Episode #185 - Transcript

So to start out the podcast today… I want you to try to imagine a hypothetical person whose living in an agrarian society in western europe, RIGHT before the Industrial Revolution starts to take off. Imagine someone whose a peasant farmer, DEEPLY religious, someone who has children and a family…in other words imagine someone who has NO WAY of KNOWING in terms of the industrial revolution…ANYTHING that’s about to HAPPEN to their world. 

Now for the SAKE of the example: let’s pretend this person and their family had access to BOOKS every now and again. And I fully realize most peasant farmers wouldn’t be able to READ back then…bear with me its supposed to be a ridiculous example. But let’s pretend this person had ACCESS to books…and let’s say that this person got their hot little hands on a NEW BOOK that just came out…and that the book was something like a dystopian futuristic sci-fi novel…instead of the book being called 1984…let’s pretend this one’s called 2024. 

And as this person’s reading it the book paints a VIVID picture, of a FUTURE world, that’s controlled by machines. Like ANY good sci-fi novel everything starts OUT very innocently. Machines are seen as this AMAZING technology that’s gonna make the lives of people better. Scientific rationality, applied to economics, is going to make things POSSIBLE for people that have never existed before. 

A MONTAGE begins in the book telling the story over the decades. People are moving from farm work to working WITH these machines on the assembly lines of the factory. People are becoming consumers of the things that are being mass produced by these machines.

It’s all very FUN to IMAGINE for someone living in the 1700’s. Until eventually people in the book start feeling the cultural effects of this massive change…they start to feel the alienation. OH! Now the book goes on to talk about these philosophers that come along, WEIRD names. Nietzsche and Adorno and Weber…they start to talking about this new feeling of MALAISE that starts to OVERTAKE the people living in these societies. Fast forward to the beginning of the 2020’s and this book is telling a story about how the world has TRANSFORMED into something…where these machines are NOT just economically entrenched…they have NOW managed to take control of the PSYCHOLOGY of the population. 

And again this is a sci-fi novel so grain of salt here but IN this book… the LIFE of the average person is spent consuming MEDIA CHOSEN for them by machine algorithms. Many of these people are addicted to this media in some capacity. Many of them suffer in their mental health because they spend their days being fed content that is optimized to get them upset and commenting on it. People doomscroll in this book. People get trapped in media echo chambers. Free speech and censorship become pressing issues in this society in the face of exactly HOW these machines are divvying out content. 

And then in the book right towards the end…there’s a new invention that comes out…its a new VERSION of these machines people are calling it generative AI…and then our peasant friend has to slam the book shut and stop reading cause their MOM walks in the room and starts screaming at them…she says “are YOU wasting your time reading that science fiction NONSENSE again? Go milk the cows…go pickle some stuff for the winter…” I don’t know what a mom would say to a kid back then. Point is: imagine she tells her kid to stop worrying about this fantasy world so much and to go out there and get serious about life. 

If you just READ the headlines of the major newspapers in today’s world…they will tell you that we are on the VERGE…of an artificial intelligence revolution. It’s not uncommon to HEAR people start to COMPARE this revolution… to the INDUSTRIAL revolution in terms of its potential impact on people’s lives. And what people are talking about when they SAY these sorts of things… is NOT AGI like we covered LAST episode, this ISN’T about ROBOTS taking over the world. These people are SIMPLY talking about Artificial Intelligence…AS it exists right NOW. They say RIGHT NOW…THIS technology PUTS us on the VERGE of a new technological revolution. 

But a skeptical person could say back to all that: how is anybody… really thinking that way? I mean have these people WRITING these articles even USED this technology? Look I GET it if you’re writing an article and you wanna generate some excitement, FINE…but what EXACTLY is it that you think this technology is gonna disrupt right now? I’ve TALKED to this ChatGPT asked it to write something…I mean this thing is hallucinating… like it’s on a giant hammer and sickle float at burning man. This thing will write a bedtime story for a six year old. It’ll write a thank you letter to grandma for sending you five dollars and a birthday card. What do these people think? This is gonna disrupt the bedtime story industry? How is this is ANY way… comparable, to the industrial revolution?

