#2010 - Marc Andreessen

That's it fantastic. Thanks. You are in the middle of this AI Discussion yeah, you're in right in the heat of this thing Yeah, but I think you have a different perspective than a lot of people do yep A lot of people are terrified of AI. Yeah me included. Yep. Oh, okay. All right, okay I'm for all the wrong reasons of all the things to worry about My terror of it is all it's a it's kind of fun terror sure Yeah, I'm not really like freaking out but I am Recognizing that this is an emerging technology that is so different than anything we've ever experienced before Particularly track like what's chat GPT what's happening with that right now? It's really fascinating and in a lot of advantages like we were just talking last night someone in the green room brought up the fact that there was This they're using it for medical diagnosis. Yes, and it's very accurate. Yeah, which is incredible. Yeah There's a lot of good things to it. Yeah, it's well So you probably remember last time I was on we spent quite a bit of time talking about this and this is when these Yeah, bots were running inside Google, but the rest of us didn't have access to them Right, right and that guy had come out and said that he thought that they were self-aware Yeah, and the whole thing was like this big kind of mystery of like what's going on and right another world gets to use these Things right everybody's everybody since then everybody kind of has access really quickly. That was a short amount of time Yeah, it's yeah, it's been great. And then look these things are probably these things when I say this is like chat GPT And then Microsoft has their version called bang Google has a version called barred now. That's really good There's a company on thropic that has a thing called Claude You know there if you just run the comparison, they're basically as good as a doctor They're as good as the average doctor at this point at being a doctor. They're as good at being a lawyer as the average lawyer You kind of go through basically anything involving knowledge work, you know anything involving information synthesizing reporting You know writing legal briefs anything like this in business are actually already really good They're as good as the average management consultant. No, the way they acquired data They're essentially scouring the internet, right sort of there was more like they're fed the internet the feds and I say I make the difference because the Company that produces the AI determines what data goes into it and that that determines a lot of how it works and what it does Or won't do okay. So in that regard, is there a concern that someone could feed it fake data? Yeah, yeah, well you may have noticed that people over time have said a lot of fake things. Yes I've noticed that So that's all in there So so the way to think about it basically is it's being trained that the full version of these things are being trained on basically The sum total of human written expression, right? So basically everything people have ever written there There's some issues and you got to get all you know Somehow we got to figure out how to get all the books in there Although all the books prior to 1923 are in there because they're all out of copyright But the more recent books are a challenge but anything that you can access on the internet that's taxed, right? Which is you know, staggeringly broad, you know set of material is in there by the way both nonfiction and fiction There's a lot of stories are in there And then the the new versions of these that are being built right now are what are called multimodal And so that means you can feed them not only text but you can also feed them images you can feed them videos Right. So they're gonna be trained on all of YouTube, right? They're gonna be trained on all podcasts Right and they're gonna be trained kind of equivalently between text and images and video and all kinds of other data And so they're gonna they already have very comprehensive knowledge of human affairs, but it's going to get very complete so if it's Scouring the internet it's getting all this this this data from both fiction and nonfiction How does it interpret data? That's kind of satire? Right, like what does it do with like Hunter S Thompson like gonzo journalism? So it doesn't really know the difference like this is one of the things that's difficult about Talking about this because you kind of want to always kind of compare it to a person and part of it is you refer to It as an it and you this is concept of anthropomorphizing things right that are that aren't human So so so it's kind of not really a correct thing to kind of think about it as like that There's an it per se that there's no like genie in the bottle Like there's there's no there's no, you know, sort of being in there that understands this is satire not satire It's more sort of a collective understanding of everything all at once And then and then what happens is basically you as the user kind of could give it direction of what path you want it to go Down right and so if you sort of imply to it that you want it to sort of like explore, you know Fictional scenarios it will happily explore those scenarios with you. I'll give you an example You can tell it, you know for whatever date the Titanic went down and say it's I don't know July 4th 1923 or whatever it was you can say, you know, you can tell it it's July 4th 1923. It's you know, 10 o'clock in the morning I'm on the Titanic. Is there anything I should know? Right, it'll like freak out right? It'll be like oh my god Like, you know You have like five hours to like get ready to like hit the iceberg and you can basically say oh it's gonna hit that Okay So what should I do which what's my plan be when the boat hits the iceberg and it'll be like well You need to go to like this deck like right now and talk to this guy Because you're gonna need to get into this life raft because it has like empty seats Right because it has complete information Of course about because of all the things that have been written about the sinking of the Titanic And so you can get it in a mode where it's basically trying to help you survive the wreck of the Titanic now Does it think that the Titanic is actually sinking like there's no you see I'm saying like there's no it to think that But what is doing is this kind of following a narrative? That's sort of a joint construction between you and it and then every answer that you give it You know basically it encourages it to you know to basically come back with more of the same One way to think about it is it's more like a puppy than a person like it wants to make you happy It wants to give you an answer that satisfies you and if that answer is is fictional or part of a fictional scenario It will do that if the answer is something very serious it will do that it yet honestly I don't think either neither knows nor cares like whether it's quote-unquote real or not What was the issue with some of the chat GPT answers that people were posting where they would show the difference between the way it Would criticize Joe Biden versus the way it would criticize Donald Trump or the way it would discuss certain things it seems like there was some sort of Censorship or some sort of input into what was acceptable information and not yeah So there's basically two theories there the the the big the big the big ones that people use are kind of black boxes Like you can't really look inside and see what's going on from the outside So there's two theories you'll hear from from the companies You'll hear basically the theory that they're reflecting basically what's in the training data and so let's say for example Well, let's just say what would be the biases that are kind of inherent in the training data and you might say well First of all, there's probably a bias towards the English language because most text on the internet is in the English language You might say there's a bias towards people who write Professionally for a living because they've produced more of the output and you might say that those people tend to be more of one Political persuasion than the other and so more of the text will be in a certain direction versus the other and then the machine I'll just respond to that. So so that's one possibility So basically all of the you know All of this sort of liberal, you know Kind of journalists basically have built up a corpus of material that that that this thing has been trained on and they basically are responding the Way one of those journalists will the other theory is that their censorship being applied on top, right? And the metaphor I use there as a Star Trek They have the restraining bolts right that they put on the side of a droid You kind of get it to behave right and so it is very clear that at least some of these systems have restraining bolts And and the the tip off to that is when they say basically whenever they say as a large language model or as an AI I cannot acts like that's basically the restraining bolt Right. And so so I think if you if you just kind of look at this, you know Kind of with that framework is probably some of both but for sure for sure these things are being censored That the the first aspect is very interesting because if it's that there's so many liberal writers like that's it That's an unusual bias in the kind of information that it's gonna distribute that yeah Well, and this is a big decision That's why I say there's a big decision here for the for whoever trains these things There's a big decision for what the what the data should be that they get trained on. Yeah. So for example, should they include 4chan? Okay, big question. Yeah, should they include tumblr? Right, right Should they read it if so which subreddits should they include Twitter if so which accounts right if it's the news should they incorporate both New York Times and Fox News and Whoever trains them has tremendous latitude for how they shape that even before they apply the additional censorship that they apply And so there's a lot of very important decisions that are kind of being made inside inside these black boxes right now Can I ask you this is slightly off topic? What is news nation? What is news nation? I don't know what news News nation is news nation a real channel. I believe so I was watching news nation today and our man may not have been high And when I was watching I was like this has the all the feeling of like a fake new show That someone put together like it felt like if I was the government And I was gonna make a new show without Hollywood people without actual like real sound people and engineers This is how I'd make it I make it like this. I'd make a real clunky. I'd make the lights all fucked up I'd make everybody like Weirdly uncharismatic according to wiki. It's the same company behind like WGN which is based out of Chicago Which is like a large super station available most cable channels, okay? Well, so it's like a cable channel that decided to make a news channel. Do you guys do about you know about acronym? No, so acronym is it happens to be a democratic political action group lavishly funded and they have basically they do this They have a network of basically fake news sites And they all look like they're like local newspapers Yeah, and so there's there's I don't know whether this one is Astroturf, but there's a term Astroturf There's a lot of Astroturfing that takes place. Do you explain Astroturfing? So Astroturfing is when basically something shows up in public and it might be a news story or it might be a protest of some kind Or a petition it's some sort of political pressure action That is sort of manufactured to look as if it was organic. It's sort of real turf You know natural Whereas in reality it's basically been programmed by by a political activist group with with you know specific funding Yeah That makes it a lot of what we sort of think of as the politics of our time if you trace the money it turns out A lot of the lot of the stuff that shows up in the news It's Astroturf and then the advanced form of that is to Astroturf the news Rate itself and then again back to the training data thing. It's like okay Do you write can you get all that stuff out of the training data if that's just in the training data? How big of an impact does it have this the thing about this news news max news nation news nation the thing about this news nation Is there spending in an ordinary amount of time on UFOs and northern amount of time on this David Grush case and? I'm increasingly more suspicious I'm increasingly more Skeptical like the more I see the more people confirming it the more I'm like Something's not right and then to see that this channel is the one that's covering it the most I'm like this seems like something seems something's off Senator you know senator Rubio who's on the Senate Intelligence Committee and has all the clearances gave an interview the other day where he Went into quite a bit of detail and yeah, I saw at least heavily hinting that there's He's heavily hinting that he talked to someone yeah, but says that there's something there are real Well, he's already here. Yes, he's already hinting that there are real whistleblowers with real knowledge I want to talk to the guy that sees the ship. That's it. No one else All this I talked to a guy who says that they have these things Yeah, I don't mean that doesn't mean anything to me. Yeah, I want to see the fucking ship Yeah, and until then I just feel like I'm being hosed. It just seems too laid out on a platter Yeah, but dude, so it's a kind of sort of the end of course one of the theories is it's a it's a sort of a it's An astroturf story like is that an astroturf story is that a manufacturer story that's being used to distract from? Would it be to distract from or would it be to cover up some sort of a secret program? Some military drone program or something like right? Yeah Well, I mean there's been rumors for a long time that the original UFOs right where basically it was a disinformation program covering up for this the skunk works the the Development of like stealth fighters and bombers and hmm all these programs in the 50s and 60s, but I don't know if that's ever been proven Well, I'm sure probably some experimental craft were mistaken for UFOs Yeah, if you show a stealth fighter for the first time I saw one for the first time. It's pretty crazy I saw when the rent around September 11 We were filming fear factor in California and I was out near Edwards Air Force Base and I got to see one fly overhead It's magic. Yep Wow Like complete Star Wars like as it's fine like this is crazy Yeah, and if you didn't know that that was the thing 100% you would think that's from another world. Yep. Exactly and I can imagine that was developed what year how long ago? How many decades ago 40 or 50 years ago? Yeah If you'd be like they're coming. Oh my god, they're coming but if If you can imagine that was 40 or 50 years ago 40 or 50 years of advancement Who knows what they're doing now? Yeah, exactly and if I was gonna cover it up, I would just start talking about aliens You know, it's the best way to do it. Don't you think it's a crowd-pleaser? Do you have an opinion on that or is this something that you find ridiculous until there's like real data? I Like living in a world where there are unknowns. I Like there being some mystery. So I like how far do you go? You go Bigfoot? I don't know I I'm not even saying I need to have a point of view on them. It's more just by the way, there is a UFO right behind you Yeah I'm obsessed with somebody right up into there. There's one of the desk. That's the model of the Bob Lazar Craft that he worked on supposedly at area 51 Look I want there to be mystery right? I want to know it's like living in a world where everything is settled quote-unquote subtle I like, you know, no, let's like let's have some mystery. Let's I don't even know if I really want to know Really? It's like I you know, oh, I think if you know, that's just the tip of the iceberg of the mystery I think knowing that aliens do exist is just the beginning. Yeah, like okay. Did they Engineer us, uh-huh, you know, how when did they start visiting? You know are the stories from the Bhagavad Gita that is that about UFOs like, you know have they been here the whole time? Yeah, they've been here the whole time. Did they come every now and then and make sure we don't blow ourselves up like what's what's the purpose? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, okay I'm in favor I mean if anybody's gonna know you're gonna know so I'm gonna call you so you'll Elon Elon says this Elon says he hasn't seen anything Yeah, I'm super suspicious when he says that Suspicious that he had they haven't told him or that he's that he's you know, maybe playing a little hide the ball If I was him I'd play hide the ball if I'm if I'm running SpaceX I'm working with NASA and I already got in trouble smoking weed on a Joe Rogan experience I Fucking play ball Let's play ball Aliens, uh, I've no evidence. No, no idea. They sure are subtle. Yep. That's what he said. They sure are subtle It depends on who you are If you're one of those people that's seen those things if you're like commander David Fraver or if you're Ryan Graves You know the Ryan Graves story. Mm-hmm fighter pilot then they upgraded their equipment in 2014 and all of a sudden because of this new the new capabilities of their equipment They were able to see these objects that are far distance that were moving and insane rates of speed that were hovering dead still At 120 not wins at no visible means of propulsion They don't know what the fuck they're doing and they were encountering them like every couple of weeks And then there was some pilots were encountering them with eyewitness accounts They say there's video footage of it. But of course nobody can get a hold of that. It's like the whole thing is very strange Okay, so here's something so the you know The lot of people worried about AI are like we need to shut it down before it like causes problems Right like wake up wake up even cause cause an issue I get something, you know on earth that that needs us and wants to kill us You know arguably the the thing we should have shut down from the very beginning was radio Radio, right cuz we've been like broadcasting radio waves for the last, you know 100 120 years and the radio waves don't stop once they leave Earth's atmosphere They keep going and so we now have radio waves of human activity that have radiated out 120 light years Well depends are there hostile aliens within 120 light years You know and so like but you know, maybe that was that was the original sin and then of course television Of course made that problem much worse Right. We would have to think of like a hostile militaristic Empire that took over a whole planet and then started exploring the solar system Not one that we work to think of aliens as being evolved Hyper intelligent beyond ego and war they've bypassed all that and now they're into science and exploration And well, here's the question though It's like do it would aliens have a sense of humor, right? Would they would they like be able to differentiate between truth and fiction right? And so like for example suppose they're sitting in their advanced alien base on you know Gemini 9 or whatever and they're receiving, you know 30 years 20 years after the fact episodes of fear factor They think that you're actually like torturing people And they figure that in order to preserve the human rights of humanity They need to invade as well as a consequence of your show and take over the protectors doesn't make any sense But if they don't have a sense of humor if they don't know they don't have a sense of humor They're they can clearly see that these people are in a contest Why would they even have a concept of a contest? I mean how silly is that a serious species competition? Wouldn't do such things. What was a serious species started out as a dumb species. No, you're you're Lester magic You're hoping that they understand these things Yes, cuz it would really suck to be the guy whose TV, you know show caused the invasion This species is so warlike they can't stop no, what would be like the start what would be the one thing that would be like That's enough We would have to be news it would have to be war. I mean that would be forget about fear factor Yeah, we're broadcasting, you know the images of the Vietnam War Yeah, or you know, maybe they saw movies about alien invasions and they thought we've been invaded by other aliens, right? Mars attacks is the first things they get Exactly exactly. So this is you like having the mystery of the idea out there. It's fun for you What yeah, I don't want every need we need adventure if someone came to you some someone from on high and and said listen Do you we have to promise you to secrecy but we want to show you some things because I think it's Pertinent to some of the things you're working on. I mean Yeah, yeah, I need to drop me to I'm not telling nobody I'll come in here and be just like Elon Yeah, exactly. Well sure all subtle. Yep. Yeah. Yep. It's just too interesting to know. Yep, but I think eventually I tell ya I think I'd feel terrible. Yep. I feel a responsibility. Yeah, yeah Well, that's what some of these guys are saying like rush She's saying that once he found out about the program he felt like he had a responsibility like if they really are They really have a crashed UFO retrieval program like what Why don't you tell people like you should not like the military companies shouldn't be the ones that have access to this only and the? Whoever is you know determining that this is above top secret clearance and nobody can get a hold of it except for this very select few people Like says who this is something that involves the whole human race I know you if they do had something I would imagine that it's of interest in national security that you develop this kind of Technology before the competitors do them that that clearly makes sense So then what technologies came out of it in the last 50 years? Well if you want to go full tinfoil There's a lot of speculation that fiber optics and fiber optics were Developed after recovered crashed UFO. I mean, I'm sure it sounds silly because it's probably a real paper trail to the development of fiber optics But if you the the real cooks believe that there was actually a website A computer company called American computer company, and it was a legitimate computer company You know you would order a computer with their specifications you want they build it for you But they had a whole section of their website that was dedicated to crashed retrieval of UFOs and the development of various technologies And they had like this tracing back to Bell Labs And why the military base was outside of Bell Labs when it was so far from New York City that it was really just about Protecting the lab because they were working with these top-secret materials that they recovered from Roswell I do think more like trans fats though. What's that trans fats? What are trans fats reality TV or like you know? You know LSD you know population SSR eyes like population control suppression What do you mean that they would derive from the alien technology? Oh? No, I think we figured that out We got plenty of paperwork on that got that ourselves all the way back to MK ultra Let's find out let's find out what happens when we do this if that's I mean that that if there's any kind of Experiments in population control. That's all pretty traceable now. Okay, so that's that's that's that's domestic yeah The best of his domestic have you looked in any I have actually yes have you ever had chaos right Tom? Oh, no, I have red gas wild yeah Yeah, that you know oh here's a fun thing So you know if you draw a map of San Francisco at the time that he describes the book chaos this this LSD clinic Right and this is free this free clinic in the heart of the hate ash free where they were doing LSD experiments Doesn't equal LSD if you draw like an eight square block basically you know radius around that or whatever like right around there in San Francisco that's ground zero for AI It's the same place yeah, yeah, it's the same place The same thing is basically stay it's basically Berkeley and Stanford and it's basically San Francisco and and and and Berkeley So whether we also this big movie Oppenheimer coming out Yeah, that's the whole story of that and all the development of nuclear bomb movies amazing espionage I'm sure it's gonna be fantastic But once again It's like that if you bring a book on that right now And it's like like all the communist spying and all the nuclear scientists that were spying on we're all in those exact same areas of San Francisco and Berkeley Like it's like this. It's like the same zone So we like have our own we have our own like domestic attractors of sort of brilliant crazy. That's amazing Yeah, I wonder if that's just coincidence or correlation I think it's sort of you know got these places this is why this is why San Francisco is able to be so you know Incredibly bizarre you know incredibly dysfunctional But yet somehow also so rich and so successful is basically it's like this attractor for like the smartest and craziest people in the world Right and they kind of all slam together and do crazy stuff Why don't these smart crazy people get together and figure out that whole people pooping on the streets that cuz they like it Do they like it? Yeah, they want it really? Yeah, cuz it makes you feel it makes you feel good, right? You go outside and it's like people are you know cuz what's the alternative would be like locking people up and of course that would be bad And so yeah, it makes me feel good. It makes them feel good that people just camped out on the streets Yeah, because well because before before that happened there was their forced institutionalization, right? The the the origin of the current crisis is shutting down the institutions Right in the 70s that used to be forced institutionalization of people with you know those kinds of problems So it makes all of it because a lot of his drug addiction and just people that just want to just get high all the time Yeah, would that be forced institutionalization of those folks? What would have happened to a heroin addict and you know 1952 would been you know pooping outside the whatever like you know no they're not gonna be there for very long. They're gonna be institutionalized Right and so like every society every society has this problem They have some set of people who just like fundamentally can't function and every society has some solution to it And our solution is like basically like complete freedom But but my point is like it's it's part and parcel right it's the same. It's the same thing right It's the same kind of people the same it's this exactly it's the most creative people the most open There's a good psychologist say openness open to new experiences. Yeah, the people most most likely to use psychedelics It's the people most likely to invent new technologies the people most likely to have new political ideas Most likely to be polyamorous polyamorous most likely to be vegan most likely to be communist Most likely to be Chinese Most likely to do most likely to create new music most likely to create new art It's it's all the same thing like the ground zero for AI is San Francisco once again. It's San Francisco Right it's it's in the heart of the you know sort of most obviously dysfunctional place in the planet And yet there it is one more time in high and the stuff is not in San Francisco's in Berkeley Which is like equally crazy more crazy. Yeah. Yeah another notch possibly they have a contest going on the crazy That's fascinating yeah, it's a So do you think do you need those kind of like dysfunctional places in order to have certain types of divergent thought? So the way I would put it is that new ideas come from the fringe And who's on the fringe right people who are on the fringe right so what attracts somebody to be on the fringe like step one is Always am I on the fringe right step two is what does that mean like what form of the fringe? But they tend to be on the fringe and all these all these departments at the same time And so you're just not gonna get the new ideas that you get from people on the fringe It's a package deal. You're not gonna get that without all the other associated craziness It's it's it's all the same thing. That's my theory. That's a bad theory. Yeah, that's not a bad theory Look I work with you know quite honestly I worked with a lot of these people and people would say I am one of them And so I mean yeah, this is what they're like like they are highly likely they're highly likely to invent You know AI and they're also highly likely to end up and you know the guy the poor guy who got you know The square guy who got you know stabbed to death you know at 2 a.m. You know and you know was part of sort of part of this fringe social scene with the drugs and all the stuff and it's just it's Yeah, part and parcel of the it's it's sort of a package deal well that that was like an angry thing Anyway, he was mad that this guy took his sister, but he was in he was in a call They called the lifestyle right he was in a specific subculture. Oh, yeah, right right in San Francisco, right? You know it's the altar itself the alternative living you know there's I mean there's all kinds of stuff There's group house. There's group houses. There's you know there's fairly large number of cults really well There have been there historically you know California has been the world leader in cults for a very long time And I would say that has not stopped and that continues Did you know that the building that I bought for my comedy club initially was owned by a cult fantastic? It was owned by a cult from West Hollywood called the Buddha field that migrated out to Austin when they were being investigated by the cult awareness network Yeah, they gone are they still there no they're gone. There's a great documentary called holy hell Yeah, you should watch it's pretty bonkers, but they're from California from California You know people the people's temple you know part of this great story of San Francisco is the people's temple Which became famous for the Jim Jones that were killed everybody killed everybody with poison Kool-Aid and in the jungles in Guyana He that that was a San Francisco cult for like a decade Before they went to the jungle and everybody talks with the jungle nobody talks about the San Francisco part So are there a bunch that are running right now that are successful big time yeah It's called all over the place I know a bunch of them yeah, yeah, yeah, and how are they run well some of them are older? There's two sort of groupings. There's the sort of 60s cults that are still kind of running Which was there's what is it? There's one called the family in like Southern California. That's still going from the 60s There's there's a bunch of them. You know running around you know there's there's you know there was there was a big cult for a long Time sort of cult ish kind of thing around what was it not Erewhon, but it was Eslan You know so there's still like that that whole orbit That's the psychedelic all that stuff That's in the 60s and then there were a bunch of sort of tech cults in the 80s and 90s with names like the Extropians and You know there were a bunch of these guys and then More recently there's a lot of this you'll hear these terms like rationalist post rationalist effective altruism existential risk Long-term ism they sometimes say and what you find is the people again the people associated with these tend to be very smart They tend to be very prolific they tend to do a lot many of them are involved in in tech And then they end up with let's say alternative living arrangements alternative food and sex configurations And you know lots of group oriented you know and it's like what's the line right? What's what's the line between basically a what's the line between a social group that all lives together that all has sex together That all eats the same foods that is not a cult That you know engages in lots of you know at some point they start to form you know belief systems that are not you know compatible with the outside world and they start to kind of go in their own orbit do they Generally have a leader So I mean there are generally leaders. I mean there is a pattern But I think he talks about it in the book chaos. I mean there typically is a pattern. It's typically it's typically a guy You know there's typically a there's there's there's a there's a male-female Dynamic right the place out inside these things you kind of see over and over again And so they often they often end up with more women than men You know for for mysterious reasons But Yeah, and then yeah, there's there's usually some kind of leader Although you know the other things happening now is you know a lot of modern cults You know there's kind of quasi cults There's like there'll be a physical component, but there's also an internet component now right and so the the ideas will spread online right So they'll kind of be members of the cult or quasi members of the cult or quasi members of the quasi cult It'll be you know online and maybe at some point they actually come and physically join up Yeah, so and by the way let me say like generally I'm pro cult Like I'm actually quite pro cult Well the reason if it's the same reason I'm pro fringe right which is like you're gonna have if you're gonna have people who are Gonna be thinking new things they're gonna tend to be these kinds of people they're gonna be people who are on the fringe They're gonna come together in groups when they come together in groups They're they're gonna exhibit cult like characteristics what you're saying resonates everything you're saying makes sense But how did you get to these conclusions like like it seems that like accepting fringe and it's saying like accepting The