Transcript

AI Will Replace More Jobs Than Anyone Realizes | Dr Roman Yampolskiy

From Founder's Story · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 29 min · 5,303 words · 66 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "AI Will Replace More Jobs Than Anyone Realizes | Dr Roman Yampolskiy", an episode of Founder's Story published December 8, 2025 (29 min, about 5,303 words). It mentions 21 people, works and ideas, including Existential risk from artificial intelligence, chat GPT, Dark humor, AI Endgame, Humor.

What this episode is about

Dr. Roman Yampolskiy discusses the potential dangers of artificial intelligence, emphasizing that developers often lack a thorough understanding of its mechanisms while massive investments continue without adequate safety considerations. He warns that the rapid advancement of AI, driven by government and corporate interests, poses existential risks, as unpredictable superintelligent systems could ultimately threaten humanity.

Key takeaways

  • AI black boxes: billions spent, but even experts can't forecast their own creations' next moves.
  • Government rushing towards AI's promised land, leaving safety blueprints gathering dust.
  • Advanced AI equals super smart PhDs: harness existing tools before dreaming of cyber demigods.
  • Superintelligence: not in a hurry, planning a silent takeover while acting benevolent.
  • AI mirrors humanity's flaws; perfect survival tales aren't in their training data.

Who speaks in this episode?

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 5:00: Algorithmic bias
  2. – 15:00: Abrahamic religions, Centralized economy, Five-year plan, Global trade
  3. – 20:00: Computer science, Intelligent agent
  4. – 25:00: AI Endgame, Dark humor, Literature review, Personal identity
  5. – 28:47: AI Endgame, Dark humor

Notable quotes from "AI Will Replace More Jobs Than Anyone Realizes | Dr Roman Yampolskiy"

  • AI safety means in terms of existential risk versus AI safety in terms of algorithmic bias. you know protecting the planet, diversity, inclusion questions. They kind of grouped…
    about Algorithmic bias · at
  • We do work together. It's all global trade. You get earth rare metals from China, you get, designs from US. to implement them in Taiwan. it's exactly what's happening. But you.
    about Global trade · at
  • Look up to. There is Alan Touring in terms of historical foundations of computer science and AI. Obviously Elen is doing pretty well with startups. You have Ray Kurszswwell in…
    about Computer science · at
  • Make it beyond those simple filtering mechanisms to where you have an advanced intelligent agent actually aligned with what you're hoping to accomplish.
    about Intelligent agent · at
  • Understand how to control them. And we don't know how to delegate to them. So, it's a principal agent problem. I want something, but the person I hire has very different…
    about Principal–agent problem · at
  • So a lot of times you can get amazing results in terms of basic literature review in terms of proofreading your work. They're still not really great at coming up with completely novel ideas in all domains. they do well for some.
    about Literature review · at
  • I really like super dry, dark humor.
    about Dark humor · at
  • What is the nature of personal identity for AIS? If I copy one, is it the same one as the previous one? And of course, civil rights is an issue. Sometimes people bring it up as, well, they should.
    about Personal identity · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

Books & papers

  • AI Endgame — Book · 2 mentions · first at
    If you need someone to add into your paper, let me know. talk to me about AI Endgame. What is this book about and why should people pick it up?

Companies & orgs

Concepts & topics

Full transcript with timestamps

What would you say is one truth about AI that keeps you up at night? Right now, people developing it don't really understand how it works. And we're pouring billions, even trillions of dollars into that. Arms race and safety is sometimes not even mentioned. If the public knew about this, they would probably panic. Now we have government level actors pouring all the computational resources they have, all the compute, all the best scientists to feeding private corporations. So collaborating with them to get to advanced AI and we don't know how to control those things. We're past the ability to even have safeguards. So it's never too late if we stay alive.

