Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to It could happen here a podcast about
Speaker 1: things falling apart, and today it's kind of going to
Speaker 1: be a conversation about is shit falling apart? Are we
Speaker 1: all about to be devoured by a rogue AI? Is
Speaker 1: your job about to be devoured by a rogue AI?
Speaker 1: These are the questions that we're going to, you know,
Speaker 1: talk around and about and stuff today and with us
Speaker 1: today is Noah John Syracusa, a math professor at Bentley University. Noah,
Speaker 1: welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, and I'm
Speaker 1: reaching out. We're talking right now because there's an article
Speaker 1: that was put up in The New York Times on
Speaker 1: March twenty four, twenty twenty three, titled you can have
Speaker 1: the Blue Pill or the Red Pill and We're out
Speaker 1: of Blue Pills, which is a fun title by Yuval Harari,
Speaker 1: Tristan Harris and as a Raskin. And it's an article
Speaker 1: that is kind of about the pit falls and dangers
Speaker 1: of AI research, of which there definitely are some. I
Speaker 1: enjoyed your thread on the matter. I thought it was
Speaker 1: a lucid breakdown of the things the article gets right
Speaker 1: and the areas in which I think they're a bit
Speaker 1: fear mongery. So yeah, I think that's probably a good
Speaker 1: place to start, unless you wanted to start by just
Speaker 1: kind of generally talking about where you kind of are
Speaker 1: on AI and what you kind of think, you know,
Speaker 1: the technology is advancing towards right now. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: I think I can probably answer both those questions and
Speaker 1: the same because part of why I enjoyed writing that
Speaker 1: threat dissecting the article is I just had the strangest
Speaker 1: feeling reading it that I agreed with it so much
Speaker 1: in principle and yet somehow objected it to so much
Speaker 1: in detail. Yeah, and it thinking about that article helped
Speaker 1: me think about my own feelings on AI, which you know,
Speaker 1: every day of the week is slightly different because so
Speaker 1: much news happens. Yeah, I found myself overall deeply frustrated
Speaker 1: that I agree with the central conclusion, which is that
Speaker 1: maybe we shouldn't be just like plowing headlong into this
Speaker 1: and should be more careful when we we we screw
Speaker 1: around with technology like this, which I agree with and
Speaker 1: I feel like should have been the thing we did
Speaker 1: with like I don't know, Facebook, Twitter, like all of
Speaker 1: these things, Like it's less my obsession is less with
Speaker 1: like the specific dangers of AI, and more with what
Speaker 1: we keep letting these guys who are fundamentally like gamblers
Speaker 1: within your capital money really put our society through the
Speaker 1: ringer without ever asking should we like do any research
Speaker 1: on maybe how social media affects children and like how
Speaker 1: all of these different things. And it's it's right that, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: we should be concerned about what these people are going
Speaker 1: to do with AI, but also why why now? Why
Speaker 1: just now? Yeah? And that raises a really good point,
Speaker 1: which is what's different now versus what we've been experiencing
Speaker 1: with social media? And just to give your listeners some context,
Speaker 1: one of the three authors on this Sneer Times article
Speaker 1: is famous for writing this book Sapiens that's a sweeping
Speaker 1: history of humanity, and the other two are actually most
Speaker 1: famous for the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma. So they
Speaker 1: really are in this camp of warning people about social
Speaker 1: media algorithms. And as exactly as you're saying, that's sort
Speaker 1: of this thing that we've been dealing with, probably quite poorly,
Speaker 1: and now we're kind of moving on to the next
Speaker 1: societal risk, which is AI. So that as a really
Speaker 1: important question of what's different now? And I think That's
Speaker 1: one of the things the articles trying to address, which
Speaker 1: is many of the problems that we already have with algorithms,
Speaker 1: data driven algorithms, and even AI as it's used in
Speaker 1: social media is still happening now, but somehow things feel
Speaker 1: like they're aspiring out of control. Yeah, and I think,
Speaker 1: I mean, honestly, I think a lot of this just
Speaker 1: has to do with culturally, what are touchstones for AI
Speaker 1: we're going into this, you know, which are Skynet? You know,
Speaker 1: like it's that sort of thing, and you do see.
Speaker 1: I feel like the uncredited fourth author on this particular
Speaker 1: article is James Cameron, because there's pieces of it throughout
Speaker 1: this There's some it opens actually pretty provocatively. Imagine that
Speaker 1: you are boarding an airplane. Half the engineers who built
Speaker 1: it tell you there is a ten percent chance the
Speaker 1: plane will crash, killing you and everyone else on it.
