AI and Jobs: Economic Risks, Cybersecurity Needs & Election Concerns | TSG Ep. 913

Today's episode revolves around two letters. Can you guess them? You're watching Textron Gang, Happy Friday and Labor Day Weekend from the Gang.

Yes, we are here to talk about ai. Of course, its impact on jobs it spending, and what Silicon Valley is doing to back it politically in the upcoming 2026 midterm elections. But most importantly, we wanna wish you and yours a safe and happy Labor Day weekend as we head into it.

I'm John Schwartz. I'm in Silicon Valley. I'm our senior content writer at techron.

I'm sitting here for our co-host Alan Shimmel and Mike Baard. And with me today are some of our best pundits. They're all great guy Courier, Kate Scarcella and Jack Gold.

And, uh, we're gonna start off first with something that Alan wrote. It was kind of a, uh, labor Day, or as Kay would say, unor, I think Jack said that actually Unlabored Day message about AI and the state of AI and its impact on jobs. And, uh, he said this in this commentary he wrote for Tech ai, and he talked about layoffs continuing to loo large, in part because of the specter of AI replacing human roles.

And, uh, he cited a couple of statistics. All Dary, by the way, there's one tracker that found 140,000 people. Literally 140,000 people had been impacted by nearly 500 layoffs this year.

Um, more specifically, software engineering postings, job postings have dropped significantly, no matter how you look at it under any timeframe. AI related job posts have plunged and anecdotally and even proven by, by, by data. There has been some numbers out about the college graduates in computer science and computer engineering, and a significantly higher unemployment rate or out of work rate among them.

And we can get into that later. But first, uh, kay, you have some strong feelings about the industrial revolution and the, the, the phase that we're in right now. Maybe you could fill in what you, what you were talking about earlier.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for that, John. So first it's important to acknowledge the, the numbers.

The numbers are real, you know, and for many of us who have been in the IT field, it's, it's, um, concerning without a doubt, but it's, it's important to understand. So I, I do, I talk a lot about the industrial revolution. Industrial Revolution.

0 was, was literally the steam engine and the replacement of humans. 0 like that. 0, and that started and was kicked off in 2020.

And literally, it's about human machine teaming. It is about, it is about augmenting humans. It is so important that we embrace, and it's something that Alan put at the end of the article about embracing, we do we need to embrace, um, ai.

However, as we embrace AI, and, um, the, I think it's like the next segment or a segment after one of it, it talks about this doomsday. Yes. Is, is all this real?

Yes. Are the numbers real? Is the potential of AI being dangerous?

Re real? Yes. But it doesn't have to be.

We understand more now than we have because of history, because of how we have seen the, the industrial revolutions play out. And while this is new, we absolutely need to, as we move forward, just secure, embrace insecure. As we, as we look at this.

I mean, it's, it's important. It's important that we embrace ai. It's important that we under, because humanly it is not possible for us as a person who has been in cybersecurity now for, you know, for 20 years, looking at all those network logs, looking at all the different events that was coming into the soc to the security operation centers.

It was not humanly possible for us to examine all these logs and not chase false positives. And one of the things that happened as we brought in these junior analysts, and we talked about this wild, exciting career in cybersecurity, and they would chase one false positive after another. They'd be like, really, this is what I signed up for.

So, you know, this is what we need AI for. And, and I'm just talking now, but hey, guy, Jack, what do you guys think? Yeah, I, look, I, I, I think the, the impact of AI is real.

I think in some cases it's been way overestimated. I, I, I'm not convinced that AI is gonna replace all our jobs in the next few years. Um, and I'm not convinced that it's even going to replace a lot of the entry level jobs.

I think some of what we've seen, uh, the effect of, of job loss has to do with the economy or the perceived belief that the economy is not gonna be great, uh, going forward. 0. Everyone said, no one, you know, with all the steam engines, we're not gonna need labor anymore.

We're not gonna need people anymore. Guess what? That didn't happen.

Didn't happen in in two. Oh, didn't happen in three. Oh, we change, we, we adapt.

And I think that's going to happen. Yes, there are a lot of low level entry level jobs that AI can do that can't be created. AI does not create things.

It, it, it regurgitates. It's really good at that. Uh, and so we need to be smart about how we define entry level jobs and better deal with how we educate people coming into the workforce so that they can be augmented by ai, not replaced by it.