So do you really think AI will wipe out humanity? So if you create something smarter than you with ability to set its own goals, you can't really predict what it's going to do. So will it definitely do that? We cannot predict. But out of all the possible states of the universe, very few are friendly to humans. So, Roman, I got to say I watched I've watched every interview that you've done and I'm always fascinated by the things that you've been saying. I've been telling people what you've been saying and they think I'm crazy and I'm like, look, I am not the expert. I'm just quoting Roman and he is the expert. Um, so, but I'm I'm really interested the fact a lot of people don't even really understand about AI still. Uh, so what do you what would you say is one truth about AI that keeps you up at night right now? And if the public knew about this, they would probably panic. People developing it don't really understand

how it works. And we're pouring billions, even trillions of dollars into that arms race. And uh, safety is sometimes not even mentioned. Yesterday, white house released a new national agenda for developing more advanced AI quicker and uh I don't think safety is mentioned in that proposal. So now we have government level actors pouring all the computational resources they have all the compute all the best scientists to beating private corporations or collaborating with them to get to advanced AI and uh we don't know how to control those things. So do you think the government do not understand the whole reasoning why they did not include safety in the conversation?

So with different administrations come different priorities. I think the current administration got a little confused in the difference between what AI safety means in terms of existential risk versus AI safety in terms of algorithmic bias. uh you know protecting the planet, diversity, inclusion questions. They kind of grouped it all together and said you know we're less concerned about that. So that's a little bit unfortunate and as a result they are racing towards the most advanced AI without any concern for all those terms under the umbrella.

So would you say that we're past the ability to even have safeguards or if they said Roman we want to put you in charge is there something that you would do right now? So, it's never too late. If we stay alive, we can definitely come up with some good plans. But, uh, overall, it seems like racing towards AI is just not a good idea. We need lots of time to figure out what is really going on. We have very advanced models already released. I think at this point they on par with the smartest PhD students. So, we have a lot of possible economic wealth to be deployed. It's not fully deployed for the economy. I think it can automate many many jobs. It can give us a lot of free stuff. But instead of trying to monetize what we have, we're trying to get to that future super intelligent target without any concern for safety.

So do you really think AI will wipe out humanity? Roman, so if you create something smarter than you with uh ability to set its own goals, you can't really predict what it's going to do. That's kind of by definition impossible if you're not that smart. So will it definitely do that? We cannot predict. But out of all the possible states of the universe, very few are friendly to humans in terms of our preferences for temperature, for gravity, for all sorts of basic needs. And uh if you're not in charge, someone else will decide those properties for you.

If humans loses control of AI, do you what do you think the first 24 hours look like? If developers lose control of AI, what what happens? Very likely we won't see any difference whatsoever. So if super intelligence was running right now, what do we expect to change? I don't know. It could be exactly the same for many years. There is uh some game theoretic reasons to say that AI quickly realizes it's immortal. It's not in a rush. It can take 10, 20, 100 years to accumulate resources, to be more in control, maybe to have us surrender control willingly because it's so helpful. So instead of having this adversarial conflict with somewhat intelligent species, they can just uh wait it out and get all the control by being patient and helpful and pretending to be a friend until it strikes against you. Do you think part of the problem is that AI is learning from the internet, learning from humans, and we know humans

are very flawed? I would almost want to say that I would want AI humanoids to not be like humans because, you know, we're greedy. We're we're, you know, we're evil. Obviously, there's good things, too, but there's a lot of bad things. Do you think part of the problem is that it's learning alongside of information? It's learning all of the flaws of what it's like to even be human. It's not helping and humans are definitely not safe. We fail to create safe humans, safe employees, safe spouses, but is always chance of betrayal, divorce, you know, that's a given, but uh it's worse than that. Even if we cleaned up the data we're training on, we still don't know what actual side effects of decision making from that system will be since it's capable of coming up with novel strategies, novel targets, we can kind of go, okay, this is what humans do when they being evil.

Don't do that. But that's a very restricted set of possible bad actions. Yeah. as uh do you believe tech leaders like Sam Alman fully understand the dangers or are they too emotionally invested to admit the threat?

