🎙️ 139: Why cities are now competing for nomads (ft. Sondre Rasch)
David speaks with Sondre Rasch, Co-founder and CEO of SafetyWing, a global social safety net for remote workers and companies.
A natural entrepreneur, Sondre started selling server space in his early teens whilst playing MMORPGs. While most kids were focused on high school, at 14 he was already planning to build a Silicon Valley company, something he'd eventually do twice as a Y Combinator founder with Superside and later SafetyWing.
Sondre used his own problems as a digital nomad to create solutions that now help thousands of people who want the freedom to work from anywhere.
They talked about:
🏙️ Why cities are now competing for nomads
🌐 The Rise of Internet Countries
🌱 How Reddit Keeps Subcultures Alive
🚀 How work is becoming borderless, not just remote
🛡️ Building safety nets for nomads (SafetyWing)
This is just one part of a longer conversation, and it's the third part. You can listen to the earlier episode here:
Part 1: https://theknowledge.io/sondrerasch-1/
Part 2: https://theknowledge.io/sondrerasch-2/
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📄 Show notes:
[00:00] Introduction
[03:15] Global Culture is Eating Local Traditions
[07:48] How Reddit Keeps Subcultures Alive
[10:05] The Rise of Internet Countries
[23:53] Why cities are now competing for nomads
[28:31] The Evolution of Work and Compensation
[30:43] AI’s Role in the Future of Work?
🗣 Mentioned in the show:
Robin Hanson https://theknowledge.io/robinhanson-1/
Balaji Srinivasan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balaji_Srinivasan
Kevin Kelly https://kk.org/
Nick Bostrom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Bostrom
David Deutsch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Deutsch
Plumia https://plumia.org/
Superside https://www.superside.com/
Superintelligence https://www.amazon.co.uk/Superintelligence-Dangers-Strategies-Nick-Bostrom/dp/0199678111
The Inevitable https://www.amazon.co.uk/Inevitable-Understanding-Technological-Forces-Future/dp/0525428089
👤 Connect with Sondre:
Twitter: @SRasch | https://x.com/SRasch
Website: Safety Wing | https://safetywing.com/
👨🏾💻 About David Elikwu:
David Elikwu FRSA is a serial entrepreneur, strategist, and writer. David is the founder of The Knowledge, a platform helping people think deeper and work smarter.
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📜 Full transcript:
Global Culture is Eating Local Traditions
David Elikwu: Let's talk about digital countries. I think in your business SafetyWing you are importing at least two little bits of Nordic essence or you know, some Norwegian energy here. So one is in the flat salary type structure, and another is in, just the idea of having this social safety net, which is a very Nordic thing. Whenever people talk about having social safety nets, that is the case study that everyone turns to. And so these are some things that you're bringing but to before, and I'll let you talk a lot more about the mission and everything that you're building, but just to connect this to the previous conversation that we were having.
I'm interested to know as the world becomes a lot more global and we [00:04:00] become a lot more hyper online, there is a lot of blending of social references and like online culture kind of becomes its own thing, which sits on top of local culture. So you have things that might be locally relevant to people that are in San Francisco, people in India, people in Nigeria, people wherever else in the world. But then online culture is like a layer on top of that, which is shared and universal. And I wonder if you think there is an extent to which, you could end up losing if we end up having these digital countries where everyone's hyper online, you know, twitter is actually text, right? iMessage becomes the online version that is universally transmissible. Do you end up losing some local culture? And the idea that, because they are somewhere particular in the world can export, like something, when we say Nordic culture, that it's inherent to that region of the world because loads of people have been living in that area developing coders and rituals and ideas and philosophies that are localized and that is part of what makes them so robust.
If we were all moving around very [00:05:00] quickly being nomads or just being hyper online, do you think we end up losing some of the localized culture that gets refined by virtue of being in a particular place?
Sondre: No, definitely I think it's a complete massacre in some sense. Like it's really, really powerful. So yeah, we're definitely in that process of the global culture interacting with the local culture. And when that happens, you know, the local culture in a way, it's like a protected market of ideas, and customs and norms and phrases. So as the kind of global come in, they're like hyper potent, right?
