AI has sped up work, but you still feel behind | What's behind the race for productivity

OSOlga Stolyarova

We're living at a time when artificial intelligence helps people work more efficiently. Something that used to take two hours can now take ten minutes. Yet both before AI and since it arrived, even though people are actually doing more, that inner feeling of not having done enough remains: “I didn't get everything done. I didn't do enough. I wasn't productive enough.” I'd like to talk about that state. Is it simply a matter of time management, or is it a state we need to work with, something we need to look at differently—that constant feeling of “I haven't done enough; I need to do even more”?

AVAlexander Volchek

You know, this is a very important subject when it comes to being aware of and understanding your goals, your life, your own state. People ask themselves this question endlessly throughout the day. We now live in a society that increasingly promotes the idea that we need to know more, be able to do more, study more. That the most important skill is learning how to learn. Learning how to learn, right? And piling even more information of every kind into ourselves. Knowing every subject at school, having to attend eighteen extracurricular activities. Children didn't use to do that many activities, and that much information and content didn't use to enter a young person's head. Whatever we may think, it wasn't like this. Even someone who read a great deal wasn't consuming such a large amount of such varied information.

Here's another interesting aspect to look at. If you spend time with five people but watch two hundred people in Instagram Stories, you begin living alongside those two hundred people. You might as well count that as being in constant contact with them. That's a huge amount of interaction with other people. And if we look at the development of technology and science over the past thirty years, we see an incredible leap forward, but we don't see the fundamental effect on a person. Are people really living better? Do they really feel better? Are they actually earning more money? Have conflicts, wars, problems, arguments at home disappeared as a result? Now that we have access—endless access—to psychotherapy, are there fewer problems in families, or more?

For example, in Soviet times, or even in the 1990s, access to psychotherapists was extremely limited compared with access to psychotherapy today. But if we actually look at the number of marriages that break up, or the number of conflicts within families, have there really become fewer of them, or more? What do you think, Olga? Fewer or more?

OSOlga Stolyarova

I think more.

AVAlexander Volchek

You see, even you think there are more, although you weren't born in Soviet times. You were born in the late 1990s or the 2000s, somewhere around then, right? So this is a serious question. My daughter is sixteen and goes to school, and she's the vice president of the psychology club. They study psychology at school. On the one hand, that's great. You'd think they would have a broad outlook. You'd think a person would develop a broader understanding of certain subjects. Yet when you start looking more deeply, you wonder: is this child actually smarter? Does this child really understand life better? Or are these simply additional indicators that someone has completed more courses or earned better grades?

There's an example from my own life that has always struck me as incredible. At school, I could never memorize a poem—or learn anything by heart, really. Then, in my second year of college, my memory opened up, and I began remembering things incredibly well. Here's another example: I could never write essays, but now I can talk for hours on any subject, and look at it from different sides. I can explain things very clearly, point by point, constructively. Or I can lead a discussion in a way that gets the other person thinking for themselves. I can speak quickly, or in short phrases, and so on. In other words, I can adapt to a particular audience, convey the meanings I have in mind at that moment, or work toward a particular goal I've set.

But I didn't really learn this as a child. I didn't read a certain number of books to achieve it, or take special courses in public speaking. I never took them at all. So when we talk about the development of the technological world and about people endlessly chasing something, it's very important to begin understanding for yourself why particular effects come about. For example, if you did well in school and then got into a good university, does that actually mean you'll have a good salary, or always have a job? Or does behaving in a particular way toward your boss really mean you'll get promoted? Or are company stock awards given out differently, for something else?

Or some people achieve things and others don't, and that isn't because of how someone did in school. I'm certainly not dismissing school. It's very important. I believe you need a good education, a good upbringing, and a coherent set of guiding principles. But what comes first? And do you see the relationships between cause and effect in what's happening? Over these three years of AI, a very interesting pattern has become apparent. I talk to people who speak about artificial intelligence with incredible enthusiasm, and I ask: have you personally earned more money with AI, or not? Have you personally freed up more of your time with AI, or not? Have you started knowing more, for example? But people started knowing more through Instagram and Facebook, too. Or have you begun to feel better?

An acquaintance of mine, a very good doctor, once said: “People are taught to memorize quickly and read quickly. But no one teaches them how to get that information out of their brain, so it isn't there anymore—so they don't know it.” I have to say, there are many things I'd rather not know. I'd like to take many things out of my head and delete them. And so we constantly see this pattern in the world: some people say you need to sit, learn, find silence and be in silence, especially once you've achieved something. As though people who have achieved something don't spend time in silence. For some reason people say that. It's complete nonsense. And on the other hand, there's this constant attempt to cram in more information than you can possibly hold, to rush somewhere. Everyone talks about FOMO. They say there's FOMO in Silicon Valley, FOMO in the technology world. But there's FOMO in every part of life.