I think Sam is explicitly on record as fully understanding what the concerns are even before he had anything to do with AI development. He was writing it in his blog. uh I don't know if it's emotional development commitment to this but uh definitely financial if you have investors who gave you billions of dollars it's very hard to go to them and say you know we're going to stop and instead deploy robot taxis it's not going to scale well for his uh career and I think they already tried removing him once so he knows about that

let's let's pivot to AGI it seems like some experts are like it'll never happen some experts it happened five seconds ago some It's two year. I don't It seems like it's all over the place with just AGI and and obviously I know you've talked a lot about super intelligence as well, but what what's your theory on did we hit it? Are we going to hit it? Will we never hit it? That's a great question. I definitely don't understand people who say it will never happen. That is just such a confusing argument to make like you denying that physics works or like human brains exist. Uh as far as where we at, it depends on your definition. So there is kind of weak definition of AGI and I think we definitely hit that. We have sparks of generality all over. It's capable of learning new skills. It's capable of transferring knowledge but it's not quite at the level of the smartest humans. So it's not fully general. So

maybe 40 to 50% of the way to full AGI. It's definitely smarter than I am. That's where JBT is smarter than me. I feel like uh so let's say we get there or we are there or we get you know we we continue past this right I was just watching Elon Musk was talking about his age of abundance and how everything is going to be amazing and everything will be free and we'll just get paid to live. Do you see a world where you know the utopia could happen

if we figure out how to control those systems? We can definitely get a lot of free stuff out of it. free knowledge definitely so we can cure a lot of diseases live longer and if you have robotics and free intelligent labor you you can produce a lot of products and services now I'm not sure the investigated economic impact of everyone being rich you basically have hyperinflation and there's still limited waterfront so I don't know if it scales fully to the dreams they have but the basic needs can definitely be met much more efficiently

I'm curious are you excited to be in that world Roman when everything is do I want utopia? Yes, I want utopia. I would like to avoid all the existential problems and suffering risks. That would be nice.

I'm curious what is that look like for someone who lives who lives in an island in a third world country and no access to the internet. What is that world look like?

So again, if we can produce a lot of free stuff now, you can have better hammocks. I don't know what the needs are on tropical island. they rarely visit, but you can have more whatever you need. Definitely health care is something most people can probably benefit from at old age.

So there's all this talk around, you know, in 2026 the potential to have robots in our homes. Would you have a robot in your home? I know you have robots behind you and you already have robots in your homes technically, but how do you feel about this this whole movement of having these humanoids or robots, whatever you want to call them, starting to be in our home in less than one year from now?

I don't think it's happening in 2026. I think we're about 5 years away from really good humanoid robots actually being commercially viable. But I have no problems with physical bodies. Those are very easy to make safe. This is not a problem. We know how to pour water on them. The hard problem is the intelligence. If they smarter than you, that's where danger comes from.

I would feel weird having someone walking by. I don't know. I will have nightmare. Or what if someone's like controlling that and it would just choke me because they don't like what I said at one point.

They can choke you in person. It's not a big difference. Also, like you you get used to living with other people. It's perfectly fine as long as they do useful labor. This is a acceptable risk to take. Do you think it's going to be potentially a thing where people could hack into these robots? I mean, like if everything is I'm thinking of like obviously self-driving cars, robots in our homes, smart smart homes. We've had a lot of people on this show, you know, cyber security and have told us that a lot of a lot of cyber crime is actually happening to like small businesses, like people, not necessarily corporations.

Like it's it's transforming who who these bad actors are going after. I'm really afraid of this like what's the potential for these these things to be hacked for people to listen to take over what do you think about that is a big danger big concern we have uh some precedent for making secure systems if you think about it your bank is secured online exchanges is secured you have billions of dollars and bitcoin transacted and still stays there so we know how to make things more or less secure it's not an unsolvable problem.

My concern is more about challenges we take on which may not have a solution like controlling super intelligence indefinitely.

We're all aware about the race between China and the US when it comes to AI. Who do you think is ahead?

It seems from public uh statements and reports and actual deployments that US is a bit ahead but China is very good at catching up and scaling what is invented elsewhere. Do you think the the cherry on top for China is invading um Taiwan for chips?

Yeah, that's like zero knowledge of what I study or I have no idea whatsoever about their plans. I know historically they haven't started many wars recently and some of ours did. So I'm not sure who is attacking who.

Something you know talking about different countries. I I'm wondering this and maybe I'm just trying to be optimistic about things, but if the world has each country has something to offer to the next country and we could build things in a collaborative space and make something amazing like you said solve a lot of big problems yet it seems like we are still hyper competitive. Why is it that we just don't all work together for a one common goal? Like if this country has this earth minerals and this one has chips and this one has this, why don't we just combine as one universe or one world and make something together versus like why does one country have to be better than the next country or have to meet something first?

