In this episode of Elements of Community, join me as I debunk the myth that AI will replace humans. Discover how AI's growing role in tasks liberates us to embrace our inherent value - love, relationships, creativity, and collaborative iteration. Despite the challenges of transition, let's unlock the potential to forge unparalleled community and relationships.

Don't miss this eye-opening episode as we explore how AI empowers us to prioritize what truly matters. Together, let's shape a future where humans and AI thrive in harmony.

And the implications that those tools have on building community and on my sort of humanistic perspective on what exactly those are gonna do to what we become as a species as we continue to roll out increasingly capable technology, technology that's increasingly more capable of interacting with our understanding of the world.

So what I'm looking at right now, at least in the conversation of AI, is I'm looking at sort of how do we exist and how do we think about the way that we exist and how is it that these generative AI tools are going to interact with that and how are we gonna change a result of it. So the first thing is I'm gonna look at it from an economic perspective, cause I think that makes it easy to talk about.

And by that I mean you complete a task and by completing that task, you store some value. And over time, the value that you have amassed can be traded inside of your community for some of the stored value that is elsewhere in your community. So letting that sink in a little bit. Let's talk about that in a very specific way.

You go out into the fields and you till the fields, and by tilling the fields, you've stored some value. Now you can't trade the stored value of a tilled field in your community. Or maybe you could, but let's pretend that you can't. I, you actually could. Let's pretend that you can't for this. So in order for that to be useful to you pretending that you can't trade the stored value of a tilled field, you then have to make another step store additional value by completing another task.

And then over the course of the summer, the work that you've done, the value that you've stored into that field starts to produce in a very little sense fruit. And towards the end of the summer, you get to the point where you get to read what you sew.

You get to harvest the stored value in your field. Now you've got this amassed value as a result of tasks that you have taken. And that's what I mean when I say it's a task economy. You take some tasks, you store some value. Once you've amassed some value, you can trade some of that amassed value for other value that is important to you.

Now yes, this creates the opportunity for specialization and that's fantastic because as you can specialize in a task, you can perform that task with a higher degree of quality and a higher degree of efficiency, and that means that you can store value more quickly and you can amass that value more quickly, and that makes it easier for you with that amassed value.

To be able to trade for the things that you want. So you take that as a basic starting point instead of looking at currency for the sake of currency. Now, let's start from this perspective that you complete a task, you store some value. Currency is a representation of completed tasks and stored value as a result of the work that you have done.

And this is really important as we start to look at why people are so reactive every single time a new technology comes out, including the current time that a new technology is coming out. So let's look at some of the other technologies that have come out, some technologies that caused a huge stir, and let's take a look at how that's going to play out with this particular technology, or at least.

From the time back in the fifties and sixties, the accounting industry was terrified by the accountant, the calculator, because the accounting industry was certain that the calculator making complex math available to everyone was going to decimate the accounting industry. And in fact, that was a reasonable assumption.

So even though businesses had a greater access to their capacity to be able to use complex math, they were actually less interested in doing so for the sake of reducing cost on accounting. The result of that is that the accounting industry actually exploded because of the calculator. An unforeseen consequence of the invention of the calculator.

A good consequence of the invention of the calculator. I would argue the same thing happened when we invented the word processor as a result of the invention of the word processor. We didn't get fewer books. We got more. We didn't get fewer authors, we got more. In fact, we democratized access to information sharing in a way that had never before been conceived.

All of the journalists were relatively wealthy, successful business people who had an idea that they wanted to spread, and maybe the idea was germane to their business and maybe it wasn't, and they spent their extra resources, their time, their money, to be able to put together that idea in a way that was consumable by an audience.

Journalists cared deeply about being an artist inside their profession, about making sure that they were deeply concerned and connected with the message that they were sharing, and level that up one level, the editors were even more concerned with making sure that they protected the brand of their periodical.

So it had a very big impact on one of the niche industries where the typewriter was an important tool. Those impacts are still being felt today. There are other impacts relative to the calculator that are also still being felt today. Ask yourself this. How many people who were in control of their checkbook in the 1950s were not capable of balancing their checkbook themselves?

And the average person is not as good at writing. They're not as good at keeping in contact, they're not as good at building relationships where contact is a part of that relationship. Unless it's direct person to person, it's an interesting thing that has happened. So in one sense, we've leveled up. The average person can now share information better and many do.

