Fisher Investments Reviews AI's Potential Societal Impact

Transcript

Ken Fisher:

I'm almost hesitant to even talk about this topic. There has been so, so, so much talk about AI this year that I really don't know that my opinions on it really matter, but I'm asked about it all the time. I'll tell you a story. It's a tragic story.

There's a woman I know, a little bit lonely— widower—approached through AI with a phony face and phony image of a person romancing her, who embezzled quite a lot of money from her. That tragic tale. It's true. I've known this woman from the time she was a girl. And I've known her since, from the time I was a boy, and it's a sad thing.

One of the biggest impacts of AI will be that continuation of the process that has moved steadily through our world, through most of my life, basically through my adult life, where crime has gotten sneakier and trickier and in many ways much more evil than it once upon a time was.

When it was more blunt and direct and not so much— we still have plenty of that blunt and direct in the world, too. But now we've got this kind of sneaky feature that AI really enhances in the bad side of things. It also on the bad side of things, enhances people's overconfidence as they would use it at what they're doing is actually right when it may not be right.

On the positive side, let me just say first, stop and think about what AI actually is. It's pre-programed algorithms to solve pre-thought and programed problems, just a lot of them. So, in that it doesn't think like supposed real intelligence thinks. It isn't going to create novel, never yet done creations. It's going to spew, correctly, what's been programed into it to spew. And in that, it will become a tremendous labor saver. It will become a tremendous ability to replicate things in volume that couldn't be replicated easily before.

It will allow things to be synthesized perfectly. In that regard, it will destroy many jobs. While, like has been true with technology, almost always creating other new ones. I mean, this really started as we started moving away from a pure agricultural world. I want to go back and take a second on that agricultural world, for your benefit.

Once upon a time, when my grandfather was a young man, the agricultural employment sector was over half of the total US labor force. Today, we produce a lot more agricultural output than we ever did in those days, with it being a couple of percent of the US labor force. What did that? The implementation of all kind of forms of technology into agriculture—better forms of tractoring and equipment, things that never existed when my grandfather was 25 years old in the year 1900. The fact is that that technology wiped out some kind of jobs, while creating many others that were parallel into all of the kind of things that had to be made for those technologies that improved agriculture.

One of the biggest, when I was a kid in the 1960s, when I say kid, I'm, you know, going to high school then, kids chose to go to college or they chose to go into the trades. And those were both perfectly viable forms. Some guy would want to be a going to some great college. Some other gal would want to go and be a person that was an, took reservations for a travel agency, which is now largely replaced by technology.

Or some guy wanted to be a Maytag repairman, which is largely replaced by technology, or some guy wanted to be a builder, which is still, you know, a framer, let's say, in house construction, which is still largely as it was then. But as technology would replace the Maytag repairman or the travel agent in ways that you know fairly well. Those people had to learn to retrain into other positions, and so they get impinged by the technology wiping out their job. But the world creates a new, different and better jobs that require a whole lot less onerous, brutish reality than the agricultural worker in 1900 had to undergo.

AI will just extend that same process again. People will have to train more for the future jobs. The future jobs will require more of them in their brain. differently than in the past, but it will also wipe out many jobs that have been replicated before. The replicative part that just repeats over and over is largely boring and mundane. The data collection.

So, displaying it in a format that's palatable to the consumer. These are all things that the AI will be able to do and enhance our lives. We need to embrace that while also being sure to be ever more on guard for the evil side, which will come with it assuredly, as people try to engage in crime.

I, as you may know, live in Dallas, Texas, and in the great state of Texas. And I was reading about the first train robbery in Texas by Sam Bass and his gang in 1877. This is two years after my grandfather was born. And, interestingly, Sam Bass only lived another year after that and died at the age of 27.

That's a pretty tough way to go, and a pretty good incentive that crime doesn't pay. But in the process of that train robbery, which was just a little ways north of here in Collin County, Texas, the next county to the north, the reality of that is that technology would eliminate train robbers. The radio function and communications wiped out both stagecoach robberies and train robberies and changed employment.

When you think of that world, that process of the evil guy and the technology that deals with the evil guy, we'll still have to deploy that teeter totter on the bad side of things moving forward. And yet in the beginning, it always favors the evil guy. And so both of these realities, the good and the bad, will be what AI will confront us with. We will learn to live with it. Life will be good and better, just as life is better today than it was when my grandfather was a young man in 1900.

And with that, I want to thank you for listening to me and hearing my views, even though I don't particularly think any of them are novel or different than you've read or heard other places, because so very much has been said about AI this year, that I kind of think it's almost ridiculous that I'm doing this video on the topic, but some people seem to want to know. Thank you very much for listening to me. I hope you found it useful.

Voice of Ken Fisher:

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