LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman on What Could Go Right with Our AI Future (Part Two)
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Today's episode is part two of our recent live event in London's St. Martin-in-the-Fields with LinkedIn founder and AI entrepreneur Reid Hoffman. If you haven't yet heard part one, just skip back an episode to get up to speed.

Hoffman was joined in conversation by researcher and host of the hit podcast Kill List, Karl Miller, to discuss what could possibly go right with our AI future. Now, let's rejoin our host, Karl Miller, with more. I've got a very gloomy question for you, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry. In a moment, I'd love to talk about your background and how that shaped this outlook, but I think one gloomer question first before we go on there. And it's basically, I think, the Gordian Knot that I'd love you to try and unpick with me. And it's basically that...

you know, in the last 20 years, we've seen a whole succession of democratizing technologies, of course, at exactly the same time as we've seen social inequality massively increase and social mobility drastically decrease. And so like the Gordian knot, I suppose, is we can make the sum of the world's information available to Wikipedia, but we can't, you know, that doesn't mean that poor kids get into Harvard. Yeah.

How do we unpick this? It seems like at the same time as these fantastical capabilities sit at our fingertips, or exactly the same time, actually most of us are feeling more scared, more lonely, more isolated, and we're living in a less just and less empathetic world. So, weirdly, part of the reason why we feel that the world is less just is because we, in some senses, see more of it. Like, for example,

I think actually in fact there were massive wealth inequalities and power inequalities, but we see more of it now. And so that's part of the trigger and it's seeing it as part of what leads to it. And so, and by the way, I think seeing it is generally good and how we evolve and whatnot. Now I do think, I think there usually is an over focus on inequality. Like, you know, as a parallel, it's like, well,

what's the magic number by which is the maximum that a CEO should be paid more than the person who's least paid in a company? And you shouldn't have that magic number. It's markets that determine that kind of thing. It's like, should it be 10x, 20x, 100x? Who knows? Inequality is usually, I think,

There's asterisks to it, like does it distort the system, et cetera. It's are we raising, like call it 80% plus, 90% plus people's capabilities, incomes, life, savings, that's the thing that most matters, like is

is the tide rising for the vast majority of people. And I think that's the thing that we do need to be focusing on. And I do think that part of the issue of when you get to a more network society, when we get to globalization, it does present challenges, especially within wealthy societies, because part of what globalization happens is you go, well, the middle class in the US hasn't really gotten a good raise,

but 500 million people in China have gotten elevated into the middle class. And you go, well, okay, but that still matters, like just speaking within the US to how to make that happen. And I think it's one of the things that we need to

like make happen better within our societies because it matters. It's like, so look, globalization I think does create a lot of value everywhere in the world, but you got to make sure you're not trading out your middle class of your own society for the middle class, the rise of middle classes of other societies. It's,

great to have the rise of the other societies, but you need to make sure we're investing. And it's part of the reason why, like when people ask me, well, what kinds of things should we be doing as a government with AI? It's like, well, get the medical assistant, get the tutor, get the, like,

make sure that there's AI assistance that help with the job transitions, help with the upskilling. And for example, that's the conversation that I would be having with the AI companies. It's not like, oh my God, I want you to be slowing down. It's like, I want to make sure that you're building the things that are helping the average person navigate their work life, given that some changes are coming. Make sure you're doing that too, please.

So what are the strongest signals then that we should be looking for to kind of work out whether we're on course towards the revolution that you see as possible versus, you know, and want versus one that you don't? Like, what are the kind of biggest metrics? Is it lives getting longer, people living healthier? Beyond the use of the technology itself, what are the other kind of aspects, I suppose I'm asking, of life that will tell you whether we're succeeding?