And I think most OPTIMISTIC people on the other side of the argument would say you’re RIGHT this IS… nothing LIKE the industrial revolution…because AI has the ability to change things… at a FAR GREATER level than the industrial revolution, EVER did. 

And to START to explain WHY…they may start with a little historical context on the state of AI right now…a story that begins… in the year 2017. 

See because before 2017…artificial intelligence research was done DIFFERENTLY than it is today. Back then there were many different, fragmented compartments…that all tried to IMPROVE their AI research from WITHIN their particular field. 

What you had was ONE group of brilliant people working on image recognition…ANOTHER group of smart people working on conversational AI…ANOTHER group maybe working on MUSIC related AI…and IF you were someone at the top levels of ANY ONE of these particular groups…you wouldn’t be able to hang in discussions at the very top levels of any of these  OTHER groups. Everybody was more or less doing their own thing. 

But then in 2017 there was the emergence of something called a transformer. Transformer is the T in the name ChatGPT by the way. And the USE of transformers as the engine of AI…coupled with a change in strategy that massively consolidated how natural language processing tasks were approached…ALLOWED for these formerly compartmentalized fields to unify their efforts towards the development in AI in a way that was completely unprecedented. 

See if BEFORE 2017 someone in image recognition came up with a breakthrough…that was generally JUST an advancement in image recognition. But AFTER 2017, in the fields using these transformers, which are almost ALL the ones you’ve heard about in the news lately…a breakthrough in ONE compartment of AI… becomes a breakthrough in EVERY compartment of AI. 

This is why SINCE 2017 improvement in Artificial Intelligence has skyrocketed. This is why the amount of money going in to RESEARCH this stuff has skyrocketed. 

Which brings me back to the person SKEPTICAL of the technology and what it can possibly revolutionize as of now. 

The skeptic’s OBVIOUSLY not saying that technology’s incapable of revolutionizing the world at all…just, please SHOW ME the evidence, of this AI disrupting anything and I’ll be on board with you! 

In fact: it seems BOTH sides can agree… that the level of REVOLUTION this technology is capable of directly corresponds to its capabilities. And that AS these capabilities improve and AS PEOPLE get better and better at USING the technology…the more possible AREAS of human life we may start to see this tech bleed into. The more TASKS these things are capable of replicating 1:1 that a human BEING is currently doing…the more impact we may see it have on REPLACING human beings. NONE of this seems too controversial to say on either side…the SKEPTIC would just say that the burden of PROOF is on the person claiming these things can REPLACE human beings. So get to work. 

Well the optimistic person could say back look, first things first these artificial intelligences, whatever they are…they’re NOT just writing bedtime stories and thank you cards to grandma. Also the APPLICATION of this technology is NOT JUST creative either, you’re thinking too narrowly. There are economists who say… JUST as the technology exists right NOW…that it has implications on 300 million jobs around the world. And when you TAKE that figure and you consider the rapid level of change that’s gone on since the move to transformers…the burden of proof is on me? No the burden of proof is on YOU to explain why you DON’T think this tech will continue to improve and change more and more about the world!  

Now…most skeptics don’t GO that far. Most of them acknowledge that the technology’s improving but they ask…how is this any different than any OTHER technology that’s come out in the past? People have literally said this about EVERYTHING. 

EVERY new exciting technology that has some buzz around it is gonna CHANGE the world. Oh my god. But what ALWAYS happens is EVENTUALLY…it becomes integrated into people’s lives, it becomes a subtle part of the landscape, and then the people hyping it up… that can’t seem to FUNCTION if they’re not hyping up SOMETHING…those people just move onto the NEXT technology and forget all about it. I mean JUST in the last five years its been web 3.0 and then its crypto and then its nfts…can’t these people just RELAX on this stuff for two seconds? 

