On Oct. 19, Trevor Noah launched Luminaries, a science conversation series at Boston’s Museum of Science. I joined him onstage, and Rana el Kaliouby moderated. Rana is a pioneer of emotion AI, software that reads human emotion, and the host of the Pioneers of AI podcast. She wrote afterward that she expected Trevor to be witty and funny, but “didn’t expect to be so blown away by his humanity and depth of ideas.”
Here are a few of his insights with his own words highlighted.
AI often appears deep but merely works on the surface
When an AI matchmaker Rana built in ChatGPT picked Trevor as her match, he pointed out that it knew very little about either of them. It assembled a plausible answer from what’s on the internet.
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Trevor added that when you tell AI it made a mistake, it thanks you but often fails to correct the error: “It’s like a friend who’s been to a lot of therapy but doesn’t actually change.”
In-person community is a defense against a dystopian AI future
When asked how we protect ourselves from AI’s downsides, Trevor said the answer “goes back to something that is very un-technological and very un-AI.” He cited Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone, noting that places where communities form accrue many surprising benefits including more accountable governments.
I pushed back that communitarianism, the 1990s movement my father helped found to foster communities, had failed. Trevor responded that we hand too many ideas to intellectuals, who then “apply too much academia” to them. Communitarianism failed, he deadpanned, “because it’s called communitarianism.” An overly academic name.
He noted that nobody calls a phone a failure when the first version doesn’t sell; companies keep re-releasing it. He vowed never to stop investing in community.
Trevor is optimistic about technology
Despite his concerns, Trevor has “yet to see a technology that blew up and then left everyone behind.” Cars, computers and the internet all spread to ordinary people.
AI has reached what he calls “work intelligence”: it can do the jobs we invented, but we keep inventing new ones. Salt and ice used to be precious. Now restaurants hand them out for free. What we value changes, and in Trevor’s view, we’re expendable only if we define being human by the tasks we value today.
Our conversation turned to AI’s impact on jobs.
The real jobs question is the following distance
Touring as a comic, Trevor saw towns hollowed out after Kodak and the automaker Studebaker left. Factory workers were told automation was progress. “White-collar workers are now experiencing what many blue-collar workers experienced for decades,” he said. The difference, he argued, is that white-collar workers are closer to power, so newspapers are covering it.
Trevor is confident new jobs will come, as they did after telephone exchange operators disappeared. What worries him is the gap. His analogy is the highway, where the following distance is the space that lets you stop before you hit the car ahead:
Trevor tells tech leaders that “it’s easier to be patient when you are in a position of privilege,” and added, “But ironically, they don’t have patience when it comes to quarterly earnings.”
Why AI isn’t coming for Trevor’s job
After ChatGPT took off, show hosts kept telling him weak jokes that ChatGPT had written in a pale imitation of Trevor’s style. He rattled off four reasons AI struggles with humor: there isn’t enough comedy data, the model is a frozen snapshot while what society finds acceptable keeps shifting, comedy depends on knowing your audience (there are jokes you know are funny but you wouldn’t tell your mom), and companies have made models risk averse.
Job security
In addition to being the former host of The Daily Show, an award-winning author and a sought-after comedian, Trevor Noah is Microsoft’s Chief Questions Officer.
I reminded him of Picasso’s famous verdict on computers, “They are useless. They can only give you answers,” and joked that as Chief Questions Officer he has something rare these days: job security. He chuckled. Of course, his real job security comes from his depth and humanity, which feed his exceptional humor and wit.
Rana noted that everybody’s getting replaced by AI, but Trevor had played an AI, voicing Griot in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
He quipped: “Yeah, I’m coming for AI’s job.”
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