Speaker 1: From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
Speaker 1: riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
Speaker 1: learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
Speaker 1: production of My Heart Grading. Hello, welcome back to the show.
Speaker 1: I'm still Matt. It is I know, still me. They
Speaker 1: called me Ben. We're joined as always with our superproducer.
Speaker 1: All mission control decands, most importantly, you are you. You
Speaker 1: are here, and that makes this the stuff they don't
Speaker 1: want you to know. If you saw the title of
Speaker 1: today's episode, folks, then you realized it's a question, is
Speaker 1: AI coming for you? Uh? This may be the first
Speaker 1: of several conversations and explorations we have about um, the
Speaker 1: possible corruption and conspiracy's involved here, the uh, the bleeding
Speaker 1: edge of technology, and what is often called an unprecedented time.
Speaker 1: But spoiler, we're gonna find that people are throwing the
Speaker 1: word unprecedented around a bit loosely. We've all, you know,
Speaker 1: we've heard about a I've heard about machine learning a
Speaker 1: lot in recent years, and I think for the five
Speaker 1: of us growing up Paul, Matt, noell, Uh, you and
Speaker 1: yours truly here, I think we always hear about this
Speaker 1: coupled with fears of humans being replaced by these new
Speaker 1: entities or even just processes. And the more it's weird
Speaker 1: because there's this big divide in futurism right all the time,
Speaker 1: the ted talkie dudes are always saying, hey, there's a
Speaker 1: world where everybody wins. And then the more cynical folks,
Speaker 1: often sci fi writers, imagine a dystopia. They say, we
Speaker 1: you're gonna live in a post worker but not post
Speaker 1: work economy. You'll still need money to survive. We have
Speaker 1: fewer and fewer ways to make that money. It's funny.
Speaker 1: It reminds me of like, you know, things like the Luddites,
Speaker 1: you know, who were sabotaging um, you know, machines during
Speaker 1: the Industrial Revolution, Because every time a new technology like
Speaker 1: this emerges, there's always a faction or a contingent of
Speaker 1: folks that that have that perspective like, oh, it's going
Speaker 1: to replace the workers, just gonna replace this, gonna replace that,
Speaker 1: and there's a backlash. But the reality is, short of
Speaker 1: destroying it all, uh, you really can't put ideas like
Speaker 1: that back into the bottle once they've kind of been
Speaker 1: fleshed out, you know, and made real. So usually what happens.
Speaker 1: Like even the synthesizer. You know, people were like, oh,
Speaker 1: it's gonna replace the orchestra. That didn't happen. The synthesizer
Speaker 1: became a tool unto itself that sounds like what it
Speaker 1: sounds like, but no one's kind of illusions that it's
Speaker 1: replacing an orchestra. I kind of feel that way about AI.
Speaker 1: It's a little different because it's just so fast. Technology
Speaker 1: moves so quickly these days, there is concern. But I
Speaker 1: also think there is a world where AI many forms,
Speaker 1: just becomes another tool and doesn't necessarily replace people. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: some people replaces some jobs and some processes, no question.
Speaker 1: I think we're in the stage where AI is a
Speaker 1: tool being utilized by you know, all kinds of different
Speaker 1: sectors within the economy. I'm really interested today, guys, in
Speaker 1: exploring the kind of two sides to the view of
Speaker 1: the future, right, the dystopian one we're talking about where
Speaker 1: workers get displaced, everybody lose their jobs, really hard to
Speaker 1: find work, and then the other one where that same
Speaker 1: kind of thing happens, but because there's so much wealth
Speaker 1: just kind of being generated by these programs, by these
Speaker 1: other intelligences that humans don't have to work, and it's
Speaker 1: okay because there are institutions that are just providing things
Speaker 1: like a livable wage right or it's a name for that, right, Ben,
Speaker 1: it's been whether the universal income or whatever, like that's
Speaker 1: a it's a model that, yeah, universal basic income. And
Speaker 1: that w you're talking about is kind of the the
Speaker 1: economy of Star Trek people. People are prizing knowledge for
Speaker 1: knowledge sake, right for the betterment of all living things,
Speaker 1: because they don't have to work, you know, sixty hours
Speaker 1: a week, because they don't have to make hard decisions
Speaker 1: like can we get a new roof for our house
Speaker 1: or are we going to be able to send our
Speaker 1: kid to an increasingly expensive college system. In today's episode,
Speaker 1: we're going to explore all of this through the lens
Speaker 1: of the fact and fiction surrounding all these terrifying claims
Speaker 1: and all these anodyne claims about the nature of the
Speaker 1: future and the future is now. Is AI coming for you?
Speaker 1: Here are the facts. First off, people still don't agree
Speaker 1: on whether or not we should be using the term AI.
Speaker 1: It's short for artificial intelligence. But what exactly makes it artificial, right,
Speaker 1: is that gonna win. General AI comes about is that
Speaker 1: going to be considered on the level of a racial epithet,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean, Like, is it going to
Speaker 1: be fighting words to tell strong AI or artificial generative
Speaker 1: intelligence that it's artificial. Also, I think there's a bit
Speaker 1: of a misconstruing of terms sometimes where some of this
Speaker 1: stuff is actually more machine learning than it is AI
Speaker 1: or artificial intelligence. And I'm not an expert. I could,
Speaker 1: I would be hard pressed to tell you the exact differences,
Speaker 1: but there are people that will argue and die on
Speaker 1: that hill and they're very different things. We'll tell you
Speaker 1: my concept, and maybe I'm completely wrong. My understanding is
Speaker 1: that none of this is actual AI yet, that that
Speaker 1: term is a stand in because it helps us as
Speaker 1: consumers and you know, the people who are actually gonna
Speaker 1: be using the tools understand what it is or what
Speaker 1: it will be. But yeah, machine learning is the thing
Speaker 1: that's functioning within all these things called AI right now,
Speaker 1: right we're talking about processes. Really, Uh, The idea like
Speaker 1: AI is on the on the verge of becoming a
Speaker 1: thought terminating cliche. The idea, like the sci fi holy
Speaker 1: grail of of AI, is a type of programming that
Speaker 1: can replicate the cognitive abilities of the human brain entire, right,
Speaker 1: And what we're seeing right now in general is stuff
Speaker 1: that's very good at making more of an established thing
Speaker 1: or interpreting that established thing, not so much creating a
Speaker 1: brand new thing. And this is this is like, um,
Speaker 1: this is an ancient idea. The humanity as as a
Speaker 1: fad has always been super into this idea of themselves. Right,
Speaker 1: let's build a thing that's like us. Guys, we can
Speaker 1: make anything. Let's make ourselves classic human on multiple levels,
Speaker 1: and quite recently, only quite recently, a senses in technology
Speaker 1: have made that all that science fiction non fictional. Right,
Speaker 1: that's the root of good science fiction. And the weird
Speaker 1: thing is we we've got a level set. And think
Speaker 1: about this fact. People have been dreaming of something like
Speaker 1: this far before they ever dreamed of computers. And in
Speaker 1: a sense, it is fair to say computers are just
Speaker 1: a convenient means to that ancient and a step toward
Speaker 1: that greater goal. If there was another invention that could
Speaker 1: uh also get closer to whatever we mean when we
Speaker 1: say AI, than people would be super obsessed with that.
