Speaker 1: Media, Well, come back to Behind the Bastards. I don't
Speaker 1: know why I did that, kind of like it was
Speaker 1: like I was doing a Halloween opening. Didn't work at all,
Speaker 1: horrible idea. But I'm very happy to announce our guest
Speaker 1: today back after a long hiatus from this show, but
Speaker 1: not from our hearts, Iffy and whatdy Wall.
Speaker 2: How's it going going to be back?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Oh so happy to have you back. If he
Speaker 1: you are a significant part of the dropout, a wonderful
Speaker 1: channel on YouTube that is the survivor of college humor,
Speaker 1: which is kind of like we're ken in the comedy
Speaker 1: internet comedy world.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you guys have been doing some really cool
Speaker 3: stuff lately, like some of the funnest, like most interesting
Speaker 3: like quasi game show comedy bits like I've watched hours
Speaker 3: of it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I was, you know, I was talking to
Speaker 2: Sam and Dave's the kind of like higher ups there,
Speaker 2: which is, you know, which is a testament to how
Speaker 2: cool the company is, because no, I haven't spoke to
Speaker 2: the higher ups at ICC or any of the other companies,
Speaker 2: but I was like, oh yeah, this is like where
Speaker 2: like Panel Comedy lives and now after Midnight's back. But
Speaker 2: I feel like Americans run away from panel comedy shows
Speaker 2: and I like an excuse to riff and goof with friends.
Speaker 1: Yes, I think, and I think that YouTube and the
Speaker 1: kind of what people get out of a lot of
Speaker 1: like streaming stuff too, like not like streaming TV, but like,
Speaker 1: you know, streamers is that goofing with friends thing. Like
Speaker 1: I watch red letter media stuff for a lot of
Speaker 1: the same reason, and I feel like there's a way
Speaker 1: to save that stuff. It's just not putting it on
Speaker 1: television at eleven thirty at night necessarily.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, people should be a little more lucid
Speaker 2: when they're taking in that kind of media. But yeah,
Speaker 2: where else are you gonna watch? You know, a block
Speaker 2: trying to think of the name of the show it was.
Speaker 2: It was the one with the guy he has the
Speaker 2: it's not a top hat, it's like a fedora almost,
Speaker 2: and he's a detective and all dads love it.
Speaker 1: Bosh Yes, oh god, I don't even use the tools
Speaker 1: that Bosh makes. They love Bosh the Bosh heads. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I would laugh. But I just got into Reacher, which
Speaker 1: is like it's, you know, it's the stupidest thing on TV,
Speaker 1: but I love it. It's like, it's like I used
Speaker 1: to watch a lot of Walker Texas Rangers again the
Speaker 1: inheritor of that, but not racist or as racist, I
Speaker 1: guess exactly say not at all.
Speaker 2: Look, that's why I'm not even going to judge, because
Speaker 2: I remember one time, me and em we were up
Speaker 2: in the cabin in right Wood and we needed to
Speaker 2: kill Tom and we were like, let's watch this nine
Speaker 2: to one one show whatever, just see and we were
Speaker 2: like seven episodes in locked. You're like, hold on, this
Speaker 2: is this? This kind of goes Angela Bassid know what
Speaker 2: she's doing.
Speaker 1: Mm hm oh yeah, no, she's she's a pro. And
Speaker 1: you know, you can't get work like that or work
Speaker 1: like you and your colleagues do at the dropout without
Speaker 1: human beings actually doing things. Which is why today we're
Speaker 1: here to talk about AI, and particularly we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about how a lot of the conversation and a
Speaker 1: lot of the fandom around AI has turned into more
Speaker 1: or less occult. So that's that's that's the premise of
Speaker 1: this episode. Iffie, I want to start by going back
Speaker 1: to a place I was about a week ago as
Speaker 1: we record this, the Consumer Electronics Show. Every year they've
Speaker 1: been holding it for a long time now, and it's
Speaker 1: kind of how the tech industry talks about itself and
Speaker 1: what it has planned for the future. A lot of
Speaker 1: it's hype, you know, they're kind of talking up what's
Speaker 1: coming out that they're hoping we'll get buzzed, we'll make money,
Speaker 1: but you also get an idea of like what do
Speaker 1: you think we want and what are you trying to
Speaker 1: get us excited about? And I think the most revealing
Speaker 1: product that I saw this year was the Rabbit R
Speaker 1: one and it's it's a little square shaped gadgets a screen,
Speaker 1: it's got a little camera that can swivel, and it's
Speaker 1: an AI that basically you talk to it like you
Speaker 1: would an Alexa, but it can use your apps and
Speaker 1: it's supposed to reduce friction in your life by basically
Speaker 1: routing every move you make online through this machine intelligence.
Speaker 1: So you tell it what you want to do and
Speaker 1: it does it instead of like you using like physically
Speaker 1: using your smartphone as much. You still have to click
Speaker 1: it sometimes. And I want to play you a clip
Speaker 1: of this where this is the CEO Jesse Lu's keynote speech.
Speaker 4: Our smartphones has become the best device to kill time.
Speaker 4: Instead of saving them. It's just harder for them to
Speaker 4: do things. Many people before us have tried to build
Speaker 4: a simpler and more intuitive computers with AI. A decade ago,
Speaker 4: companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon made Siri, Contana and Alixa.
Speaker 4: With these smart speakers, often they either don't know what
Speaker 4: you're talking about or failed to accomplish the past. We
Speaker 4: ask for recent achievements in large language models, however, or LMS,
Speaker 4: a type of AI technology, have made it much easier
Speaker 4: for machines to understand you. The popularity of LM chatbots
Speaker 4: over the past years has shown that the natural language
Speaker 4: based experience is the pass forward.
Speaker 1: Now. I don't know that I entirely agree with that,
Speaker 1: because I think the biggest influence that these chatbots have
Speaker 1: had on me is that whenever I try to deal
Speaker 1: with like an airline or something, I get stuck on
Speaker 1: chat GPT and it's a pain in the as to
Speaker 1: do anything.
Speaker 2: What's so funny about the rise in AI right now
Speaker 2: is like, if we really think about it, and god
Speaker 2: damn it, Robert, you threaded the needle right there. When
Speaker 2: you really think about it, all AI is is just
Speaker 2: the evolution of the shittiest part of calling. Yes, yes, all,
Speaker 2: the one thing that we do as soon as we
Speaker 2: call is like zero zero zero, let me get straight
Speaker 2: to a human.
Speaker 1: Let me talk to a human.
Speaker 2: And the and these these like eggheads were like, what
Speaker 2: if we did more of that? What if we remove
Speaker 2: your solace from this sad eyes of your life?
Speaker 1: And it's it's the kind of thing he seems so
Speaker 1: off from my experience where he's like the problem with
Speaker 1: phones is that it's too hard to do things. No,
Speaker 1: it's too easy for me to order a bunch of
Speaker 1: junk food and have a stranger deliver it. That's been
Speaker 1: a problem for me, right, Oh yeah, it's too easy
Speaker 1: for me to waste six hours on Twitter, Like that's
Speaker 1: what the issue is.
Speaker 2: Do you know how much the easiness of everything has
Speaker 2: made me wake up the next morning with cold food
Speaker 2: on my porch that I never touched.
Speaker 1: Yes, because it's too easy, It was too easy.
Speaker 2: Sometimes we need those those those like bumps in the
Speaker 2: road to keep drunk stone diffy from ordering a like
Speaker 2: triple double burger that I'm hoping gets to me and
Speaker 2: before I fall asleep, it never does.
Speaker 1: I've had so many problems as with my phone, but
Speaker 1: I don't think I've ever had the problem of like
Speaker 1: this thing's just too hard to use. Yeah, that's just
Speaker 1: not a problem I know that anyone has. But but
Speaker 1: Jesse complains that, you know, there's too much friction with
Speaker 1: smartphones and his device. That rabbit is going to let you,
Speaker 1: Like you can just tell it book me a flight
Speaker 1: or a hotel on Expedia and you don't even have
Speaker 1: to know, like it'll just pick a hotel for you
Speaker 1: a lot of the time, or like what flight you
Speaker 1: know it thinks is the most efficient. Jesse's goal is
Speaker 1: to basically create AI agents for customers, which like live
Speaker 1: in this little device you wear and act as you
Speaker 1: online to handle tasks you normally use your phone to do. So,
Speaker 1: you can tell your rabbit to book you an uber,
Speaker 1: you can have a book you a flight, or you
Speaker 1: can have it plan your trip to a foreign country.
Speaker 1: Nobody sounds really bad. It sounds so fucking bad.
Speaker 5: Rabbit's like, hey, how would you like a middle speech
Speaker 5: seed on.