Speaker 1: Would you still board? In twenty twenty two, over seven
Speaker 1: hundred top academics and researchers behind the leading artificial intelligence companies,
Speaker 1: we're asking a survey about future AI risk. Half of
Speaker 1: those surveys stated there was a ten percent or greater
Speaker 1: chance of human extinction from future AI systems. Which yeah,
Speaker 1: let's zoom in on. Yeah, yeah, let's talk about that,
Speaker 1: because what I tried to do in my thread was
Speaker 1: go through all the claims and assertions and really pause
Speaker 1: and say hold on. But that's a great one to start,
Speaker 1: because there's a lot to dig in right there. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: first of all, there's a huge difference in that airplanes
Speaker 1: are based on science and physics and things that we
Speaker 1: understand pretty well. There's a lot to it, and there's
Speaker 1: been millions of flights, so you have a lot of data.
Speaker 1: You know, how many planes crash and how many don't.
Speaker 1: Maybe one engine goes out, you can do the statistics
Speaker 1: and CEO you know whatever, percent of planes without the
Speaker 1: engine still land safely. The problem with AI is we're
Speaker 1: just guessing, right There's no way to know one hundred
Speaker 1: years from now or ten years from now what it's
Speaker 1: going to do, what the real risks are, so we speculate,
Speaker 1: and that's not uncharted territory, right let nuclear weapons were
Speaker 1: first introduced, people had to guess and speculate. But the danger,
Speaker 1: I think is putting it in that same category as
Speaker 1: things like airplanes or climate change. I'll like to think
Speaker 1: about climate change when you see these you know, what's
Speaker 1: the IPCC if forget the acronym in these reports, that's
Speaker 1: based on thousands of scientists digging into thousands of published
Speaker 1: papers and all this data really modeling the environment. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of meat and substance to it. The problem
Speaker 1: with the AI is it's mostly people I hate to
Speaker 1: say it, but like me or like you, just kind
Speaker 1: of guessing and thinking, maybe this will happen, maybe that'll happen.
Speaker 1: The reasonable thing to say if you're in the airs,
Speaker 1: which is like, yeah, I have concerns that AI could
Speaker 1: cause serious negative externalities for the human race, perfectly reasonable statement.
Speaker 1: It is physically impossible to say there's a ten percent chance,
Speaker 1: exactly because it's never done that before. You know, I'm
Speaker 1: a math professor, and I'm the first to say numbers
Speaker 1: don't have some intrinsic meaning. Right. If I just say
Speaker 1: something has maybe a fifteen percent, I'm just making up
Speaker 1: I'm pulling out of my ass. Yeah, it doesn't make
Speaker 1: it true. So it's this, it's a general pet thieve
Speaker 1: I have of sort of giving a false sense of
Speaker 1: precision by using numbers that you don't really know where
Speaker 1: they came from or they're just made up. So that's
Speaker 1: one issue is these numbers are made up, and asking
Speaker 1: a thousand people to make up numbers isn't necessarily any
Speaker 1: better than asking one or two. You know, then if
Speaker 1: the numbers made up, it's made up. So that's one issue. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I also do think and I'm not the I saw
Speaker 1: someone making no I think it was Ben Collins, who
Speaker 1: writes for NBC. On Twitter made a note that like, well,
Speaker 1: the fact that all of these statements about like how
Speaker 1: dangerous they are about human extinction are coming out of
Speaker 1: people in the AI industry has started to kind of
Speaker 1: feel like marketing. That's right, Yeah, exactly, it's a little
Speaker 1: bit of buzz marketing going on here. And I think
Speaker 1: you mentioned social media, and the authors of this article
Speaker 1: mentioned social media, and we have to look to the
Speaker 1: past right to understand the future. I think that's the
Speaker 1: only way to do it. So, what was one of
Speaker 1: the biggest scandals in social media was Cambridge Analytica And
Speaker 1: as you know, we probably remember, this was this data
Speaker 1: privacy scandal where a bunch of data was collected from
Speaker 1: Facebook users that shouldn't have been you know, people didn't
Speaker 1: realize that the data has been collected, they didn't approve it,
Speaker 1: and it was used for this election company or this
Speaker 1: political company that was trying to profile people and influenced
Speaker 1: campaigns towards Donald Trump towards Brexit. So this was a
Speaker 1: huge scandal, and you know, Facebook was fine five billion
Speaker 1: dollars or something, very justifiably. But I would say what
Speaker 1: it was in retrospect was a data privacy issue. People's
Speaker 1: personal data was leaked when it shouldn't have been. The
Speaker 1: problem was there was so much fear and fear mongering
Speaker 1: over it that people felt this data was used by
Speaker 1: these sort of algorithmic mind lasers to kind of know
Speaker 1: us in such great detail and get us, trick us
Speaker 1: into voting for Donald Trump and targeting us. And the
Speaker 1: journey is still kind of out, but most of the
Speaker 1: evidence looks like Cambridge Analytica it wasn't that effective. They
Speaker 1: just couldn't do it. And it turns out you can
Speaker 1: know a lot about a person, a lot about their data,
Speaker 1: and it's really hard to influence them to change them.
Speaker 1: So what happened I think was there was a lot
Speaker 1: of alarm set spread rightly so about the tech companies.