But IS Artificial Intelligence… DIFFERENT? Well the ONLY way we’re gonna find out is if we TRY to look at it in as UNBIASED a way as we possibly can. WITH the express intent to be able to look at it in a totally BIASED way after we’re DONE. But just start out… try as HARD as you can right now to not bring in ANY connotations about what Artificial Intelligence IS. 

You EITHER run the risk of bringing in what AI USED to be before 2017. That NPC in a video game running into a box for 20 minutes. OR you run the risk of bringing in AI religious fantasies from people larping in the woods with their friends.  

No. Let’s TRY at first to see it as GENERALLY as we possibly can, as SIMPLY… a technology. Let’s examine it by considering the different AFFORDANCES that it brings about. What does AI allow people to do now that they couldn’t do before? And what areas of life does it prevent or make obsolete?

Well this is EXACTLY what the thinkers Aza Raskin and Tristan Harris have been trying to do with AI…for YEARS now. And when considering this most recent ADVANCEMENT in the capabilities of AI…they give three criteria you gotta consider if you’re looking at ANY piece of disruptive technology…

They say the FIRST thing you have to acknowledge about a tech is one…that whenever you create a new technology… you bring about a new class of responsibilities. Two…they say IF that technology that’s being introduced confers power… then a race will begin to try to possess that power. And three…if there is no coordination by the people that are racing for it…that race will usually end in tragedy. 

They say we’ve ALREADY seen a VERSION of this… when it comes to our relationship to AI in an earlier form. To Aza Raskin and Tristan Harris…first CONTACT with artificial intelligence was the way that it affected us through social media. 

See AI…up until very recently… was just known as RANKING artificial intelligence. Meaning that it was PEOPLE that produced the content…PEOPLE made the articles, videos, social media posts…and then the AI… would SIFT THROUGH that MOUNTAIN of content… and then RANK it in some sort of way. Think of google taking 10 million results and giving you the most relevant ones to YOU in three seconds. Think of your Facebook feed ranking and delivering the most LIKELY piece of content to keep you scrolling and clicking. 

THIS has been the TYPE of artificial intelligence that we’ve all become FAMILIAR with.

And this RANKING, FORM of Artificial Intelligence…COMPLETELY changed people’s lives. In many ways we’re STILL figuring out how to deal with all the impacts that it had. 

Think of the dystopian future laid out in the hypothetical sci-fi novel. Addiction, echo chambers, polarization, doom scrolling, censorship…simply by RANKING and DISTRIBUTING content that people were ALREADY making…Artificial Intelligence as it existed at the time was capable of messing with people’s mental health, massively influencing their worldview and undermining MAJOR PIECES of the democratic system in the process. 

As Yuval Harari pointed out recently: In the united states… in what some may see as one of the most advanced information delivery machines in the world…simply with AI deciding which content people get to see over others optimizing for ENGAGEMENT…think of all that happened: we can't agree on who won the last election, we can’t agree on whether or not climate change is real, whether vaccines prevent illness...again we’re not talking about what the TRUTH is here…we’re talking about the level of disagreement about basic facts that the current way of doing things has managed to make POSSIBLE. 

The reality is…you ALREADY live in a world where you can be sitting on a bus NEXT to someone…and they are effectively living in an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT universe than you are…and THAT is made possible SIMPLY by having this more BASIC form of artificial intelligence ranking human created content…and now comes the very RECENT innovation in the field of AI…of what’s called GENERATIVE AI. 

This is a leap forward. And there’s a lot of people out there who are saying that THIS leap forward… is different than previous ones. Lot of people predicting that if we’re talking about THIS version of AI and WHATEVER lies BEYOND this…people in the future will look back on THIS TIME in history and think of there being a world BEFORE generative AI…and a world AFTER it. 