Speaker 1: Sufficient as hell? Yeah, spirits so cheap. Now you can
Speaker 1: you can direct it more. But then that just seems like, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what I'm already doing on my computer. Why is
Speaker 1: it easiest just to like work through a vocal chatbot
Speaker 1: that might not understand me, or at least will be
Speaker 1: as much friction as like, Yeah, when I touch my
Speaker 1: phone and it hits the wrong thing, right, I just
Speaker 1: don't see that I'm saving much here. No one also
Speaker 1: seems to know how Rabbit's going to integrate with all
Speaker 1: these apps, because that means their device has to have
Speaker 1: access to them for you, and that's kind of a
Speaker 1: big ask for all of these different companies. That said,
Speaker 1: and no one knows, by the way, how secure it's
Speaker 1: going to be. But no one at CES was listening either,
Speaker 1: because the first ten thousand pre order models that opened
Speaker 1: at CES sold out instantly. How does it mean? That
Speaker 1: doesn't mean a lot of normal people are going to
Speaker 1: buy it? It means a lot of tech freaks wanted
Speaker 1: this thing. Yeah, that is the thing.
Speaker 2: Too, is like, yeah, if you're at c you're already
Speaker 2: you're already drinking the kool aid. Yes, I you know,
Speaker 2: And I'm very much It's so funny because I'm very
Speaker 2: much that guy, or I was very much that guy
Speaker 2: who wanted to be on that cusp of technology. And
Speaker 2: I feel like, you know, in my early twenties, it
Speaker 2: seems so cool because you're like, yeah, I want to
Speaker 2: be iron man, I want to just have full control.
Speaker 2: And then you kind of get to the point where
Speaker 2: you start if you have enough self reflection, you notice
Speaker 2: that you're just kind of you're using technology to do
Speaker 2: things that you could just do for much simpler and cheaper, Like,
Speaker 2: for example, like when you get these apps and then
Speaker 2: I'm like sitting in a photo editor for like fifty
Speaker 2: minutes just to make it look like it was shot
Speaker 2: on film, And I was like, I can buy a
Speaker 2: disposable camera like that exists. And what's great is when
Speaker 2: you now when you develop them, they put it, they
Speaker 2: email it to you so it can go on Instagram.
Speaker 2: It's going to take longer, but arguably you might get
Speaker 2: some post flip clarity that pick that didn't look good
Speaker 2: isn't now on the internet, or you know, you can
Speaker 2: like spread it out. But yeah, I am getting.
Speaker 1: Very you are, like, you are so much more thoughtful
Speaker 1: in that than like anybody involved in this product has
Speaker 1: been over the course of their entire life. Now, a
Speaker 1: couple of skeptics who have given reviews have already noted problems.
Speaker 1: Richard Lawler of the verbs was like, this thing is
Speaker 1: not built for left handed people to use, Like they
Speaker 1: forgotten that left handed people existed, and so they designed
Speaker 1: it in a way that's specifically a pain in the ass. Which, yes,
Speaker 1: there's also they brag they have this camera that can
Speaker 1: like move on its own, so we can cover stuff
Speaker 1: in front of it or behind it, And a commenter
Speaker 1: on Lawler's article was like, it's a pretty fundamental design
Speaker 1: principle that you don't add moving parts if you don't
Speaker 1: need them. And there's plenty of space in this for
Speaker 1: a camera in the front and the back, which is
Speaker 1: one less point of failure, one less thing for shit
Speaker 1: to get gunked up in. This is actually bad design.
Speaker 1: They're bragging about this, but it's a bad idea.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a couple of other issues in there. You know,
Speaker 1: we'll see it looks like it's going to be a
Speaker 1: lot thicker than a smartphone. I just don't know the
Speaker 1: degree to which a regular it's the same Google glass issue, Right,
Speaker 1: do you want a second thing that you have to
Speaker 1: keep on you like alongside your you know.
Speaker 2: Just going to be my question. So I'm glad, So
Speaker 2: is this a something that should be replacing your phone
Speaker 2: or is this another thing that you are supposed to
Speaker 2: be holding on to.
Speaker 1: I think the goal is for it to eventually replace it,
Speaker 1: but at this point you will still need to have both,
Speaker 1: so like carry another thing, you know.
Speaker 2: You know, walking around like a drug dealer. You have
Speaker 2: two different It's kind of bit.
Speaker 1: It's a big device and it's it's not tiny and
Speaker 1: it has a big screen. So it's just like, well,
Speaker 1: you just made a different kind of smartphone. Again, what
Speaker 1: am I gaining? Yeah? What he's holding in this video? Correct? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, well and what ye what more
Speaker 2: is like that? On top of tech person, it's definitely
Speaker 2: the person who carries a power bank with them. So
Speaker 2: that is a thirst and that's me. So that's three
Speaker 2: things you're rocking with. I know I have so many
Speaker 2: power banks and have and ADHD has blocked every single
Speaker 2: one of them from being useful because you do, I
Speaker 2: forget to charge them or I forget to bring them.
Speaker 1: It also just doesn't look comfortable. It's bigger than his hand.
Speaker 1: Oh yes, he's not a teenage We'll get a better
Speaker 1: look at in a second, because I want to show
Speaker 1: you when he's talking he's trying to make the case
Speaker 1: for this and one of like, he spends a significant
Speaker 1: portion of his not very long keynote on him Rick
Speaker 1: rolling himself in the most iffy You've gotta fucking watch this.
Speaker 1: It is so painful.
Speaker 4: R One has an eye, an onboard camera designed for
Speaker 4: advanced computer vision. It can analyze surroundings and take actions
Speaker 4: in real time. To activate the eye, just double tap
Speaker 4: the button. Oh funny seeing you here, Rick.
Speaker 1: It's a picture of Rick Astley that he points it at.
Speaker 6: Let me take a look. I'm never gonna get you off.
Speaker 1: Enjoy what am I getting? Rip roll in my own keynotes?
Speaker 2: The next one okay tech keynotes spe to take impromt.
Speaker 1: Class one like and I don't recommend that to normal people.
Speaker 2: Because like you're you're like, no, selling your own joke,
Speaker 2: just like what you're not even laughing at it? Why
Speaker 2: am I gonna laugh?
Speaker 1: I will say this that was scripted almost exactly the
Speaker 1: way Tim Robinson would have written it. Oh man, But
Speaker 1: I bet Sam Richardson could have delivered that bit better.
Speaker 1: So that is very funny. But I find this next
Speaker 1: clip more disturbing because it shows this kind of desire
Speaker 1: that the people that are the early adopters here have
Speaker 1: not just for more convenience, but to hand over like
Speaker 1: the power to choose to a robot that's basically just
Speaker 1: pulling the first advertised result from Google Like it's kind
Speaker 1: of messed up.
Speaker 4: Ooh, I can also use our one to order foot
Speaker 4: get me a twelve inch pizza from Pizza Huts. Denvers
Speaker 4: will hear the most ordered option on the app.
Speaker 6: Is fine ordering a twelve inch pizza from Pizza Hut.
Speaker 6: Since you mentioned that the most ordered option is fine,
Speaker 6: I will select that for you. I just created an
Speaker 6: order for a twelve inch pizza. It's going to be
Speaker 6: hand tossed with a classic marinara sauce and topped with
Speaker 6: regular cheese. Please confirm your order.
Speaker 4: That sounds really good. I just come from an order.
Speaker 1: He has to click it again, just like on a smartphone.
Speaker 1: He guess, like, look at the device and click it.
Speaker 2: Here's a freebie for any of even Richard Lawlor, who
Speaker 2: has been in the game for a long time, but
Speaker 2: like any of you tech bloggers, I just do a
Speaker 2: side by side with this video and physically do everything
Speaker 2: he's doing and the real time, because a pizza would
Speaker 2: have been ordered way faster if you would have just
Speaker 2: pulled out your phone.
Speaker 1: Well and you could get the pizza you want. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I like the twelve.
Speaker 5: Inch Classic marinera most ordered pizza.
Speaker 2: I want this shit. I actually like that's so weird.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah. Also, who orders a twelve inch pizza from
Speaker 1: Pizza Hut?
Speaker 2: Nobody? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Then no way? Is that the most ordered product from
Speaker 1: Pizza Hut. I don't believe it.
Speaker 2: It was definitely paid nonsense.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, it's just like yeah, and they're the next clip.
Speaker 1: I don't think we'll actually play it, but like it is,
Speaker 1: it's him saying, hey, plan out like a three day
Speaker 1: vacation in London for me, And as far as I
Speaker 1: can tell, the AI goes for like the first top
Speaker 1: ten list of things to do in London that it finds,
Speaker 1: which was probably written by an AI, and then makes
Speaker 1: an itinerary based on those and it's like, first off,
Speaker 1: are you that basic? Second, planning a vacation is fun?
Speaker 1: Is that not a thing that you want to do?
Speaker 2: Yeah? You're so right? Why would you? Because I look,
Speaker 2: the reason you would go to like a travel agent
Speaker 2: is because they are experts at it. They're gonna find
Speaker 2: the most fun thing for you outside of that, Yeah,
Speaker 2: I want to plan the cool stuff I'm gonna do,
Speaker 2: you know, And and yeah, what about people with fears,
Speaker 2: you know? Or people without skills, which is definitely going
Speaker 2: to be a large margin of people who do this.