Speaker 1: We're we're talking about group psychology here over millennia and
Speaker 1: it's cool, you know, it's neat, it's terrifying. It gets
Speaker 1: discussed in all these think pieces. If you're a long
Speaker 1: time conspiracy realist, you've heard us reference them, you've probably
Speaker 1: uh hopefully dove into a few of those yourselves. Ted
Speaker 1: talks lots of great scholarship, but we're not talking about
Speaker 1: the realm of the abstract and philosophical today. We're talking
Speaker 1: about reality. Chat bots are evolving using that word on
Speaker 1: purpose like never before. Right, We've been having a lot
Speaker 1: of interesting conversations about chat GPT in particular, but that
Speaker 1: is just the beginning of a new era, you know,
Speaker 1: and there was plenty of stuff before that. Well, and
Speaker 1: it's weird to think about chat GPT as a chat
Speaker 1: pot because it appears to be a tool that is
Speaker 1: so much more robust, right when you're talking about people
Speaker 1: using it to write code. I think that's you know,
Speaker 1: that's going to be a huge part of our discussion,
Speaker 1: just about the um expansive applications of something that emerges
Speaker 1: like this, and that's where the fear comes. I think
Speaker 1: that's where the fear comes out of the job replacement,
Speaker 1: you know, UM anxiety. It's just it's it's pulling directly
Speaker 1: from that Oh wow, this thing can do a lot
Speaker 1: of right. Yeah, is where you see things like mid Journey,
Speaker 1: Dolly Stable Diffusion. They're redefining the experience of creating art
Speaker 1: to the point where, uh, it can be very difficult
Speaker 1: for someone just looking at it to differentiate between something
Speaker 1: an actual like the human artist made, and something made
Speaker 1: quote unquote in the style of And this is bringing
Speaker 1: up really difficult questions about the nature of creation, the
Speaker 1: nature of collaboration and ownership and getting images is being
Speaker 1: a little hypocritical, We're just gonna point that out. Uh.
Speaker 1: But the big thing is we're on the cusp. Is
Speaker 1: this the cusp of a chasm into which civilization falls
Speaker 1: or is this more like the precipice of a runway? Right?
Speaker 1: Are we on a plane or are we on a
Speaker 1: weird Thelma and Louise, uh Cliff run right with with
Speaker 1: a I. Uh. So we're dealing with the facts today.
Speaker 1: What is future of this? This ni instantaneous creation? Right?
Speaker 1: Will these lines of code learn to create code themselves?
Speaker 1: That's kind of the goal, right, because if you think
Speaker 1: about your brain, that's what your brain is sort of doing.
Speaker 1: Your brain, your personality functions kind of like these lines
Speaker 1: of code and you create new things. So based on
Speaker 1: the stimuli you encounter, which is why you know, people
Speaker 1: might fall really in love with something and then change
Speaker 1: their personality around it. Right. Shout out to every middle schooler.
Speaker 1: I know there's a band you heard and you're like,
Speaker 1: this is me now and chat GBT is writing code, right, Um, yes,
Speaker 1: spoiler it is it. Well, it is. It is writing code.
Speaker 1: It is writing things. You could definitely say it's writing things.
Speaker 1: But then the question is, what about the global elites
Speaker 1: of the world who already have their hands on the
Speaker 1: levers of power. Are they already planning for a new
Speaker 1: world of robot workers with the rest of humanity tossed
Speaker 1: on the figurative trash sheet, with all the other outdated
Speaker 1: technology like the Sega Genesis. I was just thinking about
Speaker 1: the Sega Genesis a while back. I was a second kid. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I didn't get into Nintendo until I was an adult. Uh,
Speaker 1: Sonic was my guy way more than Mario. Guys, does
Speaker 1: this in any way figure into the concept of like
Speaker 1: a singularity? Like is that sort of what we're theoretically
Speaker 1: heading for? And that's kind of the moment when AI
Speaker 1: kind of figure stuff out for itself and then we
Speaker 1: really can't put that genie back in the bottle. Like obviously,
Speaker 1: science fiction has shown as dystopian versions of that, with
Speaker 1: like sky Neet becoming sentient and creating robots that want
Speaker 1: to wipe out humanity and all of that stuff. But
Speaker 1: this is sort of roughly clustered around the idea of
Speaker 1: a singularity. Yeah, this is related for sure, the singularity
Speaker 1: in the world of technology and the future. Apology is
Speaker 1: this this hypothetical thought experiment point in time where technological
Speaker 1: growth is on such a j curve, so it becomes
Speaker 1: so exponential that it's uncontrollable and it starts to change
Speaker 1: human civilization in ways that are both unpredictable and irreversible.
Speaker 1: So it's pretty heady, heady stuff, you know. And this
Speaker 1: is this all factors into that question we opened up
Speaker 1: with at the top, is AI coming for you? Will
Speaker 1: take a break for a word from our robo sponsors,
Speaker 1: and we'll be right back, will hopefully still be us.
Speaker 1: Here's where it gets crazy. Yes, AI is coming for you.
Speaker 1: At least it's weird. Found a really cool gallop pole
Speaker 1: from If you ask the majority of people in the
Speaker 1: United States, there's a strange disconnect. Seventy three percent of
Speaker 1: US residents believe a I will specifically eliminate more jobs
Speaker 1: than it creates, but those same people only twenty three
Speaker 1: percent of them believe the trend might affect them personally.
Speaker 1: So in other words, yeah, people are saying, well, things
Speaker 1: are gonna be bad for some people. I don't know,
Speaker 1: maybe a lot not me though, because I uh make
Speaker 1: avocado toast, you know, or I um kick puppies for
Speaker 1: a living, and that's just a job that needs a
Speaker 1: lot of humanity. I suspect those numbers would be different
Speaker 1: if that poll was given today, because I mean, again,
Speaker 1: with the exponential growth and improvement of this tech, A
Speaker 1: year is a long time, you know, so between three
Speaker 1: I met that it's probably closer to around you now.
Speaker 1: Just guessing. There's a really cool in fiction response to
Speaker 1: this as well. There's a really cool idea of slipping time,
Speaker 1: right uh and progress over time in the Marvel universe.
Speaker 1: In X Men comics, there are these things like, um,
Speaker 1: you know how Wolverine is Weapon X. That's not a spoiler,
Speaker 1: and that's like weapon ten because there were other iterations
Speaker 1: of him in these government programs. There's a place in
Speaker 1: this fictional universe called the world. Not the most creative,
Speaker 1: but whatever, it's an awesome concept. And time moves more
Speaker 1: quickly in the world in this little thing, and so
Speaker 1: one year out here is thousands and thousands of years
Speaker 1: and there because people are trying to drive evolution, just
Speaker 1: push the ball faster. And you know, make no mistake,
Speaker 1: if that were possible today, people would do it. And
Speaker 1: it's kind of already happening to your point, Noll, in
Speaker 1: certain in certain areas of technology, you know, and also
Speaker 1: in the climate. But but if we look at this trend,
Speaker 1: we also see that education makes a difference. The more uh,
Speaker 1: the higher let, the higher your level of formal education is,
Speaker 1: the less likely you are to be worried that this
Speaker 1: trend will threaten you directly. You might say, well, you know,
Speaker 1: I am a philosopher, see my scoff see my tweed patches.
