatively new phone, uh, will be using AI.
[00:30:02] Cameron: Every
[00:30:03] Steve: here’s the impact I actually think it’ll have on society based on what you’ve just said. I actually think it’s going to change the context of work. Even quicker than ChatGPT has, because I think you’re going to get people who are not necessarily office bound, who have an iPhone, starting to use it far more frequently.
[00:30:22] Steve: I go around and I do surveys every time I do a speech. I do at least one a week. In corporate, it’s about 50 to 60%, sometimes 80, but I would say on average 50 percent are using it or have used it. When I’m doing it with trades and factories and mining. The numbers are so low. We’re talking about Australia with as high a technology penetration as any market in the world.
[00:30:43] Steve: It’s tens and twenties. So that is going to, I think, change the way people work and the way people view work, because all of a sudden they’ve got this tool which changes their mindset, which changes the type of jobs we do, and has a big impact probably on the future of work.
[00:30:57] Cameron: day. I think, yeah, I think it’s gonna have huge trickle effects, uh, that we won’t see overnight. But, um, I, I do think now that Apple is retooling their OSS to have at the core, I imagine that as we have big improvements in ai, um, capabilities. They will very quickly make their way into the device OS’s as well.
[00:31:35] Cameron: And there’ll be an upgrade path for it, and we’re gonna quickly go from AI being still as it is today, a fringe. Part of daily life to becoming core to the way that people think about how they interact with their devices in the next year or two.
[00:32:00] Steve: So a couple of things that I think would be, I’d like to get your view on with this, from a business point of view and almost a, you know, tech oligarchy, you know, oligopolies and monopolies that we’ve discussed sometime. One of the things that was really evident from my view was that there was a lot of app killers in, in this business.
[00:32:23] Steve: So it was really, um, significant to see. There was a lot of people who would have went, well, there goes my business. You know, watching, uh, the conference and the announcements, uh, simple things. There’s apps out there that do like the calculator on the iPad and take a photo of something and it’ll give you the written word.
[00:32:43] Steve: And there was so many clear. App killers out there, uh, which again, further ensconces the power and it makes you think about, uh, desire to keep people in the ecosystem. It gets harder and harder, the bigger a company gets, achieving the growth that, uh, investors have become accustomed to with tech companies that they’re just double digiting every year.
[00:33:07] Steve: It seems as though they’re stealthily ensconcing their monopoly powers within that ecosystem and shutting out innovators within it. I was a bit surprised, especially given. Some of the antitrust cases that have gone against Apple for taking 30 percent on purchases within apps. Uh, we’ve seen that in the gaming industry.
[00:33:25] Steve: So I was a bit surprised at that, but there’s a hell of a lot of app killers. What are your thoughts on that?
[00:33:29] Cameron: Yeah.
[00:33:30] Cameron: A lot of the apps that I use, 1Password, which I’ve used for years and years and
[00:33:35] Steve: Yeah. Another great one.
[00:33:36] Steve: Yeah. Yeah. One pass
[00:33:37] Cameron: going to have a standalone password app, uh, Rectangle Pro and Moom, apps like that, that enable you to set up your desktop with a lot of separate, you know, dragging windows into predefined spaces so you can manage lots of, um, simultaneous apps.
[00:33:54] Cameron: They’re going to have their own version of that, so there goes those subscriptions. Um, the calculator stuff, uh, yeah. Their calculator app is actually really cool. Their iPad calculator app is pretty cool with the, with the pencil, uh, functionality in it. But all of that aside, I mean, it’s really the AI stuff that is gonna, you know, uh, in terms of, so one of the questions that my boys had is the, the ChatGPT integration, who paid for it?
[00:34:26] Cameron: Is Apple paying OpenAI to have ChatGPT on the phone? ChatGPT on the phone? Or is OpenAI paying Apple to have ChatGPT? We know Google pays Apple 20 billion a year to have
[00:34:37] Cameron: Google on the phone. Is OpenAI going to be paying Apple or is Apple going to be paying OpenAI? What do you
[00:34:45] Cameron: think?
[00:34:45] Steve: interesting. Well, I think Apple will be paying open AI, I think. And, and I’ll tell you why, because I imagine that would go to the paid level of functionality. And they wouldn’t want their users to have to pay and OpenAI, I think, is in a position of power. Generally, if you want to know who paid, then it usually comes to who’s got the most power.
[00:35:10] Steve: And I would have thought that in this, it’s one of the rare events where the small company has the thing that the big company doesn’t have. So, OpenAI doesn’t need more demand. I mean, of course, it’s a big company and it gets Well, if anything, they have problems serving the demand they’ve got right now because they have different layers of access, potentially.
[00:35:32] Steve: So, I would have thought that OpenAI would pay. If you think about Google as a search engine, they’ve got an alternative which, um, just to make it the default, Is really profitable for Google, right? Super profitable. Apple’s like, whatever, do you want it or not? Do you want access to our wealthy consumers who all have iPhones?
