AI & Group Chats of the Apocalypse

[00:00:00]Hello and welcome to this week's episode of Silic Consciousness. I am your host David Ruffkco and this week we are joined by a friend who has been on a past episode and was real good. You liked him a lot and there's a lot to talk about. His name is Dave Karp. He's associate professor in the school of media and public affairs at George Washington University and a contributor to Tech Policy Press. He's also the author of The Future Now and Then on Beehive. How are you doing?

[00:00:31]>> Good. How you doing?

[00:00:33]>> Uh, real good. Uh, one of the subjects that just sort of hits me 10 times a week or 10 times a day maybe, uh, is associated with the misperceptions and misrepresentations surrounding AI. Um, and it goes, you know, every I I just saw that The Economist this week has AI has granted America vast new power. I was like, okay, well, that's interesting. I don't agree with it, and I'll get to that in a minute. And then, you know, on the other hand, you know, I regular I'm a blue sky, you know, I apologize, but, you know, that's where liberals have to go. And it's like AI is the end of the world. And I was like, okay, that's not true. Um, and then I do deeper dives into the, you know, the more, uh, specialized media pertaining to this stuff. We do a lot with MIT Tech Review, there's Wired, there's, uh, you know, Tech Policy Press and other places. And still I'm I'm always finding I'm like, there's something wrong with the angle here. And you did a piece um in your Beehive um uh uh columns uh just the other day and it was called bullet points digital futures past uh in which you did the smart thing and said well how have we dealt with past revolutions even ones that were not the same size and you you flashed back to an article about the growth of the web from 2015 seems like ages ago. Um, and then you talk about some of the shortcomings of the article and I just want to read something that you said here and then ask you a question or two about it. But you know you that you said with regard to what you perceive as a mistake they made here. It uh it's this strikes me as a common mistake among tech futurists. It's relatively easy to tell a story that says one, our society has been defined by this one scarce resource. Two, but technology is about to make that resource abundant. And three, this changes everything. Just imagine the wonderful possibilities once this new area of abundance has arrived.

[00:02:49]And then you go, they're missing a critical force step. With every new abundance, there will be new scarcity.

[00:02:55]And how we manage that scarcity will tell us what sort of society we will be living in. Look towards the scarcity, not the abundance. I thought it was a real deep insight. And I thought first I will turn to you and say um flesh this out as you will because my just reading two paragraphs doesn't do it justice.

[00:03:15]>> Sure. Thanks. Um so yeah that's in reference to uh a piece that Kevin Kelly wrote in 2005 for Wired. It's my favorite Kevin Kelly piece. For folks who closely read Wired, there's a lot of Kevin Kelly and Wired. So this is number one for me out of a big uh pile. Um, and it's because in 2005 he spent some time looking back to the web as it looked in 1995 and sort of talks about what he got wrong and then says where are we now in 2005? And uh listeners might know 2005 was kind of just as we were getting into the web 2.0 revolution. Right? So that is the age of social media, the age of the blogosphere, YouTube is coming.

[00:03:54]There's this real sense of the web the title of the article is actually the web is us. So there's this real sense of like people have shown up and that that's what the web is going to be is user generated content, everybody offering stuff up together and there's going to be an abundance. And then he looks forward to 2015 and what he invites us to do is imagine a world where everyone is creating a blog or a piece of music or a video where everyone is a a content creator and nobody is just a consumer. And he's kind of saying like, you know, imagine how incredible that will be. And I I teach a class every year called the history of the digital future. So this had come up during the semester. And when I ask my students to sort of say like, you know, did he get it right or wrong?

[00:04:38]Empirically, he's right. Like if you just do a counting exercise and we include things like blue sky posts or exposts, probably everybody does create some content on average every year. And yet it it didn't feel like the world that he was describing to my students.

