S13E3 DB|BD at Aspen: AI is the Greatest Civil Rights Issue of Our Time With Chris Hyams

Chris Hyams spent 15 years at the job search platform Indeed, becoming its CEO in 2019. When he stepped down in 2025, more than 300 million jobseekers visited Indeed’s site every month. He also 200x’d the company’s revenue. 

So why would a guy who is so good at what he does step down? According to him, he had a higher calling.

Chris believes that AI is the single greatest civil rights issue of our time and he’s appalled it isn’t better regulated. And he’s taking action. Chris is teaching a college course on responsible AI and he’s also Founding Board Member of the Guardrails Alliance, a Super-PAC that was created to fight ANOTHER Super PAC that has invested more than $140 million dollars in snuffing out anti-AI congressional candidates.

In this conversation with DB|BD host Ellen McGirt, Chris explains why he is so worried about the unfettered growth of AI. To be clear, he isn’t about to rattle off an anti-AI screed. But he DOES openly question the claims made by OpenAI, Anthropic and others who stand to profit from AI. Oh, and he has the data to back it up.

On this season of DB|BD, we are thinking about radical collaboration. Host Ellen McGirt sat down with visionary designers, leaders and thinkers at the 2026 Aspen Business & Society Summit to ask them about the radical act of collaborating with others in a time when it often feels impossible to find common ground.

The Guardrails Alliance

TRANSCRIPT

Ellen McGirt: Chris Hyams doesn’t do anything halfway. He spent 15 years at the job search platform Indeed. He started as a VP of product in 2010 when the site had about 20 million monthly users. He stepped in as CEO in 2019 and when he stepped down in 2025, more than 300 million jobseekers visited Indeed every month. He also 200x’d its revenue.

So why would a guy who is so good at what he does step down? No, he didn’t retire. And he didn’t really burn out. According to him, he had a higher calling.

As the leader of a company for job seekers, he had a front-row seat to, and access to a whole lotta data about, AI’s impact on the labor market. And spoiler alert, it’s not good.

Chris believes that AI is the single greatest civil rights issue of our time because of its unbelievable ability to fundamentally change our lives. And he’s appalled that it isn’t better regulated.

So remember what I said about Chris not doing anything halfway? Well, it applies here too. He teaches a college course on responsible AI and he’s also Founding Board Member of the Guardians Alliance, a Super-PAC that was created to fight another Super-PAC called Leading the Future which has invested more than $140 million dollars in snuffing out anti-AI congressional candidates running in the 2026 midterms.

But more on that later…Let’s get into my conversation with Chris from this year’s Aspen Business and Society Summit.

To be clear, he isn’t about to rattle off an anti-AI screed. But he DOES openly question the claims made by OpenAI and Anthropic, while also describing why he’s so worried. Oh, and he has the data to back it up…

Ellen McGirt: Chris, I’m so happy to see you and to be with you, and I’ve been so lucky that I’ve gotten a chance to really see you work over the last few years.

So your decision to leave Indeed, the role of CEO, was not a surprise to me, but I imagine it was a surprise to lots of people. And you have been very clear as to why. So why don’t we start with, your decision and what you’re doing now, and then we’ll dig into the details. Does that work? Absolutely.

Chris Hyams: Well, uh, first of all, let me just say thank you for having me.

It’s always a pleasure to get to talk to you, uh, in any environment, but it’s really nice to be in the room together- yeah… to be in this beautiful place is really special to, to get a chance to catch up, um, ’cause it has been a little while. So I spent 15 years at Indeed. I had the incredible privilege of joining when it was very small, about 130 people.

Got to see it grow, uh, quite, quite a lot, um, you know, uh, more than 100 times, uh, in terms of people and revenue and, and, and the number of people that we, we could help. And the mission of the business, helping people get jobs, is incredibly profound and personally meaningful, and I, um, I really had an extraordinary experience getting to be there.

What happened that precipitated me leaving just a little over a year ago, it was June of last year, was a couple of different things. Um, the first and what we’ll probably end up spending most of the time talking about was, uh, where we sort of got in a very short period of time with AI and its potential impact.