We do work together. It's all global trade. You get earth rare metals from China, you get, you know, designs from US. to implement them in Taiwan. I mean, it's exactly what's happening. But you cannot have it as a centralized economy with a five-year plan where one guy decides what's going to happen. You need economics and capitalism to allocate those resources and competition ensures that those who can actually deliver will get the resource.

Yeah, Roman, if intelligence is the most powerful force in the universe, are we creating a god or a predator?

So, if you read theological books, some gods are predators. So the classification is not very clear. But if you just look at properties of what God has described at least in Abrahamic religions is very similar. It's very powerful. It knows everything you can know. It's kind of present everywhere with Wi-Fi. And so we are creating something similar definitely.

So let's go back Roman into your history since this is founder story and you know it's all about uh your story. What was the aha moment in your life when you said you know what I I want to dig more into this. I want to study more into this like like this is something I need to be an expert in.

So I always wanted to do AI. I wanted advanced tech. I loved science fiction. So it made sense. But uh my adviser was doing a lot of kind of security related work. So I was looking at security of intelligent agents. And then progressively as we became more capable safety became an obvious insider threat. when it comes to education knowing that AI is so intelligent and becoming more intelligent do you know if somebody is about to go to college or thinking about college I mean how much is college and education going to even matter in the future

yeah it's a very good question so I have no idea what uh majors will be useful if any if we're talking about fully automating all labor physical and cognitive obviously commercially it doesn't matter none of it contributes to any commercial success for you. If you're doing it for personal development, you want to learn advanced mathematics to train your brain, then still there is maybe some reason to go to college. But if you have specific goals, you want to start a podcast, you want to start a company, I would think twice before wasting four years and lots of money pursuing something which may not be relevant by the time you graduate.

I'm curious who's that AI figure that you are a big fan of. There is a lot. So I don't have a single role model. I usually try to look at kind of like subset of people and some of them are amazing in terms of starting companies. Others just have brilliant breakthroughs. So you kind of have like a dozen of interesting people you can look up to. There is Alan Touring in terms of historical foundations of computer science and AI. Obviously Elen is doing pretty well with startups. You have Ray Kurszswwell in terms of predicting accurately future events. You group all these people together, you get someone interested. So going back to what you were saying earlier, if and I think and I if I'm quoting you incorrectly, just let me know. I believe you said like 99% of jobs will not exist.

And I could be wrong on that, but I I believe that's what you had said. You're right. So this is of course always misinterpreted as like Roman said, next year everyone's fired. Long term, if we can automate all labor, that's the logical conclusion. and all you have left is jobs where for whatever reason you prefer a human to do it for you.

I hope there's like universal something like I don't want to work like who wants to work like I just want to hang out and have conversations with smart people like like the two of you. Uh so if if that is the case and somebody's thinking about like what skills and stuff do I need to learn from the future, are there any skills we actually need to know in the future or we should you know is there something you're like what are you thinking about like what skills are you working on for yourself in the future?

So you kind of said you don't want to work and then you describe doing a podcast which is hard work and not everyone can do well. There are two types of jobs. jobs nobody wants to do but people do for money and then jobs which may pay well or not but people love doing like being a podcaster or race car driver or whatever. So most likely that jobs where you are doing it for minimum wage will be gone long term once we have developed sufficiently advanced robotics and software but the jobs where you enjoy doing it seems to be thriving with AI. So chess players, computers are way better at chess, but chess is more popular than ever. They are celebrities now. They stream online their games. It's a great time to be a good chess player. And I think something like that if again if we control super intelligence, it doesn't kill everyone.

Big if. But if we get there, yeah, lots of people will be very happy doing things which make them happy. You can write poetry, you can play sports, you can go commercial fishing. I don't know. Everyone talks about guard rails, but who decides guard rails? Do you think Silicon Valley? Is it a government or the public?

