Kartik Gada (00:00) The rate of change will never go down because it's never, ever, ever gone down, even before humanity, even from days of dinosaurs. When there was extinction, subsequent evolution was faster. So even in AI, if all AI companies crash right now, the rate of innovation is not changing. There'll be new companies in three months. ICEO Technologies (00:14) Kartik Gada is a renowned futurist who teaches finance and technology at Stanford University, has raised $800 million of investments, managed ⁓ &As and delivered many conference keynotes. Diego Calligaro (00:25) Up to the time of the singularity, what do you think are the main milestones or technological achievements you need to have to get there? Kartik Gada (00:35) So some aspects of intelligence advance much earlier and some are still slow to even get anywhere close to a human. Therefore, the type of intelligences that artificial intelligence represents are uncorrelated to human because it can be thousands of times better than human in certain things and nowhere near human in other things. But it still has an economic impact in whatever it does well. Therefore, it can go to a point where that is what is fueling the economy and gets to this economic vertical takeoff point. where all economic progress is pretty much instantaneous. ICEO Technologies (01:09) Kartik has studied for over 30 years the effects of technology into society and the economy with a deep focus on AI, which led him to advise governments on necessary policies. Kartik Gada (01:19) There's virtually unlimited money that will be made by whoever fixes this problem and many companies are trying to do it. It is a very technologically intensive problem, but it's very exciting. Diego Calligaro (01:29) hi, Kartik. Very glad to have you here. How are you? Kartik Gada (01:31) Hello. Very good. Thank you for having me. Diego Calligaro (01:34) Kartik, it's been a pleasure having you here. I've been following you for several years now regarding all your insights that you are providing. Of course, you have an impressive background, but I would like to start specifically on the foundational concept that you have been studying for more than 30 years, which is the accelerating rate of change. So if you can share with us directly, what is this, the accelerating rate of change, and if you can also provide directly some examples of this concept. Kartik Gada (02:11) Thank you for having me. The accelerating rate of change is how every process and every evolutionary cycle we have on planet Earth, even predating humanity, is always at an accelerating rate. And that leads to everything within humanity also being at an accelerating rate. So if you go back four billion years, many people have watched the Cosmos series with Carl Sagan from 1980. That's been watched by maybe one billion people. And he had this cosmic calendar. dividing the entire timeline of our universe into one year. And then as we could see, important things from an evolutionary perspective only begin happening in the final 1 12th of that December, as we say, then humanity only on December 31st and in the final hours and minutes and so forth. And so each salient event happens at shorter and shorter intervals. And this was true in terms of biological evolution, in terms of technology and the byproduct of technology, economic progress and economic growth. And that includes the stock market, GDP growth, all of the above. So each of these cycles has an inherent accelerating nature to them because each output makes the next cycle faster. It becomes the ingredients of the next cycle. So this is unstoppable and it has withstood pretty much everything that's ever happened on planet Earth. evolution accelerated after there was a big extinction event. After there is a huge war or something in human society, everything accelerates after that. Each of these items continues to foster acceleration and this is continuing to happen even now. From what we see, an uptake in the rate of technological change with artificial intelligence, which is my primary field, we see there's something new every week even. Diego Calligaro (03:50) Yeah, and it looks like ⁓ this concept and this law essentially is literally entering all economy itself, like all aspects of our society. And if you look, for example, also at the high tech itself, which I believe currently stands at 3 % in terms of penetration, right? And maybe if you can share more as well about why high tech is important within this concept of acceleration rate. And if you can provide some example of why high tech is really driving as well this acceleration. Kartik Gada (04:26) Okay, so I'm happy to announce that at this point, you cause that video of 3 % was made a couple of years ago. Now we are closer to 4 % and that progression is continuing. So 4 % of the total world economy is what I define as high tech. And what is high tech? Something that has about 10 % per year improvement per fixed cost. So everything from computation, storage, bandwidth, many software like AI and so forth, improvement rates are much faster than 10 % and certain things are closer to 10 % or a little less even such as batteries and electric cars. So now 4 % of this economy worldwide is now under a 10 % a year annual improvement, exponential improvement. And that is why more low tech things are being converted into high tech. How we saw A few years ago, in music, for example, people used to buy vinyl records and cassettes and they bought CDs and now it's all software virtual. We saw this in video streaming. Everything is virtual streaming, no cassettes and things like that. We see this now in e-commerce ordering and delivery. So those are things from even 10, 15, 20 years ago. Now we're seeing more and more. It's very easy to generate art with AI, generate music with AI, generate documents with AI, generate video with AI. Right, so this is a conversion of low tech to high tech. And this continues to happen in more and more places in the economy. And it's