Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux - Does AI Increase Productivity?
Aired: 2025-06-02
Duration: 04:07


=== Technology And Productivity Gains (03:10) ===

[00:00:00]  Now, here's my rant.
[00:00:02]  I don't care.
[00:00:04]  I don't care.
[00:00:06]  I look within, right?
[00:00:08]  I look within.
[00:00:09]  And I try to be honest with you.
[00:00:11]  I aim to be honest with you guys.
[00:00:12]  I don't care.
[00:00:16]  So some of the studies are not great with regards to AI and productivity.
[00:00:21]  There was one study about managers that...
[00:00:33]  Computers had a sort of similar thing.
[00:00:35]  Everyone said, oh my god, computers are going to make us so much more efficient.
[00:00:38]  It's not really the case.
[00:00:40]  Human beings adapt to technology and have an amazing genius at finding ways to destroy productivity gains.
[00:00:49]  From technology.
[00:00:51]  It's really quite remarkable how we're able to do that.
[00:00:54]  So, oh, email is going to be so much more efficient.
[00:00:56]  No, because sometimes phone calls are much better, right?
[00:01:01]  I mean, a lot of people who have social anxiety just end up emailing all the time.
[00:01:05]  They're not very good at communicating.
[00:01:06]  You can't read between the lines, whereas you can read people's emotions with regards to especially face-to-face calls.
[00:01:13]  You can read people's emotions on a phone call much better than you can an email.
[00:01:17]  And of course, The email flood.
[00:01:20]  Oh, it's so much easier.
[00:01:21]  Now we have Zoom.
[00:01:22]  Or now we have other things.
[00:01:24]  We can just do these meetings in so much more of an efficient manner.
[00:01:27]  My God, it's beautiful.
[00:01:28]  It's like, no.
[00:01:29]  Now you just have a bunch of made-up HR jobs where people have endless meetings with no particular purpose or point.
[00:01:37]  So we have an amazing ability to completely screw up productivity gains.
[00:01:41]  Now, in a free society, that wouldn't really be the case, of course.
[00:01:44]  But it certainly is the case in the society that we have now.
[00:01:48]  I have to watch this tendency in myself to not keep tinkering and fussing with things to the point where I wreck the productivity gains of having all of this great technology.
[00:02:00]  So, for instance, I've done some article reviews recently, and I just hold my tablet, and I'm not, oh, let's do the separate, slightly better audio with the, you know, all of this.
[00:02:10]  It's like, no, just boot it up and talk into the microphone.
[00:02:13]  It's fine.
[00:02:16]  It's fine.
[00:02:17]  And to not fuss with massive productivity gains.
[00:02:20]  As you can see, you know, the studio here is not very sophisticated.
[00:02:29]  It is me inside an aging ping-pong ball of grey testicle doominess.
[00:02:34]  And I really want you guys to focus on the ideas and the arguments and not be distracted by some sort of background nonsense.
[00:02:42]  So there is that.
[00:02:44]  Now, on the other hand, I think that the technology is a lot further ahead than people think.
[00:02:51]  I've worked in tech R&D.
[00:02:53]  And the stuff that's in the pipeline is way better than the stuff that's out here in the world.
[00:02:59]  And so I think with regards to physical robots, everyone's like, yeah, but they can't clean toilets.
[00:03:04]  Yeah, they can.
[00:03:05]  Yeah, but they can't, you know, assemble this out of the other.
[00:03:08]  It's like, yes, they can.

=== Technology Surpasses Expectations (00:56) ===

[00:03:10]  They really can do absolutely wild and amazing stuff.
[00:03:13]  Now, they can't do philosophy yet.
[00:03:16]  I'll give you sort of an example of an AI productivity that I used.
[00:03:21]  I'm working on this new novel, which is, oh my god, it's so good.
[00:03:25]  Oh my god, it's so good.
[00:03:29]  You know, sometimes I amaze even myself.
[00:03:32]  It's an old line from Star Wars.
[00:03:34]  But no, it's really, I've had a real breakthrough in writing and all of that.
[00:03:37]  So I needed to...
[00:03:44]  Now, in the past, I'd have buried myself in books and done research for a week or two.
[00:03:49]  But with AI, you can just say, give me this scenario, give me a Canadian context, and whatever, right?
[00:03:57]  And it can map it all out for you and get all the research done together for you.
[00:04:00]  It's really amazing as far as that goes.
[00:04:02]  So for me, it is really helpful and good for these kinds of things because...