MADISON, Wis.–CU leaders are all thinking about AI and their own work, but one expert has shared how he believes the implications go beyond anything they may have imagined, including why college may be unnecessary, to how computers won’t have screens, to what it might mean to not go to work at the credit union at all. Or anywhere, for that matter.
In a provocative and far-ranging presentation, Zach Kass, an AI futurist, consultant, adjunct professor and the former head of Go To Market for OpenAI, prefaced his remarks to the TruStage Discovery conference by noting that he doesn’t expect everyone to buy what he is selling, as he has “some pretty wild opinions,” and then he proceeded share many of those wild opinions around how AI will affect everything—including what will bring real joy to a life.
“I want to give you an opportunity to reconsider how the world might look in the future,” Kass said.
Kass, who was with ChapGPT to help unveil the technology’s launch in 2022 and then through ongoing updates as the AI got better and better, said he now spends his time helping large companies and governments try to make sense of a “really important question,” which is “What happens next?”
His comments came at the same time ChatGPT has unveiled its newest upgrade.
‘What’s Most Important’
“I care a lot about what happens next from all sorts of different angles, but I’m particularly interested in talking to you today about what happens next to us as humans,” Kass said. “We are building machines that possess human intellectual equivalence and superiority. That’s the pursuit of AI; you can set everything else aside in my opinion. Agentic AI and generative AI and robotic AI–these are interesting ideas. But what’s most important to actually making sense of what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to build machines that are capable of human intellectual equivalents…Machines are getting very good at human intellectual equivalence and they’re getting very cheap. Of all the trends in the world, this is the one that I care about most. This is the trend that I am staring at that gives me the most hope for the future… Good things happen economically when critical resources see declining costs.”
Indeed, Kass said AI is going to become as interwoven in human existence as electricity, if not more so.
Where Are Things Going?
“The first phase (of AI) is the one we’re in today–the enhanced application phase.”
Kass shared that when ChatGPT began allowing people to explore version 3.5, which he described as the “most important consumer app basically ever,” he learned the first of “three epiphanies.”
“That opened my eyes to realizing that the science was less important than the application,” Kass said. “Everyone is now infusing this technology into the places we already work. The nice thing is it’s working really well; it doesn’t mean that we have to change any behavior to get a bunch of the benefits of this technology.”
The Second Phase
The second phase of AI is autonomous agents or agentic AI, where he said the world is really starting to see the “full power of AI come to bear on the economy.”
“In this phase machines are going to execute tasks and goals on our behalf across apps, web browsers and data links,” Kass explained, pointing to a recent Silicon Valley acquisition of a company that is looking to build a computer without a screen.
The Natural-Language Operating System
Kass predicted the natural language operating system will be marked by two major inflections, the first moving from a world in which people carry their machines (think laptops and cellphones) to a world where people wear technology (think rings, glasses, pins, etc.). It’s a world in which the screen becomes less important because so much of the computing is happening passively in the background.
“We don’t have to stare at a screen because the machine can do most of the things that we were normally pressing a button to do,” explained Kass. “The other thing that happens is we go from a world where we need to learn how machines work to a world where machines know how we want them to work. This to me is going to be one of the major evolutions in the next 10 years.”
Epiphany Number Two
Kass said his second epiphany came when he first demonstrated ChatGPT to his mother, a medical doctor who has always struggled to use the Internet in that she searches using whole sentences vs. keywords.
She has since taken to ChatGPT for search and “run with it.”
“For me, it was an epiphany where I realized the future of all computing, especially personal, was natural language,” Kass said, predicting the end of the digital divide.”
“We are building exceptionally brilliant machines that are getting very cheap and, given that we are integrating those machines in a very natural passive way into our lives, using them becomes basically effortless,” he said.
Unmetered Intelligence
Kass said the world is about to have access to what he calls “unmetered intelligence,” meaning computing power and intelligence that doesn’t have to be paid for, and the implications he suggested will challenge the thinking of many in credit unions, if not the world.