Speaker 2: So you you're in London, now you're you're, you're, you're,
Speaker 2: And then it takes you on a trip to Malta
Speaker 2: to go scuba diving. You don't even know how to swim,
Speaker 2: and now you sit in therey like you already paid
Speaker 2: for bro, Yeah.
Speaker 1: You let your fuck for you. It's on you. It's silly, right,
Speaker 1: and I don't want to be I'm gonna say this
Speaker 1: is not the most direct parallel to cult shit will have,
Speaker 1: But watching this, I couldn't help but think about a
Speaker 1: cult that was like the subject of our second episode
Speaker 1: for this year, The Finders, And it was one of
Speaker 1: those things. The guy Marion Petty who ran it was
Speaker 1: like running games is the way he framed it. And
Speaker 1: people would join the cult and give up their agency,
Speaker 1: and he'd tell them go take a job in this city,
Speaker 1: or like go follow this guy and take notes on
Speaker 1: him for a year, or like have a kid and
Speaker 1: raise it. This way, and this is stuff like this
Speaker 1: is really common within cults. One of the appeals of
Speaker 1: a cult to a lot of people is that you
Speaker 1: both get a sense of purpose by following the cult
Speaker 1: and whatever things that says it going to do, and
Speaker 1: you give up the burden of having to choose a
Speaker 1: life for yourself. And this is such a common thing
Speaker 1: in cult dynamics that psychologist Robert Lifton, who's kind of
Speaker 1: one of the foundational minds and studying cults, described it
Speaker 1: as voluntary self surrender, and it's a major characteristic of
Speaker 1: a cult. Many of the finders, we're not you know,
Speaker 1: these are not dumb people. These are not like rubes.
Speaker 1: These are not hillbillies as they're often portrayed in our
Speaker 1: popular media. A lot of the finders had Ivy League degrees.
Speaker 1: One of them owned an oil company, and these guys
Speaker 1: still handed their lives over to a cult leader. Haruki Murakami,
Speaker 1: writing about ohm Shinriko, which is the cult that set
Speaker 1: off a bunch of poison gas in the Tokyo subway,
Speaker 1: noted that many of its members were doctors or engineers
Speaker 1: who quote actively sought to be controlled. I found a
Speaker 1: lot of this really information on the fundamental characteristics of
Speaker 1: what makes something a cult In an article by Zoe
Speaker 1: Heller published for The New Yorker back in twenty twenty one.
Speaker 1: At the time, she was kind of looking at QAnon
Speaker 1: and trying to decide, there's not like a clear guy
Speaker 1: and that's the cult leader, and there's not like a
Speaker 1: geographic center to this, and usually there is with cults
Speaker 1: in history. Does this still qualify? And I think a
Speaker 1: lot of people would agree that, like Yad does. I
Speaker 1: think a lot of experts tend to agree that Yead does.
Speaker 1: And when she was looking at the QAnon movement as
Speaker 1: a cult, Heller noted this. Robert Lifton suggests that people
Speaker 1: with certain kinds of personal history are more likely to
Speaker 1: experience such a longing, those with quote an early sense
Speaker 1: of confusion or dislocation, or at the opposite extreme, an
Speaker 1: early experience of unusually intense family milieu control. But he
Speaker 1: stresses that the capacity for totalist submission lurks in all
Speaker 1: of us and is probably rooted in childhood, the prolonged
Speaker 1: period of dependence during which we have no choice but
Speaker 1: to attribute to our parents and exaggerated omnipotence. And I
Speaker 1: found particularly the bit where he's talking about like, yeah,
Speaker 1: if you an early sense of confusion or dislocation makes
Speaker 1: people crave this kind of to give up this kind
Speaker 1: of control and responsibility. The people running these AI companies
Speaker 1: and maybe not necessarily the very top, because I think
Speaker 1: those tend to be pretty cynical, realistic human beings. But
Speaker 1: like a lot of the people who are in them,
Speaker 1: and a lot of the people who are latching onto
Speaker 1: AI as a fandom online are people whose childhoods and adolescences,
Speaker 1: like all of ours, were shaped by nine to eleven,
Speaker 1: the dislocation and change that that caused, and their young adulthoods.
Speaker 1: A lot of these people, like us, will have come
Speaker 1: of age around the time of the two thousand and
Speaker 1: eight crash. Many of the people who are younger in
Speaker 1: the AI fan base are you know, maybe zoomers and stuff,
Speaker 1: and you know, a lot of them are people who
Speaker 1: have really ugly ideas about like artists shouldn't charge for
Speaker 1: shit or whatever. Yes, but also these are people who
Speaker 1: a lot of them came into their careers went into
Speaker 1: stem fields because they were told coming up the tech
Speaker 1: industry is the safest place to make, you know, a
Speaker 1: good living for yourself and that all fell apart a
Speaker 1: couple of years ago, right, it started to at least
Speaker 1: tech laughs began so again dislocation, chaos, the sense that
Speaker 1: like what else am I going to entrust my life to?
Speaker 1: I thought I had a plan and it fell apart.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, I this is this is where if
Speaker 2: he's going to get real, it's philosophical and big brereer.
Speaker 2: But I just finished All about Love by Bell Hooks,
Speaker 2: and you know she often talks about like the wandering
Speaker 2: life with lovelessness and that, and that's searching for it
Speaker 2: and not having having it. And I feel like that
Speaker 2: goes hand in hand with what you're saying right where
Speaker 2: it's like I want a sense of belonging and I
Speaker 2: want to feel like I'm a part of people, and
Speaker 2: whether that is running into target trampling people for Stanley cups,
Speaker 2: or it's being a part of like what you perceive
Speaker 2: to be the next big thing. Like I think that
Speaker 2: is the biggest kind of selling point for a lot
Speaker 2: of these AI people who's like this is the future,
Speaker 2: Like that is almost every person who starts a fifty
Speaker 2: tweet thread with shitty examples of why AI rocks starts
Speaker 2: itting with this is the future and you just got
Speaker 2: to get over it. And there's so many people who
Speaker 2: just want to be on the ground floor of that.
Speaker 2: They want to be the people who were on it.
Speaker 2: Because how many times even I, you know, when you
Speaker 2: have that like time machine question, you're like, oh, Stock
Speaker 2: and Starbucks, ooh uh an Apple. You just want to
Speaker 2: be there before it gets big. So when it really
Speaker 2: at the end of the day, it all comes down
Speaker 2: to commerce, you want to be at the top when
Speaker 2: it all shifts. And that is actually the danger in
Speaker 2: this for me is the commerce. I think about it
Speaker 2: often because you know, like you're saying it, like orders
Speaker 2: the top Google search. Google is kindrently in courts right
Speaker 2: now fighting against you know, basically shaking down companies to
Speaker 2: see who would be the top one. So like the
Speaker 2: future of this being actually you know, a useful app
Speaker 2: kind of lives now in that case because if Google
Speaker 2: wins and they can put whoever's on top, that's only
Speaker 2: going to make it more valuable where they place who's
Speaker 2: on top. Because people are using these weird rabbits, you know, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 2: it's yeah, it is to them. They see the beginning
Speaker 2: of the futures, and I feel like, to me, I'm
Speaker 2: just looking at all the ways it can be abused,
Speaker 2: because if we just look at everything that has come
Speaker 2: before us, we have to think of the ways that
Speaker 2: it has been abused.
Speaker 1: And all the ways it'll be a worse future, you know.
Speaker 1: And I think I really liked that you brought up
Speaker 1: the panic they try to inciteen the rest of us,
Speaker 1: the like the fomo where it's like this is the future,
Speaker 1: get on board or you're gonna get left behind, y right?
Speaker 1: That is that is the cult recruitment tactic, right, And
Speaker 1: what they're trying to do. I just brought up that
Speaker 1: a lot of the people who are most vulnerable to
Speaker 1: this are the folks who like, yeah, they have this
Speaker 1: sense of like insecurity, dislocation, and they see getting on
Speaker 1: board with this early they feel like a sense of
Speaker 1: security there. And by saying you're going to get left behind,
Speaker 1: this is the only way forward, you won't be competitive
Speaker 1: if you don't embrace this stuff that they're trying to
Speaker 1: induce that sense of fear and dislocation to make people vulnerable.
Speaker 1: And I want to read another quote from that art
Speaker 1: from that New Yorker article, The Less control we feel
Speaker 1: we have over our circumstances, the more likely we are
Speaker 1: to entrust our fates to a higher power. A classic
Speaker 1: example of this relationship was provided by the anthropologist Bronislam
Speaker 1: Molina Whisky, who found that fishermen in the Trobyan Islands
Speaker 1: off the coast of New Guinea engaged in more magic
Speaker 1: rituals the further out to see they went. And I
Speaker 1: think we all feel like we're getting further out to
Speaker 1: see these days, right, Like, it's not hard to see why.