But then of course there's also discovery mechanism, right? So it's like it will, that will happen. And then as there's some new, let's say, village coming online, you know, maybe they'll have some idea that actually just goes global, right? And then becomes kind of into the, the universal culture. So that definitely happens. You very much see it now with like so many Indians coming online that, like a lot of Indian origin memes to some degree associated with Nigeria. Although that's earlier in the process, but [00:06:00] you can definitely see that. And so there is this, you know, global knowledge creation happening there, which is good.
I do think that there is a loss, right? You know, that's the sub, that's the subculture point, right. There is this benefit to the subculture, but I don't think we can go back, right? So we can't go back to unplugging. We need to go forward. And now that I'm thinking of that through, that's sounds like a terrible idea. But it's kind of how do you make, create the possibility for enduring subcultures or even localized ones in the future. I think it's like first starts with like appreciating it and then there's also I think some technical solutions. And then I think you will start, once you kind of pass that barrier you will actually get a reinforcement mechanism the other way potentially.
So that can go like this right now, massive flattening across the world of all knowledge. And then we will reach this kind of peak point and then people will be like, oh, this flatland universal culture that's boring and then they will [00:07:00] kind of recede back to, to the unique, the digital nomad phenomenon will cause people to be able to move. So you will have people moving where they wanna live, right? So much more voluntary movement, and that will cause the sort of city's competitive advantage to be much more enhanced. So you already have this phenomenon here in the Bay Area in a big way, which is a place of immigrants mostly, right? So it's like people are here by choice and it's a very, yeah, some of this is from opportunity, but a big part of it is values. So what happens then is that over time actually Bayer becomes more Bay area like through selection.
And I think a similar thing will happen globally, and then you might start to get local expression getting reinforced potentially. Another thing you can do is the technical solution.
How Reddit Keeps Subcultures Alive
Sondre: So here, the only place I've seen successfully maintain subcultures is Reddit. I don't know anywhere else. Everywhere else, every other platform is flat, flattens subcultures. Yeah, [00:08:00] there are, there are, there are filter bubbles on Twitter or whatever. Like there are clusters, I'm not saying that, but they interact with each other and flatten each other. But on Reddit, you do actually have real subculture formations that can be like, so if, if you, you drag it out a few years, they have like their own vocabulary. It's like rich, it's like rich subculture of, I don't know, lord of the rings, memes or whatever.
Yeah, so, so I think that there is still more of those kind of platforms to be built and that you will also have moral communities emerge and maybe the filter bubbles will be even stronger and you will have a bit of a branching out, or platforms will be built that allow for it, that essentially, like, imagine just Reddit, but without the are all or are popular. It's just the communities. And you can take that even further than that.
I think that there's probably more to be built here and that once we've kind of gone through, first everyone just wants to get global. They wanna get smart and they wanna get like, you [00:09:00] know, rich and successful. But once they've kind of gotten there, then they, I think they will return. Then they wanna be unique. They wanna find their value preferences and they wanna build a home and, and all of those things. I mean, you see it so clearly with the digital nomads, which is the world I live in, which is that first is this like dream of escape from this. Like, I had it myself, like living in this you know, somewhat nice life, but like, kind of like a boring job, boring place, spending all my money on rent situation. And then I hear about the digital nomad possibility, oh, I can escape from all of this. Get out. And then it's this, a new identity and I meet all the digital nomads. It's this global community. It's, it's amazing and it's so attractive. And then at some point a few years, and once you fully realize that, then it's like, well, how are we gonna connect now, right? How are we gonna then build a community, you know, so low and et cetera. So I think that the digital nomads are ahead of the curve here, but I think a lot of people are gonna [00:10:00] gonna get to that place.
