Trevor Noah:
I think one of the most important discussions we should be having is around people, purpose, and the plans around what we are going to do when these technologies evolve, as opposed to thinking of the technologies as some sort of boogeyman, because the technology isn’t.
REID:
Hi, I’m Reid Hoffman.
ARIA:
And I’m Aria Finger.
REID:
We want to know what happens if, in the future, everything breaks humanity’s way.
ARIA:
We’re speaking with visionaries in every field, from climate science to criminal justice, and from entertainment to education.
REID:
These conversations also feature another kind of guest: GPT-4, OpenAI’s latest and most powerful language model to date. Each episode will have a companion story, which we’ve generated with GPT-4 to spark discussion. You can find these stories down in the show notes.
ARIA:
In each episode, we seek out the brightest version of the future and learn what it’ll take to get there.
REID:
This is Possible.
Welcome to the Possible podcast. We are today going to be exploring a particular version of what’s possible: what’s possible in entertainment, what’s possible in media. Although our illustrious guest is Trevor Noah, who has hosted the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning show, The Daily Show, from 2015 to 2022; he’s the author of the New York Times bestseller book, Born a Crime; he’s been a comedian for over a decade; he speaks about seven languages; and he calls New York City home, just like you, Aria. But with his breadth, I anticipate we are going everywhere.
ARIA:
As we always do on the possible podcast, we also share an AI story with Trevor about what The Daily Show could be reimagined, with AI, down the road. So get ready to hear him talk about whether he likes or dislikes the future that GPT-4 provides. I will also say, if you haven’t read Born a Crime, I was gifted it for Christmas a few years ago, and it’s just so good. And you just hear his smarts and his brilliance on The Daily Show – it’s no surprise when you hear about his background and everything that he’s done.
It’ll be interesting to hear how he talks about grit and resilience and how do you build that for the future.
REID:
So, Trevor, I cannot tell you how excited I am to see you and have a little bit of a chance to turn the microphone having gone on your shows before. So welcome to Possible.
TREVOR:
Thank you so much and good to see you again, good to chat here again. I’m excited for the conversation.
ARIA:
So, Trevor, I’m excited because Reid and I have a little East Coast, West Coast battle, me being a New Yorker and him being a West Coast-er. So, when you hosted the Grammys and you talked about LA maybe not being the greatest city in the world, I’m just gonna pretend that you think New York is actually the greatest city in the world. [laugh]
TREVOR:
[laugh] Oh, that’s funny. I love how everyone thinks it’s in relation to their city. Yeah, I’m always intrigued by how everyone thinks their city is the best city.
Here’s the thing I always ask New Yorkers. I go, if New York is the greatest city in the world, why does everyone have to leave it every weekend if they get a chance? [laugh] Everyone’s quick to say “greatest city.” I feel like everyone has to say “greatest city for…” and then have the input that, you know, what is the specifier that makes it the greatest city for something? And then I’ll agree with you. So, “greatest city for ‘nonstop?’” New York. I’m in.
ARIA:
All right. I’ll take it. I’ll take it.
REID:
I know actually, from various contexts, you actually work on technological projects. Everything from, you know, thinking about where it plays in the future, and everything else. And you voice the artificial intelligence system in Black Panther.
Is the topic of AI something that you were following intensely? And was there anything that you were thinking about – when you were doing the “Wakanda Forever” AI voice – about what role AI will be playing in the future?
TREVOR:
In many ways, like when I would talk to Ryan Coogler, the director of Black Panther, I would always ask him what he envisioned his AI to be, because I think everyone has a different idea of what AI is. And I’ve come to realize some of the conversations people have about AI are endearing, but misguided, often.
So some people talk about AI, but really they’re just talking about simple machine learning. Sometimes people are talking about AI and they’re just talking about processing a very simple command. I think AI, the way I understand it, is it’s a computer model that’s getting to a place where it understands, or it processes logic, in a way that a human would be familiar with, you know? So when I was thinking of that for the Black Panther role, it’s an AI that is intelligent, but at the same time, still at the mercy of the people who have created it.
And I think that’s what we would hope AI will become, is a tool that we are using, but then somehow interacts with us in an almost personal way, which, which will be interesting for us to try and, I think, grapple with, because then we’re gonna ask ourselves questions of sentience, and we’re gonna ask ourselves questions of life, and what is and isn’t, and what is personality. So definitely, for that role, it was interesting thinking of an AI that is for all intents and purposes, feeling, but is still not.
REID:
I do think that right now, actually, in AI, we’re much more like tools than like beings. And the tool/being question is one of the central ones that’s beginning to start in the dialogue.
At OpenAI, we have GPT-4 that will be coming out later, but I have access to it. I actually, in fact, generated some light bulb jokes because I personally have an affectation for light bulb jokes, because I think they’re a form of cultural haiku. [laugh] They’re a very short form lens into, you know, reflecting a bias or reflecting a meme, or something else. We’re going to read you a couple of the light bulb jokes about Trevor Noah that GPT-4 generated, and we’d love you to reflect on what that means on GPT-4’s sense of humor, on what you would improve. You know, that kind of stuff.
So I’ll kick it off and then we’ll trade. How many Trevor Noahs does it take to change a light bulb? None. He just shines his smile and brightens the room.
TREVOR:
[laugh] Oh, wow.
ARIA:
All right, we started with the easy ones. We started with the kind ones.
TREVOR:
Oh, okay. [laugh] Yes. Wow. That’s, that’s “GPT my mom.” I like that.
REID 2:
Exactly. It’ll get a little bit –
TREVOR:
“Artificial Mom-telligence.” I like that.
ARIA:
That. Yeah. The prompt was: “in the style of Trevor Noah’s mom, give us a…”
TREVOR:
[laugh] Yes, that’s what that seems like.
ARIA:
All right, so the next one. How many Trevor Noahs does it take to change a light bulb? One, but he has to do it in six different accents and explain the cultural context of each one.
TREVOR:
[laugh] Oh, I like that. Okay, I like that.
REID:
And you can tell GPT-4 does have some knowledge of you when we ask these questions. So, and now we’re getting into a little bit more of like the knowledge of you on The Daily Show. How many Trevor Noahs does it take to change a light bulb? Two: one to change it, and one to roast Donald Trump for not knowing how to do it.