Speaker 1: I like, yeah, I'm near the shore or what. I
Speaker 1: don't believe in anything but what's right in front of me.
Speaker 1: And then like you can't say anything but water, and
Speaker 1: you're like, no, there's a god and I can keep
Speaker 1: them happy.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, indeed, it's it's tough. Yeah, everyone's just kind
Speaker 2: of grasping at what they can to just bolster themselves.
Speaker 2: And sometimes yeah, you're grasping at some weird stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, And it's you know, it's noted often
Speaker 1: by I think a lot of particularly atheists on the Internet,
Speaker 1: that like church attendance is down people who identify as
Speaker 1: part of an organized religion like that that is at
Speaker 1: its lowest level basically. Ever, and this is true. These
Speaker 1: are real trends and they have real effects. But I
Speaker 1: don't think the fact that less people are religious in
Speaker 1: the traditional sense means they're less superstitious or spiritual than
Speaker 1: they ever. It's just that what they invest with that
Speaker 1: belief has changed, in part because they've seen the world
Speaker 1: dislocate so far out of what most priests and another
Speaker 1: sort of like religious heads are capable of sort of
Speaker 1: explaining or comforting them over right, It's like, oh, religion
Speaker 1: is less comforting in a world as advanced as ours
Speaker 1: for most people. Now, this may seem like a reach
Speaker 1: still to kind of call what's going on around AI
Speaker 1: a cult, and I get that. I ask you to
Speaker 1: bear with me here, and I do want to note
Speaker 1: there's nothing wrong with the inherent technology that we often
Speaker 1: call AI, or at least not with all of it.
Speaker 1: That's A because it's used as such a wide banner
Speaker 1: term for stuff is very just like a text recognition
Speaker 1: program that can listen to human voice and create an
Speaker 1: on the fly transcription. That's an AI. That's an example
Speaker 1: of that kind of technology, right like it gets folded
Speaker 1: in there. That's one of the things in AI has
Speaker 1: to do recognizing language in like facial recognition too, recognizing faces.
Speaker 1: If you're ever going to have an actual artificial intelligence,
Speaker 1: those are two of the baseline capabilities that it needs.
Speaker 1: Chatbots obviously are a big part of this, along with
Speaker 1: like the Sundry tools that are being used now to
Speaker 1: clone voices, to generate deep fakes and fuel our now
Speaker 1: constant trip into the Uncanny Valley. Cees featured some real
Speaker 1: products that actually did harness the promise of machine learning
Speaker 1: in ways that I thought, we're cool as I noted
Speaker 1: it could happen here. There's like this telescope. It uses
Speaker 1: machine learning to like basically clean up images that you
Speaker 1: take with it at night when there's like a lot
Speaker 1: of light pollutions so you can see more clearly. And
Speaker 1: I'm like, yeah, that's dope. That's great, But that lived
Speaker 1: alongside a lot of nonsense, you know. Chat GPT for
Speaker 1: dogs was a real sin I saw, and like, there
Speaker 1: was an AI assisted fleshlight to help you not be
Speaker 1: a premature.
Speaker 2: Because of course that's the one that popped on my tongueline.
Speaker 2: It's like and it was like and then they gamified
Speaker 2: it where you go to different planets, you defeat the planet.
Speaker 2: So I'm like, what you You keep talking about beating
Speaker 2: the planets? So how do I lose? Is it when
Speaker 2: I bust about bussing loss? Because you're now introducing shame
Speaker 2: to sex again and I thought we finally got out
Speaker 2: moving best that. Yeah, I can't beat.
Speaker 1: Level those kind of bad ideas. That's all par for
Speaker 1: the course for CEES. But what I saw this year,
Speaker 1: in last year, not just at CEES, just over the
Speaker 1: year in the tech industry from futurist fanboys and titans
Speaker 1: of industry like Mark Andersson, is a kind of unhinged
Speaker 1: messianic fervor that compares better that to scientology than it
Speaker 1: does to the iPhone. And I mean that literally. Mark
Speaker 1: Andreesen is the co founder of Netscape and the capital
Speaker 1: firm Andresen Horowitz. He is one of the most influential
Speaker 1: investors in tech history, and he's put more money into
Speaker 1: AI's startups than almost anyone else. Last year, he published
Speaker 1: something called the Techno Optimist Manifesto on the Andresen Horowitz website.
Speaker 1: On the surface, it's a pean to the promise of
Speaker 1: AI and an exhortation to embrace the promise of technology
Speaker 1: and disregard pessimism. Plenty of people called the Peace Out
Speaker 1: for its logical fallacies. For example, it ignores that a
Speaker 1: lot of tech pessimism is due to real harm caused
Speaker 1: by some of the companies Andresen invested in, like Facebook.
Speaker 1: What's attracted less attention is the messianic overtones of everything.
Speaker 1: Andresen believes quote, we believe artificial intelligence can save lives
Speaker 1: if we let it. Medicine, along Manye with many other fields,
Speaker 1: is in the Stone age compared to what we can
Speaker 1: achieve with joined human and machine intelligence working on new cures.
Speaker 1: There are scores of common causes of death that can
Speaker 1: be fixed with AI, from plane crashes to pandemics to
Speaker 1: wartime friendly fire. Now he's right that there's some medical
Speaker 1: uses for AI. It's being used right now to help
Speaker 1: improve the ability to recognize certain kinds of cancer, and
Speaker 1: there's the potential for stuff like in home devices that
Speaker 1: let you scan your skin to see if you're developing
Speaker 1: a melanoma. And there's debate still over how useful it's
Speaker 1: going to be in medical research. I've talked to recently
Speaker 1: some experts and I've read some stuff that like there
Speaker 1: are some reasons for caution too, for some of the
Speaker 1: same reasons we should have caution with this everywhere. There's
Speaker 1: also disinformation that spread medically with AI, even to doctors,
Speaker 1: and some of the patterns that using this stuff gets
Speaker 1: medical professionals into can make them discount certain diagnoses as well.
Speaker 1: So I don't say that to like say, there's not
Speaker 1: going to be some significant uses for some of the
Speaker 1: way this technology works medically. Some aspects of AI will
Speaker 1: save lives. It's just the evidence right now doesn't see
Speaker 1: just it's going to completely revolutionize medical science. It's another
Speaker 1: advancement that will be good in some ways, and there
Speaker 1: will be some negative aspects of it too.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: It's also very much not fair to say that, like
Speaker 1: we're going to reduce deaths for human beings as a
Speaker 1: result of AI, because right now the nation of Israel
Speaker 1: is using an AI program called the Gospel to assist
Speaker 1: it in aiming its air strikes, which have been widely
Speaker 1: condemned for their out exceptional outstanding, in many cases genocidal
Speaker 1: level of civilian casualties. Yes, it's just outrageous.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh, one hundred percent, And you know, you know
Speaker 2: that's exactly what's going on as a genocide, and you
Speaker 2: know the language and a lot of these speeches says
Speaker 2: that say as much fair, yeah, even more so. Yeah,
Speaker 2: like like you're saying another thing I want to point out,
Speaker 2: which you might have been about to say, and I'm
Speaker 2: already jumping ahead. Is how I think it was chet
Speaker 2: GPT that has quietly switched their terms of service to
Speaker 2: say that it wouldn't be used for like weapons and.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, to hurt people, and that's for sure.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and now now it has it has been quietly
Speaker 2: scrubbed from those terms of service, and we do we
Speaker 2: need to talk about that, Yeah, because there's just so
Speaker 2: many things that we have grown accustomed to with tech
Speaker 2: that I think is dangerous as we get into things
Speaker 2: that have more room for error. Because we're used to
Speaker 2: updated terms of services on our iPhone, right every time
Speaker 2: we grab an eye an update, it's like, here's a
Speaker 2: new terms of service and you just kind of scroll
Speaker 2: through it and you go yeah, because you're like, yeah,
Speaker 2: you know, this is just a phone. It's not gonna,
Speaker 2: you know, be used for anything weird. Yet uh so
Speaker 2: you're you're comfortable. But like when you're doing the same
Speaker 2: thing with these chat GPT machine learning situations where you're
Speaker 2: you're agreeing, and you're agreeing, Okay, I will help this
Speaker 2: thing learn, and now you are just actively helping it
Speaker 2: learn how to be an assassin. Like what happens there?
Speaker 1: Yeah, And it's again it's this back and forth where
Speaker 1: on one hand, there is some technology like AI enabled
Speaker 1: robots that can go run onto a battlefield and pick
Speaker 1: up an injured soldier. I have no desire to see
Speaker 1: some random private bleed to death in a foreign country,
Speaker 1: fine with that. Or anti missile missiles right, using AI
Speaker 1: to intercept and stop a missile from blowing up in
Speaker 1: a civilian area sounds fine, Like I don't. I don't
Speaker 1: want random people to die from missiles, But it's also
Speaker 1: going to be used to target those missiles. And to say, like,
Speaker 1: based on some shit we analyzed on Twitter or whatever,
Speaker 1: we think wiping out this grid square of apartment buildings
Speaker 1: will really get a lot of the bad guys, and based.