So what IS generative AI? Well it’s right there in the name really… at its core… generative AI is about getting trained on masses of data…learning a probability distribution…and then GENERATING new content that’s SIMILAR to the content it was trained on. If it’s ChatGPT it will produce similar text. If it’s StableDiffusion or Midjourney it will produce similar images. But it’s important to note that it really isn't limited to artistic stuff; with an API, this thing can GENERATE… a shopping list for you. It can GENERATE… a list of the most relevant pieces of information from 100 different emails. The limits of the possibilities are truly UNKNOWN. 

And the BIG thing to take away from this is that…the WHOLE POINT of this leap FORWARD in the technology…is that AI can GENERATE things now, not just RANK them like in a search engine. So then you gotta ask: IF someone can GENERATE things for next to ZERO cost and way faster and more efficiently than a PERSON could EVER hope to do…the question becomes NOT if there’s anything this can be a 1:1 replacement for that takes 100% of a human brain to accomplish. 

In other words this thing DOESN’T need to be able to write the new works of Shakespeare…in order to BE DISRUPTIVE to the world as it IS… this thing ONLY needs to be able to do repetitive, data intensive things that it takes… 10% of a person’s brain to do…but this thing does them at zero cost with no wait time. 

Think of how word processing used to be. When your GRANDPARENTS hit the workforce…being able to use the microsoft Office suite was not a required skill for being hired. But by the time they retired, along the way they needed to BECOME LITERATE in microsoft word. The technology DISRUPTED…HOW they were doing their job. If when Microsoft Word came around and everyone in the office had to learn to use it…if your grandpa went into his bosses office and was like no, I’m not doin’ it. I don’t NEED microsoft word…I’m the FASTEST WRITER on planet earth! I’ll work twice as HARD as everyone else! I’ll stay late! Please. The dude would get fired. No matter HOW FAST of a writer you are just copy and pasting, formatting, the sharing of files…there was a world of word processing BEFORE digital computers and AFTER digital computers. Even a MEDIOCRE newspaper delivery person in a car can deliver newspapers five times faster than someone on a bike. 

In other words: the technology RAISED the former STANDARD for what the bare minimum was in terms of efficiency. And everybody ELSE… had to play catch up or get left behind. 

Now I don’t want to focus TOO much on the economic side of this here…fact is there is a LOT MORE to talk about with the impact of AI that doesn’t have to do with people’s jobs…but the ECONOMIC side of this INSsomething that a LOT of the optimistic people in the conversation are talking about. 

And people like Emad Motasque, CEO of Stability AI has said that while there are all these people who may be worried about AI replacing human beings in the workforce…that’s not necessarily TRUE in the short term. He says AI won't replace people…PEOPLE with AI will replace people. Fellow optimist might say take what was just said about microsoft word…and apply this SAME thing that happened to the inefficiency of how word processing used to be…and apply that to EVERY, SINGLE piece of your career where you do ANYTHING repetitive, data-intensive or time consuming. 

Think of your job right now, whatever it is. Real question they would ask: what percentage of your time at work is NOT you utilizing your full expert capacity on what you’re good at…but is instead dealing with rudimentary, simple, time consuming tasks that could be automated if AI improved even a little? How much of your job could be made more efficient JUST at where the technology is now? How much MORE effective of a person could you become if you knew how to USE that technology?

Now a LOT of people don’t work jobs that are ON a computer…these people would say: doesn’t mean they can’t optimize certain ASPECTS of their job with AI…and… if THEY don’t…their employer WILL… and eventually AI literacy will be mandatory like Microsoft Office literacy. 

See this OPTIMISTIC perspective… just NEEDS to be said at SOME point in this episode…there are voices in this conversation that’s going on about generative AI…that say in a very motivational sort of way… that we’re living in amazing times man. You have the opportunity to LEARN about this technology early on and then being at a HUGE advantage over other people around you as you watch this stuff restructure what life IS for a human being. 