manifested in how the valuations of many of these tech companies are just rising to numbers that would have seemed unheard of. Just yesterday, Microsoft became a four trillion, four trillion dollar company. Before, we did not have any one trillion dollar company until 2019 even. Not that long ago, six years ago was the first one trillion. Now there's so many about one trillion we don't even count. The biggest is four trillion. Four trillion. And even if there's small correction all that, the duration of corrections is also shorter because we're on this whole steeper slope now. Now here's the thing, for humans, this is often very dividing in that there's some humans who find this very exciting and are thrilled that you can just be in stock market index and returns will be higher than you thought before. Or, Some people are very worried. Like, I thought my job could never go away and my job is being replaced by AI and what do I do about that? Or this rate of change is too much and it's frightening. So half of people find this exciting and half find this very stressful and worrisome. So that is a part of the aspects of this in terms of how accelerative change is affecting people. Diego Calligaro (06:55) And what happens when this percentage increases, let's say to 30 %? For example, when we look at now it's 4%. So now it's really driving this. But of course, in the coming years, it's going to grow significantly. So what do you think will be the impact of this increase in percentage? Kartik Gada (07:01) So. So I say that that percentage itself doubles every, let's say, eight, nine, 10 years approximately. So when I was very young, it was not in one percent. It was like point one point two percent. Very little in the world was high tech. People didn't have PCs and even calculators. Let's now we have all these things. Four percent. Just to get from even one percent to four percent, that was to doubling that took maybe 16 years from 2008. Nine was one percent. Two thousand twenty five is four percent. to go from four to 8%, maybe just eight years more, 2033, to go from eight to 16%, maybe just another eight years more, 2041. And when it finally gets to 50%, that is my definition of what would coincide with the timing of a technological singularity. And I say that that happens early 2060s, give or take a few years. So the general range is 2056 to 2070 or somewhere in there. And that is when the entire economy or close to it is high tech. Once it's 50%, then the amount that's not high tech just shrinks very fast. And technology becomes human surpassing, but it also transcends many direct economic concerns and assumptions about scarcity, economic input, value, and things like that. So that will happen in the lifetime of many of the people still watching, because I'm saying it's only 35 something years away. And this is already appearing as evidence in a lot of things, the speed of AI, the valuation of these tech companies, every day it's a new high, that type of thing. Even if there's a correction from the bubble, recovery will be much, faster than before. All of that is already a permanent and manifesting, and just even the rate of economic change in so many other things. China has skipped so many generations of technology, so they are more advanced than the United States and other Western countries in many technologies just because there was an understanding of what they could skip to get to a more advanced state in certain technologies. Diego Calligaro (09:13) And if you look the economy itself and how this is to impact, of course, it looks like this is going to drive more economic activity, more growth, but there's also a deflationary aspect of high tech, right? In which deflation is within this, with high technical technologies. So how does this deflationary aspects is impacting the economy itself as it grows the percentage. Kartik Gada (09:41) Yes, and thank you for bringing up the deflation because many people don't quite understand that or they're skeptical that it exists. All technology is inherently deflationary in nature because technology is about doing the same thing at much lower cost for the most part and therefore a much higher volume of that thing that now became lower cost. For example, when it became easy to produce videos, know, individuals do not need to be television professionals to produce videos. We got so many videos on YouTube and elsewhere. We can even do a podcast like this now, which was not something we could have done many years ago. So this deflation then becomes pervasive on the entire economy, because even the people who understand that a computer or smartphone may get cheaper over time, they're not rolling it up all the way to the top. What is the impact in the economy? What happens when all these retail stores that sold electronics are gone and everyone buys electronics online and all that resource is freed up? and becomes something that has to be sold at low price that is an input for a new business. So this deflation becomes pervasive in the economy. It is offset by the amount of money printing that has been done worldwide, which is many tens of trillions of dollars at this point, 40, 45 trillion at least at this point. And that is what confuses people because if not for all this offsetting money printing, we would have net total deflation. The fact that we have net inflation, which is itself very low right now, but the fact that it's even a little bit net inflation is because of all this money printing that was needed to fill the deflation gap. And that is rising exponentially. So the amount of money printing needed just to keep up with deflation and keep our existing structures from not having to deal with deflation is itself rising exponentially. This is very good news for people who invest with this understanding in mind. But it's confusing to people because some people still say that increasing the money supply is inflation. Whereas it will increasing the money supply did not lower your standard of living. just