Speaker 2: On we should blow them up exactly. It's crazy.
Speaker 1: It's just it's there's certainly it's certainly not fair to
Speaker 1: say there won't be benefits, but it's absolutely unclear in
Speaker 1: every field of endeavor whether or not they will outweigh
Speaker 1: the harms, right, And even if they do, to what extent,
Speaker 1: you know, because a lot of what I'm saying suggests
Speaker 1: that even if the benefits outweigh the harms in a
Speaker 1: lot of fields, it's still I'm not going because of
Speaker 1: the extent of the harms. In part, it's still not
Speaker 1: going to be a massive sea change.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of reasons for caution, but Mark
Speaker 1: has no time for doubters. In fact, to him, doubting
Speaker 1: the benefits of AGI artificial general intelligence is the only
Speaker 1: true sin of his religion. Quote. We believe any deceleration
Speaker 1: of AI will cost lives deaths that were preventable by
Speaker 1: the AI that was prevented from existing. Is a form
Speaker 1: of murder. And that's fucked up. That's really dangerous to
Speaker 1: start talking like that. Oh yeah, and this is the
Speaker 1: more direct cult comment here. I want you to compare
Speaker 1: the claim Mark made above that slowing down AI is
Speaker 1: identical to murder. I want you to compare that to
Speaker 1: the claims the Church of Scientologies makes. Because the Church
Speaker 1: of Scientology, they have this list of practices and the
Speaker 1: beliefs that they call tech, right, and they believe that
Speaker 1: by taking on tech, by engaging with it, people can
Speaker 1: become clear of all of their flaws, and and by
Speaker 1: doing that you can help you can fix all of
Speaker 1: the problems in the world. Right, the Church of Scientology
Speaker 1: on his websites claims that its followers will quote rid
Speaker 1: the planet of insanity, war and crime, and in its
Speaker 1: place create a civilization in which sanity and piece exist.
Speaker 1: How is that in any way different from Mark Andresen
Speaker 1: saying all of the shit that he's saying, right, that
Speaker 1: it's going to like create this this We're going to
Speaker 1: revolutionize medicine, We're going to like d friendly fire, We're
Speaker 1: going to cure pandemics, we're going to stop car crash.
Speaker 1: Asks what is the difference? Right and Scientology uses that
Speaker 1: claim that scientology tech is so necessary it's going to
Speaker 1: fix all these problems. So anyone who gets in the
Speaker 1: way of the Church of Scientology and the deployment of
Speaker 1: this tech for mankind's benefit is subject to what they
Speaker 1: call fair game. A person declared fair game quote may
Speaker 1: be deprived of property or injured by any means by
Speaker 1: any Scientologist. And again, Mark Andersson has not said that
Speaker 1: in his Techno Optimist manifesto. In fact, he makes some
Speaker 1: claims about like none of no people are our enemies.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: If you're saying you're a murderer for slowing this down,
Speaker 1: it's not her to see how some people might adopt
Speaker 1: a practice like fair game eventually, right, that's how where
Speaker 1: else does this go?
Speaker 2: Is my way? What do we do with murderers? What
Speaker 2: does I feel like the general rule across all creeds? Yeah,
Speaker 2: across all beliefs is typically murderers are bad and should die.
Speaker 1: That is at least to be punished. Right, there's a
Speaker 1: punishment for murders. Most people agree. Yeah, speaking of murder,
Speaker 1: you know who has never committed a murder?
Speaker 2: You cannot say that, like Blake. Okay, all of our ads.
Speaker 1: You know who, I can't prove we're involved in any murders,
Speaker 1: just like I have no evidence that Jamie Loftis had
Speaker 1: any role with Okay, Okay.
Speaker 5: What I'm saying one one, my girl is innocent, and
Speaker 5: two you can't say that about ours about this, Okay, Well,
Speaker 5: we don't pick them.
Speaker 1: If he By the way, we're spreading a rumor online
Speaker 1: that Jamie Loftis was possibly involved in a series of
Speaker 1: murders in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It's a bit, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's a good bits.
Speaker 5: So you know who knows innocent?
Speaker 2: Uh huh.
Speaker 1: Anyway, here's here's some ads. Oh We're back. So the
Speaker 1: more you dig into Anderson's theology, the more it starts
Speaker 1: to seem like a form of techno capitalist Christianity. AI
Speaker 1: is the savior in the cases of devices like the Rabbit,
Speaker 1: it might literally become our own personal Jesus. And who
Speaker 1: you might ask, is God. Quote. We believe the market
Speaker 1: economy is a discovery machine, a form of intelligence, an exploratory,
Speaker 1: evolutionary adaptive system. Now God, through this concept of reality
Speaker 1: capitalism itself and capitalize the sea there because it's a deity.
Speaker 1: Hassen to bring artificial general intelligence into being. All the
Speaker 1: jobs lost, all the incoherent flats and choking our Internet,
Speaker 1: all the Amazon drop shippers using chat GPT to write
Speaker 1: product descriptions, these are but the market expressing its will.
Speaker 1: Artists have to be plagiarized. Children need to be presented
Speaker 1: with hours of procedurally generated slop and lies on YouTube
Speaker 1: so that we one day can reach the promise land
Speaker 1: of artificial general intelligence. Iffy isn't it worth it.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, it's so isn't And it's I didn't know.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 2: One of the biggest criticism with AI is that it
Speaker 2: you know, it is one of the effects of when
Speaker 2: you know, creativity and commerce meets commerce will always try
Speaker 2: and kill creativity because it is commerce is more concerned
Speaker 2: with the the the the the buck than it is
Speaker 2: the outcome or what it takes to get set buck.
Speaker 2: And that was that was going to be a whole thing.
Speaker 2: I was going to drop at some point, and they
Speaker 2: just said it for me. They just send like like
Speaker 2: they I didn't. I thought it was more veiled. I
Speaker 2: thought it was more hidden. But you know, that is
Speaker 2: that is why you can you can try and say
Speaker 2: that it is ethical to take from artists because we're
Speaker 2: making it easier for you. Your fingie's hurt doing all that drawing.
Speaker 2: But if it learns from you, and and and and
Speaker 2: and and you know, uh, don't ask how you're gonna
Speaker 2: get paid, But if it learns from you, we can.
Speaker 2: We can give the people what they want without causing
Speaker 2: you all this labor. You know, but who gets the money.
Speaker 2: It's it's always the dork behind the computer who did
Speaker 2: the code that is just essentially stealing from all of
Speaker 2: these people and learning from them and then just producing
Speaker 2: this amalgation of everything they've done.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Also, I should know I'm trying to
Speaker 1: be consistent about this. I wrote it down and then
Speaker 1: I think slipped into it. It's Andres and Mark Andrees
Speaker 1: and andresen Horowitz. Uh, it's just a weird name that
Speaker 1: I'm not used to say. I wrote this down and
Speaker 1: then immediately forgot to correct myself at the start of
Speaker 1: the podcast. Again, folks, hack and a fraud. But you
Speaker 1: know who can own well, actually, I won't say only
Speaker 1: humans can be hacks and frauds like that. Because the
Speaker 1: AI is absolutely mispronounced shit and get shit wrong too.
Speaker 1: I guess that maybe they are getting conscious. Can they
Speaker 1: build an AI that's as much a hack and a
Speaker 1: fraud as I am. We'll see. So no, thank you, Sophie,
Speaker 1: I appreciate it. AGI is treated as an inevitability by
Speaker 1: people like Sam Altman of open Ai, who need it
Speaker 1: to be at least perceived as inevitable so their company
Speaker 1: can have the largest possible IPO. Right, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of money on the line and in the people with
Speaker 1: money believing all of the promises that Andresen is making.
Speaker 1: This messianic fervor has also been adopted by squadrons of
Speaker 1: less influential tech executives who simply need AI to be
Speaker 1: real because it solves a financial problem. Venture capital funding
Speaker 1: for big tech collapsed in the months before chat GPT
Speaker 1: hit public consciousness. The reason cees was packed with so
Speaker 1: many random AI branded products was that sticking those two
Speaker 1: letters on a new company is like they treat it
Speaker 1: like a talisman, right, It's this ritual to bring back
Speaker 1: the rainy season. You know, if you throw AI in
Speaker 1: your shit, people might buy it. Yeah, And it's you know,
Speaker 1: there's versions of this, like laptop makers are throwing AI
Speaker 1: in everything they do now just because like laptop sales
Speaker 1: soared during the start of the pandemic, but they plummeted
Speaker 1: because people, for one thing, don't need to buy laptops
Speaker 1: all the fucking time. Most people wear them out right, yes, exactly.