And I think that's a real process that we haven't started yet. Or, or we haven't started very well yet, at least. Um, now that's number one.

Number two is if AI takes all the entry level jobs, that we are not hiring entry level people anymore, how do we get mid-level and high level people? They come up through the ranks. AI's not gonna do that for us.

So there are a lot of issues around this. 5. I don't know what the number would be, but we need to think about what all of this means long term.

And in fact, I think ultimately AI creates more jobs than it displaces, just as all technologies have in the past. So it, it's, Can I ask you a quick question, Jack, about that? Like, what, what do you think the timeframe is for that?

When do we see this transition from maybe initial job losses to in, to job gains eventually? I think we're gonna see that in the next one to two years. I think we're already starting to see it in certain industries.

I mean, think of all, think of all the jobs that AI is created in at, at Nvidia as, as an example, right? It's, it's, you know, it's, we're, we're, or, or at AWS or, or, you know, Google or whoever in, you know, in the cloud space. Um, so think about the high level programming that gets done in ai that's not being done by AI itself, in most cases.

It's being, it's doing some low level stuff, but there's always software engineers that are looking over the shoulder and finding out what to do better. So I think we've already started that trend, but I think in the next couple of years, you're gonna see a, a a, a new it. It, it's a process.

It's not gonna happen overnight, but it's gonna, we're gonna see, we're gonna see it happen. I think it's important to make a dis the distinction that, uh, uh, um, Jack and Kate are making between the, the short term effects and the general trend. Uh, we all say that to ourselves all the time, but nonetheless, especially when you're in the news and reporting business, um, you react to short term news as if it's the long term trend.

So that's, so that's good. I, I am not as, uh, bullish as Jack is about, um, the productivity gain. But that's mostly because I think, um, we need to enter the, whatever it's called, trough of despair or something with, with ai.

But the, the other shoe is not yet dropped, really. Um, and the longer it takes to drop, the worse it's gonna be, uh, because, um, AI is simulative. Um, AI is not, I actually, it's, it's artificial.

It's not intelligent. Um, it, it learns through imitation and it, it is literally trained to appear good and correct and truthful when in fact it's, it's, it's not necessarily. And, um, I think many of the, uh, efforts to remove hallucinations involve essentially good old fashioned programming, just maybe using prompt engineering rather than software engineering directly.

Agents themselves are programmed. But what I'm getting at is, um, I, the, the principle that it is another tool, which is, you know, the main point Alan was making, um, Kate as well. This is yet another productivity tool, yet another way to, um, move our activities, let's say higher up, and to be more policy setters and guide, guide, you know, providing guidance and all that stuff rather than doing the nitty gritty.

Um, I, I think that's true. Uh, I do think that eventually there will be human replacement type intelligence, actual intelligence that's not this. And I also think, by the way, that when we start talking about artificial general intelligence, which is supposedly that it might be general, and it might be artificial, but it still won't be intelligence.

This is all so much marketing and positioning that is unfortunately compounded by the fact that really AI is trained to look intelligent, even though it's not. So that leads us towards, um, this, this situation, this which will also be, let's call a medium term, um, where, uh, the, the world will turn against it. Um, we'll have, uh, loom breakers like everywhere instead of just in limited number of people whose jobs are being replaced.

Ultimately, the long-term trend for AI as we see it now, generative ai, analytical ai, predictive AI will be that productivity gain. 0 or something. 0 where we actually have independent action and intelligence, um, that's artificially created, that's what's gonna, you know, start creating widespread job loss, truly widespread enduring job loss.

We're not there yet. You think? Thank you.

Go ahead, Kate. No, I was just, I was just gonna say really quickly that I think Alan points out that ai, I don't, I'm not sure where he got the statistic handles about 40 to 60% of mundane tasks. That always makes me think that if that's the case, some people who are lesser performers might initially be impacted and then eventually, but when AI is able to, to handle a higher level reasoning than the, uh, the, the higher producers might be worried.

I'm sorry, go ahead, Kate. Well, The only thing I was gonna add or say with guy, like, I had a real problem accepting the term ai, um, artificial intelligence and I, and you know, because I'm like, it's, you know, machine learning, it's supervised, unsupervised, and I really, but you know, it, if we didn't talk about the term then it was as if people almost didn't understand what we're talking about, right? And so there was an, an embracing of, of the term ai.