TREVOR:
[laugh] Oh, okay. All right. That joke’s a little simple, but, I’ll take it. Yes.
ARIA:
No intelligence there. All right, joke number four. How many Trevor Noahs does it take to change a light bulb? One, but he has to wait for Jon Stewart to retire first.
TREVOR:
That’s funny. [laugh] Yes, that’s funny. See, that’s a great joke. That’s actually a very nice light bulb joke.
REID:
Good, we have similar judgments. So, what do you think about GPT-4 and, in this little microcosm, does it have a sense of humor?
TREVOR:
So, I will start with the second question first. Does it have a sense of humor? I don’t know the answer to that question, and I don’t think any of us knows the answer to that question. Does it understand what a sense of humor may be? I think the answer is yes. It is able to learn how we use language to create what we call a sense of humor.
Understanding is – maybe that’s one of the most difficult questions to ask about AI, I find, because we don’t know what understanding even is. And I know you’ve done a lot of work in this, Reid, but one of the most fascinating stories in AI I came across was – so you know this, I’ve been working with Microsoft for years. I’ve been lucky enough to consult with them.
It started in hardware and then we work in philanthropy together, and then it spilled over into AI and everything else. So, I’d go to Redmond [Washington] and I’d work at the campus and I’d travel around the world with Brad Smith, and sometimes we’d be at events with Satya [Nadella] and Panos [Panay] and the team out there. And one of the more fascinating stories I came across involving AI was there was a model that they were trying to train, and this model had an almost perfect track record picking between pictures of men and women. Men and women, men and women. It was really simple in what it was trying to do.
What it failed at consistently was picking out black women from the men and women sample. If it was black people. And try as they may, they could not get this AI to get it right. And they kept on loading more images, more images, more images. Training it, training it, training it. More images.
They were like, is it a bias? Is it this? What is happening? What is happening? It kept on mislabeling black women as men. And this is one of the most fascinating stories ever: what they did, essentially, was they sent the AI to Africa. I think it was to one of the centers in Kenya that Microsoft has. I mean, it sounds like a really ludicrous story, when you go like, “ah, we sent the AI to Africa to learn!” And essentially what they did was they started training the model out there. And, over time, the model a) got exponentially faster at understanding the difference between black men and black women. But the reason was most interesting. They realized that the AI never knew what a man or a woman was. All it had drawn was a correlation between people who wear makeup and people who don’t wear makeup. And it had decided that that was man and that was woman.
And so the programmers and everyone using the AI had assumed that the AI understood what a man was and what a woman was, and didn’t understand why it didn’t understand it. And only came to realize when it went to Africa that the AI was using makeup. And because black people, and black women in particular have been underserved in the makeup industry, they don’t wear as much makeup. And so they generally don’t have makeup on in pictures, and they don’t have makeup that’s prominent. And so the AI never knew. It never understood man or woman, it just went, “ah, red lips, blush on cheeks, blue eyeshadow: woman,” and that was it.
And so, I think whenever we have these conversations about that, about understanding, I think we are still at the very basic stages of understanding what understanding even is. And then trying to draw all those correlations between all the different data points of what a thing is thinking or not thinking, or is it just inferring from an idea. You know what I mean?
REID:
Yeah, a hundred percent. One of the things that I think about 2023 being this year of large language models and acceleration of a variety of AI things, is we’re now actually gonna get much more sophisticated. We kind of apply this human metaphor: understands, speaks, has a sense of humor. And we kind of do it poorly when we get to animals because we presume that they’re less intelligent, because they don’t really have that same model. And yet they do have a model of the world and they do have some feelings and all the rest. And we do it really crazily when it gets to, like, “my car, you know, is feeling bad today.” Or something like that.
Now we have to be much more sophisticated and understand what understanding is. That it isn’t just the question of, well, does it understand the way Trevor does or the way Aria does, or the way Reid does? But it’s like, okay, what is that notion of understanding and how does it apply here? And how does it apply here? I completely agree.
TREVOR:
Yeah. And so, to answer the second question you had, what do I think of ChatGPT and GPT-4, which I’ve tested a little bit. It’s one of the biggest leaps in technology and in the evolution of how we do things that we have experienced in decades.
I always think back to major moments in time – what was it like when the steam engine was created? What was it like when the telephone was created? All these moments where, all of a sudden, you were able to do in ways that you never imagined possible. That’s where we are with GPT. And I think in the same way, I am cautious, or I try to tell people to be cautious about thinking about how bad it can be. I’m also cautious to think about how good it can be. I go, we genuinely don’t know. It could be one of the biggest leaps forward in helping us understand how thinking even works, in a strange way. From what I’ve seen, it’s problem solving. You’ve seen it solve problems that haven’t even existed. Its ability to try and understand logic using just, you know, natural language. It’s a brilliant, brilliant tool.
ARIA:
Well, to your point, it’s limited on the data that it’s trained on. And I do appreciate, I feel like right now in the AI discussion, it’s like you either have people on Twitter saying that the robots are coming for us, or you have people saying, “it’s amazing, don’t worry, these aren’t the droids you’re looking for.” And so I loved your woman versus man Microsoft story. They had to go retrain the data. Do you see that as an unhopeful story? Because, you know, this is often created by white men, and so there’s limitations, whether it’s bias, anti-women bias, et cetera. Or do you see that as a hopeful story where, actually, once we find out what’s wrong, we can sort of fix the model? How do you see that in the evolution of AI?
TREVOR:
I’m eternally an optimist in this space and, you know, you can probably play this recording back when the earth is burning and the robots have put us into prisons. [laugh] But, for me it’s a hopeful story, because – let me ask you this. If you have an AI model that you realize is biased, you are able to find and correct that bias in a time that is almost impossible to recreate in a human being. So, I think about how biased the world is that we live in and how impossible it is, it’s almost impossible to change those biases that people hold. So, if you say judges are sentencing people from poorer backgrounds and, you know, people of color and black people are getting higher sentencing from a judge, how do you now go and undo that? And so that’s why people talk about dismantling a system and recreating a new one, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
But I argue in the world of AI and in these models, you can actually create a system where you are constantly refining it and it does not have any ego attached to its decisions or the way it processes information. And so, I think, for me, that’s more hopeful. I think the ability to change your mind is something that most human beings struggle with. Myself included, like, I always ask myself the question, I go, what if I’m wrong? What if I’m wrong right now? What if I’m wrong? You know, that’s, I’m always playing that in my head because I always have to think about the possibility that I could be wrong, because everything I learned in life is because I was wrong. Somebody had to teach me something else. And with AI, I don’t think we have that limitation, you know? Yes, we have to be aware, but the fact that we are having the conversations means we’re at least aware.