Speaker 1: And again this comes in. If you can get people
Speaker 1: in the cold, if you can get them scared that
Speaker 1: they're going to fall behind without AI, then maybe they'll
Speaker 1: buy a new AI and I have lap cup top
Speaker 1: because they're like, well, this is what I got to
Speaker 1: do to stay competitive. You know, the terminology that these
Speaker 1: rich tech executives use around AI is generally more grounded
Speaker 1: than Andreson's prophesying, right, but it's just as irrational. The
Speaker 1: most unhinged thing I heard in person at CES was
Speaker 1: from Bartley Richardson, an AI infrastructure manager at Nvidia, who
Speaker 1: opened a panel on deep fakes by announcing, I think
Speaker 1: everybody has a co pilot. Everybody's making a co pilot.
Speaker 1: Everybody wants a co pilot. Right, there's going to be
Speaker 1: a Bartley co pilot maybe sometime in the future. That's
Speaker 1: just a great way to accelerate us as humans, right.
Speaker 1: And it's funny he's named Bartley. If you if you
Speaker 1: know your old Star Trek and you can remember Barkley,
Speaker 1: the the Sad insign. He sounds like that guy and
Speaker 1: resembles him.
Speaker 2: Oh man, What's what's funny about that speech is it
Speaker 2: sounds like he's trying to convince himself to that Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: we were not wasting our time, are we?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah again. Later in a separate panel, in Nvidia in
Speaker 1: house council Nikki Pope, who's like the only skeptic they
Speaker 1: let On cited internal research showing consumer trust and brands
Speaker 1: fell whenever they used AI. This gels with research published
Speaker 1: last December that found around twenty five percent of customers
Speaker 1: trust decisions made by AI less than those made by people.
Speaker 1: No one on stage bothered to ask Bartley. It was like, Okay,
Speaker 1: you want to use this thing. We know your own
Speaker 1: company has data that it makes companies less trustworthy. Are
Speaker 1: you worried that if you use it people won't trust you?
Speaker 5: Like?
Speaker 1: Is that not in your head? And that's that was
Speaker 1: kind of a pattern at CEES all of the benefits
Speaker 1: of AI, with some very very specific exceptions. Most of
Speaker 1: the benefits of AI were touted in vague terms. It'll
Speaker 1: make your company nimble, it'll make it more efficient, you know,
Speaker 1: it'll accelerate you harms though, while they were discussed less often,
Speaker 1: they were discussed with a terrible specificity that stood out
Speaker 1: next to the vagueness. One of the guys in the
Speaker 1: deep Fake panel was Ben Coleman, and he's the CEO
Speaker 1: of Reality Defender, which is a company that detects artificially
Speaker 1: generated media. Right their job is like, let you know
Speaker 1: if something's AI generated. And he claims that his company
Speaker 1: expects half a trillion dollars in fraud worldwide this year
Speaker 1: just from voice cloning AI. Not fraud from AI, just
Speaker 1: the fake voice AI happy trillion dollars.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I here's the thing too that I think is
Speaker 2: the scariest part of AI that I don't think we've
Speaker 2: talked about yet is that everyone can use it. You know,
Speaker 2: like it's not this isn't a thing that is like,
Speaker 2: oh well, it's it's you know, these companies is too expensive.
Speaker 2: People are priced out, and we just got to hope
Speaker 2: that everyone's good. You're getting like SpongeBob rapping Kendrick Lyrics
Speaker 2: on TikTok. You know, we my buddy Bennieam jokingly like
Speaker 2: promoted his show and made it look like he was
Speaker 2: having a FaceTime with Obama, and it was like pretty good.
Speaker 2: The only reason you knew it was it was fake
Speaker 2: was because of just the nature of the video. But like,
Speaker 2: at what point is someone going to stop and go, hey,
Speaker 2: we shouldn't have technology where someone can impersonate world leaders.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's and you know, to be honest, that's not
Speaker 1: even because just because like I think everyone is ready
Speaker 1: for the idea that like, yeah, people are faking Obama
Speaker 1: or by because we've done little versions of that for
Speaker 1: years now. I think the scariest thing is people aren't
Speaker 1: ready for their loved ones to be imitated by AI.
Speaker 1: And that is a thing that is happening in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty three. And this has happened in a lot to
Speaker 1: a lot of people. There was a specific case that
Speaker 1: kind of went viral of this mother who got a
Speaker 1: call from what sounded like her kidnapped daughter and like,
Speaker 1: the AI generated the voice of her daughter, and then
Speaker 1: a guy was like, give us money or will fucking
Speaker 1: murder her? Right, and her kid was never kidnapped. She
Speaker 1: very nearly sent them money because who wouldn't write yea
Speaker 1: like if you don't know that that's a thing that
Speaker 1: can do. Who would not y like, that's a that's
Speaker 1: a rock and it's the AI was able to clone
Speaker 1: her daughter's voice because her daughter has a TikTok, right,
Speaker 1: it doesn't take that much, you know. And this is
Speaker 1: why by the way that people are talking about ways
Speaker 1: to mitigate this, I think one of them is like
Speaker 1: have a family password or something where it's like, all right,
Speaker 1: if I'm fucking kidnapped, I'm going to say the password
Speaker 1: you know, so that you know some random person with
Speaker 1: your TikTok won't know it or at least has to
Speaker 1: try harder to guess it. So great, thanks to AI,
Speaker 1: now we have to have passwords for our families in
Speaker 1: real life. Cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you want to see that Thanksgiving, you got
Speaker 2: to know the password.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Fucking great. At CEES and at the substacks and
Speaker 1: newsletters of all these AI cultists, there's no time to
Speaker 1: dwell on problems like these. Full steam ahead is the
Speaker 1: only serious suggestion they make. You should all be excited.
Speaker 1: Google's VP of Engineering Bashad Bazzati tells us during a
Speaker 1: panel discussion with McDonald's executive if you're not using AI,
Speaker 1: bishod warned, you're missing out. And I heard versions variations
Speaker 1: of the same sentiment over and over again. Right, not
Speaker 1: just this stuff is great, but like you're kind of
Speaker 1: doomed if you don't use it, And I will give
Speaker 1: Nicky Pope was the only skeptic really who had a
Speaker 1: speaking role in CEES. It is not coincidental that she
Speaker 1: was an academic and a black woman, because her background
Speaker 1: is studying algorithmic bias in the justice system. Yes, and
Speaker 1: so she she she had some really good points about
Speaker 1: like the actual dangers this stuff had. She was on
Speaker 1: this the panel, she was almost governing AI risk and
Speaker 1: kind of her like the partner on the panel. The
Speaker 1: guy she was talking with was Adobe VP Alexandrew Costin,
Speaker 1: and she urged the audience, I want you to think
Speaker 1: about the direct harm algorithmic bias could do to marginalized communities. Quote,
Speaker 1: if we create AI that desperately treats one group tremendously
Speaker 1: in favor of another group, the group that has disadvantaged
Speaker 1: or disenfranchised, that's an existential threat to that group. And
Speaker 1: she was specifically like people talk about the existential threat
Speaker 1: of an AI going crazy and killing us all, but
Speaker 1: like that's not as realistic as what we know will happen.
Speaker 2: Yes, oh yeah. When you have these banks that like
Speaker 2: automatically you know, are using AI to try and approve
Speaker 2: you know, loans, and Deonte sends his name in and
Speaker 2: they're like not approved.
Speaker 1: Yeah exactly.
Speaker 2: He's like nah, good, And.
Speaker 1: I am glad she was there. She again she still
Speaker 1: you know, works for a company it's gonna make money
Speaker 1: off of this. She's not like a doomer on it,
Speaker 1: but like at least one person was being like, could
Speaker 1: we please acknowledge there are dangerous I.
Speaker 2: Know, because here's the thing is and I truly believe this,
Speaker 2: And you were basically saying this earlier that AI as
Speaker 2: a tool is fine. You know, yeah, when you win,
Speaker 2: it is. And a tool is something that is always
Speaker 2: held and used by a human that there's the checks
Speaker 2: and balances. It is only as evil as the person
Speaker 2: who's using it. And that is just any item, physical
Speaker 2: or digital, will ever, you know, will always be under
Speaker 2: But the moment you're like, I'm going to give you
Speaker 2: free reign based on information, and how many times has
Speaker 2: an article gone online that was like, it's scanned Reddit
Speaker 2: or it's scanned Twitter and it's racist. Now you know
Speaker 2: there's and we still like went full steam ahead with
Speaker 2: producing this and thinking we're right and we know, especially
Speaker 2: when you see a lot of these tech leaders being
Speaker 2: predominantly white men, and we know that in general, most
Speaker 2: white men don't care about protecting marginalized people. They care
Speaker 2: about getting their bottom dollar. They don't see they see
Speaker 2: it as a as a rare occurrence because they don't
Speaker 2: live that existence. They don't have the data pun intended
Speaker 2: to build something to defend against it because it's not
Speaker 2: a real problem to them because they don't see it
Speaker 2: because and that is beyond just them being them and
Speaker 2: more into as humans. A lot of times, if you
Speaker 2: don't do the work to see it and understand what
Speaker 2: happens to other people outside of your perspective, you're just
Speaker 2: gonna believe that it's it's not real and or people
Speaker 2: are exaggerating, or it's this and it's that. And when
Speaker 2: you are a gung ho and you have drunk the
Speaker 2: kool aid that is the AI kool aid, and you
Speaker 2: are telling people that this is the future, we have
Speaker 2: to do it, you're gonna push ahead. But like we've
Speaker 2: literally have seen a clear cut example of what happens
Speaker 2: when you push past safety and and you just do
Speaker 2: what you want to do just because you have a
Speaker 2: whole bunch of money and a mad Catz controller, Like,
Speaker 2: it gets dangerous.
