The AI Job Disaster Congress Refuses to Fix

Last week I interviewed Gina Romando, 40th Secretary of Commerce and 75th Governor of Rhode Island, in the fifth live episode of on with Tara Swisher that I recorded at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C. In each episode I posted timely discussions on AI, policy, copyright, and intellectual property, and more as part of the Hopkins Bloomberg Center's Discovery series. Listen to my conversation with Gina Romando in this week's episode

and stay tuned for more live discussions to come from our partnership with Johns Hopkins University.

“What is the problem on the federal level? Why couldn't the Biden administration get this done?”

I mean, like most I roll for people listening at home. This is the podcast you can't see my fingers. Now you can now. We're not podcasts or now video. Hi everyone from New York Magazine in the box media podcast network. This is on with Caros Wisher and I'm Caros Wisher. My guest today is Gina Romando, the U.S. Secretary of Commerce under the Biden administration and former Governor of Rhode Island. During Gina's tenure as Secretary she held a

crucial role in the passage of two huge pieces of legislation, the Chips Act and the Infrastructure

Investment and Jobs Act. Now Gina has been turning her efforts to getting the American workforce ready for AI with a nonpartisan organization. She co-founded with former Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb. It's really important to talk to Gina. She's one of these sort of quiet, competent people that

“always end up doing a lot of big things in ways that are critically important. I think the”

Chips Act and the Infrastructure Bill were very important and she's someone who actually appeals to people across party lines and she makes an effort to do so in an incredibly competent way. What she's talking about is really important and of course she may be a presidential candidate too. So it's important to listen to how she thinks about these things and of course AI and jobs is an important issue for the American voters. This episode was recorded live at the Johns Hopkins

University Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C. as part of their discovery series. Our expert question today comes from Chiliana Stern. So stick around.

I've wanted to get you on forever as you know and here we are. Finally. I'm very excited.

All right Secretary Gina Romando. Gina, thank you for coming on on and thanks to the Johns Hopkins University which currently is celebrating its 150th year. If you didn't know Hopkins is the American's first research university and I'm glad to be back at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C. So let's get started. We've a lot to cover on AI. This is something I know you taught you were one of the first people to talk about this as commerce secretary and in other

places that I recall hearing about. But I want to get a sense of where you are and what's coming. So on a scale of 1 to 10, how worried are you for the United States about the rapid acceleration of what we're seeing and you know Colin the stuff you had done as commerce secretary and maybe as the governor Rhode Island which I think the coolest job ever but it is the best job and the in the governor is the best job of American politics by thanks. Awesome.

Well first of all thank you for having me. I'm a big fan and it's fun for me to be here.

I'd say you know nine pretty high. Wow. Yeah. So and here's why. Okay. You're saying concerns. Yeah. Yeah. Here's why. Because I don't think the country has the laws, the institutions, the you know we're not ready. Commerce secretary. It's an interesting job. Your half trade minister and half tech minister in the U.S. systems. So why was the AI minister?

“Right. You also get a sense. Right. And sense is and fish and if you want to know anything about”

red snapper catchment on your woman. But if you were to say to me also, hey Gina, on a scale of one to ten, how excited are you about it's potential, I'd also say it. Right. Like I think it's going to be fantastic to accelerate research, cure diseases, make life easier. I'm really bullish. But what I see now is and you said it a little bit before, you know I see the

particularly among certain kinds of people, white color workers, white color workers,

women and clerical jobs, entry-level workers, and we are just not ready for it. We don't unemployment insurance was created a hundred years ago. It hasn't changed. We don't have support infrastructure incentives for companies to retrain and redeploy very good retraining initiatives. So I worry about that and that's my new initiative is focused on. I'm worried about the national security implications. We don't have any laws on the books right now,

“or regulations. That should worry everyone. We need standards. What is a safe model?”

