What Makes You Valuable If AI Can Already Do the Same?

OSOlga Stolyarova

What makes a person valuable if artificial intelligence is starting to do the same things? For example, we have now reached a world where AI can do in ten minutes what a person spent decades learning to do. That raises a question: if my value lay in what I could do, and now AI can do it, what is my value today? What should people now base their sense of professional worth on, and what qualities might they need to develop? Because AI is now an enormous competitor in virtually every profession.

AVAlexander Volchek

It is interesting: I had an episode about artificial intelligence on my ToTheMoon channel. We have a fairly large channel, and from time to time I give examples of how the modern world is replacing standard processes in our lives. One of my recent examples was that my younger children will not need to learn to drive. That set off a whole discussion about how I was stupid, clueless, off in my own world, and completely out of touch with people's lives. People said that learning to drive develops neural connections, makes you smarter, and so on. Nobody mentioned the enormous number of people who die in accidents, the huge amount of time people spend driving, the anxiety, the extra money it costs, and so forth.

Nobody mentioned how many people are afraid to drive, how stressful it is, how tired people get, or how their mobility is limited, including because they cannot drive. Cars also harm the world through emissions and so on, whereas modern cars do less harm. It was a very interesting discussion, because I also had another example involving a vacuum cleaner. I said that a robot vacuum does a better job of vacuuming than an ordinary person. People got angry with me about that too: "What are you telling children? That they no longer need to learn how to vacuum?" A robot vacuum does a better job than a person. These discussions always arise from a very narrow view of human life. Absolutely.

It is the same as the discussion about AI doing something better than a person. Where does that leave us? As always, people start worrying about their egos rather than where that leaves them. Because a human being remains a human being. In terms of our spiritual system, a person cannot be replaced. If you see a person as an object, then of course they can be replaced. Humanity has a huge problem here. Over the past five hundred years, certainly, or very seriously over the past three hundred, it has begun to see a person as an object, as some simple material substance that can be reproduced. Even the main goal in developing artificial intelligence is to make it better than a human being, supposedly so it can help people, so it can, in effect, replace them.

This is discussed all the time: replacing a human being. Again, this is very important, and the leading minds on Earth talk about it. Take the person in charge of AI at Facebook, Meta. He says he will have children when he can load all the information into their brains automatically, put some chips in them that will let them suddenly know everything. In other words, they want to replace parts of a human being, turn a person into a robot, and forget the most important thing about being human and what a human being should be doing. Returning to my robot vacuum example, so we do not lose the thread, there is a very interesting explanation when I talk about efficiency. My wife and I laughed about it yesterday, because I had replied to people. There was an enormous discussion about this robot vacuum. Unbelievable.

I made a very simple comment: if my vacuum cleaner goes around my house thirty days a month for five hours a day, and it really does, is that even remotely comparable to a person's efficiency? It is not comparable at all. The way you can clean a space today with this little disk is beyond comparison with a person. That became true more than ten years ago. I remember it very clearly: when I lived in Moscow, my apartment was three hundred square meters. Someone came to clean it every two days and spent an enormous amount of time mopping and sweeping the floor. A robot vacuum that can go around every day and pick up dust is an incredible help to a person. Why fight it?

Someone said, "So you are not going to teach your child to vacuum?" Vacuuming, definitely not. Nobody in my household knows how to vacuum. My children do not know how, and they do not need to. But that does not mean my children cannot hammer a nail, climb a tree, or do other things. Or know how to react to a snake, or to the very varied world we live in. What matters more? Is it more important to know how to drive or to love other people? Look at why I ask these questions about what matters more. Because, in my view, we really do get caught up in this abstraction. In fact, I just went out to get some water, and my wife told me a cyclist had been hit and killed on our street.

But I can tell you that an autopilot will not hit and kill a cyclist. The probability of that happening with an autopilot is close to zero. It is possible, but the probability is close to zero. With a human driver, it is very high, especially in hilly terrain. I live in Silicon Valley, but up in the hills. Driving here is unsafe, absolutely unsafe. These are narrow roads through hilly, mountainous terrain, and there are a lot of cyclists sharing the road with cars. A modern electric vehicle such as Waymo, which operates in San Francisco and here too, cannot have that sort of incident, because its ability to detect everything is tremendous. It is beyond comparison with a human being in every respect. Why argue with that?

Then people started criticizing me for living in Silicon Valley, saying everyone in California thinks the world revolves around California. I do not think that. I know there will still be plenty of countries with cars, of course. But I was talking about whether my own children need to learn to drive. Even if they go to a region where they cannot drive, they simply will not use cars that way. My mother does not know how to drive, my grandmother did not know how, and my nephew does not drive. It all depends on the person. We all know plenty of people who cannot drive. I do not know, do you drive, Olya?

OSOlga Stolyarova

Well, I know how.

AVAlexander Volchek

Do you have a car?

OSOlga Stolyarova

I know how, but I do not have a license.