[00:35:53] Steve: Whereas with OpenAI, it’s actually providing a needed service. They’re way behind. They need something to integrate there. I think, gee, we’ve got to get to the bottom of this. We’ve got to get to the bottom, but I think that OpenAI has the power and OpenAI would have been the recipients of funding. But that’s a great question for you
[00:36:10] Steve: boys.
[00:36:11] Cameron: So the rumors have been going around for the last month that, uh, Apple were in negotiations both with OpenAI and Google to put Gemini. So it was Gemini versus GPT as the default. Now if you’re OpenAI And then the announcement comes out that Apple are making Google Gemini the default, uh, AI on their phone.
[00:36:40] Cameron: that integrates with Siri, that’s a, that’s a potential killer. If you, if, if Google, Gemini becomes the default,
[00:36:52] Cameron: like Google is
[00:36:53] Cameron: the default search engine on your phone,
[00:36:55] Steve: Yeah, now that’s a good point because it could get people used to using that and when they’re off device they revert to Gemini instead. It’s a really good point. So it becomes a defense mechanism to make sure that your brand is ensconced. Um, but then the other flip side is you would have to think through these levels of integration and usage that there would be by stealth.
[00:37:20] Steve: Lessons coming in. It’s almost like a little bit of a visit to Xerox PARC to understand how things work before they come back with their own version. It’s a little bit like Back to the Future. 50 years on, you know, 1974 or 1977, we’ve got people looking at what’s next. Learning from having a little bit of a tour, you know, without knowing the levels of integration in the back end when it reverts to ChatGPT.
[00:37:46] Steve: What, what sort of an access to, to their knowledge and how it all works and their ability to, to clone it is, is another
[00:37:54] Steve: question.
[00:37:54] Cameron: the question Taylor asked was, um, why would OpenAI give Apple ChatGPT when You know, probably Apple are just going to build their own fully implemented LLM in the next year or two and then they will cut, will cut GPT
[00:38:15] Cameron: straight out. And I was like, well, assuming that this is basically Microsoft, um, doing their deal with IBM in the early 80s to put a version of MS DOS on every IBM PC for a dollar.
[00:38:33] Cameron: Microsoft A computer that they ship, you know, I’m assuming, my guess is that Apple is paying OpenAI, despite the Gemini threat that I mentioned. We all know, I mean, you said it, Tim said it, Tim Apple, uh, and I think we all, the rankings out there pretty much agree that ChatGPT is superior to Gemini. So, if I’m Sam Altman and I’m having negotiations with Tim Apple, um, I’m like, Sure, go ahead, put Gemini on your devices, but Gemini sucks.
[00:39:09] Cameron: Do you want people to have the best experience when they’re using your new
[00:39:15] Cameron: supercharged version of Siri? Or do you want them to have a shitty experience? If you want the best, you come to us, and you’re gonna have to pay us. A dollar a phone that you ship with this on it. If you don’t, then fuck you. Go put Gemini on it.
[00:39:31] Cameron: Cause Gemini sucks. I don’t know. It’s, it would have been interesting negotiations to
[00:39:35] Cameron: be part of, you
[00:39:36] Steve: that, to me is where it’s at. That’s, that’s to me is real
[00:39:40] Steve: clear.
[00:39:41] Cameron: you talked about who has the power. I mean, one and a half
[00:39:44] Steve: I think OpenAI has the power. No, I think OpenAI has
[00:39:47] Steve: the
[00:39:47] Steve: power in this situation. Yes, they’ve got a billion
[00:39:50] Steve: people who, it, but remember a billion people is a quantum, right? And so that’s scale. And usually scale has this advantage.
[00:39:57] Steve: But scale is, is a double edged sword because the scale also means one and a half billion people Severely disappointed. So, so it kind of works in both ways, right? yeah,
[00:40:10] Cameron: Well, um, Steve, the other,
[00:40:13] Cameron: uh, I know you’ve got a heart out. What time’s your heart out today?
[00:40:17] Steve: Oh, 1230 is okay. But, um, but look, there’s a couple of other little bits. I, you know, I think it’s interesting to talk about this private cloud thing, because there was a lot of hoo ha about that. And, uh, Mr. Mars got real upset, which again, obviously doesn’t really care
[00:40:36] Steve: about the privacy. Clearly that’s a, that’s, yeah, Mr.
[00:40:39] Steve: Mars, that’s a ruse. We’ve got Tim Apple and Mr.
[00:40:41] Steve: Mars.
[00:40:42] Cameron: Elon Mars, that’s what you call him,
[00:40:44] Steve: Yeah. Elon Mars. Elon Musk. Elon
[00:40:47] Steve: Musk is really upset
[00:40:49] Cameron: said he won’t allow, he said if, if, if Apple announced they’re putting ChatGPT on the phones, then he won’t allow any Apple phones in any iPhones in any of his businesses and factories. And I was like, and I care about that, why? Unless you’re a Tesla employee or a SpaceX employee or a Twitter employee, why do you give a fuck?