And at Indeed, and actually throughout most of my career, I was working on systems that were, you know, not generative AI, but large-scale machine learning systems where, uh, huge amounts of data could help solve some kind of meaningful problem, in the case of Indeed, helping hundreds of millions of job seekers connect with millions of jobs. Employment is within the, uh, the categorization that they have, uh, within the EU AI Act, for example. It is considered a high impact area. Mm. So you have things like law enforcement, critical infrastructure, employment, where mistakes that can be made or, um, problems that can be magnified have a significant impact on people’s lives.

And so we saw that pretty early on, about 10 years ago, put together a responsible AI team and really started to focus on how in the world of employment we could ensure that we were creating a fair and equitable hiring environment. And part of the problem, and this is- Mm-hmm … one of the things that we see with AI, is that, uh, AI didn’t invent the problem of inequality in hiring.

That has been around for a long time, but it’s built on top of data, and the data comes from- Yeah … humans, which are flawed and, and create the system. And then w- what we, what we see very clearly is that AI not only sort of codifies and, um, uh, and scales those problems, but it actually magnifies it considerably.

And so we had to do a huge amount of work to ensure that we could, uh, measure and counteract that bias, um, that, that inequality. And one thing that happened through that was seeing very clearly that if it was happening in employment, it was happening- Mm-hmm … absolutely everywhere. And so I was, I was really fortunate to be in a position where I felt like I could do that work that was having a, a real impact on, on the world.

Um, you, you heard me say in, in many of our conversations that, you know, what those insights led me to believe was that AI is the single civil rights and human rights issue of our time. And I found myself saying that enough to, you know believe that, well, if that’s, if that really is the case, then this is what I need to be spending all of my time and energy on.

And I was able to, to do a lot of that at Indeed. But then, you know, to be frank, in January 2025, the, the climate, uh, politically with the, with the Trump administration shifted so radically and the, uh, attack on first the public sector, but then very, very quickly followed by the private sector and ensuring that any of the types of things that were important to me as a leader.

Obviously, as a, as a business leader, my job was to help the company to be successful and, and grow, but also the kind of values that I have, uh, and the things that are important to me is really, you know, how to create a more fair and just and equitable world. And, um, that became under direct attack by the administration.

It became, uh, almost impossible to be the kind of leader that I wanted to, to be and still, um And still s- uh, fulfill my financial and fiduciary responsibility to the, to the shareholders and the business without putting the business at risk. And it was not my business. I didn’t start it.

Ellen McGirt: Yeah.

Chris Hyams: I was an employee and I was CEO, but I was, I was an employee.

And, uh, and I’m incredibly fortunate enough to be in a position where I could make a, a decision in line with my own values and, and walk away from, from that job. Um, uh, the other thing, just to be frank, that I saw very, very clearly happening, and this is when we’ll get into the, the AI and, and the impact on the labor market, was, um, you saw very, very clearly that with the disruption to the economy, uh, I think as a direct result of many of the policies of this administration, the, um, the long, uh, sort of many years of, of unrestricted growth that a lot of companies got to, uh, enjoy, Indeed being one of them, sort of came to, to an end.

And a lot of companies were facing, uh, challenges with top-line growth. And so what all companies tend to do in that point, because the market, um, rewards it, is to, to start to go after their bottom line by, by firing people. And AI essentially became the chief excuse for that. Right. And so it also looked pretty clearly to me like the job of a CEO for the next several years was gonna look a lot like, um-

Ellen McGirt: Man.

Chris Hyams: Uh, like firing people and trying to replace them with AI. Yeah. Um, and when you put those, those two things together, it was a push and a pull like that, that made that work, um, not appealing at all. But then the desire to actually be able to work full time on this issue of how do we create, uh, the awareness necessary to bring about just, you know, some sensible and rational conversations about how more people can have a voice and how AI is gonna be deployed and, and governed.

Ellen McGirt (pickup): So, your focus now is spreading the gospel and the necessity of regulating AI and helping others understand how to interact with it responsibly. And one place you are spreading that gospel is in the classroom. For the past year, you have been teaching a course on responsible AI. Can you tell us about your course?