Then we need to, you know, the government ought to test these models before they release. And they have to pass these standards. And then if they don't pass, there's going to be consequences. So I worry about that. I worry about child safety. You know, I worry so much of a mother to kids, like I worry about that. So on the one hand, I'm excited. I don't actually think the technologies the problem. I think we have a politics

problem in institutions problem and we better get our act together fast so we can meet the challenge. So talk about that politics problem. What is the problem? Obviously, this is a group of people who figured out that you give money and you get to be the front of the line here. You don't get regulation, whether it's in crypto, whether it's in anything else. So talk a little bit about where we are. That's the case we need that. How do we get to those kind of policies, especially around the workforce,

that are critical? Yeah. So, you know, as you might imagine, I have a lot of views on the matter.

Money has always been a problem in politics. You know, 50 years ago, people were complaining about money in politics. It is out of control. But it's not just tech. Okay, let's be honest. It is you know, financial services. It's every regulated industry, farm off financial services, the amount of money that is spent to buy influence is broken. It's a broken system. So, you know, you can say this is a problem with these tech billionaires and I agree. But honestly,

we have to fix these systems. We need more transparency. You know, Citizens United was a terrible decision. People often say to me, if you could do one thing to fix American politics, what would

“it be? I would say this, Citizens United. Yeah, you have to find a way to get money to get reduced.”

Then how then do you get policy around jobs? Because, as you said, this job juggernaut is coming. Yeah. You know, it was really interesting because, as I noted before, the tech people said, we're very do me. Like, oh, yeah, jobs are going to be replaced and suddenly they're changing their tune not. So, I think they're first, they were telling the truth the first time. How do you then get good policy into place? Because, every day Americans are using AI in their daily lives,

and their jobs. And, but the anxiety has never been higher among citizens. A survey that's

summer from Reuters that had a half of Americans fear that AI could put them out of the job. I don't know how you feel because, according to Boston Consulting Group, 10 to 15 percent of jobs could be eliminated by AI as soon as five years from now. So, I, my focus in my new organization,

“it's called Razus. We're working with them through governors. Governors, in a bipartisan way.”

So, my new organization is non-profit, non-political working with governors of both parties. They will take action. They can take action. And we are obsessed with making sure America can lead the global AI competition without leaving workers behind. That's our single mission. And in order to do that, we got to get innovating. We need new forms of training. But more than training, training isn't going to get us through this. We need incentives for companies to do the redeployment,

or disincentives to just hit the easy button with layoffs. We're working with Governor West Moore in Maryland, probably some people here from Maryland, to start a year of service. Like, one group that I'm really worried about is young people. I have a 22 year old and a 19 year old. You know, they're stressed. What are my jobs going to be? So, in Maryland, we're going to fund and the governor will run in Maryland, a year of service for any Marylander, a young person,

interested in a job. And we're going to put them in jobs in companies in areas with a shortage. Clinical health care work may be teaching or teachers assistance. That's innovative. I hope it works. I hope other states do it and I hope one day Congress gets its act together and puts it in national legislation. I'm very worried about, like, honestly, middle-aged, clerical workers,

this economy and, you know, every middle-aged woman who has had that same job for 20 years,

you say, "Sorry, you're out of work. You're 55. That does be my age. You're 55. No more work for you. No. How about wage insurance? How about we let that person get another job if she gets a job

“at a lower rate? The government tops up her pay. How about some kind of transition support?”

How about job sharing? Let's go. Let's get creative. Listen, right now, you may know this. You may not. In the United States, if you lose your job, you really get unemployment insurance. That's pretty much all there is. It's a flawed program in a hundred different ways.

If you start a business, why you're collecting UI, chances are you get kicked off of UI because

you're not really looking for a job. That's kind of dumb. I think, especially if you think, as I do, that AI could unleash a lot of new digital entrepreneurial. Everyone knows the majority of jobs created in America's economy is from new small companies. AI potentially could increase that. Make it go up. One idea very quickly that we're going to experiment with is we're going to pull all the levers that wants to make this work. A governor will say, in our state, if you want to start

your own business, you could continue to get unemployment insurance and you can get a new thing called

self-employment assistance, and then we raise us, are going to fund in that state, a start-up

accelerator, and help those people to start a business. So is any of this going to work? I'm not sure. But we've got to try it. We've got to stop admiring the problem and get out there and do some work. Why have everyone is sort of saying the doom is coming? It's sort of like the flood is coming. The flood is coming. The flood is, you know, and no one's building an arc anywhere.