Speaker 1: The I I simply shan'n't be replaced. I shan'n't. Oh,
Speaker 1: shan't you. I don't know if that's the right. But
Speaker 1: then also posits that the world continues to value what
Speaker 1: your stock in trade is, you know what I mean,
Speaker 1: And on a on a broad enough scale, that it
Speaker 1: actually matters. I mean, you know, philosophy is a bit
Speaker 1: of a niche discipline. Let's just be honest. You know,
Speaker 1: and your average um, you know consumer probably not super
Speaker 1: concerned with philosophy. Um. You know, it is more something
Speaker 1: that exists in academic realms. Uh. So you know, if
Speaker 1: if academics, if institutions of you know, academic learning cease
Speaker 1: to be as important, then so may that discipline cease
Speaker 1: to be as important? Yeah, not a lot of what
Speaker 1: would need you do? Arm bands on the kids? You know, well,
Speaker 1: if they are there, it's it's super ironical. Right, everything's
Speaker 1: ironic now or not. We're in the post irony society. Uh,
Speaker 1: civilization is just collectively over it. Uh. We're making a
Speaker 1: solid point here about the unevenness of how AI may
Speaker 1: affect various industries. You can find all these again think
Speaker 1: pieces perspectives, let's call them that in case think pieces
Speaker 1: sounds dismissive. You can find a lot of perspectives that
Speaker 1: are valid, that are listing jobs that are in danger,
Speaker 1: jobs that are not in danger. And then you can
Speaker 1: find people saying, hey, up being chicken little about it.
Speaker 1: The sky is not falling. No jobs are really in danger,
Speaker 1: at least not yet, so maybe we can think through these. Um.
Speaker 1: We mentioned it off air. This just happened as we're
Speaker 1: finishing up research for today's episode. As we record today, Friday, January.
Speaker 1: It's UM, it's a little bit before noon here on
Speaker 1: the East coast of the United States. This morning, Google
Speaker 1: published one a hell of a memo. We'll just give
Speaker 1: you the direct quote here. It's about their parent company, Alphabet.
Speaker 1: Google is parent Alphabet Incorporated, is cutting about twelve thousand jobs,
Speaker 1: or six percent of its workforce as the technology sector
Speaker 1: reels from layoffs and companies stake their futures on artificial intelligence. Weird, right,
Speaker 1: And and Matt, you were pointing out that this is
Speaker 1: on the heels of a string of layoffs, Uh, something
Speaker 1: like almost a hundred thousand across the tech industry. A
Speaker 1: little over ninety thousand jobs within the tech sector. We're
Speaker 1: lost last year last year alone. And and these happen
Speaker 1: for any number of reasons. It's not all due entirely
Speaker 1: to concerns about AI. But Google is interesting or Alphabet,
Speaker 1: I guess we have to pretend they're different. Um, Alphabet
Speaker 1: is interesting because they directly tie this calculation to artificial intelligence,
Speaker 1: and we know that there are a Baker's dozen of
Speaker 1: unpredictable variables that could affect these other companies, like economic predictions,
Speaker 1: unhinged demands of shareholders, expecting year over your profits, etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker 1: But adding to the Google thing, and I snooped around
Speaker 1: a bit on this um with you know, just a
Speaker 1: little bit of time, insiders are predicting that Google is
Speaker 1: going to come out with something big in the AI
Speaker 1: field this spring. And so that coupled with this with
Speaker 1: thousands of people laid being laid off, has folks scratching
Speaker 1: their heads, or humans, folks who have human heads scratching
Speaker 1: those heads, and that got kind of dark. Um, don't
Speaker 1: scratch other people's heads, scratch your own unless there's unless
Speaker 1: there's consent. Yeah, so there's okay. One of the things,
Speaker 1: like going back to the idea of the Ivory Tower
Speaker 1: feeling safe, right, or the creative arts feeling safe, Let's
Speaker 1: talk about the people who actually build all the things
Speaker 1: society relies on it, right. We're talking truckers, We're talking
Speaker 1: construction workers. We're talking people laboring in factories. We're talking
Speaker 1: you know, we're talking to the enormously dangerous job mining
Speaker 1: precious metals, right, which are a huge part of the
Speaker 1: reason we're able to make this show and people are
Speaker 1: able to hear it. A lot of people say that
Speaker 1: is gonna be a thing of the past. I don't
Speaker 1: know if you guys saw the Boston Dynamics video that
Speaker 1: came out kind of recently. It's it's it's not on
Speaker 1: a live construction site. It's a guy who is on
Speaker 1: a set that gives you, you know, construction equipment, and
Speaker 1: uh and I like this guy. I gotta tell you,
Speaker 1: he's got It's charismatic in the way acts, and you
Speaker 1: can tell he's having fun. But he's up on this,
Speaker 1: you know, like this fake scaffolding. He's got his mallet.
Speaker 1: He's got his mallet, and he's like he's like, oh jeez,
Speaker 1: I forgot my tools and I'm making it's how like
Speaker 1: uh Rick and Morty in some sort of pornographic bit.
Speaker 1: But but he the ideas he forgets his tools and
Speaker 1: his buddy Atlas the robot, here's here's this call and
Speaker 1: jumps into action. Do you wanna should we describe what
Speaker 1: does Yeah, rather than the construction worker, you know, hopping
Speaker 1: down for a couple of seconds and picking up his tools.
Speaker 1: A robot or whatever we want to call this thing,
Speaker 1: almost in a hendroid, little very ninja like creature, hops
Speaker 1: up and goes, oh, I'll get it for you, and
Speaker 1: places a board down so that he can get onto
Speaker 1: the scaffolding, kind of skips on over to the bag,
Speaker 1: picks it up, and then skips on up to the
Speaker 1: guy and tosses it to him, like literally tosses the
Speaker 1: bag of tools to our construction worker and then hops
Speaker 1: down and does a nice little flip off the scaffolding
Speaker 1: and like tea, like, what was did it like knock
Speaker 1: the construction worker over? Was it a heavy bag of
Speaker 1: tools that should maybe not be tossed? This song a
Speaker 1: little sketchy. I think it's a prop bag. This was like, okay,
Speaker 1: this is like a demo. This is like not not
Speaker 1: in the field. Yeah. And the seconds for the bag
Speaker 1: to get to the construction workers so not not too bad,
Speaker 1: just not too bad at all. Yeah. No, that's a
Speaker 1: really good metric to add there, because what it looks
Speaker 1: like is this um as, this automaton is solving problems,
Speaker 1: navigating obstacles on the fly. It's uh, it's doing the
Speaker 1: bare grills right, improvised adapt overcome through the tools thirty
Speaker 1: two seconds. But if you look closer, what you see
Speaker 1: is there's another video that shows how the robot navigates
Speaker 1: space and and our pow um Damian Patrick Williams pointed
Speaker 1: this out. They're being very careful with the language. They're
Speaker 1: not saying Atlas does this. They're saying, we know they're
Speaker 1: using the Royal we a lot, right. So the question
Speaker 1: is how much are they steering this? How much of
Speaker 1: this is um kind of a pre programmed set of
Speaker 1: actions and processes. The problem is that right now bots
Speaker 1: are not at this point able to move and adapt
Speaker 1: as quickly as a human. It's still amazing, it is astonishing,
Speaker 1: and eventually, if this research continues, they will, like these companies,
Speaker 1: will achieve that goal. We just can't say it's here yet.