Speaker 1: They have too much power, too much data, they know
Speaker 1: too much about us, and this horrible thing happened. The
Speaker 1: problem was a lot of the alarmism then actually reinforced
Speaker 1: this aura of power, of godlike power that the tech
Speaker 1: companies have. People criticizing them actually gave them more potency
Speaker 1: than they deserved. And then suddenly Google and Facebook and
Speaker 1: all they had. It wasn't sudden, but it kind of
Speaker 1: built it up. They had this aura that our algorithms
Speaker 1: are it's so insanely powerful, and we have to make
Speaker 1: sure they stay in the right hands, and we can
Speaker 1: do so much. And that's unfortunately what I see happening
Speaker 1: now a lot, and that is kind of the setting
Speaker 1: for critiquing this article. Yeah, absolutely agree that this stuff
Speaker 1: is risky. AI. I absolutely agree that we could go
Speaker 1: down to dangerous path. But once we start leaving firm
Speaker 1: ground and speculating wildly and using the terminator stuff that
Speaker 1: you described. Yeah, even if you think you're criticizing the
Speaker 1: tech companies, you know what you're doing giving them the
Speaker 1: biggest compliment in the world, saying that you guys have
Speaker 1: created are godlike and you've created these mighty machines, created
Speaker 1: a deity which is very similar to the language this
Speaker 1: argue article has at the end, and I think it's
Speaker 1: kind of worth like, as you're bringing up there are
Speaker 1: real threats. There are real threats that are immediately obvious.
Speaker 1: The threat that a lot of writers are going to
Speaker 1: lose their jobs because companies like BuzzFeed decide to replace
Speaker 1: them with you know, chat, GPT or whatever. The fact
Speaker 1: that a lot of artists are going to lose out
Speaker 1: on work because their work has been hoovered up and
Speaker 1: it's being used to generate Like these are very real
Speaker 1: and very immediate concerns that we don't have to They're
Speaker 1: not hypothetical. We don't have to theorize about the AI
Speaker 1: becoming intelligent for this to be a problem. These are
Speaker 1: things we have to immediately deal with because it puts
Speaker 1: people at risk. It's the same thing with like, you know,
Speaker 1: there's a lot that gets talked about with Cambridge Analytica,
Speaker 1: with kind of like the different Russian disinformation efforts. But
Speaker 1: when I think about the stuff that was happening in
Speaker 1: the same period that worries me more. One of the
Speaker 1: things that occurred is because there was so much money
Speaker 1: to be made if you could get certain things to
Speaker 1: go viral on YouTube, companies that use tools that weren't
Speaker 1: wildly dissimilar from some of these basically generated CGI videos
Speaker 1: based on kind of random terms that they knew were
Speaker 1: likely to trick the algorithm into trending. And god knows
Speaker 1: how many children were parked in front of these like
Speaker 1: very unhinged videos for hours at a time that like
Speaker 1: they would start watching some normal kid musical video or something,
Speaker 1: and then they're watching like the disembodied head of Krusty
Speaker 1: the Crown bounce around while like some sort of nonsense
Speaker 1: song gets sung, and it's like, well, what is that
Speaker 1: actually going to do with kids? Like, we don't know.
Speaker 1: That's unsettling, thoughttling. Yeah, And that's the kind of thing,
Speaker 1: you know, And I'm sure there will be obviously, Like
Speaker 1: one of the things that this article is not wrong
Speaker 1: about is that if we kind of leap forward into
Speaker 1: this technology with the kind of abandon that we're used
Speaker 1: to giving the tech company, there will be unforeseen externalities
Speaker 1: that we can't predict right now that will be very concerning.
Speaker 1: I just don't think it's sky in it. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: that's what was so challenging, not just with that article,
Speaker 1: but with I think the movement we're having is I
Speaker 1: do agree very much in spirit. I agree with the recommendations.
Speaker 1: We need to slow down, we need to be more
Speaker 1: judicious and cautious, we need to really consider these. But again,
Speaker 1: if we overhyped the technology, we may be doing ourselves
Speaker 1: a disservice by empowering the very entities that we're trying
Speaker 1: to take power from. And a sample like that, can
Speaker 1: I read a quick quote from the article, do you
Speaker 1: AI's new mastery of language means it can now hack
Speaker 1: and manipulate the operating system of civilization. By'm gaining mastery
Speaker 1: of language, AI is seizing the master key to civilization
Speaker 1: from bank vaults to holy sepulchers. That's right, and that
Speaker 1: I mean, that is funny, and you're right to laugh.