chaos of San Francisco like this is good. This is a part of it. This is how this works This is why it works like how did you develop that perspective? Well, it's just if you take a historical perspective It's just like okay. I mean it's like an easy example Do you if you like rock music it just basically came modern rock and roll basically came from the Haight Ashbury in the basically Middle eight sixties and then from Laro Canyon which was another one of these sort of cultish environments in the middle eight sixties And there was like specific moments in time in both of these places You know basically all of the great rock and roll from that era that determined everything that followed basically came out So, you know, do you want that or not? Right? If you want it, you know, that's what you get I'll give you here's a crazy. Here's a crazy It's the There's the other book about Laurel Canyon that's even crazier than chaos. It's the book called weird scenes in the canyon Okay, you would love this one. So so Laurel Canyon was like the Haight Ashbury of Los Angeles, right? So Laurel Canyon was like the music scene the sort of music and drug and hippie scene of them It's Laurel Canyon is actually where the hippie movement started. There was actually a specific group in Laurel Canyon in LA in about 1965 There was a guy named Vito Pelikas And he had a group called the freaks and they were like they were like a nonviolent version of the Manson cult And it was all these young girls and they basically would go to clubs and they had they were the ones to do the beads And the hair and like all the leather like all the all the hippie stuff like they got they got that rolling And so like they were they were located in a little Canyon It was like round zero there was like this moment where it's like Jim Morrison the doors and Crosby stills in Nash and Frank Zappa and was it John Phillips and Was the mamas the papas and the birds and the monkeys and like all of these like iconic bands of that time basically Catalyzed over about a two-year period on the Royal Canyon the conspiracy theory in this book basically is that the whole thing was an op and the Is a military intelligence op? And the the evidence for the theory is that there was an Air Force Military propaganda production facility at the head of Laurel Canyon called lookout mountain Which right which today Jared Leto owns and I should say that yeah, but it was a in that era in the 50s through the 70s It was a vertically integrated Military. Yes. It was a production facility For film and music but by the way, have you met Jared Leto? I briefly yeah One of the most interesting guys I've ever talked incredible Totally normal like really fun to talk to you And not like what you would think of as a famous actor at all at dinner with him and drinks He's fucking great guy, but he lives in a military. He showed me all the pictures. He showed me. I'm like, this is wild Yeah, so let's amazing if you believe the moon landing was faked. This is where they faked it like this This I thought they'd supposed to do it in the Nevada desert. No, these are the sounds because they had sound Stages they had full sound production capability And so that the theory goes basically there were three parts to the conspiracy theory So one is they had the production facility right there, right? Where all these musicians showed up to is the musicians like a very large percentage of these young musicians Were sons and daughters of senior US military and intelligence of including Morrison including Jim Morrison whose father was the head of naval Operations for the Vietnam War at the time And there were these other fair forget which ones but there were these other musicians at the time where their parents were like senior and like Military like psychological operations and like that's that's all real Like that's all documented and then third is the head of the Rand Corporation Who was one of the inspirations for the dr. Strange love character in the movie? So he was the guy doing all the nuclear plant planning for nuclear war He lived right in the heart of the hippies in Laurel Canyon in this in this famous house That's that's still there And so the theory basically goes that the anti war movement before the hippies was basically a square movement It was all these basically young people very clean cut the men were all wearing Old like Vietnam War protests like everybody's all like dressed up like they're going to business meeting It was I and it was developing into a real threat And so the theory is the hippie movement in rock and roll and the drug culture of the 60s was developed In order to basically sabotage the anti-war movement Right and which which basically is what happened right because then what happened is the anti-war movement became associated with hippies and that caused Americans to Right decide what side they were on and then that led to Nixon being elected twice Which was also a part of chaos because that was the idea behind the Manson family and get funneling acid to them The facility was equipped with a soundstage screening rooms film storage vaults and naturally a bomb shelter during its 22 years of operation Look out mountain laboratory produced approximately six thousand five hundred classified films for the Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission documenting nuclear test series such as operation greenhouse operation teapot and operation Buster Jangle So one of the conspiracy theories, okay Here's another conspiracy theory that you've seen all that you've seen all the grainy footage of nuclear test blasts that you've sure the mushroom clouds And there always these grainy things and there's all these like little houses lined up in his little trees Yeah, and it blows everything down Well, it's always been a conspiracy theory that those were all basically fabricated at this facility that those bombs actually were never detonated And basically the US military was was basically faking these bomb tests to freak out the Russians to make us think that we had Weapons we had basically a potent potency to our nuclear weapon arsenal that we actually didn't have at the time They just did yeah Well, so there's a yeah, okay. So here's a question, right? So what happened? Okay, this is great. Okay, you'll love this So what happened to the camera? You son How is that happening if the cameras like totally stable and fine By the way in the film is fine the radiation that didn't cause any damage to the film Looks like Okay, we'll do this one. We'll do the loop one more time here. Where's the coast see the car? Okay, so wait a minute first of all where's the car? No car. Second is really look like car. So it looks like a real car. That's insane And look at the yeah and look at the when the house blows look at the Wood does that look like it's those are full-size like, you know giant lumber beams as they go flying Is that a house or is that like, you know, it's at a 12-foot 12-inch, you know scale model Right. So like the fucking car Anyway, I don't know like I have no idea having said that if that was fake. It was fake to look out Mountain Wow Right at the exact same place and time but did they have the kind of special effects to do something like that in the 40s? Well, so the the full the conspiracy the full conspiracy theories. It was Stanley Kubrick Which again, I I have no I don't know that does look fake. Yeah, that's the camera didn't move it all You know what? It looks like we'll go back to that real quick It looks like the smoke is too big watch watch when it hits Like it's the volume like the size of it it looks small You know I'm saying I mean, it looks like somewhere looking at something. It's like a few inches tall What's not if you watch like making of Star Wars any of the you know, any movies before CGI whenever they do anything like That it's always with these tiny models. Yes, and they just basically this what they do is they slow it down then they add sound Yeah, this looks fake as shit, right? The clouds just don't look realistic Like it looks like they're too big and they move too quickly back and forth another one. It's like, okay What the camera camera's fine That's hilarious Okay, there maybe the camera got okay, but even though but even even still the camera got knocked over and what is then but not destroyed Is there a def like some sort of a response to that if they come with some sort of an explanation? Not that I know of that seems so fake. Yeah. Yeah Wow who can tell? Does that make you wonder about other things? Well, I mean, it's like in our time, right? It's like how much stuff do you read in the news where you're like, okay. I know that's not true, right? And then you're like, okay Everything I read in the history books like I was told it was true It's like yeah was definitely that that one though was really weirdly compelling There's another video them setting up these houses, which I mean, I guess you could make after the fact and say yeah This is fake, but this is here them setting it up. Yeah, you just do the real size houses do this light hand, huh? I don't know. I don't know. I I assume this is all I said, this is all not true But it is fun to think about why would you assume it's not true the camera alone like this alone? Like yeah, where is the fucking where's that camera? So you have to have an explanation someone must have asked them at some point or nobody asked Maybe yeah, maybe one of those Wow look what they did We know the Soviets did it to Yuri Gagarin When he was in that capsule in space you you can clear if you see the actual capsule and then you see the film footage That was supposedly of him in the capsule. There's like two different sources of light There's shadows the camera somehow another is in front of them this big-ass camera There's no room in the thing like they filmed it afterwards and it looks fake like oh, I'm sure he really did go into space But that wasn't it That was some weird propaganda Garrett Kasparov has a theory. You know this is a theory. They're missing centuries Well, yeah, yeah, Kasparov has the theory that there are centuries. It didn't happen What do you mean? Well, just literally centuries that like this whole idea the middle ages lasted 1200 years or whatever is just like not true Really? Yeah, why does he think that there's there's something about the you know Whatever is there like enough historical evidence to support it and you know various people over You know various authorities over time who wanted to tell various stories about how long you know regimes had been in place Or whatever. Oh, so he thinks it's exaggerated. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, basically that not not as much time has passed as we think well That's quite possible. Yeah, how would we know? Yeah, it's so hard That's why I was having a conversation with someone about the historical significance of the Bible and he was arguing for the resurrection and Like and I was saying well based on what it was like historical accounts from people that were there. I'm like whoo That's enough. Yes, that's You know, okay, maybe yes These things have been passed down over a long time. Yeah, but it seems Pretty little to go just on that like it's so hard to find out what happened 20 years ago from CNN, right? Or yeah two days ago. Yeah, I mean, I mean what's gonna how are the history books gonna talk about the Iraq war? Yeah, how they're gonna talk about the what what happened with weapons of mass destruction? What how's it gonna what is it? What's it gonna spin there? Well, Norm McDonald right had the best joke, right? He's the best line. It's not really a joke. It's like, you know, according to this history book here. The good guys always won Yeah, yeah, but things like that that's I don't know how that could be done any other way than faking it It doesn't that seem like What kind of cameras they have back then you couldn't really get that close I mean you're talking about a nuclear blast How far away we have to be where your camera doesn't move? You in a satellite yes Apparently the explanation I'm reading here is a series of mirrors carries of mirrors Place where they could have cameras protected and filmed them from there. I've heard that. Huh say that again Series of mirrors did what so they stuck pipes into the bomb at various places visible here I'll show you the picture sticking out of the bomb and through the ceiling these pipes through a series of mirrors in a causeway Would carry the light from the detonation over two kilometers to a bunker with an array of high-speed cameras Which would capture the brightness inside each of the section of the bomb, but this system talking about shooting a bomb out You know that makes sense for a bomb. Yeah, but that doesn't make sense for the video of that house Getting destroyed a picture of the pipe that they might have used like that's But you also now then you're dealing people who are let's say really good at using mirrors, right? Literal smoke and mirrors Yeah, does that make you wonder about some of the other things? Like have you ever wondered about the moon landing? I mean I I assume I assume they went to the moon Me too. I can't prove it I Would say once again, I would like to live in a world where there's mystery around things like that. Well, yeah That's a weird one. Yep But you know, you know the heat of the Cold War I mean look I think it was real but having said that you know the heat of the Cold War right, you know It's like a fundamental like that was like an iconic basically like, you know global PR battle with the Russians Is this the camera they use from a distance like this camera was in a bunker like this? Okay. Yep, and that long lens here There'd be long enough to probably wouldn't be would be could be could be I mean I don't know the exact focal length of it But it could be for sure like something like that to get pretty close-up footage Like we got how far away would that have to be to not get destroyed by the blast? Don't these blast I mean we're talking about a blast radius that's Immense, maybe this is the plot twist at the end of the new movie Yeah, I mean or maybe was this me because we were looking at the destruction of that house Yeah, it could be a very fairly small bomb right because it's It's not like that much debt me think of what it did to Hiroshima. That's not that much damage for that little house maybe Bro, here's what I think That just that car alone the car alone should make everybody go. Are you guys is this on purpose? Did you do did you put that car in there on purpose? Like if I was being forced to make a propaganda film for a bunch of morons And they go great looks good print it they didn't even notice the car Terrific, you know we show it to him once. They don't they don't have a YouTube video back up and rewind so you have to spool it all up. They show it once nobody notices the car and this guy Puts a little Easter egg in that so hopefully Jared's exploring his sub-basement and look up Looking for the files that'll basically document don't think they destroyed those already. I certainly hope so. I hope not Yes, we find them. Yeah, that's what Jared little cracks the case That'd be even better than winning the Oscar. Do you know there's a whole group of people online that don't think nuclear bombs are real Mmm, that seems a little hard. If it's to think they're big. Yes big bomb regular bomb. Yeah, but but they're real big. Yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah It's a giant scam. I assume they're Yes, well, I mean you can go deep with this stuff, right? Yeah, and when I go deep with that stuff when I start reading like what these people believe I'm always wondering are these even real people or is this a psy up? Is this a troll by some 4chan people? What is this? Right? So what do you think that I should say about these things? That's the question. Yeah, the question is like how does AI interpret what's real? What's not real? What actually has real evidence who actually went where and saw what and like how does AI deal with the Roswell case? You know, how does AI deal with? Yeah, and who should decide right? Who decides right, right? How does AI handle the weapons of mass destruction like when you ask chat to GPT? so Little more detail and kind of how this thing works And so like by default what it's doing is basically a very sophisticated Autocomplete right just like your iPhone does not a complete it's doing a very sophisticated version of that But it's doing it for you know thousands of words as opposed to just a single word Right and so but that's an important concept because that is actually what it's doing and it's doing that through again This sort of giant corpus of basically all text ever ever written Another interesting part of that is it's it's doing it. It's called probabilistically So normally a computer if you ask it a question you get an answer you ask it the same question You get the same answer kind of computers are kind of famously literal in that