And then I thought to myself, you know, and when I just heard you say Nont intelligence, I almost wondered if we should put like a small NI going forward as, as we talk about, you know, AI and roll our eyes. Um, so I appreciate the comments that we are not there yet. And it gives us time from a cybersecurity point of view to look at the large language models that are being used to help them to prevent from being poisoned.

And, and, you know, they're being used, we have to look at this in order to secure it. Um, I do think that there will be another jump in another industrial revolution, another industry. I, I don't, I couldn't imagine though that we would never become people that would just not do anything.

I, I mean, that would be a hard piece of utopian that would be very, it would be like, like the society that would be very difficult to embrace. And It's been imagined, it's been written about. Um, one popular example is, uh, the, um, uh, oh boy, now, now of course the, the name of the series, uh, it was an Amazon Prime series in a book series by, uh, Corey, and I'm not remembering the name that stinks, but, uh, they, it, it envisioned a future where, um, there was 50 to somewhere between 50 to 70% unemployment, I don't remember.

And people played games and raised around and had children and what have you. And, uh, that was one, that's one, a different one. Uh, other, uh, science fiction writers have written about a sharp reduction in population, um, with the remaining people doing maybe a higher level of play and direction because of all of these robotic slaves they have working for them.

And then of course, there are the doomsday robots take over everything and decimate us, uh, uh, views. But, um, I, I think it's easily imaginable, uh, that people who spend their entire lives, you know, not necessarily working, um, by being fed and doing things that they want to do at a even a higher level in our current standard living, it's, it's, I can see you almost Wonder right, too, whether the, the, the someone's job career, which used to be 40 or 45 years in many cases, would be reduced by, by the abilities of AI or abilities of super intelligence. I mean, just the, the larger impact, Uh, I'm not sure that it's, it's so much years as perhaps ours.

I mean, I look at AI today as, and when I talk to people about it, I, I, I agree it's not all that intelligent, but I, I look at it as assisted intelligence rather than artificial intelligence, because that's really what we're dealing with right now. We're dealing with a nice computer program that knows how to help, by the way, all sudden knows how to do harm. I mean, there was a, a case right now where, um, is it, uh, OpenAI is being sued.

I think, uh, it was OpenAI for helping a, a kid figure out how to commit suicide. I mean, that's, that's, that's horrible. That's, that's absolutely horrible.

One of the things we also need to learn that, that people don't talk about enough, is that the, a AI programs we have right now are not always correct. I mean, they talk about hallucinations, but, you know, we're having a discussion here. I may not agree with what guy or Kate says, I may not agree with you, John.

I may not agree with an AI program, and I think that's totally valid and not really discussed appropriately in most organizations. So there is a lot to be, uh, improved, I guess would be a, a good way to put it in this system. I don't know what the timeframe is.

I mean, you know, the, everything gets accelerated. The more technology we have, the more acceleration we get. Um, so, uh, it'll happen.

I'm not sure it'll happen to the level that, you know, guy was talking about with some of the science fiction writers. We'll, see, I can't see the population reducing, for instance, unless there's a, you know, mass disease that, that comes in and people are just going to stay home and have kids. I mean, that's just the way it is, especially if it's if they're fed and they have a, a place to live.

So, and It was, it was the expanse, by the way. The expanse was what I was trying to Remember. Yeah.

So, yeah, it's a, it's a vex vexing situation, right? Even when we get these conflicting messages, on one hand, we have NVIDIA and Salesforce telling us of these, envisioning these, you know, millions if not billions of bots doing all these jobs, which makes me nervous. I mean, if, especially if I'm starting at a company.

And then on the, on the flip side, you have A-W-S-C-E-O, Matt Garman saying the idea of replacing junior employees with AI is the dumbest thing he's ever heard. So, uh, you know, these mixed messages, and then the press picks up on it and builds into the narrative. So if you're somebody who's seeking a job or already has one, you're, you're a little bit paranoid.

I mean, just wondering what's gonna happen because this is moving fast. Can I provide a quick example that I think is illustrative of this, of, of this situation? Um, I think it's pretty clear that, um, uh, trucking, um, jobs, uh, driving, and especially everybody, you know, like a taxi or, or car service type jobs or, or, you know, Uber and Lyft type jobs, um, are likely to disappear.