[00:04:53]So the thing that they were all kind of grappling with is like, hey, he's right, but he's kind of missing the point. And that's because once we live in a world where there's all that content, well then it becomes a world of algorithms, right? It becomes a world where attention is the scarce resource and the fight over attention defines so much of our politics, so much of our society, right? These are students. If you're 19 years old today, then you've grown up amongst influencer culture. And that is a culture in which everybody's creating content, but it's also a culture where you're kind of sick of the influencer industry and find it kind of gross and corrosive in a way that in 2005 we didn't imagine. And again, that's because he was imagining the abundance and not sort of instead focusing on well once we have that abundance will be scarce. Attention will be scarce. So then how are we going to manage attention? And that fight and sort of you know the way that the companies made uh sort of found their way to making money off of attention that defines platforms today. that defines the influence in influencer industry. That sort of is the real story of the world that you know my students are growing up in today. And I I don't know what exactly that's going to mean for AI, but I think that's the question we should be asking, right? Because I do hear people like Sam Alman saying, "Yeah, you know, AI is just it it's just intelligence and we're going to meter intelligence and we're going to sell intelligence and intelligence will just be on tap." I don't I'm a bit of an AI skeptic. So I don't know if that's exactly true. But even if we were to say, okay, sure, in 10 years they will wart it out and that's true. Once we have an abundance of intelligence, what is the thing that will actually be scarce? And importantly, how are these companies going to monetize that? And what's that going to do? Because there there's a lot of opportunities to make it better or worse. Right now with these companies in control, it seems like it's all kind of going bad. But that to me is the question we should be asking is like, okay, let's say that that's true. What will the scarcity be and how will that go well or poorly?

[00:06:46]>> Well, I I I agree with you and I think that's a right question to ask and I think you framed it well and I encourage people to go and read the piece. Let me pick up though because it raises two or three questions. One of which as I was reading it, you talked about how back in the day when, you know, the assertion was that everybody would, you know, be able to be a creator, everybody would have platform. One of the questions was, well, what then? I mean, who's going to consume it if everybody's a creator? And you talk about this concept. I think you called it proumers or, you know, something. never liked the word but that was >> but well but you know it's it it it it it was interesting in that context but also um it it it it was preant right because it it's not just that you know there are producers who become consumers in that world in the world of AI um the mass consumption of this stuff means that most of the people who are consuming it will actually not be the first set of eyeballs or or electrodes or whatever it is that land on it, right? You know that that that if I go and write something and it ends up being consumed by the right bots, it could have more impact than if it's consumed by a lot of uh eyeballs directly, right?

[00:08:05]And so, you know, I I think part of it is also something that that should go without saying, um, but for a reason I'll get to in a moment that you also touch upon um it it doesn't. And and that is we don't understand exactly what's next. And so things are always presented through the lens of our last experience >> and not with the ability to imagine our next experience very well.

[00:08:39]>> Um and I just before I get on to the next point, I was just wondering maybe you want to comment on that. I >> mean I So that brings up two things for me. One um have you ever had uh Renee Desta on your show?

[00:08:50]>> Yes. Many times.

[00:08:51]>> Yeah. So Renee, I was at a workshop with her almost a year ago and I remember she mentioned offhand uh that she had started thinking about writing for like when she is writing one of the things that she's aware of is that she's kind of writing for the bots, right? Like affecting what's going to come up when people do generative AI searches. I remember her saying that and I thought to myself that's really smart and also that is so depressing to like as a writer the idea that I would be writing for AIS to affect what's going to come up in AI search seems both very strategic and also my god I hate it and I want to rail against it but that always stuck with me because it like it just seems so smart.

[00:09:27]>> Well, you never know. The AI may treat you fairer than other academics do, right?