Chris Hyams: And, um- So I left in June of last year and started right away teaching at Huston-Tillotson University. It’s a small private HBCU in Austin. I’ve been on the board for the last four years. It’s an extraordinary institution that I’ve been so thrilled to, to be a part of. Um, and I kinda had in the back of my mind all along that whenever I wrapped up my time at Indeed, that I wanted to end up at Huston-Tillotson.

I think a big part of this is these issues that I care about, and especially, uh, AI and how it is going to impact essentially every area of society very, very clearly. It is, um, you know, in the simplest terms possible, it’s an everything problem, right? Right.

Ellen McGirt: Right.

Chris Hyams: It’s- it’s certainly not just a technology problem.

Right. Uh, I think the term of art is, uh, it’s a sociotechnical problem, so it’s deeply embedded in all of the social, political, and economic systems that surround it. But it is already, uh, upending and will upend employment, communications, education, our financial system. You just go on and on. And so if that’s the case, then it becomes really, really clear to me that everyone needs to have a voice, and in particular, the voices that are the most marg- marginalized, that are the, the least likely to, to have a say.

Um, I think those are the ones where these conversations need to be centered. And, um, and an institution like, like Huston-Tillotson is, for me, uh, sort of the ideal place to, to have as my, as my home base, to be able to be working with the, the students there and the faculty. And so I st- I, I started teaching a course, um, called Responsible AI: Technology, Power, and Justice, which is Really, I mean, it’s such a huge topic.

It’s- Yeah … as, as much as I could cram into, to one semester. Um, a kind of, uh, a tour of what AI actually is and, and what the potential concerns and areas of impact are. And had to editorialize a lot because there’s so much that you could cover. Yeah. Um, but really did two things. The, the first part of the course was, um, uh, a deep dive into what a lar- large language model is and how it actually works- Mm-hmm … um, for non-computer science majors. Mm-hmm. ‘Cause I think it’s actually critical for everyone to understand what this technology is, and what it isn’t, and how many human decisions go into steering it, and the direction that it takes, and the problems that it’s solving. There’s this, you know, I think really dangerous narrative that is, um, reinforced for people who don’t actually understand the technology at a, at a reasonable level coming out of Silicon Valley, that it’s either- Yeah … AI is some kind of magic, or even more dangerously, that it’s some kind of god. And, um, that’s not an exaggeration. There’s, you know, Peter Thiel and a handful of other people talk about it that way. And if you believe that it’s some kind of magic or, or some kind of god, then, um, then there’s a couple of things that, um, that are significant problems.

The first one is that it sort of feels inevitable. So the inevitability narrative of, “Well, it’s just gonna happen. There’s nothing– You know, don’t even try to fight it.” Um, that’s a real problem if, if, if you think it’s magic, then of, of course there’s nothing that we can do to, to change it. And then it’s also, it takes away the, the, the human agency of the decis- deliberate decisions people are making for h- what it is they’re building and how they’re building it.

Um, the, the other problem is that it’s easier to sort of intuitively believe some kind of benevolence, um, that- Mm-hmm … oh, if it’s, if it’s magic, you know, or if it’s, if it’s some kind of god, well, then it’s, it’s, it’s just gonna do good things. Um- AI is not, uh, an independent, autonomous, conscious entity. It’s, um, it’s math. It’s pretty extraordinary math, and it can do really amazing things that certainly feel and think, uh, and, and, and, and seem to be exhibiting human-like behavior. And that as, um, as a computer scientist and as a kid who grew up on science fiction, it’s amazing. Like, I never thought I’d, I’d see any of this in my lifetime.

And so I am amazed by it, and I do believe that there is extraordinary potential for good. But I also believe that we as a species have never invented a technology that is asymmetrical in its potential power for good and for harm. Mm-hmm. The exact degree to how extraordinarily positive something can be, there’s an equal and opposite potential for harm, either through carelessness and error, which is certainly something that can happen quite easily, or through deliberate- Yeah … misuse and, and misdirection. We- we’re already seeing a lot of that, and it, it doesn’t take, um, a radical imagination to, to see how that can go wrong. And so if you believe that it is the single most consequential technology that humans have ever created, and as some say, maybe ever will, because once we in- create

Ellen McGirt (pickup): And because it is so consequential… the answer isn’t to let it run amuck unchecked.