Speaker 1: Let's actually zoom in a second, and I think this
Speaker 1: is such a tempting trap that AI is super intelligent
Speaker 1: in some respects, right, you can. It's done amazing at
Speaker 1: chasss amazing, It's jeopard be amazing at various things. Chat
Speaker 1: Gypt is amazing at these conversations. So what happens is
Speaker 1: it's so tempting to think AI just equal super smart
Speaker 1: and because it can do those things, and now look,
Speaker 1: it can converse, that it must be the super intelligent
Speaker 1: conversational entity. And it's really good at, you know, taking
Speaker 1: text that's on the web that it's already looked at
Speaker 1: and kind of spinning it around and processing. It can
Speaker 1: come up with poems and weird forms. But that doesn't
Speaker 1: mean it is super intelligent in all respects. For instance,
Speaker 1: one of the main issues is to hack civilization. To
Speaker 1: manipulate us with language, it has to kind of know
Speaker 1: what impact its words have on us, and it doesn't
Speaker 1: really have that. It just has a little conversation a
Speaker 1: textbox and I can give it a thumbs up or
Speaker 1: thumbs down. So the only data that it's collecting for
Speaker 1: me when it talks to me any of these chatbots
Speaker 1: is did I like the response or not. That's pretty
Speaker 1: weak data to try to manipulate me, you know, it's
Speaker 1: so basic. That's not that different than when I watch
Speaker 1: YouTube videos. YouTube knows what videos I like and what
Speaker 1: I don't like. Would you say that YouTube is hacked civilization. No,
Speaker 1: it's addicted a lot of us, but it's not hacked us. Yeah.
Speaker 1: We people have hacked YouTube and that has done some
Speaker 1: damage to other people, like but it's like the thing is.
Speaker 1: And that's part of why while I have many concerns
Speaker 1: about this technology, it's not that it's going to hack
Speaker 1: civilization because like, we're really good at doing that to
Speaker 1: each other. Like there's always huge numbers of people hacking
Speaker 1: bits of the populace and manipulating each other, and there
Speaker 1: always have been. That's why we figured out how to
Speaker 1: paint like it's I do think that there's there's an
Speaker 1: interesting conversation to be had about the part of why
Speaker 1: people are kind of willing to believe anything as possible
Speaker 1: with this stuff is that for folks who were just
Speaker 1: kind of living their lives with a normal amount of
Speaker 1: attention paid to the tech industry, it seems like these
Speaker 1: tools popped out of nowhere a couple of months ago, right.
Speaker 1: It feels like, oh, there has just suddenly been this
Speaker 1: massive breakthrough. And the reality is that all of the
Speaker 1: stuff that people you know, chat gpt, these different ais
Speaker 1: that everybody's talking about, this is technology that people have
Speaker 1: been pouring resources into for years and years and years
Speaker 1: and years and years, and that's why it's able to
Speaker 1: do some of these amazing things that we've seen. But
Speaker 1: it's not I don't think it means that in a
Speaker 1: month it's going to be a thousand times smarter. It's
Speaker 1: it's it's a process of labor, and it was finally
Speaker 1: ready to be unveiled to the extent that it has been.
Speaker 1: Maybe that's right. And a good example is a GPT
Speaker 1: four which recently came out. There was GPT three before
Speaker 1: and chat Gypt, and there was so much speculation that
Speaker 1: GPT four is going to be again this godlike thing
Speaker 1: that just you know, that brings us to the singularity.
Speaker 1: And honestly, it's done better at tests. You know, I
Speaker 1: forget the numbers, but maybe one of them got a
Speaker 1: twenty percent grade on some tests and this one got
Speaker 1: an eighty percent. So that is a significant improvement. Right.
Speaker 1: If you're a teacher and your students improve that much,
Speaker 1: you should be happy, right, But as you said, is
Speaker 1: that a thousand times No, even though the machine is
Speaker 1: much bigger, much more data, and it just shows that. Yeah, Like,
Speaker 1: the reality is this is incremental progress going at a
Speaker 1: very fast rate, very unsettling even for those of us
Speaker 1: following the field closely, where it experiencing that kind of
Speaker 1: vertigo that you're saying that whoa where did this come from?
Speaker 1: So even within the field, and you're absolutely right, if
Speaker 1: you're just at home, you know, not paying attention for
Speaker 1: a week or a month or a year, suddenly the
Speaker 1: stuff pops up. It is disorienting. But one thing I
Speaker 1: think that's helped me at least kind of clarify what
Speaker 1: not even answering what the risks are, but just understanding
Speaker 1: the different camps of why certain people are reacting differently,
Speaker 1: and why even the people afraid of AI seem to
Speaker 1: be now fighting amongst each other and why it's getting fractured.
