Human Nature and History: How Our Past Teaches Us About Our AI Future.

[00:00:00.790] - Dan Paulson

Yeah, I agree with what you're saying there. Now, as somebody who might be a future employee or looking at, where is the work going to be in the future? Because I agree with you. Ai is going to assist in a lot of ways. It's going to eliminate certain jobs that exist now. But at the same point, that's going to free up other opportunities somewhere else. And where do you see it from an AI perspective? Where do you see the labor force needing to grow in order to adjust?

[00:00:33.090] - Mark Stouse

I think, again, we can take a lesson from history here, recent history, right? So at the end of World War II, the average fighter aircraft could move at around 450 to 500 miles an hour. It had about five to seven gages max on the dashboard, and pilots were largely flying by the seat of their pants, right? It was a very pilot-centric centric, talent centric idea. And total closing speed between two combatants would have been roughly a thousand miles an hour. Then all of a sudden, we broke the sound barrier. So we were now mock, and then very fast, two years later, mock two, mock three, right? So we're now moving at closing speeds in combat, right? With a lull, the swirl, and all this stuff as well, right? That are approaching four to five times the speed of sound. There was not a World War II pilot capable, reaction time, of making that happen, unaided, right? And so you started to see more and more automation. You started to see a lot of stuff in these aircraft that we could call proto-AI, right? A lot of decision aids, all this stuff. And it required a, usually, not many World War II era pilots, Korean War era pilots, were able to make the transition mentally to this new thing, right?

[00:02:26.810] - Mark Stouse

It was almost like a generational shift. Then what we're looking at now, probably from the next... So most experts would say that we are currently at or very near the last generation of combat fighter that's man. Like on board, right? So you're going to see fighter aircraft in the next 20 years that have no human beings on board, that are probably controlled by someone on the ground, not unlike a Predator drone or something like that. But also, you're not going to have one pilot sitting in a console back in Dover, Delaware, controlling one aircraft, you're going to have to have the ability to have one guy controlling a lot of aircraft, right? So there's going to have to be an AI interface to that. So are we going to be training pilots for naval fighter aircraft, US Air Force fighter aircraft, in the same way that we are training them today? Not a chance. So does that mean that the skillset, the need, goes away? No, it doesn't. Does that mean it changes substantially? Yeah, it probably does. Does that mean that you don't get personally shot at anymore? Yeah, that's probably a real upside.

[00:03:58.570] - Mark Stouse

You know? So I think that we saw this to talk about briefly, a much more pedestrian topic. I was present for a lot of the data center automation stuff, right? And what we saw there was a whole layer of activity in the data center that was automated. And all of a sudden, people didn't have to do that anymore. And there wasn't actually a lot of layoffs. There was just a big step up in terms of what you got to really work on and higher value stuff. And you're moving faster, doing cooler stuff, all this stuff. And then Now what we have is a situation 20 years later where a lot of people are graduating with IT degrees that literally have no frame of reference outside of that automation layer. So can they do those skills personally at all? If they had to? No. There was a great article not too long ago that was interviewing the top IT management graduate from MIT, and they took him into a data center that was about to be powered up for the first time and said, so how do you do this? How do you power it up?

[00:05:28.860] - Mark Stouse

Where's the go button? Right? Didn't have a flippin clue, right? Who had the knowledge? A guy who was 68 years old had that knowledge. So you're now talking about just some really interesting factors that we're going to see. It's going to make it messy. I think that actually one of the good things about this is it's going to puncture the whole ageism thing, which is like, out of all the prejudices that human beings have, which are all stupid, ageism is the most stupid. Ageism is the most stupid, because it's going to happen to all of us.

[00:06:18.000] - Dan Paulson

Yes. Right? I mean, you're also taking the person with the most experience and eliminating them.

[00:06:24.000] - Mark Stouse

That's right. And so I mean, so it's just, so I do think that's going to be a beneficial piece of collateral on this. We already see it right now. I mean, in sales, and marketing, and a whole bunch of areas, and businesses right now, a lot of people have never been through a time like this before. Their whole career is, say, less than 20 years, and in some cases, less than 15, in most cases, less than 15, right? So They literally have no frame of reference. There's a whole bunch of SaaS sales teams that have no idea how to sell SaaS in a radically suboptimal environment, right? And so we're going to have to make our way through this. There's going to be a lot of those kinds of rocks that have to be overturned and we have to look underneath them, and the bugs are going to be there, and all that stuff, and we're just going to have to deal with it.

[00:07:37.880] - Dan Paulson

Yeah, I think that's a good point. Anytime there's these major shifts, it's going to upend everything.

[00:07:44.270] - Mark Stouse

Yeah. I mean, it won't be fun. But I will say this. I really believe this. I think there's tons of evidence for this statement. The more T-shaped you are as a professional, as a as a leader, as a follower, the more successful you're going to be. So the T is this is your specialization right here. And that's pretty easily measured because it's basically How deep can you go in a conversation about your specialization? Or some people have more than one, right? This is all about the context, right? This is about, Hey, you know what? Do I have the business business acumen, the financial understanding, the marketing understanding, the business understanding, the marketplace understanding to better understand my specialization and other people's, and the interaction between them. And a great measure of how T-shaped you are is take your area of specialization. Can you discuss it with the rest of the business team using only business words? So none of your own specialists slang. No marketing terms, no IT terms, nothing. Can you discuss it really fluently and be easily understood Only talking about it in business terms. Likewise, going the other way, can you take a business idea and talk about it with your specialist team members who may may or may not be very T-shaped in a way that they understand it?