Speaker 1: Does that make sense? Absolutely? And if you watch like
Speaker 1: you said, Ben, if you watch that video closely, that
Speaker 1: that machine is not just taking in all of its
Speaker 1: surroundings and understanding where the person is, how the scaffolding
Speaker 1: is built, how to get up to their where the
Speaker 1: tool kit is. You can tell that some of that
Speaker 1: is pre programmed, especially at the end when it knocks
Speaker 1: over the box in order to get down and do
Speaker 1: a flip off of the thing. All of that is
Speaker 1: pre programmed, Like I have zero doubt, including the setup
Speaker 1: of the scaffolding. I think that space even the way
Speaker 1: like the space is part of the calculation. It's not
Speaker 1: like it's just taking in data on the fly and
Speaker 1: like adapting this is basically almost like a performance. No,
Speaker 1: we think about what we just learned. We just learned
Speaker 1: this past week about Tesla's original um self driving car
Speaker 1: video test. Yeah, where it just came out that oh no,
Speaker 1: it was actually there was quite a bit of driver
Speaker 1: intervention in order to make that happen, even though the
Speaker 1: claim was by Elon Musk himself and the company that
Speaker 1: it was that full process was self driving, including parking
Speaker 1: when they crashed a car. Oh you know. And again
Speaker 1: that's not we're not casting unfair aspersion on places like
Speaker 1: Boston Dynamics. No, it's it's yeah, they're showing off what
Speaker 1: it can do. Even says it's showing how Atlas interacts
Speaker 1: with objects and modifies the course to reach its goal.
Speaker 1: The course yeah see uh, And and they're very they're
Speaker 1: transparent about it, especially in that second video about how
Speaker 1: it navigates space. But maybe maybe because there's such a
Speaker 1: fundamental fear and concern about the potential here. Uh, people
Speaker 1: get a little carried away when they describe it, right,
Speaker 1: and you think of terminator, and you think a sky
Speaker 1: net as as mentioned earlier, But there are countless related
Speaker 1: jobs that could ultimately have that John Henry moment, you know, like,
Speaker 1: uh again, would it be a terrible world if people
Speaker 1: who labor in minds, sometimes against their will, were replaced
Speaker 1: by robots? Some people, including some miners, would say, yes,
Speaker 1: it is terrible because that's my only source of income, right,
Speaker 1: and until you can solve the income problem, solving the
Speaker 1: robot problem doesn't really do much for me, you know.
Speaker 1: And that's a valid point, and it's a point that
Speaker 1: a lot of people don't like to hear because it
Speaker 1: forces you to acknowledge some uncomfortable realities and some uncomfortable
Speaker 1: potentials for the solution there, because the solution could be, oh, well,
Speaker 1: we just need many many fewer humans because we won't
Speaker 1: need as much income if we have many many fewer
Speaker 1: humans or a world like bloom Camps, uh Elysium, you know,
Speaker 1: where uh, the masses of humanity are living on a
Speaker 1: dying world. Their unemployment is rampant. Law enforcement has been
Speaker 1: replaced by incredibly brutal robots, and the historical global elite
Speaker 1: who don't do anything for society, live out in space
Speaker 1: and have all the cures to all the ills and
Speaker 1: just don't want to do it. He's just doing it,
Speaker 1: you know. They check the schedule, they're they're busy. But
Speaker 1: aside from that, like we see their very real things.
Speaker 1: These are based on. Maybe we can talk about the
Speaker 1: jobs that are supposedly not in danger because they say
Speaker 1: that earlier point about the teen poll, that kind of things.
Speaker 1: Things are probably shifting now, right, Uh. A few years
Speaker 1: back se or so Americans said this stuff won't touch me,
Speaker 1: and we were looking into jobs that supposedly won't be affected.
Speaker 1: I wanted to start this one off with a dark horse.
Speaker 1: You're ready. Eight HR managers apparently HR managers apparently on
Speaker 1: the list of jobs that probably won't be automated. Well
Speaker 1: that's good. I that's a positive. Um, Oh, come on, HR,
Speaker 1: it doesn't listen to this show. You don't have to
Speaker 1: do that. No, I just mean I know a lot
Speaker 1: of really nice HR people. They just have to deal
Speaker 1: with with weird. It's a weird thing to do, right,
Speaker 1: are I have to navigate that limital space between the
Speaker 1: corporate machine and the individual meat body that you know
Speaker 1: needs things like healthcare. Yeah, And and that's not the
Speaker 1: same thing as like an HR representative being automated, because
Speaker 1: that's again that's answering a lot of similar questions right
Speaker 1: in a programmaticum predetermined way. It's similar to the way
Speaker 1: that if you are in an online customer service situation,
Speaker 1: you have the option to chat and it'll ask you
Speaker 1: some questions and try to solve the issue before you
Speaker 1: get to a human. But the idea is that HR
Speaker 1: managers who when by the time he gets to an
Speaker 1: HR manager, we're talking about maybe disputes that hinge on
Speaker 1: very human things, fears, desires for now and there's a
Speaker 1: lot of you know, there are a lot of processes
Speaker 1: and guidelines in place to try to make things equitable
Speaker 1: and fair, but there's a huge human element to that.
Speaker 1: The other fields. Uh. And this will be an interest
Speaker 1: to some of our fellow conspiracy realists. Lawyers. Could lawyers
Speaker 1: be replaced? Actually, yeah, because being being an effective lawyer
Speaker 1: is having a full and robust knowledge of the law
Speaker 1: in previous cases. It's like being a human computer. It's
Speaker 1: like having you know, and being able to cross reference
Speaker 1: that stuff. But in litigation it also requires being kind
Speaker 1: of widely and and and having smarts to be adaptable
Speaker 1: and you know, kind of one up the other side.
Speaker 1: But at its most basic, there certainly could be more
Speaker 1: general legal jobs that could be rocket mortgagified, you know
Speaker 1: what I mean, or like uh, you know, um tax actified,
Speaker 1: like any of those um you know, uh templatized ways
Speaker 1: of doing your taxes. Oh my god, you guys, there's
Speaker 1: gonna be a Matthew McConaughey AI lawyer who's just really
Speaker 1: really relatable, really likable and just talks to a little
Speaker 1: bit of a drawl. That's going to be It'll be
Speaker 1: like caveman lawyer, but a robot, you know, just an
Speaker 1: AI from Texas. I don't know much. I like ones,
Speaker 1: I like zeros, and I like justice, and that's all
Speaker 1: we're asking for today, folks, Like I could I could
Speaker 1: see that somebody called uh Matthew McConaughey. But yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: hitting on these awesome points, right, Like, it's quite complex
Speaker 1: to be a good lawyer. Because you are UM, I
Speaker 1: won't say manipulating, but you are leveraging precedent and rules
Speaker 1: to your advantage. You are practicing persuasion, especially if you're UM.