And it means when we discover it, just like we do with every other technology – you know, you discover, oh, this car, the brakes were, yeah, they have a recall. And they go like, all right, let’s fix the brakes. And now you have over the air updates. Gone are the days of getting a cartridge from Nintendo, and that’s the game, and it’s done. Now, you get a game and in the first week you’ve got your first patch. On the first day often. I think that’s hopeful because you would want a system that is constantly changeable and a system where you’re constantly trying to resolve all of those bugs along the way.
ARIA:
I mean, you hit on an issue I care deeply about. If we could just like, send patches to the criminal justice system and make it not discriminatory, I’m in.
TREVOR:
Exactly. That’s what we should be doing. Yes.
REID:
[laugh] A thousand percent. I watched your interview with Mira Murati on The Daily Show, and one of the things that I – you know, because she shares a lot of beliefs – we work together in the OpenAI context. She shares this view of, actually, in fact, of amplification, and she was talking about that with you, with DALL-E and other things.
I didn’t quite get from the show how it sat with you. Like, do you think AI is going to be a really useful tool in augmenting writers and artists? Will there be some replacement? You know, how – when you were having that dialogue, you were doing a very good job of, as you do, of bringing her out. But I was curious about what your reflections within your industry are of what the next year, three years of this will look like in terms of producing perspective, news, entertainment.
TREVOR:
Right, right, right. Yeah. So here’s the biggest thing I’ve enjoyed, but in a, like, a curmudgeon-y kind of way in this conversation. I found it particularly interesting that everybody says the phrase, or not everybody, but a lot of people will use the phrase, “AI is going to replace these jobs. These jobs are gonna be taken away by AI.” And I’m like, people, I think everybody needs to take a step back and realize you’re not afraid of AI, you’re afraid of the companies and the employers who are gonna look for any excuse to get rid of somebody and replace that person with either AI or with one person who can do multiple jobs. In the same way it took what, 20 odd people to, you know, farm a piece of land, then the tractor was invented, and then those 20 people immediately became obsolete, and one person was driving this tractor that was pulling the plow.
I think one of the most important discussions we should be having is around people, purpose, and the plans around what we are going to do when these technologies evolve, as opposed to thinking of the technologies as some sort of boogeyman. Because the technology isn’t. The boogeyman is capitalism. That’s the truth. So you have to figure out how you manage in a world where some people’s purpose may change and be moved around. And I think, to be honest, you see a lot of classism in this conversation because when these conversations center around manufacturing jobs or mining, you’ll see a lot of people saying like, look, you gotta reskill, you’ve gotta retool. That’s what happens. Totally. At the end of the day, you know, it’s like mining won’t be around forever, you gotta learn about green energy. That’s just life. And then now AI comes and it’s threatening more white collar jobs, and all of a sudden those same people are like, “you can’t just have this technology – there are writers in Hollywood that are gonna be out of jobs. There are journalists that are – is it gonna write articles for them? We can’t just allow this.” And it’s like, oh, now, first of all, you see what it’s like to have a technology that may replace you and you understand how callous a lot of your comments have been. But also, I think it gets everybody, it should push everybody to the real conversation, which is, what are we trying to do?
One of the most wonderful quotes I ever heard was, I think it was Sweden’s – it either was like Minister of Finance or somebody high up in Sweden’s government. And he said, in Sweden they don’t care about protecting jobs, they care about protecting workers. The people aren’t the jobs. And so in Sweden, what they say is, “hey, we’re just gonna make sure that you are always fine. Your job can go away and your job can disappear, but you don’t disappear with it.” And I think a lot of the fear that we’re experiencing, especially in America, is in and around the fact that so many people’s livelihoods are tied to their jobs. So, if you don’t have a job, you don’t have healthcare. If you don’t have a job, you don’t have a credit report. If you don’t have a job you don’t have access to… If you don’t have a job, sometimes you don’t even exist. Like, what you do is more important than who you are.
And so, I think in and around AI, the reason I’m an optimist is because I go, we can create this tool, but it is forcing us to have a larger conversation around what is the job, what isn’t the job? So, you know, when you ask me what I think of it, I think it’s a fantastic tool. It’s the same way I remember when Windows 3.1 launched in my life, I was like, this is the greatest thing I’ve ever experienced, ever. I don’t wanna type, “d i r slash page,” I’m done with that. You know what I mean? I don’t want to be going through every single file and searching for a folder and typing every command prompt out there. I don’t want to do that.
The graphical user interface changed everything. And I think this is, in many ways, a different type of graphical user interface where it’s gonna enable us to either program faster, or to write quicker, or to summarize information in a way that we never have before. And in doing that, we can do more.
The question is, how do we protect people from the inevitable conclusion of capitalism, which is a company’s going to try to make as much profit as possible because of a thing called quarterly earnings, which I hate.
REID:
By the way, this isn’t really our subject here, and we will get to a funny GPT-4 thing as part of it., but I do think it’s important for me to say. When an undergraduate, I was kind of, like, very opposed to the philosophy of capitalism. Like, I would say it’s a great technology and a bad philosophy, you know, a little bit kind of “the meaning of life.” You know, I’ve now kind of come to the view that it’s like, look, what we’ve been doing as a technology is we’ve been modifying it all kinds of ways. And a lot of where we’ve gotten to – because it’s, you know, amongst some circles it’s fashionable to be critical of capitalism – is like say, well, actually a lot of the progress we’ve made since the middle ages in terms of, you know, manufacturing, a bunch of other stuff, all comes through capitalism and does come through mechanisms like quarterly profits, which have some negative side effects, too. But, we’ve also gotten a tremendous amount out of it. So I tend to be – how do we mod it, or if someone has a better idea than it entirely, like with a new idea. But it’s like, oh, we’ve gotten a lot of good things about it. So I tend to be a “modify capitalism” person.
