AI is disrupting everything. Here's the human change plan. | Joel Pearson | TEDxSydney

[music] [music] [applause] When electricity first came on the scene, people thought about it as a lighting technology, a better candle.

And if you thought about it this way, you would have predicted, you know, brighter rooms, brighter roads, and more nighttime activities.

But you would have missed a whole lot of things. You would have missed

things. You would have missed refrigeration, electronics, the cinema, and everything that followed. This is a categorical

that followed. This is a categorical error.

So, electricity wasn't a lighting revolution, it was an energy revolution.

So, it's a categorical error. And we're

doing the same thing right now with artificial intelligence.

We keep calling it a technology revolution, but it's not. It's an intelligence revolution. And that's also a

revolution. And that's also a categorical difference. It's a It's a

categorical difference. It's a It's a categorical error, if you like.

[snorts] How big is this revolution going to be?

It's already begun, and the first stages we're familiar with.

Now, this is the kinds of AI we're used to, your chat windows, you would type something in, it comes back to you straight away. You know, your chat GPT,

straight away. You know, your chat GPT, your Claude, these kinds of things. But

already, this is moving quickly to agents who can go off and work asynchronously, while you're sleeping, while you're at the gym, do your work for you.

So, that's this sort of first wave of this AI or intelligence revolution. And it's

already disrupting cognitive work everywhere.

Now, the second wave is when AI gets a body, and this is these so-called humanoid robots.

And there's about a hundred companies around the world working on these already. And the best of these can

already. And the best of these can already operate autonomously for many hours, doing the laundry, cleaning your house, doing the gardening.

They're already in factories, sorting mail, and soon they're going to be in nursing homes, hospitals, and a lot of our homes.

So, this second wave, if you like, is really when AI gets a body.

And the so-called, you know, blue-collar work that we feel like is safe for the moment is also about to be disrupted.

So, how big is this disruption going to be? Well, I think it's going to disrupt everything.

And I don't use that phrase lightly. I

do mean everything.

First, everything that uses electricity, then everything that touches intelligence.

So, I'm a university professor. It's my

day job. And universities are about to be massively disrupted by AI.

And I just don't mean AI doing the teaching for me. I mean

something much bigger.

So, we're soon going to have our own personal AI assistants on us 24/7.

They're going to be tapped into the world's information. They're going to be

world's information. They're going to be smarter than any individual.

They're going to be private, trusted, tapped into my physiology. They're going

to know when I'm stressed, nervous, too sleepy.

So, in this world, what's the role of education? What's the role of a

education? What's the role of a university? Do we still need

university? Do we still need universities?

[clears throat] I think we do.

[sighs] But, they're going to be have to be very different. They're going to change.

different. They're going to change.

So, it's not just universities, of course. Jobs are going to be massively

course. Jobs are going to be massively disrupted. No what? No matter what

disrupted. No what? No matter what anyone says, the number of human jobs on the planet is going to shrink. They're

building the AIs to do human work.

But, it's more than that. It's your

children's education. It's your human relationships.

It's your entertainment. It's your trust in everything you see and hear. It's

even sort of the nature of reality you understand.

Companies that have become AIs, you know, whole economies are going to be disrupted by AI.

Measures we have like GDP are going to become more or less useless. Um and even capitalism itself is going to take a big hit from AI.

So, this is where we are right now and this is what I call the everything disruption. Everything, every strata of

disruption. Everything, every strata of society that we interact with, we think of, is going to be disrupted by AI. Not

right now, not tomorrow, but over the next decade or so.

And we didn't really choose this, we didn't vote for it. Um but it's happening. A lot of this change is

happening. A lot of this change is already locked in.

It's happening whether we want it to or not.

So, we've had a taste of this kind of disruption before. So, for example,

disruption before. So, for example, during COVID, we had a bit of a taste of this. But imagine that times a thousand,

this. But imagine that times a thousand, times ten thousand, times a hundred thousand.

Yes, spread out over a longer period, that's kind of what I'm getting at here.

So, why can't why aren't really intelligent, really capable people seeing this, forecasting it? Why don't

we really feel it? Some of us, of course, are, but plenty aren't yet.

Well, it's because part of it for part of it our brains are lying to us.

So, what do I mean by this?

If I take a piece of paper and I fold it once or twice, it's a little bit thicker. If I keep folding it and

thicker. If I keep folding it and folding it, once I fold it about 42 times, that piece of paper now goes from the Earth all the way to the moon.

And that's exponential growth. And we

have a blind spot for that. Our brains

can't understand it, we don't get it.

We've evolved in very linear world where each step I take is one more meter from the last.

And so, we don't get this exponential change at all. We under predict.