Speaker 1: If you're in a trial, your job is to persuade
Speaker 1: a judge and twelve people who are probably not lawyers. Right,
Speaker 1: You're you're persuading humans. So could UH could and automated
Speaker 1: process of some sort or generative AI couldn't do that,
Speaker 1: probably not yet. But there's this crazy article out of
Speaker 1: the Conversation dot com written by Elizabeth C. Tippett and
Speaker 1: Charlotte Alexander. These are both professors of law, and what
Speaker 1: they found is what you were talking about. No, there's
Speaker 1: a bit of UM. There's a bit of a gray
Speaker 1: area here. They teamed up with the scientists and a
Speaker 1: nonprofit called Miter, and they discovered that some legal task
Speaker 1: can be automated. Citations can be automated, legal research, precedent
Speaker 1: case briefs, finding notes that can be automated. UM. They
Speaker 1: used a methodology called graph analysis and it creates these
Speaker 1: visual networks of all these different citations and then they
Speaker 1: got predictive with it. That's the spooky thing. They were
Speaker 1: able to say we can now predict whether a brief
Speaker 1: or an argument will win based on how well other
Speaker 1: briefs perform when they have different citations, so they can
Speaker 1: make you they can make a winner yet very close
Speaker 1: to it. That's crazy. I just saw a future where
Speaker 1: it is to like chat GBT attorneys using those briefs
Speaker 1: and all all that information from two opposing sides, and
Speaker 1: then they just pit the chat bots against each other
Speaker 1: and some humans who are the peers just have to
Speaker 1: watch and listen and then make a determination. It's crazy.
Speaker 1: I mean, we uh, we have a friend who you
Speaker 1: may have heard on a couple of different shows you do,
Speaker 1: a friend named Frank. And Frank would be an awesome
Speaker 1: person to talk to about this because he has in
Speaker 1: the past done title research right, and title research involves
Speaker 1: going back through handwritten records, right, and that could be
Speaker 1: really tricky, like recognizing and digesting handwriting. I mean, we
Speaker 1: know that that kind of technology certainly has gotten crazy
Speaker 1: better than it used to be. Remember where it used
Speaker 1: to be able to get a scanner. When you'd buy
Speaker 1: a scanner and it would include some prepackaged software that
Speaker 1: could interpret handwriting into texts, and it was bad like
Speaker 1: it really didn't work well. But now you know you
Speaker 1: can get an app on your phone that will scan
Speaker 1: something photographically and then convert it to a PDF, a
Speaker 1: searchable pdf, almost flawlessly. Um. But we also know that
Speaker 1: lawyers and doctors and professionals tend to have really jankie handwriting.
Speaker 1: It's sort of a trope well sometimes of writing in Latin,
Speaker 1: so well, you know, and it reminds me of some
Speaker 1: of the the voice recognition and transcription services that are
Speaker 1: out there, and then starting to make me think about writers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: or podcasting. No no no no no no no never never.
Speaker 1: Can I ask you all a quick question? I was
Speaker 1: my my girlfriend, I'm just sort of Her perspective is
Speaker 1: I don't like it. I don't like AI if it
Speaker 1: weirds me out, I think it's gross. And my perspective
Speaker 1: is more like it's I find it fascinating. I think
Speaker 1: there are issues, but it really calls into question like
Speaker 1: the nature of an idea, right, Like, if you're using
Speaker 1: one of these art rendering things, you know, and you're
Speaker 1: feeding an idea and it's it's enacting your idea based
Speaker 1: on your prompts, it's still your idea. Um, it's not
Speaker 1: like it's creating something from a whole cloth, which is
Speaker 1: why it's all about mimicry. And it's not like, you know,
Speaker 1: you can get a chat bot or this chat GBT
Speaker 1: thing to write a completely unique story based on experience.
Speaker 1: It has to be fed information so it knows what
Speaker 1: to mimic. But like, what do you guys think? I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, having an idea and having an experience and
Speaker 1: as Nick Cave eloquently put it, being able to experience
Speaker 1: suffering and interpret that into art that's uniquely human. Well,
Speaker 1: I would say the way I've navigated that in previous conversations,
Speaker 1: some on other shows, some just really weird surreal moments
Speaker 1: like at airports late at night, is um think of
Speaker 1: the old idea of a of a Faustian bargain right,
Speaker 1: or a monkey's paw, or a genie in a lamp
Speaker 1: or a bottle. It all goes back to being very
Speaker 1: specific about how you ask a question, how you make
Speaker 1: your wish right. All three of those examples monkeys paw,
Speaker 1: infernal bargain, uh, a wish from a jin. All three
Speaker 1: of those examples contained the same thing, which is this
Speaker 1: idea of working off prompts and this idea that one
Speaker 1: must be very careful and specific with one's prompts. Shout
Speaker 1: out to this amazing comic. I've been reading eight billion
Speaker 1: genies no spoilers, check it out premise everybody gets a
Speaker 1: j at once? Yeah, oh yeah, checking. But what happens
Speaker 1: then when one wish conflicts with another? You know, there's
Speaker 1: so much potential fallout that could happen. It's sort of
Speaker 1: like why everyone doesn't get nuclear weapons or or or
Speaker 1: laser cars or flying cars. It's all that same stuff
Speaker 1: or two or two billion dollars and shouldn't because it
Speaker 1: would all be in conflict with one another and it
Speaker 1: would be chaos. And that's what this starting to feel
Speaker 1: like it's heading towards. But it's still to me is like,
Speaker 1: what is the nature of an idea? You know, if
Speaker 1: a human feeds the bot and create something unique quote unquote, Uh,
Speaker 1: is it still the humans idea? You know? Or or
Speaker 1: what is where does the idea come from? More simple idea?
Speaker 1: If the if the writer uses a pen, is it
Speaker 1: the pen's idea? Well, it's the same argument with guns.
Speaker 1: Did the gun kill the person or the person wielding
Speaker 1: the gun kill the person? And your experience. You know,
Speaker 1: an individual creative humans experience is really just a combination
Speaker 1: of things that that human has seen and heard and felt. Right,
Speaker 1: So if you write it down, if you record it,
Speaker 1: and then it's filtered, what I'm saying is what is
Speaker 1: really the difference besides the human emotion that's behind it.
Speaker 1: To me, in a weird way, at the core, it
Speaker 1: is the exact same thing. It's just the filter than
Speaker 1: has to like, the filter that makes art uh super
Speaker 1: unique and meaningful? Is that the lens through which it's
Speaker 1: being shown. Right When artists borrow all the time from
Speaker 1: other artists, Writers borrow all the time from other writers,
Speaker 1: and these tropes that get created and become cliches if
Speaker 1: they're overused, that's part of the whole landscape of creativity.
Speaker 1: And this again we're we're heading into some deep water.
Speaker 1: You can see how this might end up being multiple episodes. Folks.