TREVOR:
Oh yeah. But I think if you look at it, there’s no denying it comes with good. Many things come with good, you know. Like I learned working with my mom in the garden, which I hated: every single plant, given the opportunity, will try to destroy every other plant in its ecosystem if it’s not meant to be part of it. You know? And I think we shouldn’t take that for granted in terms of how, to your point, capitalism has been designed in the way we think of it now. Like what is it actually trying to do? Everything is good, but everything taken into an extreme will have disastrous effects. You know? So, fasting is good for you. Fasting perpetually is starvation. So, drinking is good for you. Drinking perpetually is drowning.
I think the same thing goes for this. We have to ask ourselves the question: if we’re going to exist in a society where people’s livelihoods, literally their livelihoods, are dependent on a thing called “job,” what happens if “job” no longer exists? And what if “job” is replaced by AI or robot or machine or anything? And so I think when we look at AI, I think we will yield better results if people aren’t spending half their energy worried that this thing is coming to get them and can spend all of their energy working on using it for what it can be used for. And so, I think that’s what we need to be thinking about now with AI is, okay, how does this make people’s jobs as opposed to take people’s jobs? And then for me, which is my passion, I go to, well maybe it means it’s not an eight hour workday anymore, it’s a four hour workday. You know? I mean, I know I’m delusional in saying that, because it’ll never happen. But, that’s honestly my dream, is that people will use these tools and then we just have more time in life.
ARIA:
Trevor, let’s pull that thread for a moment. So this is your dream, like one of your big ideas: let’s go to the four hours a day. Paint the picture in 20 years, what would that be like?
TREVOR:
Think about it, Aria, what are we trying to do? You know, everyone thinks the week – so, during the pandemic, I realized how many of our ideas are actually just constructs that we’ve created.
ARIA:
Monday through Friday. Yeah, what does it even mean?
TREVOR:
We’re so confident. We’re so confident that a weekend is two days and then you work for five. Everyone goes like, “this makes complete sense.” But then you just read a little bit and you realize, oh wait, the weekend was invented. Because labor unions at some point said it is not sustainable to work every single day of the week. And they had to force manufacturing plants and factories to give workers time off. Imagine that: the weekend was invented as we know it. So when you see these discussions now with the pandemic, people being like, should we do a four day work week? And what do they find: productivity doesn’t actually drop. And you’re like, huh. And I will challenge anyone listening to this podcast right now, tell me how much time you spend in an office where you’re not working.
Just be honest. [laugh] From the time you walk in, to the time you turn on your computer, then you walk over to the coffee machine, and then you waste time, then you chat to people, you catch up with them about their lives, talk about something. Then you talk about scheduling a meeting. You don’t need to schedule a meeting. You get to the meeting, you talk about what your kid did at school and a funny story. They chat about something that happened at the teacher’s association. You talk about your gripes in the neighborhood, the trash didn’t get picked up, you have a bit of a meeting, then you schedule another meeting. No one’s working at work. We’re all lying. [laugh] None of us are working at work. Most people are not working at work, especially in office jobs. And so I think if we have an honest conversation, we can get to a place where we go, you know what? We don’t all need to be in work for as long as we think we do. And I almost feel like we get out of the world of saying people are paid for their time, but they’re paid for their productivity, in a larger sense. And then you go like, yeah, how many hours a week a week do you work? Depends on how long it takes for me to get my job done. And with AI it doesn’t take that long and I’m an AI technician, you know. That’s what it should be.
ARIA:
I mean, I love it about office workers because I’m always like, take any office worker and let them be a teacher for just one week, where they actually have to work all day long. And they’ll be like, where was my coffee break?
TREVOR:
[laugh] Yes, exactly.
ARIA:
So I’m with you. To transition a little bit, we talked about how AI could be a tool for the future of the entertainment industry. We shared with you a story that was written by GPT-4. And so, if you hate it, I didn’t write it. That’s fine. [laugh] You’re only hurting GPT-4’s feelings. [laugh]
It posited a future where there was “The AI-ly Show.” Okay? And it was a show in 2033 where the AI was customizing the show to who was watching. If the person was 70, it was explaining what TikTok was. If the person was 40, it was talking to them about LeBron just getting over the scoring title. What do you think about this story? Or how would you use AI in the next, you know, five, 10 years to create a better entertainment show, to create a better media show, to create something in your industry?
TREVOR:
So there were two parts of the story that I really enjoyed. The idea of creating a show for every individual person that catered to them is, I think, one of the most exciting advances in technology and in entertainment we could possibly pursue. Because, while it is normal for us to, like, learn together, grow together, go together, et cetera, you can’t deny that means a lot of people get left behind because of a standardized anything. So, imagine if you had a news show that catered to your level of knowledge about the subject matter and knew how to filter out what you already know, and what you should know, and what you don’t know, and what you need to know. That would be amazing. I think that would be phenomenal.
The one downside, though, is I think we should never take for granted what we lose in society, the more niche and individualized our experiences become. I think it’s important for us to remember how much being a part of a society comes from having a shared experience of what reality is. That’s why I’m a big fan of cultural touchstone moments. I love big events like the World Cup, you know, the Super Bowl, you know? Any of these things that everybody is watching, like a space, you know, like a moon launch, a moon landing. All of these big moments. Because what they do is they just make everybody agree on reality for a moment. “Where were you the moment that…” That’s such a powerful tool that we take for granted and that we are losing in a world that becomes more, you know, individualized. So it is good. Yeah, now we can watch whatever TV show, we can listen to whatever song. But it also means there’s fewer of us humming at the same frequencies. There’s fewer of us laughing at the same moment. So while it’s good and amazing, I think for learning, especially, I think there’s also an element of bringing it all together that would also be crucial. And maybe it could do that, you know, maybe at the end of the day, Reid watches something, you watch something, I watch something and it makes sure that we all know that LeBron James has now surpassed the all-time scoring record. But the way in which we learned it was completely different. And then maybe that could be what sort of brings us back together.
