AT FIRST, IT was fun to ooh and ah as ChatGPT performed its amazing tricks. Now, two years in, who among us hasn’t experienced that nagging worry about how A.I. will upend what we know as our lives? Coincidentally, we recently heard serial tech entrepreneur/visionary Charles Morgan (Acxiom, First Orion) hold forth on this very subject, and we asked him to sit down and chat—lower case—with us about it.

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You have some thoughts about “the A.I. revolution” and what it’s going to do to society. Tell us about it.

This story started years and years ago. I think you can trace it back to the desktop computer, which in turn helped create the features that we now have in our many mobile devices—all of which have changed the way we operate and interact with one another. But none of those things has been as dramatic as what A.I. is going to be, because none of those things immediately took people’s jobs away. The desktop computer certainly made us able to do things more efficiently at work, and no doubt there was an impact on employment because you could now automate the normal paper flow. We were able to build all these ERP systems and now everybody’s connected all the time. But it wasn’t like this was going to knock out 20 or 30 jobs. It was a much more subtle thing that happened over years.

Well, here comes A.I. I remember pitching the A.I. concept at First Orion as far back as 2019, because I saw even then that its impact was going to change the world—and I only knew then a fraction of what I know now. But I don’t think anybody really listened to me.

And now here we are. What A.I. is doing is acting like an incredibly smart person who’s read every book that was ever written, has studied and mastered all the sciences, and is able to do complex engineering problems in his head. A.I. can be a reference source for about anything you can think of other than maybe the sale prices at Macy’s—it probably doesn’t know those. But it knows all of the important stuff. So now we have this Somebody who not only knows everything, but who is now available to advise everybody in every company.

Take the legal profession, for example. Say I’m a junior lawyer and I need to know the laws regarding the rights of landowners in Arkansas, and I know absolutely nothing about that topic. In the past, what lawyers in that situation have done is call in an expert to help them.

Today I can just ask ChatGPT. To take it further, let’s say the judge has asked the attorneys in this property case to prepare briefs on our position. Well, ChatGPT can write that brief. And there are now systems that can combine ChatGPT with database knowledge that’s specific to that topic. All of a sudden, a very junior lawyer who doesn’t have any experience in property law could write a very astute brief on this particular circumstance.

But can you trust it?

It’s not going to be without oversight. People make mistakes and ChatGPT will make a mistake, partially because you might not have explained the situation right. What I’m saying is that A.I. now allows everyday people to solve everyday problems that used to require experts. I personally use ChatGPT to solve fairly heavy engineering problems. With very little effort, I can now get engineering calculations done in 20 minutes that back in my engineering school days would’ve taken me all week to figure out. So the time savings are immense, and those extra outside experts—lawyers, engineers, architects and the like—are pretty much unnecessary, along with their fees.

We have horrible inefficiency in the healthcare field, but because of HIPAA and all these laws we have, it’s so hard to apply A.I. to that industry. But eventually that’s going to have to get done. I mean, it’s such a waste. Doctors and nurses spend half their time doing paperwork. They shouldn’t spend any time doing it. It’s ridiculous.

When we get into my typical field—technology—the opportunities for improvement are beyond dramatic. The number of pure programmers that are going to be needed will shrink significantly. We’re already seeing that ChatGPT can write simple software right now, but more importantly, it can test the software effectively without setting up a whole big test environment. There’s nothing more boring than documenting software—that is, going line by line and module by module to make sure it’s spec’d properly. Give ChatGPT a bunch of code with very little help and it’ll document the hell out of it.

Again, it’s certain types of jobs in software engineering that are going to be lessened, along with those in the overall process management of things. A whole lot of everybody’s time is spent dealing with customer service reps, and we can’t get our own work done because we’re sitting on the phone for hours waiting for a rep to pick up. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just talk with a human-sounding computer and tell it in regular English what we need and have it ask us intelligent, appropriate questions and solve our problem almost immediately? Microsoft has a 35,000-person call center, both the inbound and outbound for 1-800-FLOWERS. Ultimately, how many of those jobs do you think could be taken over by A.I.?

You’ve been talking about professional jobs. What about more “everyday” occupations?