Speaker 1: Is are you more afraid of this AI used as
Speaker 1: a tool by people or are you more afraid of
Speaker 1: it kind of taking on its own autonomy and kind
Speaker 1: of going rogue and doing its own things. And I'm
Speaker 1: very much afraid of people using it. I think big
Speaker 1: companies are going to use it and there's going to
Speaker 1: be a lot of problems, just like we saw with
Speaker 1: social media. People will get addicted, democracies will be flooded
Speaker 1: with misinformation, It'll be weaponized by various actors, will be
Speaker 1: bought accounts. So I am very concerned about it being used. Basically,
Speaker 1: it performing the job it was told to do. But
Speaker 1: it'll be told to do dangerous jobs, either making money
Speaker 1: or making discord. There's another group of people that are
Speaker 1: more worried about the AI somehow deciding on its own
Speaker 1: to do things to take over. And that's where you know,
Speaker 1: I can't roll it out, But that's where I kind
Speaker 1: of am skeptical. Let's focus on how people are using
Speaker 1: it for now, for the foreseeable future. I don't think
Speaker 1: we need to worry yet, at least about the AI
Speaker 1: somehow having a life of its own and stabbing us
Speaker 1: in the back and enslaving us, because there's just so
Speaker 1: much that can go wrong before you even get to
Speaker 1: that point. Yeah, and it's it's not that's exactly like
Speaker 1: it's a threat triage kind of thing, where like, is
Speaker 1: it theoretically possible that one day human beings could create
Speaker 1: an artificial intelligence that is capable of having its own
Speaker 1: agency that is malicious? Yeah, sure, I guess, Like I
Speaker 1: mean maybe, but man, we're there's a lot of us
Speaker 1: that are very malicious right now that are actively trying
Speaker 1: to harm other people at scale. I'm concerned about how
Speaker 1: they will use AI to do that. I think botonets
Speaker 1: are a really good example. One of the things that
Speaker 1: that these these new this newest generation of AI tools
Speaker 1: allows is more realistic and intelligent bots than I think
Speaker 1: have been accessible at scale before. And that's a very
Speaker 1: real concern. Um. I will say when I kind of sorry,
Speaker 1: when I kind of wargame this back and forth with myself.
Speaker 1: One thing that is oddly comforting is like, well, the
Speaker 1: shared comments that we all inhabit of, like ontological truth
Speaker 1: is already so shattered that like there's there's only so
Speaker 1: much damage. I feel like adding additional bots and additional
Speaker 1: disinformation can really do um. Like I done one thought
Speaker 1: on that though, because I've been digging into that too.
Speaker 1: I've been, you know, trying to ponder how to feel
Speaker 1: about that, because a lot of this I don't know,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm trying to make is. I do think
Speaker 1: if you go back to like two sixteen earlier versions
Speaker 1: of the Internet before leading up to Donald Trump's election,
Speaker 1: I think there was a lot of wild West to Google,
Speaker 1: to social media, to all these things. Right, fake news
Speaker 1: was just like piling up to the top of Google
Speaker 1: search results. That election was so monumental and such a
Speaker 1: seismic shockwave through tech that fake news and misinformation might
Speaker 1: have played a role that they really had to do something,
Speaker 1: and I think some companies are more effective than others.
Speaker 1: I think Google put a lot of effort into making
Speaker 1: sure authoritative sources rise to the top. So what that
Speaker 1: means is when now you go online and you google
Speaker 1: for medical information, the top results you get are WebMD
Speaker 1: or some official CDC, your government thing. They're pretty decent reliable.
Speaker 1: It's not to say there's an all that crap on
Speaker 1: the Internet, but Google has done a pretty good job
Speaker 1: of having the good stuff float to the top, and
Speaker 1: that's the information that people see. So what I'm worried
Speaker 1: is now we might be kind of resetting ourselves back
Speaker 1: to the twenty sixteen where when you're talking to these
Speaker 1: chat bots that are trained on all the internets. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know if the web mds and the CDC
Speaker 1: type of information is necessarily going to float to the top.
Speaker 1: Maybe they'll work that out. But I'm also worried that
Speaker 1: open Ai or Google or Microsoft for wherever, they'll have
Speaker 1: ones that are pretty reasonable and kind of you know,
Speaker 1: tuned to appeal to a lot of people. But Elon
Speaker 1: must might build his own competitor, one that might be
Speaker 1: really tuned to elevate the right wing site your car.
Speaker 1: So I have been messing around, as I mean, and
Speaker 1: you have been doing so in a much more rigorous manner,
Speaker 1: I'm sure. But I've screw around with a couple of
Speaker 1: different AI chat and search engines. I use find PHI
Speaker 1: and D sometimes I've been playing around with BING and
Speaker 1: one of the things I've noticed is that you know,
Speaker 1: if you ask it like, hey, summarize for me, like
Speaker 1: why the Battle of Hastings mattered, You'll get a reasonably
Speaker 1: decent answer. But if I ask it like I don't know,
Speaker 1: specific questions about myself, I've come to I noticed at
Speaker 1: first when I did it, I would get some really
Speaker 1: weirdly like colloquial vernacular from it explaining things, and I
Speaker 1: realized it was just pulling answers directly that fans had
Speaker 1: asked about me on the subreddit that this show has.
Speaker 1: And so when I think about like ways in which
Speaker 1: to game the system, well, you make a bunch of bots.