So, what does this mean with AI? It

means when we predict what's going to be happening next year or the year after, we we today and we kind of crank it up a little bit, maybe 10% and we project that as the future.

But AI is exponential.

It's doubling in speed and capacity about every four, or five, six months depending on how you measure it. Some

would say it's hyper exponential.

So where does this take us? It takes us to this.

Where we're going to predict things out in a straight line and what actually is happening is this sort of hockey stick exponential function.

And that gap there that gap is surprise. That's

government's being caught flat-footed, it's companies being wiped out, it's jobs being lost, it's a whole lot of things.

And it's not just one exponential. It kind of gets worse

one exponential. It kind of gets worse or more complicated.

Right now there's many exponentials happening. AI is kind of this tide that

happening. AI is kind of this tide that lifts all the boats in the water. So

we're seeing exponential functions emerging across a range of fields from material science, mathematics, physics, protein folding, rare disease work, all

kinds of things.

And where does this take us? It means

that when you have this this many exponentials they're all interacting in complex ways, predicting the future becomes almost impossible. We can't do it. And that brings me to the elephant

it. And that brings me to the elephant in the room.

Uncertainty.

So we're in the midst of an uncertainty pandemic if you like. The world is structurally less predictable than it's ever been before and it's ratcheting up week on week. And the thing with

uncertainty is it hurts.

It triggers our brains. It's a stress stimulus. It's like seeing a venomous

stimulus. It's like seeing a venomous snake or spider. Sorry if it's a triggering image, I'll take it away.

But simply not knowing the future activates our limbic system, our amygdala and we feel the fear from that everyone to some degree.

[snorts] But some people more than others.

So we're in the midst of this.

And it really is this sort of new business as normal. It's not going away, it's here to stay.

So, I sometimes talk about we're in the midst of this uncertainty transformation.

Now, back in the day we went through a digital transformation, but this transformation is fundamentally more human.

And the solution is more human as well.

We have to learn not just to survive this uncertainty, but to thrive in this uncertainty. This fight or flight state

uncertainty. This fight or flight state that it puts us into hurts our well-being. It hurts

creativity, innovation, and a whole lot of other things.

So, what can we do about that? Well, the

first step is to embrace it.

All right, [snorts] we you can't fight it. You can't make the world certain

it. You can't make the world certain around you. You can try and surround

around you. You can try and surround yourself with certainty, but you're going to burn yourself out. It really is like trying to fight your way out of quicksand. You're going to sink deeper

quicksand. You're going to sink deeper and deeper. So, that's the first step.

and deeper. So, that's the first step.

Accept it, embrace it.

That's just the way the world is right now. And the second step is to

now. And the second step is to understand why it's triggering the stuff I was just talking about.

Simply having brains like we do means that uncertainty is scary. It's triggering.

It's causing stress and anxiety. So,

it's not a failing. It's not lack of education or intelligence or anything like that. It's simply the nature of

like that. It's simply the nature of having brains like we do.

Then third, we can do something called we call cognitive reframing in psychology.

So, taking examples of uncertainty and reframing them, telling yourself a different story about them.

So, there's lots of examples of uncertainty we really like, like horror films, roller coasters, fancy restaurants. We have no idea what

fancy restaurants. We have no idea what the food is going to come out to your plate to your table.

[snorts] And the interesting thing is that the physiological state in [clears throat] your brain between this sort of stressed version of uncertainty and that exciting version, like the roller coaster, is very, very

similar. The difference is really that

similar. The difference is really that story you tell yourself.

So, I invite you to find examples of uncertainty every day that put you in that discomfort, that you feel that little bit of stress, and practice framing that, reframing that as something positive, something

exciting, something thrilling, filled with opportunity.

So, that's uncertainty, but really the bigger picture that's happening right now is change.

Massive structural change, like I mentioned earlier. Every level of

mentioned earlier. Every level of society is going to be changing.

And it's not about that change being good or bad. And this is a conversation that hijacks some of the AI talk. Is AI

going to be good? Is it going to be bad?

And that's the wrong question completely. It's about this the

completely. It's about this the magnitude and the speed of that change.

So, for example, a surprising number of people who won millions in the lottery ended up regretting it just a few years later, historically.

Right? They they they lost friends and family, they had mental health challenges, substance abuse problems. Then what did lottery companies do? They

brought in change specialists.

So, psychologists, financial planners, lifestyle coaches to help them manage their way through this positive change.

And now large sporting franchises do something very similar.

So, the point here is that even if somehow magically we could go from today to some kind of AI utopia of abundance, it's the change that would still get us.

It would throw us into chaos. It'd be

too much to handle. We really don't handle change that well.