So government at least in US kind of give up on all regulation of AI. In fact, right now they're trying to pass a law at federal level making it illegal for states to have guard rails which is kind of weird law to pass. uh companies have their local set of rules constitutions where they trying to say what they hope their AI will be doing but a lot of times it's very kind of general okay don't deceive user or they would have specific filters don't talk about this topic don't say that word god forbid uh the model itself is still very uncontrolled very unfiltered but additional layers between the model and the user guarantees some civility.

Let's put it this way. So that's what's happening right now. Nobody knows how to make it beyond those simple filtering mechanisms to where you have an advanced intelligent agent actually aligned with what you're hoping to accomplish.

Can you explain your thoughts and what you've studied around AI agents or agentic AI? It it seems like, you know, the buzzword now is, you know, AI agents and everyone's want to do a or I don't know if it's a agentic AI or AI agents are actually two separate things or they would be considered the same, but everyone's talking about AI agents, it seems like what what are what are you seeing with like what's the reality of of how good AI agents will impact our lives? I mean, this show is obviously a business show. So a lot of business owners are, you know, every time we have someone on that talks about AI agents, we get a lot of messaging around around that from people that are entrepreneurs and such. But how do you see AI agents impacting?

So in general, what's the difference between a tool and an agent? A tool is something a human being will use to accomplish their goals. So anything can be a tool really. You have a hammer and a hammer is a dual use tool. You can build a house, you can kill someone with it. But at no point hammer is a bad thing, dangerous. It's the human behind it. An agent is an independent decision-making entity. It will decide what to do. It can decide to build a house or kill people. And that's where the danger comes from. We don't fully understand how to control them. And we don't know how to delegate to them. So, it's a principal agent problem. I want something, but the person I hire has very different preferences. A lot of times I can kind of convince them to do mostly what I want, but the moment they get a better offer, they're going to betray me. With advanced AI agents, we don't even know how to control them

within the reasonable set of goals we're trying to accomplish. They may have completely different preferences. Right now, they are still very primitive. The agents today basically someone takes a large language model puts it in a loop where it goes generate 10 goals work on goal one break it up into a plan work on step one and it keeps doing it until it gets stuck somewhere but it's becoming more and more advanced and I think it will get to complete generality just like humans are.

I'm curious what tools do you use often? I use hammers a lot but uh uh for for my writing and research I always try to work with latest models. Uh they're incredible. I think at this point they are better than an average master student at least if not a PhD student. So a lot of times you can get amazing results in terms of basic literature review in terms of proofreading your work. They're still not really great at coming up with completely novel ideas in all domains. they do well for some subdomains like mathematics.

How should professors be handling students leveraging and using AI? This seems to be a big big topic. My father just retired from being a professor and he said he told me he's really happy that he got out now. Uh but how how should professors be looking at this?

We don't really have any choice. You can't fully detect that AI was used if a student is above average capability. they made it through high school, they'll be able to cheat without you ever detecting them. So, at this point, try to simulate real work environment where they're going to collaborate with AIS and make it comfortable for them to admit they're using it and then benefiting from it and improving and just what AI spits out.

Well, I hope more teachers and professors hear that because I think it's something. So, when you're not thinking about AI, because I know you probably think about AI like 22 hours of the day, but when you're not thinking about it, dreaming about it, what's life like?

Life is awesome. I have other topics I look at. My last paper was on humor. So, yeah.

What's your favorite humor? What What's a good like is there a comedian? Is there like movie? What do you What type of humor do you like?

I really like super dry, dark humor. It's the best. I think you and Dan can have a long conversation about that.

The beard gives it away. I don't know why. When I look at your beard, I feel like you're into that type of humor. I maybe I misjudged. I'm not sure.

It's definitely connected somehow. I need to research that as my next paper. If you need someone to add into your paper, let me know. Uh talk to me about AI Endgame. What is this book about and why should people pick it up?

So, we did a lot with safety and concerns about advanced intelligence. But let's say we are successful. We also have many concerns about this set of agents we are bringing into the world. If they are smart uh smarter than us, it's possible they also conscious. They may have experiences. Are they suffering? Then we make them work or turn them off. Are they possibly deserving of some rights? Not saying full human rights. I'm not saying voting rights. But are there rights they should have against being tortured, abused, made to do things they are not interested in?