Speaker 1: You have them post questions and answers that are you know,
Speaker 1: supportive of this specific product line or whatever on a
Speaker 1: subreddit and hope that it gets picked like scanned by
Speaker 1: an AI and that becomes part of its like answer
Speaker 1: for you know what happens if you know, I can't
Speaker 1: stop itching or whatever. I don't know, like, but I
Speaker 1: like obviously you can see using them ways in which
Speaker 1: these cannon will be gamed to some extent. You know,
Speaker 1: it's always kind of a red Queen sort of situation
Speaker 1: where you have to disinformation people fighting this info. You're
Speaker 1: always running as fast as you can just to stay
Speaker 1: in place that's right, And that is that brings up
Speaker 1: another issue which I do feel like this is possibly
Speaker 1: really tipping the balance in that it takes a certain
Speaker 1: amount of resources to create misinformation, it takes a certain
Speaker 1: amount of resources to debunk it. Right, A journalist has
Speaker 1: to sit down, Snopes has to write a little piece
Speaker 1: about it. And the problem is with this AI, it's
Speaker 1: suddenly just dropping the price of creation down to essentially zero.
Speaker 1: Anyone can create essentially limitless supply of quasi information that
Speaker 1: may or may not be true. But the problem is,
Speaker 1: is the price of journalism of debunking also going down,
Speaker 1: maybe by fifty percent, right, maybe it takes you half
Speaker 1: as much time to write an article. It's not going
Speaker 1: to zero, no, So that's the balance is Creating stuff
Speaker 1: has gotten a lot cheaper, Detecting, debunking, doing proper journalism
Speaker 1: has gotten a little bit cheaper. So I'm worried that
Speaker 1: that's journalists are already stretched then. And this is by
Speaker 1: far my biggest concern because it's it's not just this
Speaker 1: that's obviously a significant factor in it. There will be
Speaker 1: more disinformation, there will not be more journalists, in part
Speaker 1: because I think AI is going to take jobs from
Speaker 1: a particularly low level d It's not going to replace,
Speaker 1: you know, prizewinning columnists at the New York Times, and
Speaker 1: it's not going to replace like guys like me who
Speaker 1: have a very long and established career of doing the
Speaker 1: specific thing that we do. But I think back to
Speaker 1: when I got started as a journalist as a writer.
Speaker 1: It was as a tech blogger, and I had an
Speaker 1: X number of articles that I had to get out
Speaker 1: per day, and obviously, like my boss was essentially trusting
Speaker 1: that with that many articles, i'd have a few that
Speaker 1: did well on Google, and that brings in traffic, and
Speaker 1: that brought in money. And there's a degree to which
Speaker 1: you're just kind of doing seo shit. But it's also
Speaker 1: I conducted my first interviews for that job, I went
Speaker 1: to trade shows for the first time. I did my
Speaker 1: first on the ground journalism for that job. It taught
Speaker 1: me how to write quickly and an a polished nature.
Speaker 1: And I was not writing anything that was like crucial
Speaker 1: to the development of humankind. But it made me into
Speaker 1: the kind of person who was later able to write
Speaker 1: things that were read by people all over the world,
Speaker 1: and that had an influence on people. And I worry
Speaker 1: about the brain dray, not just among journalists, but among writers,
Speaker 1: among artists, you know, people who do illustrations and stuff. Eventually, musicians,
Speaker 1: at least some kinds of musicians will probably also run
Speaker 1: up against this, where the stuff that it was easy
Speaker 1: for kind of people breaking in to get a little
Speaker 1: bit of work that would hone their skills and allow
Speaker 1: them to live doing the thing that they're interested in
Speaker 1: is going to disappear. And more and more of the
Speaker 1: stuff that we kind of casually low level consume, not
Speaker 1: our high art, not our favorite movies, not our favorite books,
Speaker 1: but the stuff that we encounter when we stumble upon
Speaker 1: a web page or like in a commercial or whatever,
Speaker 1: will be increasingly made by AIS, and that AI will
Speaker 1: be pulling from an increasingly narrow set of things that
Speaker 1: humans made because less humans will get that in tree
Speaker 1: level work, and that is there's something concerning there that
Speaker 1: is something that worries me about the future of just creativity. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think, I mean two points. One is just
Speaker 1: to kind of be Devil's advocate a little bit, because
Speaker 1: I do sympathize and I think you're right, but a
Speaker 1: little bit devil's advocate is there. It might be on
Speaker 1: the out flip side of the coin that there's people
Speaker 1: that feel like they have artistic imagination and desires but
Speaker 1: lack the technical ability, and suddenly they can paint, so
Speaker 1: to speak, by using these aiimage generators. Maybe someone has
Speaker 1: some form of dyslexia or their English as a second
Speaker 1: language or even you know, native speaker without any of
Speaker 1: these issues obstructions, but just finds the writing process difficult,
Speaker 1: and maybe AI enables them to be a writer to contribute.