“I mean, that's what I'm trying to say. No, I understand that. But what is the problem on the federal level?”

Why couldn't the Biden administration get this done? Why couldn't? I mean, like, almost I roll for people listening at home. This is the podcast, you can't see my figure. Now you can now. We're not podcasting our video. We have changed. We're television now. Congress doesn't get things done. Right? Congress doesn't get shit done. You're not functioning. So in the absence of a functioning bipartisan Congress, I'm taking my message to governors.

Who I think will get some things done. If this plays out in the way that something and some number of years from now, we start to see, you know, pretty high levels of unemployment, my real hope, dream ambition, whatever, is we will buy, raise us between now and then. We'll have some pilots around the country that are working. Some of these interventions that are allowing people to land jobs, transition from one job to another, not get fired. And that could become

the basis for bipartisan federal legislation. We'll be back in a minute. With a rubber meets the road a lot of this. And I do, I just got and I talked about this today on on pivot. Data centers have become how people are expressing their disgust over AI, really. And there were flashpoint in New York, Governor Kathy Hockel hit pause on new data centers in her state until she didn't say none. She said we're going to figure out how to work this out correctly.

We're going to give it a year. Many people now it's up to 50% are approving of this about 20%. All right. Do you think the approach of moratorium as a policy answer to push back on that ordinary citizens in Utah, they're saying in Virginia, same thing? So, but talk about that because it's become, it to me, there's nothing wrong with creating data centers if they're done in cooperation with the community. Correct. Yeah. I agree. You just said it. Do it in cooperation. Don't go

“where you're not wanted. Listen, people are anxious for a reason. This is what I believe. Just like”

everyone here, you get anxious if things are happening to you, making your life worse, making your bills go up and you can't do anything about it. And that's how people feel about data centers.

want commerce. However, in Virginia, when there weren't the appropriate safeguards, people's bills,

“the electricity bills went up. That's not okay. So, I think you have to say to these companies,”

yes, we want your data centers, but do it right. Do it right. Like, you got to bring and figure out your own energy. Electricity bills cannot go up. Same thing with water. You got to recycle the water. The water bills can't go up. You're not going to get a tax break to do this. There are ways to do it right. Take care of the workers that you employ. Take care of the area. By the way, I don't want to be an apology for any tech company, but I think if you said these are

the rules, they would probably follow the rules, because they need to open these data centers.

So, why didn't they go in the first place? Because they have to be made to. They have to be made, too.

Right. You know, they have to be made, too. If you, if I were still the governor, Rhode Island doesn't have any open space, but if I were still the governor, but theoretically, if we had space

“for a data center, I would say, yeah, you can come here under these conditions.”

One of the things, when you talk about job loss, you often talk about your father lost his job, but the bull of a watch factory in the 1980s when the company moved manufacturing to China. With air adoption, we're walking into, as I said, something faster. Anything else that's coming, talk about that transition. And as you said, what do we get wrong in that transition?

And this, that was happening in a much slower pace than what's happening now.

So, I use that a lot as an analogy, you know, to what we're facing now. In that case, every company, every manufacturing company, they put their blinders on. They focused exclusively on efficiency and hands profit from moving labor to China. They did better for a period of time, except it really destroyed the country in many ways, you know, because the quantum quote losers, like my dad, they were concentrated. It was non-college-educated man in a handful of states.

And that brought us, I think that, so the seeds for a lot of this dysfunctional politics and anger, and such that we see today. And the thing of it is, it didn't have to be that way.

“We could have had a planned intentional transition, and that's what I would like to,”

that's why I'm doing racism. I want to play my part in having a planned intentional transition. By the way, the same was true for the Chips Act, right? Like, of those of you who don't know one of my achievements, and the Biden administration, we passed the Chips Act because all all-ming effecturing of leading edge chips left this country and all went to Taiwan, all of it. And we woke up one day and said, my god, national security risk.