[00:09:32]>> It could could but you don't have tenure so who cares they treat you. Um um that's one thing that comes up is I I do think there's going to be a bunch of learning over the p next few years about how do these AI fit into critical systems and how do people then strategically try to bend them. You know, in the same way in the as the the big thing that people were learning how to do was search engine optimization and then in the teens it was social sharing optimization, right? Like how do you make something pop on Facebook? um we're probably heading towards a time of uh uh what bot-based search al optimization or they'll come up with some better term than that for it like that that's going to come and there's going to be at least a few years where being ahead of the curve there probably matters and the social impacts of it are still being sort of figured out. Um but yeah and I I think you're also you're you're right that we we don't know what the scarce thing is going to be and all of this is just sort of like if this was happening in a time of broad social stability if it was even happening just in sort of the the politics and the society of the mid as right like 2005 when Kevin Kelly was writing that we were you know we were in the Iraq war we were in the Afghanistan war times weren't great you know I'm I'm a liberal I was not real not a not a fan of how things were going with George W. Bush and we were in the midst of Hurricane Katrina and also things were so much better than they are now, right? Like you you could live uh you could pay rent in major cities without uh nearly the hassle that you do today. Like stuff there's just a lot of stuff that is getting worse and more precarious and in that procarity all of these questions end up taking on I think greater uh greater stakes. Um this brings me back to the Kevin Kelly piece. Another one of the things with that idea of proumers that wasn't in the piece because I think it wasn't at top of mind in 2005 like part of why we got the influencer industry is because as soon as there was money in creating content online people went and figured out ways to scoop the money out and then the question became okay how do you make enough money to you know how do you make them enough money as a blogger that you can do that full-time and in 2005 you know sidebar ads allowed you to do that but then as everything got more expensive and also money got concentrated. The answer to that got tougher, right? And right now as we look at AI bots kind of swallowing the web, the open web, part of the question here is how like how is anybody in journalism going to make enough money to keep the lights on and pay their rent.

[00:12:07]And if the answer is that if the answer to that is like they kind of can't, then what happens to all these different things? So there's there's both the scarcity of let's say that it actually is intelligence. Okay, what becomes scarce once intelligence is abundant?

[00:12:19]But then there's the paired question of just, you know, how are people going to make enough money to live and how do these companies that are trying to scoop the money out to serve their investors, like how is that going to impact it all?

[00:12:31]And, you know, to me like that that turns me sort of pretty AI negative pretty quick because it just seems like of all the things it could be, it'll probably be the the most brittle and worst version that that we could get.

[00:12:41]This podcast is underwritten in part by the US Embassy of the United Arab Emirates. Its editorial content is completely independent and the views expressed are exclusively those of participating experts. It is presented live without editing. For further information about the UAE's efforts in the areas of artificial intelligence and technology, go to the website of the embassy at www.uae.

[00:13:10]uae-mbbassy.org and search for UAE- us tech cooperation.

[00:13:19]We thank them for their support. We thank everybody who's supporting this podcast for their support and we look forward to it developing and growing over time because the issue is so important.

[00:13:37]Well, of course, part of the problem is AI is 1,00 or 1 million or 10 million things. And so to say, well, AI is this is part of, you know, is is is a key issue. and and and I and I and I want to get back to it at the end because to be honest with you, I think and we may have touched upon this last time we talked, but the failure of the AI industry leaders to frame what their product was properly and to think of it in terms of its benefits for society rather than its benefits for them um strikes me as one of the great failures of all time. And it's led to a situation where you have literally a generation and you know anybody under 40 in the US AI is bad. AI is not 100 things. It's just bad. If you were to say, "Oh, here are new Kelloggs cornflakes with AI," they'd say, "I'm not eating that." You know, because AI is bad.

[00:14:33]>> Yeah.

[00:14:33]>> Um, now you get to one of the reasons why that is the case in this piece. And it's your concluding point which is first Silicon Valley built hardware that got smaller and faster and cheaper and better. Then Silicon Valley built software that became the mediating layer of the global economy. And then the finance industry ate the software industry and every tech company today is a finance company. Um you know or software ate the world and then finance at software. And I thought this was super insightful. And of course, part of the reason it resonated was that in the prior section, you talk about the fact that SpaceX had just gone public. And here you have a company, just to pick up that example, that has gone public with a valuation of 1 dot whatever it is, trillion dollars, that is a money loser.