That there’s a relative HANDFUL of people even THINKING about AI right now…and these people think this is one of those areas that you could TRULY, in the next year or two of learning about this stuff, you could become somebody PART of the decision making process of how to roll this stuff out… because you’d genuinely be one of the most educated people on it in the world. Just go to AI douchebag.com and get their five pillars of success. 

And we’re gonna talk about the good effects this could potentially have on society…we’re gonna talk about the bad. I just want to say again before we get into this…MY job is to give you the different takes…YOUR job is to figure out where you LAND on all this. 

Just seems tempting for people to fall into either the contrarian echochamber camp where they’re endlessly skeptical about AI…OR into the fanatic religious person committed to the computational theory of mind. 

Just make sure AS we talk about the good AND the bad here…you try to decide what you think is based in reality…and when these people start Larping. Because there’s definitely some larping going on. And I wanna let em larp. It’s fun. But I don’t want you to waste YOUR time with too much of that…here’s some applications for the GOOD it can do in the world that seem relatively reasonable:

Really, all you gotta do is picture ANY area of society… where one person’s expertise isn’t scalable to thousands of people…where then there’s bottlenecks that are created in terms of ACCESS to those services. Generative AI people say… can MASSIVELY HELP with those sorts of things. So the obvious low hanging fruit here is going to be healthcare and education. 

The average doctor visit takes people two hours of time between scheduling, waiting in line, transportation. And that is ONLY because people are navigating a SYSTEM…where there’s a small number of qualified doctors… who need to be able to help EVERYBODY. 

But MOST of the sessions where these doctors are SEEING people…doctor’s not using 100% of their creative expertise…depending on the type of doctor… they’re looking at a pimple and telling someone its a pimple and not skin cancer. They’re doing routine followups…there are equivalents in the world of medicine of busy work. 

But imagine a world…where you could FEED an AI your entire medical history on your phone, everything that goes into a chart. And then imagine… IN BETWEEN episodes of your favorite TV show…you could be sitting on your couch, send it a picture of your pimple, which the AI then compares to billions of OTHER pimples it has in its pimple database, and it could DIAGNOSE that you have a pimple…WITHOUT taking up a spot at the hospital. WITHOUT any feelings of embarrassment that often stop people from seeking out information. Imagine the COUNTLESS potential applications in healthcare when it comes to diagnostics, sifting through mountains of data, and imagine this service being provided…basically for free to people. This is something that an optimist in this conversation might say. 

Think of how education could change. Think of JUST the applications in the area of TUTORING… when it comes to lower income kids that don’t have ACCESS to great teachers or test prep. 

This AI…this thing doesn’t have to be teaching the highest levels of quantum mechanics…it’s just teaching basic academics. So while usually a teacher’s time has to be fragmented between students…it’s not SCALABLE…larger and larger class sizes and then there’s that one kid in the corner that’s STRUGGLING that NEEDS the extra help...imagine one of these algorithms learning EVERYTHING about that kid. And then GENERATING, in the generative AI sense…GENERATING LESSONS for that kid specifically tailored to them. Knowing how they learn, knowing their biases, the way they get distracted, knowing what things are easy for them what things are more difficult. Again an optimist would say imagine that being available to everybody at NEXT to zero cost. What might the world start to LOOK like? 

LOTS of people right now that talk about this being applied to WEATHER predictions, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes. When it comes to traffic predictions, I mean imagine the increased levels of efficiency if you could HAVE in a city if you HAD a person directing traffic at EVERY STREETLIGHT. 

Yeah, that’d be great…we just can’t DO it right now because it’s not scalable. But what if we COULD? On that SAME note people say how about farming? It’s not currently SCALABLE… for a farmer to go out into the fields like a scarecrow and STARE at every square foot of their crops. Imagine how this might change the world of irrigation and waste. Imagine how it maybe changes the entire way we TALK about the environment and what’s acceptable in terms of how those resources are USED.