[00:41:15] Cameron: Who gives a shit?
[00:41:18] Steve: And, and, and yeah, Apple’s really going to change its strategy for 10, 000
[00:41:22] Steve: customers.
[00:41:24] Cameron: Um,
[00:41:26] Steve: Has to be in the news. That’s his whole
[00:41:28] Steve: It’s
[00:41:28] Cameron: yeah, yeah, like he, he also dropped his lawsuit against OpenAI this week too. By dropped I mean not delivered it, uh, he dropped it, dropped it. You know, pulled out of his law. He was suing OpenAI for, you know, not being open. And, you
[00:41:45] Cameron: know, he dropped that lawsuit. Like, it’s just, he’s just fucking around with getting attention.
[00:41:52] Steve: the same with the Well, the other
[00:41:53] Steve: one is the 45 billion payout that he
[00:41:55] Steve: wants.
[00:41:56] Cameron: he
[00:41:57] Cameron: got that approved today by the shareholders.
[00:41:59] Steve: got it. Yeah. Yeah. Which Anyway, uh, look, I think that, uh,
[00:42:04] Steve: the
[00:42:05] Steve: private cloud thing for me was interesting for one perspective. What Apple promised was kind of funny in my view. They said, it’s going to go into this place where it’s, it’s not on device, but it’s in a cloud and we’re going to protect it.
[00:42:15] Steve: We’re going to do it. They basically just described what cloud computing is basically. But ours is private and better, but they basically just described cloud computing. It’s not like you put it in the cloud, that’s an open rule and everyone can just go into your data warehouse and stuff. They basically just.
[00:42:31] Steve: Described cloud computing. Come on now. Seriously.
[00:42:34] Cameron: unless it’s Facebook. I mean, they are
[00:42:37] Cameron: trying to position themselves, you know, Facebook and Google,
[00:42:40] Steve: It’s not, there was no fact in that. That was just positioning. We’re going to be really protective of cloud’s different. It’s more private.
[00:42:47] Steve: It’s like,
[00:42:47] Cameron: well, no, but there is a point here, like again, I was having this conversation with Taylor and Hunter the other day,
[00:42:54] Cameron: that, see, Apple doesn’t make money out of advertising,
[00:43:00] Steve: Okay. So I was going to
[00:43:01] Cameron: money by selling your data to advertisers,
[00:43:06] Steve: I get it. I
[00:43:07] Cameron: although,
[00:43:09] Cameron: It does get paid 20 billion
[00:43:10] Cameron: dollars a year by Google, who make their money from advertising, so they kind of,
[00:43:16] Steve: on your phone while they’re learning it. So it’s not like
[00:43:19] Steve: your phone is. Exactly. The other one as well is that
[00:43:24] Cameron: they don’t make money directly from advertising.
[00:43:28] Steve: indirectly they make a lot of money from advertising and they make a lot of money of
[00:43:31] Steve: advertising with apps and advertising apps, all of that kind of stuff. So they’re not in it direct, but indirectly they, they extract revenue.
[00:43:40] Steve: Um, but they’re not in the, let’s call it the surveillance capitalism business, right? That’s, they’re not particularly in that like the others are. But I did think that the idea that this cloud is private, because the mindset that they’re trying to overcome is this idea of, oh, we’ve got on device information and that’s all there, and then you’ve got, and that’s all encrypted in there, and then you’ve got cloud, but we are going to use the cloud, but don’t worry, no one will get into it.
[00:44:03] Steve: I kind of, that’s really different to the idea of, Whatever we see on a screen, we’re going to use that to surveil you and sell advertising to you, which is the Facebook, Google, whatever model. But the idea that their cloud is somehow more private than Dropbox or Azure or any other cloud is kind of, you know,
[00:44:22] Cameron: But their
[00:44:23] Steve: paying homage, uninformed of what a cloud is.
[00:44:26] Cameron: I do think this is going to be an important thing. And you know, so I wrote a blog post I wanted to talk to you about if we have time.
[00:44:32] Cameron: I did a blog post, uh, actually I, I wrote it, for myself and then I sent it to you and then you didn’t reply. So then I did it as a blog
[00:44:38] Steve: No, no, no. I did have a look at it, but I was on my phone when I looked at it, and it had this really weird thing where it went.
[00:44:45] Steve: So I actually, I’ve got it on my list of things to look at. It was the flow thing. I did look at it, but I need to look at it more closely.
[00:44:51] Cameron: I basically sat down, um, over the last week. I called it mind mapping the future. I was just trying to think through the next five years and what I think’s going to happen, how it’s going to play out. And I applied some probabilities to some of it. But, um, I, I do think we are at a critical point with all of this.