Speaker 1: So as you started talking about like the dangers of
Speaker 1: certain tools, right and how they the value of the tools,
Speaker 1: I literally looked over at the gun on my table, right,
Speaker 1: and we all agree, even people who really like them,
Speaker 1: there should be regulation. And I think the vast majority
Speaker 1: like agree more regulation, but they are like, again, not
Speaker 1: to say that it's sufficient, but there are a lot
Speaker 1: of laws about like where you can carry a gun legally,
Speaker 1: how you can buy a gun, right, and because people
Speaker 1: understand that, like, yeah, if a tool is that powerful,
Speaker 1: there should be limitations and things and things that you
Speaker 1: can do that get them taken away from you forever.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: Yes, I don't know how we do that with AI,
Speaker 1: but I don't think that's a reason not to try. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you do what.
Speaker 2: In that movie Hackers, and it's like you're just being
Speaker 2: from the Internet till you graduate at high school or
Speaker 2: whatever it was.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, Now, Costin claimed that the biggest issue again,
Speaker 1: so nicky Pope is like, yeah, I think this stuff
Speaker 1: could really hurt marginalized communities, and Alexandrew Costin from Adobe
Speaker 1: responded that like, well, I agree, but the biggest risk
Speaker 1: of generative AI isn't fraud or plagiarism. It's not using AI.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 1: He claims, like this is as big as the Internet,
Speaker 1: and we all just have to get on board. And
Speaker 1: then I'm gonna read verbatim how he ends this particular statement.
Speaker 1: I think humanity will find a way to tame it
Speaker 1: to our best interest. Hopefully great, cool, no way, why awesome, awesome,
Speaker 1: And the whole week was like that again, these really specific,
Speaker 1: devastating harms and then vague claims of like, yeah, we're
Speaker 1: all just gonna have to debt. And I brought up
Speaker 1: scientology earlier. But when I think about touting like vague
Speaker 1: claims of world saving benefits alongside, and it's going to
Speaker 1: hurt too, when you have to accept the pain, I
Speaker 1: think of Keith Ranieri, right, the next Sium guy. We
Speaker 1: all remember Keith. You know, like most cult leaders, Ranieri
Speaker 1: promised his mostly female followers, you'll get all these benefits.
Speaker 1: I'm going to like heal you. You'll be extra productive,
Speaker 1: you'll be super good in your business, super good in
Speaker 1: your career. But you have to follow my commands because
Speaker 1: they have to retrain you on some stuff, and so
Speaker 1: it's going to be uncomfortable, right, And the end result
Speaker 1: of this is a bunch of them branded them their
Speaker 1: flesh and partook in sex trafficking. You know, the techs,
Speaker 1: these tech executives are not Ranieri, but I think they
Speaker 1: see money in aping some of his tactics. Right, the
Speaker 1: benefits are so good, we just have to accept some pain.
Speaker 1: You know I got to hurt you to rebuild you better. Now,
Speaker 1: all of the free money right now is going to AI,
Speaker 1: and these guys know the best way to chase it
Speaker 1: is to throw logic to the wind and promise the
Speaker 1: masses that if we just let this technology run roughshod
Speaker 1: over every field of human endeavor, it will be worth
Speaker 1: it in the end. This is rational for them, because
Speaker 1: they're going to make a lot of money, but it
Speaker 1: is an irrational thing for us to let them do.
Speaker 1: Why would we want to put artists and illustrators who
Speaker 1: we like out of a job. Why would we accept
Speaker 1: a world where it is impossible to talk to a
Speaker 1: human when you have a problem, and you're instead thrown
Speaker 1: to a churning swarm of chatbots. Why would we let
Speaker 1: Sam Altman hoover up the world's knowledge and resell it
Speaker 1: back to us. We wouldn't, and we won't unless he
Speaker 1: can convince us that doing so is the only way
Speaker 1: to solve the problems that scare us. Climate change, the
Speaker 1: cure for cancer, and into war, or at least and
Speaker 1: into the fear that we will all be victimized by
Speaker 1: crime or terrorism. All of these have been touted as
Speaker 1: benefits of the coming AI age if we can just
Speaker 1: reach the AI Promise Land, and we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about some of the people who believe in that promised
Speaker 1: land and what they think it'll be like. But first, Iffy,
Speaker 1: you know, it is the real promise Land, the only
Speaker 1: actual paradise any of us will ever know. What by
Speaker 1: from the sponsors of this show, of course, all right,
Speaker 1: here's an ad All right, we're back. So I want
Speaker 1: to talk about Silicon Valley's latest subculture, emphasis on the
Speaker 1: cult Effective Accelerationism or E slash acc e AC, I
Speaker 1: think is probably how you could pronounce it. The gist
Speaker 1: of this movement fits with Mark Andrewson's manifesto AI development
Speaker 1: must be accelerated without restriction, no matter the cost. E
Speaker 1: act has been covered by a number of journalists, but
Speaker 1: most of that coverage misses how very spiritual some of
Speaker 1: it seems. One of the inaugural documents of the entire
Speaker 1: belief system opens with the statement accelerationism is simply the
Speaker 1: self awareness of capitalism, which has scarcely begun. Again, we
Speaker 1: see a statement that AI has somehow enmeshed itself with
Speaker 1: capitalism's ability to understand itself. It is some way intelligent
Speaker 1: and can know itself. I don't know how else you
Speaker 1: interpret this, but as belief in a god built by
Speaker 1: atheists who like money a lot. The argument continues that
Speaker 1: nothing matters more than extending the quote light of consciousness
Speaker 1: into the stars, a belief elon Musk himself is championed.
Speaker 1: AI is the force the market will use to do this,
Speaker 1: and quote this force cannot be stopped. This is followed
Speaker 1: by wild claims that next generation life forms will be
Speaker 1: created inevitably by AI, and then a few sentences down
Speaker 1: you get the kicker. Those who are first to usher
Speaker 1: in and control the hyper parameters of AI slash techno
Speaker 1: capital have immense agency over the future of consciousness. So
Speaker 1: AA is not just a god. It's a god we
Speaker 1: can build, and we can use it to shape our future,
Speaker 1: the future of our reality, to our own whims. And again,
Speaker 1: some of these guys will acknowledge maybe it'll kill all
Speaker 1: of us, but as long as it makes a technology
Speaker 1: that spreads to the stars, that's worth it, because we've
Speaker 1: kept the light of consciousness alive. Wow, that's not I
Speaker 1: don't think the mainstream view, but you can definitely find
Speaker 1: people saying that shit and they'll be like, if you
Speaker 1: attempt to slow this process down, there are risks, and
Speaker 1: they're saying the same thing, andres you stop it from
Speaker 1: doing all these wonderful things. But also I do kind
Speaker 1: of view that as a veiled threat, right, because if
Speaker 1: AI is the only way to spread the light of
Speaker 1: consciousness to the void, and that is the only thing
Speaker 1: that matters, what do you do to the people who
Speaker 1: seek to stop you, right, who seek to stop AI?
Speaker 1: I actually am fine with extending the light of consciousness
Speaker 1: into space. I'm a big fan of Star Trek. I
Speaker 1: just don't believe that the intelligent, hyper aware capitalism is
Speaker 1: the thing to do it. Again, too much of a
Speaker 1: Star Trek guy for that. When I look at the
Speaker 1: people who want to follow Mark Andresen's vision, who find
Speaker 1: what these each people are saying is not just compelling
Speaker 1: but inspiring. I think of another passage from that New
Speaker 1: Yorker article by Zoe Heller quote, not passive victims, they
Speaker 1: themselves sought to be controlled, Hiki Murakami wrote of the
Speaker 1: members of om Shinriko, the cult Hu's seren gas attack
Speaker 1: on the Tokyo subway in nineteen ninety five killed thirteen people.
Speaker 1: In his book Underground Murka, he describes most own members
Speaker 1: as having deposited all their precious personal holdings of selfhood
Speaker 1: in the spiritual bank of the cults leader Shoko Asahara,
Speaker 1: submitting to a higher authority, to someone else's account of
Speaker 1: reality was, he claims their aim. Now the EAC Manifesto
Speaker 1: newsletter thing use the term techno capital in conjunction with AI.
Speaker 1: This is a word that you can find a few
Speaker 1: different definitions on because it's it's a wonky, like weird
Speaker 1: academia philosophy term, and there's a number of folks who have,
Speaker 1: you know, will argue about how it ought to be described.