I often use my wife, Polina, as an example. She's been using artificial intelligence almost from the beginning, and she's a fairly capable user. But what has really changed in her life? Has her inner state in relation to anything really changed? Yes, she can ask a question, fill out a form more easily, do a few additional things. But has that actually affected her life, or hasn't it? What kind of life am I talking about? I'm talking about a person's own state, their ability to interact with the world around them, their ability to love other people, their ability to truly understand cause and effect—and why things happen in the world one way rather than another. Has the person figured any of that out? People use AI, but when you talk with them, you see how mistaken they are, how constantly they deceive themselves.

We actually had an interesting discussion about this yesterday, too. Sometimes it's paradoxical. There are so many situations around us where people are suing each other, discussing things, expressing opinions. You sit there thinking, “But there's ChatGPT. Just go and check this information, and you'll immediately understand whether it's true or not.” On the one hand, people have begun taking videos and checking them. Some people take a video of mine, for example, put it into AI, and ask, “Does Alexander Volchek have the right to talk about this?” That's one side of it. On the other, they don't check simple things. They don't actually examine themselves. Who are you? What kind of person are you, really? I had a video come out on the AI channel. It got about a hundred thousand views, and there was someone who wrote a great deal of negativity under it.

I clicked on his photo and saw that he'd left thirty comments under one video. I wrote, “Oh, thank you very much for the thirty comments.” And, actually, I think he disappeared after that. But here's the point: all his comments were incredibly negative. What if he'd uploaded his own negative comments to AI and asked whether leaving thirty comments like that is normal behavior? Instead of uploading my video, he could have uploaded his comments. What would AI have told him about himself? The fundamental pattern, the fundamental problem of humanity—and it's been very, very clearly visible over the past hundred years, not five, seven, or ten, but a hundred—is people's inability to really look at causes and effects. There was a recent discussion about the existence of spirit and soul, and someone wrote, “Prove that it exists.

It's all hormones. Prove it,” he says. You see, when you encounter the understanding of someone who demands proof, while the scientific world itself hasn't proved or explained an enormous number of things, what is that soul supposed to do? What is that person supposed to do, wanting endless proof of things throughout life? And they want proof that will fit their own system. So, on the one hand, we have a person's lack of understanding of how cause and effect actually work. When someone doesn't understand cause and effect, Olga—and this is a very important subject—then no matter how much information they consume, how much more content they generate, or whether they do two tasks a day or fifty-six, how will that lead them to a result?

How will it lead to a result? Look: if artificial intelligence really, truly made people more effective, then already, right now, five billion people on Earth would be happy. They would be happy already. But when someone says that AI will make it easier for anyone in the world to start a business, I say very clearly: wait a second. If there are, say, a hundred thousand businesses in a particular field, and there are going to be ten million, do you really think that will help? Things will get much worse, because everyone will stop making money. The system of how money is distributed will be disrupted. People will simply stop making money.

The government will stop printing it. Someone will stop launching additional projects. You'll disrupt the way the world is organized. Then there will have to be another flood on Earth, or another earthquake will happen, stirring something else up and introducing another imbalance. Last year there was a terrible tragedy in California: enormous fires, and a huge area of Los Angeles burned down. If you drive through Malibu and the surrounding areas, it really looks catastrophically bad. But if you actually look at how people discuss life here, how they talk to one another, what they say, nothing has changed in them. Even though tens of thousands of people apparently suffered and lost enormous amounts of money. The average property price there was—I don't know—five, seven, ten, or three million dollars, and tens of thousands of homes were wiped out.

Yet in actual fact, nothing has changed. Nothing has changed for anyone. Something simply happened. Of course, with the rise of technology, huge numbers of people gain opportunities to change their lives. That really does happen. In the past, making a significant change—changing professions, moving to another country, taking up five or seven additional hobbies or activities—was a very substantial achievement. Just as getting into a newspaper, appearing on television, or being interviewed used to be a substantial achievement. But today, Olga, can you imagine the number of interviews now compared with thirty years ago? You can't even compare the numbers. They're incomparable.

It's like comparing a real Porsche with a toy car. Not even a toy car—a car drawn in the sand with a finger. It isn't even a toy; it doesn't even exist in plastic. That's roughly the scale of the comparison. Have people started feeling better because there are interviews, because something has become more accessible? What has happened? Or take healthcare becoming more accessible. But in absolute numbers, there are now far more poor and destitute people, and far more unhealthy people, on Earth than there were four hundred years ago. I'm sure that if we pulled up the numbers, counted properly, and looked at them, we'd find far more, because there simply weren't that many people alive then. So, all right, healthcare is apparently accessible. It's the same thing. But does anyone understand why there are more people? Who is in charge of that at all?