Well, those are good metrics. You know, obviously, I don't want to have a massive surge. I mean, I think there'll be a lot of transition and disruption, but obviously you want people working through that transition and disruption to new work and new jobs and new creation. And just like, for example, one of the things that we...

you know, study at LinkedIn is, you know, which jobs are really growing. So we like saw the data scientist jobs growing, you know, 20 years ago. And obviously the how to use AI is actually one of the things that's really kind of growing and kind of job demand. And it's actually one of the things that I tell young people, which they say, well, what do I do in this new AI age? Well, one of the benefits is you're more AI native and you go to a workplace and say, I know I've been using AI a bunch and I can help the organization use it.

It's one of the things I think actually creates a lot of interesting, good job opportunity. But to your metrics question, look, I think there's going to be a lot of, you know, kind of, we're going to have a lot of transition opportunities.

difficulties and challenges that happens. When I say AI is the cognitive industrial revolution, I both mean the upside of like, for example, we don't have a middle class. We don't have functioning democracies the way we do without the industrial revolution. It's a massive increase. The productivity and the increase of kind of wealth per person with the industrial revolution goes massively up. But the transition

is super difficult and the transition will be difficult too.

let's try to learn from it, let's try to have AI help us with it, et cetera. So when it gets to metrics, I think a lot of it's the kind of standard life quality metrics, but by the way, it's also going through that transition to the future and it's also specific metrics about how do we navigate that transition that I would start kind of looking at. But those are the kinds of things, and obviously we have this complicated world we're living in with all kinds of global disruption and

Obviously, we've all read the news with the Turkish president Erdogan imprisoning his chief political rival and all the rest of the stuff, which is not good for the global world order. So anyway, I think those are the kinds of things to look at. And obviously, it's somewhat more art than science because the variables are so connected to other things that are happening in society. Just before we get on to country politics, Reid, the engine room of all of this, Silicon Valley.

So, you know, PayPal, LinkedIn, you're obviously, you know, a famous longstanding member of that community. And quite often, if there'll be two Brits on the stage, we'd be talking about Silicon Valley like they were lunatics. You know, this separate place with a very specific philosophy, you know, very different from it seems the rest of the world. So what is it that...

Brits, let's talk about Brits. What do we get wrong about Silicon Valley, do you think? Do we misunderstand the people that are there and what they're trying to do with the technologies that they're building?

It's interesting. Like I don't, one of the, when I was a student at Oxford, one of the books that I, and I presume it's still in print, but that I bought and gave to a bunch of my English friends was Brit Think Amerithink by Jane Walmsley. And it was a very good cross-cultural perception. So I'm not 100% sure that I can represent the Brit perspective on Silicon Valley. Maybe I'll talk a little bit about kind of

I know that Brit is kind of like halfway between the US and Europe, so I'll color it a little bit on the European side. I think that part of the thing tends to be

emphasizing the crazy elements of the massive ambition about, hey, one person, a small number of people can create a new technology that will massively transform the world, a new company that will transform industries. And in running towards it, you're taking risks, you're being just massively ambitious.

And you can look at all that from a negative side. It's like, well, you think you're really important. You're willing to take risks that affect all of us that you're just kind of very self-confident about doing. You're doing it with an intent to maximize

a huge amount of money and power and so on, then you can take all of the negative side of that. But by the way, with all of that negative, there's also flip positives. It's, no, actually, you're going to make a huge difference in an industry. You're going to change a lot of how the world works. And you're potentially going to do it in

in really great ways. And like for example, on a small way in my own journey, when I started LinkedIn, people were like, no one's ever gonna put up their professional profile on the equivalent of the internet. It's like, no, no, the world's much better for them and the world's much better for the industry and the world's much better for society if it works that way.

And yes, I envision a way of getting there and of making kind of a global network on this. And I think that this kind of thing is that kind of like just massive ambition is actually in fact overall a good thing if sometimes very irritating and sometimes very concerning.