[00:15:30]that is its entire sort of growth is predicated on the idea that people are either going to go to Mars and they're going to do it in SpaceX rockets that won't blow up right or alternatively because this is the other angle that the finance industry gurus who are running tech though we're going to have space-based data centers and in it's one of those things where in the past three months I went from nobody ever talked about that to everybody I have lunch with goes, "The secret is space-based data centers." And when it happens that fast, I'm like, "This is bullshit." Now, now, you know, might there be some truth that there might be, but the point is Elon Musk is not a technologist. Elon Musk is a stock hustster.

[00:16:16]>> And amazingly, the companies that he has invested in have all had really big problems. And yet, >> he trades it forward. He trades it forward. And it's all based on something else you talk about, which is this sort of core financial issue, which is not that you're creating uh wealth by creating value, but rather you're creating wealth by predicting what you somebody else will want to buy as as a fin as a financial instrument and that you can sell >> before people realize that you aren't creating anything at all. and and you know which is sort of the scam of bubbles and and I and I just I I thought it was a great point and I just wanted to hear you expound on your views on that a little.

[00:17:09]>> Thanks. Yeah. Um so several points. Um I'd say the first thing is going back to why everyone under 40 seems to hate AI.

[00:17:17]It's not that people can't imagine a future where AI is useful. it's that they don't they don't buy it because the finance industry ate the software industry and it did it long enough ago that like when Elon Musk or Sam Almoreman or any of these figures talks big vision about the world they're creating people say yeah I don't believe you though right like when young Mark Zuckerberg or uh the Google guys and the as we're expounding about how their technologies were going to change the world people believed them. Um, and that's because it was more believable then finance and the finance was still in Silicon Valley then but not at the same scale. So now when you know when s when Elon Musk says like yeah no I mean again to to pick up the SpaceX thing either we're going to Mars or like if you read the SpaceX perspectus which I do not recommend to people because it will drive you insane like they claim that it's going to be worth all that money because AI will become 90% of the global economy and Grock will take up 90% of the AI economy. So you both need to believe that AI will transform the entire global economy and like be what all what everything gets spent money on and you have to believe that Grock is the thing that will beat out uh Claude, it will beat out Chat GBT, it will beat out Gemini, which are two big leaps like you both need to be >> Well, there's actually a third one I saw today someplace on the internet where somebody I don't maybe you saw it or maybe you wrote it but where it said that the way people are going to make money on Mars is by creating um intellectual property.

[00:18:55]>> Okay. I I didn't write that. I would love to >> and and I was like, what the [ __ ] I mean, you know, we don't I mean, who knows if people are going to get there and how they're going to live there. But yeah, that you figured out the Martian economy and that's going to drive an investment decision today.

[00:19:12]>> But so like the the other bit that we need to bring in here is the Keynesian beauty contest for all, right? because there's a narrow way that the value of the SpaceX stock makes sense, right? It like when when we say that uh like a stock has value, there's an old way of looking at it that says, "Oh yeah, you're buying a share of the company and you're buying a share of its future profits." And so the value of the stock is the market's sense of the value of it uh future profits. And if you take that version seriously, then everything about SpaceX makes zero sense. It's like that that cannot be right. But there's a second version which is just when you buy a stock when you buy stock in a company for a price, you're making a bet that you know if you buy a stock in the company for $170, you are betting that someone at a later date will buy it from you for $171, right? And so that's just the Keynesian beauty contest, which for people don't know, this is a classic Keynes thing. Ke described the market as not betting on which beauty contest contestant is the most beautiful, but which one will other people uh casting ballots or casting votes say is the most beautiful. So you're betting on other people's judgment. That allows for all of these markets booms and booms and busts. It always did. And so Keynes back in the day was saying, "Yeah, markets are fine so long as they're really small, but they're not the real economy." And now they're basically larger than the real economy, which means that all of these tech companies and you know really the entire economy is just acting like finance companies, right? Like they're just trying to win Keynesian and beauty contests. The one skill that I have to grant to Elon Musk is that he's really good at meme stocks. He is very very good at saying, "Okay, like Tesla's not going to sell any cars anymore, but it will still be a multi, you know, it'll still be a trillion dollar company."