[00:45:15] Cameron: So think about it from this perspective. Okay. We’re going to end up with AI. At the core of all of our devices, not just Apple’s devices, but Google’s devices and Samsung devices. Is there anyone else I’m
[00:45:33] Cameron: forgetting? Is it Google and Samsung? Who’s left? That’s, that’s pretty much it, right? That’s all the devices really out there today.
[00:45:40] Steve: Microsoft are making a comeback when they invest in Sam Hoffman and Johnny Ives new piece of hardware,
[00:45:46] Steve: and they’re going to win
[00:45:47] Cameron: well, I don’t know if that’s going to happen now that they’ve done a deal with, Apple. I
[00:45:51] Cameron: think.
[00:45:53] Steve: what about the Facebook,
[00:45:53] Steve: phone? You’re forgetting about our boy Facebook
[00:45:55] Steve: and the fire phone from Uncle Jeff.
[00:45:58] Cameron: Yeah.
[00:45:59] Steve: on now,
[00:46:00] Cameron: Uncle Jeff He does, he is not Jeff, Amazon. He doesn’t get the Jeff Amazon
[00:46:04] Steve: he’s Uncle Jeff, we’ve got Tim Apple, Uncle Jeff And Elon
[00:46:08] Cameron: And what’s ma what’s um, um, Facebook
[00:46:13] Cameron: Mark, Facebook of Berg. Just, he’s just Zucker face.
[00:46:18] Steve: one of
[00:46:18] Steve: them. Zuckerface, he is a bit of a Zuckerface.
[00:46:22] Cameron: Um, so, okay, we’re going to end up with all these devices with AI at the core. Now, AI is going to know everything about you.
[00:46:31] Cameron: Our devices already know a lot about us, but it’s in silos. It’s got your cookies and your web history and your message history and all your email history. But the AI at the core is going to literally understand you.
[00:46:48] Cameron: It’s going to have
[00:46:49] Steve: Crawl. It’s like gonna crawl. It’s gonna crawl and train on your full digital life experience.
[00:46:57] Cameron: not just Your, digital life. It will
[00:47:00] Cameron: be
[00:47:00] Steve: your
[00:47:00] Steve: entire,
[00:47:01] Cameron: one of the, one of the, in, one of the most, I think, jaw dropping parts of the ww DC presentation was, you will be able to record your phone
[00:47:15] Cameron: calls
[00:47:16] Steve: I
[00:47:16] Cameron: in
[00:47:17] Steve: that was, that was the best innovation in the, in the entire thing. I cannot tell you how many phone calls I’ve
[00:47:22] Steve: said, I wish this was recorded. mate of mine, you know, Scotty Kilmartin, we used to say, this could be a good podcast because we’d just shoot it, you know, shoot the shit and it would come out real nice, but I actually like that as a feature.
[00:47:35] Steve: I think it’s a great feature.
[00:47:37] Cameron: You’ll be able to record it and it will transcribe it and then summarize the transcription. Now, it’ll also, it won’t be long before it’s not only recording your phone calls, it’s recording.
[00:47:51] Cameron: Every conversation you have in the real
[00:47:53] Cameron: world, you’ll watch your phone,
[00:47:57] Steve: Well, it is. We know that, remember?
[00:47:59] Cameron: openly,
[00:48:00] Steve: know that
[00:48:01] Steve: it is. So formally, we’re going to formally announce we’re
[00:48:06] Steve: backfilling the reality
[00:48:08] Cameron: be retrospective, by the way,
[00:48:10] Steve: We’re just conditioning. We’re just conditioning society. We’re
[00:48:13] Steve: conditioning
[00:48:14] Steve: society
[00:48:15] Cameron: by the way, we’ve also got recordings of the
[00:48:17] Cameron: last 10 years of your conversations, which will also be archived.
[00:48:22] Steve: How did it get so good so quick, Cameron? How did it know so much about what happened? Did I talk about what happened in 2013? I
[00:48:28] Cameron: So it’ll be record, it’ll, it’ll, you’re, the AI at the core of all your devices will be not only tracking your digital life, it’ll be tracking your. IRL, and it will understand you infinitely better than anyone, your spouse, your parents, even you yourself, because memories, we forget shit, it won’t forget shit, it’ll remember everything you’ve ever said or has ever been said to you.
[00:48:59] Cameron: Right? All written. Now,
[00:49:03] Steve: Well, my AI now, my Steve Sammartino AI, is better than
[00:49:07] Steve: me. Because it remembers everything I’ve written, because I’ve
[00:49:09] Steve: directed it to, and I can’t
[00:49:10] Cameron: now in that world, there will be privacy concerns, there will be security concerns. Um, you know, one of the things I explored in my, my blog post is what happens when the police say to Apple, we want access to Steve’s entire, AI Core, because we want to know about every conversation that he’s had, every message that he’s written.