REID:
And that’s kind of the thing that I’m hopeful for. And by the way, to your earlier work comments, which I basically completely agree, it’s like, how do we use this tool? How do we do it? I think there’s a whole bunch of human work that we essentially have almost infinite demand on. I’ll use a parallel from LinkedIn, which is: when we started LinkedIn, people said, “oh, this is gonna put recruiters out of work because it’ll amplify the ability for recruiters so much that you’ll have one versus 10.” And what I’ve seen over the last 20 years is we have, if anything, the same number, or more recruiters, because we have kind of infinite demand for it. It’s not every job. Like, we don’t have infinite demand for tractor drivers You know, there are places where that 20 becomes one.
But I think that kind of amplification, and I think that AI in the media space, can be used to build bridges and build bridges also to share truth. Like, obviously everyone’s worried about misinformation, and can be used that way, and how groups politicize. But I think it can also be: how do we use it to find a common truth, partially through common events as well? And I think that’s one of the things that we should be asking for the creators of AI to be paying attention to and to doing. And I think that’s one of the reasons why the public dialogue about it is so important.
TREVOR:
Right, right. I think it can be achieved. You know, I always think of Wikipedia as a great example. Everytime people talk about misinformation and, you know, society being bad and whatnot, I disagree. I disagree because I look at Wikipedia as a perfect example of what naturally happens when there isn’t an external factor pushing the platform to make decisions that are suboptimal for the facts that it is trying to push out. And because of Wikipedia’s business model, it’s accurate. And you would think – think of the internet, think of the world we live in, think of what we think of ourselves as people. You would think Wikipedia would be trash, and everything would be a lie, and everything would be a scam. And it’s not. People pride themselves on being really good at putting out good information.
The community prides itself on self-policing, on self-regulating. And what you end up with is one of the most accurate sources of information you’ll ever come across. And, it’s also balanced. You know, so you’ll go into a Wikipedia article and you can type anything. Vaccines. And it’ll say to you, “now, some people have thought this and it has been disproven by this, and these are the studies, and this is the that, and this is the…” And it’s there, it’s all laid out for you. And so, I think we should never take for granted – that’s why I keep going back to the capitalism of it all, because to speak about AI in a vacuum is ignorant, in my opinion, because AI is not existing in a vacuum.
REID:
Let’s go to one other kind of non-AI angle of technology, because you have this broad technology interest, and AI is obviously one of the ways. There’s all of this other sort of things: AR, VR, even, you know, holograms, you know, StarTrack, Smellovision. You know, all of this stuff. Is there anything that – either AI combining with that or other things that you see coming – that you think will be particularly useful for the kind of society, social, media?
TREVOR:
Oh, definitely. I think there are many places where I’m excited to see AI contribute beyond creative expression, idea generation and information gathering. I think one of the more exciting aspects of AI for me right now is seeing what it’ll be able to do in terms of being an assistant. I think people take for granted how wonderful and powerful AI could be as an assistant for everyone in everything. You know, your grandmother using it to tell her about her medication, but really break it down. Your child using it to ask a question to further understand what the homework assignment is actually about, as opposed to just sitting at home blank and not understanding. Somebody at work asking for a piece of clarification with some of the materials that they may be using. In, I don’t know, everything from building a power plant to compiling an an Excel spreadsheet, whatever it is.
I think those areas are really exciting. And so, in the world of like AR and VR, I mean, we don’t know. I’ve often thought, – like, I’m a gamer. I love gaming. I love thinking about how AI could combine with gaming. I think of worlds that we already experience in video games. And now imagine if AI is generating all of the conversations that every character in Grand Theft Auto is having as you’re walking through the street. All these NPCs, these non playable characters, you’re walking around and they’re all having real conversations that are being generated – the possibilities almost endless. And then what does that mean for a world like Second Life? What does that mean for the metaverse, if it ever exists? What does that mean for all of it?
And then you think of, you know, small things like, training. You’re training to be a doctor, an engineer, a pilot, uh, you know, a mechanic, whatever it is. Imagine a world where your instructor is AI. You are wearing goggles that are showing you what you’re gonna be doing. You are able to stand in front of a Rolls-Royce engine on a Boeing 787, or whatever plane it’s on, and you’re able to meticulously work on it and work to the level of skill that you need to to be able to get that job in a way that you wouldn’t have before. You couldn’t have flown to the right academy. You wouldn’t have been able to live where you needed to live. You wouldn’t have afforded accommodation on campus. And yet, now you could do all of this, and your instructor moves at the pace that you need them to move at as opposed to moving at the pace that they have to because of the hour hands on a clock. I think all of those applications are really, really, really fascinating because it can become everybody’s personal professor, where you can say, “professor, I don’t understand that. Could you repeat that? Could you go back? Could you slow down? Could you elaborate? Could you break it down? Could you give it to me in an analogy? Could you…” Whatever it might be, it means that you almost have an infinite capacity for learning and applying that knowledge. Yeah, every avenue I see it co-used in, I find particularly fascinating.