“I think now we are very much on the near horizon of a world where there is an abundance of brilliance to the extent that we no longer actually compete for who is smartest,” said Kass, who added he has spent a lot of time thinking about what could go really well and what could go really wrong in a world of unmetered intelligence.
First, the Bad Stuff
Kass began with what he called the “bad stuff,” including his theory of idiocracy, which holds that at some point a material percentage of the population will discover that the importance of critical thinking has so meaningfully declined that it is no longer necessary to critically think in order to survive and this population will regress cognitively.
Generation Z, said Kass, would appear to be the first population to be less intelligent than which preceded it.
“There is an alarming rising rate of illiteracy and motor dysfunction and there are definitely some things to concern ourselves with here,” Kass said. “We’ve created a world of abundance where for many people it means they can do whatever they want because they know they’ll be OK.”
On the flip wide with Gen Z, Kass said it also has the highest rate of geniuses per capita of any generation prior because so much information is now so readily available to everyone, as are “exceptional” teachers.
Two Trends
What the latter has led to, said Kass, is two trends:
- Companies such as Palantir have quietly waived the requirement of university degrees and are hiring certain people straight out of high school, including with large bonuses.
- Savants are showing up in incredibly scientific fields. “The actual outcome probably is going to depend much more on motivation and personal agency than anything else going forward,” Kass said.
The Bad Actors
Kass said he one of the things he worries about is two buckets worth of actors, including those backed by nation-states, but increasingly, the individual criminals and psychopaths who now have infinitely more resources available to them.
“The rise of the Internet has created this exceptional sense of toxicity, which is driven largely by about10% of the population,” said Kass. “What we are experiencing online that makes us uncomfortable is a very small percentage of the population misbehaving to an exceptional degree, and we are now about to see that magnified by AI. The opportunity that AI presents low-resource bad actors, especially to accomplish things like financial crime, is very, very unsettling.”
Kass said he wants to see governments enact “very punitive” policies for individuals responsible for such acts.
Who Am I if Not a Job Title?
Job displacement may be the biggest issue on the minds of just about everyone when it comes to AI. And it’s an area on which Kass has some opinions that, as he said when he began his remarks, aren’t going to be embraced by everyone.
He noted that if he polls an audience about who feels their jobs will be lost to AI, few hands are raised. But if he asks that same audience if they believe others in the room might lose their jobs and careers to AI, nearly every hand is raised.
It’s what he calls the “zombie apocalypse phenomenon,” where everyone believes they would survive a zombie apocalypse but their idiot neighbors would all die.
“I don’t worry about job displacement for the reason most people worry about it,” he said. “Most people who fear job automation do so on an economic basis.” That is, jobs will be lost and ultimately, someone will be unable to afford food and will starve.
“Most people can discover the logical fallacy in a world where we automate most of our work,” Kass stated. “Certainly, in a world where we automate all of it something profound will happen economically and it turns out that might not matter.”
It is that fear of job loss, he said, that drove the longshoreman’s union to demand their employers promise no job losses due to AI and automation. It’s a misplaced fear, Kass posited.
‘Everyone Will Benefit’
“If we automate the ports…everyone, eventually, including the longshoreman and their children, will benefit. We are all descendants of people who lost their jobs at some point to automation and we are all better for it economically. Everyone on earth basically sits around all day, every day asking ourselves when is a good or service going to be better faster or cheaper, without actually acknowledging that what we are asking is, when are we going to extricate the human from the manufacturing or delivery process? The reality is we are facing a world that is almost certainly going to be profoundly better economically as we start to automate a ton of work.