[00:49:33] Cameron: Um, you know, Cameron made a joke about, um, Christians murdering Jews in 1096
[00:49:40] Cameron: and roasting their babies on spits.
[00:49:42] Cameron: We want access to everything else that he said. We think he might be anti Semitic. I’m
[00:49:46] Steve: You’re pretty public with,
[00:49:47] Cameron: you
[00:49:48] Steve: but you’re really
[00:49:49] Cameron: want to know anything about me, just go listen to my podcast. I don’t filter anything. It’s all, it’s.
[00:49:54] Steve: Yeah, you’re not hiding it. See, everyone else is like, you’re fine because you’ve been, for ever since I’ve
[00:49:59] Cameron: It’s all out there.
[00:50:00] Steve: calling it as you see it. Whereas most other people,
[00:50:03] Steve: they have these
[00:50:03] Steve: phone calls
[00:50:04] Cameron: my actual, my real life is boring
[00:50:06] Cameron: compared to what I’m like on my podcasts. Uh, cause I, I don’t get, no one, no one cares in my real life. I only get to talk about what I really think with my podcast hosts. Um, so, uh, now my point is. It’s taken me a long time to get there. In that world where your AI is at the core and it knows everything, who are you going to trust?
[00:50:27] Cameron: Google, who has spent 20 years selling your data? Facebook, who has spent 20 years selling your data? Microsoft or Apple, who has spent years and years and years telling the FBI to go fuck themselves? Remember the FBI have been trying to hack into, uh, Terrorists, alleged terrorist phones for years and Apple have been going, alleged terrorists and Apple have said, no, we’re not going to give you access to their phones.
[00:51:01] Cameron: Um, uh, who are you going to trust? I think Apple positioning themselves as the security
[00:51:08] Cameron: first company is going to be incredibly
[00:51:12] Cameron: important to their brand.
[00:51:15] Cameron: Five years
[00:51:15] Cameron: from now.
[00:51:17] Steve: 100%. Look, I agree with that. I don’t think that the private cloud is part of that. It’s just
[00:51:20] Steve: whether or
[00:51:21] Steve: not,
[00:51:21] Cameron: it
[00:51:21] Cameron: is. Yeah, but it’s private. they’re
[00:51:23] Cameron: like, they’re like, they’re saying it has the same level of encryption as your device.
[00:51:31] Cameron: an extension of the same encryption technology. So even they can’t see what you’re doing and talking
[00:51:37] Cameron: about in the cloud. Cause it’s totally encrypted.
[00:51:42] Steve: I’ll be to that. I mean, for me too, I mean, one of the big ones, I did the calculation once in Australia, can’t remember what it was when I wrote the manifesto on, um, um, Saving Technology, oh no, that was about eight years ago. Um, 10, 000 word manifesto that no one read, you know those, they’re always fun. Um,
[00:52:00] Cameron: your thinking straight.
[00:52:02] Steve: yeah.
[00:52:03] Steve: Uh, the numbers were astoundingly small on what we, what the companies get in order to invade our privacy. It, it, it might’ve been 20 or a hundred bucks per person, per year. The fact of what we are giving up just for that
[00:52:20] Steve: small
[00:52:20] Steve: amount of revenue is in,
[00:52:21] Cameron: Yeah,
[00:52:23] Steve: well, well, I would, I would, all the privacy, I would pay that amount of money.
[00:52:26] Steve: Do you know what I mean? I would happily go, here’s the a hundred. Don’t surveil anything. Yeah, have the hundred. Give me access to all the services, but have the hundred. Don’t surveil me at all. I’ll do it in a heartbeat with Google, with Facebook, with all of them. I mean, I use Instagram and WhatsApp. I don’t use Facebook at all.
[00:52:41] Steve: Um, Google I use a lot and, and, um, yeah, it, it, it knows everything I’ve searched and, and, and, and heaven help me. That that stays private. Please let that stay private. Because you know, sometimes I just get itchy and play. No, I’m joking.
[00:52:57] Cameron: Yeah. Oh, well I, I do think that’s going to be important. Um, so just touching briefly on the mind mapping the future thing that I wrote, um, you know, my, people can go read it on my blog, CameronReilly. com, if you want to see it, if you haven’t already seen me talk about it on Facebook, um, but, you know, the, the, most of the feedback that I’ve got from people, Steve, is, oh, this is just going to be the rich that have everything, like, one of the things that I’ve been exploring in this is what happens to our jobs. How many jobs get taken by AI? And I was having this conversation with ChatGPT as I was writing it. I was trying to like, I said to ChatGPT something like, okay, what happens when all of these, like initially white collar knowledge worker jobs, and I, and I sort of map it out in the, in the blog post. Like I think the earliest.
[00:53:53] Cameron: Iterations, um, of jobs are the ones that we’ve already seen are starting to go, um, you know, you’re like low level graphic designer jobs, I see, this is what I wrote, um, Ahem. that AI gets, is massively smarter and more capable in the next five years, like, uh, most people involved in the industry think it will, and it’s available to everyone and every business for 20 bucks a month, what happens?