ARIA:
I love that so much. Reid actually wrote an article called “A Co-Pilot for Every Profession,” that was similar sort of in vein to what you’re talking about. Like, everyone thinks about like, “oh, but isn’t a real life teacher better than an AI tutor?” And it’s like, well, if you’re a kid at home, to your point, like sitting after school for three hours with no adult, like, oh my God, an AI tutor is so much better. And so the possibilities are endless. Like one thing we talked about was truth, information. You talked about social media, how the capitalism profit motive has sort of disrupted that cycle. Do you have any hopes for how to make the social media atmosphere better? How to, not necessarily with AI, with anything, how to make the disinformation cycle better? I mean, this is something you talked about on The Daily Show for the last six years. Like, how do we fix that part of society? Or are we hopeless? [laugh]
TREVOR:
Well, I, no, I don’t think we’re hopeless. I think we are misguided. In my opinion, trying to fix disinformation is trying to undo humans. I am yet to discover a period in time when there wasn’t disinformation. You know, it’s literally as old as time. Go read the Bible. There’s people lying and telling stories in the Bible. When I think of it that way, I go like, instead of trying to fix disinformation, first of all, we try and understand why people do it, why they don’t do it. We’ll always study that forever. What I look at with social media, rather, is how do we protect ourselves from something spreading as quickly as it does? So, it’s the same reason we don’t allow people to own bombs. You know, unfortunately in society, most humans don’t want to hurt other humans. Most humans. But, for those outliers, we don’t want them to have an outsized ability to inflict harm upon others. And so, we try and limit their access to these weapons or to these tools of destruction. I think the same goes for social media. The one downside of social media is it’s designed to create engagement. And I think sometimes we block ourselves when we talk about it being good or bad. It’s not good or bad, it’s just, it is designed to maximize engagement. Unfortunately, for humans, and maybe this is because of our reptilian brain or whatever, we engage with danger and we engage with what we don’t agree with. Way more than things – if you read a tweet that you like, if someone tweets something out there, they go like, “nothing better than the first day of spring!” You just read it and you’re like, yep, keep it moving. Happy, happy, keep it moving. You might not like it, you might not retweet it, you might not anything. But if somebody writes there, they go, “spring is the worst season ever invented. I wish it was winter perpetually.” You would go, all right, I need to engage with this psychopath, and it’s on. [laugh] That’s engagement. And so, unfortunately what happens is because the model needs engagement to remain profitable, it then has to encourage the thing that is not best for us, and that is conflict. So, how would we change that? I honestly don’t know. I mean, I look at – what’s interesting is, like, look at how China has handled their social media. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying we should move to China’s model. [laugh] But, there are a few interesting elements in how they’ve decided what you can and cannot do for the health of a community.
You know, you cannot just inundate people with TikTok videos that basically mush their brains. They are TikTok, and yet here they are saying, “no, this is how we think TikTok should be applied to our country, and how kids should use TikTok, and what should be on TikTok, and how many hours of TikTok, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.” I don’t think that’s meritless, you know, I’m not saying we should move to a Chinese clamp down system, but I don’t think it’s meritless. The same way, at some point, the US government said, “hey, vape pens – actually, what’s happening here?” The same way, you know, the US government decides how much alcohol can be in a bottle of alcohol. We decide all these things. We decide, often times, what is best for the health of human beings. And I think it should be no different with social media.
There has to be some sort of reckoning and some sort of conversation around: can it just be unbridled? Can you just use it infinitely? Can it just spew as much hatred at you as possible? When I open my phone, I’m just gonna see every racist incident that’s happened in the last 15 years. And there’s no context as to when or how or if it happened. That, to me, is – I don’t think that’s good. It’s not healthy, it’s not sustainable. To be honest with you, I do think social media companies should be held responsible for what is, not put on their platforms, but for what is pushed on their platforms. And I think a lot of social media companies have tried to duck and dive there and be like, “oh no, we are just a public messaging board. We’re a public square. We don’t, we don’t want to decide what people say or don’t say.” And it’s like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. But if that’s the truth, and if that were true, there’s no public square that amplifies somebody’s speech on their behalf. If Reid goes and stands in a public square and says something, the public square doesn’t send that to me at home. And so, I think there’s a level of culpability that social media companies wish to avoid. And I think at some point – like, I think of the most dystopian version of this is, I can see a world where somebody, and I think there may be a case that’s heading up either to the Supreme Court or somewhere, where somebody’s gonna do something and it’s gonna be something terrible. And their defense is going to be that they thought they were acting either in self-defense or protecting their country or whatever it may be because of the reality that they were presented with by social media.
And I think it is then going to be an interesting case study in how much does social media play a role in determining what people do or don’t do? Because if you are watching, let’s put it this way, if you were watching the local news, or even the news like the national news, and someone like Lester Holt came on and said, “breaking news, America’s being invaded right now. There are aliens out, everyone get outside and take your pots and pants, fight, fight with all your might.” And you walked outside and you saw aliens, or you saw what they said were aliens. They said they’re gonna be dressed like this, and this is – “fight with all your might.” And the President put out an address and said, “there’s aliens. We’ve gotta fight these aliens.” You would do it most likely, right? You’d either lock yourself in your house or you’d go outside and you’d fight the aliens. And then the next day someone comes and goes, “ah, actually that was all fake. Yeah, it was, it was actually just like a, it was a fake news report. We don’t know what happened.” Are you liable for all the aliens that you’ve killed that weren’t aliens? What do you do now? You’re like, oh, they were actually humans. Are you, are you fully liable or aren’t you?
REID:
We wanna make sure we capture a few rapid fire questions. And I will open wit: is there a movie song or book that fills you with optimism for the future?
TREVOR:
So, a book. One of my favorite stories is by Roald Dahl. It’s, I think it’s “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar.” I love that story, yeah. It’s such a wonderful story because it’s the story of a man who has everything in life, wants to get more of everything in life, and on that journey discovers that he was trying to fill a bucket full of holes, essentially, which was himself. And on this journey of trying to become the richest, the everything-est, he discovers that he doesn’t need all of what he was chasing. And he actually pares down his life and he becomes more philanthropic and he gives away more. It’s a beautiful story about what, you know, what people can be and what we shouldn’t forget we’re actually trying to do. It’s a really wonderful story because it reminds me if we can find ways to tap into what we actually need in society, we can find a cleaner path to getting there.
ARIA:
All right, rapid fire number two. Where do you see progress in society that makes you hopeful or that inspires you? Like what good is going on that you feel really good about?
TREVOR:
Oh, everywhere. Everywhere. I think one of the downsides of a nonstop, 24 hour news, both on television and on online, has made people a lot more cynical than I think we should be. You know, because news has to be bad in order for you to find it interesting, in order for it to generate that engagement we talked about. And what that means, unfortunately, is you can live in a space where you only think bad is happening.
And I’m not saying bad isn’t happening, but it is not happening at the rates and the scale that most people think it is. You know? I’ll ask people questions, someone will be like, “oh, this, this city’s not safe.” And I’ll go like, “oh, what makes you say that?” “Oh, you know, crime has gone up and it’s just dangerous now.”
TREVOR:
And I go, “okay, have you been in danger?” “No, but-” “Have your friends?” “No, but I, I heard of, and I saw, and I-” And I’m like, where? And the truth is, it’s just how it’s told to us. You know, it’s that great quote: “For the great majority of mankind are more concerned by things that seem than by those that are.” And so, what makes me hopeful is the things that actually are. Standards of living increasing across the globe. Yes, we’ll have moments where we backslide, we’ve always got to fight against those. But just like a drought in, you know, in the Serengeti, there will be moments of that in life, unfortunately. And what we are always trying to do is immunize ourselves from the effects of those backsliding moments and hedge ourselves. But, but we shouldn’t forget that we are constantly moving forward in all areas.
