Superagency: The Bull Case for AI | Reid Hoffman

can you guarantee me that Killer Robots will never be built the only existential risk for human beings is not Killer Robots there's pandemics there's asteroids there's nuclear weapons there's climate change and the list kind of goes on and so you have to look at existential risk as a portfolio namely it's not just one thing it's a set of things and so when you look at any particular intervention you say well how does this affect the portfolio my very vigorous and strong contention is that AI even unmodified at

all is net I think very positive on the existential risk portfolio welcome to bank list where today we explore the frontier of AI this is Ryan Sean Adams I'm here with David Hoffman and we're here to help you become more bankless the question for today will AI give us super agency or will it be used to enslave us we have Reed Hoffman on the podcast today he gives his bull case for AI why it's good why we should accelerate AI into the the future and how it will turn each of us

into Super agents and to him that equals more freedom for everyone I think the Bist journey is all about becoming a more sovereign individual that's what David and I have talked about since Inception and it's increasingly hard to imagine being a sovereign individual without crypto which we've talked a lot about but also without AI like crypto gives you the ability to own things but AI seems to be the ability to control your own destiny and that's why we're doing an AI episode today with Reed

Hoffman to help stay ahead of the AI curve few things we discuss super agency doomers bloomers and Zoomers what could go right how to use AI American super intelligence and finally we end with the question to Reed what if this whole AI thing is overhyped stay tuned for that answer super agency is the title of Reed Hoffman's book uh which is coming out this week uh if you are listening to it at the time of release and so this is all on the backs of that Ryan of the two

co-hosts of bankless read the book uh I did not and so I'm more along for the ride I'm in listening mode asking a few questions here or there but it's really Ryan in the driver's seat for this episode so I hope you guys uh enjoy the episode with Reed Hoffman but first before we get there a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible bankless nation very excited to introduce you to Reed Hoffman he is a Founder investor he co-founded LinkedIn which I'm sure many of you have uh used in the past he's extremely active in Silicon Valley um particularly over the last couple of decades and more recently he's been very

close to what we would call the epicenter of this whole AI thing uh so he was serving on the board of open AI starting in 2018 notably I should mention because whenever someone talks about the board of open AI a lot of things he'll come up but he actually left to go focus on AI investing before Sam Alman in the outing drama and you guys remember all that um he's also a gifted writer a communicator I've read several of his books I think one of the canonical books for Tech Founders is this book called Blitz scaling which is just phenomenal on how to grow an

internet scale business uh and now all of this preamble to say now he's written a book on AI called super agency and I'd pretty much describe this as maybe Reed Hoffman's thesis for artificial intelligence and how it will impact us uh in the decades to come Reed Hoffman welcome to bankas it's great to be here and I look uh I look forward to not only this conversation but future ones as well yeah I mean I I think we're going to really focus on AI because that's the subject matter of your your book but maybe in a a future episode we get into crypto because I know you have a lot of

uh thoughts on that yeah no I actually think I bought my first Bitcoin in 2014 um a little late but you know um it's earlier than most yeah yeah it's a that's that's a good um good seasoning of a time to buy Bitcoin for sure um so let's talk about the this book let's talk about your thesis for artificial intelligence and when I heard that you were writing a book called uh super agency my first question without reading anything further was like okay super

agency who is Reed talking about like who are the super agents is this uh the humans do they become the super agents or is he talking about the the AIS themselves do the robots become the super agents so may maybe you could kind of start there could you define what you even mean by by super agency and like who gets it yeah so let's actually start even a little bit earlier with agency and then get to your excellent question which is because what is agency agency is the ability to kind of make plans do things in the world you know kind of make parts of the world you know

according to your intentions and desires and to and to kind of you know kind of um uh Express Yourself um in the kind of The Ordering of the world around you and obviously nobody has perfect agency um you know that's you know kind of theoretical de deistic like creatures like God has that maybe perhaps and it depends even on what your particular theology is so that's the reason I was being a little bit more vague right so not denominational today in this podcast yes exactly and so um super agency um is

the the precise term is kind of when uh millions of human beings get access to the kind of a an elevating technology a transformative technology um what kind of the superpowers not only they get as individuals but Society gets transformed and so for example like canonical um example as cars so you go well it gives me superpowers because I can go farther I can drive I can get to farther farther distances but as other people in this in society also get cars

you know like suddenly you'd had to go down to the doctor's office to get an appointment now the doctor can come to you and obviously later instantiations of this is you can get you know instacart deliveries and you know all the rest and so super agency is kind of how we all get superpowers and so to your opening question about our humans the super agents or our AI the super agents to some degree it's both um but it's but the important emphasis is that rather than us as human beings and