Speaker 1: So I could see, you know, there's going to be
Speaker 1: the pros and the negatives, and I don't know how
Speaker 1: the balance is, but I think you're right thinking from
Speaker 1: a profession that's sort of like a passion project view.
Speaker 1: From a professional view, I do see the profession narrowing.
Speaker 1: If it journalists are expected to work twice as quickly
Speaker 1: because they're all using chatbots, there's probably going to be
Speaker 1: half half as many of them, right, I mean, that's
Speaker 1: that's the economics. But this brings up a bigger issue,
Speaker 1: which is I do think what you're hitting on is
Speaker 1: there are these long term risks that maybe AI is
Speaker 1: gonna fuel this rebellion of robots and this. You know, maybe,
Speaker 1: but again, we have an economics, social, political, economic world
Speaker 1: we live in, and I just think let's really focus
Speaker 1: on the issues we have. Now. That's not discounting the future.
Speaker 1: It's not like let's burn a bunch of carbon and
Speaker 1: meaning fuels because who cares about climate change? That's our
Speaker 1: grandkids problems. Yeah, this is different. It's like, let's think
Speaker 1: about the jobs the world. I mean, another way to
Speaker 1: put this is if we mess up our economy and
Speaker 1: mess up our democracy by people losing jobs and mass
Speaker 1: protests and losing trust in the government and there's just
Speaker 1: an erosion of truth, we're not going to be able
Speaker 1: to handle climate change or any of these big AI
Speaker 1: you know, the singularity type of risks. So what I
Speaker 1: feel like is, let's focus on what keeps our economy
Speaker 1: and our sanity and our humanity. Well, let's keep this
Speaker 1: fabric of society together now so that we're more equipped
Speaker 1: in the future to handle all the risks AI and otherwise.
Speaker 1: But this goes back to what you're saying, which is,
Speaker 1: these are real issues in the short term, and if
Speaker 1: we don't address them, if we get distracted by the
Speaker 1: long term, we're not going to be ready to address
Speaker 1: the long term even if we think about it now,
Speaker 1: we'll be so distracted and so dismayed. Yeah, so I
Speaker 1: think we have to be practical here. I agree, and
Speaker 1: I am also I think it's a valid point that
Speaker 1: you make about the fact that all these are tools
Speaker 1: that will reduce options for some people, there are also
Speaker 1: tools that create options that can be used for the
Speaker 1: creation of art of culture. I do think some people
Speaker 1: I know have brought up photoshop when I talk about
Speaker 1: my concerns with AI and are, like, you know, there
Speaker 1: were a lot of people, draftsmen and whatnot who were
Speaker 1: concerned when photoshop hit because it was a threat to
Speaker 1: some of the things that they did for money. And
Speaker 1: photoshop effectively has created whole forms of art that didn't
Speaker 1: exist or didn't exist in the same fashion before it
Speaker 1: did as a tool and tools like it. And that's
Speaker 1: not a think I think it's kind of worth I
Speaker 1: don't like I don't want to be kind of just
Speaker 1: on the edge of tragedy here. You know, this is
Speaker 1: a there's a lot of different ways this could go,
Speaker 1: and they're not all bad. I think we're all used
Speaker 1: to calamity right now, so much so that we potentially
Speaker 1: expect it in situations where it's not the inevitable outcome. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean that's I think one way to kind of
Speaker 1: boil a lot of that down is we can adapt.
Speaker 1: We just need time to do so to many things.
Speaker 1: And what's really challenging and frustrating now is the pace
Speaker 1: is so fast. It's not just an illusion, and it's
Speaker 1: not just oh, if you don't pay attention to AI,
Speaker 1: it really is fast. It's very very hard for us
Speaker 1: to adapt. So, just thinking of the Internet, we got
Speaker 1: a lot like individuals as users and tech companies got
Speaker 1: a lot better at dealing with clickbait. Right YouTube was
Speaker 1: tons of baden. They figured out ways to demote that
Speaker 1: to some extent. We got a lot better at keeping
Speaker 1: fake news out of the high search rankings in Google.
Speaker 1: Like I mentioned, a lot of these problems that came up,
Speaker 1: we're not perfectly addressed, not even close. But there was
Speaker 1: significant progress and that's often understated. But if these problems
Speaker 1: are coming so fast and so intense, it's a lot
Speaker 1: to adapt to. And that's what's really the challenge is
Speaker 1: the pace. And I think we're we're seeing a very
Speaker 1: very breakneck pace. That's really hard. Now does that main
Speaker 1: you're on the side of like Elon Musk and some
Speaker 1: of those folks who just signed that letter being like,
Speaker 1: maybe we should put a pause on AI research because
Speaker 1: you know, I'm not one hundred percent against it. Again,
Speaker 1: I kind of am, like, Man, I wish we'd been
Speaker 1: having this conversation when Facebook dropped or YouTube dropped. But
Speaker 1: I don't think that's a realistic thing. I'll say that,
Speaker 1: but I do. Look yeah, yeah, so I would say, no,
Speaker 1: I'm not I'm not a favor that for one thing.