Now, we've been working on um change management plans. Change

management plans that are specific for AI in my lab.

And I won't go into the details tonight, but there's a fundamental difference between a lot of the change management plans you've probably heard of that have been around in the business world for decades.

Because the AI or the intelligence revolution is just going to have ongoing sort of change after change after change. And also the uncertainty, the

change. And also the uncertainty, the resistance to that, all that sort of mental health side is much much stronger when it comes to this kind of change.

So, AI specific change management frameworks need to deal with those things. They

need to do it differently.

So, the models we're kind of working on are scalable models that you can apply at home, in an organization, or to a whole nation. And this brings me kind of

whole nation. And this brings me kind of to what I think is the biggest policy gap in any country anywhere in the world right now.

What we need is something like this.

Every nation on the planet needs a an AI change plan to help every citizen take them through the next decade or two of this radical change.

And we don't have that.

As I said, these things this is exponential at the moment. It's hitting

the vertical. We're about to hit the vertical. So, when it comes to these

vertical. So, when it comes to these kinds of policies, the chances of getting in on time, being on time are almost impossible. You're

either going to be too early or too late. And I think we'd all rather

late. And I think we'd all rather governments bring this in and be too early rather than too late.

We've already seen this year already some violence around AI.

Already, and things are just getting going.

So, just for a second, this is not a fun exercise, but just imagine what a city might look like if when we hit 20, 30, 40, or 50% unemployment. What's that

going to be like? Is it going to be Mad Max on the streets?

We don't have a plan for this, and we need one right now.

So, what about the Terminator scenarios, the misalignment, the AI becoming sentient and deciding to wipe humanity off the planet? So, you've probably heard these

planet? So, you've probably heard these these stories, these things from from AI scientists.

Well, I'm not dismissing them. They are

important. They've been working on it for a while now and they should continue to do so.

But all those ideas have one thing in common. They're all hypothetical.

common. They're all hypothetical.

They're all predictions about the future somewhere on the horizon. They haven't

happened yet. What I'm talking about this uncertainty, this change is already begun. People are feeling the

begun. People are feeling the uncertainty. They're feeling the stress.

uncertainty. They're feeling the stress.

They're worried about their mortgages already right now on the ground.

So my take is we should be shifting resources to what's already happening rather than worrying about something that may or may not happen on the horizon.

You might be surprised so far to think that to hear that I'm actually a massive AI optimist.

So I I I love the technology if you want to call it that. I love technology in general and I do think we are going to make our way to some kind of AI abundance utopia thing. I don't know

when. That's very very hard to predict,

when. That's very very hard to predict, but I think we can get there.

But I'm an active optimist and there's a clear difference between that and a passive optimist.

A passive optimist just thinks, you know, it'll be all right. We don't have to do anything. An active optimist says, "We're going to be okay if we put in the hard work."

hard work." So think of it this way.

We need to build a bridge from where we are today to this sort of AI utopia on the horizon somewhere. And that bridge needs to be wide enough and strong enough to take 8 billion people across

that bridge.

And we haven't we haven't started building the bridge. We haven't even started the blueprints, the engineering diagrams for that bridge.

Everyone just seems to be standing on one this side of the bridge, looking over to the horizon, crossing our fingers, and hoping we get there.

So I invite you to go home, talk to your friends, family, colleagues, push your organization, your any political leaders you know, your the governments to try and start thinking about this bridge.

What would it look like?

What can we do?

I know these aren't you know, the most fun things to talk about, but they are really important.

And we can't keep our heads stuck in the sand. We have to be thinking about this

sand. We have to be thinking about this generally, everywhere. And we need

generally, everywhere. And we need national AI change plans in every country, everywhere in the world. And I

do think this is the most important issue right now. It supersedes all other projects happening on the planet. I know

that's a controversial statement, but think about it this way. If we're

going to be thrown into chaos from all this change, things will start crumbling jobs mortgages whole economies, any other project, whether it be cleaning the oceans, the climate, these

kind of things, they're going to they're going to be put on hold. They're not

going to work. So, this overall uncertainty and change has to be our number one priority as we move forward.

So, I do think if we can take sort of the humanity of this moment, think about the human side of everything that's happening, and treat that as seriously as the technology, we can get there.

We can have all the sort of golden promises of AI and minimize that downside. Said another way, we can have

downside. Said another way, we can have our cake and eat it, too.

But really, if we just need to remember that the most important technology in the room has never been artificial. It

really is the one between our ears, our brains, our minds, and how our humanity.

So, I wish you well on this journey, and best of luck. Get out there, think about it. Take any emotion you're feeling

it. Take any emotion you're feeling tonight, and put that to good use. Thank

you very much.

[applause] [music]