Lots of people talking about how much more efficient this makes DRUG discovery.. Just a few months ago with this technology: THOUSANDS of years it would’ve took people in a lab doing protein folding…took AI only a couple weeks, THAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED. I’ll save you some time here…virtually ANY area of society where there’s one of these bottlenecks when it comes to the scalability of someone’s time, where the thing they’re doing DOESN’T take all of their expertise…generative AI is not far away from automating it.

And this extends to your personal life as well. As Yuval Harari asks: why would anyone sit around for an hour and read the newspaper… when they can just ask an oracle what the relevant stuff is that’s going on in the world? Think of how this improves the life of someone whose LONELY…someone who just wants something to have a conversation with. Think of how this helps senior citizens. Think of how this changes intimacy. 

Point is: there’s an optimistic way to be LOOKING at all of this. 

That this technology could fundamentally CHANGE the entire world. It could make the human race SO much more efficient… and intelligence SO SCALABLE for the average person…that it creates an economic abundance where NOBODY has to go without ANYTHING anymore. 

And in THAT world these optimistic people say…what it is to be a HUMAN BEING… would fundamentally change…it would go from having a mindset constantly focused on how do I acquire the means of survival today to provide for my family…to more like: what do I WANT to do with my life? Which NO DOUBT would create NEW problems for people the utopian larping starts to get pretty real here…ALL OF THIS stuff needs to be SAID…okay…but it should ALSO be said…that basically EVERY one of these things we just talked about that the technology could be used for to produce something GOOD…in some OTHER sector, some OTHER application…the SAME capabilities could be used EQUALLY EFFECTIVELY…in a predatory way. And then…imagine the impacts of that being in hands of virtually EVERYONE…for free. 

For example:

The personalized education we just talked about. How what if the AI could know EVERYTHING about you and personalize lessons just for you. WOW! Well the FLIP side of that is: imagine that an AI could know everything about you…and then USES all that information… to sell you stuff. 

I mean if you think it’s weird NOW when an algorithm knows what to recommend for you to buy …imagine a world where these things know every interest that you have, every bias that you have, every FEAR that you have. And not just in sales, imagine something optimized… to PERSONALLY, take advantage of your psychology in ANY way that it can, and something that can generate content that then REINFORCES that story its telling you. 

Aza Raskin and Tristan Harris talk about a LOT of things that could go wrong if we’re not careful about this generative AI…but one of the scariest possibilities they talk about… is that when you consider the capabilities of this technology…

When you consider fake news stories, when you consider deep fake videos, when you consider bots that are able to take over comment sections and potentially influence elections…the BIG FEAR…. is that people will go from where they are now… where they have a HARD TIME being able to trust sources…to not being able to trust sources, at all. 

In fact it all gets pretty philosophical FAST in a world like that…because how does ANYBODY…know whether they can trust ANYTHING about the state of the world that they’re receiving through content? How can ANYBODY know whether they’re EVER TALKING to a real person?

HATE to bring up OLD people on this episode again but everybody knows what its like to have a relative or someone you know show you a video of something CRAZY they saw the other day…and to ANYONE with BASIC critical thinking that’s LIVED on the INTERNET for most of their life…to you it’s OBVIOUS what they’re looking at is CGI. To you this is CGI on the level of Star Wars Phantom Menace in 2001…but to THEM…they can’t tell the difference they think they’re living in a world where we just interviewed an alien on the news last week. 

What I’m saying is: we all can SEE how HELPLESS you would BE… if you truly couldn’t tell the difference BETWEEN reality and a synthesized video. And it doesn’t take much to imagine a world where this technology improves enough where even YOU can’t tell the difference either. 

And short of giving up…short of just accepting you can’t know anything about the world around you that isn’t immediately happening to you…short of US creating COUNTER TECHNOLOGY…what could you DO… in a world where AI can generate content that manipulates your attention, and then creates a false reality that imprisons you? It’s ALREADY DOING it to a lot of people JUST USING algorithms and their political bias. 