And so that's probably the sense of it. And people who tend to move to Silicon Valley tend to have that as a goal. And one of the things that I tend to measure that's interesting is which government ministers around the world tend to show up trying to ask questions going, how do we have the learnings here benefit my society? And so for example, a comment from the European side is,

It's part of how I've become friends with a number of English ministers, 'cause they do that and show up. By the way, some French ministers show up too. I met Macron when he was a minister, 'cause he showed up at the Silicon Valley going, "What do I learn here that can help France?"

I have yet to see a German minister show up. I don't know why that is, but so far, zero. Anyway, so that's the kind of thing I think that it's valuable to learn from in Silicon Valley, even if sometimes we look more like mad people than geniuses. That might be the news line for this evening. Hoffman levels challenge at German ministers. Excellent, especially with my last name. Yeah.

But in all seriousness, that kind of existential threat, the status quo, that's what you're talking about there. And the kind of flashes of irritation in the book are with that acceptance of a world that also doesn't work, it seems. People can't access talking therapies. People are needlessly dying of diagnosable diseases and so on. - Yeah, and this is, I mean, think about it. Part of the thing is when you get to that medical assistant,

that can run for, call it, like its inference cost might be less than five pounds per hour, that could be on every smartphone.

And obviously, like the number of people who do not have access to a GP, and that makes a difference globally, is huge. And so being ambitious, and part of, by the way, the reason why it's not happening in medical stuff as much is because regulatory liability is such that everyone's kind of steering away from it. And it's like, no, no, let's try to create the conditions to steer into it.

Because, like, you know, you could say, okay, like one of the questions I've asked a couple of my, you know, kind of very knowledgeable friends is say, what would be possible if government said you're allowed and encouraged to give medical advice if you ask the first question of do you have access to a doctor or not?

And if you say no, then say, look, I'm not a doctor, but this is the best I can do for you. And if you say yes, like I'm not a doctor, and here's what I would suggest you do in terms of prioritizing going and talking to a doctor and talking to a doctor about the following things. Like, because then, by the way, a lot of people who do not have access to doctors and including, you know, in one of the things that I always find somewhat interesting

challenging about the US society is there's a whole bunch of people who are uninsured, who don't have access to doctors. That's, like, access to medical care is one of the things that we get to as we improve our human rights. And how do we make that happen in good ways? We have the technology to do it now. Let's make it happen. Would you rewrite any of the book if you knew what you knew was going to happen after Trump's inauguration?

Fundamentally, no, despite the fact, I presume most people here know that I put a lot of energy into trying to not have Trump elected.

Partially it's because I was talking about AI and society and humanity and where we're going to. Obviously, with Trump's, the administration's America First policy of being much less good of a partner to our historic friends and allies, that begins to raise a whole bunch of questions about the importance of having your own sovereign models and own sovereign AI and a bunch of things that is having...

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The PC gave us computing power at home, the internet connected us, and mobile let us do it pretty much anywhere. Now generative AI lets us communicate with technology in our own language, using our own senses. But figuring it all out when you're living through it is a totally different story. Welcome to Leading the Shift.

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You talk a lot in the book about social cohesion and, in fact, almost like a kind of latter-day social contract. You go back to Rousseau, talk about social contractarian theory, which seems massively important how we need to reform it. I suppose the kind of visage, though, is that America is going to be the country, perhaps, that is obviously going to do more than any other to bring about, technologically speaking, the AR revolution, but might be the country that's least able to actually deal with it in a cohesive way.

Depolarized way. Well, it's an interesting conundrum I mean one of the things that you know ten years ago Europe including the UK and the US had about the same GDP now the US is twice the GDP and You know, it's a little like societies work Democracies get buy-in when there's economic growth. I think it's extremely important thing to do one of the things that I think is

that drives that within the U.S. perspective that is both helpful for creating it but also creates a lot of friction is the U.S. is still much more like the frontier. The U.S. is more like the Wild West. It has much more of a kind of ask for forgiveness versus permission. And some of that I think is very important for all of this.