Chris Hyams: …gonna solve all the problems from here- Yeah … um, then the answer seems pretty clear that it should be treated with more care and concern and consideration and caution than anything that we have ever built. Which certainly means it shouldn’t be treated with a lot less care, and definitely with none at all. Right. And so right now what we’re seeing, um, is, uh, an… what to me is a mind-boggling and unprecedented effort to just put a lead brick on the accelerator and not even slow down to talk about any of these things, and to brand as hysterical, um, anyone who wants to pause and talk about the impact on jobs, the impact on the environment, the, uh, exploitation of labor in the Global South, the copyright and creative theft, all of these things that are, are very, very clear and very, very real and documented.

And not only brand as hysterical, but if you’re Marc Andreessen in his techno-optimist manifesto saying that AI could save so many lives, that anyone who wants to do anything to slow down the development of AI because of the lives that would’ve been saved that would be postponed- Yeah … is guilty of a form of murder.

And so to me, um, you know, there’s nothing more urgent than putting all of my time and energy into, uh, trying to create some clarity and some sense around this. And, and the thing that I’ve, um, thrown myself into that I taught all last year, two semesters, wrapped up the semester, and have, uh, now joined forces with, uh, a group called the, the Guardrails Alliance that is focused on ensuring that Everyone has a say in how AI, which again, everyone who’s building it says is the single most consequential technological and social and economic, um, force that’s ever been created, that, that everyone has a say in how that is going to be developed and how it’s gonna be governed.

And so that is, um, that’s what I’m spending my time and energy on right now. All of these things are things that I care about and I’m gonna continue to work on, but between now and November, to me, there’s nothing more urgent than, uh, than, than trying to ensure that everyone has a say in this process.

[Transition]

Ellen McGirt: I’m really struck by how you and I– I do not put myself in your category at all in any w- meaningful way, but you and I have come to a very similar point of view in what we’re spending our time on. As you know, um, when we reconnected here in Aspen, I’ve just spent, uh, you know, the, uh, the third or fourth major trip to Louisiana reporting on the ground after the Calais decision, which has had such an extraordinary ripple effect to do exactly what you are a- what, what you are already afraid of, which is to further dis- disenfranchise marginalized voters who need to weigh in on absolutely everything from carceral reform, to education, to data centers, to infrastructure.

I was in Cancer Alley in Louisiana, and, um, they’re losing their ability to, to even have meaningful conversations with representatives about the harm, the physical harm of chemicals in their community for a number of decades. And now there’s this. So I’m not surprised by anything anymore, but I’m constantly surprised by all of it.

But I am really intrigued with your Willingness to move from the arena that you know so well, which is technology in the workforce, to the civic sphere. I think it’s extraordinary, really extraordinary. And you, you walked us very clearly through your emotional and intellectual journey. So your, all your ducks are in a row, as they all, as they always are.

Um, but there is just such an unusual nastiness in the political arena that comes up over history, off and on, off- often, but in the last few years in particular. And you’re stepping, you were stepping out of, out of it in one arena when you decided to leave your post at Indeed and into it full force in another arena.

Ellen McGirt: So let’s talk about the super PAC and the goals of the super PAC and what you and your co- f- colleagues, not co-founders, but colleagues, feel that meaningful conversation about the issues would actually look like. Because part of it is going to be investing in vulnerable races and influencing ambitious politicians to speak openly about guardrails and rules and regulations or maybe even corporate structure.

Anthropic, who is a relatively, is a, is a less harmful player in the sphere in your mind, is organized as a, a public benefit corporation. You know, there, there are some things that we can be s- talking about in the, in the corporate org- governance arena as well. So what is, what does success look like for you?

And how are you preparing to survive in a Goliath kind of argument?