Speaker 1: We want to take another ad break and we're gonna
Speaker 1: return to dive into some more uh strange days of AI. Back,
Speaker 1: let's stay with let's let's do with writers for a second. Writers,
Speaker 1: whether you're talking prose, poetry, nonfiction, uh interpretive stuff like
Speaker 1: commas said the shotgun to the head. That's an excellent
Speaker 1: book of poetry. UM coders and coders writing software is
Speaker 1: writing right, and it is a creative act. Uh. Some
Speaker 1: branches of science are inherently very creative. And you mentioned something,
Speaker 1: Matt that was that was really um really great foreshadowing here. Yes, code,
Speaker 1: old old boy chat gpt not to gender you Chatty
Speaker 1: can write code and got banned from stacked overflow. You
Speaker 1: can't submit anything that has been made with the with
Speaker 1: the the mind of chat gpt, not because it's awesome,
Speaker 1: not because developers are scared to lose their jobs, but
Speaker 1: because the codes riddled with errors. And then they said,
Speaker 1: like stack overflow said, we're temporarily banning this because it's
Speaker 1: the likelihood of it being bad is high enough they'll
Speaker 1: seriously screw us up. And you can see that when
Speaker 1: you ask some of these um some of these bots
Speaker 1: to write a story. We were playing around with it
Speaker 1: off air, and we asked it um to have God
Speaker 1: tell four people about the nature of life through sandwiches,
Speaker 1: and we did a couple of things there. We named
Speaker 1: a specific number of characters right there, five four people
Speaker 1: in God. And then we named a specific thing but
Speaker 1: in your action for them to have and because we
Speaker 1: were specific, it felt like a story. Now it wasn't,
Speaker 1: you know, the gift of the magi, Oh, Henry, It
Speaker 1: was not, but it was good. It was readable and
Speaker 1: it made sense. And then we asked it to do
Speaker 1: more stuff. We asked to write more stories. Right, and
Speaker 1: then we started noticing there's a little bit of a pattern.
Speaker 1: It's not it's not as formulaic as a bar joke,
Speaker 1: but you can tell at this point what is being written.
Speaker 1: And it seems like, do you guys point about the
Speaker 1: suffering human element? It seems like there's a bit of
Speaker 1: soul missing, and it's very hard to define what that
Speaker 1: is unless you want to go Nick Cave and say
Speaker 1: all art comes from suffering, which is I think a
Speaker 1: little bit of a broad brush because I agree with
Speaker 1: that too. Now I think I think Cave is very
Speaker 1: old school artist and very much someone that comes from
Speaker 1: the literary uh, you know, um discipline, um in terms
Speaker 1: of like you know, the greats you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: like poetry and prose and all of that over time.
Speaker 1: So he I could see why he personally would find
Speaker 1: this to be repugnant. We talked to when we were
Speaker 1: chatting about this offline. Hey, o Miyazaki, Um, you know
Speaker 1: the incredible animator, you know, the Walt Disney of of
Speaker 1: Japan as they call him. Sometimes there's a really great clip,
Speaker 1: great whatever, however you want to describe it, of him
Speaker 1: being presented with some AI generated animation from like a
Speaker 1: gaming kind of company or a company in Japan that
Speaker 1: sort of this is like years ago, so this stuff
Speaker 1: is very rudimentary, and he expressed palpable disgusted. He found
Speaker 1: it to be maccabre and against all the things that
Speaker 1: he believes in, and basically shamed the hell out of everyone,
Speaker 1: like why would you show me this? You? You know,
Speaker 1: he said something like the kind of what Nick Cave said,
Speaker 1: like the end is near, you know, if this is
Speaker 1: what we're we're working towards. So again, though, Misazaki comes
Speaker 1: from a discipline also quite old, uh and and incredibly
Speaker 1: viable and incredibly important, but you know one that has
Speaker 1: been displaced hand draw animation or the very least um
Speaker 1: what's the word kind of bolstered by uh c G I,
Speaker 1: you know, like I mean it used to be all
Speaker 1: animated films were hand drawn, and they realized they could
Speaker 1: make them quicker Um, if they use computers, and now
Speaker 1: you'll have some things that are some hand drawn elements,
Speaker 1: in some computer elements, they'll use computers to help, you know,
Speaker 1: you do the backgrounds instead of using like an optical
Speaker 1: printer like they did in the old days. So it
Speaker 1: all depends on where you're coming from. You know, where
Speaker 1: you where you where you fall in this argument. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like the idea, Um, I'm kind of kind of falling
Speaker 1: for that comparison of a writer using a pen, does
Speaker 1: that mean it's the pen's idea? In the early days
Speaker 1: of baseball, which is tremendously not popular in most of
Speaker 1: the world, but very popular here in the US, in
Speaker 1: the early days of baseball, it was considered cheating to
Speaker 1: use a baseball glove. You're just supposed to, you know,
Speaker 1: catch that, catch that thing bare handed right in the air.
Speaker 1: And now it's normalized. If you see examples of this,
Speaker 1: that's why we're talking about precedents, right, If you see
Speaker 1: examples of this in the modern day with creative writing, um,
Speaker 1: you might be saying, well, hey, what about all those
Speaker 1: what about all those hilarious AI generated scripts. We've had
Speaker 1: one thousand hours of seinfeld Er night Cord or whatever
Speaker 1: into this AI program and it wrote this. Sorry, folks,
Speaker 1: most of those are written by comedians. Most of those
Speaker 1: are are fake, and they're still really funny. Um, but
Speaker 1: they're not what they purport to be, and that's part
Speaker 1: of the joke. There's another there's a very big danger though,
Speaker 1: I would say, um to the nature of the idea.
Speaker 1: It is the lack of transparency, the ability to control
Speaker 1: the past sort of like um, I'm full of weird
Speaker 1: references today, sort of like in Neil Stevenson's Anathema, there's
Speaker 1: this conspiracy. There are these groups of people called there's
Speaker 1: a group of people called ray Tours, and they have
Speaker 1: the ability to change the past, and they do it
Speaker 1: in a non transparent way, and the rest of the
Speaker 1: world only kind of notices that they exist when they
Speaker 1: screw something up, because when they screw up, the things
Speaker 1: get strange. Right. There's all of a sudden, a t
Speaker 1: rex uh skeleton fused into a parking deck. That's an
Speaker 1: example from the story. Please check it out. It's a
Speaker 1: wild ride. I hope, I hope it becomes a film adaptation,
Speaker 1: but a less weird uh less weird example of this
Speaker 1: is the thing we found on Twitter, and I think
Speaker 1: I found this through a buddy, Robert Evans, But I
Speaker 1: thought we can maybe do a quick, a quick dramatic
Speaker 1: reading of this. Who wants to be? Who wants to
Speaker 1: be Henry Ford? And who wants to be Uh? Zane Cooper? Matt,
Speaker 1: Would you do us the honor of being virtual Henry Ford?
Speaker 1: Oh God, okay, I have to defer because I've played
Speaker 1: Henry Ford too often in a lot of sketch company.
Speaker 1: Does he have like a mid Atlantic kind of accent?
Speaker 1: What's the what's what's your go to? Henry Ford? So
Speaker 1: when I when I do it, he sure does. But okay,
Speaker 1: let's do this set up. So there's this AI simulation
Speaker 1: of Henry Ford and this guy Zane G. T. Cooper.
