Bo Bennett on Future of Work

HOST: Welcome to Future of Work, where we look at how jobs, teams, and offices are actually changing. I'm Renee Marlow, and today we're looking at whether AI will be good or bad for the economy with Bo Bennett, a serial entrepreneur and critical-thinking educator who's running AI-assisted businesses right now. Welcome, Bo. Let's start here: In your operations, have you personally reduced headcount or avoided hiring because of AI recently? And if so, in what roles? GUEST: Yes, I have in fact. My son was doing a lot of work for me. And he no longer is. I had another employee that she was a contractor that she would work about like 20 or 30 hours a month. And that position is no longer needed. Fortunately, both my son and the other contractor did not want to work anymore in this position. They were both moving on from this. So I didn't have to fire anybody. But AI was did enable me to to compensate for their losses and do the work that they were doing. HOST: So, you didn't have to fire anyone, but that's real displacement of essentially one and a half roles that are no longer needed. What tasks, specifically, were they doing that AI was able to absorb? GUEST: Well, I am in the book industry, so, uh, we were doing some things with books, for example, like book submissions, um, sending books from from our database to the many different retailers. And, uh, that was done manually. It would take about 15 minutes per book, but, uh, with the with the advent of AI and using that, I had AI build me an entire automation system that does it all with one click. So now I just click once and it's done. One of the manual parts was evaluation of problems in being able to to detect anything that might be wrong with the submission, and that's where AI comes in as well. So it could actually do that before I submit the book. So it's not just something that's autonomous that I could have done back in the '90s with some scripting. This is something that I could only do with AI. And then there's the whole support aspect of it in dealing directly with customers and customer issues, and that's where AI AI really shines, at least for us. HOST: That's interesting because you're on both sides of that now. You run eBookIt, which deals with these publishers, but you also have tools like lazyposts.ai and bookbud.ai, which generate content. Are you seeing a huge growth in that AI-generated book content, and is that good for your bottom line or is that basically just drowning the human creators? GUEST: It was huge, probably like a year and a half ago, and it's been slowly declining. I think it was kind of like a novelty. Ooh, look, I could I could use AI to write a book. But then people are realizing, well, it's not it's not really my book. It's AI writing a book. So they don't have that connection to it anymore. I think it's changing a little bit now. Now we have people who are or like serial publishers, who who that are really working as a publisher, and instead of getting a bunch of writers giving them their books, they're using AI. So they're they're not really an author anymore. They're more of a publisher, and there is money in that that side of the business. So, so I'm seeing a shift to that. Um, in terms of your question, is it is it good for the bottom line? I would say that it it's basically a wash. Uh, whether AI writes the book or humans do, it it doesn't matter. It's just a matter of who reads it. And uh, if if books are selling as well as they used to, and they everything seems to be leveling out. It's not not too much of a variance, um, compared to how it was before AI, in terms of book sales. HOST: So, it sounds like the real cost, at least in the publishing industry, is falling on content creators, authors and designers, because you can generate their work mechanically and not have to pay them. There's a lot of fear out there that that's going to happen across the board in all sorts of creative industries. Now, you literally wrote the book on logical fallacies. When you hear arguments like "AI will take all the jobs" or "AI will create more jobs than it destroys," which do you think commits the bigger reasoning error? GUEST: Well, they're both the same because the reasoning error there has to do with with absolutes. Um well, I I guess technically it's the uh AI will take all the jobs. You're using the word all there. Um so that that's probably the bigger fallacy. The the fallacy with AI will create more jobs than it destroys. That's coming off as a statement of fact when it's mere speculation. So, they're both fallacious but but in their own ways. Um personally, I think the the the bigger fallacy or the bigger uh false argument would be AI will take all the jobs. It's not going to take all the jobs. Um AI will certainly and is creating more jobs. Do we know it's creating more jobs than it destroys? And destroys is definitely a um a weighted word as well. It's it's a not um it it's there to make it sound like it's evil. It's destroying something. Uh it's I guess you could argue that that sure, I mean, technically, it's true. Um but it's it's just displacing people who are doing things that computers could now do. And uh I mean, that's been happening since the advent of computers. As computers get more powerful, uh people who used to do things that software could do, uh they find themselves moving from one position to another and adapting. And that's what you need to do. You just don't can't say they're in complain about it or be bitter about it. You got to uh you got to realize that, okay, what I did was something that now computers could do a lot better than I can, so I have to do something else. Uh and that would be my advice to anybody who feels like their jobs are being destroyed by AI. HOST: That adaptation is a difficult prospect for a lot of workers, even if they understand the logic, but economic historians often say that those transitions create net positive outcomes over the long horizon. But that long horizon can be cold comfort to someone who loses their job at 45. With your social psychology background, what do you think the human cost of this specific transition looks like, and is there any data that shows retraining at scale works? GUEST: Uh in terms of the the data, I wouldn't really have the answer to that one. Um and I'm sure there you could find if you do the research, you'll probably find research showing both that that it doesn't work too well or for some people it does. And there's a lot of caveats as to why it would or why it wouldn't. Uh but the bigger question is the that that you hit on there is is the long horizon being cold comfort to somebody who loses their job at like 45. And yeah, that's that's the case. It's it may be a good thing in the long run just like yeah, cars replace horse and buggies. The horse and buggy industry was gone, but a whole new industry came up with a whole bunch of other human workers. The thing that's different with AI. And I would combine AI with robotics here is that for the first time in history, I think we're going to see a different change. And that change is a lot of jobs are really going to be going away because AI and robotics, especially humanoid robots will be able to do it better and cheaper. And that is going to be a problem. Because it's not like we're just opening up a new industry where we're going to have to have a lot of human workers, but we're going to have we're not going to need human workers anymore. But some philosophers and I economists argue that this may be a really good thing because it'll free up humans from this monotony of nine to five work to be able to do things that really matter in life and and give them an opportunity for the first time ever. And it may lead to something like universal basic income, uh where we have a whole new level of wealth because we're we're not being like slaves here and being able to have have to to commit ourselves to working 12 hour hard labor days anymore. So, this could be a good thing for everybody, but it's it's difficult to say at this point. HOST: Picking up where we left off — uh, that's a pretty optimistic picture you're painting with the Universal Basic Income, but where's the evidence that productivity gains from AI will actually lead to shared wealth rather than concentrating at the top? Data seems to show corporate profits climbing, but wage growth not keeping up. GUEST: Yeah, and that's um that's a good question. You know, again, I think it's too early to have some really reliable data when it comes to what we're seeing and what we will see in the future. I think it's just a lot of speculation right now. And uh and we just uh everybody needs to kind of look out for themselves and and their families and and do what they can to stay ahead of the curve. HOST: Well, looking out for yourself can mean different things depending on your resources. You've spent your career as an independent operator, so when you look at AI's economic effects, does it look different at the small-business level than the Fortune 500 level? Are small operators actually capturing the upside, or is it concentrated at the top?