So yeah, that's my 2 cents. That's my 10 cents on that
The Rise of Internet Countries
David Elikwu: No, I love that. I think what you were just saying is making me rethink some beliefs that I had, and that's always a good sign. And I think a few times this year there's been a few things. AI is another one of them. My conversation with Robin Hansen, there was a few things that came up where I'm just being forced to reconsider the extent to which I see certain things as special and things that are sacred to you. And they have inherent importance because of that. And you know, as an example, we think of culture as special localized culture, and I greatly value localized culture. I value my, you know, cultural heritage and all of these things. And it's interesting to potentially envisage a world where simply because of the depth of the shared law of people that are in the same online spaces, whether they are deep subcultures or even the extent to which they, some of them are flattened out.
But using Reddit as an example where like the people that are in those subreddits that have been there for years, there's shared [00:11:00] law, there's history that they remember. There are memes that are callbacks to previous memes, and you see a lot of that online, right. There's law of the internet. And as it continues to develop, a lot of ideas become entrenched and they become very strong internet ideas and a lot of these things kind of intertwine in the same way that they do in real life. And in real life, in certain cultures, in certain areas of the world. Just in the same way, as you might say, in certain areas of the internet, there are ideas that kind of harken back to previous ideas. And if you were in that area for long enough, you will understand the significance of that thing. And, you know, if you have a certain tribe, whether it's online or offline, you'll have certain belief systems that you share, certain jokes that you share certain. And so is this idea that maybe there is a point at which your offline culture might be less relevant and you might care about it a lot less if you can really find like a online subculture that you can be part of, or an [00:12:00] online group or a digital country and a place that you can share with others that you have shared law and you have a shared connection and it feels like home and you know, you develop a lot of the same perhaps, cultural characteristics that we currently have in the offline world. And yeah, I, I wonder what the future version of that world looks like, I don't know if you have thoughts on that and how that interfaces with what you're building.
Sondre: No, for sure. It does, it does. And I don't think we've fully solved or realized it yet, but we know we, we want to. Certainly I think that for digital nomads what, yes, the offering the social safety net is a useful product, offering the kind of global passport is a useful tool. But it is definitely also necessary to have like the identity and community that comes with that, be well developed. It's very easy to build on top of the digital nomad because it is already a community that has a lot of values and natural things built in. And I think [00:13:00] it's, it's, it's lovely. I mean, it's, well, they're obviously explorers. I am a bit agnostic and on purpose, though, like, I don't wanna fill it with too much meaning. I do think that it is important to develop this sort of digital nomad citizen into like a really good pro-social entity in the future. But I also sort of want to hold back to see what it is part discovery and part aspiration.
In terms of how we are going about that discovery and I would say, you know, in safetywing I really believe in this idea that kind of art precedes ideas. And when we started safetywing, one of the first thing we did was that we draw a lot of these bird art, which looks kind of strange. It looks less strange actually. But in when we made it, it looked really strange. So, it was a designer several years in who commented like, oh, these birds live in the world we're trying to make, and I think that's really accurate. So you have then two, that there's two types. What one is this [00:14:00] like, digital nomad bird. They're in this like colorful world and they're traveling, they're exploring, they're on an adventure. And then the other one is their sort of remote health aesthetic, which is this sort of retro, futuristic bird And this came about not intentionally, by the way, this is like something we discovered looking back.
Which I also love this idea, it's like retro futurism is this idea of like remembering the future, right? It's like in the sixties, what does the future look like? And I think it's such a, it has been at least such a important thing for our time because people forgot about the future a little bit. And so that's the sort of spirit of early science in our community is this is the, the adventure. And it has the, I would say also the authenticity and optimism of like remembering the future.
And yeah, so these are some early signs I'm seeing. I'm super curious how this will play out. I do, I'm like pretty sure, I think safetywing will be the one to do it, but like, I'm sure that the Arab Internet countries is coming and that [00:15:00] they will develop in a very interesting way and that, that in the future there will be this overlapping internet countries and, they will be types in a way that you, you might interact with.
I hope they will be like, really good and interesting. I'm a bit with you in the sense of just observing to see where it's going.
David Elikwu: I think people will want to move to internet countries for probably between shared ideals and shared benefits. And I would love to know what you think of as the future of the digital nomad space and this idea, particularly I'm thinking about where we are now and some of where, what the intersections are in how we're progressing, both from a remote work perspective, also from an AI perspective. And I'll ask you some more questions about that.