So what happens to those people? They don't become higher level drivers where they're sitting there like monitoring, you know, whatever, Waymo's and stuff like that. Um, they, um, go to another job in another occupation.

There are job functions that will disappear or reduce drastically, um, in number. And so, uh, where do they go? Um, well, uh, what happens in these industrial revolutions is, um, a lot of disruption in pain, but ultimately people finding there, there are new occupations created and also, um, ways for the same skill levels to be applied elsewhere.

And I think the, the big scare is what do you need paralegals for? Um, what do you need, you know, uh, junior associates for, or what have you, when you can have, or, or for that matter, junior coders who just graduated, what do you need them for when all those kinds of functions are being taken up by ai? So that's, that's just a wider spread of the, of the disruption.

Yeah. Oh, well, we're gonna probably have to end it here, but I mean, this country and this economy has always been based on reinvention, but I think we, maybe we vendored a cycle or a revolution where things are moving much faster than we ever seen them move before. And there's just a lot of doubt and anxiety and fear, but we'll, we'll, we'll find out.

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Uh, we're gonna talk a little bit about agen AI and AI in general. Again, um, especially the context of this bubble talk we keep hearing about. While we're hearing that, and we're hearing it mainly perhaps from short sellers or even from some of the executives like Sam Aldman, who, who fear of a bubble coming for now, that's not the case, and perhaps it won't be the case for several years, several more years, because it, spending, especially through the adoption of AI agents, is booming.

3 trillion by 2029. Um, signaling not only the acceptance of this autonomous workforce that we keep hearing about, but a transformative moment for enterprise IT budgets, especially when it comes to software and how it's used. Jack, I know you cover these types of reports, and you've written a lot about this in the, in the past.

I'm wondering where you see the market going. Do you think this number maybe is too optimistic or realistic? Uh, it's hard to tell, to be honest.

Uh, I think, I personally think it's a little bit too optimistic, uh, in discussions I've had in the industry, but, um, I've been known to be wrong, and numbers are, are, you know, future numbers are always hard to predict. My sense though, is that, uh, while ag agentic AI is a real thing, uh, it's going to be a while before enterprises can actually get a positive ROI from agent Agentic ai. I mean, we've, we've already seen reports about what, what was the number?

95% and what was the MIT Report? Yes, that was the MIT, that's the infamous MIT report. But that one, if, if just if you, uh, indulge me, that one was kind of narrowed down in very nuanced.

It was about, uh, immediate impact on a bottom line. And so it was, you know, it's very early. Yeah.

Uh, and, and I don't agree with all of the conclusions either, but, but even if they're off by, you know, half 50%, if, and from an IT spending perspective, you don't invest billions of dollars if you're, if you don't get a, you know, or an improvement in, in your bottom line. So it's going to take longer, I believe, for agent AI to take, hold it, it will take hold in certain areas for, we're already seeing it, for instance, in customer support capabilities. We're seeing it in some lower level, even medical diagnostics looking at X-rays, but there's still somebody overseeing what's going on there and, and making sure that it's real and it's not artificial.

Uh, um, so it will happen. Uh, I'm not convinced that it's going to be as big a market. I, I still think there's a bubble coming.

0, that never happened. Um, so I think that there's gonna be an issue with that. You can't continue to build out data centers.

This is, you know, Nvidia just did their earnings yesterday. They had good earnings, but you can't have a 50% increase in data center build out every quarter forever. It, it just, Eventually the math catches up to you always.

Right? That's right. And so that's the problem I have with trying to predict this.

Now, having said all of that, there are also new companies that are come on, will come on board just as we had in the past, uh, that will have agents that are really useful. There will be some companies that don't, and they will, they will quickly be discovered. Uh, and it will be very much an issue of how well I understand a particular role I have to solve.

So for, for customer service, it's fairly easy. There was a, there was just a report, the, the name of the company escapes me right now, but there's a company that's using AI for, uh, 9 1 1 calls. And what they're basically trying to do is they're trying to filter out the real 9 1 1 calls where there's an emergency where I need a doctor, or, you know, there's a big accident from someone calling up and say, Hey, there's a tree in my neighborhood that just fell.

Send somebody to, to, to fix it. You don't need a, you know, you don't need to dispatch police for that kind of thing. Those are the kinds of agents that will work very effectively.