allowed a lot of things to also become cheaper despite more money. Therefore, your purchasing power doubled on two levels. And this is a poorly understood phenomenon even by formal economists because formal economists don't study anything new. They study things that are 50, 60 years old and try and fit what they see today into what their textbooks tell them. So they're not curious about this, but people in the technology industry, understand this right away and they've already observed aspects of it and are making decisions accordingly, like a decision to produce a technology company based on a product that is replacing a prior product and thus is deflationary if the new product is adopted. That is a everyday activity here in Silicon Valley and people are aware of that. Diego Calligaro (12:19) So the solution in this new world would be like to essentially print more money to counteract the deflation. Kartik Gada (12:27) The solution is to continue to print money, but they have to print in a better way. The way they print money now, it's like you could hardly invent a more inefficient and unfair way of printing money because the printing is in the US, for example, is done just by buying two things, treasuries and mortgage-backed securities. In Europe, it was also similar, just buying ⁓ sovereign bonds and things like that. And that is something institutions can invest. in without doing any fundamental finance analysis, but just front running the central bank, the US Federal Reserve in the US or the European Central Bank in Europe, and also the same in Japan and China, their central banks. So all financial decision making is destroyed because of this type of money printing, whereas a more egalitarian way to do the same amount of money printing that would be fairer and more hard for institutions to rig is actually to Recognize this reality don't pretend that you're buying bonds with intention of selling them back and then never selling them back But actually just transmitting the same amount as the equal amounts of cash to all people Because the printing has to be done anyway and it has to also be done in a manner that offsets the taxation of humans because I say If AI is replacing human jobs, then you cannot tax human labor anymore, because you're putting humans at a disadvantage compared to AI even more than would otherwise be the case. And that's a way to finance government in a manner that effectively comprises taxation of this deflation or more precisely monetization of this deflationary phenomenon so you don't have to humans anymore at this point. That is technologically and economically possible. It's not politically possible quite yet. Diego Calligaro (14:09) Thanks for sharing Kartik. And I want to go back to what you were saying before, the moment that we are going to reach that 50 % of high tech presence within the economy. That's where you see also the moment in which there's going to be this point in time, which is called also a singularity itself. If you can stop a moment here and if you can explain better this concept. Kartik Gada (14:36) Yes. So the concept of a technological singularity was originated by Ray Kurzweil. And he has said that he expects it to be 2045. Now, I don't think it's quite that soon. That's only 20 years away. And his analysis assumes a certain speed of computation progress that is faster than it has actually been. So my assumption is a little bit later. Like I said, mine is between 2056 and 2070. meaning let's say 2060 as a middle point. And the definitions of technological singularity differ a little bit by futurist. So for Ray Kurzweil and others, is about artificial general, it is about all computation becoming human surpassing. Other commentators, they say artificial general intelligence, AGI, is the point of a technological singularity. And I say that can certainly help. But it's not mandatory. You don't have to have AGI to have a technological singularity. And for two reasons. One, AGI mimics a human perfectly, and a human is not the perfect type of intelligence, right? There's other types of intelligence that can be arrived at through computation and artificial intelligence that are different and in some aspects more valid, one could say. Secondly, an AGI demo doesn't change the entire world immediately. So many people who talk about a singularity say this company has an AGI demo. have an AGI demo. That has to spread over the whole world. If there's an AGI demo, there are poor people in Africa who don't have food. How did the demo help them or how did the demo affect them in any way, right? So there has to be a total worldwide economic impact. And that happened somewhat later than a technology is merely at the demonstration phase. And I say the economic aspect of the technological singularity has to overarch everything else because, you know, too many people in technology say, This is possible now in demo, has it scaled to a large number of people? No. So it doesn't really count in terms of a wholesale technological singularity. So that's why my timing is a little bit later. And my definition, however, is more robust because it has to be the entire world economy. Now, what could happen by then is unclear. And by definition, it's something humans cannot see past. We don't know what the world will be like after the technological singularity. We call that a prediction wall. to that extent because if I say technological singularity is 2060, what will the world be like in the year 2100? We don't know. By definition, we cannot see that because to predict 2100 from 2025 is as hard as to predict 2025 from 700 BC. We don't have the tools to do that and the vision to even understand what that could be. Do humans merge with technology? Does technology do everything and humans are just taken care of, sort of like benign pets in a way? We don't know. It could be any of the above, all of the above. Do bad people get a hold of technology and a smaller and smaller group of people are able to do worse and worse