Who is in charge of the process? Why are there more people? That's an enormous task for people, by the way. An incredible task. On the one hand, the world thinks about ecology, about a greener world, about protecting everything from data centers, electricity, gasoline, oil, money, about preserving animals. On the other hand, small groups of people in different countries can blow something up in space, or somewhere other than space, with absolutely no understanding of the consequences. None whatsoever. Who today understands the consequences of launching ChatGPT or Claude? Imagine if it were switched off tomorrow. Just imagine it being switched off tomorrow. How many people around the world would experience not just FOMO, but suffering that runs through their entire lives?

Olga, can you even imagine what kind of virus this is? If it were switched off tomorrow, if people were deprived of it, what would happen? This isn't taking away cars or airplanes, Olga. ChatGPT, Anthropic, and Gemini together have hundreds of millions of unique, regular users. ChatGPT has 1.2 billion weekly users. But I'm talking about the regular users who are dependent on it. What would happen? What would happen if YouTube were taken away from people? What would happen if they lost YouTube? What would they do? What would happen if people had YouTube taken away? Would that be a positive or a negative thing? This is an unstudied aspect. We know that many countries have shut off social media for children, for example, or for adults. Some things have been blocked because of sanctions; elsewhere countries have shut something off themselves.

And I personally know a lot of people who stopped using a great many social networks. Nothing happened to them. Apparently nothing happened. Or did something happen? How do you measure it? Who can measure it at all? Who can measure the effect all these chats, systems, and everything that's happening have on a person? Who can actually measure that? You find yourself in a very interesting situation when you move from Moscow, for example, to Silicon Valley. You think, “Why aren't the restaurants here as good? Why don't the restaurants have good tableware?” And here's what's interesting: if restaurants don't have good tableware, people still want to go to restaurants, and they still go. They already have some idea of why they go to a restaurant. If you give them good tableware, they'll get used to it. Of course they'll start saying, “Give me good tableware.”

But if you don't give it to them, they won't even know it exists. They won't turn the plate over to look. I was in France recently with two friends, one from Minsk and the other from Rome, and both were turning over the plates in the restaurant. Clearly they're interested in what kind of tableware it is. I also like turning a plate over in a restaurant, or looking at it, or discussing it with my wife. I've developed an eye for it; sometimes I don't need to turn it over. That has come with the years, because it doesn't come in one, two, or three years, but over decades. That's how my life is arranged. My parents brought me up that way, from the 1990s onward: the fork matters, the plate matters, the size of the plate matters, how many plates should be set out, where they should go, how many forks and spoons there should be, what different kinds of utensils there are, and so on.

That's simply how I was brought up. It's basic for me. But there are people for whom none of it matters: it makes absolutely no difference what kind of fork or plate it is. If the fork says Amazon, they don't feel any worse while eating. I do feel a little different when the fork says Amazon. A certain added aesthetic dimension matters to me. The most important thing for a person today, with so much going on, is to pay attention. Again, things haven't changed all that much, because if we look at the amount of change between 1990 and 1995, between 1995 and 2000, between 2000 and 2005, we still see leaps taking place everywhere.

By the way, I'm certainly not comparing artificial intelligence by saying it's the same as cryptocurrency, or the internet, or something else. Although, taken as a whole, you could say it's more significant than the internet. This is something very serious. But the process of change, in terms of its speed, has simply accelerated. We were sitting with my sister and my wife, discussing fashion collections: how rapidly things are being released in the fashion market now. How collections and the market are renewed, how you need a new collection and new window displays almost every week, every two weeks, every month. Zara is a very good example. If you look closely at Zara, the sheer volume of changes happening inside it is staggering.

That's the turnover people need. And people really will live in a state of constantly lacking content, of simplifying, accelerating, and aggregating content, on the one hand. Yet on the other, we'll see huge numbers of people going to the same restaurant and drinking the same coffee as fifty years ago. For people who have seen enormous changes in their lives—for example, the changes following the collapse of the Soviet Union, from around 1990 to 2005—it can seem that many countries have stood still, that their technological progress stopped somewhere along the way. When you come to America, for example. We were watching a 1991 movie with Tom Cruise. Interestingly, in their New York apartment, they have two large built-in ovens.