Um, how well agents will work diagnosing cancer from a blood sample. I, you know, I don't know. Uh, but we'll, we'll see where that goes, but it, it's really hard to predict what the future's gonna look like from, from where we are right now.

Boy, I have so much fun talking to AI when I'm trying to change a plane reservation. I can just imagine the front I'm gonna have when I witness a, a, a bike accident or something, and, uh, I have to talk to an ai. I was, I was, uh, yeah, I, I was chag, grinned, dismayed, um, and, um, kind of darkly amused by, by the, the IDC report.

Um, and your coverage of it, John, I think it was your article. Um, I was, uh, um, I was, uh, chag grinned because, um, un unusually for IDC, um, it was a little impenetrable. It was kind of like, especially the press release, like, like walking through a maze, trying to figure out what the real broad trend was here.

Um, uh, I was, I was dismayed, uh, because, um, unlike almost every, I mean, IDC is the, is a standard bearer for this sort of thing in the industry. Um, although I have to say future of intelligence, future and research produces similar kinds of reports. Um, and you should check them out.

That's my company. But, um, uh, I, I was dismayed because, um, I felt that there was, there was something really tone deaf about this. I'm somewhat familiar with their methodology, but I think Jack is being really kind in talking about how, um, uh, there there may be a little bit more optimism here, um, than, than is warranted.

And I was darkly amused because none of these reports ever predict the shoe dropping and the dip they never do because they're based on surveys where you have, uh, usually senior IT people, um, saying where their spending shifts are going and where they're, um, where they're increasing and where they're maybe staying stable or decreasing. Um, so I just look at it, you know, I'm like, well, you know, if the, if, if, if the bubble bursts in six months or in nine months, none of these reports is ever gonna be, uh, predicting those because of, although you've forgotten by Then, you know, that I, I was gonna Ask you this guy, that's the dark amusement. Yeah.

This is my sin cynic cynicism coming through, is that when I see there's so many reports to making so many projections and often there they're leagues apart from one another. I wonder if there's, and this is kind of a side, like, but I wonder if there's a, like a perceived pressure within some of these places to come up with these estimates just to, to, to gain attention from people like me or, uh, they, oh, no, So not so, so definitely not IDC that is, yeah, IDC doesn't, doesn't do that, if anything. Yeah, No.

'cause I don't, I don't think that, that way about Yeah's Way. Yeah. You know, they're, they're, they're conservative.

I mean, you can put 'em on a par with the one, the School of Economics or with, um, with Harvard Business Review or what have you in terms of, uh, um, how careful they are with this. I just, I just think that they fall into that double, double trap of like the dark amusement one, which is, um, they don't, they're not really asking people like, uh, you know, do you think that that people will suddenly turn against ai? And if so, when, and that sort of thing.

They don't ask you that. Um, the, um, the, the other part of the trap is sort of treating overall IT spend, um, without that sort of general perspective. I mean, you know, what is a, what do I need to say again?

Like an ag agentic ai, it's an agent that uses ai. We been make creating agents forever. I, I ag agentic AI is a fancy term for a new way to program stuff.

And the shifts in budgets come out of custom application class of custom application programming and modification, and into ingen AI development instead. I, that's, that was the, the, the chagrin was like, I was trying to figure out, um, are they saying that overall it spending is going up thanks to agent ai? That seemed to be what they were saying, but the details they provided didn't support that They Yeah.

And they said it, they, they backed into it. I mean, they were trying to kind of, in a sense, protect themselves, but, um, it, yeah, I, I understand where you're coming from when you, I had the same impression. Um, it was, there's a bigger piece complicating a bit.

Sorry, sorry for interrupting. John. I think there's a bigger piece of this.

I mean, where are they getting their numbers from? They're going to see your IT staff and they're saying, two years from now, how much do you think you're gonna be spending on ai? Right?

What it person that you talk to today doesn't believe that they're gonna be spending gazillions of dollars on, on, on AI in the future, whether it's true or not, they all believe it, and they're all being pushed in that direction. The board of directors of your company are saying, why aren't you spending more money on ai? Because it's the future.

So we have to be really careful when we look at these, uh, visionary types of numbers. And, and I agree with you, guy. I, IDC is probably better than most, but they're still only as good as who they ask and what those people believe.

Yeah. And I agree with you, Jack, and on that point of view, I actually believe that we haven't seen what AI will do. And any term, you know, AI that we wanna put into it, what do we mean by this?