Chris Hyams: Yeah. So, um, let, let me start by, with the, the organization itself was, was founded by two extraordinary, uh, women, Shonda Thomas, uh, who was the founder of Ultraviolet, among other things. Uh, Leah Hunt-Hendrix, uh, was the founder of Solidaire. They’ve, they’ve done incredible work in this public and s- civic sphere, and, um, I had heard about the Alex Boris race in New York 12, which was sort of the bellwether here, and that was the first thing that Leading the Future was targeting, trying to make an example of him, ’cause as a state assemblyman, he had, um, sponsored and, and passed the, the Raise Act, which was the first tiny little step towards some sensible regulation at a statewide level in New York.

Um, because right now there’s a small group of, of billionaires in a race to become trillionaires. One of them, you know, briefly made it there, uh, and, and will again, who are using their money and their power specifically in the 2026 midterms to ensure that they are the only ones that have any say in this process.

They’ve, um, there’s a super PAC called Leading the Future with, um, m- founders of Andreessen Horowitz, Greg Brockman from, uh, founder of OpenAI, uh, Joe Lonsdale, founder of Palantir. They put $140 million into targeting specific races in the 20s– ’26 midterms, where there is a candidate who might possibly want to have a sensible conversation about h- how AI should be governed.

And they are pouring millions of dollars into these small races, not only to ensure that these people don’t end up in Congress and raise their, their voice at all, but I think more importantly, to make an example of them, to create a, a, a chilling effect that no politician would be willing to open their mouth to say anything because they know that…

And, and they put $140 million in. It’s infinite money. That’s just what they put in today. They have- Right … all of the money in the world that they could put behind, uh, essentially subverting the entire democratic process to make sure that they are the only ones that have a say.

Um, and we had been talking to some other friends and said, “Somebody needs to do something,” and I said, “Oh, well, Leah and, and Shona are, uh, are doing this right now.” And so I just basically, you know, called up and said, “Hey, how can I help?” Um, and so I’ve joined… I’m, I’m on the board of, of Guardrails, and I’m, uh, I’m acting as a spokesperson here and just going out and trying to use, um, whatever platform I have where people might pay attention.

But also, in particular, the angle that I have coming from the inside of the industry, and, um, I can see some things that might be harder to see from the outside in terms of when businesses say one thing and, you know, what are they actually doing on the other side? What are their financial incentives?

Ellen McGirt (pickup): So for those people who maybe don’t yet see the existential threat of AI or don’t yet see how it will affect their lives, what do you say to them?

Chris Hyams: We’ve spent a lot of time on this question of how do you explain to people how this technology is gonna impact their lives? Because a lot of the issues are ones that, um, maybe are not ones that are of concern to everyone. They, they happen to all be of a concern to me. Mm-hmm.

The issue of protecting kids is one that all sides, um, come together on. But the other one I think is, is jobs. I came not from, I mean tech- you know, I was, I was working in, you know, in the corporate world in technology, but I feel like the work that we were doing at Indeed was civic work. Um, number one in that we were helping millions and millions of people find work. So the, so the jobs thing is, is a big piece ’cause I think, I think it’s… we’re at like a pretty unique moment in time where there’s always been this fight between, you know, management and, and, and workers, and the biggest challenge- Mm … to worker power has been all of the ways that management can divide and conquer and the, you know, the first lie is that, you know, you as a journalist are not the same type of worker as a welder or a pipe fitter or a house cleaner.

And for the first time, everyone’s job now is potentially, um, on the line. And so I think that there’s an extraordinary opportunity right now to get people to, to open their eyes and see, um, who the real challenger is in this. And, um, and to get together because while there’s, you know, seven or eight, you know, multi-billionaires right now who have an extraordinary amount of power, the other eight billion people actually do have a lot more power if, if we can sort of get together and point in the right direction.

And so the, with the– with jobs right now, um, and this is, you know, from my perch, um, I think it’s, it’s helpful to sort of start with a, a point of view that, um, anything we talk about with AI and potential harms, the hardest thing about the conversation is that so much of it is speculative.

We could say, “Well, well, all of these things could happen.” So I try to bring the conversation back to, okay, what is happening right now? What can we see right now that is, that is irrefutable? And, uh, what I see right now that is irrefutable is that AI is disrupting the labor market without having, in any way, to actually successfully replace a worker.