[00:20:59]SpaceX like it is really kind of like it's sickly entertaining to check out the stock ticker on SpaceX and try to look at the price to earnings ratio because it just it's unavailable because it doesn't have earnings. It's a company that loses money that is worth more than Microsoft.

[00:21:14]>> Well, look look at Pal look at Palunteer. Look at look at look at look at all of these companies um that that that are out there. Look at the [ __ ] entire crypto business, which you know is selling makebelieve to idiots, but all of it is based on the idea that I can have a little more information than you and get out a lot faster than you.

[00:21:37]And that's >> the greater fool. Right.

[00:21:39]>> Right. Right. And and we and we are at this point, but you know, there does seem to be a related problem to this.

[00:21:45]And I, you know, I'm not saying you're a sociologist and I'm certainly not a sociologist, but um the system ends up creating perverse incentives in who leads these companies.

[00:21:56]>> Yes.

[00:21:56]>> You know, 150 years ago when John D.

[00:22:00]Rockefeller was creating a standard oil.

[00:22:03]Um, he figured out that if you put an extra drop of se or he took an extra drop of sealant off of a can, he could save one cents a can and he would increase his profits.

[00:22:16]>> And the banker said, "Oh, this guy knows how to, you know, produce and his part product and he's going to make me money and so I'm going to." Now, John D.

[00:22:26]Rockefeller is, you know, strange a bad dude in some respects, but it was about creating the product. Now that, you know, you say meme stock, which is a nice way of saying it, but I think that there is a huge incentive to being what I would put in my own financial terminology, and I did work for a couple years at institutional investor, lying [ __ ] Because because you know, I the two things you want in a guy who runs a company is the ability to sell it. call it the meme or call it whatever it is and really to oversell it because at the beginning you want to create that demand and also the willingness to crush all his partners to to go in you know and be the guy who when it goes to the B round and the C round [ __ ] everybody else over but keeps their own head above water and so you know one of the things that I think is just amazing I mean just amazing is here we have AI the reinvention of fire the transformation of the global economy And there is not one leading CEO spokesperson for it who is not a lying [ __ ] there there there is this, you know, Mount Rushmore of shitty people and and and and frankly I think that colors the opinion because the average 40-year-old says Zuckerberg, Ellison, Andreen, Peter Teal, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, these guys are awful, you know, and and so there is I I think the the the financial thing you put your finger on is related to a perverse incentives thing which produces is these kind of leaders. Am I overreaching?

[00:24:04]>> I'd hate to interrupt this thrilling podcast, but we have some exciting news at the DSR Network. Our Substack is now live. Our Substack is going to be the new home for free and paid content here at the DSR Network. The best way to support us over at our new Substack is by becoming a member. Right now, there's an early bird special until the end of the month where you'll get 30% off of a new subscription with no code required.

[00:24:30]To sign up for either a free or paid subscription to our Substack, you can go to dsrnetwork.substack.com.

[00:24:39]That's dsrnetwork.substack.com.

[00:24:43]We're super excited for our new Substack and for you to join us there. We have a lot of things coming that we're thrilled to share with you in the future. We appreciate your support and thank you for listening. Now, back to the show. I think that's exactly right. Right. And some of this goes into as well to to bring in another Keen quote. Um I'm I'm a real Ke fan. Um you know Ke said that the market can stay stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, right?