I, I, I think we really don't have an idea yet. At the end of the day, you know, we're, we're riding this wave and, and we don't actually see when it's going to, you know, crash onto the shore, you know, so it doesn't mean another wave won't come along, right? It just means that this wave that we're riding is, you know, and we'll have to swim out and catch that wave as well.

You know, that's, Yeah. Quantum computing is next, right? That's, that's my prediction in a couple of years.

We're gonna see people saying, we're gonna spend $3 trillion on quantum computing in the next three years. Maybe. We'll see.

Well, I, I think our predictions instead of being two years out, seriously have to be more like three months, six months. And, and that may just seem, you know, ridiculous. Right?

But, you know, that's what we're talking about. You know, we're, we're not, you know, what is it? One internet year was, you know, 10 years, 10 life years.

Now, I think with ai we're talking, you know, maybe 15, 20, you know, we have to really change the way we think, really, the way that we're looking at things. We just need to almost throw the baby in the bath water out. Let's try this again.

You know? So Yeah, the trouble is companies can't plan on three to six month windows. Right?

The reason these numbers come out is because companies want to know, uh, what they should be doing over the next two to three years so they can put in budgets in place. The VCs want to know who they should be investing in. I mean, it, it's, it's, there's a whole ecosystem around these numbers.

So, but it to Be five years, you know, it did, it used to be three to five years, years. When, when, when, when we were going out talking cybersecurity, you know, do this, do this three to five years. Now it's two to three.

You know, we gotta shorten the cycle again. We, we, in order for us to be competitive, we need to shorten this cycle one more time, I think. Yeah.

And in the sage, right? Everything's moving. As we, as we said, often things are moving faster.

Um, maybe you think about shortening the, the, uh, product horizon or the revenue horizon for some of this stuff, and then, and then, and then coming back and then updating it, which would be useful. Um, yeah, we'll see, The trouble with a three month though, is how do I determine an ROI, if I have to go out and spend a billion dollars on new equipment, and it's only a three or six month life cycle, I've gotta gen generate an awful lot of revenue, get an ROI on that. Um, and, and that's a real challenge for most companies.

Most companies still have equipment that's, you know, they still have servers that are five to seven years old, and they shouldn't, but they do. Yeah. I mean, Look at critical infrastructure, trust me.

Yeah. Yeah. There's still Windows XP out there, you know?

Yeah. You know, always too work. Is it out there anymore?

It, it, It always, it always appalls me when I get on an airplane, you know, what are they doing behind the counter there? They're printing out on a dot matrix printer what an airplane is gonna be doing over the next six months, or sorry, six hours. So yeah, it's like, okay, don't Take, I, I, I, I hear you and I see that, and I, and, and I understand, but those of us who love technology, don't, we always want the latest and greatest.

And, you know, I I, I want the new foam. I I really do. I, I'm, you know, I want the new gadget.

I mean, I do anyway. I'm horribly that type of human, but Yes. Well, And, and, and the truth.

Now, if you look at the statistics, you talk about phones, people are keeping phones mu smartphone much longer now than they ever Did. Yes. Yeah.

The product. Yeah. The lifecycle's longer.

What, uh, well, this is, I mean, one there, you know, in a valley here of uncertainty, and one thing that's certainly, if we're gonna see more of these reports, we're gonna see more hyperbole. And as guy pointed out, we're probably not going to see any type of, uh, nod to the impact of a potential bubble or a downsize in the market. So, um, something to, to keep in mind.

Um, but I think we can, we, we better move on to, uh, AI and Super pacs in our next Well, if I May though, John, I do wanna say like, um, I don't think IDC is indulging in hyperbole here. Okay. Um, I, I, the, the problem I had with is how difficult it is to peel back what exactly it is that they're Yeah, no, You, I'm sorry.

Yeah. I just stated that I need hyperbole in terms of other reports. That's right.

I think, think these press folks are getting a little hyperbolic in order to get attention. Oh, absolutely. Press Releases we're paid to do.

Yes. Um, but anyway, it's all, all, all good. Um, but we're gonna come back and talk a little about Super pacs and some of our friends in tech who are backing these pro AI candidates and issues.