AVAlexander Volchek

Do you have a car? So that means you do not really know how to drive, right? "I know how, but I do not have a license." You are not a safe driver, and you have not spent thousands of hours behind the wheel preparing to enter heavy, complicated traffic out in the world. You can press the accelerator and the brake and so on; okay. That is roughly the same as my eight-year-old child driving around inside a little electric car. But look, real driving takes years of your life. It involves your inner state and automatic responses. These are very complicated things. I recently had an incident while driving on autopilot, just last week, with my sister. It was the kind of autopilot that lets you take your hands off the wheel. I have that in my Cadillac. It is called self-driving, hands-free.

But it is not a full autopilot, because you still have to watch the screen. It is probably level two or three; I do not remember which. You have to look ahead. On a bend, it suddenly jerked the steering wheel. Let me tell you: if I had not spent tens of thousands of hours driving—and even with all those tens of thousands of hours—some automatic reaction kicked in. Something in me reacted, and I did something, but the risk of an accident was very high. You might say, "That is how autopilots are going to drive." But modern cars that drive without a human are at a different level. They do not jerk the steering wheel like that. What this system did was relinquish control. It said, "I am no longer driving." Cadillac is known for this. I do not know; it seems to me someone will probably have to sue them someday. They really do let go of the wheel from time to time, and it is very frightening.

But we understand that a person can easily let go of the wheel too: if they have an aneurysm, a pinched nerve somewhere, are in the wrong psychological state, and so on. The probability is very high, because people die, get sick, and lose consciousness while driving. Why argue with that? I do not understand why, but we keep arguing over the question you asked. People are afraid. First, of course, people argue simply to set themselves against the world, without understanding who they are talking to and so on. That is one side of it. On the other, people really do keep raising the question: "What will happen when AI starts doing certain things?" But Olya, we live in a world where, over the past hundred years, tools that do things better than people have been appearing endlessly.

A particular person used to be best at performing an operation. Then cameras were added, and with cameras that person could operate better. Is that bad or good? I think it is good. Humanity constantly talks about how smart it is, how smart people are for having reduced mortality or increased life expectancy. But who did that? The technologies that came along and began doing things better than a human being. On the one hand, people talk about how wonderful it is that so much information is now available to study. On the other, they complain that these same systems will replace them because the systems know so much. What has happened over the past few decades? We have all come to know more information, but that has not made everyone's life better. Far from it. Some people are living better, while others are living much worse.

Look at the real conflicts around the world. Let us truly open our eyes and look at what is happening in every country. What madness! People have far more opportunities to reach agreements. In the past, to reach an agreement they had to meet, fly somewhere—or actually travel on horseback, not fly—and negotiate. Someone could attack someone else without warning, without fully understanding them. Now there is an opportunity to understand everyone. Yet the number of conflicts is only increasing, and agreements amount to nothing. They change every day because people change their opinions, change what they say, and do not fully stand by their words. That is what is happening. So the fundamental question is this: if you regard a person exclusively as a material being, a physical object; if you believe nothing exists except the physical, material world, that there is no soul and no spirit, then all those people should at least stop crossing themselves as they approach a church, attending religious celebrations, celebrating Easter, and performing all those rituals.

If that is truly how they regard a human being, then of course there is a problem, and life will become harder and harder for them. But you know that you do not fully control your consciousness, your state, your thoughts, your ideas, or whether you feel good or bad at a given moment. Why does one person look ahead and feel wonderful, while another, standing right beside them and looking at the same thing, feels bad? My wife and I went to Beverly Hills recently. I mention it simply as an example because this conversation came up. We were sitting there, and I asked, "How do you like it here?" She said, "It is so wonderful!" I said, "I feel uneasy." We were spending time together, in the same place, sitting in the same café, drinking coffee.

She feels wonderful about what she sees, and I feel uneasy, because each person has their own state of reality, their own energies at work. If there is even a little hope in you, even a ray of light—and there is in every person—a spark of knowing that the world is much broader than the material, physical world, then you should know that a human being cannot be replaced. I will be very happy if AI does an enormous number of tasks for me. Let it. That is wonderful! If someone could go and check all seven hundred flowers I have planted, check the soil acidity and various other details that only one gardener in a million understands, distribute water properly, and avoid wasting water or electricity. I have perhaps a hundred light bulbs at home, and the children keep walking around turning them on and off, on and off.

My wife does too. Perhaps electricity could be distributed properly, not just in my house, but all over the world. It could be managed properly. A plane nearly crashed recently, a Flydubai flight, as we know, because the pilot decided to commit a crime, to kill people. We need a system that will not do that. Aviation safety is at its highest level today. Why? Because there are so many automated systems. Planes fly and land themselves. That has helped make travel possible for people, among other things. A friend of mine here recently bought a plane, a fairly inexpensive little one. I categorically refuse to get into planes like that. But this plane flies itself. During the flight, he changes its route in a mobile app, just moves the line and says, "I want to fly a little closer to the ocean here, or a little farther away."