things? That is possible. That is one of the things Ray Kurzweil, I think, does not address enough because he assumes most people are still good. And as we find out, new technology is always used by criminals as well. So these are the things to think about, but the certainty is that the rate of change is becoming so much faster that we will have pretty much a vertical point in technological change and economic progress by that point. By vertical point, mean the chart becoming so fast that the rate of change is just extraordinarily rapid, even by today's standards, even though today is extremely rapid by the standards of maybe 100 years ago. Those are... part of the aspects of how one can envision a technological singularity. One thing is certain is that the rate of change will never go down because it's never, ever, ever gone down, even before humanity, even from days of dinosaurs. When there was extinction, subsequent evolution was faster. So even in AI, if all AI companies crash right now, the rate of innovation is not changing. There'll be new companies in three months again. So we will never go back to, let's say, 10 years of just stagnation like that, like we used to have. Diego Calligaro (18:29) I really appreciate that perspective because you speak a lot as well about history, and how those changes in the past, you can track them until today and you can see that acceleration that is going on since like a thousand or millions of years before. speaking about up to the time of the singularity, what do you think are the main milestones or technological achievements we need to have to get there? Kartik Gada (18:58) the most important technology of the remaining time between now and singularity is artificial intelligence, number one. But number two most important technology is solar, photovoltaic. Now that is something that is exponential from an energy perspective. It is a type of semiconductor and is growing very, very fast. And many people still think solar will not work, but their information is 20 years out of date. It has worked. It's already rising exponentially. And it's crucially important not only for its exponential nature, but specifically because it helps the poorer countries more. Poorer countries are usually the sunnier, hotter countries. And they were being left behind because there wasn't any technology that they could use to catch up. They could only use technologies that were also used in more advanced countries that were colder weather. So, but photovoltaic is uniquely suited to enable poorer countries, tropical countries with a lot of sunlight to catch up. This is favorable from a singularity perspective because they can have abundant energy as long as they just maintain a photovoltaic grid. So energy infrastructure is important. The next one is this overhauling of government. So one thing I always talk about is you cannot have this private sector becoming more and more productive. And we see a tech company with AI now needs only 10 employees when it used to have 100 employees. So all of the valuation revenue can be kept by just 10 people. What about government? Government efficiency is not rising. They don't want it to rise, but you cannot have public sector being so inefficient when we see a government office in almost any country, a lot of bureaucrats, and they do their job, but they do their job the same way as 40 years ago when artificial intelligence could eliminate 80 % of them. So any government office. with 100 bureaucrats should be just one guy and then AI. And you get better service at lower cost, right? Because only one guy, pay him more, fine. But that type of overhaul of the cost of government services is necessary because at the moment it's extractive of the private sector. And they say just tax-risk, tax-risk, but too few people are even thinking of government itself becoming more efficient, which is necessary. for economic progress because you can't have this much of a productivity mismatch between the two. So that is another aspect of infrastructure that really has to change that too few people are thinking about not only government themselves, but regular people also, they say raise taxes, but I never hear a question, well, what about making government more efficient? Right? First do that, then talk about what tax should be. But too few people. Diego Calligaro (21:17) Would you Elon Musk tried to implement sort of efficiency, let's say, within the government, maybe not how you would have envisioned, there was a trial of that concept. I don't know what your thoughts about that or if it would be ever possible to... actually get efficient government. Kartik Gada (21:37) So at initiative, I was very excited about DOGE, Department of Government Efficiency. I was very excited about that because if anyone can do it, it was Elon Musk and the other person who actually created the vision of DOGE was Vivek Ramaswamy. So I thought these two can do it if anyone can do. But it turned out to not be thinking big enough and because it did not meet its original vision, Vivek Ramaswamy quit on the first day, January 20th. Since that time, we do denounce certain amounts of wastage, which are very shocking, and savings is a saving $10 billion, but not enough because total U.S. budget is not going down. It's still $7 trillion a year, U.S. federal budget. Now, in 2019, not that long ago, it was still only $4.4 trillion. So all we have to do is go down to 2019 by cutting by one third, $7 trillion down to $4.4 trillion. That would be very good. But they're not doing anything like that. And the US legislature has to approve any spending cuts and they are not doing that because they profit from the existing status quo. So the only place in the world where someone really has made true changes in cutting government spending and the results were immediate was in Argentina. Javier Miller. He finally makes it look funny and does all that, but he cut a lot of spending and Argentina's economy grew very fast after so many decades of not