Humanity losing our agency we are gaining agency and by the way in a very similar pattern to the way that I gain agency when you guys also get cars right it's it's it's not just me that gains agency with my own car I gain agency when you guys get cars and so that's the elevation of agency and hence super agency I was almost thinking about your like book title if you used a different synonym besides super agency if you just titled the book superpowers right and like and like who gets them that's

almost the same discussion like or maybe maybe um when we get into this term agency is the term superpower and super agency are they kind of synonyms is the short form version of this to just like we get all of this additional Choice surface area we have new abilities to do things that previous generations could not have imagined that feels like a superpower to me is it kind of one and the same in your mind well superpower it it's it's it's deeply related the ven diagrams have a high overlap because the

the kind of the elevation of capabilities are superpowers and every you know kind of new major technology gives us new kinds of superpowers now some of it is with a superpower and as lots of people get superpowers you know IND individuals institutions societies governments Etc your agency changes some so it isn't like for example like like like the agency of people who are like kind of driving horse and buggy carriages that

changed with cars because it was like well no longer are the streets set up for you no longer can you be doing this thing that you were you know you had been doing and were're planning on doing you know no longer for example was the you know the the the hores transport industry you know kind of as um kind of Central and so these kind and by the way even like earlier Technologies Like Trains those changed uh in the kind of the ways that people would Express their agency and and be able to to work on it so superpowers are a way that you get

the um you way you extend your agency but when it happens in a super agency context it also transforms it and changes it so that's the reason why it's not 100% the same but but but but close related read something that we share in common is we actually both have podcasts you have a podcast called possible uh and I think we Ryan I assembled on your podcast and we noticed that you did an episode an interview with yourself but yourself was uh we would might call in the in the crypto World an AI agent now

maybe maybe this illustrates what you mean by super agency and maybe you can uh take that metaphor all the way home but how do we know that we are actually talking to the real Reed Hoffman and not your AI co-host by that now is with us actually and and the real human Reed hoffen is somewhere else doing work in a different direction how do we know how do we know you're the real Reed Hoffman well um that will get to be a more and more complicated question um at the moment uh the video avatars are not

actually in fact real time so the the the the read AI discussion has to be a little bit scripted even though it looks like it's on a podcast that it's a completely real-time thing there's actually in fact you know kind of running it through the chat gbt instance that's trained on 20 years of my writing and then more specifically getting the audio and video produced with the right kind of quality doesn't really you know enable that for kind of a a a a full real-time stack today um but you know

part of the reason of course you know I did it put it on possible because what could possibly go right um was to start getting people familiar with the future Universe just just as you guys are doing you know in the kind of you know all of the technology broadly but also around of course crypto and what is sovereignty and identity and all the rest of that mean um it's it's it's kind of like hey here's a lens into the future and we don't know exactly where the future's going but we're trying to get everyone you know kind of participating uh ready uh navigating

well Etc and that was part of the reason why doing REI but there is you know obviously at some point one could get to that is an interesting question um and you know my own you know Hazard of an answer here is something a little bit more like you know well uh crypto signatures and identity um as sure what's happening but of course you know given that I'll probably have both the crypto signatures for me and for re AI you know that might still even be a Live question yeah it's it's really

interesting though there's something very empowering about the experiment that you're running with with read AI because it it it uh leads to a promising future of like if individuals are sovereign over their own kind of AI agent twin maybe that AI agent twin could go do work well they're like goofing off they're going like doing something that they enjoy maybe they're watching a movie they're doing art they're like working out something like that and then there's Reed AI doing podcasts like while all of this goes on and you know the real Reed Hoffman sort of has ownership over that and somehow like that feels very democratizing I I

want to get back to the through line of this conversation though when we when we talk about um super agency though so your your thesis is we understand what what a uh super agents or super agency is and how that's similar versus different to uh superpowers and you said very emphatically that it's not the robots that get it the AIS do get it but also the humans get it right your your view here is that it's going to be humans Amplified by AI That's the real unlock here but like I have a question within that subset of humans who get it which humans are we talking about Reed