And we spent hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money to fix that by incentivizing Taiwanese and Korean companies to come back. Why didn't we have the foresight to say, hold on a minute, if we allow every stitch of chip manufacturing to go to Taiwan, we're going to wake up one day and be a less safe country. So if you were to say to me, hey, Gina, what's the biggest risk of AI? And I know a lot about China and I know a lot about everything I went through. It's this job's

disruption. Leading to a full-on train of our democracy and political institutions, which I argue is not in the interest of any tech company. It's not in the interest of any company. I don't know a single company benefited from mass unrest, writing in the streets, sky high unemployment. So get in the boat, not don't wait for that to happen. Get in the boat today, have a plan transition because the fact of the matter is it's in everyone's industry. Do you think they're serious about that? Do you

see a concern from tech companies that may be causing this damage? You know, look, so I'm putting a I put a big coalition of companies together, including tech companies. We have a couple does and so we'll see. I'm given them a benefit of the doubt, you know, we have competitors working together and so we have to try. At the end of the day, I, you know, this is all going to take law regulations and such. But I do think they're worried, although even a lot of them who are

raising the alarm bell, like a warning isn't a solution. You know what I mean? Okay, warning, what are we doing about it? How, and I don't, I will not just put all the blame or responsibility at the foot of AI companies, right? It's every American company implementing AI. I refuse to believe there's not a way to use AI, invent AI, lead the world in AI, and implement it in a way

figure it out. So each episode we get a part of on the podcast, we get an expert question. Here's

yours from Joanna Stern. Hi, I'm Joanna Stern, a tech journalist and the author of I am not a robot, my year using AI to do almost everything. My question for Gina Romando is this. I am currently reporting on a company that pays low-wage workers to wear head-mounted cameras and they're wearing these while doing their jobs, including house cleaning, so that the data can be used to train robots. In the short term, those workers earn money. In the long term, they may be helping train the very

robots that could replace them and we've seen this already in customer service. What do you say to someone who's literally training the AI that is going to create their replacement? Is retraining enough or do we need new economic models that let workers share and the value that they're helping create? No, retraining's not enough. Yeah, it's not enough. It's a piece of the puzzle. But, you know, I've already said, we need new forms of transition support, incentives for companies,

dis-incentives for mass layoffs. It is possible. Listen, it's a very dynamic economy.

Our economy is amazing. As much as we complain about it, I wouldn't want to be anywhere else in the

world. Most of the jobs in American economy today didn't exist 50, 60 years ago, and I really am still bullish that in some number of years, AI is going to create new jobs, new businesses that we can't now predict. But, you cannot pull the rug out from under 10s of millions of Americans quickly. You just can't. And think that we're still going to have an America that we want to live in. What, when you look at that picture, that is what's happening. I know. And I recall when I went down,

“when they were going to remember it was going to be Silicon Hall, or they were going to train”

former coal workers to be software workers, which, thank goodness, they didn't, because they would have been replaced by AI very quickly. But I got up and said, actually, none of you are going to be doing this. You didn't get the proper education. And by size AI is going to replace you. And FYI, as soon as the guy sitting next to me who is the coal mine owner, can use robots to replace you. He's going to do it in five seconds. And he was like, no, I'm not. I'm like, oh, you will. I know

you will. I'm absolutely certain. No question. In fact, you probably already bought one. And the workers, I thought I would sort of get the workers' management. They were appreciative, because I was like, you're not. They're going to replace you. So, how do you that, if you think of where jobs are going, what is the role of the human being? And the only saving grace is right now, tokens are more expensive than people. These are the tokens you use AI for, right? So, what kind of

jobs exist? Because this, this raise AI, you're doing with Eric Holcomb, who is the former governor of Indiana Republican. Yeah. And you're working with Maryland, Arkansas, Utah, and Connecticut.

“Very nice. Two, two, two, two, and two. Two, two. Two, two. Two, blue, two, bread, right?”

So, what jobs do you imagine happening there? So, I would say, it's hard to know right now. I do think that, like I said, I think they'll be a lot more startups. And you're already starting to see that, or it's, let me say, it's very early days, very early days. I think it's a little early to tell who's losing the job, who's gaining the job. You started to see the freak out with no one could get a job and software engineering, but now software engineering,

job openings are up again. My general view is this. Right now, people say, oh, it's a strong economy forish percent unemployment. You're going to get under the hood of that number. If you're working part-time in America, you're counted as employed. Even if you have a crappy 20-hour week job, we have a lot of people who are economically insecure, etc. So, I think the way I think about it is we have to focus on entry-level workers and help them get jobs. We got to put

pressure on companies. I want to get the first company to say, we are not cutting our analyst program.