“The question of whether or not there will be more exciting work is almost irrelevant, because what we are now facing is not a world where we cannot make money. In fact, it’s almost certainly a world where there is more and better food on the table. The problem, actually, is can we find happiness in this new world, because we’ve attached more and more of our purpose and identity to our work…A lot of us are going to increasingly face an identity displacement crisis. We are going to be asked, ‘Who are we if not for our job?’ I am not sure that anyone is fully prepared to answer this question. What does a joyful world look like in which everyone cannot assign a lot of identity to their work? This becomes one of the most important challenges I think our generation will face, if not the greatest.
“I do think this might be our greatest sacrifice: rediscovering ourselves, our purpose, our identity, our joy in a world where we cannot attach it easily to our work. The greatest risk in all of this is that we can’t recognize the incredible abundance that we are facing because we are too emotionally aggrieved by the loss of the identity.”
It’s Going to Get Better
After observing he had scared everyone, Kas said remnded that he believes the world is going to get much better, thanks to AI.
“We are going to see the incredible potential of humanity,” Kass predicting, noting how much more work a person can accomplish today vs. 1960 and how it’s almost impossible to measure how much more productive someone is today versus the 1700s.
He credited AI with helping to drive GDP growth despite all the uncertainty around tariffs and other economic factors.
“But even more importantly than that, in my opinion, is actually exploring the ways in which human potential radically improves the human experience, and that actually leads you to explore the simplest question, which is, if only we were smarter, what would we solve?” Kass asked.
The Obvious Answer
The “obvious answer,” he responded, are a countless number of scientific questions. He predicted cures for cancer and other illnesses are just decades away, thanks to a “supercharging” of intellectual capacity due to AI.
“One of the amazing things that happens as a result of both the expansion of human potential on a productivity basis and also a bunch of other scientific discoveries is that the cost of goods and services will plummet and, this is somewhat of a hot take and when I say this I think I lose some supporters, and I understand we’re experiencing some local pain some relative pain, but what I have to remind everyone of in order to disabuse them of their recency bias and their negativity bias, is that it has basically never been less expensive to be alive than it is today,” said Kass. “It’s true a carton of eggs cost more today than it did, but can you imagine what a carton of eggs cost 100 years ago? We live in a world where we have created such an expectation around the path from luxury to commodity that it is basically the assumption from most generations that the things that we enjoy today will simply get less expensive and more prolific, such that it is every generation’s great honor now to pass their luxuries on as staples to the next generation. This is happening all sorts of places. We spend 10% of our wages on foodstuffs in the developed world; our great grandparents spent 40%.”
After listing a number of global challenges that remain stubbornly present, Kass said the issue isn’t a lack of technology.
“The reality is we can’t (solve some problems) because we’ve politicized these things into oblivion,” he said. “We now have to focus on the fact that most of our inflationary pressure comes from poor policy and poor planning and the thing to do now is to put pressure on ourselves, on the system itself, to allow technology to do one of the most important things that it can–increase access to all goods and services. The idea that everyone on earth can have access to everything they need to thrive is one of the great promises of AI.”
Live Long & Prosper?
Kass said it’s his firm belief AI is going allow people to live so long they will ultimately decide when they want to end their lives—lives he also believes will be quite different from just about all of human history.
“We’re going to work a lot less…and then eventually we might not work at all,” Kass proposed. “I say this with a smirk because I know how upsetting this idea is to people. It is, in fact, my hottest take–the idea that humans are not destined to work necessarily, that exploration and recreation are in fact far more important to our happiness. People hate this idea almost universally and I think they hate it for two reasons.
“The first reason most people hate this idea is that many people believe that we can only be happy if we work and then, in fact, without work many people will drift away from their reality,” Kass continued. “But there’s something else going on, which is that even though many people can actually imagine a world where they are much happier working less, they also can’t imagine that technology would allow us to do this.”
Kass said that while most people point to the Internet and argue they are working more hours than ever, the data show the average work week today is approximately 12 hours shorter than in 1960.
What People Won’t Share
Instead, what is consuming the average person’s time is another factor they don’t like to acknowledge.