are we talking about the silic Valley Elite in your thesis are we talking about you know the the 1% those that control most the capital in society are we talking about governments or are we talking about individuals because the distribution of this uh seems incredibly relevant to how we actually view whether this is a good thing or not so I think the pattern the path we're already on you know with you know hundreds of millions of people using chat gbt and you exposure to you know

agents in other contexts whether it's you know anthropic Gemini co-pilot Etc so I think we're already seeing hundreds of millions of what you're referring to as individuals but you know kind of call it access from you know kind of the a bulk of at least middle class uh Western folks although like one of the things that I was very cool that I'd heard about from a friend who was traveling in Morocco recently is that the taxi driver was using chat gbt as

the translator for you know like where do you want to go for the tourists and so you know it's it's very broad indeed now that being said I don't want to paper over the fact that we live in a human society that has you know kind of differences of wealth differences of power differences of position not just between nations but within Nations and you know it that's not not going to go away and so it wouldn't surprise me you know if you said well

but actually the kind of AI that the that the that the uh uh the wealthy have access to has some improvements and betterness than you know maybe real-time you know responsiveness maybe you know number of gpus available etc etc than you know kind of a a lower income person now that being said part of the reason I'm really optimistic is a little bit like you know kind of smartphones which is you know three of the world today has mobile phones but the smartphone that

you know that you know kind of Tim Cook has or Jeff Bezos has or SAR bishai has is the same smartphone that you know the Uber driver has and and so I think that the you know the kind of the the the the natural uh Drive in technology which includes AI is is building it for the very Mass Market you know billions um and so I I I think that I can confidently assert that superpowers

will be available very very broadly even if you know there's also some differences in in superpowers based on you know country and wealth and you know kind of access but but I think democratizing will be um will be the the name of the game so in your world AI is really a democratizing technology it's pretty like you know of course you know uh if you're in the early adopter curve maybe you get things a little bit sooner but generally it's going to take the

form of the way cell phones did where in the 1980s was a large you know big brick you cost thousands of dollars until then the technology democratized or the way the internet has kind of democratized things it's not because there is this fear out there Reed that um AI is kind of a uh going to be controlled by superpowers let's say governments uh or a small cabal maybe in in Silicon Valley that they're going to have the technology and kind of the rest of us plebs like maybe won't but you're saying

it'll be more similar to I guess the propagation of the internet or the cell phone in that it will be fairly widely distributed and actually be like a a technology that's available to the general public yes in short and part of that also because you know the same you know kind of call it Silicon Valley ecosystem uh that built smartphones that built the internet you know and obviously there not just Silicon Valley but there's a lot of Silicon Valley contribution um is also very similarly

building you know kind of AI uh both in the hyperscalers and the large models but also you know at this point there's so many thousands of startups um that you know they kind of you know uh you could start mapping uh various uh cryptocurrencies per per startup you know there's similar numbers of orders of magnitude let's talk about uh some of the AI religions that exist because I think this was a fairly fantastic framing in in your book and and one of

my chief takeaways so you talk about uh and I'm using the term religion you could say ideology you could say philosophy but just the point is that each of these categories I think all of them have a an expected outcome or an Article of Faith because of course the future is unknown um but anyway so the the four categories uh on your book in your book of you know people with thoughts about Ai and it's useful I think to categorize them to sort of understand the worldview a bit better one is the Doomer okay the second is the

gloomer the third is the Bloomer and the fourth is the Zoomer okay now these are four different categories uh subsets of of um groups with different perspectives on AI could you just Define those four categories for us Absolutely I'll go through them in that order which is um uh doomers basically are like AI is the destruction of humanity and you know it's you know very much like the Terminator robot or other kinds of you

know kind of popular Hollywood thieves argued in a way that's kind of like well it'll be more intelligent than us it'll kind of uh want to run the Earth you know it'll look at human beings is either hostile or you know kind of uh you know ants or a kind of equivalent and so AI should just be spped gloomer are um essentially look I don't think the AI future is going to be particularly good I think it'll you know um take away a whole bunch of jobs and

kind of dis uh kind of disorder Society um it may lead to much more misinformation and kind of uh unbalanced democracies um it'll have a whole bunch of kind of more information you know kind of surveillance and so they privacy will be worse and so like I don't think it's stoppable because you know multiple countries and multiple you know companies around the world are building it and you know that's the way that Humanity rolls and you know companies are going to become a lot more productive for this but I think it'll be