So, we got to focus on that. We have to focus on these call center workers. They have skills. You cannot just fire them all. You got to figure out what they're good at and help them get

“another job. There's an economic theory, which I think is probably true, when you make stuff”

cheaper, people want more of it. So, if, because of AI, things are more productive, cheaper to make software, there may be more of it. All of which is to say, I don't think anyone knows where the new jobs are coming from, the companies need to know that, and I think we have to hold them to account. What jobs are you most worried about? You mentioned a few that we're worried about, which ones do you feel are safe in the economy? In that regard?

Well, I definitely think it's a timeline, you know, safe 50 years from now, who knows what the world's

right now. Technicians are in demand, fibers, technicians are in demand. Exactly. Clinical jobs like

“this, this is another thing. America's workforce system is pretty terrible, right? We just”

route everybody to college and hope it works out, and it mostly doesn't. It's true, 40% of people who ladies and gentlemen, she's running for president. Do the work out. You know, you might go to college in an event. We have shortages right now of physical therapists, all respiratory therapists, all kinds of political workers, AIDS. But yet, you go try to become a physical therapist. It's really hard. It's expensive. They're on enough spots and schools. It takes forever. So,

let's use the occasion of AI, which could be a crisis and start fixing these institutions. Get people where the jobs are. There are some, and let's get going. So, presumably, like a lot of technologies, they do cut jobs, and then they create them. That tends to be the historical. Many tech people will tell you that's not going to be the case this time. They do say that now they don't, because they're PR people. I don't either. But I do think that at some point,

you wouldn't have anticipated over the beginning of the internet age or Airbnb or any, like you wouldn't, you might have, but you wouldn't have necessarily. And what's interesting is some of that your funders of this raise us are tech companies, because they're obviously concerned. Can I, why would you take their money? I would take their money if it was to screw with them. I'm going with that. But you want to guard against reputation insurance with these companies,

presumably. For them, not you. Oh, for them. Yeah. You're going to have to ask them why they gave them money. I'm trying to solve a problem. I'm trying to come up with ways to get America through this transition. Be creative, innovate new things, and they're funding the effort. So I'm going to take them at their word, and we're going to see what works. But you know, they're not running the company. I am, it's not a profit, not a company. So I just feel that

it's time for action. It's time for, like I've said, let's try some new things. So say you were ahead of the president of the United States. For example. Yes. Yeah. I'd be refreshing change. Yes. I know it's

“what we have. What would be the, the important, what would be the first thing you would do here then,”

in this, you know, you help, you are very critical to this, the chip sack. What is, what kind of

scale, if the first thing you would do as a president in this area? Very first thing I would do. Besides taking the gold down, go ahead. Yeah. The gold, that's a funny story about that. No, go ahead. So, sorry, when I became governor, you, you get something called the Gorgia. Does anyone know what a Gorgia is? Anyway, it's like a giant piece of metal. It's a metal shield from the days when, you know, the governor commanded the militia in the colonies in Rhode Island.

Okay. And so I put my head down and they put this gigantic, like, 10-pound shield around me. And when my mom, whose hilarious and dry-witted, came up to the stage to, you know, congratulate me, she said, "Nice bling, G." So, when I think of gold, I think of the bling. Anyway.

“Okay, like, first, first. You should go give it to Trump and get something from him. Yeah.”

Yeah. Yeah. It's not gold, he wouldn't like it.

First thing these are his, what's in the White House, because I safety, safety, safety, safety.

You know, this stuff is pretty scary. You just did a program on Nicole Poerod, right? Cyber. Yeah. I don't want to freak anyone out, but these models get pretty scary pretty fast. Yes, they do. With respect to cybersecurity, you know, in the hands of bad actors who want to take down our hospital system, want to take down our military, want to take down our infrastructure. It's pretty scary, pretty fast. Creating an average people can do it.