By the way, but some of that also makes a certain amount of chaos, a certain amount of a less planned society, a certain amount of less social cohesion, dangers around that. Now, obviously, the extreme polarization that we've been seeing is something I think is unhealthy and bad. It's some of the things that I would like to have our media ecosystems as democracies need to get us to getting to more of a common ground.

knowledge about learning. Obviously, when you address that in political circumstances, you end up in a bunch of basically, you know, like just weird black is white, white is black kind of conversations. But the way I start that conversation frequently is

is like talking about anti-vax stuff. Because most of the increased anti-vax stuff is just lunacy. I mean, the basic issue is you go to, like how we do knowledge

Because we have panels of reflective experts that study things. That's part of science. That's part of, like, juries. That's part of, you know, all of that. And so when you talk to a lot of medical folks, they go, well, actually, in fact, sure, sometimes an individual has a reaction to a vaccine. That's difficult. But on the other hand, like, the vast majority of people, their lives are saved by

Many more lives are saved than the people who have that bad reflex. And so it's very good for society to have that vaccination. There is a truth coefficient. And if your media ecosystem is leading you away from the truth coefficient, you have a problem in your media ecosystem. And so those are the kinds of things we need to sort through. But obviously, it's very difficult politically.

All right, well, Reid, we've only got five minutes before we go to Q&A. So the book's all about, of course, personal agency. So let's spend the last five minutes talking about that. So people are going to leave this talk, hopefully, if they haven't already, go home and they'll download ChatGPT for the first time. What do they need to know? Like, what kind of advice can you give them about how to begin to use AI in their normal life? Give everyone a piece of homework. Or mobile phone work, you know. Yeah.

So I already covered a little bit of it in some earlier examples, like as an education thing, asking questions, putting in things that you don't understand, asking questions around that. Now, here is a general kind of prompting thing that is useful, which is AI is very good at kind of role taking.

And what I mean by role-taking, I'll start with kind of super agencies. So when Greg and I were writing it, we would feed in sections and say, okay, critique this from a deeply knowledgeable historian of technology point of view so that we could see what things when we're talking about electricity or what things when we're talking about cars and by nature of kind of

kind of going through and doing a mass market book and arguing about AI, we are being simplistic about some of the technologies. But we wanted to understand, like, well, where would we be critiqued? And is there anything that we would...

modify a little bit to keep our simple argument, but like be detailed and on point the way that a historian of technology, whether she or he would go, oh, this is an important point to include. And that's like adopting a role that's useful in what you're doing. And by the way, like some of the very basic things that I do with AI is I go, here's what I think, what's the counter argument? Or here's what I think, what's the additional arguments for how I think about that?

And this is part of the thing, like people frequently worry, it's like, oh, am I gonna be giving up my agency and my decisioning and my learning to AI? Well, you could, just like you could say, I'm gonna do a search and I'm gonna believe whatever is link one and that's what I'm gonna believe.

Well, don't do that. Do it in an active mind, but that active mind, it's now the best tool that has ever been made for learning quickly and deeply in these things. And part of it is thinking about those kinds of roles. Now, the other thing, the last thing I'll put in is my guess is this will be useful to most people in the audience because it's not a well-understood part of it, is the longer and deeper your prompt is,

the usually better answer that you get. Now, you would say, "Well, I should then write for four minutes and writing in my prompt." You can do that. And by the way, most people don't understand is how modern search engines work is they're actually making a guess. When you write in two words, they're actually making a guess as to what the other 20 words that should be part of the prompt and then prioritizing those in your search results in terms of how operating because this is a general use of this kind of technology.

And frequently, when I'm using AI, I'll go, well, give me the prompt that would give me the best kind of answer to this kind of question. And then it comes back and writes a, you know, call it a 300-word prompt. And I go, okay, and I change that and change that and change that, and then I put that prompt in.