a a a an unfortunate outcome it's gloomer gloomer by the way because they only see the gloomy side if that if that helps people exactly um and um actually I'll do Zoomers before Bloomers because I want to spend a little bit more time on bloomers since I self-identify there um Zoomers are um are essentially like no no no this technology is great it's like the Absol it's the the opposite of doomers and it's like uh everything we're going to build with it is going to be really amazing um you know it it you

know the the the the the like the sky isn't even the limit in terms of what kinds of things could be made or you know maybe AI is going to invent Fusion rather than us inventing fusion and and everything that comes out of this is just just spectacular and the way Zoomer Zoom refers to just hitting the gas pedal just go forward go fast exactly yeah and then Bloomers which I describe myself as is kind of a Zoomer but as supposed to just like maximally hitting the gas pedal in all circumstances you

go well drive intelligently uh like avoid the potholes slow down at the curve you know be looking at kind of like oh look this is a little bit of a dangerous area let's let's go through this with a little bit more care still accelerationist that that the kinds of things that we can build in the future whether they're medical outcomes or or climate change outcomes or you know kind of human enablement with with with work and with uh education all of that stuff is super important to get to but you

know let's kind of make sure that we're not enabling Rogue States or terrorists or unbalancing you know kind of you know crime waves or other kinds of things as ways of doing this and let's make sure we don't for example um inadvertently create Terminators um you know because it's a little bit of question of how we drive it's not it's not inevitable and so um so that's the Bloomer category and that's that's the category I'm in and obviously if you said well you can't pick Bloomer I'd be closer to Zoomer uh

much closer to Zoomer than gloomer or dumer um but it's also part of the reason why the subtitle of super agency which parallels the podcast is what could possibly go right is because we always as human beings encounter new technologies with like oh my God the world's coming to an end I mean remember all those discussions around crypto maybe we're still having them right and and and also you know by the way the internet and by the way cars and by the way the printing press it always starts with oh my God this is the end of

society and then when we start navigating we go oh wait if we do that this way we we make Society a whole lot better and by the way we have in every technological instance in history so far made that happen and gotten superar agency through all of them one can argue whether or not the AI technology is uh it is new and unique whether it's new and unique in that characteristic or not and that's of course why to write the book and go out and talk to people and so forth to show actually in fact the

only way you can create a positive future is by imagining it and steering towards it and so that's that's what we should be doing let's make sure we understand the the these examples of these four categories you like maybe by way of example actually um so somebody on the Zoomer side of things and again this is not we're not referring to gen Z here we're talking about Zoomers um I I I was thinking in my head another term that bank list listeners might be familiar with is eak if you've heard that term a read Effective accelerationists of which we've had Beth

Jos on the podcast who's B he's basically like full Full Speed Ahead like let's harness energy let's harness Ai and like conquer the universe Full Speed Ahead Mark andreon you know put together a uh you techno Optimus Manifesto that has some eak characteristics Zoomer is basically the eak group is that right exactly although I think you might say that that Zoomers and Bloomers are kind of two variants of the eak group one of them you know where I would

characterize it is the CU I also by the way I think you know I started using the term techno optimism some number of years ago like e I'm a techno Optimist not techno utopian um which is you can build great things with technology doesn't mean everything you do with technology is great right so so do it you know do it with some care I'd say it's it's the Zoomers are hey anything that anyone's doing with this it'll end up good and the Bloomer is hey most of the stuff is gonna end up really good

let's try to like steer a little bit it's it's hard for me too to actually put people in boxes like somebody like Mark Andre I don't know if he's full like kind of everything techn technological technical is good or how much of this is sort of um you know a a personal choice to just amplify this extreme position he might need to plant a flag in order to to shift the Overton window move the Overton window right and like I think that's part of the the meme games that that uh people like Beth Jos and and maybe uh Andre are doing but

that's hard to speculate on okay so that's the Zoomer now the Doomer is pretty easy I think we've also had guests on Bank list Ellie your Kowski he he very much clearly thinks that like everything that we're doing right now in AI like basically we only have years uh maybe decades to kind of live before uh AI actually supplants us like he genuinely thinks that that's the that's the uh Doomer category so you don't have to go into more detail there but how about the the gloomer category a little bit more it seemed to me that this is sort of the mainstream media type of

take on things and it might even be the popular narrative around AI like if you ask the average American what do they think about AI I think in like the 2020s with the current Spirit of the age I think there'd be some cynicism about AI there'd be some pessimism about AI it would definitely be the the glass um you know half full type of Outlook and I think that's the the popular idea but who are some archetypes for this uh this gloomer category so I do think that it's

kind of generally speaking the the you know kind of the the the discourse because the discourse now just like earlier times in history with earlier Technologies tends to focus around like all the things that could possibly go wrong and so uh many journalists um definitely the vast majority of people in Hollywood um who are like oh my God this is the destruction of the content production industry and you know when