It's not, it's not everyone's like the Chinese, I'm like the Chinese has no interest in our country, collapsing. Correct. Some crazy person with a nuclear weapon does. Totally completely. Bioterrorism, same thing. It's not that hard for quote unquote, "average people to create new pathogens," so I would be all over that. Like Erdes had standards, pre-deployment testing,

maybe even China. China has no interest in this stuff getting into the hands of terrorist

“or non-state actors. So I would be all over that right away. And then I would get very aggressive”

around the economics. You know, it's hard for me to sit here today, no exactly what I would do. But by the time I'm in that position, Razus, we'll have some great pilots and we're like scale, the good ones now. Seriously, I don't know. You need major overhaul of unemployment insurance. We need much more creative thinking about mid-career transition support and training. Companies need incentives. I mean, look, you might like CEOs, you might not. You might like

companies. You might not. It doesn't matter. We all respond to incentives. Your CEO,

you fire people today. Your stock price goes up tomorrow. It's an incentive. You hire a human being. You pay for that human being. Payroll taxes, health care benefits, etc. Use an agent. Free. That is not the right set of incentives. So at some point, maybe we have to tax AI usage by companies. We needed to do that. Yeah, I like that idea. When I was governor in Rhode Island, I put in a new tax on software as a service. Now, there's a lot of reasons

you might not like that. However, it raised money. And we may have to get to that place. If we find companies buying lots of tokens and firing lots of people and dumping them on the government to deal with. Don't pick them out of the government to deal with, Medicaid, food stamps, whatever. That's a free lunch that they shouldn't have. So we've got to figure out our way through it. We'll be back in a minute.

When you think about higher education, and I see now, your presidential run will be about college. What's it for? Here at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C., but how does higher education? I pay in a lot of bills for two kids. I feel your pain.

I feel you're paying on that. My son's at Michigan. Yeah, go go go. Those people never stop.

I know that. I get it. But calm down. I know. It's far the best. It is a disease. It is a disease. I know. I know. I know. Are you. I, I ran into a guy who was about 100 years old and I was wearing a Michigan dad hat. My son got me. And it's perfect. And this guy was literally, he was 100 years old. He's like, that was the best time in my life. And I'm like, any goes, go, lose, bet time in my life. I was like, you literally had the worst life ever that.

Yeah, that was the best time. That was the best time. Downhill, a lot to 21. That's a little sad. Anyway, sorry. Let's trash other universities while we're here at Johns Hopkins. But how does higher education fit into this university's incorporating AI into the curriculum, preparing students for jobs, you know, beyond, you know, creative cheating. Like what is important about this rampant? Yeah, it is. But again, so I have a lot of views on this. That might not surprise

“you. Look, I think we need many fewer colleges. There's about 4,000 in this country.”

Not you guys, you're awesome. But just like listen, there's 4 about 4,000 universities, this college is in this country. Many, many, many don't have great outcomes. It is expensive. 30 plus percent of kids who start college don't finish. That means they have a lot of debt, no degree, and maybe not a great job. And if you're a high school student when you graduate in this country, there's precious few other options. You go into the military. Awesome.

You can go into a labor union, do a trade job. Awesome. Otherwise, what do you do? You get routed to college or you get some low-aged service job. That's not okay. You know, why?

“That's one of the things that raises us. I want to build. Why does Germany and the UK and everything?”

Why can you get an apprenticeship program? Why don't we have apprenticeships in this country? Why don't we have training options that are shorter than a four-year college and set you up for a

doing big things. If you get lucky enough to go to Johns Hopkins, lucky enough to go to Notre Dame, Michigan, Great. It's great. But, you know, I'm not everyone can do that. I'm not an

“educator. I'm not going to pretend I am one. So you have to ask educators how to educate in the”

edge of AI. I would simply say this. Every employer I talk to and I talk to a lot all the time. They want people who show up on day one, who know how to use AI to do the job. Not AI to do the simple query. So where do you get the ROI from it? Yeah. Where exactly? You have to show up on the job knowing how to use AI for that job. So you guys in high red, you have to figure out how to

teach people still critical thinking and how to write. But you can't ignore AI. You have to teach

them those actual skills otherwise they will never get that job. I'm sure we have some Johns Hopkins students. What would you say to them and what to expect and how to prepare for their futures? Because they're really on the pointy end of all these changes especially some of them. I mean I also have older kids. My son is a cook so no robots aren't really good. I know he's doing great. I just had a delicious meal in San Francisco where he's at. And I know my other