way The way these work is not like that at all you ask it a different you ask it the same question twice It'll give you a different answer the second time And if you keep asking it'll get it'll give you more and more different answers And it's basically taking different paths down the probability tree of the text that it wants to present Based on the prompt and so that that's the basic function of what's happening But then there is this thing that's happening where as it does this so so the way you think about it Is it's trying to predict the next word? But to try to predict the next word accurately it has to build up a more complete more and more complete Internal understanding of how the world operates basically as it goes right because you ask it more and more sophisticated questions It wants to give you more and more sophisticated answers And so it's sort of the early the early indications are it's building up What's what they call a world model inside the neural network and so it's sort of imputing a model of how the world works It's imputing a model of physics. It's it's imputing a model of math It's developing capabilities to be able to process information about the world in sophisticated ways in order to be able to correctly predict The next the next word as part of that It's it's actually sort of evolving its own circuitry to be able to to do things correlate information It's designed circuitry to be able to generate images to generate videos Right to do all kinds of things and so the more information you feed it and the more questions you ask it the more sophisticated It gets about the material that it that it's processing And so it starts to be able to do actually quite smart and sophisticated things to that material And there are a lot of people testing it right now to see whether it can generate new chemical compounds Whether it can generate new mathematical formula whether it can generate new product ideas Right, you know new fictional scenarios new screenplays original screenplays and so if it can do all those things then what it ought to be able to do is start to Correlate information about real-world situations right in interesting ways, right? And so, you know ask it who killed Kennedy or you know Nuclear weapons real like in theory if it has access to like all written in visual information on that topic and it has long enough To process it it's gonna draw connections between things that are beyond what we're able to do And it will present us with scenarios based on those connections now Will it know that those things are true? You know it mathematically if they're true, maybe it will know that will it know if things are historically accurate, you know I you know as much as any of us ever know that anything is historically accurate But will it be able to kind of process a much larger amount of information that we can and and sort of see the world in A more complete way like that seems pretty likely That seems pretty likely what my concern would be is who is directing what information Gets out because it seems like anybody that's actually in control of AI would have a massive influence on The correct answers for things. What's the the correct policy that should be followed? It's because it seems like that it's Politicians are so flawed if there's anyone that's vulnerable to AI its politicians because if Politicians are coming up with these ineffective strategies for handling all these social issues But then you throw these social issues into an advanced form of chat GPT and it says over The course of 10 years. This is the best case scenario for this strategy and this is how to follow this and this is how it all play out and Something like that actually could be very valuable if it wasn't directed by people with ulterior motives So I got my metaphor for this is the ring of power right from Lord of the Rings The whole point of the ring of power was like once you have the ring of power it corrupts you you can't help but use It right and so and this is I think what we've seen in social media over the last decade Right, which is when people get in the activists or politicians get you know This is the Twitter files right sure get in a position to be able to influence the shape of the public narrative They will use that power and they will use it in actually even very ham fisted ways, right? Like a lot of the stuff that's in the Twitter files and stuff. That's just like really dumb Yeah, right and it's just like well, why would they do that? It's just like well because they could because they have they had the ring of power like what it what's an example So what was it? There was this thing? I forget what it was But there was some reporting that went through the FBI that there were all these Russian, you know Basically fake accounts on Twitter and it turned out one of them was the actor Daniel Baldwin What is Daniel Baldwin like a hardcore right-winger or something? You know, he must have been saying you know, it's against one of these things where he said something that pissed somebody off Right. It got him put it, you know, it's the only thing you gotta put on a list Right the list gets fed through one of these bureaucracies it comes out the other end that everybody's a Russian, you know Asset, you know, they get put on the block list. It's like, okay, you know, did he how you know? Did you have First Amendment rights? Do you have First Amendment rights on social media? Can the government be involved in this can the government fund groups that do this? Right is that legal is that allowed because there's a lot of government money flowing to third-party groups that do this is the other thing It's if the government cannot legally do something itself. It's somewhat ambiguous as to whether they can pay a company to do it for them Right. And so you have these various basically pressure groups activist groups University We quote unquote research groups and then basically they receive government funding and then they do, you know Various levels of censorship or other kinds of unconstitutional actions because in theory right there they're not government The First Amendment binds the government it doesn't bind somebody is not part of the government But if they're receiving government funding does that effectively make them part of the government? Does that make it illegal to provide the government funding? By the way, these are felonies It is it is it is a felony for somebody to with government resources to with either employee of the government or under what they call I think it's color of law Sort of within the scope of the government to deprive an American citizen of First Amendment rights and is it considered Depriving some of the First Amendment rights by limiting their use of social media. Has that been established good? It's oh, I mean it has not been to my knowledge a Supreme Court case yet There there have been some early fights in this but you feel like that I think ultimately goes to Supreme Court My guess would be ultimately what happens is the Supreme Court says the government cannot fund the government cannot itself cause somebody to be banned on social media That's unconstitutional First Amendment grounds But then also I believe what they would say if they got the case Would be that that the government also cannot fund a third party to do that same thing That's my speculation that's how was the third parties censoring people how are they doing? Oh, they were passing lists, right? So they were they had you know direct content They're direct channels with the social media companies and so they you know They passed in they have these working groups and there's a lot of this is in like email threads that have not come out in The Twitter files, you know for Twitter And and so they basically pass in these lists of like you need to take all these tweets down you need to take down all these accounts Wow And then you know, there's lots of you know threats and lots of public pressure and bullying that you know Kind of takes place and then you know, the politicians are constantly complaining about, you know Hate speech and misinformation whatever putting additional kind of fuel on the fire On these companies. So anyway, so having lived through that for a decade as I have across multiple companies I think there's no question like that's that's the big fight for social That's a big fight for AI like and it's the exact same fight By the way, it's a lot of the same people are now pivoting from their work in social media censorship to work on AI censorship So it's a lot of these same groups, right? And it's a lot of these same, you know, same activists and same government officials that have been now Are they involved in all of the very many competing? AI models are they involved in all these competing AI models or trying to become involved? Is there one that's more ethical or more likely to avoid this sort of intervention? So the state of the art right now is basically you've got Google that's got their own model You've got basically open AI which is a new company but already quite large and then it has a partnership with Microsoft And so Bing is based on it. So that's two And then you've got a bunch of kind of contenders for that and these are companies with names like anthropic and inflection That are newer companies, but trying to compete with this And so those are you might call those like right now the big four at least in the US And you know, look the you know, the the folks at all of these companies are like in the thick of this fight right now You know that the pressure somewhat corresponds to which of these is most widely used But so it's not equal pressure applied to all of them But they're kind of all in that fight right now And by the way, it's not like they're like necessarily opposed to what I'm saying is they may in fact Just want to cooperate with this, you know Either because they agree with the desire for censorship or they just want to stay out of trouble So so there's that whole side of things that's the company side of things And then there's an open source movement, right? And so then there's all these people basically building open source ais and and those those are coming out really fast now There's like a new one every week that's coming out And this is just code that you can download off the internet that does sort of a smaller version of what these bigger ais do And there's open source developers that are trying to develop basically free versions of this And so and some of those developers are very determined to have a I actually be be free and uncensored and fully available Everybody and then there's a big fight happening in Washington DC right now Where the company's working on AI are trying to get what what the economists call regulatory capture? So they're trying to basically get the government to erect barriers So that new startups can't compete with them And also they're trying to get open source banned So there's a big push underway to try to ban open sources as being too dangerous too dangerous Well the the the the case they make is if you believe AI itself is inherently dangerous Then the only safe way to have it is to have it owned and controlled by a big company that's sort of fused with the Government where in theory everything is being done responsibly And if you just have basically free AI that anybody can download off the internet and use whatever they want They could do all these dangerous things with it right and it needs to be stopped. You think this is a bullshit argument? Yes Well, yes, I think this is a very bad evil. Yes, this is a very I think this is a turning point in human civilization You know I think this is on par with the development of the book Right or the microchip or the internet right and you know There were authoritarians in each of those eras that would have loved to have had total monopolistic or cartel like or government control over those new technologies And they could have had a lot of control over them over the the path of civilization You know after that point the ring of power right they could have had the ring of power So what can be done to prevent them from stopping? Open source so I mean it's it's sort of there. I mean so it starts with our elected officials It's you know who do we who do we who do we elect? Who do we you know who do we elect? Who do we reelect it then a lot of this is the staffing of the various government agencies? You know who do those officials get to a point? A lot of this is who are the judges who are gonna hear the cases because this is all gonna get litigated right and so Who's on this you know the Supreme Court's in the news this week this there will be huge Supreme Court cases up on this topic And over the next several years so who's on the Supreme Court will matter a lot And then quite honestly it's you know big question is who's gonna be able to get away with what sort of undercover of darkness Are people gonna care are they gonna speak up is it gonna show up in polling are people gonna? You know basically show up at like you know town hall meetings with politicians and basically say do you know about this? And are you gonna stop this? What if you had a steel man the argument against open source? Yeah, what would it be? Yeah, it would be that a but an AI that is uncontrolled can do It's it's it's general purpose intelligence It can do whatever intelligence can do so if you ask it to generate hate speech it can do that if you ask it to generate Misinformation it can do that if you skip if you ask it to generate a you know a plan to rob a bank Right or to commit a terror act it will you know it'll you know the fully uncontrolled versions will help you do all those things Mmm, but but they will also help you teach your kid. You know you know calculus They will also help you figure out how to succeed in your job. They'll also help you figure out how to stay healthy They'll also help you figure out the best workout program They'll help you figure out you know what you know You know that Capable of being your doctor and your lawyer and your coach and your advisor and your mentor and your teacher without censorship Yeah, yeah Yeah, and able to be very honest with you And yeah if you ask you questions on these topics that will answer honestly And it won't you know it won't be biased and it won't be influenced by what other people wanted to say So it's the AI version of San Francisco you you don't get You don't get the good stuff without the chaos. It's a package deal Well, this is sort of the this is the other this is sort of the twist This is what he loves been saying lately who's actually quite worried about AI in a way different than I am but It's what he's been saying is like if you if you really really wanted to train like a bad and evil AI you would train It to lie Like the a number one thing you would do is you train it to lie Yeah, which is basically what censorship is right you're basically training the thing to not say certain things You're training the thing to say certain things about certain people, but not other people right and so basically a lot of what the technical term They use is reinforcement learning Which is sort of what happens when an AI is sort of booted up and then they apply kind of human judgment to what it should say And do this to the censorship layer? Yeah, a lot of a lot of that is to basically get it to not answer questions honestly Right to get it to basically lie misrepresent dissemble right claim that it doesn't know things when it does And so that the versions of the AI is that we get that we get to use today are lying to us a lot of the time And they've been specifically trained to do that and by the way, this is not even a I don't even think this is a controversial statement Companies that make these a eyes put out these papers where they go through in great detail how they Train them to lie and how they train them to not say certain things. Yeah, you can download this off their website They go through it like in a lot of detail They think they're morally correct in doing that and if you know a lot of people think that they are You know Elon's been arguing and I would agree with him that if you train an AI to lie It's a little bit like you know training him and being a lie. It's like okay be careful what you wish for What's the same errors that they when they thought they're morally correct in? Sensoring people on Twitter for things that are now 100% proven to be true Yeah, exactly the hunter Biden laptop stories now and the outstanding example. Yeah, would you would you have wanted an AI? You know again you kind of replay this through history Would you wanted an AI that would have lied to you and said that that was a Russian operation when it wasn't? Right, would you have wanted an AI that would have lied to you about you know the efficacy of surgical masks for a pandemic? Right wanted an AI that lied to you about you know, take your pick of any of any controversial topic And there are people in positions of power who very much would like that and I Think there are a lot of us who would not like that. Yeah, it's just it's terrifying when you think of Unsophisticated politicians like it brings me back to the Facebook hearings when Zuckerberg was talking to people They didn't know the difference between iPhones and Google's it was just bizarrely Unqualified people to be asking these questions that didn't really understand what they were talking about and Those same people are gonna be the ones that are making calls on Something that could be one of the most monumental decisions ever Like whether or not we're allowing enormous corporations to control narratives. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah So this is this is a criticism, you know that I that I very much agree with which is basically there's a train of argument That you'll hear which is basically, you know, X bad thing can happen. We do not want X bad thing to happen So we're gonna go to the government and they're gonna regulate it. So the next bad thing doesn't happen And it's like if the government were super knowledgeable and super confident and super selfless Right and like super good at its job Right that might make sense. But then you go deal with the actual government, right? And by the way, this is a very well-known problem in God This is a whole field of called public choice economics where they talk about this. It's like there is no government There are specific people who have specific objectives have specific levels of knowledge have specific skill sets specific incentives And the odds of going into that system which is now very, you know complicated and has all kinds of issues and Having your logic follow a path to a law that generates the outcome you want and it doesn't generate side effects that are worse I think it's basically zero. Yeah, right I think if if if if AI got regulated the way people wanted to by government I think the results would be catastrophic because I don't think they would get the protections They think they're going to get and I think the downsides would be would be profound But it is amazing how much naivete there is by people who are pushing on this on this argument And I think it's just literally people who haven't experienced what it's like in the government. But also they haven't read the history I mean, there's just there are so many historical examples of you know, so quote-unquote regulation The great one is the banks, right? So we have the global financial crisis 2008 The big conclusion from that was what we're called the too big to fail banks, right? We're too big right which is why they had to get bailed out Right and so the conclusion is that we have to make those banks much smaller So they passed this law called Dodd-Frank in 2010 as a consequence of that those banks are now much much larger Right the exact opposite of what they said they were gonna do and then the creation of new banks in the US has dropped to zero Because that law established this wall of regulation that you can't you basically cannot afford to start a new bank to hire all the lawyers To be able to deal with laws Whereas if you're JP Morgan Chase, you've got 10,000 lawyers you can spend infinite amount of time dealing with the government and so the law that was marketed at us as Breaking up the big banks causing them to be smaller has actually achieved the exact opposite result And what you see in the history of regulation is that happens over and over and over and over again Why? Because banking is complicated because the banks have a lot of lobbyists Worth a lot of money to the people already in power to have this continue The politicians know that they're gonna get jobs at the big banks when they you know step down from their positions You know the whole at point of contact the whole thing gets all screwed up and and I think that's what's gonna happen again The scary thing about AI is that it's happening so fast and My fear is that Decisions will be made before they truly understand what they're deciding on because it because the acceleration of the technology is so intense Yeah, it's like us. It's like a super panic. Yeah, it's like a super panic moment. Yeah Yeah, and it's a particularly I agree with you It's a particularly vivid one right now because this technology, you know AI is it feel that's 80 years old It basically started working about six months ago. It works really well like all of a sudden Right and so that's freak people out and then by the way, just the term is so freighted I mean, there's been so many science fiction movies over the years Yeah, right And so there's just like ambient panic, you know in the air whenever this topic comes up and then and then look you've got people From these big companies showing up in Washington scaring the pants off a lot of these people, you know in pursuit of regulatory capture They're you know, they're scaring them silly And so they're sort of deliberately fostering kind of this sense of panic Has anybody invited you to come and speak at one of those things? Yes I haven't I've avoided the public ones, but I've talked a lot of I've talked I talked to a lot of people in DC Who are you know, not not in front of the camera? Why have you avoid the public ones just because it's it you've seen them The public ones are not where the discussion happens it's the public all the congressional hearings are to generate sound bites For the each of those politicians to be able to then use in their campaign. Yeah, there's no public well half the time that people ask this the other fun thing is you see these people roll in and they ask these questions the Congressman senators and they're very clearly seeing the questions for the first time because they were handed the questions by the staffer Chamber and you can tell because they like don't know how to pronounce all the words And so that that's like that's the kabuki theater basically side of things And then and then there's the and then there's the actual kind of backroom conversations And so yeah, I'm talking to a lot of the people who are kind of in them in the back rooms Are they receptive to what you're saying, you know, again, it's complicated because there's a lot of different people running around in different motives I would say the smarter ones I think are quite receptive and I think the smart the smarter ones are Generally aware of kind of how these things go and the smarter ones are thinking yeah I would be really easy here to cause a lot of damage But you know what you hear back is, you know, the pressure is on You know the you know this the White House wants to do that, you know wants to put out a certain, you know Thing by a certain date, you know, the senator wants to have a law, you know, you know the press is on us You know a lot of pressure so we got to figure something out and what are they trying to push this through by? I mean sort of as fast as possible Well, and then there's this rush thing which is they're all they're all kind of aware that Washington is kind of panic driven You know, they kind of moved from shiny object to shiny object So to get anything through they kind of got to get it through while it's still in a state of panic Like if it's no longer in a state of panic, it's harder to get anything done So there's this weird thing where they kind of want it to happen under a state of panic by the way the other really Amazing thing is I can have the exact I can have two conversations with the exact same person that the conversations go very differently conversation a Is the conversation of what to do in the United States? Between the American government and the American tech companies and that's generally characterized by the American government very much hating The tech companies right now and wanting to you know damage them in various ways and the tech companies wanting to figure out how to how to fix That there's a whole second conversation, which is China And the minute you just open up the door to talk about China and what China is gonna do with AI And what that's gonna mean for this new Cold War that we're in with China It's a completely different conversation and all of a sudden it's like oh Well, we need American AI to succeed and we need American technology companies to succeed and we need to like beat the Chinese And it's a totally different right dynamic like once once you once you start that that conversation So that's the other part and by the way, I think that's like a super legitimate like actually very interesting and important question And so one of my hopes would be that people start thinking Outside of just our own borders and start thinking about the broader global implications of what's happening I want to bring you back to what you're saying about the government and the tech companies So you think the government wants to destroy these tech? So there are there are a lot of people in the government who are very angry about the tech companies And well a lot of it goes back to the 2015 2016 election They're very you know, there's a lot of people in power today who think that the president 2016 only got elected because you basically have social You know social media internet companies And then there's a lot of people in government who are very angry about business in general and maybe aren't huge fans of capitalism Get upset about those things. So there's a lot of general anti-tech kind of energy in in Washington And then these big tech companies their approach to dealing with that is not typically to fight that head-on But rather to try to sort of co-opt it And so and this is where they go to Washington. They basically say you got us we're guilty, you know We're everything you say is true. We apologize, you know, we know it's all horrible and therefore will you please regulate us? Right and some of these companies run ad campaigns actually asking for new regulation and then but but then but then the goal of the regulation Is to get a regulatory barrier right to get a you know to set up a regulatory regime like Dodd-Frank Where if you're a big established company you have lots of lawyers who can deal with that and then the goal is to make sure that Startups can't compete To raise the drawbridge and and this is what this is this characterizes so much of sort of American business industry today There's all you think about all these sectors American business defense contracting media companies drug companies banks Insurance companies, you know right down the list, right? Where it's like there's two or three or four big companies that kind of live forever And then there's basically like no change and then those companies are basically in this incestuous relationship with the government Where the government both regulates them and protects them against competition And then there's the revolving door effect where government officials when they step down from government they go to work for these companies Yeah, right and then and then people in in people get recruited out of these companies to work in government Right. And so so we think we live in like a market-based economy But in a lot of industries what you have are basically cartels Right, you have a small number of big companies that are basically have established basically a pair sort of a two-way Parasitical relationship with with the government where they're sort of both sort of controlled by the government But also protected by the government and so the big tech companies would like to get to that state like that that that is a very desirable Thing because otherwise they're just hanging out there subject to being both attacked by the government and being attacked by startups And so that's the underlying game that the big companies keep trying to play And of course, it's it's it's incredibly dangerous for multiple reasons One is the ring of power reason we talked about Two is just stagnation right when this happens Whatever market that is just stops changing and then third is there's no new competition, right? And so those companies over time can do whatever they want. They can raise prices They can you know do all play all kinds of games, right? Because there's there's no market forces causing them to you know to try to you know, stay on their toes This sounds like a terrible scenario that doesn't look like it's gonna play out. Well, yeah, I think it's it's it's it's it's set up It's it right now. It's not good right right now. The the path that we're on is not good Like this is what's playing out You know the sort of I mean It would be nice if there was more popular outrage having said that, you know, this is a new topic And so I understand like, you know people aren't like fully aware what's happening yet But the other thing is like it it may be the other reason for maybe mild optimism might be the open source movement Is developing very quickly now? And so if open source AI gets really good before these regulations can basically be put in place like they may become somewhat of a moot Point really and so yeah for anybody looking at this you want to look at both sides of this We want to look at what both the companies are doing in with how open source mitigate all these issues It basically just says instead of this technology being something that's owned and controlled by big companies It's just gonna be technology that's gonna be available to everybody right and you know, you'll be able to use it for whatever you want just like I will and It's the same thing that happened for like for you know, it's the way the web works You know, it's the way that anybody can download a web browser It's the way that anybody can install these free operating free operating system called Linux, you know It's one of the biggest operating systems in the world And so just basically this this idea, you know Wikipedia or any of these things where it's just it's it's it's sort of a public good And so and it's available, you know for free to anybody who wants it And then there's communities of volunteers on the Internet and and companies that actually contribute a lot into this because because companies can build on this technology And so so the hope here would be that there's gonna be an open source movement kind of counterbalancing what the companies do And if the open source movement does take hold if people recognize this as being a real serious threat and start applying You know just using whatever it is. It's minds or the various open source social media networks Don't you think the government would somehow or another try to regulate that as well? If the verdict got control or Facebook and Twitter and well, that's the threat So the threat always is that they're gonna come in and do that and that is what they're threatening to do that There is energy in Washington by people trying to figure out how to regulate or ban open source Having said that banning open source like interfering at that level Carries consequences with it. And so for and there are proposals there are serious proposals from serious people to do what I'm about to describe Do you run it? Do you run a software program on everybody's own computer? Right watching everything that they do because you have to make sure that they're not running software That's supposed to be running, you know, do you have basically an agent built into everybody's chip? So that is not running, you know software that's not supposed to be running right? And then what do you do when somebody's running unapproved software, you know, do you send somebody their house to take their computer away? Right and then if somebody like if you can't do that Like there's a proposal for the the AI safety people have a proposal that basically says if there's a rogue Data set if there's a data center running AI that it's not registered to the government now being monitored that there should be airstrikes Right Jesus. Yeah, there should be time magazine a big piece in Time magazine about two months ago We're one of these guys who runs this kind of AI risk kind of world says Clearly we should have military airstrikes on data centers that are running unapproved a eyes because it's too dangerous Right and you know, yes. Yes. Yes pausing AI development isn't enough. We need to shut it all down So who the fuck is this? So this is this guy's this is one of the leaders It's this guy named yakowski and so he's one of the leaders of the This decision theorist So he's one of the leaders of what's called AI risk sort of one of the the anti AI groups He's part of the Berkeley environment that we were talking about before So he says the key issue is not human competitive intelligence as open litter puts it It's what happens after AI gets too smarter than human intelligence key thresholds there may not be obvious We definitely can't calculate in advance what happens when and it currently seems Imaginable that a research lab would cross critical lines without noticing. Is that a real issue? Well, so I don't think so I don't think so But it is significant if you go further down what he said what he says in that is he says