When you think about the trend of what it looks like to move around the world. A lot of people can look at digital nomads and think this is some new thing. It's a weird thing, you know, what's happening here? Why are people doing [00:16:00] that? Why would people ever end up moving to a digital country? And a lot of it, I think makes sense on the surface. People have always moved around for opportunity. People have always aggregated around economic value. Back in the olden days, land had the inherent value and you move to where the land has value, either because of natural resources or just because of, you know, rome already had roads and it already had a lot of infrastructure. And London has infrastructure. New York has infrastructure. And so there are these places around the world that people have moved to and aggregated around in these big cities because they have resources and they have wealth.
I'm interested in this idea that, okay, so in the old paradigm, the land had the wealth. And so that's where people went. The land had the value, and so people have to go there. And then I guess, and that's kind of like the manufacturing paradigm. And then you move from there to maybe like the technological paradigm where actually the people have the value and they can take it with them actually.
And so if [00:17:00] I decide to build my business in Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley will reap some of the benefits of that, the land benefits from the people that go there. And maybe that's kind of the world where more so in now, I think where countries around the world are starting to compete over the intellectual capital that they can get to come to where they are in the world and come build your company here. I think it's Lithuania that's been great at this. There's a few countries in in Europe that's been great at this and also around the world, you know, obviously Ireland and some places in the EU, Portugal but then also in the US, Canada just had these new visas that they're rolling out. And so there's this idea that. Okay, in this, maybe technological paradigm, we want people, people that have the value to come here and build your thing here. But I wonder what the next version of that looks like when, okay, so the first one was land has the value. People go to the land. The second one was, the people have the value. And so almost the land goes to the people. But when I think of digital [00:18:00] nomad culture, if everyone can be anywhere, nobody needs to be in the same place. And you could build a business where everyone is in a different place for different reasons. And so actually this is now peer to peer, it's people to people. And really it's not so much about the land. People make their own individual decisions about the land. We are not all going to go and build our company in Silicon Valley. So none of those previous factors are interplay in the same way.
So I'd love to know, I guess, what you think of from a futuristic and idealistic perspective, and also from an economic perspective about how that starts to change, what migration patterns look like, what economic patterns look like as people and money move around the world. [00:19:00]
Sondre: I love the question. I think it is like really important actually for us to know. So I'm really glad you asked me that.
Like my first intuition was something, something access that seems to be organized in some particular way, like having access to things. And the risk is feedback loop phenomenon, which I agree with you. You also have with the land where the people go there, makes the land more valuable which makes more people wanna go there and creates the value of the and you know, that on the internet, that's the sort of network effect. So that would be my first pass to post. But I'm gonna think about this one. I suspect there might be more to [00:20:00] it.
David Elikwu: So one thing I might add to it that might help to flesh it out is just, you know, for example, some of the complaints that some people may have about digital nomads is, okay, so we talked about how in the past people would aggregate around land and, okay, this land has these properties. Maybe they have natural resources, maybe they have infrastructure. There is something inherently there and you move there for the resources.
Criticism some people could have about digital nomads is that now when they move to a place, they take the value with them because they have their own economic value. What should be happening, perhaps in the slightly previous paradigm, the economic paradigm is if I was a business, I'm planting my business in your land, in your territory. And so because I'm here, I'm benefiting the people around me. So I'm benefiting the local area because I'm gonna spend money here. I might have to hire jobs, I might have to, I'm bringing jobs here, all of these things. So the area is benefiting economically from my presence there. But then in the new paradigm, so instead of people going to, let's say London, New York, Paris, some of these places in the world, people are now [00:21:00] going to the digital economic capitals like Bali and Tulum and Krakow. When people go there as digital nomads, if they are just a contractor or something like that, they're not building a physical business there. They bring and take the economic value. And so it doesn't necessarily stay in the land or a and people might say it doesn't benefit the locality in the same way.