If I go into a restaurant, even a high-end restaurant, at some point in the future it’s going to be a lot more efficient and pleasant for both me and the server if I talk to a computer and say, “I want this steak, I want this sauce, I want it medium rare,” and so on. A.I. could interpret all of my order correctly, and the expert waiter or waitress would then come over and say, “This is what I have for your order here, but I could also suggest that you might want to change this or change that.” Even up here in Heber Springs where we often eat on the weekends, the waitress is standing at our table trying to key in our orders and all the special instructions, and she’s frustrated. What I’m saying is that if I talked to A.I., she wouldn’t have to spend 10 minutes going back and forth with us, and we’d all be happier.

Is A.I. going to take the jobs of the guys digging the ditches? No, probably not totally, but I can almost guarantee you that A.I. and vision systems are going to be able to help with almost any dirt-moving job you can think of. They already have the ability to grade lots and roads using lasers and other stuff. The fact is, a bulldozer driver today is almost just a passenger. That’s what automation has done, and A.I. will take it to the next level. What I’m trying to suggest is there’s hardly any job you can think of that’s not going to be impacted.

So what effect do you see that having on the society as a whole?

There won’t be enough work for everybody. Businesses will only need so many people. Even the U.S. government could probably cut their head count from, say, 20 million to 10 million. So now, instead of having maybe 175 million people employed in this country, we’ll have only 125 million.

What happens to those without jobs?

Well, if we’ve got as many as we have right now who aren’t gainfully employed, and if we keep adding to that number every year, we have just gone forth with ever greater and bigger and more comprehensive social welfare programs so that nobody gets left behind. And it just means the government is collecting taxes from this half of the population and giving it to this other half. And that’s going to generate ultimately a lot of what we’re seeing today—a lot of class warfare in a way that I don’t know how we get around. I don’t know how we solve the problem. Because there just won’t be enough jobs.

One band-aid solution that doesn’t fix the problem but might help a bit, is that everybody in the country is guaranteed at least, let’s say in today’s time, $30,000 a year, pick a number. And that $30K goes away after they’re making a certain amount. So you kind of bolster up the bottom end and you’re not giving checks to people like me who don’t need them.

So how’s this going to change cities and rural areas?

I think it’s going to make cities less and less desirable. Because remember, we have all those people who aren’t in the workforce—where are they going to go? They’re not going to move to the country, they’re going to gravitate to the cities. The data shows that people in the country are generally happier than people in cities, and I think we’re going to see more people wanting to move from the city to the country. Experts in topics can live remotely; if they’re part of a team, it gets harder. But if I’m a consultant or I’ve got a two- or three-person specialty business, I can work out of places like Heber Springs where I now live several days a week, though generally closer to an airport. And A.I. does allow more people to create good livings in these kinds of areas.

This A.I. Revolution is going to be the most impactful revolution the world has ever seen—more impactful than the Industrial Revolution, and much more so than the Computer Revolution in 2000. Because it’s going to happen a whole lot faster. We’re not going to have time to adapt to it. People are starting to use it for everything, and it’s going to create the Have world and the Have Not world. There’s no reason we can’t bring a lot more manufacturing back to this country, because Elon Musk, whatever you think of him, is building cars in this country as cheaply as anybody else anywhere can build a car. It’s because everything’s automated and he just keeps taking workers out of his factory. With more and more automated factories, there’s no reason we can’t do whatever we want here. I was talking recently with someone about IKEA, the huge international furniture conglomerate. With the advent of A.I., we could essentially replicate IKEA’s products and not have to pay for all that international shipping.

So as A.I. changes our country, it’s also going to change the world. Our economy is still growing at a pretty good clip, despite the last several years, and if the politicians don’t bankrupt us or let runaway inflation kill us, then we’re going to continue to get richer and richer and richer. But countries that are producing less and less, and depending more and more on the outside world, they’re in trouble. The Have-Nots in Africa are just going to fall further and further behind. Ditto the Have-Nots in the Middle East—say, Iraq and Afghanistan.

And what about Russia? Russia hasn’t got a prayer, because a lot of their technology brain power has left the country and also their population’s shrinking. So I think countries like Russia are going to struggle to take advantage of the A.I. Revolution in any massive way. They’ll use it, but not in the same way we will to broadly impact everything.

Just look at how much has happened in the last few years. It’s been 15 years at most since the very first cloud computer was commercialized. At Acxiom, we built our own cloud computer in 2002 or 2003; it was special purpose, but it was the same thing, and at the time, it was game changing. But today, ChatGPT is probably run on a grid that’s 5,000 times as big. I predict that the world will be a very different place in 2030.

The year 2030? That’s less than six years away.

I know. It’s going to be a dramatically different planet.