But the other thing that we see very clearly is that… And this is where the Indeed data becomes very helpful. So the Indeed Hiring Lab is a team that, um, we built of, uh, of labor economists that post incredibly, you know, valuable and useful insights and even- that I’ve been gone for the last year, I, I, I read everything and, and, and consume all the data.

And, um, one thing that we see very, very clearly… So if you think about part-time hiring, part-time jobs are a very accurate measure of current supply and demand in the labor market. So if you are Amazon and you hire 400,000 workers during the holidays to staff your, your warehouses and, and delivery, and then you don’t need them in January.

That’s actually a, a really good barometer of what is the immediate demand.

Full-time hiring is not a measure of current demand. It is more like a, a future, really. The average US worker stays in their job about 4.6 years. So if you’re hiring someone full-time, it’s because you think you’re gonna need them for the next four to five years.

Ellen McGirt: Mm-hmm.

Chris Hyams: And if we look at what’s happened since November of 2022, when ChatGPT was released, um, you know, post-COVID, we had this incredible boom in multiple different sectors of hiring. Nearly all of the sectors that went up during that period of time, uh, are down, and actually multiple ones are down below pre-pandemic levels in terms of new job openings.

So, so this is essentially what the business community collectively is saying: Where do we think we’re gonna need people over the, the coming years? And if you look sector by sector… Um, now the Indeed data doesn’t prove causality, and no one from Indeed right now, I don’t wanna put any words in their mouth.

No one from Indeed is saying AI is the cause of this. But if you look sector by sector, every single place where AI has the largest potential for impact on jobs, those jobs f- new job postings are down the most. And the simplest way to think about this is, again, that future question. If you are a CFO and [someone] comes to you and says, “Over the next four to five years, do you think you’re gonna need more financial analysts?

Do you think you’re gonna need more people in customer service? Are you gonna need more people writing code?” Whether or not AI can do that, you would be excoriated if you said, “Yeah, I think we’re gonna need more coders. I think we’re gonna need more financial analysts. I think we’re gonna need more junior marketing copywriters.”

Um, because every single narrative out there is saying those jobs are going away.

Ellen McGirt (pickup): And what’s the narrative coming from the AI companies themselves? Is it the same or are they dressing it up differently?

Chris Hyams:  Let’s just look at the words that come out of their mouths. So Dario Amodei says, uh…And, and when I say say, on the record is saying. They’ve all changed their tune in the last three to four weeks since their S1s have come out,

Ellen McGirt: Okay. Okay.

Chris Hyams: They can’t run away from their records, so- Okay … uh, Dario Amodei says, you know, 50% of all entry-level jobs are going away, period. 90% of, of all coding, maybe 100%, is, is going away.

Mustafa Suleyman, uh, the CEO of Microsoft AI, says, uh, and has said multiple times, not just once on a hot mic, his statement is that AI is fundamentally a labor-replacing tool. Fundamentally. To me, the most powerful one is the mission statement of OpenAI. For some reason, I, I don’t hear as many people talking about this as– I mean, it’s, it’s on there.

You go to openai.com/charter, paragraph two. “Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence, M-dash, by which we mean autonomous– highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work, M-dash, benefits humanity.” So somehow the mission is to build a system that benefits humanity by outperforming humans at most economically valuable work.

So that is their mission, and that is their definition. So the M-dash is, that’s their definition of what AGI is. AGI is not some level of consciousness. It’s not the ability to solve problems. It is outperforming humans at economically valuable work. If you are a human and you care about your economic value, you should pay attention to that.

And, um, I– So I pay a lot of attention to that. And so then you have all these same people saying AI is gonna make the world better in every possible way. It’s gonna solve every problem. It is gonna cure cancer. We’re gonna have clean water in sub-Saharan Africa. We are gonna have cheap and abundant energy.

And you, you won’t have to worry about work ’cause you’ll get to be a poet. You’ll get to- Right … spend more time with your kids. You’ll pursue the things that you love. Right. And there will be so much abundance, and everything will be so s- so cheap that it’ll be great. Um, but definitely don’t worry your pretty little head about any of these potential problems ’cause AI is gonna, is gonna solve all of this.