Sora and vo are going going you know all of our jobs are going um a lot of it's focused on job displacement um so worries and concerns about Job displacement um so you know I think it's it's more or less kind of like if you can't put the person clearly in another bucket they're probably in the gloomer bucket it's probably the the the and that's a little bit like mainstream media and it's the everyone else uh bucket how about uh from a political landscape perspective would you look at

the axis that way uh here because I think a lot of people listening would be like okay Democrats are a bit more on the gloomer side of things and Republicans are a bit more on the uh maybe not the Zoomer side of things but the Bloomer side of things do do you think that's an axis at play as well well I think it depends right because there's also a lot of modern Republican that's kind of anti- big Tech um you know thinks that big Tech is you know too big for its britches and and and should conform so I you know I think

that that there's kind of as were gloomer in both sides I think the Democratic side tends to be a little bit more we should be regulating um and the and the Republican side tends to be the No No we should be allowing you know industry to do what industry does so Reed I think for the rest of this podcast um I think we want you to make the case for Bloomer ISM here like why why uh why is AI going to go really well for for Humanity this this idea of humans really uh Amplified by artificial

intelligence and it kind of leads to to Really positive outcomes um one of the the early chapters in your book talk about some history I actually wasn't familiar with and maybe this is an analog that will be helpful for some it was helpful for me so uh this is the history of the Mainframe computer and you go back to the 1960s and apparently I did not know this maybe some Bank list listeners also don't know this during the 1960s when the Mainframe computer kind of entered the the cultural public scene as a as a new technology we had

computers that could uh do incredible things for the time there was a media hysteria that broke out okay and there there was uh concerns about this this new computer that had the ability to recall in a few seconds every pertinent action including all of your failures your embarrassments or incriminating acts from a lifetime of every citizen there were many comparison to a 1984 the book of course that's in Western uh Cannon by George Orwell just like this orwellian society that would be built out by these mainframe computers there

were even Congressional hearings guys so one lawmaker warned of the danger of uh the computerized man which is a citizen that would lose all of their individuality their their privacy basically their agency and they'd be reduced to Magnetic Tape that of course was the technology to program computers at the time is like literal uh magnetic tape so give us the history uh of the Mainframe computer in this this hysteria why do you think this is analogist uh to what's happening today

so uh well you've covered it uh pretty well um thank you for actually reading the book uh that doesn't happen that often these days um and so you know I think that the question is anytime that we encounter a new technology and in this case the Mainframe they were like looking at like okay what could possibly go wrong and they think about well actually in fact this could um you know track everything make all the decisions take away the agency of people by

putting it into kind of government centralized control um you know little bit of the discussion of what's happening with you know AI in some circles today and um and then make you know kind of uh you know us as as human beings um essentially powerless and agency um and that's you know of course you know part of the you know a lot of the and we we talk about this and super agency a bunch is you know a lot of it was the 1984 George Orwell worries where

that kind of centralizing Technology became a control over individuals and individuals through this kind of control of information control of power become you know almost irrelevant cogs in a machine and you know this is you know if you look at it same like well what you know what's AI doing with my data oh am I going to be able to make decisions because AI is going to be so um you know persuasive and manipulative and advertising systems and information systems you know um am I going to be

able to you know control my life and work um or is AI going to be doing all the work all of those are very parallel not just obviously to the Mainframe discussions which are you know relevant and close and you know the kind of uh we at least gotten through uh I think Punch Cards the Magnetic Tape before we started having all the worries um so we're not we're Magnetic Tape not Punch Cards um that that's to be a joke uh and so um anyway that that was that was essentially what the dialogue was going

and people forget it now because it seems absurd looking back on it I mean it's kind of like well yeah I don't know why those people thought that I mean look at all the computers we have now and look at you know the the the smartphone that that everyone has in their pocket is is you know thousands of times more powerful than those main frames right um and you know kind of everyone has one and and and and and it's kind of you know working you know throughout the entire place and by the way I think everyone's going to have an agent too and you know with AI and so I