And that's an argument. So I'm not necessarily saying that. That's just something that people say.
So I'd love to know, yeah, is that something that you think about how that aspect of things changes the way that we build societies as well?
Sondre: Well, so as I think it can be to an extent, but I don't think it's as kind of logically determined as the thought might imply because the digital nomad visiting a place. It does have the economic effect of tourists. And in fact, many digital nomads, live histories goes like this, right? It's like they start digital. They have like high intensity movement every couple of months, new place for a few [00:22:00] years. They typically discover their dream place, they meet someone, and that becomes their base. But then they do travel a lot, right? Then they might go to Bali three months you know, over the summer because they can, but they have a base.
So in a way, what they're doing is in that first period, it's also just exploring, meaning, figuring out what's, what are the cities of the world like, and where do I wanna live? And the value that they provide is the same that a tourist does. And that's when you saw with digital nomad visas, the, the motivation for all the countries was like, Hey, we have these people who are alike tourists. In fact, they're better than tourists in some sense, because on average they're a little bit higher income. And they don't have any problems that, like regular economic situation, that regular immigration has, like there's no concern with like competing for local jobs. They're actually, they have internet income. So like this is an all win. And on top of that, they've seen us like, oh, they bring startups, knowledge, creativity toward little town. So that's what motivated a lot of the countries and I think that's all true.
However, okay, so that's, [00:23:00] that's just a logical, like that qualification. With that said though, I do think that there can be more or less pro-social behavior from digital nomads. I would love to see more, a little bit. I would like that to be developed a bit, especially in, in safetywing. We have toyed with this several times. We've never really fully grasped it. But what you would love to see, especially if that community becomes larger and larger is that you want it to be kind of known to be like incredibly pro-social, where like people are so grateful. There are these digital nomads in town who are, I don't know, like renovating the local coworking space and like, I don't know, solving pro, like contributing to the community that they're at, right. If they do that, if people go around and they're helping out like you would in a normal community then I think that will make it the reputation for nomads much better long term.
So I hope to see that, but I don't know exactly how to make it happen though.
Why cities are now competing for nomads
David Elikwu: Where do you see, you know, you talked before about turning your ambition up to 11, so when you think of [00:24:00] maybe both SafetyWing and Plumia turned up to 11 in the, the far future vision of what these businesses could look like. You mentioned before this idea of, okay, maybe this looks like access. When you think of the, the future of how people move around the world, where do you see SafetyWing or Plumia in that stack? Where I think, the way I might conceptualize it is, okay, you start at the product stack, which is fine. Wherever you are in the world, you have access to these products and we can give you some health, we can give you some insurance, we can give you access to doctors, things like that. Maybe the layer above that is kind of almost like a digital union kind of thing, like an internet union. Union in the offline world, you pay your union dues and you get access to like a raft of benefits and some shared access to, you know, things on an equal level. We may already have some contracting arrangements.
We might already have, you know, there's a raft of things you can immediately buy into. We've already arranged this health insurance. And so you are just gonna buy into and, and get this raft of things [00:25:00] just by paying your, your monthly dues. Yeah, so there's that. And then maybe, I guess the layer above that is, I don't know, maybe you think of something like digital timeshares in a way where it's like, actually, not only do we have that, and actually I think this ties to some of Balaji's ideas where he imagines people congregating around the world in physical spaces and owning compounds where people like them, people that are bought into their, you know, digital country or whatever, can all live in the same place. And maybe you have places around the world that are kind of shared by this community of people that are, you know, they're paying their dues, they're getting their shared benefits. And now they are sharing both space and ideology. And so now actually you can move around world and stay in particular places.
So I'd love, I mean, feel free to expand on that as, as much as you like, but I'd love to know, yeah. Where do you see that going?