And so then the question is: How is AI gonna do that? Well, this goes back to the sort of myth of AI is not some autonomous entity. It’s not like you flip the switch, and then the GPU starts spinning, and suddenly cancer gets cured.

Right?

Google did, with DeepMind, solve this extraordinary problem of protein folding.

Yeah. Demis Hassabis won the Nobel Prize, I think deserved it for something incred– But it, but they didn’t build Gemini, and then Gemini came back one day and said, “Hey, I solved prob- you know, I solved protein folding.” They spent, by some estimates, between two and two and a half billion dollars on this problem.

They pointed-

Ellen McGirt: Everything they had at it.

Chris Hyams: … GPUs, brilliant people, so much money at this problem. It is not the general purpose technology that was so smart that it solved one of the biggest and most important problems in science. Where do you, where do you– The simplest question is: where are you pointing your GPUs?

So where are these companies pointing their GPUs right now? It is not at solving climate change. It is not at finding ways to make clean water in Africa. What they’re being pointed at very, very clearly is the thing that they’re selling, where they’re making their revenue, which is replacing workers. The only thing that they’re doing is they’re, they’re making money selling to companies, and what they’re telling them is that this system can do financial analysts- Mm-hmm … this analysis. This system can do legal work. This system can write code, and actually the, the writing the code is probably the most important thing that it’s doing right now, and where the, the trillion-dollar valuations that these companies either have, have already shown or are on the, the path to showing does not come from solving important problems in the world that are not gonna generate a lot of revenue.

Where they come from is the single largest market in the world is all of human labor.

So again, I personally don’t believe that this thing can replace humans. I think that it’s the most misguided and insane thing to think that, um, because AI can write code that you won’t need coders. This is just- you know, in the same way that 30 years ago, 40 years ago, the tools that were available to us for coding compared to today, they’re unrecognizable.

What, what a coding job in the future is gonna look like is unrecognizable, but a human with those tools is gonna be able to do extraordinary… But that, that’s just my opinion. Right. But I think they’re, they’re wrong about us. But what it means is the labor market for the next five years is likely to be a bloodbath because they believe this, and because there’s so much money being put into trying to convince [companies] to do this- Yeah … that the, the pressure is gonna be ne- So, so my, my goal is just to be able to try to talk about this in a way to help people see that when, when someone from Andreessen Horowitz or OpenAI is giving money to defeat a candidate, just know that what they really wanna do is they want, they want to replace you, and they wanna get paid half of your salary by the c- by your company to put you out of work, and they wanna take a bit of that money to make sure that no politician gets involved in any way in having them have some responsibility or liability or any questions about how, how this should all go.

[Transition]

Ellen McGirt: So let me ask you this.  You’re hopeful. I tend to be optimistic ’cause it just lives in different parts in our body. I’m pointing to my head for optimism, my heart for hope. Um, optimistically and hopefully, you are successful in the, your, the guardrail, um, attempt, and your narrative strategy is to make sure that people are connecting the dots.

What else is on your radar screen for stopping some of the abuses of power that we’re seeing? When you first joined Indeed, you were, you were in product before you became CEO, there was no billionaire class. I mean, there was… The, the seeds of them being viable were in place, but now it’s legitimate. You know, they’re, they’re out there.

So how do you see the tweaking the dials on the rest of civic life so that we don’t have to keep dealing with this every election cycle?

Chris Hyams: I’ll start very briefly with the work with Guardrails.

Part of the inspiration actually that, that Shana and, and Leah talk about is in 2025 when Elon Musk came into Wisconsin and poured $25 million of his own money into a Supreme Court, Wisconsin Supreme Court race because there was a candidate that was gonna be friendly to him in a number of ways, and that blew up in his face.

That once people– Nobody else spent $25 million, but once they said, “Hey, this money is coming from Elon Musk. This is what he has done elsewhere. This is what he wants to do in Wisconsin,” that candidate got destroyed. And so, uh, you know, so much of what’s happening right now is there’s so much noise that, that if you can start with a really simple message and help people understand where the money is…

Right now, one thing that, that gives me hope, um, is that, uh, polling in the US shows very, very clearly that, um, Americans are not excited about this billionaire class, um, and AI and the you know, 60 to 80% of people believe that, um, we need more guardrails, we need to be more careful, that a few people shouldn’t be making these decisions that, um, uh, that everyone needs to have a say.