So with that in mind and again, that the economy is a task-based economy. We complete a task, we store some value. It is the stored value as the result of the completed task that gives us spending power. We get to use that stored value to bring things into our life that is outside of our capacity to complete a task and or that's easier to buy for us from somebody else than it is for us to do ourselves.

It's amazing. The things that AI are doing right now today that's making it more possible for us to do cool things in the world is extraordinary. We've just invented, and there's an AI now executing against this. We've invented an AI, generative AI, just like chat GPT, whose job is to predict the way that proteins will fold.

In a scientific endeavor now proteins are amazing. Proteins are the basis of all viruses. So if you can predict the way proteins are going to fold, you could actually predict the way that a virus will create itself and recreate itself under an infinite number of circumstances, including the circumstances that might exist inside a human body.

This is so amazing. We could go through the process of actually having a viable prototype that's unlikely to cause significant damage to a living thing. We could cut back the amount of time that we need to take, cut back the number of lives that are affected by animal trials, and then human trials. On these retroviruses, on these fixes to things that have happened to us naturally.

It's amazing, it's amazing. It fills me with the light and. As a result of this, it's going to reduce the animal trial industry. Is that a bad thing? That's for you to decide, but it's gonna happen. It's going to increase the demand for quality thinkers in the scientific world who are going to think about the scenarios that we're feeding into these tools so that we can get good outputs.

In ways that are somewhat predictable, but maybe only somewhat predictable. Now, here's why I'm really, really excited about AI. Again, keep in mind the task-based economy. Now I'm gonna take another little detour. Keeping in mind the task-based economy. I'd like to take a detour to World War II. Yeah, world War II, and I'd like to take a look at what made Nazi Germany possible.

Look him up. Joseph Gerber did something amazing, and I'm gonna take it and I'm gonna reframe it so that you can see why I think it's amazing. What Joseph Gerber did is he literally said. In German, if you say a thing, anything, if you say it loud enough, often enough it becomes the truth.

Amazing, incredibly powerful tool and it showed us something. And I'm gonna get to that. First I'd like to add, while it is amazing and an incredibly powerful tool. For all of you who have a little bit of trigger around this, I'm with you. I understand it is an amazing, incredibly powerful tool, and we got to witness the power of that tool through something that was horrible.

When you tell a lie loud enough and often enough it becomes the truth. If you look at that from a slightly different perspective, what that tells you is that there is no objective truth. Now what's interesting is I brought up journalism intentionally. What's interesting is that we've spent 150 years inside this professional journalism world, cultivating the idea that there is actually an objective truth, and it's not just inside journalism that we talk about this.

Instead of there being an objective truth, what you can conclude from that. And as I say this, you're gonna be like, oh, I hope if you're still with me, what you can conclude from what we learned there is that truth rather than being objective. And of course, the obvious opposite of objective is subjective.

And it was that. That specific thing. That's the thing that I'm gonna talk about more here. It's that gift that Joseph Gerber brought to us, and I don't believe he was intending to give us that gift, but that's what I get here. Truth is co-created. How powerful is that? If that's true, imagine how much more powerful it will be if a cancer patient.

Oh, beautiful thing that is really actually giving me shivers right now. I'm so delighted by this. This is the gift that Joseph Gerber brought to us. How else can we use this? Imagine people who are trying to manifest and they're doing it themselves inside a little spell circle or something.

If truth is co-created, then your manifestation is six times more powerful with six people than just with one, maybe not six times more powerful. Maybe it's 12 times more powerful. Maybe it's 20 times more powerful. I think we should find out.

Let that settle in for a minute as that settles in, draw in the mental health crisis. It's kind of a downer, isn't it? Lucas? Yeah, but here I am sharing this idea that Joseph Gerbers gave to us as a gift through a terrible medium. The idea is that our path to health could very well be a co-created process if people are having mental health crises.

You're not alone right now. You're not alone in five minutes. You're not alone in an hour, and you will not be alone tomorrow. All of us are in this journey together.

And invite them to do the same with you and make the success of the person next to you part of your own success, and invite them to do the same with you. Because truth is co-created, you'll both succeed better, faster. You'll both be happier doing it mental health, and you'll be able to spread the joy and the success of that wider faster in every aspect of your life because your truth is co-created.[00:26:00]

It actually gives me a little bit of tears to really let that settle in, let it become part of my reality. It gives me tears of joy because that means that the best and the least that I can do for my brothers and my sisters that are standing by my shoulders is to make their success in everything that's important to them.