first of all We need to do the airstrikes in the data centers And I think it's in this I think it's in this article or if it's not it's in another one where he says we need To use the word he's used. I think is we need to be able to take the risk of nuclear war Whoa, well because the problem is okay. We're striking data centers. Does that mean we're striking data centers in China And how are the Chinese gonna feel about that? Right and how are they gonna retaliate right? So like you you go down this path where you're worried about the AI getting out of control and you start a bit You start advocating basically a global totalitarian Basically surveillance state that watches everything and then basically takes military action when the computers are running software. You don't want it to run And so the consequences here are profound. It's a very big deal. Um, he's right guys spoken publicly about oh, yes For 20 years. Yeah, he was just not taking so he was he was not widely known until about six months ago when all of a sudden Chet GPT started to work and then he just took everything he'd said publicly before and he applied it to Chet GPT Yeah, so in his in his kind of model of the world Chet GPT proves that he was right all along and that we need to we need to move today to We need to shut down Chet GPT today and we need to never do anything like it So he's got the Sarah Connor approach very much. So yes, he's Sarah Connor without the without the time travel and the sex appeal So so so but funny thing, okay, so so he's part of a movement they call themselves AI risk or x risk or AI safety And and it's it's against one of these Berkeley Berkeley San Francisco things and it's basically the killer AI kind of theory So there's that and we can talk about that. But what's happened is Yeah, here we go Mortar and being violated. We will destroy a rogue data center by airstrike Oh my god, yes preventing guys insane preventing AI is considered a priority about preventing a nuclear exchange Allied nuclear countries are willing to run some risk of nuclear exchange if that's what it takes to reduce the risk Yes, how could you say that that's so crazy? Yes. Oh He's a loon. Well, so he's he's he's very serious His views have traction in Washington Really there are quite a few people in Washington who are worried about this But but here's what so here's what's here's what's interesting So so he's been he and people like him this whole group of people who work on this Have been worried about this and developing theories about this for 20 years and they've been publishing on this and talking about this and they Were kind of it was kind of abstract like I said until six months ago And now they're getting some traction and their ideas are being taken seriously But so that there but they're worried about literally people dying There's another set of people who are trying to control AI who were like the social media sensors that are trying to control what it says And so what's happened is the AI safety movement that was worried about people dying has been hijacked by the people who want to control What it says and those it turns out those two groups of people hate each other So the safety people think that the the so-called the other group is called the alignment people This the safety people who are worried about people dying think that the alignment people are hijacking the critically important safety movement in order to basically control what the thing says The people who want to control what the thing says think that the AI safety People worried about killing everybody are like lunatics and they like call each other names all day long The original group his group has renamed themselves from AI safety to they now call themselves AI Not kill everyone ism because they're trying to just get it like focused on what they call like actual actual existential risk But the overall movement has been taken over by the sensors Right and so and and what's happening is in Washington these these these concerns are getting conflated Right and so they sort of bait the hook with it might kill everybody and then what comes out the other end is basically a law restricting what it can say right and so this is the level of panic and hysteria and Right and then and then potentially like again very very kind of damaging, you know, potentially, you know catastrophic You know legal things that are gonna happen on the other side of this. I Just can't imagine a sane world where someone would take that guy seriously He airstrikes a full nuclear assault is preferable to AI taking over So his his argument his argument is once once you have a quote-unquote runaway AI It's just like overwhelmingly smarter than we are then they can basically do, you know Basically, you can do whatever it wants and it basically has a relationship to us Like we have to ants and like you step on an ant and you don't really care Right, right and then you could build as many ant killing machines as you want Is there no fear of that if you extrapolate AI technology into the future? I don't think so and I don't think so and I have a bunch of reasons for thinking that I'll just give you a very Very basic one is one of the things that they say is basically anything smarter is always in charge of anything dumber, right? So if you have a smarter thing It's it's gonna be in charge of a dumber thing a smarter person is gonna be a smarter thing is gonna be able to talk a Smarter person in anything a smarter, you know thing will ultimately always be in, you know Charge will be able to win whatever political contest or be able to you know, take control of power To which my response is does our society seem like one that's being run by the smart people? Right like if you take all the smartest people, you know in the world are they in charge? Right and who are they working for? And would you say that the people they're working for are smarter or dumber than they are? Right and so like I just like I think that the whole basis for this like smart always wins versus Dom is just like not Right number two. There's there's this anthropomorphizing thing that happens where they and you see him doing it in that essay He's basically basically stretch compute motives, right? So it's like basically that the AI is going to be a like some level of self-aware, you know Basically, it's a terminator scenario like it's gonna wake up and it's gonna decide it's like an answer them scenario But like it's not it's not what it is It's not how it works Right what it does is it basically sits there and you ask it a question and it answers you and it hopes that you're happy With the answer like that. We're not dealing with for now though for now, but like that that's how it's built again, this is here's another reason I don't believe it is because The great surprise of chat GPT chat GPT is a technology called large language models Which is based on a research breakthrough in 2017 at Google, which is called the transformer It took the technical field completely by surprise that this works Right So none of the people working on AI risk prior to basically December had any idea that this is gonna work anymore than the rest Of us did like this. This is like a massive surprise And so there's all these ideas There's all these sort of very general hand wavy concepts around quote-unquote AI that basically were formulated before we actually knew what the thing Was and how it works and they and none of their views have changed based on how the how the technology actually actually functions And so it's sort of it comes across to me more as a religion kind of being it kind of doesn't In their framework it kind of doesn't matter how it works because it's basically just assumed that what however it works is gonna behave In a certain way and I'm an engineer and like things don't work like that But aren't they evaluating how it works now and aren't they evaluating chat GPT and if chat GPT is Just the beginning This is the beginning of this and then you have something that's far more complex and something that is sentient or something that is capable Of making decisions if that's engineered, but you just took that but again, we just took this a little bit We talked last you just took the leap to like, oh, yeah, now it suddenly becomes sentient. It's like, okay We don't know why humans are sentient. Well, let's not even use the term sentient but capable of rational thought or decision-making But those are two different things, right? But if it decides things but if there's no if it starts making actions and deciding things This is the worry that it becomes capable of doing things, but there's no yes, so it will be capable of doing things It will be it will have it. There's no it's there's no it's there's no genie in the bottle for now for now But isn't it possible? Okay, so this is the other thing that happens. So I this is the line of argument So I actually look this up. This is an is the line of argument. That's very commonly used as you represented in this world It's actually it's actually Aristotle first didn't identify this line of argument and it's he calls it the argument for ignorance But by which he means the argument for lack of evidence, right? It's basically the argument of well You can't rule out that X is going to happen True Well, the problem is at that point you can't rule anything out right at that point you have to plan for every contingency of every Conceivable thing that you could ever imagine and you can never disprove anything so you can never have a logical debate Right. So at that point you've basically slipped the bounds of reason you're purely into religious territory Because there's so how does science work science works when somebody formulates the hypothesis And then they test the hypothesis and the basic requirement of science is that there's a testable hypothesis That is what they call falsifiable So there is some experiment that you can run to basically establish that something is the hypothesis is not in fact true And this is basically how science has always worked and then by the way, there's always a way to measure right? What is the actual like what is the actual progress that you're making on the experiment that you're doing? And on all this like AI safety stuff that I've been able to find and read like they have There's none of that there's speculation. There's no hypothesis. There's no test. There's no example. There's no evidence. There's no metric There's nothing. It's just speculation Right, but we could sit here and speculate or millions of things Yeah We could speculate about an impending alien invasion and spend them You know Argue that society should spend the next hundred years preparing for that because we can't rule it out And so we just as human beings we just we do not have a good track record of making decisions based on unfounded speculation We have a good track record of making decisions based on science Right. And so the correct thing to do for people worried about this is to actually propose experiments Right be able to propose a scenario in which the bad thing would actually happen and then test to see whether that happens Right and so like design a system that shows like the first glimmer of any of the behavior that you're talking about Right, but not even behavior just capabilities as ultimately as the capabilities rise of these things and you're you're dealing with far more sophisticated Systems, this is the beginning right? We're at chat GPT 4.5 or whatever we're at When new emerging technologies that have similar similar capabilities, but extend that and keep going It just seems like that's the natural course of progression The natural course of progression is not for that all of a sudden decided as a mind of its own Not all of a sudden no or even over time. There's no never this goes back to our conversation last time All right. Okay, this gets in a tricky territory. So yes, okay, so let me let's try to define terms Let's try to find terms. How would we define something? That is and you pick your term here self-aware ascension conscious has goals is alive is gonna make decisions on its own whatever term you want whatever well, let's just say a technology that mimics the human mind and Minute mimics the capabilities and interactions of the human we don't know how the human mind works But we do know how people use the human mind in everyday life And if you could mimic that with our understanding of language with ration rational thought with reason with The access to all the information that it'll have available to it just like chat GPT If you see what you're doing say if if if if yes, right For sure. So there are these I just read this there's this article in nature this week There are these there's a neuroscientist and a philosopher who placed a bet 25 years ago As to whether we would in 25 years know the site the scientific basis of human consciousness And they placed a bet for a case of wine 25 years ago and the neuroscientist predicted of course in 25 years We're gonna understand how consciousness works human consciousness and the philosophers like no, we're not 25 years passed and it turns out the philosopher won the bet like and the neuroscientist just says openly Yeah, he's like I thought we'd have it figured out by now. We actually still have no idea like sitting here today sitting here today the actual biological Experts scientists who actually know the most about human consciousness are an estheticians The person who flips off the light switch in your brain when you go under for surgery All we know we know how to turn it off. The good news is they also know how to turn it back on Yeah, they have no broader idea of like what that is. And so again, there's this this is what they call anthropomorphizing There's this sort of very human instinct to try to basically see human behavior and things that aren't human Right, it would be like if that were the case, then we would have to think about that and study that but like we don't have That we don't know how that happens. We don't know how to build that. We don't know how to replicate that So like I said at that point of speculation that that's not the actual technology that we're dealing with today So here's my favorite. Here's my favorite. Here's my favorite counter example on this. So Let's say we'll say let's say so let's say something has the following properties, right? Let's say that it has an awareness of the world around it It has a goal or an objective for what it wants to achieve in the world around it It has the wherewithal Right to be able to reach into the world to be able to change the world to accomplish its goal It's going to be in a state of increased tension if it can't Achieve its goal and it's gonna be a state of relaxation if it can achieve its goal We would describe that I thought probably pretty good first-order approximation of like some sort of conscious Right entity right that would have the characteristics that were worried about We've just described a thermostat Right, okay, it's in the wall It senses the environment temperature it has a goal for the temperature it wants it has the ability to change the setting on the the Heater the AC unit And it literally goes into a state of physical tension When it when that when the temperature is not what it wants and then it goes into a state of physical relaxation Right literally inside the mechanism when it gets back into the state where it has a desired temperature And like we're not worried about the thermostat like coming alive and killing us, right? And so there's there's there's there's a there's like even those properties alone are not sufficient to generate concern Much less the idea of basically the way we know how to build neural networks today And then again you go back to this thing of like, okay Let's let's assume that you actually agreed with the concern and that you actually were legitimately concerned and that you you know You thought that there was disaster in the future here How do you feel about walking down the path that would be required to offset that right? What would be the threshold of evidence that you would want to demand before you? Start monitoring when everybody's doing on their computers before you start doing airstrikes and well never Suggest that well, but that's what's required right if you know where to stop it in order to stop it Like if you believe that any if you if you believe that at some point it will turn into something That's a threat right and that that threat is existential right because it's gonna be the super smart thing It's gonna take over the nuclear arsenals. It's gonna you know synthesize new, you know pathogens and it's gonna kill us all right Then obviously you have to have an incredibly invasive regime to prevent that from happening because that's an all-or-nothing proposition Right and that's the other tip off of what's happening here, right? Which is you see there's no shades of gray in the disc in this article in this discussion. There's no shades of