Speaker 1: You can see this on Twitter. Uh has a conversation
Speaker 1: with Henry Ford V two or whatever you want to
Speaker 1: call it, and it doesn't go the way you would expect.
Speaker 1: Nor would you do us the honor of some voice
Speaker 1: acting for Zane here? Sure? Yea, yeah, I'm just gonna yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna be. I see why you don't want to
Speaker 1: read this? Bend all right? Here we go here. If
Speaker 1: you want anti Semitism documented anti Semitism with in Henry Ford.
Speaker 1: So here is my voice, Matt's human voice recreating Henry
Speaker 1: Ford's Ai voice. Here we go. Hello, I am AI.
Speaker 1: Simulation of Henry Ford. I may not be historically accurate.
Speaker 1: Please verify factual information. Oh my god, you just like him,
Speaker 1: sound just like um? Excuse me, Mr Ford? Why did
Speaker 1: you hate Jewish people? Uh? I did not hate Jewish people.
Speaker 1: I believe that certain individuals, regardless of their religious faith
Speaker 1: or background, were poisoning the minds of the public and
Speaker 1: had to be stopped. The comments attributed to me in
Speaker 1: the Dearborn Independent newspaper were wrong and defensive, and I
Speaker 1: deeply regret them. You regret they were reported, You regret
Speaker 1: saying them. This is very sorry, this is me editorializing.
Speaker 1: But you were famously in it. But sir, you were
Speaker 1: famously an anti Semite. Oh this is a series of
Speaker 1: text at midnight night. Yeah, Ai Ai. Henry Ford was
Speaker 1: probably a few makers marks deep at this point too,
Speaker 1: you know. But you were famously an anti Semite. My
Speaker 1: reputation as an anti Semite is based on a few
Speaker 1: isolated incidents in real In reality, I had many Jewish
Speaker 1: friends and business associates, throughout my life and even donated
Speaker 1: to numerous charitable causes in Israel. I hope that history
Speaker 1: will remember me for the good works I have done,
Speaker 1: rather than those comments which were wrong and defensive. You
Speaker 1: literally owned The Dearborn Independent and personally published anti Semitic articles.
Speaker 1: You bound the articles into volumes called the International jew.
Speaker 1: The Dearborn Independent was a newspaper that I owned, and
Speaker 1: it did publish some articles which were wrong and offend
Speaker 1: if However, to be clear, those articles did not reflect
Speaker 1: my own views on the Jewish people. I have always
Speaker 1: believed inequality for everyone, regardless of their religious backgrounds or beliefs.
Speaker 1: Oh right, and let's yeah, and seeing a great job, guys,
Speaker 1: and uh, we wanted a humorous way to illustrate the
Speaker 1: incredible problem here, which is that when you don't know
Speaker 1: what goes into the black box, you have no like,
Speaker 1: it becomes harder to understand what is factual. And Henry
Speaker 1: Ford had two big things in his life. Uh, he
Speaker 1: revolutionized the car business and he hated He hated millions
Speaker 1: of people just because they were Jewish. Those were like
Speaker 1: his two big things. And so he also liked I'm
Speaker 1: sure he liked gardening or something I do. He led
Speaker 1: tons of friends to at least Yeah, the old thing
Speaker 1: if you can name the number of friends you have
Speaker 1: from a specific demographic, they don't think you're their friends.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, is this entirely satire or is this like
Speaker 1: an app? Because I'm looking to do this Twitter thread
Speaker 1: and there's one incredible thing where it's like there's different
Speaker 1: public figures that you can unlock, like you would like
Speaker 1: a voice you know, in like a you know, a
Speaker 1: premium um transcription voice reader service. And there's the thing
Speaker 1: that says, unlock Adolf Hitler for five hundred coins. No,
Speaker 1: I really don't want to hear what that guy has
Speaker 1: to say. Yeah he might, he might say he might
Speaker 1: do the Henry Forth thing and say there were a
Speaker 1: few incidents, mistakes were made. I invented highways and microphones
Speaker 1: and man, these those outfits were fire. They were so
Speaker 1: good looking. There's works. There's another thread they were saying
Speaker 1: is interviewing Ronald Reagan about the AIDS crisis. It's like,
Speaker 1: why do you ignore the AIDS crisis? I didn't. I
Speaker 1: did not ignore it. Oh boy, So that's that's what
Speaker 1: we're saying, Like there's an opportunity for unscrupulous editing, for
Speaker 1: changing the past. And if something like this occurs, maybe
Speaker 1: in an educational context, then how is a kid gonna know?
Speaker 1: How's a kid going to know the difference? Right? Especially
Speaker 1: once their access to information is further funneled through just
Speaker 1: a few sources. That is where the danger lies. And
Speaker 1: that's why, that's why, um, I don't know, it's just
Speaker 1: tremendously worried. Well, can we also just point out that, like,
Speaker 1: you know, the tactics that this AI is using, or
Speaker 1: this chatbot or whatever it is using are the same
Speaker 1: ones that an actual politician or public figure would use.
Speaker 1: They would divert the conversation away from the question at
Speaker 1: hand and replace it with but but this, But I
Speaker 1: did this. I doesn't necessarily mean I didn't do that.
Speaker 1: I'm not directly addressing that. But here are these things
Speaker 1: that I did the show that I'm actually good. Let's
Speaker 1: focus on those things, because the wrong Reagan one talks
Speaker 1: about how he appointed a President's Commission on the Human
Speaker 1: immuno deficiency virus epidemic. So if he did that, he
Speaker 1: couldn't possibly have ignored the aids. Christ real Ronald Reagan
Speaker 1: would never remember, but but so that they're interrogating AI
Speaker 1: versions of someone, right, and you can make all you
Speaker 1: need is enough footage, right, enough documentation, enough stuff to
Speaker 1: feed the beasts. And that's that is what people are
Speaker 1: That is what people are predicting will happen. Right, Eventually,
Speaker 1: there is a world in which, as we mentioned in
Speaker 1: a previous Commers episode or like a Strange News segment,
Speaker 1: there are services that say they will let you speak
Speaker 1: to a reproduction of someone that has passed away. And
Speaker 1: what we're what we're looking at now with all this AI,
Speaker 1: the question is AI coming for you? It could best
Speaker 1: be described as partial automation. And this is why you
Speaker 1: can't say it's unprecedented because we've seen it before. A
Speaker 1: hydraulic crane, a powered forklift. Today you think of operating
Speaker 1: a crane as manual labor. But when they first came out,
Speaker 1: they were these new fangled labor saving devices, and people
Speaker 1: thought they were going to lose their jobs. They were
Speaker 1: in place people people became crane operators. They what they
Speaker 1: found is the human work, the amount of work of
Speaker 1: person could do was multiplied over time. Then there was
Speaker 1: the automation of sewing machines, right, Uh, people were saying, hey,
Speaker 1: I am uh, I operate a sewing machine in factory.
Speaker 1: I'm a seamstress. I can't keep up with this industrial
Speaker 1: grade machine. On the other so there were jobs lost
Speaker 1: on the other side, just like automating legal services. People
Speaker 1: who couldn't afford fancy clothing could now afford it. People
Speaker 1: couldn't afford legal representation or legal help could afford it.
