 You've been hearing about AI everywhere. Chat GPT. It's gaining popularity for its ability to craft emails. Technology that's making waves in the world of AI. He thinks it's the most revolutionary thing since the iPhone. This video is not about the latest AI developments, about hype versioned reality or the tools you can use in the AI field. In this video, I want to zoom out because that's where things get really interesting. I want to focus on the impact AI will have on society. Because the potential is huge, but if you want all to benefit, we have to make some fundamental changes. If you want to understand why the impact of AI can be so huge, we have to look at our history. From 1870 until 1970, we've seen an incredible 50x increase in productivity. We are talking about a 50x increase on all manual labor. And because of it, the output per person exploded. The societal gains have been tremendous. The workweek went from 68 hours to 40. Life expectancy nearly doubled from 40 to 80. We've seen the sprout of wonderful technologies like the car, central plumbing, electricity, the airplane, but also something that seems trivial right now like the washing machine. And we've seen a 100x increase in worker safety. We've mostly seen these benefits in Western society. We expected the productivity boost to continue thanks to the internet, the computer and the smartphone. With most work becoming knowledge work, the potential was even there to work less hours, work where, when and how you want, and to work with more passion and freedom on the stuff you want to work on. But that is not what actually happened. Productivity did increase almost linearly starting from the 1950s, but the wealth created there didn't end up in the general population. It ended up at shareholders. Since the 1970s, we've seen technicians over development in multiple areas. Prices of energy are actually going up as are healthcare costs. CO2 levels are on a permanent rise and extreme poverty is on a rise again as well. Now, how is the history of industrialization and productivity connected to AI? What the Industrial Revolution did for manual labor I expect AI to do for knowledge work. Translating a text, analyzing data, writing computer code or even making a video, I expect AI to augment all of that work and do part of the work or the entire job for you. We've historically seen that a bump in productivity raises living standards tremendously. There is, however, one big problem. If we raise productivity in our existing systems, the benefits will end up in the same places it ended up over the last 50 years. It will end up at the shareholders. Over the last two years, the richest 1% have backed nearly twice as much wealth as the rest of the world put together. That is an insane statistic. Our current economic system is deeply broken. If we want productivity to benefit us all, we have to stop optimizing for shareholder value and start optimizing for system value. This means we have to rethink systems like markets, shareholder, ownership, equity, and maybe most importantly, tax systems. Companies have to start paying taxes in the countries where they earn their money. Yes, Apple, yes, Amazon, yes, Shell, I'm looking at you. No more tax deals. You have to start paying it where you earn it. Another thing we have to change is that we have to tax wealth instead of labor. If history learns us anything, it's that wealth for a few adds little to the total of society. It's our capacity to be productive and share the benefits of it that has deeply improved the human experience. It's great that AI will bring the next bump in productivity. But we have to change the system if we want the entire society to flourish. Thanks for helping me make these videos and I would love to see you in the next one. Cheers.