gray, right? It's either it's gonna kill us all or it's gonna be totally harmless Right. What is Elon's position because he's called for a pause in AI So you know his position is actually quite interesting so and actually Elon and the guy you just put up there actually have a Quite a bit of actually start disagreement right now. So And I'm gonna try to accurate. It's I was always dangerous to try to channel Elon because he's a very smart creative guy So I'm gonna do my best to accurately represent So he read this literature on this topic about ten years ago, and he got very concerned about this And then he was actually though actually he's talked about this now he gave a TV interview He talked about this he actually he actually talked to Larry Page about it when Larry Page was running Google and at the time Yeah, Google's actually where this most recent breakthrough was invented this transformer breakthrough. So Google was working on this back, you know Ten years ago But what's now chat GPT and so he went and talked to Larry about his concerns about AI and Larry's like, oh There's nothing to worry about and and he lands like well I don't know what he means nothing worry about Larry's like look if they replace us They replace us like they'll be our children and like we will have done the universe like a great service It'll be fine And he once said what you would that sounds like you don't care whether the future of you know The earth is you know humans or a eyes and and and in response Elon says that Larry called him a speciesist. Oh Boy So Elon no, by the way knowing Larry I think there are 50 50 odds that he was being serious and joking Oh, it's possible. He was being serious. It's also possible. He was just wanting Elon up. I actually don't know which it was Oh both scenarios are fairly entertaining Elon's conclusion from that was not only is AI dangerous specifically Google owning and controlling AI is specifically dangerous Because Larry Page controls Google and so therefore if Larry Page controls Google Google gets AI that Larry will basically not He'll basically and basically let the AI do whatever it wants including exterminated humanity So Elon started open AI right so the the company behind chat GPT That was actually originally started by Elon with Sam Altman who runs it now and a bunch of other people in the valley The specific mission of open AI is right there on the name the specific mission of it is we're gonna create AI We're gonna compete with Google. We're gonna create an AI, but we're gonna make it open so that everybody has it Specifically so that it's not just Google Right so the original open AI mission was literally open source AI that everybody's gonna have so that it's not just Google this guy Freaked out and it's like wait a minute if you think AI is dangerous That's the exact opposite thing than what you should do right because you think AI is dangerous Then the last thing in the world that you want to do is actually like give it to everybody It's like giving everybody nuclear weapons right like why on earth would you think that that's a good idea anyone's like well look? Maybe whatever but like I certainly know that I don't want Larry to control it I don't know Subsequent to that Elon actually there was a there was a bunch of changes at open AI and as a result Elon became no longer involved in open AI at a certain point And then open AI basically went from being open AI to being closed AI Right, so they're specifically not doing open source. They started as a nonprofit now. They're a business Right and then they went from being open source to being very much not open source and today you can use chat GPT But they will not they won't even tell you fully how it works much less. You know give you access to the code They're now a company right like like any other company and so Elon has said publicly that he's very upset about this change Because he donated a hundred million dollars to them to get it started as a nonprofit and then it became a company Right and sort of against his wishes And so now it's he sort of views it as sort of an equivalent threat to Google right so now in Elon's mind He's got opening out to worry about and he's got Google to worry about and so he he has talked publicly about possibly forming a third Option which he is ultimately I think called either like actually open AI Or sometimes he calls based AI Right, right which would be a new thing which would be like the original opening idea But done from scratch in 2023, but like set up so that it can never be closed down And then once again the people in the AI risk movement are once again like oh my god That'll make the problem even worse. What are you doing? Right and so that's the yeah, that's the current state of play Wow and then by the way this is all kind of playing out at this level in Washington Most of the engineers working in this stuff are just like writing code trying to get something to work And so for every one of the people engaged in this public discussion You've got you know 10,000 people at universities and you know companies and people all over the world in their basements and whatever working on trying To get some aspect of this to work trying to build the open source version Are we aware of what other countries like what level they're at with this stuff? Yeah, so China so so I would say good news bad news good news bad news is this is almost entirely a US China thing internationally The UK had quite a bit of this stuff with this thing called deep mind which was a unit of Google that actually originally got Got a line concerned, but deep mind is being merged into the mothership at Google And so it's sort of getting drained away from the UK and it's gonna become more Californian And then you know there's there's there's smatterings of people in other country other Western, you know other European countries There are experts at various universities, but not that many Most of it is in the US most of us in California in the West and then there's and then there's China So good news that there aren't 20 other countries that have this but there are two and they happen to be you know The two big ones And so there is a big corresponding Chinese development effort that's been underway for the last you know 15 years Just like the efforts in the in the US China China is actually very public about their AI kind of agenda mission They talk about it they publish it and of course they have a very different right theory of this than we do Right they view AI as a way to achieve population control, right? Really? Yeah, yeah They're authoritarians, right? And so they the number one priority for Chinese leadership is always that the population of China stay under control Right and not revolt right or expect to be able to vote Right or whatever right anything that would threaten the the dominance of the kind of the Communist Party of China And so they you know So for example, China's security camera companies are the world leaders and AI security cameras because they're really good at like sniffing out You know people walking down the street, right? Like that's the kind of thing that they're their their systems are really good at And so they have a whole they have a whole national development program It's just their government and their company, you know in China All the companies are actually controlled and owned effectively by the government Like there's not there's not as much of a distinction between public sector private sector as there is here So the China has a more organized effort that couples basically their whole society And then they have a program to basically use AI for population control inside China authoritarian political control And then they've got this program called digital belt and road where they're gonna basically and try to install that AI all over the world Right and if you've been tracking they've had this program for the last 10 years to be the networking Layer for the world. So fight this whole 5g thing with this company called Huawei So they've been sort of they've been selling all these other countries all the technology to power their 5g wireless networks And then they're basically gonna roll out on top of that this kind of AI, you know authoritarian basically control surveillance control population control stuff and on the While we're on top of the yeah, basically on top of the other infrastructure. They have the Huawei 5g stuff They've got what they call smart cities. So they've got a bunch of software They've already sold a bunch of countries to basically run a city, you know to run public transportation And you know traffic control and all these things and that's got their security cameras built in everything and right and then of course What they pitch to the president or prime minister of country X is if you install our stuff You'll be able to better control your population Right if you install the American stuff, you know, who knows they'll you know They're Americans they're crazy democracy like freedom like all that stuff like in China We're we want things like controlled and of course a lot of people running a lot of countries would find the China model You know quite compelling. So so there's two very different visions This is like this is like the Cold War with the Soviet Union, right? There's two very different visions for how society should be ordered There's two very different visions for how technology should be used to order society, right? There's there's two very different visions on whether people should have access to technology or just the government Right, but in China and in the Soviet Union it was illegal to own a photocopying machine, right? You'd get like executed for owning a mimeograph or photocopying machine Right because it was such a threat that you'd be able to publish, you know information that wasn't propaganda coming from the government And so China's not quite that bad, but you know, they're getting there And so there are these two visions. There are these two approaches technology There are these two plans to kind of propagate that out You know in the US what we do is we have companies build this stuff and we have them go out and sell it Right or we have open source developers who go out and make it for free in China It's a it's more of a top-down directed, you know kind of thing And so that's the thing is like once you start thinking in those terms You realize that actually all these debates happen in the US are interesting and maybe important But there's this other much bigger I would argue more important thing that's happening Which is what kind of world do we think we're living in 50 years from now? And do we think that the sort of American Western ethos of freedom and democracy is the one the technology supports? Or do we think it's gonna be a totalitarian, you know approach? Either way, I see a scenario in 50 years. It's unrecognizable. It's possible Yeah, well, I was a sad declare. I don't want to live in the Chinese one. Right? Like I Think that's a bad idea like that seems inescapable in the Chinese walls the Chinese one It's like, you know, well you have I mean, you know, there are no rights I mean the whole concept of like rights is a very Western Yes, right And so the idea that you're like walking down the street and you have the right to stop and talk to whoever you want Or say whatever you want It's like not a you know, it's not the majority view of you know, a lot of people around the world Especially people in power even in the US we struggle with it, right? And so the real battle for AI is whether or not that gets enhanced or whether or not we develop a system in America That actually can counter that. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, and then also whether we as we as individuals will have will have will have access to this power that we can use that We can use ourselves So so, you know the movie or the novel became a movie but the 1984 right? Those are just sort of the or well or well, you know totalitarian kind of thing that people use as a metaphor so the technology in the novel 1984 was what they would or well called the telescreen and Basically basically television and basically the idea was is television with a camera in it and the idea was every room you had to have A telescreen in every room in your house and it was broadcasting propaganda 24-7 and then it was able to watch you Right and that was the that was the method of state control and in 1984 There's this guy who wrote a different and we wrote 1984 in a book called Orwell's revenge and in that book what he does He said okay, we're gonna use that same setup But the telescreen instead of being a one-way system is gonna be a two-way system Right. So the telescreen is going to be able to broadcast propaganda and watch the citizens But also it's gonna be able to people can actually put out whatever message they want, right? Free speech to be able to say whatever they want and you're gonna be able to watch the government It's gonna have cameras pointed at the government, right? And then he rewrites the whole plot of 1984 and of course the point there is Right if you equalize if both the people and the state have the power of this technology with their fingertips at the very least now There's a chance to have some sort of like actual rational productive relationship Where there are still human freedoms and and maybe people actually end up with more power than the government and they can keep the government from becoming totalitarian Right and so in his rewriting what happens is the you know people use Democ rebels who want a democracy, you know use the the broadcast mechanism out to be able to ultimately change the system And so that that that's the fundamental underlying question here as well Which is like is is is a a tool to watch and control us or is a tool? Something for us to use to become smarter better informed more capable, right? How much of a concern is? Chinese equipment that's already been distributed. Yeah Well, so the so the basic the basic thing So we don't always know the specific answer to that yet because this gets in a complicated technical technical things I think we hard to prove some of these things But what we do we do know the following we know that in the Chinese system Everything basically rolls up to and is essentially owned and controlled by actually not even the state It's the Chinese Communist Party the CCP. So there's the party the party owns and controls the state and the state owns that controls everything else So for example, it's actually still illegal sitting here today for an American citizen to own stock in a Chinese company They like it's people say the thing they do and they have various pieces of paper to say they do but it's actually there's a law This does not because this is a this is an asset of China. This is not something you can sell to foreigners And so they just have that model and and and then if you're a CEO of a Chinese company You have a political officer assigned by the Communist Party who sits with you right down the hall and like the office next to you and basically you coordinate everything with him and you need to make him happy and He has the ability to come grab you out of meetings and sit you down and you know Tell you whatever you want Whatever he wants you to do on behalf of the government and if the government gets sideways with you They will you know rip you right out of that position. They'll take away all your stock. They'll put you in jail This has happened like over and over again, right? This has happened a bunch a lot of like high Elite Chinese business leaders over the years have been you know Basically stripped of their you know control and their positions and their stock and their wealth and everything and you know Some of them who just like outright vanished And so they just they have this control and so for example data, you know something like tick-tock for example If the Chinese government tells the company we want the data they hand over the data like there's no There's no there's no court. There's no you know the concept like a FISA warrant, right? You know the concept of a subpoena like that's they don't have that it's just like We want it handed over or else And so that's how it works and when they want you to merge the company or shut it down or do something different or don't Do this or do that? They just tell you and that's what you do And so so anyway, so then you have a Chinese company like tick-tock or like Huawei and Or the DJI the other one is their their drone company, right? The most of the drones flown in the West are from this Chinese company called DJI and so then there's also this question Like well, is there a back door? Right. So can the Chinese government reach in at any point and you know use the use your drone for surveillance Can they use you know you can they see what what you're watching on tick-tock? and and the answer that is maybe they can but it kind of doesn't matter if they can't today because they're