Sondre: Yeah. As another interesting door open up, I haven't thought that much about, but I can totally see that happening and, and even likely so. So you, you definitely see that already that you mentioned with physical [00:26:00] spaces in a huge way. I'm, I'm shocked actually how much of a wave this is. And I love this about our time. It's one of the most interesting things that you have these new cities being built and a lot of them are thinking about remote worker, digital nomads as they're doing that. New cities, new towns, new ways of living. And I can absolutely see, and to some degree already are, but especially if, if we fully realize then we have, the passport and the social safety net and, and we're able to do that in a way that is pretty unified and valuable and that you can tell a lot about the people who are there by them being member that, that will start this kind of clustering where the kind of people that will want those kind of people to attend will grant access to that, and there will be this kind of mutual benefit from that as that kind of ecosystem grows.
I do suspect that that will likely be the case in the future. Now I think about it, that, that has actually a, a dark side to it too. So I have to think a bit more about how to make sure that that's good. But I do think [00:27:00] it's likely to be the case that the digital communities will cluster to the point where they become very distinct perhaps in the form of like internet country and will start to build, or the ecosystem will start to build spaces for people like that.
And then you get these spaces that are for certain members and then another internet country have other spaces. It will still be pretty nice though because it will look more like products than countries. We say country and we think country, which is very forceful, but of course they're gonna be voluntary to join or, or leave.
So it's gonna look more like products. So it's not gonna seem, it's gonna seem kind of nice, like you choose the one that best fits your values and preferences.
David Elikwu: Hmm. So you're kind of subscribing to, yeah, kind of like what we discussed. You're subscribing for however long to a range of things that you get so access to a variety of, okay, here is some, maybe some labor requirements. Here are some [00:28:00] benefits that you might have access to. And you could move perhaps also some ideology. So I know there are some hot button political topics. And perhaps there's an interesting thing where, for example, I'm thinking about the, the abortion situation in the US where in different states, you know, different states take different opinions and perhaps there is a world in which having a certain digital passport allows you to go to certain areas of the world that align with whatever beliefs that you have. And you know, you can still access whatever you need as as you move around.
The Evolution of Work and Compensation
David Elikwu: I'd love to know, and I know this, this is one of my last questions now, but from the experience that you guys have already had building SafetyWing and thinking about okay, how you employ people, I've heard that you have this flat salary structure where people get paid the same. If that's the case, I'd love to know how you thought about that, but also how you might continue to think about that as the nature of the way that works potentially changes because for example, the idea of being a digital nomad, I think has [00:29:00] already changed what work might look like for a lot of people. So it may be the first step is remote work, being able to work from home and then being able to work from anywhere in the world. And then there's also some of these far further flung ideas like replicate where actually work could actually be fractionalized. And maybe a step beyond that is that not only is it fractionalized where maybe you're only working a certain number of days per week, for example, actually you are just working on a bounty and this job is now split into 12 joblets of, you know, micro jobs. And actually each day you might just auction for however many hours you wanna work, that is the number of micro jobs that you could do. And you could just do little sections of lots of different jobs for potentially even lots of different employers.
So I'd, I'd love to know, I don't know if you have any thoughts how the future of work could look, and also how that relates to compensation and things like that.
Sondre: This last one is something that I've, I've lived the different ideas and lived and failed and succeeded. So this, this is one where [00:30:00] I have really thought about it, and, and played out the different options.
I believe both of them are correct. So this like optimization of work is happening and I think it's a good thing. Meaning that for a certain kind of person, it can be very freedom optimizing and, especially if you have like another creative project. I think those kinds of jobs are, can be incredibly conducive to that. And working also on like some this precise thing you're excited about. It takes a while to kind of build up freelance job career, I should say. It's not easy, but I started out doing that, it has that upside.
When I built Superside you know, the, in the beginning the idea was like the whole company works like that. We would have these microservices internally instead of full-time employees. And then of course the product itself are these like teams or freelancers doing projects for companies. So I believe in that like you know, super strongly. However, I did notice a gap after a while. And the gap is something like dedication slash responsibility for a certain outcome. So you [00:31:00] can call that a service, but it just doesn't work as well. So in safetywing, we split this up. So we have two types of people. We have essentially salaried people or like you said, they have the same salary. They have full freedom in the sense that we don't know, obviously we don't, there's no working hours, nobody's tracking anywhere, but you're responsible for something.