“I ask people to let me see their screen time and I can tell you confidently there is no more intimate question than one stranger can ask another than to see their screen time,” Kass said. “No one wants to show me…The average response is, ‘I don’t know why that matters’ or ‘I don’t have my phone’ or ‘My phone is dead.’ Someone recently called me a perv. Someone made a joke about me being police and said I need a search warrant. In the process of doing this exercise I realized something, which is that no one wants a stranger to audit their screen time because no one wants to audit their own screen time. We are deeply ashamed of our addiction to our devices.
“This goes to something fascinating, which is when we talk about the kids being addicted to their phones and losing touch with reality, I always have to face the fact that the average Candy Crush user is a 59 years olds,” Kass continued. “This is a multi-generational, multi demographic indiscriminate issue the addiction to the device is rampant. It’s a blight on society, especially in the developed and high-income world. We’ve created this reality where we associate device time with productivity to such a degree that we delude ourselves into believing that we need to be on our phone in order to be productive and we have lost all of the interstitial moments.
“We’ve lost the spontaneity in our life, the romance. So many things have become so watered down because we cannot tear ourselves away from this machine that we associate with modern productivity and economic gains,” he added.
Challenges for Humanity
Kass challenged other thinking, including:
- Build a better relationship with your device. “Think about a world where you are happier and more productive because you are actually spending less time on your machine, where wealth and prosperity is associated with less device addiction, not more, and where the most successful of us can tout and appreciate our success because the technology gets to do more things that is the world…Build a more deliberate relationship with your device not just for yourself but for everyone watching you, for everyone in the room who is a leader in your family, in your community.
- Embrace Adaptability as a Strategy. “CEOs always proudly talk to me about having a culture of change, I say that’s great, does everyone agree that we are moving towards an agentic web where we probably won’t browse the Internet much longer? When I say this it sort of rocks people’s world. Many things are gong to change. Being true to your values and principles is now just as important as letting go of everything, including the expectations that come with building and running a business.
- Rethink the Whole Idea of College. “The most common question I get asked from young people 14 to 18 is, what should I study in college? And the most common question their parents ask me is also the same. What they’re both asking is how do I make a lot of money or how does my child make a lot of money? It’s fine. I actually really appreciate economic incentives. The problem is I have a terrible answer as far as they’re concerned and that is it doesn’t matter. There is no way of accurately predicting what major is going to lead to a more lucrative economic outcome for you or, frankly, anyone else, There is a rapidly declining correlation between your major and your economic outcome.
“In the future it’s not clear that you’ll have to go to college in order to be economically successful. Moreover, the rate at which goods and services are falling means that optimizing for economic gains may not even be the right thing to do…I say to people: study something you love, study something that you can be impassioned by not so that it gets you a good grade and not so it gets you a good job, but because the act of studying fills you to the brim…Being willing to change your mind, helping to change someone else’s, struggling with conflicting novel concepts–these are actually the pursuits that are most likely going to equip you effectively for the future, because there is a high probability that what you learn is far less interesting to your future employer than the fact that you learned it and mastered it.
- Spend a Lot of Time talking to People About Designing Around things That We Cannot Do. Kass said he is often asked what Open AI is not going to build or solve for. His response is that he does not know, but he recommends people take on optimizing the human experience.
Adaptability & Curiosity
“In a world where you can be great at anything, my challenge to most people is to be great at adaptability and curiosity and empathy and courage and wisdom,” Kass said. “I am increasingly convinced that as a result of all of the progress in AI the future is actually a far more human one. The AI revolution is going to drive us to a place where we don’t compete on intelligence anymore and so we must compete on everything else. It is so promising to me to imagine a world where we are regarded not by how smart we are, but by how kind and caring and empathetic and funny we are. All of the signs right now are actually pointing in that direction.”
Kass urged credit unions to begin telling their employees stories about how their jobs and the lives of all the members are going to get better as a result of AI, and to talk about how the credit union business is going to improve once it can start offering more access to more products and services to more people by lowering the cost of those services.