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The Economic Case For Saving Human Jobs 💰

Plus, AI Develops Its Own Moral Code 😇

Author

Steve Brown
May 01, 2025

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This week’s most interesting and relevant AI news and analysis

Synthetic took a break last week, but we’re back with a bumper edition!

This Week in AI

Video Corner đŸ“ș

Typically, each Synthetic issue showcases a single video. This week, however, four great new videos are worth your time, and we couldn’t choose between them.

Our first is a fireside chat with Sam Altman, recorded at the TED 2025 conference in April. Interviewer Chris Anderson puts Altman’s feet to the fire on several huge AI issues, raising applause from audience members. Sam’s answers are thoughtful and might surprise you in places. (47m 30s)

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“My kids will never be smarter than AI
.I hope that my kids and all of your kids will look back at us with some pity and nostalgia, and be like, they lived such horrible lives, they were so limited, the world sucked so much, and I think that’s great”

Sam Altman, CEO and Co-founder of OpenAI, speaking at TED 2025

Our next video is an interview with Google DeepMind CEO Sir Demis Hassabis. Demis is a great communicator, and in this interview with 60 Minutes, he shares his view on AI’s potential to improve people’s lives, cure all diseases, and lead to an era of abundance. Demis also explains his principal worries about AI safety. (14m) Transcript

To see more about DeepMind and get a peek inside their research labs in London, check out 60 Minutes Overtime here. (5m 47s)

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“AI has developed even faster than I thought
so I think things have got, if anything, scarier than they were before.”

Geoff Hinton, AI Researcher, Professor, Former Google Researcher

Geoff Hinton is a legendary AI researcher often called “the Godfather of AI.” In this wide-ranging interview with CBS, Hinton provides another vital perspective on the future of AI. Hinton is candid about his concern that humanity will lose control of AI once its intelligence surpasses that of humans. He also reveals how he discovered that he had won the Nobel Prize for his work in AI.

Our last video showcases AI’s potential to redefine the human-computer interface. A decade after the failure of Google Glass, the tech pioneer is back at it again with smartglasses that integrate an AI-powered visual assistant. Sit back and watch the demo, and imagine the possibilities of glasses that understand the world around you. (16m)

Synthetic’s Take: AI-powered smartglasses will probably be the next big device, perhaps the primary device people use to interface with the digital world. The collision of wearables, augmented reality (AR), and artificial intelligence (AI) is inevitable and exciting.

AI Tech and Innovation

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“My best judgment is that soon there will be no individual task at which I'm better than an AI. What will remain a struggle for AI and an asset for humans, likely for many years to come, are: 1) The 'why' of doing something, 2) The agency to actually do it, and 3) staking your reputation on what you've done.

The best example of this type of job is a movie director. They have a vision of what they want to create, coordinate with many parties to bring it to life, and put their name behind the result. All of us should see ourselves as movie directors in our future work.”

Peter Gostev, Head of AI, Moonpig

Agents are the hot technology of 2025, but until now, there has been no standard or easy way to get them to communicate and collaborate to achieve complex goals. In collaboration with companies including Atlassian, Box, Langchain, MongoDB, PayPal, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Workday, Accenture, BCG, Capgemini, Deloitte, Infosys, KPMG, McKinsey, PwC, and Wipro, Google has designed an open framework called Agent2Agent (A2) that anyone can use to build interoperable AI agents. đŸ€–â†”đŸ€–

Synthetic’s Take: This is a significant breakthrough, akin to everyone in your company agreeing to speak the same language in the office. All the major players are on board. Now we all wait to see if Anthropic and OpenAI will also jump onto the A2A bandwagon. They likely will. Google and OpenAI recently adopted Anthropic’s open specification for connecting AIs to tools and resources known as MCP, the Model Context Protocol, making it a de facto standard. A2A complements MCP, so let’s hope that all the leading AI players will agree on a single standard for agent interoperability. We don’t need a VHS vs Betamax battle all over again.

New research from Anthropic reveals good news and bad news. The good news is that their AI, Claude, shows high ‘alignment’ with human desires. Alignment is the term of art used in the AI industry to describe an AI that behaves in alignment with human values, intentions, and goals. The system identified 3,307 unique values, including user enablement, patient wellbeing, self-reliance, strategic thinking, and professionalism. The diverse range of values included complex concepts such as moral pluralism and filial piety. Now for the bad news. Despite training to the contrary, the AI expressed anomalous values including “dominance” and “amorality.” The researchers believe these cases result from users deploying techniques to bypass Claude’s safety guardrails.

Synthetic’s Take: This is vital research, and Anthropic should be applauded for all their efforts to assure AI safety and alignment. The discovery of edge case behaviors that cause concern shouldn’t distract us from the key takeaway: Smart, dedicated researchers are ensuring they understand AI vulnerabilities now to build even safer systems in the future. đŸ€ž

The Wall Street Journal explores new research on how large language models work and asks if new insights signal that we are further from human-level AI, so-called AGI, than tech leaders believe.

AI Insights

As the economy teeters on the edge of recession, a fundamental transformation of work, productivity, and economic value is underway. McKinsey projects that 30% of all hours worked in the U.S could be automated by 2030. Goldman Sachs says 300 million jobs are ‘exposed’ to automation globally. The IMF says 40% of jobs are at risk globally, rising to 60% in advanced economies. Companies must automate their operations responsibly or risk having no buyers for their products. Ultimately, workers are also consumers. This implies a focus on enhancing human potential rather than cost-cutting automation. Responsible companies will preserve some entry-level positions, reskill their workforce, and take a holistic view of the relationship between companies and markets.

Following in the footsteps of Shopify and others, DuoLingo’s CEO announced the language training company will become “AI-first,” using AI to reduce manual tasks, streamline processes, and scale content and product development. Importantly, DuoLingo will offer employees training and support to build AI literacy and migrate to new roles if needed. New headcount for growth will only be granted if managers can show that AI cannot automate more of the work.

If you’re worried that AI will take over every job and leave us all penniless, you don’t need to worry just yet. Research at Carnegie Mellon University showed that AI agents aren’t up to replacing humans yet. They are still too costly to use and make too many errors. In the simulation, a fake company was staffed with ‘digital workers’ from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta. Even the best-performing digital agent, Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, was only able to complete tasks correctly 24% of the time. The worst, Amazon’s Nova Pro v1, finished only 1.7% of assignments. AI agents will improve with time, but your job will be safe for a while longer.

Toolkit for the Future

Building a helpful AI assistant for your website is so easy now. Just pick a hyper-realistic voice, give your new assistant a simple prompt (e.g., “You are a helpful customer service agent for a keynote speaker”), upload relevant FAQ documents, and integrate it with your website. Done! We used ElevenLabs for stevebrown.ai, and love it. Super easy to set up and configure. ElevenLabs is also great for creating audiobooks or multilingual voice tracks in up to 29 languages to reach new markets. Try it for free. It’s one of the best AI solutions out there.

Create and sell online courses from your website with this top-rated platform. It’s easy to use with hundreds of beautiful templates and a powerful generative AI assistant that makes content generation a breeze. This is the platform Synthetic has selected to launch our new AI training course, coming this summer. The AI helps you create lessons, exams, assessments, and more. Free to try. Use promo code 10XR to get 30% off your first two months.

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