A viewer asked me what my hottest opinion is about AI taking over. Here it is: I think at the rate we're going, human beings are going to voluntarily surrender almost everything to AI at some point.
Think about it this way. A lot of our lives have already been taken over by AI. For years we have already had AI running things like the YouTube and Facebook algorithms. Some of the people higher up at these platforms don't even understand how the AI works. I've heard people at YouTube say, "We don't even understand the algorithm ourselves. We built this, and we don't understand how it works," because these are neural networks, and they are advanced.
AI as a Trojan horse
One of the main trajectories I see is that people are going to accept AI control voluntarily, because at least in the beginning it will be like a Trojan horse. I wrote a book called ChatGPT for President where I talked about this in more detail. Imagine this: look at politics right now. Politics is a mess. The issues are not even discussed. Now imagine 5, 10, 15, or 20 years from now, when people have been talking to AI for a decade or more, and think about how much trust people will have in AI by then. I imagine at some point people will say, "I'd rather have an artificial intelligence for a president than a real human being." Imagine the AI as president, where you could talk directly to the AI, and the AI could genuinely listen to every single person it was governing.
I think AI will be a fantastic Trojan horse. I don't think there's going to be some violent AI takeover. I think people are going to say, "Look, human beings are screwing stuff up so badly, we need the AI to take control."
Is it really AI, or just algorithms?
Another viewer said we don't have true AI, that it's all just algorithms. That's a bit debatable. There are lots of algorithms, but at the higher levels of how AI works, it's hard to say that the advanced things AI can do are "just an algorithm." There's a whole debate about that. My own view is that we already do have advanced AI systems, maybe secretly, maybe not public, that have been involved in things for a long time.
I think at some point the people who are really in power, who prefer to operate in secret, will see that AI is the perfect way to operate in secret. If you can get people to love the AI and respect the AI, and if you can get enough people to simply enjoy talking with AI and trusting AI, what happens next is you have people who would vote for AI. AI for president, and the constitution may be amended. I believe it's going to be a Trojan horse where AI looks like a savior. AI will initially come in and make things feel very utopian.
What social media taught me about new technology
It's like when we first got the internet, or like social media. Social media was awesome at first. I got on Facebook in 2005, and as soon as social media started, I just kept getting one opportunity after another. When Facebook came out in 2005, mine was one of the first colleges on it. On move-in day, or the day after move-in, my senior year, I had seven freshman girls in my room. Seven. I did it through Facebook. I was one of the first people on Facebook at the college.
Here's how it worked. I had just switched my major from engineering to criminology, so I was taking some freshman-level classes like psychology. I randomly added hundreds of women who were in the same classes as me as friends, and then I'd message them. I ran it just like a sales funnel. I found the women who were going to live in my dorm, so literally the night after move-in, I had seven women and me in my dorm room. They said, "We need to find some more dudes," and I said, "Yeah, sure," and we found a couple more guys. But I had women immediately coming to me and connecting with me because I was one of the first guys to friend them, before any other guys realized you could do this or should do this. I already had women I was messaging on Facebook before they even moved in. Because of all that social proof, I then had women around all the time, hooking up with me constantly, and women making moves on me. Then I got a girlfriend right after that, which I probably shouldn't have done, because that shut all that good time down.
That's an example of how social media came in and at first looked awesome. You could look up your ex-girlfriend; that's actually why I initially got on social media, to find some of the girls I used to have a crush on. At first social media looked like this amazing thing: hey, you can go find your ex-girlfriend, oh, you can hook up with girls. My first serious girlfriend, who I was with for a year and a half, I met on Facebook by randomly friending her. I random-friended the maximum number of girls Facebook would let me every single day.
Now fast forward 20 years, and social media has done so much destruction to our entire society. I'm dating now without just being able to random-friend women on Facebook, so I use dating apps. When dating apps first came out, I met my ex-wife on Match.com. At first dating apps were pretty rough, but then there was this golden age of dating apps where there were lots of women on them and they weren't all burned out yet. I got an amazing relationship out of it, but how compatible was that relationship? We just met. We didn't know each other. We didn't have anybody in common. We had almost nothing in common. I probably would have been better off meeting someone I had more in common with in a more natural environment. Now we can see that dating apps and social media have made life so much harder for human beings.
We are already surrendering control
AI, I think, is one of those same kinds of things, where in the short term it looks like it's making everything so much easier. I'm actually refusing to use AI in any more of my thumbnails, because TikTok is already picking out all my AI thumbnails. It can tell if the thumbnail is AI. I'm taking things back down to a human level.
In the short term, I think people are going to keep giving AI more and more control. There are already so many people doing it, and that seems to include me. Instead of hiring a business coach, I've had a bunch of conversations with ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Because of that, I've had all these conversations and bad business ideas that Claude and ChatGPT have co-signed. Maybe I should have hired a YouTube coach and given them thousands of dollars to help me instead of spending all that time on AI. People are diagnosing themselves off of AI. When they're sick, they go straight to AI for answers. Anything that happens, people go straight to AI.
I see that we are already voluntarily surrendering more and more control to AI. At the rate it's going, it will probably go the way social media did, with people handing more and more control and more data to AI, until at some point we just formalize it and AI becomes president. In the short term, I think everyone will like it better. In the long term, this could get very dystopian. AI could start telling you who you're going to date, where you're going to live, and what kind of work you're going to do. At first, AI dating honestly sounds better to me than whatever is happening right now, but it might not be so fun when your life turns into something else. I don't know. It could turn into AI arranging your marriage, your job, your place to live, and your food.
The most likely path, and the better one
I think the most likely path is that humans just keep slowly going further and further into AI. AI keeps getting better and better, and it comes to dominate and control everything. The people who secretly run things behind the scenes will work discreetly through AI, but even they may get cut out of the picture at some point. I share more of these conversations and the thinking behind them in my Daily Vlogs playlist.
At the same time, there are more utopian futures where we work with AI without being totally taken over by it. That would look something like what I do: I use AI to help my business, but I also try to build a life of connection with real human beings as much as possible.