going anywhere. So that's the only place in the world where this is really happening at the level that it should happen. But even he is cutting a lot, which is good, but he's not taking the high tech solution replaced with AI. That would be step two. I had hoped Elon Musk of all humans on earth, Elon Musk is the one most capable of doing that, but he has either not been able to push that through or That was not within the scope of vision or something like that. So this doge has not really made a difference. And we can just look at that at 2025 spending, the US publishes government spending on a weekly basis versus same week one year ago, and there's no reduction really. He may have stopped further increase, but no reduction when it's supposed to be one third reduction for the reason I said. Diego Calligaro (23:39) I see. And so going back to the main points, to get to a singularity, we essentially need a lot of energy, government efficiency, AGI, as you mentioned. And what about the process? Kartik Gada (23:51) It's mandatory. We need a lot of AI. It doesn't have to be AGI. AGI can help, but it's not 100 % mandatory. Yeah. Diego Calligaro (23:57) Yeah, okay. And related to this probably computational power. So I know you've been discussing a lot about supercomputers as well. Can you share more on why this is very important, super computer, how they've been impacting society, and whether we're going to go back to the trend line? Kartik Gada (24:15) So it's less about supercomputers themselves, although they're very important for R &D, including in medicine, energy and materials and so forth. But that's a trend by which to observe whether computation is accelerating. Because the existing computational paradigm of semiconductors, Moore's law, that is saturate, that is flatlining someone, which was expected in that it gets more and more difficult to get to smaller and smaller transistor size. they're always able to push it one more generation even after it is said that this is the last generation. So it continues to have one more life, but the time it takes to go to each new generation is slowing. So this paradigm of computing is very mature and it's in need of a new paradigm because semiconductor based transistors have existed now for 65 years or so. And it's important to go to new type of computing. which will then reflect in the super computing trend line that's on my channel very often. Because that flattening is because semiconductor is getting harder and harder to get more incremental computation. When there is a new paradigm of computing, I wish there were many competing technologies for 15 years and Ray Kurzweil talks about many of them. Whether it's carbon-based, know, nanotubes and things like that. Whether it is DNA-based, whether it is 3D circuitry and the heat management of that or quantum computing. or some combination of all of those. That remains to be seen. But we will go to a new paradigm of computing for sure at some point, perhaps any day now, just in order to keep that supercomputing trend line going, which is the trend line of all computing. It's not that supercomputers themselves are uniquely important, but that is how we measure the ordinary computing that we would buy in our home PC as well, how much it is progressing. That is how we would measure that. So there has to be a new computational technology. The reason a company like Nvidia makes so much money is because their chip, the GPU, is more suitable for artificial intelligence than the ordinary chips made by Intel in the past, like CPUs and so forth. And nobody has been able to compete with Nvidia yet, and there's such a shortage of GPUs still. Just because, even though it's still a semiconductor chip, it is more designed for AI type algorithms. And all of this has to be superseded so that we don't have a scarcity model in computation in hardware and AI can grow unfettered. So there's virtually unlimited money that will be made by whoever fixes this problem and many companies are trying to do it. It is a very technologically intensive problem, but it's very exciting. And here in Silicon Valley, obviously I watch all the news about that on daily basis as everyone in AI does, because AI is being held back by the limits of existing computation. both the technology behind it as well as the shortage of GPUs and why they're expensive for startups to just buy GPUs. Diego Calligaro (26:57) And I can imagine there like, you see a lack of investment as well in this specific area that is preventing to... Kartik Gada (27:05) Now there's certainly not a lack of investment. There's many, many billions of dollars available to anyone who even tries to do a little bit, has even a somewhat compelling technology. It's just a very difficult technological problem. And someone will eventually figure it out. But we're talking about a completely new architecture of computing that has to spread as the majority of computing use. And at some point that happens. But nobody knows exactly what company or where, right? So far, Nvidia is the substitute, but it's still silicon. It's not a new technology. just, it's not a new computation technology. It's just a new architecture of GPUs, which are favorable for AI algorithms and graphics and things like Diego Calligaro (27:46) And when it comes to AGI, so you said that you don't necessarily need AGI, it's enough AI. Can you elaborate on that? Why you have this concept, contrary to Ray Kurzweil, for example? Kartik Gada (27:59) Well, because remember what I was saying before was AGI is designed to simulate humans, but it presupposes human intelligence as the ultimate intelligence and best type of intelligence, which I don't think is necessarily the case. So AGI can help a singularity occur, but it's not necessarily mandatory for that because think of what computational intelligence currently is versus not. There are things that computer became better than humans at 50 years ago, like calculations. You have even the free calculator we have in our PC, can