And that's one way that you can very quickly, by iteratively prompting, get to a much more interesting prompt about something that's more in depth. So I don't know if that counts as homework, but it certainly counts as a prompt. - What about skills and training? 'Cause I mean,

You mentioned there's going to be an economic transition, the people, the activities that go by script, the machine will be able to do the script better. I am reading from a script as we speak, which hasn't made me feel great about my own job security. So, but I mean, people are constantly, I think, worried, you know, how on earth can you future-proof yourself in a,

in an economy that seems like it's going to be changing so drastically. Have you got any advice for people about, are there core things at this point that you think, okay, these are the things that humans will be doing to adding value in the economy? Well, so humans are actually very adaptive. So I didn't ask you when we chatted for a few minutes, did you put your questions into chat GBT or Gemini or Copilot or anything else and say,

"Hey, I'm gonna be interviewing Reid Hoffman with these. "Which of these questions would be particularly good? "Or is there a variant of them?" Or so forth, which you should do. Don't know where you did that. And by the way, of course you're exercising good human judgment of going, "Oh, I'm navigating between these questions "and I had 10 other ones but I'm choosing this one "and I'm doubling down on it." And that kind of adaptation, so it's learning how to use it. It's one of the reasons why I, you know,

go through the massive amount of work that it is to write a book, even when you're using AI agents to help cross-check and do stuff. And my book before this, Impromptu, was the first book on AI, co-written with AI, in order to kind of show kind of how to amplify that way.

But start using it and start using it for things that are serious. I mean, to some degree, if you're not trying to think about like, that was the reason I always use, like when I'm sitting down with people who are really using it, I go, what additional prompting techniques have you learned? And to be learning those and to be evolving those in terms of how you're doing. Like all of the things that I have suggested, none of them did I sit in front of the blank page

message field for an agent and think and go, "A Eureka!

All of them I've gotten from other people that I'm talking to. And I go, like, for example, it was a friend of mine's 14-year-old daughter who really loves deep organic chemistry and was putting in chemistry papers, like high-end chemistry papers. And I was like, explain this to me, and I'm 14. And I was like, ooh, that's a good idea. And so that kind of thing, those are the things to be learning and doing.

So prompting, you're saying, is a skill set. People need to start developing it, they need to start building it, they need to start using it, and that's really the only way that we're going to be able to... And that will lead you to other things. Like, for example, when I was talking to Ethan Mollick, I started thinking about, huh, what are the kinds of things that you could do having had Ethan's revelation? Well, say, for example, you're the parent of a young baby, X months old, and

Well, I could see setting up a camera on the baby crib and saying, here's the things I want you to be watching for. I want you to be watching for, to alert me if there's any of these things that go wrong. I want you to record if it seems like the kid's saying a word so I could see the word if I happen to be doing it. I mean, this is all doable today. Like, this is not that hard to do. You could just like literally, it's not like a major do-it-yourself project.

It's a minor do-it-yourself project. And by the way, AI can help you with the prompting and all the rest in order to make this happen. So those are the kinds of things like,

I was like, huh, I hadn't thought that that could be a possible use. And when I was thinking about Ethan's construction project, I went, oh, it could work here, it could work here, it could work here. That's the kind of thing I think we all need to be thinking about. What I nearly guarantee all of us, myself included, are only using today's capabilities at 5% or less of the things that we could be doing to be amplifying. And that's the kind of amazing journey that we're on.

All right, well, the journey tonight moves onwards as well, and now it's time for questions. So if you, hands are shooting up, look at this, right there. Hi, thank you, Mr. Hoffman, very insightful. Quick question, I think many people here might have already seen The Adolescence, which is making quite waves on Netflix, and it got me thinking, I'm a father of a 17-year-old,

Will AI make us better parents? Because we're talking about business, we're talking about society as a whole. I just started thinking, I started questioning whether I really know my child. Will AI hurt or help me? It's a great question, yeah. Thanks. Reid, you talk a lot about where markets work and where the knowledge that AI needs is all out there. And there are huge chunks of the economy and society where that isn't the case.