[00:54:27] Cameron: And then I say this, the answer is we don’t know, we cannot predict. And when we’ve arrived at a place where we honestly can’t predict what life will look like in five years, that, by definition, is the technological singularity. I’m arguing that we are in the singularity now because we cannot predict what life will look like five
[00:54:46] Cameron: years from now.
[00:54:48] Steve: Isn’t the singularity as defined by Kurzweil and cohort, a moment where technology has a recurrence on itself that’s so quick that it becomes infinite and
[00:54:57] Steve: scales
[00:54:58] Cameron: I think that’s,
[00:54:59] Steve: Rather
[00:55:00] Cameron: here’s what Wikipedia says, the technological singularity is a hypothetical future point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable
[00:55:14] Cameron: consequences for human civilization.
[00:55:17] Steve: but I don’t think it’s
[00:55:18] Cameron: Oh, I think it
[00:55:19] Steve: yet.
[00:55:20] Cameron: I think It’s uncontrollable. I don’t think
[00:55:22] Cameron: anyone will or can stop.
[00:55:26] Steve: could stop, could stop. Yeah, but it hasn’t irreversibly
[00:55:29] Steve: changed
[00:55:30] Cameron: I think it
[00:55:31] Cameron: has, and this is what I’m arguing. I cannot, like, I, look, I’m not, unfore,
[00:55:37] Steve: changed our day to day living yet though. It’s not like we’re
[00:55:40] Steve: just like, in the middle of this singularity and nothing’s, you know, Everything’s so changed forever. It’s like, we’re still going to eat and go here and do work and jobs are changed. It’s still, it’s not, it’s not, it hasn’t really hit that part of the curve
[00:55:51] Steve: yet.
[00:55:53] Cameron: I, look, and, uh, uh, you’re a futurist. I’m not
[00:55:58] Steve: But we’ve always been on that
[00:56:00] Cameron: One of my, Taylor asked me the other day, why, Taylor asked me,
[00:56:03] Steve: No, no one is, you know, no one is,
[00:56:05] Steve: right?
[00:56:06] Cameron: haven’t you made a career as a futurist? I said,
[00:56:08] Cameron: because I’m, I’m not cocky enough.
[00:56:14] Steve: You know why I became
[00:56:15] Steve: a futurist and I’m really just an economist who likes technology is, um, my, my agent, nah, it was my agent, Barry Markoff. G’day mate, Barry Markoff here. That’s a great little speech you did there. Now, listen, have you got an agent? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Agents. Sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. See, what we do is we get your gigs for money.
[00:56:31] Steve: We’ll take 30 percent but you make a lot of money, mate. Now, what do you call yourself? What? You’re startups and tech. Nah, nah, nah, nah. Futurist, mate. You get 30 percent more way. All right, mate, I’ll send you a contract. You’re a star.
[00:56:40] Steve: Bye.
[00:56:41] Cameron: your agent?
[00:56:45] Steve: Sort of.
[00:56:47] Cameron: Um, my point, my
[00:56:51] Steve: So no, no
[00:56:52] Steve: one’s a
[00:56:52] Cameron: going to be that. Um, I’ve spent 30 years thinking about the technological singularity and AI and reading everything that I could about it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I cannot begin to predict what the world is going to look like five years
[00:57:10] Cameron: from now.
[00:57:11] Steve: No, no one can. You’re right. Oh yeah, you’re probably right. Five, five. I don’t think it’s going to be much different between now and
[00:57:19] Steve: four years,
[00:57:20] Cameron: Okay. So anyway,
[00:57:21] Steve: don’t
[00:57:21] Cameron: here’s my, here’s my take on it. Um, the first layer of jobs that’ll be replaced will be the low risk, high cost, high benefit jobs. Coding,
[00:57:34] Cameron: customer service. Analysts, writers,
[00:57:39] Cameron: I dunno about legal first. Um, I’ve
[00:57:42] Cameron: got gr
[00:57:45] Steve: Nah, I think a lot of legal stuff will go away because I’m doing a lot of it now that we would have reverted to our lawyers on some property stuff. There’s going to be a whole bunch of legal work right now that is new.
[00:57:56] Steve: Like. You know, biometric copyright and likeness and copyright. Yes, yes, there’s further legal jobs where it becomes more interesting and complex and more stuff, but there’s a whole lot of stuff that’s like, yeah, well
[00:58:07] Steve: now
[00:58:08] Cameron: I don’t think jobs are gonna be lost. Legal jobs are gonna be lost in the first iteration. You might use it to do legal work, but I don’t think jobs are gonna be literally replaced. I don’t think legal firms are gonna say, we’re not gonna, or we’re gonna, we’re gonna fire
[00:58:25] Cameron: some legal staff paralegals.