It's 1991. What two large ovens did anyone have in the Soviet Union in 1991? Two enormous ovens. Or in Europe? But this is 1991, and at some point you get the feeling they've stayed right there, because the ovens are the same. Everything is the same. I go into my kitchen, and I have those same two enormous ovens. Of course, your apartment or house has to be at a certain level for that. But in general, there they are: the same two large ovens. Or the same stocking hanging on the fireplace. There's the fireplace, and the same kind of stocking hanging there. Of course, when we didn't have two large ovens, they were being used elsewhere. It seems they've become outdated, because everything has stayed the same. Here it's very important for a person to understand, to look closely at the world, at different countries. What's really happening in those countries? What's really happening there?

So many people have this impression of China: that China makes poor-quality goods. That's gradually going away now. But even five years ago, never mind ten years ago, everyone was saying that China only makes crap. That's obviously absurd. Does anyone understand what this will lead to over time? When I talk about countries to help someone see reality, my reasoning is always very simple. Look at all the empires and all the great countries that have ever existed anywhere. What is there of them now, in the end? Take a short stretch of time—four thousand years—and look at what actually happened in the end. Everywhere, we'll see the same thing.

What happened in the end? We'll see the same thing. Did they think of themselves as leaders? We talk about how incredibly the Roman Empire developed. They came up with the first houses, plumbing, all kinds of things. We talk about that. Or about the incredible things people did in Egypt—absolutely extraordinary things that we still don't understand how they managed to do. Yet look at what's actually happening in the country now, in terms of its development. Everyone refers to countries, but look at what's really happening. In America, you often see stories about someone buying something in a house or a shop—a glass for ten dollars, say. Then it turns out the glass was made by some great artist or sculptor, and now it's worth a hundred thousand dollars.

There was a case just recently. An American artist had tried to sell her paintings in the 1950s, or whenever it was. She put a painting up for a hundred dollars, and no one bought it. Now someone has found it in a dark corner of a house. As usual, people came to buy all the junk inside—or, on the contrary, some perfectly good things. Our family likes doing that, too, by the way. They bought the painting for $30, then sold it for $1.3 million. That's the reality of the world. Back then it was worth a hundred bucks; now it's worth $1.3 million. Did the artist change? No. Did her state change? No. She died. She doesn't even know it happened. This painting has nothing to do with her now: someone simply bought it and then sold it. He made money because he was smart. He knew which house to go to.

There are millions or tens of millions of people going around trying to buy something, looking for things. Someone bought it. Did anyone forecast this? Plan it? Understand that it would happen? Does selling that painting for $1.3 million now mean it will be worth $1.3 million in ten years? Not at all. It might be worth $100 million, or nothing. It might burn, or someone might throw it away. We don't know what's going to happen. When it comes to money, people face total uncertainty. At some points it's manageable; at others it's completely unpredictable. No one in the world properly predicted it. If we look at all the research firms, all the investment firms, all the licensed companies, who, twenty years ago, predicted that Elon Musk would have a trillion dollars?

Who predicted that? A trillion dollars belonging to him personally, in his stock? Come on. People said that the overall market would grow, and so on. That was twenty years ago. People were afraid even to say numbers like that aloud. On the other hand, people talk about extremes that were unattainable and have remained unattainable. Settling on Mars, for example. To me, the whole idea of flying to Mars as they show it in movies, and spending forty years of your life on the question of Mars, is very strange. What is that? And in terms of energy, I talk about this a lot. We have a meditation channel, and I talk about it a great deal there, too.

Where do these energies come from at all? What is this structure of perception? How much does a person really understand what it is? It's just like the example of people supposedly landing on the Moon decades ago, in the mid-1990s—not the 1990s, in the middle of the twentieth century. Then nothing happened there afterward. Why is that? So, Olga, for the coming decades this will be an endless process of dangling an endless carrot in front of people, feeding their ego, feeding their fear, feeding the harm they do to others.

An endless diversion from the real, important, necessary things a person needs to study every day. What do I actually need to study every day? What do I actually need to look at every day as a person? What do I really need to invest in every day? Really and truly. As for artificial intelligence, the world will still have to explain how to assess it. Our lives are assessed somehow, after all: by the number of children we have, how long we've been married, how long we've lived, our health test results, how we did on our college exams, our salary, how much money is in our account, which marathon we've run or swum.

We'll have to assess it somehow. But how do you assess the positive effect of using this system for 1.2 billion people? The positive effect. Today one of my partners reminded me again of the movie Don't Look Up. I can't say I liked the movie when I saw it, but it conveys this absolutely simple idea. In so many places, everything is unbelievably obvious, yet a person simply doesn't want to look up, and personally chooses not to look up. They aren't ready to do it themselves, to look at the truth of what's happening around them—the real truth of what's happening around them. To accept it.