[00:09:35.570] - Mark Stouse

Can you essentially analogize using specialist language and describe what the business problem is? So this nexus, this point of convergence, is really where the action is going to be over the next, say, 5 to 10 years. You know? And I think that one of the challenges is that we have, in the last 20 years, we have over-rotated on specialist understanding. And so there's not a lot of T-shaped people, Calcutta, right? And we also have among the professional business class, okay? And we have a lot of people with horizontal understanding and very little appreciation for what it takes to actually operate one of these specializations. You see it in IT, you see it in data science, you see it in marketing. There's just zero empathy, zero understanding for the realities of those. So this is going to be something that's going to It has to be worked out. And again, that's not... Ai can help that in terms of crunching perspective. That's really the way that I prefer to look at it. But people are going to make those calls. Ai is not going to make those calls.

[00:11:17.440] - Dan Paulson

Do you think a lot of that's tied to the speed of change that we're going through right now? Because it's almost like the circuit boards. I forget what the terminology because I'm not IT, but every year, basically the number of connections doubles, and that's pretty much become law. It's almost like the world has moved so fast at this point, that we don't worry about the depth anymore. We're too worried about the horizontal, as you put it. So there's always to learn the next thing, but not in-depth on that thing.

[00:11:54.370] - Mark Stouse

Unless our whole area is vertical, is a specialization, which case we over rotate there, right? Yeah. This is actually incredibly human. We're now talking about stuff that actually is almost an entirely human dynamic, right? The So maybe I'm trying to think of a way to talk about this that's very approachable. So everyone in this audience has probably heard of people process technology, right? It's a triangle, right? And most Most of the time, you Google it, you're going to see a bunch of infographic illustrations of it. And it's almost always presented as an equilateral triangle. So all the sides are the same, right? The problem is that that's not even close to real, right? It's a profoundly scaling triangle, which means that one leg of the triangle is dramatically dramatically longer than the other two, and the other two are different as well from each other. So what is the long pole? What's the long leg of this triangle? It's people. It's not I mean, like one of the most explosive bodies of data, which I guess from one standpoint, I totally understand why they haven't wanted to release this because it just be not fun.

[00:13:27.170] - Mark Stouse

Okay. But one of the top analyst firms terms, has 20 to 25 years worth of data on this that shows that when there is a product implementation failure, we're talking about software, primarily. The fault is very rarely, meaning like 5 % of the time with the product. It is almost always because of people issues. In internally, right? Failure of commitment, failure of ability, right? Capability, capacity, all this stuff, right? You're really seeing this, by the way, in spade, which is part of also what's going on in the AI conversation among C-suites, is there's an increasing gap between the power of new SaaS and the ability to give teams to extract the value because they don't have the capability, the capacity, the learning, whatever, right? So this goes to your issue of speed of change. So this is a situation now where a lot of leaders are saying to themselves, number one, I don't want to spend the money to upskill my guys, which personally, I think is the wrong position to take, but that's their position. And so I just want to replace them, as many of them as possible, with robots. Because the robots won't have a lot of those constraints, and they can also work 24/7, 365, they need sleep, they don't have spouses that want to go on vacation, all this stuff, right?

[00:15:30.230] - Mark Stouse

So there will be some of this, right? And we will, over the next 10 years in environments, work with literal robots, and let's call it soft robots, right? Bots. And it will just be real at some level. But I don't think it's going to be possible to swing the pendulum profoundly anytime soon.

[00:16:08.770] - Dan Paulson

Cool. Rich?

[00:16:11.540] - Mark Stouse

I don't know how cool it is.

[00:16:14.160] - Dan Paulson

Well, In my world, there's always change. And of course, I'm dealing with people all the time. So I see eventually there's going to be opportunity where certain issues exist. It's just a matter of who's going to find that opportunity, who's going to capitalize on it. And that's what I'm always looking for, is there's always going to be a need for people. Otherwise, if we're creating technology to eliminate all of us, what good have we done then? Because people need purpose. They need something to give life fulfillment.

[00:16:48.390] - Mark Stouse

And the other thing that's going to really drive this is competition, right? I mean, look, nuclear power was theoretical in the extreme until of World War II, until you had Nazis and other fascists bent on global domination and bad stuff, right? And the biggest thing that accelerated the Manhattan Project was the thought that the Germans might get the bomb first, right? And so under that scenario, leaders, understandably, if not rightfully, tend to become pretty damn expedient. And so it was... I mean, this is, I think, one of the great lessons of Oppenheimer, the movie, right? Is it dramatized it so well. Even among the scientists, it was this theoretical concept right up until the Trinity test at Los Alamos, and everybody went, holy shit, right? And at that point, you couldn't uninvent. You couldn't undo. It had passed irretrievably from a purely scientific endeavor to one that now was almost purely political in terms of its control. So I think that that's going to happen here, right? And the EU, China, California, many other governments are creating regulatory environments around AI. One of the things we're going to find out is who really has the power?

[00:18:50.690] - Mark Stouse

Do governments have the power today, or do corporations have the power today? This actually happens in history With some regularity, approximately every 150 years, you see this cycle. This is exactly what Theater Roosevelt dealt with when he was President. He had to break the back of a lot of the trusts and things like that in the United States to show who had the supremacy, as well as get rid of a lot of bad behavior and corruption and stuff like that. But we're now in a place where we're of multinationals transcend individual national authority. So how do you really deal with that? And for a long time, there wasn't really any super compelling factor that was going to drive this to some existential answer. But I think that AI is sure. I just don't see it as being any other answer is being possible.