The AI revolution could disrupt all manner of jobs and industries, but it could also change what humanity fundamentally considers valuable.
Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas has said that in the past, giving answers to questions was valuable, but AI will likely be able to give answers to all questions. As such, what’ll end up becoming more valuable is which questions you choose to ask the AI.
“Every single person benefits from having access to better answers,” Srinivas said at a TED talk. “This is such a profound shift in human history. Until recently, if you wanted the best answers, you had to be someone who could afford it. You had to be someone who had access to the greatest minds in the world, or the best materials, libraries, expertise,” he added.
“And now, that’s changing. It was a major achievement of the Internet was to give everyone access to all of the world’s information, a major achievement of AI would be to give everyone access to all of the world’s answers. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Harvard professor or an underserved student in a developing nation, we all get access to the same answers,” he said.
“With AI that keeps getting better and better at answering all our questions, the marginal cost of research is rapidly approaching zero. In that new era of humanity that AI is powering, knowledge does not really care about who you are, where you’re from, or who you have access to. Rather, what matters is the next question you’re going to ask. When all of the world’s answers are available to all of the world’s people, one can only wonder, what will the best questions be?” he said.
It’s a pretty interesting argument. Thus far in modern human history, value was created by giving answers — a doctor told you how to get better, a lawyer answered your legal questions, and programmers helped you create software that simplified your daily life. Going forward, AI could possibly do these things instantly and cheaply, and these professionals might not be able to command the value they once did. So value might lie in doing research, and creating new innovations and technologies. But Aravind Srinivas says that even the process of doing new research could become commoditized by AI — advances in reasoning models have shown that this could well be possible. As such, the real value might shift towards asking AI which items to research on — people with clever ideas could direct AI to research certain topics, and through these advancements could create value for themselves and others. It’s a completely new paradigm, but one that could well come to fruition given how quickly AI has been progressing over the last couple of years.