do square root, cube root, just like that. So 30, many thousands of times better than a human at that. But there's also many things that it still cannot do as good as a human, like generate comedy, for example, that is funny, that it's not really able to do very well. There's some near and there, but it's really not that good at that. So some aspects of intelligence advance much earlier and some are still slow to even get anywhere close to a human. Therefore the type of intelligences that artificial intelligence represents are uncorrelated to human, because it can be thousands of times better than human in certain things and nowhere near human in other things. But it still has an economic impact in whatever it does well. Therefore, it can go to a point where that is what it's fueling the economy and gets to this economic vertical tick-off point where all economic progress is pretty much instantaneous. And that could happen even without EGI. Because EGI is not 100 % mandatory for that. Diego Calligaro (29:27) Do you believe that we could achieve as well AGI Kartik Gada (29:31) We could achieve AGI, but here's the thing, a lot of people won't necessarily find that to be that useful from a business perspective because the other narrow AIs catered to individual applications might already be there. So AGI might still just be, okay, it's fun, it's like a human, whatever, but it may not turn out that important. as people think and it's certainly not mandatory for a singularity to happen with E.G.I. because again E.G.I. presupposes that human intelligence is the perfect type of intelligence. Diego Calligaro (30:00) So we have this acceleration that is going to impact everything in the economy. Also prices on the food are going to go down, on the land, real estate, ⁓ etc. Healthcare as well is going to improve significantly ⁓ also driving a longer life. We can discuss that later. So it looks like the trend is going in that direction if you look at all these technologies. What's going to be the role of humans themselves in a world where there's no scarcity at all? Kartik Gada (30:33) I'm of the belief that there is no, I'm of the belief that nobody should worry about AI taking away their job. They just have to adapt. Because automation has been happening for a very long time already. For example, in agriculture in the United States, there was a time when 70, 70 % of people worked in just farm labor, agriculture. Now it's 2%. Yet the 2 % are able to produce food for, all of the 100 % and even surplus. So agriculture productivity has risen 35 times. And people said, well, what will the farm workers do? But no, all these farm workers, they went into something else and life went on. So AI does not eliminate jobs, it just changes jobs because now people can do three times as much and they have to structure their job accordingly. It always creates more jobs then it takes away as long as, this is the one condition that can never be broken, As long as government does not make it too hard to be an entrepreneur. That is the condition. As long as government does not make it hard to be an entrepreneur, AI will always create more jobs than it takes away. There are fewer jobs per company in the use of AI, but there's also more companies. So it'll be common for a company to have a lot of money when it's only 10 people, but there'll be many such companies also. Now, one thing that does happen with AI is, and this is a harder thing to crack, is that the smart gets smarter and the people who are less smart get left further behind. Because people who are already very intelligent, they're more inclined to figure out AI and to find new AIs. People like us probably are finding a new AI every three days and we don't have even enough hours in the day to make use of everything in AI that we want to use, right? Because we're We keep on using it to do more and more. Now, people who were not of this mindset are not using it, so they fall further behind. So that is more of a problem that the smart gets smarter and the others are getting left behind, even though the tools are available to everyone, right? That is a bigger problem versus the employment loss because net net, even the US job data, right? We're seeing the amount of jobs is not going down. The amount of private sector jobs in the United States is 30 million more than 2010. So in 15 years, there's 30 million more. So we've been hearing about all this AI automation job loss all this time, but there's 30 million more private sector jobs than 2010. Diego Calligaro (32:43) So you see the accessibility to this tool is gonna remain open to everybody, but it's gonna be more a question of mindset of people to be willing and open to use them. Kartik Gada (32:54) also how quickly they can learn to use it. Like if we use an LLM like Grok or Gemini or Chagy BT, we quickly figure out how to do it better and get better results, right? So this is when we can use AI more because we understand that we can learn quickly how to use it better, for example. Whereas I saw a poll showing that there's still like 60 % of adults have not even used ChatGTP yet. Yeah, even in the United States, something. So what are they doing? They're going to fall behind. Diego Calligaro (33:21) And when it comes to concentration of wealth, like given the strong focus on high tech as well, do you think that probably is gonna exacerbate even more like this division? Kartik Gada (33:32) Well, that is why that solution I advocate, it does not mitigate concentration, but it creates more fluidity because there's always gonna be newer fortunes created in a shorter and shorter time. But the way the government prints money is also something that the richest can take advantage of most easily and regular people, almost nothing comes down to them. Whereas I said, an egalitarian form of printing that was just cash would be more diffuse and transparent and fair. Because what is done now, I... compare it to like if you have a bucket and you want to fill it with water, you