This is incredible progress for humanity, and people talk about it all the time. Of course, the question is how it is used and for what purposes. The fact that it can be used for negative purposes is precisely a question of how developed a human being is. If you think only in terms of the physical world and only about yourself, then of course people will want to destroy others. That is exactly why there is so much aggression, madness, arguing, and conflict: people want to think only about themselves. The world of artificial intelligence has an interest in people continuing to believe that it will replace them. It also has an interest in giving people power. That is its purpose. How could artificial intelligence replace my love for my children? Once, while we were driving, someone in the car said, "Here is how I imagine the future."

"My avatar is interacting with my children while I have flown off to another planet, and something else is happening too." I listened and thought, "This is madness. What do you mean, your avatar is interacting with your children? I do not need a robot to interact with my children." Incidentally, a great many leaders who are creating AI promote this. Listen to them. Sam Altman once said, "We will write programs, and a program will interact with the child." I do not need a program to interact with my child. To handle certain tasks, okay. But I do not want to replace myself or my interaction with my child. People have difficulties figuring out how to spend time with their children. I do not need to solve that difficulty by putting a robot in my place. You can leave your questions. Yesterday we were walking, and my son said, "I want a second dog."

Our family is divided on this. I have four children, and five of us want a dog. My wife said, "If there is a second dog, I will not be in the house." We already have one, and I want it to walk around and guard the property. I said, "It would be easier to put a robot out there to guard the whole property." Recently I mentioned to my wife that I would buy a robot. She said, "Over my dead body. I would be frightened of having some alien in here." I said, "It will stay outside, and you will give it commands. You can tell it, 'Walk the perimeter, keep an eye on the property, and report any signs of anything.' Believe me, you will feel so safe you will be amazed. Nobody will ever come near your house."

If you have a system scanning the perimeter—actually, who would want to approach a system like that at night, with a robot walking around your property? The idea being discussed is that a person would guard the space better and more efficiently. Of course not. The question is why we live in a world where we have to guard our space. Why do we live in such a world? What is happening that brings crowds of people out into the streets? What is happening that makes people afraid, afraid to live, afraid to be here? What impulse is at work in people when they are afraid? Very often it has nothing to do with their environment, their location, or their surroundings. Why are people afraid all the time? Now they are afraid of AI too. They want to create it themselves, want to use it everywhere, and are afraid of it.

I went to an OpenAI conference a week ago, and there was a protest outside: "We will not let OpenAI take over. Only we get to do that." Take over what? In his latest statement, just a week ago, Sam Altman said people need to make concessions so that AI can develop, because AI is beneficial. And it is a fact that it is beneficial. Whether Sam Altman is beneficial is another question. To answer that, you would have to really talk with him, really know him, really hear him, and so on. That is not what this video is about. I am absolutely not saying that he is or is not beneficial. This video is not about that. But arguing with this, trying to stop it—what do you want to stop? It is just marketing. Trying to stop the advanced systems we already have. What is there to fight? Why fight it? Hold it back? Are you capable of holding it back? We cannot hold anything back.

Humanity cannot even predict the weather. The weather changes every minute. What they write is already laughable. Even with today's AI and today's AI models, the weather in the app keeps changing, everywhere, all the time. Maybe it does not change in the Sahara, and even that is not certain. Flowers have just bloomed in the Chilean desert, some extraordinary phenomenon. Was that predicted? Did they know how the flowers would bloom? One of the driest deserts in the world is covered in unbelievably beautiful flowers. I do not even understand how flowers can bloom there. Where did the seeds come from? Where were they? How many earthquakes and floods are there? People fail to predict these things over and over, including here in the Valley.

Just a couple of months ago, there were terrible storms in California, right near here. They tore everything apart. The ocean has not been fully studied, a physical object has not been fully studied. Has the human being been studied? By whom? Where? How? How can you replace a human being? How can you replace this person? Today my son was sitting there saying, "Put my socks on." We put his socks on. He said, "I do not like how you put them on." Yesterday you put the very same socks on him, even more crookedly, and he was happy and said, "Thank you." Why does he dislike it one moment and like it the next? Who has truly studied that all the way through? To avoid being destroyed by this illusion, on the one hand you need to keep studying new technologies. I talk about this a great deal on the ToTheMoon channel.

On the other hand, of course, you need to begin truly perceiving the world and studying the spiritual world, spiritual science. If people do not study spiritual science, do not truly study themselves and their own spiritual system, there will be serious problems. Of course, the spiritual world will renew this. From the perspective of the spiritual world, of causes and effects, that is not a problem. But how can a person truly understand what to do in their present life? How can they remember that they need to love other people? How can you develop that in yourself and remember to do it at every moment? That is what you really need to think about.

Ask yourself: how can I do this at every moment, remember it at every moment, regardless of what is happening, whether someone is shouting or rejoicing, whether I like it or not, whether missiles are falling or the sun is shining? How can I do this as a human being? Human beings will not stop today's AI, because they are not the ones creating it. Watch the videos on related topics on my channel.