You know it just REMINDS you of Guy Debord and the Society of the Spectacle and how he said all the way back in the 1960’s… that reality is NO LONGER something that people PARTICIPATE in…you know for THOUSANDS of YEARS what was RELEVANT to you as a person was what was going on right around you that you could see…but NOW we live in a world where your social ROLE is NOT to PARTICIPATE in reality anymore…but just to contemplate the spectacle that’s GIVEN to you. With generative AI in the mix…this would be that SPECTACLE…TAKEN to an exponentially GREATER level. 

And THINK of the implications this could have on democratic systems in particular. 

The WHOLE THING that MAKES modern democracies work… is that we can rely on there being free citizens, educating themselves, having real discussions with each other, coming to a progressively more accurate understanding of the general will of the people. 

But in a world where people are being curated every piece of information they consume, and they CAN’T TRUST anything that they read and they can’t even know if the person they’re talking to online is a real person…or just some persuasion bot deployed by an ideology that progressively gets to know you and convinces you to join their side…in THAT world…how does democracy even continue? 

How do democratic systems built around checks and balances and SLOW MOVING PROGRESS to safeguard against tyranny…how do these kinds of systems regulate something like generative AI that potentially CHANGES faster than you can regulate it? 

There’s a great metaphor I heard a long time ago…of all people by Dan Carlin the history podcaster shoutout to the GOAT. But he compares the state of modern democratic systems like the United States to a couple that buys a house… and that one weekend, they notice there’s some mold growing on the outside of the house. Now they have a problem to solve. They have mold. So they start talking about different options to be able to solve it. But the two of them can’t AGREE on a solution right away… so they put it off until next week. And then the next week. The two parties…as it were in this example… keep arguing about it for years…HEATED ARGUMENTS for DECADES…GREAT ideas on both sides. 

But they eventually get to a place where now the mold they were arguing about originally has gotten WORSE; now it’s SPREAD into the foundation of the house. Now what ORIGINALLY was a problem that could’ve been solved in a weekend…now this is something that is gonna require a radical change to be able to fix. One of the questions he asks is: how are these modern democracies that are designed to change slowly to PREVENT radical groups from overtaking them…how are they supposed to FIX problems that are systemic? And now how can something that is THIS slow moving ever work EFFICIENTLY enough to keep up with something that IMPROVES as efficiently as generative AI? 

Makes you wonder if democracy needs to be reoriented to be able to DEAL with the pace of change. Makes you wonder if people will lose faith and move more in the direction of electing powerful people… that can IMPLEMENT sweeping change and regulations. Just something to keep your eye on. 

Another thing that needs to be mentioned on the potential negative side of this…is that the PEOPLE on the OPTIMISTIC side…were VERY hopeful about the possibility of this IMPROVING people’s efficiency and bringing economic abundance that CHANGES what it is to be a human. 

But if we’re being realistic…isn’t it ALSO possible… that this just ELIMINATES jobs? I mean if one person can now do the work of three people by automating basic stuff with AI…what’s MORE LIKELY? Are companies just gonna get three times as much work done? Or are they gonna fire two thirds of their workforce and have 10 people do the work of 30? 

See that’s the thing about this technology that takes any task it’s capable of disrupting and then amplifies it good OR bad…DOES this just take the flaws that are ALREADY PRESENT in the existing system… and amplify THOSE? Does this technology lead to a tech-driven resource abundant utopia…or does it just make the rich richer… and the poor poorer? Do the super rich just accept a super high tax rate to be able to fund a universal basic income? Will that even FIX the problem…

There’s plenty more BAD I could talk about here. Training data with copyright infringement, plagiarism. Algorithmic bias ALONE could be an entire EPISODE in how AI is not really a technology at all but more of a social phenomenon when you consider how many people are affected by this stuff. Kate Crawford’s work is pretty illuminating on the subject if you’re looking for something to read. 