don't keep the bucket six feet away from the tap and then whatever splashes in the bucket a little bit comes in. That is very inefficient, right? But that is what is currently being done because the policy is decided by economists who are very theoretical and they don't understand business at all. Right? Whereas a more egalitarian cash-based thing is something that is transparent and nobody can complain. Now smarter people will do more with it and ⁓ people who have poor money management skills will still squander even the free cash they're getting. That will always be the case. But at least the ⁓ printing becomes an infrastructural thing rather than something that can be gamed by very few people. Diego Calligaro (34:38) And then of course, now it looks like it's still ⁓ a decision of people of getting too into like these new technologies and trying to access it and use them. But of course, maybe there's gonna be a point in which the decision is also gonna be a question, a biological question from the person. Like ⁓ if you look for example, if a brain computer interfaces. So there's gonna be a point in which as the technology evolves, there's going to be people using it and others that will need to face the decision whether to not use it and keep their own biology or access this new technology and maybe elevate themselves to a higher position. What do you think about this also ethical consideration when it comes to new technologies and how this is going to divide people? Kartik Gada (35:31) So the biggest ethical problem is not so much that some people will be more able to adopt them than others. That's always going to be the case. The bigger problem, think, is criminality. Criminals can use AI to hack people's accounts. And law enforcement is not catching up and not even really interested in stopping crime. And that's the bigger problem. Because bad people can do more and more with AI. I mean, people can hack. someone banging down from another country. You don't even know the country that the hacker was in, let alone who they are, right? And law enforcement does not catch up at all. You have no recourse. So this is a part of the problem with the whole thing. Also, there is not a philosophy of using artificial intelligence for law enforcement. Because for example, we say AI enables us to do more work, so same number of police officers can do twice as much policing. then crime falls not linearly, it falls 90%. So that is what should happen. If all our transactions are recorded on a distributed ledger or similar type of technology, so it makes it much harder to steal and commit fraud and to breach contracts and all that, then also crime goes down because many would-be criminals don't even try because it's too hard. So these are things that can create tremendous economic growth just by making crime much harder so more criminals give up. Because he criminals partake in crime based on an assumption of whether they can get away with it or not, or whether it's even possible, right? Once we get hard, then many give up and it's hard to measure, but you just see crime going down. And this is the ultimate bifurcation of whether technology can really make things better or it's just enabling criminals and law enforcement is doing nothing. that is the bigger concern versus adoption. between tiers of the workforce. like I say, criminals can do more with AI and the law enforcement is less interested in keeping up with that. Diego Calligaro (37:26) And on top of this old technology advancement that are impacting society, there's another one very important, which is one related to healthcare and extension of life. Also Ray Kurzell speaks a lot about it in his last book. And I would like to get your perspective on this, whether how you see the extension of life through technology advancement. And whether, know, if it's actually going to be possible, sort of immortality as well, whether in the digital form or biological as well. Kartik Gada (37:58) So here's the thing, I am someone who does not believe that technology can extend human life in the existing body by a huge amount. I better treatments and more information will cause very committed people to extend it up to 100 or so, right? And that's already slowly happening, but that's about it, because we still see many people not doing the basic. They still eat junk food, they eat C2L, all that stuff. People still smoke cigarettes even, right? So in that regard, There's some people who not really that interested in extending life or not interested in becoming aware about what they should just stop doing right now. So there won't be any technologically intensive super longevity, age reversal technology. And another reason for that is extending human life is not necessary for technological advancement per se, because the number of humans who are advancing technology is a very small percentage of humans. The rest are not essential to that. So this accelerating rate of change does not require all humans to be able to just get a medical treatment to reverse their age. And the reason I know that this is not really happening is why there's been some improvement in some areas and there are drugs that reduce cancer treatment, all that. Our medical system is still not about prevention. It's more about treatments that are expensive and then the healthcare system pays for it. People have been talking about this for long time. Ray Kurzweil said the same thing 20 years ago, but in the last 20 years, has life expectancy risen at all? One iota. Not at all. It's not, so of all the things they said would happen by now, even 10 % have not happened. Like Ray Kurzweil said that human life expectancy by 2029 will be 120. I think we know that's not happening, right? Because it's exactly the same as it was 25 years ago. So to summarize, A, it's a technologically very difficult thing. B, extending life of all humans is not necessary for technological advancement. And while we would like all humans to live in the grand scheme of