And then we have freelancers, and freelancers, they're doing some specific input, right? So that could be like doing tickets, customer service tickets, or an another thing. So we have both or, or they can do something hourly. And different people prefer different things and I think safetywing is like 50 50. And that's in total numbers we're probably split a bit towards the salaried then in total compensation.
But yeah. And then why flat salary? I think there is some like just Norwegian history there that just seems seemed intuitive at the time. Why are we sticking with it? I mean, I have to defend this policy so much. I should say that I do really believe that it's right not to have geographically based salaries that I, I [00:32:00] think is just correct. And anyone who does they're shooting themselves in the foot because if you hire great develop, if you're like Silicon Valley company and you hire a developer from Bosnia, and then you pay them Bosnia market salary, guess what? They will pretty soon learn that once they have your company on the resume, they can apply to another internet company. They're not in the Bosnian labor market anymore. That's a mistake. Maybe like you can fool them for a little while, but they're gonna, they're gonna get it. So that's, you know, the question of which labor market are you in? You know, a market is the buyers and sellers in a particular market. So if you can, if you're can apply to any job for internet company, that's the market you're in.
Yeah, so, so anyway, so that I think is just correct. When it comes to just totally flat meaning not by seniority or even type of position in the company that is like, I can't defend that in the same way. I can't say that just right. I will say that it's really nice and it's like very aesthetically pleasant. [00:33:00] And I do think that there is some justification to it because, the opposite argument for fairness might be like, well, you gotta pay people what they contribute. Yes. But as long as like everyone, it is a very functioning culture and company. Everyone is contributing. And it's kind of hard to say actually, especially when there's responsibilities involved, who is contributing how much, and it tends anyway to be that you're paid the average of the productivity in that company.
So you might as well just take that logic to the extreme and just say that, no, here's the, here's the job. The job is having a responsibility in this company. we all have an equal share of that. It works really well. It has some great upsides. People stop totally talking, thinking about salary, you know it's not transparency, which is, by the way, a bit of a fat word, but it's simplicity, which is even greater. Like you don't have to be transparent because there's one rule for everybody. And you're really tied to the mass. So you avoid like a whole host of like negative equilibrium that you can end in by being flexible and negotiating salary. Everyone knows this. There [00:34:00] are other tools to minimize it a little bit like salary bans, but essentially you pay more money to the people who are good at negotiating. And that's not necessarily fair.
Because it's so hard to defend and hard to hold, it also becomes a really strong signal. I think that as long as we're doing this, you know, safetywing is for real, right? So, but I think it, it's also like a signal that we still have integrity. We haven't been kind of hollowed out entirely by corporate pressures yet. Still hanging in there.
David Elikwu: Okay. I think the last question that I'll ask you. Maybe connects to something we were talking about earlier, which is just the effective altruism angle and accelerationism, et cetera, and how some of that interfaces with, you know, this idea of the future of work, digital nomadism, et cetera.
AI's Role in the Future of Work
David Elikwu: And it's a really simple question. I'd just love to know how you think AI can affect or interface with this idea of, I think there's a conceptualization of what it means to be a digital nomad, which is to a [00:35:00] certain extent, your life is kind of in your hands. You decide where to live, you decide how to work. You have a lot of autonomy and control. And there is one version of what it looks like for that kind of person to work with Ai, where actually it is more autonomy for the individual. And in fact, AI becomes a superpower for the individual person. They can do work 10 times faster. They don't have to spend any time doing Slack work or you know, just organizing their ideas. They get to do what they are very best at, and actually this is a force multiplier for every single person within an organization. It makes them a lot better and the organization benefits from it, and that's a win-win.
The other version that some people may take within a working context is that actually because of the way some of these data models work. All the power that AI could bring could just be aggregated right at the top by the corporation, at the corporation level, rather than at an individual level. And what that means is actually, if you had some people doing some rote [00:36:00] or repetitive work, maybe you don't need those people to do that or anything at all. If they didn't have much skillset beyond that to be able to apply that in a creative way, then a lot of people, and some people in Silicon Valley already have been excited about this, the potential that you could run much leaner companies. And actually you don't need to have 10 engineers. You could just have two that are really good and know how to use Ai and they could do the work of 10 people. And actually you don't even need to hire the rest of the people in the first place.