Speaker 1: I mean, in a very practical sense, you think all
Speaker 1: these companies that are putting billions of dollars in these
Speaker 1: investments in AI are all going to sit around saying,
Speaker 1: you know what, let's just not do this for a
Speaker 1: few months of course not. So here's what I think
Speaker 1: They're not going to slow down. What's going to happen
Speaker 1: is going to happen. Even if some players decide to
Speaker 1: be responsible and slow down. Guess what that means. The
Speaker 1: only people plunging ahead are going to be the irresponsible ones.
Speaker 1: So what I think we need to do is I
Speaker 1: don't think we can really slow that down. So what
Speaker 1: about the flip side. I think we need to accelerate
Speaker 1: public education on artificial intelligence. I think we need to
Speaker 1: accelerate government legislation, regulation, international cooperation. I don't think we
Speaker 1: can solve this by slowing AI down. I do think
Speaker 1: we need to find a way to speed up our
Speaker 1: democratic process processes. It's taken us how many years to
Speaker 1: pass basically nothing about social media in the US and
Speaker 1: some mixed results in Europe. Yeah, that's the problem, right,
Speaker 1: If we could work faster, then I think we could
Speaker 1: keep up. And I think that that's that's actually the
Speaker 1: long term like practical survival thing from this is that
Speaker 1: I hope we get is like, yeah, we've always needed
Speaker 1: to be more careful about the things that we expose
Speaker 1: billions of people too. Suddenly it should have happened before now.
Speaker 1: But I hope that this I hope that all I
Speaker 1: hope the fact that AI, because of James Cameron, is
Speaker 1: coated into our brains to be something that triggers a
Speaker 1: little bit of panic in people. I hope that rather
Speaker 1: than reacting with panic, it leads to a more intelligent
Speaker 1: and considered state of affairs when potentially embracing technologies that
Speaker 1: are going to change life for huge numbers of people.
Speaker 1: That's right, and that is I think we have an
Speaker 1: opportunity here to experience that and explore them and try
Speaker 1: and that that is kind of what I was aiming for,
Speaker 1: And that threat is again I love that article that
Speaker 1: you know you mentioned at the beginning, But if we
Speaker 1: start going down this road of hype, there is a
Speaker 1: danger that we're going to fall into these traps. And
Speaker 1: I think let's stay grounded. Let's say practical, let's real
Speaker 1: identify the risks. Not that I'm some guru and know
Speaker 1: what they are, but it's almost easier to see what's
Speaker 1: not true than what is true. Yeah, and that's I
Speaker 1: think let's all try to police each other and make
Speaker 1: sure we're focusing on practical things that really are manageable,
Speaker 1: that really are genuine risks that are impacting people, that
Speaker 1: are impacting people today, and especially ones that are impacting
Speaker 1: marginalized populations. Yes, so I think let's hope we learn
Speaker 1: these lessons. And yeah, I am not optimistic, but I'm
Speaker 1: not as cynical. I think there's a lot of important
Speaker 1: discussions happening now that let's just say, there's a lot
Speaker 1: more discussion now than we had with social media, and
Speaker 1: maybe that's a good thing. Yeah, well, I think that's
Speaker 1: a good note to end on. Noah, did you have
Speaker 1: anything you kind of wanted to plug before we roll
Speaker 1: out here? No, I just I think it's it's a
Speaker 1: great topic that everyone can be involved in, and I
Speaker 1: just my plug is just don't be intimidated. Don't be afraid.
Speaker 1: I am writing a book that's not going to come
Speaker 1: up for a couple of years that's trying to help
Speaker 1: empower people to kind of be part of these conversations.
Speaker 1: But that's far off. I just want to say broadly,
Speaker 1: don't be intimidated and don't fall for this narrative that
Speaker 1: sometimes happens in tech communities that, oh, you know, I'm
Speaker 1: not a tech person, I don't have a chance to
Speaker 1: understand this stuff affects all of us, and how it
Speaker 1: affects you matters, and your opinion matters, and your voice matters,
Speaker 1: and we're all part of social media, we're all very
Speaker 1: soon going to be part of AI in chat thoughts,
Speaker 1: So don't don't be afraid to join the conversation. You
Speaker 1: don't need any technical background because I think the subject
Speaker 1: is just as much sociological as technical. It's about people.
Speaker 1: I think that's a great point to end on. Thank
Speaker 1: you so much, Noah, really appreciate your time, and everybody
Speaker 1: else have a nice day. I mean you have a
Speaker 1: nice day too, also, thanks to you too. It's lots
Speaker 1: of fun. It could happen here as a production of
Speaker 1: cool Zone Media. Well more podcasts from cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: Visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us
Speaker 1: out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 1: listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It could
Speaker 1: Happen here, updated monthly at cool Zonemeda dot com slash sources.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.