And isn't this some great opportunity for progressive politics to try and remedy that? So I run the British government programs that create an alternative to gig work platforms for people who have complex lives, very few skills, but need to work around other things in their lives. I spend a lot of time poking under the hood of gig work platforms and workforce scheduling systems, and they're brutal.

And the way they are already turbocharging their business models around cutting labor costs, around controlling the workforce, keeping a market oversupplied so we get our deliveries faster is terrifying.

and contributing a huge amount to the kind of working class rage that's out there. So isn't there a kind of political opportunity in the age of AI for whichever side starts to say, we've got to make sure the underlying infrastructure, the markets, the information are fair, and then let's all have agentic AI doing stuff for us. But at the moment, if you're a low skilled breadwinner who's in this new world of fragmented employment,

No agent can do anything for you. - Okay, thank you. So by the way, great first two questions. Congrats to the audience and one of the things I love about being in the UK.

I'll take them in order, because I think they're both important, so I'll just answer both of them as opposed to meld. So the first is on parenting. I do think that it can be very helpful. Now, obviously, it could be somewhat sub-helpful if people decide that they're going to be helicopter parents and they're like, well, the AI agent can do everything and I'm not going to do anything and I'm not going to be connected. Obviously, somebody could elect to do that. You're obviously not going to elect to do that because you asked the question being very thoughtful.

I'll give an angle that was a funny discovery from inflection and pie, which is we've had multiple people write to us about how they use pie for facilitating marital conversations. Like they put the agent down, put it on audio mode and then use it in the conversation because it's almost like

not a therapist or a counselor, but it's kind of like, oh, when you said this, did you mean that? Right, is trying to facilitate that kind of conversation. And, you know, it wasn't really something we designed it for, but was, you know, we've had some very positive reports. Obviously, that kind of thing could be useful. I also do think that, like, for example, one of the things all of these agents, not just Pi, are good at, say, well, I want to have this difficult conversation. What's some way that I might do that?

you'd be surprised at the conversations, or what are the issues, or what is the way that I might start exploring this. So on both the side of the kid and the parent, I can see enormous, great possibilities. And again, I think it comes down to how to use it. Now for the gig work side,

- Look, I do think that's, I think there is a lot of things that markets don't address well. Like for example, in parallel, and one of my hopes for the UK is like in the US, the way that medical stuff tends to work is once you have a condition, then all the economics are about curing or alleviating the condition.

preventing is obviously much better, but the economics aren't as good. So the design tends to be much more around alleviating or otherwise dealing with chronic illnesses versus preventing them. And you want to shift the incentives in the market somewhat to be more preventative. And I think the same thing is true for

Like, okay, we have a set of folks where they might naturally be more exploited by corporations using AI for, like, maximizing the corporation's benefit and not helping the individual enough. And obviously I'm not a corporation against individual. I'm a corporation with individual in terms of how I'm doing that.

Now, part of the question would be is what would the shifts in the market incentives be? What would be the kinds of things where you might ask for transparency? What are the features that you might press for that would help that? Because part of what happens, I mean, one of the things that I think, and I think there can obviously be a ton of great public sector units

utility for like how AI or how mobile phones, the combination can help increase our navigation, like the kind of equivalent of oh, here's something that needs to be fixed, or here's a problem that needs to be solved, or here's communications, here's how I understand what government services are available to me, all of which can be very good. But one of the things that's frequently not focused on sharply enough is that the creation of scale technology

and deployment of it is almost entirely from companies. So, it has to be kind of public-private incentives and partnerships and other kinds of ways of doing it. There just isn't really that scale creation of technology almost at all from any entities other than corporations, not from universities, not from NGOs, not from governments. And so, navigating that, and that

That does mean that we have real blind spots from the fact that corporations tend to be most focused on their economic opportunities. One of the things that creates lots of positive value, but also leaves absences. And I think you're exactly right to say these absences are important. Let's make sure that we're trying to do something for these folks. Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by myself, Conor Boyle, with production and editing by Mark Roberts.

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