So I'd love to know what you think about that. Is this something that gives people more autonomy where they're able to have even more freedom and be far more effective on the whole? Or is it something that potentially could just be aggregated at a higher level and companies maybe become smaller and leaner and it changes the way that people work with each other and work with businesses.
Sondre: So it is a little bit all of the above. It's really hard to model. I struggle as I try to answer the question in terms of like, but okay, here's one approach. What is [00:37:00] Ai? What is AGI? What will it be? I think that the best, the model I would have the highest confidence on is Kevin Kelly. So, Kevin Kelly wrote this book called, The Inevitable in 2012. There's a chapter there on Ai, and he describes how that's gonna play out. And I think he's, he's the most right. Everyone has like good insights to it. And his kind of point is just like, look, people aren't intelligence. Intelligence is like a thing that people have. It's not the, the essence, and I think he's right about that actually. Which is very counterintuitive because we connect those stuff like intelligence consciousness and personhood. We often like think of that as just one blob.
But if you think of intelligence as something you can extract out, then the way this plays out looks much more like AWS than anything else. Which it predicts in that it says that there's gonna be a layer of intelligence, artificial intelligence on top of everything. Similar to how you might see, there's a layer of compute or software now on top of almost everything. And so far I would say that's, that's how it looks like, that's [00:38:00] what it looks like it's playing out. There's a layer of AI on top of everything. And that becomes agency enhancing for the right person. Although the reason I'm struggling to think about it is that there is this odd feedback loop happening as well where you can definitely see a situation where you get dependency and therefore loss of agency. And I have no idea what this thing is, right? Because you're interacting with the crowd or the kind of sum of knowledge in some weird way. If you're dependent on that the temptation to be lazy and just like lean on the crowd will be just stronger and stronger and stronger with the Ai. So yeah, I think if you're really disciplined and able to retain your thought and you kind of keep exercising your mind and will, and maybe even body, then I think the AI tool can be massively autonomy enhancing and that might be a great thing.
You know, and the EA approach to this, you know, that goes something like end. Because I'm in this [00:39:00] community. I do, I've had this conversation many times. I'm aware of the counter argument and argument and the counter argument, and as you might know, they would say, well, you have this goal oriented thing and they can do things. And so, so super intelligence, I think it's just debunked by the fact that computation is constrained. The Nick Bostrom's book. Now I'm just co commenting on a EA and Ai, okay. Super intelligence. That's not right, because there's no constraint on computation essentially that, once the software can improve itself, it'll go exponential, okay? And that's why you can like overnight get like, yeah, but that doesn't look like it. What's happening, it looks like it's constrained by computation. Which I think is accurate. So you're not gonna have intelligence explosion.
And then the second point is, well, even without an intelligence explosion, you can still have these bit more slowly, let's say on a kind of curs alien timeline, whatever it is, 2040 for a computer to have the computation of all of mankind or, or something which is still pretty soon that they will have a goal and they will override, [00:40:00] like the goal will be accidentally have some side effect and then, you know, will ruin the world more plausible.
However, my, I, I like the sort of David Deutsch approach to this, which is that you solve the problems you have in front of you which sounds kind of naive, but when you're engaging to kind of solve problem you don't have in front of you, it's very easy to fall into what David Deutch called prophecy when quickly can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's a bit of a waste of time because, because the future depends on knowledge that is created and you can't predict what knowledge will be created. You're not solving a real problem when you do that. So it's much better to just solve problems. And all problems are solvable. So I'm sure that when we get to that point we will solve the problems that are right in front of us and retain the positive upside. I don't think it's guaranteed, though, so I'm optimistic in the sense that I think that the problems can be solved, but sure, we can blow ourselves up. I mean, that, that's, that's definitely on the menu as well.
David Elikwu: Fair. I love that. I think that was the perfect response.