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And we're gonna talk about AI Superpacs. So folks like Meta, uh, Andreessen Horowitz and some tech executives from Open ai, uh, I believe, uh, Airbnb and others are looking into backing pro ai, super pacs to support candidates in the 2026 midterms, oppose strict regulation in states, especially like California, and counter this, this kind of rising national narrative of AI dors who are warning of the dangers of technology. So what, so I'll mention just a couple of them, then I'll throw it out to our panel.

The first one is called Leading the Future, which was created this month. Um, their idea is to influence races in Congress and, and, and support AI influencers, especially open ai. Uh, they've spent, or they've thrown a hundred million dollars into financial support, uh, into things like, uh, pushing back on legislation, uh, backing candidates who are especially keen to ai.

And then we have Meta, which has created something called the Mobilizing Economic Transformation across pac, and that's ahead of the State's governor's race. Seriously, I am serious. Yes.

What, what is it with wrong names for builds and everything else. I mean, yeah, Yeah, I know. You know, so Elon Musk seems intent on putting the word sexy and like, yes.

You Know, I thought a Tesla when I saw that. Anything that he can, and, and, and I, I think, you know, mark is, mark Zuckerberg is probably sitting there going, well, the whole meta thing didn't work, but I'm gonna just keep pushing at it eventually. It's been a light on fire.

We could talk about that too. But, uh, yeah, there's, there, I think there are 50 AI related bills that have been introduced in California this year based on some research from the national conference of state legislatures. So in a sense, it was inevitable.

There was gonna be lobbying. There always has been for tech, it's just gotten more savvy, and they're spending more and they're more, they have more influence, and they're willing to work with this administration in many ways, shapes and forms. But, uh, I'm wondering, uh, Kate, I'll start with you.

Uh, what do you think of the concept of a pro AI super pac? The only problem that I have is, well, not the only, but one of many is that I worry, uh, that we don't have a democratization. When we start to funnel money into different candidates, I think we start to lose.

We, we will start to lose, um, objectivity, which is often what we see with pacs when we become so, you know, focused. And I really, I personally worry about our democracy. I worry about what I'm seeing today, quite frankly.

I know Alan's not here to, to really get in on this. Um, which I know he has strong opinions, but I, I worry about putting money into something that, that we don't have a good handle on yet. Um, we don't know where this is going yet.

And, um, you know, so yeah, I, I have some great concerns around that. Look, Mo most industries throughout history have done or tried to do legislatively what was good for them, not necessarily what was good for us, right? I mean, think about how many years the automotive industry fought catalytic converters and unleaded gas, um, tobacco, another great example, right?

We don't know yet what the regulations for AI should be, let's be real. But there have gotta be some regulations just as there are in financial systems, just as there are in many other things. And so, my concern with having these pacs is that, as Kate rightly said, they're gonna throw money at candidates who are, are going to be incentivized to back off and not do anything.

And not doing anything is as bad as doing too much, in my opinion, and perhaps even worse. And so, I think when we start talking about pacs, until we actually see what they believe, 'cause there are pacs on all sides of things, right, left, right, middle, um, we'll have to see where it all goes. And, and by the way, the, the meta pack with meta, I'm guessing that Mark just asked AI to come up with a, something that said meta as a name for a pack.

That's Funny. I, I, you know, I feel like channeling Alan saying, let's, this is what it's really all about. Go ahead.

No, no. He, he, he'll, he'll push. No, I can't, I can't, I can't, I can't do Alan right now.

I, because I think on, with, with, with all due respect, Kate and Jack, you are not sounding enough of an alarm here. This is why, because AI is not like your other, you know, it's not like your catalytic converters. Why is it not?

Because it is very difficult for the general population and frankly, for the elite to know, to understand what AI is. It is, it is a simulation, and I, I keep saying this over and over again because it is liter, literally the design point for generative ai, which is the most common form, the design point is to fool you. That's the design point.

Does it? ResSem, does the output during the training cycles rep, uh, uh, resemble all these, all the previous types of outputs on the internet ever forever, whatever, whatever the data set is. And the internet forever is, is what, is open AI's real contribution to all of this.

So why does that make a difference here? This is an extremely dangerous area to be unregulated, extremely dangerous. I don't, I'm not in favor of a lot of regulation, but simple things like providence and transparency not being regulated means that people using it include, I, I'm not convinced that, uh, Sam Alban knows what AI is.