[00:58:29] Steve: Yeah, but you might only need, yeah, but you might only need one instead of four.
[00:58:33] Steve: That’s the
[00:58:33] Cameron: uh,
[00:58:34] Cameron: maybe, uh, but anyway, we’re just talking about timing. I do believe that’s going to happen. So what I’ve got in terms of my timeline in this post, I’m saying what’s going to happen in 25, 26, 2025, 2026. So this is assuming the ChatGPT 5. and equivalent technologies come out in the next year and are as good as Sam Altman, and I don’t know if you saw this, but Kevin Scott, I think, who’s the CTO of Microsoft, came out in a, in a interview in the last week.
[00:59:05] Cameron: He said he’s been playing with it. He said, I, if, if I said that ChatGPT 4, in terms of its overall intelligence, overall, right, not specialty, but overall, is about the equivalent of a high school graduate, uh, 5 is a PhD, in everything. for listening. Like PhD quality and everything. If it comes out and it is PhD in everything, not AGI, but PhD level in nearly everything, I think in the next 20 to 26, we’re going to see jobs go in coding, customer service, analysts, writers, graphic design, industrial design.
[00:59:43] Cameron: But then in 2020, then what happens is people get confident. It’s a tester. People start to go, you know what, it’s good enough to do these things. It’s good enough to replace people in these low risk, but you know, high cost. You’re paying 50, a year for these jobs. I can get an AI for 20, 50, 100 a month that’ll do that.
[01:00:07] Cameron: Easy, right? Easy replacement. And they’re overseeing these jobs, okay, I get rid of a writer and I use an AI to do it, I still have a human overseeing it, graphic design, I have a human who’s using AI, who’s overseeing it initially, like, humans approving the work that’s done, once you get more confident, 2027 2030, we’re more confident with using AI It’s had another couple of years of iterative improvement, thousand fold improvement.
[01:00:39] Cameron: We hit AGI by 2027. 2028 is a lot of people in our forecasting. Then. Higher level jobs start to get replaced. Middle management get replaced because there’s less people to manage. I don’t need as many middle managers when I’ve got less people doing the work that middle managers are looking after, right?
[01:00:58] Cameron: Legal, I say, starts to go here. Accounting, HR, again, because there’s less people to hire, less people to manage, we don’t need HR people. Recruitment, because we’re not hiring as many people. Psychologists, everyone has a free AI therapist that’s better than a human. Medical.
[01:01:15] Cameron: Everyone has a free gp.
[01:01:17] Steve: let me just, just, okay. So you’re right. And I, what I wrote down before was that Basically you get a reversal in the first iteration of robotics and all of that kind of stuff. Blue collar was at risk and a lot of blue collar work got replaced through industrial machinery. Now you’ve got a reversal where white collar is at risk and is almost not a white collar job that isn’t at risk or isn’t going to be impacted radically.
[01:01:40] Steve: And first, because I think it’ll take longer for the intelligence systems to enter the robotics like the figure one, which we’ve discussed before. So you’re right.
[01:01:49] Steve: it’s,
[01:01:49] Cameron: So I was asking, so, so what I’ve been trying to work out in this is what happens when people are, don’t have jobs. And I was asking GPT and it was saying, well, they’ll have to be re-skilled. And I was like, re-skilled as what? What is safe that you now there is, you know, there, there is a, the fallback is, as we’ve talked about this before, you know the jobs that you and I have.
[01:02:15] Cameron: Didn’t exist 30 years ago. So it’s possible that there will be jobs five years from now that don’t exist today. But when I try and think about what those jobs might look like, that won’t be able to be done better by AI by then than a human,
[01:02:34] Cameron: I cannot work out.
[01:02:39] Steve: the job got replaced by something that can do a thing. The thing now can do everything. So even if you think of something new, that, that AI can do that. Even if it doesn’t exist yet, that’s actually the
[01:02:54] Steve: difference.
[01:02:54] Cameron: I was, asking
[01:02:55] Steve: I come
[01:02:56] Steve: back
[01:02:56] Cameron: the question and it was saying, well, um, you know, some jobs will be safe, like upper management. I was like, what, you’re gonna take a fucking secretary and train her to be a CEO? Like, what the fuck are you talking about? And then it’s going, oh, what about, um, boutique craftsmen?
[01:03:13] Cameron: Like, what, what, what, I, like, I can’t, well, I’m gonna start making fucking bespoke wooden furniture? Like, that takes years of training and talent and, like, even when I went into GPT and got it to try and pick holes in my arguments, it came up with a bunch of facile stuff, and when I pushed back and I went, oh no, you’re right, you know, none of that actually makes sense.
[01:03:37] Cameron: And not to mention, you go, okay, well, you go, you go make custom furniture.