[00:25:13]Like the the crypto example is a great example of this. Like it's not just that crypto is the same type of insane as all as SpaceX and all these valuations, but it has been this insane for so much longer than would make any sense. Like I started following crypto like paying attention to it. God, I think around 2018. And at that point, it seemed like, okay, that has come and gone. There have been two crypto waves since then, which means that, you know, when I started reading this and wrote it off as as ridiculous. If I had just put money in it and waited, I would have four or five times more money than I that like just by reading that and instead of saying this insane, saying I want to get into it. That does then end up selecting for people who look at this stuff and rather than saying that makes no sense, say this is a great grift, I'm going to get in on it. The other bit that comes to mind, um, it's a wonderful book by John Kay, uh, titled Other People's Money, uh, came out in 2015. So, it it's helping to explain the financial circumstances that led to the, uh, great financial crisis. Um, it was not best book of the world, uh, best book of the year by like Financial Times when it came out. Great book. We're a decade older now, old now. But he has this phrase in there that helps to explain it all. It keeps rattling in my head, which is I'll be gone, you'll be gone. And he's explaining how all of these finance deals that people were making leading up to the great financial crisis were people who knew like, yeah, we we are selling derivatives on piles of [ __ ] Eventually, this is a time bomb that will go off, but probably not right away. And in the meantime, the two of us making this trade are making out like bandits. And that sense of I'll be gone, you'll be gone, it'll be somebody else's problem undergards that system that gets way out of hand. And of course then after the great financial crisis, all the people with that type of instinct, that cunning to make money and let leave it to be somebody else's problem. When the finance industry starts facing regulation, where do they go? They go to Silicon Valley and and try the same stuff without the regulating.

[00:27:11]>> Well, but a decade and a half later. But I'm gonna make you feel worse. And we're recording this on a Friday in the summer and I don't want to ruin your weekend, but I'm gonna Father's Day this weekend.

[00:27:20]>> Yeah, it's a father. Well, you know, you should have done a different podcast anyway. Um, but I'm going to make you feel worse because you're absolutely right about this. And so, we have the software industry being eaten by the finance industry and then we've got the perverse incentives in that that lead bad people to be leading it. And so you get this avalanche of [ __ ] with also, you know, bad motives behind it and people not trusting it and so forth. But something else happened in the course of the period between the Wired article, well, right around the time that you were talking about.

[00:27:56]>> Yeah.

[00:27:56]>> And that was Citizens United. And what happened with Citizens United? Citizens United said money is speech. So the people with the most money have the most speech. And and so we're in this system where because people are into the market and they're figuring out how to get a [ __ ] ton of money fast because the only way to be immunized from their horrible strategy is to be a billionaire. Right?

[00:28:19]If I'm a billionaire, I don't even live on the planet Earth. You guys can all be suffering. I'll be fine. So what do you do? How do you do that? Well, you were mentioning regulations. If I have hundreds of billions of dollars, I can pick politicians who are going to set rules for me. And better yet, and this goes back to our very first point, they won't understand a [ __ ] word I'm saying. So, I'm going to tell them what's going to happen, and they're going to have to do it because national security or economic prosperity or competitive, I'll make up something, they'll do it. And so in the course of the period between that Wired article and now the percentage of campaign finance from billionaires has gone up 14,000%.

[00:29:10]So literally I mean that sounds like a crazy number. That's the number right.

[00:29:13]It's maybe higher now. But but the but the point is that the political system becomes hostage to the financial system. Mhm.

[00:29:25]>> which is based on these irrational market perverse incentives cocktail that it that that it's sort of bad for everybody except our 1100 billionaires plus one trillionaire.

[00:29:42]>> Right. Yeah. That that's exactly right.

[00:29:44]That actually doesn't make me feel worse >> only because I I agree with you enough.

[00:29:49]Well, well, it should it should it should >> make little listeners feel worse already there with me. So, it makes you feel exactly the same. You're I think you're exactly right. I I'm actually a political scientist by training which matters because back around 2010 2011 I was occasionally participating in campaign finance conversations and we believed around >> that's charming. Those were charm. It was charming when we had those.

[00:30:15]>> Money and politics was a real problem. I in the George W. Bush era, money in politics was a real problem. And that's when rich people could bundle together hundreds of thousands of dollars and by but I guess with like a lowercase B politicians. We now have individual billionaires who have decided we're I'm going to spend 300 million on this election. And it's actually narrowly rational for you know like Elon Musk decided I'm going to spend 300 million on this election because he figured this could help him buy a government and when he bought the government that meant that none of the regulators would regulate him and all the investigations of there was an SEC investigation that just got dismissed a little while ago. This was of um when he bought Twitter. This is such a narrow thing, but when he bought Twitter and he was when he was acquiring the stake to buy it, there was some paperwork he had to fill out to say I've bought more than I think it was 10% of the company and he has to do it when he's gotten past that. He waited I think it was 10 days or so before he submitted that which cost investors money because the price would have gone up if they known he was selling the stake. So, he didn't fill out the form. you know, it's a paperwork era, but it it's several like tens of millions, I think, that he saved by not filing the paperwork. SEC investigates, it takes them years and years, and then when it becomes Trump's SEC, they say, "We're basically just going to let you off the hook." So, that is tens of millions. It actually might have been hundreds of millions that he saved by having bought the government.