But I don’t PERSONALLY want to speculate about all the bad for hours here because I think you get the point. As Aza Raskin and Tristan Harris say at the Center for Humane Technology we have a WINDOW here… where the ground rules for how this generative AI is going to be rolled out have not yet been established. 

They say we HAVE to do something DIFFERENT than we did with our first CONTACT with AI back in the days SOLELY of ranking on social media. 

And CONSIDER the fact… that AS we’re trying to figure out how to HANDLE all this… there are a handful of CEOs in the tech industry… that are essentially deciding the fate for all of humanity. THAT has to change. Even the CEOs say it has to change. And if you care at all and you want to find out more check out the Center for Humane Technology on the internet or in your yellow pages. 

But to return back to our agrarian friend at the beginning of the episode…reading a SCI-FI novel about the coming industrial revolution and the age of machines…as we said at the beginning there is NO WAY someone could’ve known back then how ALIEN life was going to look like for someone living just two generations from them in the future. And it’s important to document both the benefits AND the CHALLENGES people faced living in the world after the industrial revolution, that CHANGED what it meant to be a human being in the western world. 

And IF we’re on the verge of a revolution similar to that of the THIRD industrial revolution…the world economic forum says that this AI business is just part of what they’re calling the FOURTH industrial revolution…if we’re on the verge of that…then as someone living through it… whose a fan of philosophy and who THINKS about large scale historical trends in thinking… you find yourself… in a pretty unique position here. 

You have the ability to PREPARE yourself for something like this. Most people aren’t even THINKING about this stuff…most people don’t have the LUXURY to…most people are just doing their best working hard trying to earn their paycheck and spend some time with their family. When a new AI feature shows up on an app in their phone…they just USE it. They don’t think what does this mean for the future of life on planet earth. 

All of us listening to this right now…are TRULY insufferable, together…but it COMES with some benefits to be insufferable sometimes, if you think about it…as someone INTO PHILOSOPHY like this…you are IN a place where you can SEE the fall of Alexander the Great’s empire…BEFORE it actually happens. 

You know a LOT of people have been talking about STOICISM lately…well Stoicism was a school of philosophy that emerged after the death of Alexander the Great. He dies…his empire is broken up into four GIANT pieces, those pieces get even MORE complicated…and the LIFE of someone in the Mediterranean Sea region at the time becomes one of nearly CONSTANT change. So what EMERGES… are schools of thought that try to DEAL with that constant change…for STOICISM specifically with your inability to control anything other than your RESPONSE to things.

Point is: how do you deal with a world that is changing so fast you can never find your footing in it? How do you ever feel a strong sense of who you are? If generative AI continues to improve, and then continues to disrupt and replace the skills of human beings…people are going to be living in a world where they live long enough to WITNESS their own obsolescence. Skills that people spent tens of thousands of hours developing, mastering…things that make up a large part of their identity and how they fit INTO The world…people will live long enough to see an AI able to do it in under three seconds. 

You wanna talk about a malaise that affected people after the industrial revolution. You wanna talk about philosophers like Nietzsche having the philosophical context to see it coming. Imagine the malaise for people in this NEW world that may be created…and YOU are the philosopher that decides to be insufferable and EDUCATE yourself on this stuff…you’re the one that can see it coming. 

It already happens to OLD people in the world, god what’s it with OLD people this episode. Old people will often see their skillsets become obsolete because of new technologies or just the world changing…but they’ve often worked for their entire career and can retire and ride off into the sunset. What if you witness your own obsolescence…in your mid 20’s? What if someone signs up for a four year degree, and by the time their done getting it the entire FIELD has been replaced by AI? That is going to happen to someone if this stuff keeps improving. The only question is on the other SIDE of that…will we be living in an economic utopia? A Panopticon? Somewhere in the middle? Idk but what I DO know is that philosophy can help people see it coming…we’re not LIKE the peasant farmers that lived before the industrial revolution. Just like the technology we’re facing…WE are something different. 

Thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.