[01:03:42] Cameron: Who has the fucking money to buy custom furniture? When no one has a job,
[01:03:48] Steve: you got onto my point. Okay, so this is my point here. Everyone worries it’s going to be a real big problem if there’s no jobs. And I’ll tell you who has the biggest problem, the people who own the technology. Because if there’s no jobs, no one can buy anything. And if no one can buy anything, then you have economic failure.
[01:04:03] Steve: And, and I don’t Know what happens with that. Typically, the one thing that is super, super important with any technological advancement is that it’s not monopolized and that you have a spread of the technology because there’s more of a spread that you have on an emergent technology, whether it’s robotics or electricity or machinery, what happens is they have to compete away their price point because they’ve got automation and that frees up capital, which can go to new jobs, new industries, new whatever it is.
[01:04:35] Steve: You know, maybe like some people have said historically that if everything can be done and maintained like the physical work, labor, housing, fooding, uh, feeding, feeding, we’re feeding people, Cameron, feeding people, then maybe we move towards this Tim Apple is fooding people. It’s funny. We, um, end up with this kind of quasi leisure society where I’m trying to get as good at surfing as I
[01:04:58] Steve: can.
[01:04:58] Cameron: how are you paying your rent, your mortgage,
[01:05:01] Steve: I don’t know. Well, I, I,
[01:05:05] Steve: well, everything should be really, really super low cost because we end up in an abundance society. You
[01:05:10] Steve: know, um, Kurzweil story. I don’t
[01:05:12] Steve: know.
[01:05:13] Cameron: oh, well, the
[01:05:14] Cameron: rich are going to get richer and the, you know, everyone else will be poor. I, I keep trying to point.
[01:05:19] Cameron: Yes. That’s the point that I’m trying to get to with all of this. People are rich because their wealth is
[01:05:25] Cameron: tied up in assets, usually businesses or shares or
[01:05:29] Cameron: property. But if there were.
[01:05:31] Cameron: Yes, if
[01:05:32] Steve: are spending
[01:05:33] Cameron: they’re, locked,
[01:05:35] Cameron: there’s no money in the fucking economy, so the entire economy collapses, we are going to need to re engineer how the economy,
[01:05:46] Cameron: from the gr Now this is why we’re in the singularity, because I don’t know what this fucking looks like, Steve. I’ve been trying to work it out, and again, I’m not the smartest guy on the planet, but I’ve been thinking about this for a long time.
[01:06:00] Cameron: And the harder I think about it, I just don’t have a, I don’t have an answer. I cannot see how this
[01:06:07] Cameron: works.
[01:06:10] Steve: done some books on this. Doctorow’s done some sci sci fi books on this and what happens when you have Replicators
[01:06:16] Steve: that could uh,
[01:06:17] Steve: Cory
[01:06:18] Cameron: Oh, Dr. Rose. I was
[01:06:20] Cameron: like, Dr. Rose? Who’s Dr. Rose?
[01:06:23] Steve: Yeah, Dr. Rose?
[01:06:24] Steve: Haven’t you heard of Dr. Rose? He’s a technologist who’s really studied the singularity. Cory Doctorow has done some stuff where uh, everyone has access to things via replicators and
[01:06:37] Cameron: Yeah. Yeah.
[01:06:37] Steve: There is no money and no, yeah, nanofabricators. And there is no money because any, because everyone can create
[01:06:44] Steve: everything. And so what you end up doing is
[01:06:48] Cameron: yeah, but we’re not going to
[01:06:50] Cameron: have.
[01:06:51] Steve: know. It’s
[01:06:52] Cameron: Nanofabricators in the next five years, unless something happens dramatically, but I think we will get them at some point, maybe even a
[01:07:02] Cameron: decade, but we’re not going to have them before the
[01:07:05] Cameron: economy collapses, which I say 2030. That’s
[01:07:09] Steve: Well, I think that I think for a whole lot of reasons, we’re headed towards a
[01:07:13] Steve: significant revolution. And I think the disparity and inequality and incomes is a big part of it. Five families control 50 percent of all. Wealth in America. Like we’ve never, it’s the most extreme it has ever been and it’s getting worse.
[01:07:29] Steve: And we have, you know, you and I discussed it, a Plutocratic society where a few really large corporations control everything, but what happens when they get so much that no one has anything left to give? Then the whole thing, the edifice that’s holding them up. Collapses. I, I, gee, we’re going to end on a note of an unknown really, because it’s really almost like, and I’m going to call it’s almost, yes, it’s driven by technology, but it’s kind of like an economic singularity.
[01:07:56] Steve: We actually don’t know what happens with the economic models and it’s not communism. It’s not capitalism. It’s none of those things because you get to a point where technology can do everything. And I don’t know what happens to that monetary system.
[01:08:08] Cameron: my point. This has been The Futuristic. We’ll be back next time. Thank you, Steve. Fun, fun chatting as always.
[01:08:16] Steve: Thanks, Cam. I really like how we ended with something bigger there. That was Really cool,