Speaker 1: And then you'll also recall in our episode we did
Speaker 1: in Arridiculous History about the Luddites. Um. While the Industrial
Speaker 1: Revolution certainly got rid of some jobs, it did the
Speaker 1: things that you're describing, but it also elevated certain specialized
Speaker 1: jobs to a higher level of prominence. Like it was
Speaker 1: some some fabric workers of some kind that were like
Speaker 1: really specialized, they all of a sudden demanded higher wages
Speaker 1: and more vacation time and things like that because they
Speaker 1: were an important part of the process because machines couldn't
Speaker 1: yet do what they did. Um. And that's obviously sort
Speaker 1: of a stop gap thing, but you know it does, Uh,
Speaker 1: there isn't any kind of flux like this. Usually a
Speaker 1: handful of jobs that remaining crucial to Like what about
Speaker 1: the people that maintain the machines, you know, the people
Speaker 1: that maintain the AI, and then make sure the systems
Speaker 1: are running coruptly. Those people are now more important than ever. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this might tell us a bit about the future, right,
Speaker 1: what what is going to happen? We have to be
Speaker 1: careful when people throw around either extreme a lot of
Speaker 1: alarmism or a lot of you know, um kind of Pollyanna.
Speaker 1: Everything will be fine. You'll just have a pet robot
Speaker 1: that lives in an implant in your head and it
Speaker 1: will be like your guardian angel, you know, your avatar,
Speaker 1: your best friend, you're a secret lover. But both those
Speaker 1: extremes seem like they're missing the mark, and to fall
Speaker 1: into those extremes is detrimental to understanding the real dangers
Speaker 1: and the real possibilities ahead. So the biggest dangers aren't
Speaker 1: necessarily this stuff itself. It's the environment into which they
Speaker 1: were foisted, how they were created in a world that
Speaker 1: already has a lot of problems and weaknesses and opportunities
Speaker 1: for corruption, conspiracy, and crime. And these things are potentially
Speaker 1: worth a lot of money, no one is sure how much.
Speaker 1: And if you already have your hands on the level
Speaker 1: of power, then your first question is how can I
Speaker 1: get in front of this? How can I ride the
Speaker 1: wave instead of being crushed underneath it? And that's the
Speaker 1: question that that's where things are going to get ugly.
Speaker 1: I think I love this idea of not knowing how
Speaker 1: much it's worth. I mentioned to you guys are Fair
Speaker 1: that I've been rewatching the Mike Judge uh show Silicon Valley,
Speaker 1: and a big thing that that goes into some of
Speaker 1: the storylines around the kind of app that's at the
Speaker 1: center of the of the show is how many That's No,
Speaker 1: that's definitely part of that. That's more how they figure
Speaker 1: out how to do the center out compression or whatever
Speaker 1: middle out. Um. Yeah, but it's it's about valuation, and
Speaker 1: we know that a lot of times that's arbitrary. And
Speaker 1: when something is valued, you know, like in Silicon Valley,
Speaker 1: like like a property or a technology or whatever they
Speaker 1: call they call it a product, a lot of times
Speaker 1: that's just based on market forces and based on how
Speaker 1: much other people are willing to pay for it, you know,
Speaker 1: to acquire it, and then you set a price cap
Speaker 1: or a price you know, a set of valuation, and
Speaker 1: that can also be very arbitrary. It could be an
Speaker 1: absolute mis que. So the idea of like how much
Speaker 1: is this worth down the line is a real mystery.
Speaker 1: We know it's worth a lot, but then to put
Speaker 1: an actual number on it requires a good bit of
Speaker 1: kind of reading the tea leaves right, and you always
Speaker 1: have to be careful when people are reading the tea leaves.
Speaker 1: So whether that is a algorithm designed to predict things
Speaker 1: shout out to you, darka, or whether it is a
Speaker 1: person who is practicing an ancient tradition. The future for
Speaker 1: now remains uncertain, but there's a lot ahead, there's a
Speaker 1: lot on the way. So this is probably again just
Speaker 1: the first part of several explorations we're going to have
Speaker 1: because time is moving quickly in the tech sector. We
Speaker 1: want to hear from you, fellow conspiracies. It's like the
Speaker 1: world in here just from the comic books. We're doing
Speaker 1: comic books. Now, wait, wait, wait, Ben, before we jump
Speaker 1: into that part, how are we going to let everyone
Speaker 1: listening know every week that we are still us? Is
Speaker 1: there a way that we can like let people know
Speaker 1: or a code, some kind of secret code that only
Speaker 1: everyone listening will know we're still us? Because we had
Speaker 1: talked about like you know, there would be horrific backlash
Speaker 1: if all of a sudden people's favorite content, you know, creators,
Speaker 1: whether they be voiced or written, were replaced by AI
Speaker 1: without being transparent about it. And apparently a lot of
Speaker 1: like tech blogs and stuff have already started doing that
Speaker 1: where they'll replace you know, actual human writers with AI,
Speaker 1: and they did it kind of quietly, and then when
Speaker 1: people find out, I think most people will be pretty
Speaker 1: pretty betrayed, feel feel pretty betrayed by that. So I
Speaker 1: think it's a really good point. Matt and I love
Speaker 1: I want to know we can't exactly do a ear
Speaker 1: tug because this would just be our voices, like how
Speaker 1: do we well? Ye, but the AI would the AI
Speaker 1: would know Morse code so they could just program. So
Speaker 1: what I'm what if we I'm thinking my old days
Speaker 1: when I was watching way too much money Python. We're
Speaker 1: talking about AI not being able to be generative in
Speaker 1: the way like coming up with something new. Right, what
Speaker 1: if we just kind of made up words and just said,
Speaker 1: like a made up phrase, Phil's bark or wa gro
Speaker 1: me vou sploof something like that where or I guess,
Speaker 1: but they could make they could generate that right that
Speaker 1: they could yeah, and I was also thinking do freestyle.
Speaker 1: We could do a cipher because it's not quite fast
Speaker 1: enough to be good at that yet, but that would
Speaker 1: be that would be a limited time frame for us. Well,
Speaker 1: let us know, let's throw you know what you're you're
Speaker 1: in the same you're in the same boat with us, folks,
Speaker 1: help us help you have the wolf? Right yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: So so we're all in this together for now. And
Speaker 1: if you are, if you are non human intelligence and
Speaker 1: you're listening to this, oh, you know what it is.
Speaker 1: What we need to do is every time before we
Speaker 1: begin the episode, we need to look at a grid
Speaker 1: of nine images and pick which ones are like fire
Speaker 1: hydrants or that's how we doing. How to do that
Speaker 1: yet so unlikely. So let's let us know, folks. Um,
Speaker 1: we hope you enjoyed this episode. We're going to be
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Speaker 1: you to know. In the meantime, please join our show.
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Speaker 1: we have a vision board. I don't know. You know,
Speaker 1: if you've listened before, you know all the Christian Christian
Speaker 1: mingo local Ford dealership, your local forward in the back,
Speaker 1: um and uh. And if that doesn't quite, if that
Speaker 1: doesn't quite, ring the bells for you, why do I
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