[00:31:34]And then the government said, "All of your lawb breaking, we'll just let go."

[00:31:38]Right now, I both don't have hundreds of millions of dollars to spend to buy a government, but also if I did, they wouldn't be letting me off of my major fines because I don't break the law for hundreds of millions of dollars.

[00:31:50]>> Well, I mean, by the way, there's a story.

[00:31:52]>> It's a It's a steal.

[00:31:53]>> There's a story today. It is. There's a story today that Trump made several thousand trades in the first part of this year, didn't file the paperwork.

[00:32:02]Yep.

[00:32:02]>> And the trades are worth $750 million, and the fine he got was $700.

[00:32:07]>> Yeah. So, so, so you know, which he probably which he probably won't be, but it does lead to one last thing >> um before we go, which goes all the way back to this economist article and my issue about, you know, distorted presentation of things because it says here AI, which as we've established, I think, is not one thing, but okay, AI has granted America vast new power. Now, here's the problem with that. This is the argument that's being made by OpenAI and Anthropic and and and and all these other companies and and Jensen Wong to some degree with Nvidia and so on which is um this is crucial to US national security and you've got to give us all of these advantages so we can grow our companies and beat everybody everywhere else in the world. There's a problem.

[00:33:02]It's not true. the you know in other words owning AI is like owning fire.

[00:33:08]It's like owning the industrial revolution. Can you gain an advantage of a couple of years in a certain technology? Yes, you can. And that was the underlying thesis of the um uh high fence small yard trade policy of the Biden administration which subsequently I mean we're now you know all of a year and a half into the Trump administration. We know that's completely true. China's ahead in almost everything now. And where they where we didn't give them a technology, they found a workaround. And and so part of the problem with all of this compounded is that the policy makers and the regulators are also being told lies by the guys who are in charge, who have all this cash, who they have to listen to because they can't be in power if they don't get the cash. And those guys because the way the system works end up being a bunch of liars who don't give a [ __ ] about the country but only give a [ __ ] about their bottom line. And therefore they create this. Meanwhile, there are benefits to, I don't know, AI helping to speed up quality radiological diagnosis or AI helping planes to fly so they don't have to follow some old system in the sky and they can um, you know, get somewhere safer and faster or AI allowing us to utilize alternative energy in a you know, in other words, there are benefits.

[00:34:41]>> Yeah. But but but those things people aren't seeing or hearing because the black and white story of the broad brush stoke story is so [ __ ] depressing and awful for all the reasons we've just talked about. There's two bits I would there two riffs that I give on that. Um one is I I still think that is helpful because there there's an old line that u machine learning is everything that computers can already do and AI is everything they can't do yet. And one of the interesting bits of the past few years is that we've reversed that. So now AI is everything that computers can already do and also everything that that we imagine they can one day do. But I think it's still useful as sort of a thought exercise to replace the words better machine learning anytime you say AI. So like there's a lot of good things that better machine learning can absolutely do. Can they make the grid more efficient? Yeah, of course. Use machine learning in the grid. If we had better machine learning that would probably help radi it can certainly I would imagine help radiologists >> statistically talk to radiologist who I know he complains about how it doesn't work very well yet it's causing more problems but all that certainly could happen um built into that and this gets to your liars point um there was the theory going around during the Biden years that AI was something genuinely new and different and whoever cracked artificial general intelligence which they then started calling artificial super intelligence because every six months they need a new word. But whoever hit that milestone where the AI then trains itself and self-improves like that's when we would be essentially creating the next like like a new species, right? It's conscious and it it will self-improve which means whoever gets there first will then have a runaway advantage that no one else can catch up with. So there was that sort of hypothesis that this time will be different and if you take that seriously then the idea of we need to make sure we're the ones who get there because whoever gets that first step then gets all the other steps. If that were true, then that all would make sense. And the problem is that that was kind of [ __ ] Now that we got >> Well, it was [ __ ] for for several reasons, right? A bunch these guys five years ago didn't give a [ __ ] about Washington. Then they realized Washington was getting wise to them. So what did they do? They all came in, they set up think tanks in Washington. And what was the message of the think tanks almost universally? The threat of AI is it will destroy the world. And it was really this kind of slate of hand thing which was look over here. You know, AGI is the enemy and if you're not focused on that, it's we're all goners and and and all the other stuff which they should have been focused on privacy and security and AI plus crypto and and and AI and global inequality and AI and jobs and a you know, etc. They didn't want to focus on that because that was a problem for them and so it was a little bit of slate to hand.

