"THE WORD PEOPLE" WILL BE HARDER TO REPLACE IN THE FUTURE, WHY?

As coverage of the AI tech tsunami and its potential impact on the world proliferates, it's now become a "Will they-or-won't they?" Bachelorette-style question of whether or not AI will steal people's jobs. So many different people have such differing opinions, from the catastrophically doomy to the more upbeat. The whole debate got another spin yesterday when billionaire, PayPal cofounder and tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel spoke up on a popular podcast. AI, Thiel believes, will prove to be really bad for all the "math people" in businesses the world over. Thiel spoke on the popular education chat podcast Conversations with Tyler, which attracts diverse A-list guests like, writer Neal Stephenson, and NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. The conversation with Thiel ranged from topics like Roman Catholicism to the philosophy of politics, but when asked about the impact of AI on creative jobs like writers, Thiel took a somewhat surprising position. Typically, AI critics worry that the popular text-based chatbots everyone seems to be experimenting with right now are squarely aimed at replacing people in wordy, creative professions. "My intuition would be it's going to be quite the opposite, where it seems much worse for the math people than the word people," Thiel explained. People have told him that "they think within three to five years, the AI models will be able to solve all the US Math Olympiad problems," which will really "shift things quite a bit." He then dug into the history of math study and usefulness to the world, noting "if we prioritized math ability, it had this meritocratic but also egalitarian effect on society." But fast-forward to the 21st century, and narrow your focus in on Silicon Valley, then it's become "way too biased toward the math people," according to Thiel. And Thiel thinks math is doomed: "Why even do math? Why not just chess? That got undermined by the computers in 1997," he argued, before concluding "Isn't that what's going to happen to math? And isn't that a long overdue rebalancing of our society?" Arguably Thiel's assertion on Silicon Valley and math is true, though somewhat simplified: a lot of the technology innovations coming out of Silicon Valley are driven by science, which relies on math at its core. One very math-centric profession is now undergoing an AI-driven revolution. When touting the advances in his next-generation Grok AI system recently, Elon Musk made an effort to point out how much better it was at writing code, and calculating math, than the earlier version. Last month CEO of leading AI chip-making company Nvidia Jensen Huang predicted the "death of coding," with AI so capable of developing code that kids shouldn't learn how to code in school. With innovations like Microsoft's integration of its Copilot AI deeply into the coding social network Github, where AI is already helping coders craft code, it's easy to see Huang's point. Conversely, as any small business startup owner knows, innovation--even in a tech company--often requires a very non-mathematical, flying-by-the-seat-of-the-pants human touch. Boiling all of Thiel's words down to a summary, we get this: AI is very capable of replacing some highly logical, mathematical jobs--like some of the coding, or basic analysis and simulation tools that help technology companies achieve breakthroughs. If AI really is coming for math nerds, as Thiel asserts, then maybe accountants, business analysts and other professions may also be under threat. But he thinks that for really creative roles, including word-centric creative professions, and, arguably, inventing new ideas, human kind is probably safe for a while. Thiel dodged another question about AI's impact on more manual work by suggesting that a better way to worry about the impact of AI is to ask different questions about it--a trick that cofounder of Google's AI research division DeepMind Mustafa Suleyman also recently suggested. Questions like "how much will it increase GDP versus how much will it increase inequality?" Unsettlingly, Thiel added, "Probably it does some of both."