Uh, there’s actually a, a survey that, that showed that something like 29% of Americans have reported trying to sabotage their company’s efforts, uh, to, to use AI, 44%, I think, of Gen Z workers. Um, so there, there is, there is a sentiment right now that I think can help people see, um, again, that, that there is, there is a power that collectively we wanna fight, and that it’s not just my tribe against your tribe.

And so when, when I, when, when I heard your, your thing about, um, you know, radical collaboration, the, the example that I’ve been giving, and this is the first thing that came to mind, you know, people have asked like, “Oh, what’s, what’s an example of something like AI before and, and how do we respond?”

And, and ’cause a lot of… So the rhetoric coming from the other side, there’s all these different things about, you know, it’s, it’s murder or, you know, you’re anti-innovation or anti-technology. I’m a, I’m a technologist. I’m not anti… And like I’m not anti-technology.

Ellen McGirt: You’re not a Luddite at all.

Chris Hyams: I’m anti-bad people.

Ellen McGirt: Yeah.

Chris Hyams: Um, but the last time– So the, this argument that China, that we have to do this, and we have to run at full speed, and we have to remove all the guardrails because if China gets there first, then, then we’re all- Right … screwed. Um, the last time we invented something that was potentially earth-changing in terms of the, the extraordinary good that it could bring and also the extraordinary harm was the Manhattan Project. Mm. So after the Manhattan Project, we were in a literal existential race with the Russians,

Ellen McGirt: Yeah.

Chris Hyams: And we believed that if, if the Russians got there first, the world was over. Um, I was not alive at that time, but- Right … I’ve read enough to know that that, that’s, that’s what we believed.

And what we didn’t do in that moment was say, “Okay. Well, we’re in this existential race with the Russians. We gotta get there first.

Here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna open source fission technology. We’re gonna create massive incentive for every private corporation and every individual to build their own weapons and, and reactors as quickly as possible. We’re gonna remove all of the roadblocks and all the guardrails to make sure that we can get there first, and we’ll figure out what the problems might be later.” If we had done that, we would not probably be sitting, you know, in this room having this conversation right now.

Um, what happened was the greatest example of radical collaboration in the history of the planet, which was 191 countries got together over the next 20 years. The International Atomic Energy Coalition, the Non-Proliferation Treaty, um, which was imperfect because all of these things are imperfect. You know, we still ended up with six new nuclear nations that happened after that, but we didn’t have the 20 or 50 that we thought at the time that we were going to have.

Um, yes, in my lifetime we had Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, but we haven’t blown each other up yet. And did it slow things down? Yeah, and was that hopefully probably the right thing? Yeah, that, that’s okay. And so, you know, I’m not optimistic because what I think is required is the greatest act of radical collaboration in the history of mankind since- Yeah … the Manhattan Project. But I’m hopeful because we have at times, we’ve pulled ourselves from the brink multiple times, and this feels like a brink. Not because I’m not one of those people who thinks “Terminator” is gonna happen, that the robots on their own are gonna come… I think we’re gonna use this to-

Ellen McGirt: Yep, we are the alien.

Chris Hyams: … to destroy each other.

Ellen McGirt: We’re the alien force.

Chris Hyams: Financially, socially, economically, militarily, like really bad things will happen on the path that we’re on because people with access to something that has seems like unlimited power will abuse that with, with, when they’re not in check. But I think that there’s an opportunity here, and I think enough people, and, and certainly around the world the sentiment is, is, uh, is different.

And especially governments around the world have very different approach than, than ours does right now. So I think we’re gonna need some… You know, people are gonna need to vote, people are gonna need to join unions- Yeah … and people are gonna need to, to speak up. And, um, and when those things happen, I think then real change can happen, but it’s gonna, it is gonna require radical collaboration.

Ellen McGirt: Chris, thank you so very much.

I could just listen to you all day.