You know, I look at how tech, a world where it was once so homogeneous and blindly homogeneous, has become completely comfortable having conversations now about like, “all right, but what about women in the space? And what about people of color in the space? And how are we making this more equitable?” People take for granted how, not just unheard of, but impossible those conversations were a few decades ago. And now people just have them. I think that’s fantastic. I think that’s a wonderful place to see technology moving forward. I think in order to be a technologist, in order to be somebody who loves creating technology and working on designing a future, you have to be an optimist, because you have to believe the future you’re designing for will exist. Or, you have to believe that what you’re creating will contribute to that future. So, as somebody who loves working on technology and working in technology, I, yeah, I can’t help but be an optimist. It’s not even like I made myself that way. I am that way. And that’s probably why I gravitate towards the world of tech.
REID:
Me too. Is there a particular technology that you’re watching to help us regain optimism or to shape – to make sure we don’t – because we are collapsing in the pessimism in various ways. Is there anything that you’re particularly paying attention to there for reconnecting us, intellectually and emotionally, on a broader societal basis, with possibilities for optimism?
TREVOR:
Although it has many downsides, I have been really intrigued with how TikTok operates. And look, it’s still relatively young versus the other social media platforms. And so I don’t know what it’ll evolve into. It may go downhill, I don’t know. But there’s something wonderful in how they’ve managed to not just curate and create positive worlds for people, but they’ve also found a really interesting way to introduce new ideas to people and poke holes in their bubbles. And I look at how much joy people have. That’s often times how I measure things.
You know, I don’t know if you remember, do you remember the period in life when everyone would say, “have you seen this YouTube video? Oh, Charlie Bit My Finger. Have you seen this YouTube video? The cat playing piano? Have you, oh, I watched this YouTube video the other day, this YouTube video.” Those are magical moments. Now, YouTube has become a lot more long form, and people don’t really go to it for that type of information or content. But that’s beautiful. That’s really, really cool. And I think TikTok is in that infancy right now. I think most social media platforms actually start there, funny enough. You know, I remember I was on Twitter when it was all about jokes. All people made was jokes. And it was fun, and it was cool, and it was reckless as well, but that’s what it was. And now it’s become a lot more serious and a lot more angry and a lot more determined. But I think TikTok is in that space right now, and so I’m always excited to see where these technologies are going to go. How do they connect people? How do they inform people? How do they bring them joy? A person will always smile to you and be like, “I watched this TikTok the other day. Oh, have you seen that TikTok where…?” That’s wonderful. I don’t think we should ever take for granted how powerful joy can be.
ARIA:
Well, Trevor, you set us up really well to the final question we ask everyone, which is, leave us a final thought: what is possible to achieve if everything broke humanity’s way? Like, if everything went right, if we achieved the possible, what does that look like for us? What is that future? What is the first step to get there?
TREVOR:
This is gonna sound weird. I hope we don’t ever get there. I’ve recently been reading a lot about how we see the world and how puzzles and challenge and difficulty are the reason we survive as a species. And unlike any other species, I wonder what would happen to us if we have no challenge and everything does fall our way? Does it mean we become less resilient? Does it mean we become less resistant to what may impact us? Does it mean we don’t survive pandemics? Does it mean we – because once something pops into our world that’s an outlier, that doesn’t go our way, does that wipe us out? Do we become such a fragile species that we don’t know how to deal with adversity?
I don’t know the answer to these questions. I keep talking to people much smarter than me to try and to try and figure it out, and I like thinking about it myself, but yeah, I hope we get to a place where everybody finds a solution to an almost artificial scarcity that we’ve created in some aspects of what we do, and we sort of come to exist more as opposed to just living to do. I sort of can’t articulate it, but I think about how important it is to have art, like a sculpture, a beautiful building, a painting, music. People take all of these things for granted. You don’t see it in schools. You see them getting cut from curriculums. And I understand why people go like, “wow, I’m not gonna pay so my kids learn how to play the clarinet, are you kidding me? A recorder? That’s – what’s the point of that, you can’t get a job.” Yeah. But it’s more than just about jobs.
And so, if everything fell our way, I would hope we live in a world where not everything is about do, but everything could be about be. Then a teacher, a painter, an architect, an engineer, a pilot, a comedian, everyone could just find their purpose and meaning in a way that doesn’t threaten their livelihood. Because I think if we completely lose that, then we just become like a worker species that has no flare, no personality, and no creativity. And so yeah, I hope everything falls in our way in that direction.
ARIA:
We gotta keep that grit and keep that joy. For sure. Thank you
REID:
And on that note, we look forward to having you voice the AI on a future Star Trek episode. [laugh] Trevor as a friend and as an amazing humanist, thank you very much for joining us on Possible.
TREVOR:
Thank you so much.
ARIA:
That was so fun to hear from Trevor Noah. Reid, I’d love to hear from you, like, what was the most surprising thing about the interview? You know Trevor, he’s a friend. What surprised you?
REID:
Actually, what surprised me was the depth of the optimism, in part because – obviously, when you watch him interviewing on The Daily Show and doing, you know, his comedy routines, it tends to be the, you know, what’s absurd or broken or shining a light on something in order to make a difference in it. And so, you don’t see the very broad and deep “what a time to be alive.” Oh my God, there’s so many things that’s possible. It’s so important to get to that future. It’s so important to do that. But of course, it’s important to bring humanity along with us and to have human concerns and to not just be… Including, of course, a bunch of fairly bold proposals, which, you know, might end up – that would obviously be a spectacular utopia.