Part of my success, part of my mission, it also gives me a little tears of sadness because I've spent 20 years as an adult in this society, not doing that. Now let's not get caught up in fomo. A fear of missing out on 20 years of really truly supporting people. So I'm gonna move on. I'm gonna go back to AI in a second.

That your mission is their mission. That your success is their success, and you will be the same for them as they are for you. That their mission is yours and their success is yours. You're never going to leave their side. You're gonna be with them tomorrow. You're gonna be with them in a week. You're gonna be with them in a month no matter what, because their success is your success.

The question is why. You see, every time we come out with a technology, it comes out and it plays around for a little while, and then a whole bunch of really smart people start to iterate on that technology. They make it a little better. They make it a little bit more efficient. They make it a little bit cheaper. They find new ways to do it. They find new ways to bring it to market. They find new markets to bring it to iterations.

It's not money. It's actually stored value in task completion. We've spent the entire last 10,000 years or so building this idea, this id. That our value is in completing tasks. Everything everywhere is based on that. Even technology leverage. The richest people in the world, they're rich, not because they complete more tasks, they're rich, because they've been [00:30:00] excellent at leveraging task completion to create stored value for themselves.

Again, this is not an indictment by any stretch. This is simply the truth of where we are. Task completion economy. Now, as AI comes into play, it's going to take over those tasks, which means the people who rely on the tasks for their income are going to lose their jobs. This is true. We know it's gonna happen.

If we're not without value, even if we're not completing tasks, then we must have value somewhere else. There must be something about us that's valuable, separate from our ability to complete a task. Now, ask yourself this. Do you love your grandmother even when she's not baking cookies? For you? Hope the answer is yes.

She's completely void of capacity to complete a task. Maybe she sits in a wheelchair. Maybe she actually has a full-time attendant to make sure that she lives a healthy, happy life for as long as she's got left. Do you still love her then? It's not rhetorical. Of course, the answer is yes, or at least of course. I hope the answer is yes.

In so doing that elevates this notion that there is value outside of task completion. Now the question is what is the value? You might, of course, based on the example, you might of course conclude that the value is love itself. I love that answer. Yes. Also, I touched on it elsewhere too.

Which means their capacity to generate is only as good as the creativity that was fed into them. The intelligence that was fed into them in the creation of them as a tool, they're not otherwise creative.

Creativity is part of it. But the amazing thing about humans is actually, of course you think, I'm gonna say community, and it's true, but in a specific way. It's what I like to call iterative collaboration. I talked about iteration, right? Some new thing comes out and then we spend some time iterating on it.

Humans do it particularly well as AI takes over task completion. We will still be tasked. There I go. Using the term wrong, we will still have the need for creativity and iterative collaboration. And what's amazing about that is that as we switch out of an task completion economy, we're gonna move into something that is entirely different, where you are inherently valuable for your creativity. That hasn't happened yet.

To serve my brothers and my sisters in new and more exceptional ways. And it is that iterative collaboration. It is the love that we share and the relationships that we create, both intellectual relationships and heart-centered relationships that are gonna continue to drive inherent value for all of humanity.

The core of this argument is 100% true. Truth itself is co-created. Truth itself is collaborative, and truth itself can be iterated. And that's why. I hope you're seeing this all come together. That's why I'm so excited about what these amazing tools are bringing to the market right now. That's why I'm so excited to jump into conversations with different paid communities and corporations that are reaching out to me saying, I need you to share your message so that people can see the hope beyond the impending doom of AI taking over their jobs.

We get to move into the inherent value of humanity, collaborative truth, collaborative creation, collaborative iteration, collaborative relation.

And then, how beautifully you can collaborate together to build your ideas and theirs, and then how you can collaborate together to build your success and theirs.

Your relationship, your willingness inside yourself and your community to be iterative and collaborative towards the best good always.

I know that it sounds kind of like I'm painting rainbows and butterflies, and it's hard for me not to look at this picture of the future and just be filled with delight. Because to me it is rainbows and butterflies. But I want to remind you that there's going to be a period of change in between now and then, and that period of change might be decades inside, which things are not rainbows and butterflies.

Those challenges were created by the task completion economy. We've been playing with those challenges for 10,000 years. They were brought to a head by AI. And we have work, we have work ahead of us to move through the challenge of rebuilding humanity around our inherent value rather than just the test completion.

Thank you.