Speaker 1: But this is broadly kind of the same thing that
Speaker 1: Andresen is referring to when he talks about the market
Speaker 1: as this intelligent discovery organism. Right, And while there are
Speaker 1: a few different ways you'll see this defined, the EAC
Speaker 1: people and Andresen himself are thinking about how philosopher Nick Land,
Speaker 1: who's the guy who's generally credited with like popularizing the
Speaker 1: term technocapitalism, defines it. Land is one of many advocates
Speaker 1: of the idea of a technological singularity, the point where
Speaker 1: technological growth driven by improvements in computing becomes irreversible, the
Speaker 1: moment at which a super intelligent machine begins inventing more
Speaker 1: and more of itself and expanding tech in a way
Speaker 1: that humans can't. As one of Gland's fans summarized in
Speaker 1: a medium post, a runaway reaction of self improvement loops
Speaker 1: will almost instantaneously create a coherent superintelligent machine. It is
Speaker 1: man's last invention. The most notable of industries AI, nanotechnology, femtotechnology,
Speaker 1: and genetic engineering will erupt with rapid advancements, quickly exceeding
Speaker 1: human intelligence. Now, obviously the way Land writes is again
Speaker 1: kind of worth reading, but dense, perhaps two dents for
Speaker 1: an entertainment podcast. So I'm going to read again from
Speaker 1: a sub stack called Regress Studies by a writer named
Speaker 1: Santi Ruiz, kind of talking about this idea of techno
Speaker 1: capitalism that Land has from more critical standpoint, quote Nick Land,
Speaker 1: who coined the term is a misanthrope. He doesn't like
Speaker 1: humans much. So the idea that there could be an
Speaker 1: entity coming, already being born, drawing itself into existence by
Speaker 1: hyperstitionally preying on the dreams of humanity cannibalizing their desires.
Speaker 1: Wearing the invisible hand is an ideological skin. He's into
Speaker 1: that technoeconomic interactivity crumble social order in autosophisticating machine runway,
Speaker 1: as he would put it. And that's good. You're being
Speaker 1: colonized by an entity that doesn't care about you, except
Speaker 1: insofar as you make a good host. We'll talk about
Speaker 1: hyperstition in a little bit here. So Land is the
Speaker 1: guru of accelerationism. You might not be surprised to learn
Speaker 1: that he has a devoted following among the far right.
Speaker 1: This is because he is quite racist, anti democratic, and
Speaker 1: obsessed with eugenics. Now, his eugenics are not your gram
Speaker 1: Pappy's eugenics. For him, it involves gene editing, which will
Speaker 1: be available to greater extents than every thanks to AI.
Speaker 1: Land claims to disnet like white nationalists and conventional racists
Speaker 1: because they don't see the whole picture. Quote and this
Speaker 1: is me quoting from one of Land's publications, Racial identarianism
Speaker 1: and visages a conservation of comparative genetic isolation, generally to
Speaker 1: by boundaries corresponding to conspicuous phenotypic variation. It is race
Speaker 1: realist in that it admits to seeing what everyone does
Speaker 1: in fact see, which is to say, consistent patterns of
Speaker 1: striking correlated multidimensional variety between human populations or subspecies. Its
Speaker 1: unrealism lies in its projections. That's pretty racist. Land is
Speaker 1: listed by name and Andresen's manifesto as someone you should
Speaker 1: read for a better understanding of the wonderful, optimistic future
Speaker 1: he and his illke plan for us. He cites extensively
Speaker 1: Grigory Cochrane, who posits that space travel spreading to the
Speaker 1: stars will solve our race problem because it's a natural filter,
Speaker 1: basically saying some races won't make it into space, so
Speaker 1: we don't need to be to be violent, like, we
Speaker 1: just have to spread to space and that will do
Speaker 1: our eugenics part of it for us. So that's cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, I'm stuck on this, like, you know,
Speaker 2: journey to the Stars through f thing, because I don't know, Robert,
Speaker 2: do you play Warhammer forty two?
Speaker 1: Oh? God if he ify, of course I play. I've
Speaker 1: been playing Warhammer forty K most of my life.
Speaker 2: Okay, because this is sound a very adeptis mechanics, Yeah right, yes, absolutely,
Speaker 2: And I'm like, I'm like, what is going on here,
Speaker 2: I'm deep and well trader, and now I'm like, no,
Speaker 2: this is them.
Speaker 1: What is fun is that like Warhammer forty thousand, the
Speaker 1: deep Fluff envisions a society that it's like a hybrid
Speaker 1: between the Federation and Star Trek, and what these ai
Speaker 1: Eyak people dream of that it is this utopia for
Speaker 1: like ten thousand years because they developed thinking machines and
Speaker 1: then all of the thinking machines turn on them and
Speaker 1: murder everybody. And so in the future we just lobottomize
Speaker 1: people who commit crimes and turn them into computers for
Speaker 1: us because we can't have intelligent machines anymore.
Speaker 2: So we're just we're going that's what it looks like.
Speaker 2: We're marching towards with these folks.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And obviously the thing that the Warhammer people are
Speaker 1: are inspired by is like the but Larry and g
Speaker 1: Hot and Dune, which is the more artful version of
Speaker 1: that story with less orcs, which makes it inferior in
Speaker 1: my mind. But I do love Dune.
Speaker 2: So you need more red because the everything Yeah.
Speaker 1: Red makes it go faster.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So Land concludes by imagining both racists and anti racists
Speaker 1: binding together in defense of the concept of race. Right,
Speaker 1: that's what the result of AI is going to be.
Speaker 1: The racists need race. You know, we're going to get
Speaker 1: so good at gene editing, the racists will get angry
Speaker 1: and the anti racists will get angry because they're so
Speaker 1: in love with the concept of race. Well, we're just
Speaker 1: going to improve people annihilate racial differences through moving to
Speaker 1: the stars and the natural filter that that implies. By
Speaker 1: the way, the name of the article Land wrote all
Speaker 1: this and is called hyper racism. So cool guy Glad
Speaker 1: Mark Andresen cites him in his manifest were Glad the
Speaker 1: biggest venture capital guy in the country. I was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: read this, dude. Yeah, that's the sequel to Flom's hyperrealism.
Speaker 1: So that's yeah, it is interesting. And these guys don't
Speaker 1: tend to cide it as much. I think you get
Speaker 1: in some of the deeper stuff. They're all talking about
Speaker 1: these technocapitalist concepts that Nick Land plays with. They don't
Speaker 1: talk about what I think is actually one of his
Speaker 1: most sort of insightful points, which's about a concept called hyperstition.
Speaker 1: And in brief, hyperstition is like creating things in fiction
Speaker 1: that become real and the process by which that happens.
Speaker 1: I think about that a lot when I think about
Speaker 1: things like the bootlearry and jihad, the war against the
Speaker 1: Intelligent Machines and the do in Dune, or you know
Speaker 1: what happened in the Warhammer forty thousand universe. But I
Speaker 1: also think about how part of why these people are
Speaker 1: targeting creators, writers, actors, musicians, artists like pen and paper,
Speaker 1: you know, painting artists and stuff, is because the only
Speaker 1: way out of this future they have envisioned is in
Speaker 1: imagining a better one and then making it real, right like,
Speaker 1: and that is a thing that creatives have a role
Speaker 1: in doing. So if you can kill that ability, hand
Speaker 1: it over to the machines that you can control, maybe
Speaker 1: you can stop them from this path of resistance. Motherfuckers,
Speaker 1: I know.
Speaker 2: They're on there with They're like, you want something better,
Speaker 2: We got to take it away from it?
Speaker 1: Yeah, fuck you. So anyway, I think that's going to
Speaker 1: end it for us. In part one, you know, this
Speaker 1: this whole investigation in much more condensed form, just kind
Speaker 1: of really focusing specifically on the argument there's cult dynamics
Speaker 1: of the fandom is being published in an article on
Speaker 1: Rolling Stone. I'll probably edit in like the title or
Speaker 1: something here so you can find it. But check that out.
Speaker 1: That's kind of the more easily shareable version, more condensed, iffy.
Speaker 1: Where should people check out you and your stuff?
Speaker 6: Oh?
Speaker 2: Man, I'm if you wide away on Twitter and Instagram,
Speaker 2: you know, so definitely peep me there. Listen to our
Speaker 2: relationship pod with if you and Emmy if you want
Speaker 2: to hear us talk about relationship stuff and uh, yeah,
Speaker 2: you have Max Film for movies, but if you go
Speaker 2: to if you widy Way, you'll find all that stuff.
Speaker 2: And of course watch drop something absolutely has been to
Speaker 2: be announced next week.
Speaker 1: Yes, watch drop Out something cool is coming soon and
Speaker 1: it's also an extremely human endeavor. Yes, yes, just like
Speaker 1: this show is, so go with. Uh, I don't know
Speaker 1: whatever god you worship or the machine god you plan
Speaker 1: to meme into being Goodbye.
Speaker 6: Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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