ARIA:
What I loved that is not quite the same, but related, is his conversation about joy and that the importance of joy. He’s clearly a very serious person, he wants to improve the world, he sees the dangers and discrimination and wants to make the world a better place. But a lot of people like that are too sober that they can’t recognize the importance of joy. And I think one of the places where this could come together is even if you don’t have a four hour work day, you still work the same number of hours, but you’re working a better job. You’re working a job that brings you more joy. You’re not, to your point, doing drudgery in the field. You’re not having a terrible checkout job that you don’t really care about because AI has taken some of that away and you’ve been able to find a new job that’s sort of more centered squarely with your purpose, that you find more joy in. And so I just found that reaching for that better future, we can also include joy. It doesn’t just have to be productivity. And they often go together, because the more joyful you find something, the harder you’re gonna work and perhaps the more you’re gonna wanna work, which certainly resonates with me.
REID:
Completely agree. And one of the things that we always love about talking with Trevor is he actually exemplifies that joy, you know, and having that humanity, having that: “look, what matters – money is how we create an infrastructure that we all live in, but it’s the joy and meaning of our lives and how we add into each other’s lives, that actually is the real goal.” That was, I thought, the perfect expression of the kind of humanism, very technologically aware, and using technology to amplify humanity.
ARIA:
I think another thing that I really liked about the conversation was we sort of talked about the jobs issue head on as it relates to AI. So, obviously, that’s a big criticism. And Trevor shared that great quote from Sweden where they said, we’re not gonna make sure your job’s okay, we’re gonna make sure you are okay. And I think he made a great point, hilariously, you know, that 10 years ago, the cultural elite in the United States weren’t worried about the coal miners jobs going away, weren’t worried about factory automation. But all of a sudden when AI is coming for the journalists or the white collar workers, there’s real concern. And while being hilarious about it, he made a great point. It’s like, let’s look at our own classism as we’re embarking on impeding technology in the next generation. Why do we care so much more about these white collar jobs than we did the blue collar jobs? And, obviously, I think you and I both agree that, again, let’s make sure the people are okay, not the jobs, and that’s the only way you can, you know, go forward and make progress.
REID:
Yeah, exactly. Was there a piece of information, or a Trevor Noah perspective – it was ranged so much more broadly than obviously just the media side – but was there anything in addition to his quotes and his metaphors that really resonated with you?
ARIA:
I just think he’s such an insightful guy. So, even in thinking about his rapid fire answers, he picked the story of Henry Sugar that I remember reading when I was 10. It’s such a simple story about what we should all aspire to in life. And Trevor got it right that we all think about the means to the end. And it’s like, no, no, no, no. What’s the end? What are we here for?
Like, this is so dorky, but over the past 24 hours, I’ve been ruminating on the famed Sheryl Crow quote. “It’s not about getting what you want, it’s about wanting what you got.” And I think Trevor sort of embodied that. He’s like, “let’s slow down everyone. Why are we talking about all these things? Like, let’s stroll it back. Let’s talk about what’s really important, and let’s center that in our lives.”
REID:
I’ve watched all of his specials, but I hope one day to be in the audience. [laugh] Right?
ARIA:
You and me both. [laugh]
Reid, one thing I wanted to ask you about is he did talk about capitalism. Obviously, you are someone who believes in capitalism as as a way to create the greatest good. Did you agree with Trevor? Disagree? What would you add to the discussion?
REID:
Well, the nuance that I brought up a little bit in the discussion is that, you know, I am 100% good if we have a better idea than capitalism. The vast majority of critics, like, they just go “capitalism bad!” And you’re like, well, that’s like saying “car’s bad!” or “airplane’s bad!” or, you know, :industrialized economy’s bad!” and so forth. And you’re like, they generate all of these really amazing things that are an essential part of the vast majority of people who engage with them’s lives, and those people don’t wanna give them up for very good reasons. They’re just part of how they do it. And capitalism is part of how we’ve gotten to the massive jump in GDP per person and in prosperity. And so, if there’s a better, I’m game for it, but just yelling, whining, being Mr. Negative on this stuff, doesn’t appeal to me at all, because I think it’s just destructive and adds nothing useful to the conversation whatsoever. So that’s the reason I kind of pushed back a little bit on saying, I’m cautious now on being anti-capitalist. Now, anyone who’s got a brain and eyes and a heart can see that what we’ve done with capitalism over the centuries has been tune it. Like we go, “well, this child labor thing, let’s fix that.” [laugh] “Oh, externality is impacting the environment. Well, let’s start fixing that.” [laugh] Right? Let’s do more. Yeah. And then, so it’s really important – for example, you’re going to have a criticism, that’s great. Either: what would be your whole cloth new system? And why do you think that could be a very dangerous shift, too? It’s very, you know, we need a lot of stable infrastructure. Or, what’s the tune that you would do?
So, the question around is to say, well, yeah, if we took the meaning of life to only be money, your bank balance a quarterly profit, et cetera, et cetera, which some people do, that’s obviously very demeaning to what we can be as humanity, to what joy could be. And whichever way you do that – joy, spirituality, meaningfulness – whatever kind of particular lens on this elevation of being human is operating within the technology of the capitalist system and the technology of the money system is a very good thing. And so, it’s important to say, “okay, yes, problems.” And “Great, what might we do to make it better?”
ARIA:
Yeah. I think as with most things, and what I appreciated about Trevor, it’s all about nuance. And when we talk about capitalism, the people who try to impede it or impede progress, we would prefer to make the pie as big as possible and then worry about divvying it up later. And I think for me, the problem in the United States, at least, and in several places around the world, is we haven’t, we haven’t fixed the divvying it up yet. We haven’t created the right social safety nets, we haven’t made sure that every child gets a great education, or that everyone has healthcare in the United States – you know, a country that should be rich enough to provide everyone that. So I definitely agree with you that people who are throwing stones at capitalism without providing solutions, it’s just silly.
Let’s work together to figure out what are those tweaks, what are those tunes. Exactly what you’re talking about, to use our heart to fix it, to build toward the possible future that we want. So, hopefully episodes of this pod are going to teach us something about how we can get to a better capitalism.
REID:
Possible is produced by Wonder Media Network and hosted by Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger. Our showrunner is Shaun Young. Possible is produced by Edie Allard and Sara Schleede. Jenny Kaplan is our Executive Producer and Editor. Special thanks to Chelsea Williamson, Jill Fritzo, Stephen Fertelmes, Jennifer Sandler, Mahdi Salehi, Surya Yalamanchili, Saida Sapieva, Ian Alas, Greg Beato, Ben Relles, and the team at City Vox.