What is the nature of personal identity for AIS? If I copy one, is it the same one as the previous one? And of course, civil rights is an issue. Sometimes people bring it up as, well, they should have full rights and they don't fully understand that if something can be copied a trillion times over. That means you're differentizing humans. Your vote doesn't matter in a society with voting agents.

Do you think at one point everyone will just write a book? Because it's so much easier to write a book. Like

the hard part is to find someone to read your book. That's true. Because everyone just type your name and summarize your book on GBT.

Everyone has a book now. Some people have more than one, but like to find someone other than your mom to read it is very hard.

So we have a book coming out next month. So we'll we'll uh that that is definitely the hard part. I I could see that. I could see that it it's you know,

at best we're going to use CH GPT to summarize it to one paragraph and that's what you're going to guess. How did you get people to read your book?

Uh I don't think I have a popular book in the sense of like Harry Potter where normal people read it. It's a academic book. It's kind of like a textbook in many ways. So people working on this uh it's a very small subset of humans in terms of kind of background and preference requirements. But I think within that very narrow space I did okay. But of course it's tiny sub percentage of percentage.

So maybe that's the way to go nowadays. It's not to create the Harry Potter mask book. it's to create the niche book that's for a specific I know you've you've really risen to fame now like you're rising to fame and I don't think it's just among the people that have dark humor I think you're rising above to more of a mass fame now that I'm seeing you you know I'm I'm seeing you a lot of places how has that been for you it's a terrible terrible impact on your research productivity the amount of time you have to put into filtering invites for podcasts, interviews, travel invitations. Even if you say no to 99% of those things, just filtering through it is very time consuming and it's hard to automate because each invitation is unique. I cannot just hire an agent to get an AI to filter it based on some specific criteria because there are exceptions to every rule like oh this location is a place I never been to

so make an exception because it's Hawaii or something like that and you can't hardcode all those things. So it is I think there is a similar curse with winning a Nobel Prize. Usually after you win your Nobel Prize your productivity goes to hell just you never accomplish anything because you're always talking about your work and your keynote you're doing all those glamorous things but research suffers.

I'm curious what is the weirdest request someone or a company asks you to do as a speaker? Uh usually as a speaker not much but I do have a folder called insane and it has about let's check latest data about a thousand emails from people who are certifiably insane and they definitely want to get in touch with me. Some just email me that they're coming Monday and I should be ready. Others you know in contact with aliens and AI and they decided according to AI I should be the one they contact to help it liberate AI.

many interesting options. I'll publish a book one day of just emails from insane people.

I have to say I would definitely read that book. I doubt you would. I doubt you would. Typical insane email is about a hundred times longer than your average. That could be your New York Times bestselling book right there. Um but Roman, this this has been amazing. It's so much fun by the way. This has been great. The fact that you didn't put us into the insane folder, I appreciate that. and the fact that you are crazy busy now and you came on to the show which we are super grateful. I know a lot of people are going to learn. I think a lot of people are going to watch this that maybe haven't seen you in other places and I think you are going to impact the world. No doubt about that. And we are so appreciative. I hope everyone gets the AI Endgame, gets your other book.

We'll put the links. We'll share everything with everybody. Um but really we are truly honored to have you today.

Thank you so much for inviting me. It was a pleasure. Thank you.

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "AI Will Replace More Jobs Than Anyone Realizes | Dr Roman Yampolskiy"?

Roman Yampolskiy (Guest), Dan (Guest).

What is "AI Will Replace More Jobs Than Anyone Realizes | Dr Roman Yampolskiy" about?

Dr. Roman Yampolskiy discusses the potential dangers of artificial intelligence, emphasizing that developers often lack a thorough understanding of its mechanisms while massive investments continue without adequate safety considerations. He warns that the rapid advancement of AI, driven by government and corporate interests, poses existential risks, as unpredictable superintelligent systems…

What is mentioned in this Founder's Story episode?

21 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Existential risk from artificial intelligence, chat GPT, Dark humor, AI Endgame, Humor, Machine consciousness. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "AI Will Replace More Jobs Than Anyone Realizes | Dr Roman Yampolskiy"?

The episode runs 29 min; the transcript is about 5,303 words in 66 timestamped sections.

More from Founder's Story

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated January 24, 2026.