[00:37:41]>> Yeah. And they came in and said AI is so dangerous it must be regulated and also you must let us pick the regulations.

[00:37:48]>> Right. Which is by the way where we are.

[00:37:50]Yeah.

[00:37:51]>> Right. And so now this week we have the White House which is going to regulate AI. It's not going to regulate AI. David Sax calls up Donald Trump and he says don't do it. He says okay I won't do it.

[00:38:02]And then somebody else calls up and says, "Yeah, but anthropic." And then so then they say, "Well, oh yeah, there are jailbreaks." You don't think John Donald Trump has the slightest [ __ ] I mean, Donald Trump thinks that jailbreak may be his only hope in the future. But he doesn't know beyond it, right? And and so then they go, "Okay, well, we got to do this with anthropic because of jailbreaks, which by the way, if they exist as a thing, may not actually be controllable." Um and and but but again it's because there are sort of the politician whisperers out there and unfortunately for all of us they're the main check writers and the check writers in Washington get to be the law writers and they're like regulation writers.

[00:38:49]>> Yeah. And this is particularly like I sometimes think about how much differently I would feel about the AI future right now if Kamala Harris had won and that meant that Lena Khan was still in charge of the FTC. And it wouldn't be all the way better, but I would feel at least a little bit better about it because part of what's so depressing about this is this sense of well, they just decided that Elon and Sam Alman and they're like they're buddies like David Saxs hangs out with those guys and now David Sax is in charge of deciding what the rules will be.

[00:39:22]>> I mean, David Sax grew went to college with Peter Teal, >> right? Yeah. Like he started he worked at PayPal with Teal and with Elon, right? um like they they are all on the same group chats and when that group chat just gets to decide what's going to happen for all of national policy even if they say you know there are ways that AI could be really valuable for the future like it certainly could be but I don't think that it will be because it's just going to benefit like that small circle of dudes and also they're kind of idiots like they are morons >> no they are and you know but I think you know your next book should be called group chats of the apocalypse because because because we are not focused, you know, it's like I'm worried about AI. I should be worried about the [ __ ] group chat of a bunch of [ __ ] who are, you know, who are also to a much greater extent than anybody wants to give them credit for, as you just said, idiots.

[00:40:21]Well, if I can self-plug, uh, my my forthcoming book in January is Vaporware Incorporated: How Silicon Valley Sells the Future to Control the Present.

[00:40:31]>> I do like Group Chats of the Apocalypse as a follow-up book, though. That is a really good title.

[00:40:35]>> Okay. All right. Well, that's your that that is the highaying that's the highaying uh uh payoff of being on this podcast. Well, maybe maybe if you like it enough, you'll come back sometime in the future.

[00:40:46]>> Anytime you want to have me, I'd love to chat.

[00:40:48]>> Okay. I really enjoyed it, Dave. And everybody uh we will be back next week with more silicons consciousness and hopefully we'll pull those scales away from your eyes one way or another. U until then so long.