things, we are not the end of evolution by any means. Life extension, presupposedly, we are the end of evolution. not. And three, none of their predictions have come true for this timeframe. Well, not even 10%. Now, what will happen is that you can make a digital copy of your personality. and that looks like a younger version of you. So even if someone dies when they're older, choose younger, what they look like when they were young. And that can exist in the cloud and fine, you can interact with other people who've passed away and that can go on forever. Now, will that type of consciousness be happy when they know it's just a saved avatar type of thing? That's a different question, but that is technology possible. But extending the life of the body by reversing age, I'm saying no, that's either gonna be very difficult and super expensive to be done in just very small steps, but it's not like everyone will suddenly be able to live to be 150. Because we know once people can reverse the damage of aging, they'll just smoke more cigarettes or drink more too. Most people are like that. They won't make the sacrifice needed for higher longevity. Diego Calligaro (40:50) Okay. And then if you look instead at on the other perspective, how things could go wrong with all this technology advance. There could be nuclear weapons from one side, also I mean, as alignment, nanotechnologies, many technologies where they could go wrong. Can you give us your... What you see could be the critical problems that could be impacting society Kartik Gada (41:19) So cybersecurity, which we talked about hacking accounts and all that, bioterrorism, smaller and smaller groups can create biological weapons. Now we've been worried about that for a long time. On some level it's good, it's surprising in a good way that that has not happened yet, but it could still happen. And things like that, like there's too many government. Diego Calligaro (41:21) You said? Kartik Gada (41:40) There's too many aspects of government that are destructive. in the United States, we have something called military industrial complex, which profits by creating more wars. And 80 % of people wish it was not there, but it doesn't want to shrink because there's too many people making too much money from that. So what they do is they invent a new war every time, just so that there's more money spent. Things like that are quite bad. There's a pharmaceutical equivalent of that as well. Big pharma, same thing. Invent more and more drugs and get more and more people on them. for example. So there are too many industries that when they get too big, they create their artificial demand. And in doing so, they have too much momentum in just perpetuating evil, like create new wars or get people addicted to a certain pharmaceutical or try and force people to take a certain medical treatment and all that. So that is an ongoing problem when any industry becomes too big and creates its own. Artificial demand and there's many industry like that. I'm on one of my videos I have a list of ten or twelve of those and that's just the United States but at the world level it's similar, right? so this is a problem because as the economy gets bigger and bigger this becomes lucrative as well and therefore there's Going to be that force and not enough of a counter force That's another thing. I had hoped this Doge Department would have ended because when he said old Doge Elon Musk is going to end all these industrial complexes and all that stuff Obviously not. Diego Calligaro (42:58) Thank you, Kartik. And a last questions here. So if you can give advice to people in general on how to harness all these technology forces. Kartik Gada (43:09) So always all your surplus money, keep investing it into an index like S &P 500 or NASDAQ. Invest in small parts, but just put all your surplus money into that because the rate of that return is rising and depends on the person's age, but the younger you are, the more of a certainty this is. So that is a basic investment strategy. Just be in the index. Don't worry about bonds and things like that. Always be in the equity index. And always for your job, Keep figuring out how to use AI to do more work in your job than before, because that will lead to either higher pay or you would get a different job, but you'd be doing four times the work before without spending any more time to pay more, or the nature of the business that you're working in will also change. So always be using these AI tools to keep up with yourself as a professional. And third thing is always become more focused on cybersecurity and VPNs, things like that, changing your password, changing your login more often than before because hackers have more ability to hack into your bank accounts and all that than before. if that happens, because that happened to me too, I had to waste a lot of time to get my money back. This is something you have to be more aware of than before. Diego Calligaro (44:17) And if you look at the entrepreneurs themselves, what would be your advice on those core areas where you see the biggest opportunities? Kartik Gada (44:29) So any entrepreneur should focus on finding something low tech and making it high tech. in the old days, like 20, 25 years ago, that just meant e-commerce, like I'll sell flowers online, or I'll sell wine cases online, But now in this age, you have to think more high tech. What can you do with AI that is more productive, more far reaching, and study what other startups are doing, because there's so many AI companies that become a billion dollars in a short time because they're just automating some very boring function or some very manually intensive function, whether it was sales leads conversion or aspects of finance and things like that. Diego Calligaro (45:04) That's great. Kartik, thanks a lot for all this insightfull information. It's been an amazing conversation and definitely gonna have the chance to speak again in the future. Kartik Gada (45:14) Absolutely. Thanks for having me.