“son thinks about it a lot because that's why he went into mechanical engineering because he knows”

energy. He did not go into software engineering on purpose because he saw AI coming. What would you say to what college you're going to write now of how to prepare themselves for people in the

audience that are students? So first of all I'll tell you I might have a 22 year old kid and

who has asked me about this yesterday. And I'll tell you what I said to her which is face the future with courage. Don't be afraid. It's going to be ups and downs face the future with courage. There are going to be jobs. I really do not buy into the there's going to be nothing for humans to do because the agents will do everything. There's a hundred reasons why that isn't true. And remember just because it model can do something in your lab in Silicon Valley doesn't mean

that it will and immediately displace everyone. I mean in 2006 Alan was saying we'll have no truck drivers by I think I don't know 2015 or something. He said a lot of things. He's that's my point

but these guys do you know we have 50,000 optimists prime robots in our homes right now?

I did not know he said that many years ago. Yeah. We don't have any. Yeah no exact. Do you know there'd be thousands of his self-driving taxis across the world? There are but they're not his perfect example. Perfect example. Did you know we're going to be on Mars last year? They were behind. We're behind. We're behind. But he is more than welcome to go to Mars. I tell this to my own kids. Look at where the jobs are open in the economy. Maybe you have your

heart set on big something. Maybe you can do that at another point if there's no home jobs right now. You know there's a lot there are open jobs now. Learn how to use the technology. Learn how to be an entrepreneur. Consider starting a business and most of all learn how to make good decisions,

“judgment, like staying calm under pressure. The only thing that's certain right now is we're in for”

a wild ride. So developing the skills of the resilience to get you through the wild ride and being scrappy and resourceful and self-starter. It's important to learn those skills because any individual job you plan for is going to change and so you just gotta get ready for that and not everyone can deal with change. Change is scary. If you were 21-year-old, you were 21-year-old. I wish. You will soon do that through technology. What job would you be doing right now?

You're going to get leaving college. What would you do? I try to start my own business. I would. You know, I think it's pretty cool that with AI, you can use AI to start a business on the cheap but not that many. There's so many problems to solve in the world. That's the other thing. Face the future with courage. Pick a problem and try to solve it. Like that's what I would do. What would be the problem? Oh gosh. Not enough cheesecake. What?

I don't know. You can make a better cheesecake. I don't have those skills. Something in healthcare. It's like there's too many people who don't get healthcare in this country. Like, man, bring down the cost. Bring down the cost of delivering healthcare. So everybody can get some. Yeah. All right. Anyway, thank you so much, Secretary.

I was supposed to quit and then I didn't know which one to call or so she's called me, Gina.

“Gina. Okay. All right. Thank you so much, Gina. And thank you. Maybe Ms. President something.”

And thank you again to the Johns Hopkins for hosting us here. Tonight at the Bloomberg Center,

we'll be back later this year for more conversations about the intersection of AI,

“innovation and public policy. And you can sign up at washingantindc.jhu.edu to find out how to”

join us. I'll be back with a really interesting speaker. The next one. And I'm so glad you're here.

And I'm so glad you come out. It's really wonderful. IRL is back. I'm sorry to tell you. But that's and I'm so glad. Thank you so much.

“Today's show is produced by Tracy Hunt, Mavelin Leplant, Dui and Kaelin Lynch,”

special thanks to Dave Shaw, Steve Bone and Julia Sharplevine, Nishot Kerwis, Vox Media's executive producer of podcast, and our theme music is by Tracodemics. If you're already following the show, your career is AI proof. If not, then get to retraining. Go wherever you listen to podcast search for on with Keroswisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to on with Keroswisher from Poli Media, New York Magazine,

the Vox Media podcast network, and us. We'll be back on Monday with more. (upbeat music)