I'm not convinced that Mark, I think, I think he's, I think he's admitted that in, in small trips and drabs over The last, well, right? So I'm just saying like the people guiding this, so, and the, the combination here of, of, of this almost completely, you know, uh, uh, almost complete opacity in, in being, in being able to, uh, understand, uh, in general what, what AI is combined with the insane, I mean, I don't wanna say the saved meta, but it, it's looking like it saved meta. I mean, I have one of the most commonly used models out there and, um, Facebook, which was the, it still is the main revenue engine for meta.

Um, just as an aging user group and a lot of competition and so forth, I've been wondering what would happen with them. So, and nevermind, like, you know, the gajillions, uh, uh, of in wealth being built by Nvidia alone, even though it has competitors. Yeah.

But my point is, when you put those two together, there's tons and tons of money to be made by just letting these folks just keep doing what they're doing. That's dangerous. Facebook is not making any money with their AI stuff.

I mean, all the money is still coming. I'm Saying meta meta, I'm sorry, meta meta. But what, where, if you look at the revenue generation from meta today, from an AI perspective, it's negative.

They're spending gazillions of dollars where they just announced a deal, uh, with Google, uh, what was it? $20 billion? 10 billion?

Yeah, $10 billion. I mean, yeah, no, they, they, um, they've also though, I think in their earnings report, they did mention that they were gonna stop this, uh, hiring binge or they're gonna slow it down. Um, but that's an acknowledgement.

I mean, they, the amount of money they were spending was outrageous. But, uh, you're, you're right. I think you wanna look instead of their profitability at Mark Zuckerberg's personal worth and meta's market cap and that sort of thing, which is being built on vapor.

But that is an old tradition at this point in, in, in technology, future earnings and all that sort of thing. So, um, yeah, I just, I, I, I, I just think the combination of all of this personal wealth, let's put it that way, personal wealth and, and, and, and stock valuation opportunity, um, in, in AI with how impenetrable in AI's actual workings are. It, it's even scarier than that guy, because what if, oh, Good, go for it.

Well, imagine, you know, my science fiction mind, some terror group, I don't know, whatever, some group, uh, you know, gets a hold of a major model that's being used by millions of people and decides to weight it towards pick your favorite thing, you know, nazim, communism, totalitarianism, whatever. And people are using this, and there are no regulations in place to, one, let people know users like us that this is taking place or two to stop it. There can be some real damage.

Imagine, I actually thought about once writing a, a little short story, scientific short story about AI taking over schools. You know, there's a shortage of teachers. What if we put AI in as teachers for our, you know, kindergartners through eighth grade or something, and we had a model built that decided that they were going to indoctrinate these kids with, you know, pick your favorite.

I don't wanna pick on necessarily the political climate right now, but, you know, that's a, a good one, right? Um, what's to prevent that from happening? We have no regulations against that.

And it could easily happen if there aren't some regulations. So I agree with you guy, that maybe I'm being, or, and Kate as well are being too optimistic. I, I don't wanna have overregulation, but we need to have something in place.

And frankly, it's more likely to come from Europe than it is to come from the US in the short term. It always, is it, I mean, the us I mean, in terms of tech policy, we're, we're absolutely pathetic. But, uh, you, you, I was gonna ask one thing.

I, what can we, I'm running outta time, but I was gonna mention this scenario. You know, how candidates would run on issues like the economy and crime. Could you imagine in 2026, if you're running, say, in Ohio or Texas or Pennsylvania, you're an advocate for data center growth there and, and, and looking for, looking for, for a handout from big tech.

I mean, these might be the, the placeholders or the, the ponds of, of, uh, Silicon Valley in the future. And the, the thing, the one thing I do worry about, um, with money and Pax and everything is, you know, I believe in free markets. How free, you know, how free is free markets if we're putting all this money into these candidates who will, you know, do whatever AI people want.

You know, we really, you know, are we going with the best technology at, at that moment? I, I don't, I don't think we are. And yeah, Well, yeah.

That's a good, that's a good way to to, to kind of wrap it up and conclude things. Hey, um, we're out of time. I want to thank all of you.

You guys are great as always. Thank you for being on today's show, and we'll see you on future episodes. Uh, we want to thank the audience for watching.

We want to wish them a happy holiday three day weekends. And, uh, we hope you stick around and watch Textron tv. We have lots of great programming here.

And, um, for Alan and Mike, who will be back very soon, this is John Swartz, uh, signing off.