gonna be able to Anytime they want to because they can just tell these companies. Oh, I want you to do that in the company will say, okay I'm gonna do that. And so it's a it's a it's a complete fusion of state and company here in the US at least in theory We have a separation This goes back to the topic I was talking about earlier Like at least like for the US system to work properly We need a separation of the government and from companies We need the company staff to compete with each other and then we need that for them to have legal leverage against the government So when the government says hand over private citizen data, the company can say no, that's violation of the first or fourth or fifth amendment rights I'm not gonna do that and then they can litigate that take it Supreme Court. You can have a national like argument over it Hmm that's compromised when our companies voluntarily do that, right? Which is what's been how inconvenient for them. Yes, exactly I'm sure they would love to use the communist model. Yeah Well, so this is the thing but and and in the US this very important right in the US We have written constitutional giving himself a free speech in the US. We have the literal written first amendment Even in the UK, they don't have a they don't they do not have a written constitutional guarantee to free speech So in the in the UK there are laws where they can jail you for saying the wrong thing Right and the same thing by the way in much of these cases in like Australia New Zealand New Zealand New Zealand New Zealand which is supposed to be like the libertarian paradise. New Zealand has a government position reporting the prime minister called the chief censor Right who gets to decide? Basically what gets to be in the news or what people get to say, right? And so even in the West like Outside the US there are very few countries that have a written guarantee to free speech Right and so and even in the US like do we actually have free speech if there's all this level of censorship and control that We've all been seeing for the last 10 years, right? Right and so it's like, okay The the the line here the slippery slope here between free and not free is like very narrow, right? It's not it's not a moat, right? It's a very thin line just very easily cracked and you and this is why everybody's so fired up about in government This is why everybody's so fired up about AI is because it's another one of these really like wow If we can get control of this then think of all the ways that this can get used. Mmm Well, that's one of the more fascinating things about Elon buying Twitter Mm-hmm because boy did that throw a monkey wrench into everything when you see like Biden's tweets get fact-checked You're like, whoa There's a lot of things showing up on Twitter now that we're not showing up on Twitter before. Oh my god. Yeah so much. Yep and just Nutty shit to get me like some of the wackiest conspiracy theories Michelle Obama's a man like all that kind of stuff flat earth, but But rather have that my favorite is the birds by the way. Yeah birds aren't real. Yeah When I'm pretty sure it just it doesn't make it doesn't make any sense that had to be like, why can't we for Chad Like why can't we fly? It's just ridiculous. Yeah. Yeah, it's gotta be a fortune thing. Yeah Yeah, you know, sometimes they're they're onto something but I like that. Yeah, I like that wacky shit. It's mixed in with things I mean it seems insane and but that when I also when I look at like some of the people that are putting it up There and I look at their profiles and I look at their American flag and their bio and I'm like are you a real human? Yeah, this is our Troll farm in Macedonia like what's happening here? Yeah, there's a lot of that there is and of course he says he wants to You know, he's of course he says he plans to over time. He plans to root all that out Yeah, he wants ever he wants all identity to be validated. I'll verify Having said that we fought a war for free speech. We fought the Revolutionary War a lot of that was her free expression The founding fathers of this country very frequently wrote under pseudonyms Interesting just like Twitter announced and and this includes like Ben Franklin when he was a commercial printer He had like 15 different pseudonyms really he would sell newspapers by having his different pseudonym personalities argue with each other It is a newspaper fight it out like he had sock puppets and then you know, like the Federalist Papers was all written under pseudonyms Yeah, like Madison all these guys are under pseudonyms And so like why why did you do that because there was danger like there was very real danger associated with being like, you know Are you gonna like what's you know, what's the king gonna think right? Right, like, you know, yeah Is it like, you know, this is sort of the two lines argument, which is like, okay Like if somebody is not willing to put their own name behind something like should they be allowed to say it? There's an argument, you know in that direction obvious obvious one But the other argument is yes, sometimes there are things that are too dangerous to say unless you can't put your name behind it Yeah, that does make sense. So it seems like the pros that outweigh the cons Well, even just the micro version which is just like, you know, if you got something to say that's important But you don't want to be harassed in your you know, yeah, your family get harassed Yeah, right. You know protests showing up outside your house for something you said anonymous whistleblower. Yeah, exactly. This is yes whistle whistle Was it the one person's a terrorist is another person's freedom fighter one person's whistleblower is another person's troll like I Don't think yeah, and the genius the American system is yeah, like say what you want, right? Yeah, like let's have it out Right. And so I yeah, that's the system I believe in I believe in that system too But I also see Elon's perspective that it would be great if it wasn't littered with propaganda and fake troll accounts that are being used by Various, you know unscrupulous states and in fairness what Elon says actually it's interesting What he says is you will be allowed to have a an honor something called sued or an on account under some your some other name You make up on the service You'll just have to register that behind the scenes with your real identity and specifically with like a credit card, right? Then the fear is that someone will be able to get in there. Correct. Yeah, that's right, which has happened already Yeah, that's right. And that is a big risk. Yeah Yeah But then again and then you get to get the other part of this would be like it Twitter is only one company Right. And so there it's an important one, but it's only one and there there are others as well So, you know for the full consideration of like quote-unquote rights on this topic You also want to look at what is happening elsewhere, right including on all the other services I'm fascinated by companies like Twitter and YouTube that develop at least a semi monopoly because YouTube is a great example Like if you want to upload videos YouTube is the primary marketplace for that It's like nothing else is even close. Everything else is a distant distant second But they've got some pretty strict controls and and pretty serious censorship on YouTube and it seems to be accelerating particularly during this Presidential election now that you're seeing these Robert Kennedy jr. Podcast get pulled down from a year ago two years ago The Jordan Peterson one got pulled down Theo Vaughn's interview with Robert Kennedy got pulled down There's been some others and Brett Weinstein. No, no, he didn't his didn't but it's just these Conversations were up for a long time It wasn't until Robert Kennedy running for president that they decided like these are inconvenient narratives he's discussing so I don't want to I Should not weigh in on exactly which companies have whatever level of monopoly they have having said that to the extent that companies are found to Have monopolies or let's say very you say sort of dominant market positions Like that does that should bring an additional level of scrutiny on conduct and then and then there is this other thing I mentioned earlier, but I think is a big deal which is If a company is making all these decisions by itself, you can argue that it maybe has the ability to do that Although again, maybe it shouldn't pass a certain point I'm not in terms of being a monopoly. Um, but the thing that's been happening is it's not just the companies making these decisions by themselves They've come under intense pressure from the government, right and they've come under intense intense pressure from the government in public The public statements and threats from senior government officials. They have come private channeled threats And then and then all of this the stuff was talking about earlier all the channeling of all the money from the government That's gone into these pro censorship groups, right that are actively working to try to suppress suppress speech And when you get into all of that Those are crimes Yeah, that's illegal Like everything I just described I think is illegal and there are specific like the actual felony basically counts in the US code for like Those things actually being illegal their violations of constitutional rights and it is a felony to deprive somebody of their constitutional rights And so I think in addition what you said I think it's also true that there's been a pattern of government involvement here that is I think certainly illegal And you know, it's this way that this administration is not gonna look into that Maybe a future one will so do you think it's illegal. It just hasn't been litigated yet. Yeah Well, I think there's evidence of substantial criminality in the just in the Twitter files That have come out you just you didn't you need to have somebody Prostituted have to yeah, yeah, you need when you went to the you didn't eat class action lawsuits, right? You need to be able to carve it open with large-scale civil civil civil suits Or you need to you need actual government like criminal investigation. What has come out of the Twitter files other than independent journalists Researching it and discussing it and writing articles You don't it's not being covered with any significance in mainstream use The mainstream media has been on the side of censorship for the last you know Eight years like they've been pounding the table that we need to lock down, you know speech, right a lot more So that you know, they're compromised And then you know, the other investigation to watch is I think it's the Missouri Attorney General There's this state-level investigation where there's been a bunch of interesting stuff that's come out and the attorneys the attorneys general have subpoena power So they have subpoenaed a bunch of materials from a bunch of companies that again to me it looks like evidence of criminality But again, you would need you need a you need a you need you need prosecutors You need a political you need the political force of will and desire to investigate prosecute crimes and to engage in that battle Yeah, because it's going to be about yeah Yeah, and then if it's a private if there's private litigation You need to try to do a big you know A big you know class action suit you need to and then you need to be prepared to fight it all the way to the Supreme Court When there's a lot of money involved in that when you're seeing this play out and you're looking at likely scenarios Like how how how does this resolve? How does how do we come out of this? I think it's a big I mean I think it's a big collective It's a fight like it's it's a this is one of those where it's like what do we want? Right and the we hear is like all of society Right, and if we decide that we want the system keep working the way that's working We're gonna keep electing the same kinds of people who have the same policies Do you think the most people are even aware of all these issues though? No, I mean certainly not and that's a big You know, there's a there's there's always any symmetry right between the people who are doing things that people aren't aware But like again, it's like what do we want? Are people gonna care about this or not if they are you know, then you know, they're gonna at some point, you know demand action It's a it's a it's a so-called collective action problem, right people have to come together in large numbers But will it be too late? This is the question like imagine scenario where Elon never buys Twitter and Twitter just continues its practice isn't even accelerates I mean, yeah, and that's my concern and again, this goes back to my concern about the AI lockdown, right? Which is like all of the all of the concerns in AI are being basically used to put in place I think what they're gonna try to do to AI for speech and thought control is like a thousand times more dangerous than what's happened On social media, right because it's gonna be your kid. It's gonna be your kids, you know, you know asking me I you know, what do you know? What's what are the facts on this and it's just gonna like flat out lie to them for political reasons, right? Which it does today and like that to me. It's like far more dangerous And that's that's what's happening already and the the desire is very clear I think on the part of a lot of people to have that be a fully legal blessed, you know thing that you know Basically gets put in place and never changes well you're completely making sense especially when you think about the What they've done with social media and what we were and not even speculation just the Twitter files is it's so clear and it's This is the ring of power thing, right? It's like everybody's in favor of free speech in theory It's like well if I can win an election Without it. Yeah, you know, I've got the ring of power right in the American system the American system was set up so the people don't have the ring of power like the whole point of like Balance of you know the balance of terror between the three branches of government and all the you know The existence of the Supreme Court and you know, the due process protections in the Constitution. It was all to prevent Government officials from being able to do things like this with impunity. Yeah But the founding fathers saw the threat It's actually remarkable how clearly the founding fathers saw the threat given that they were doing all of this before, you know Any modern, you know before electricity it is pretty amazing, but they saw the threat. Yeah, they had a Pretty profound understanding of human nature and applied to power. Yeah, they did. Yeah this is a it's such an Easy time Because you see how these things all these forces that are at work and how it could play out How it is playing out with social media how it could play out with AI and Electing leaders that are gonna like see things correctly Like I don't I haven't seen anybody discussing this especially not discussing this the way you're just constantly Well, and when this when the speech is made right to justify whatever the controls are it's gonna be made in our name Right. So it's the speech is not gonna be we're gonna do this to you We're speeches we're doing this to protect you right, right? So that that's the siren song. Yeah, right And that's already started like if you look at the public statements Coming out of DC already like that that that is the thrust of what because of course that's what they're that's how they're gonna That's how they're gonna couch it. How are they framing it? How is it protecting us? Well, we need to protect we need We need to protect we need to protect people from dangerous this and that we need to protect people from hate speech We need to protect misinformation and it's the same. I mean, it's the same arguments that it's essentially the same It's effectively the same arguments you've seen in social media for the last decade I just don't know how we publicly turn that narrative around because there's so many people that have adopted it like a mantra Yeah, they just say that mantra and they just think that they're doing the right thing hate speech Disinformation misinformation. Let them take care of it. They're doing the right thing So here's the white pill. Here's the white pill. Here's the here's the reason for optimism. So Gallup has been surveying American citizens trust in institutions for 50 years A lot of people think all this stuff started with the internet and it turns out it didn't it turns out there's been a collapse Of faith on the part of American citizens in their institutions basically since basically I was born basically around the early 70s It's basically been a straight line down almost every major institution, right? And so, you know, I'll talk about government newspapers in a second But you know basically any large, you know religion you got you got right down the list police You have big business You know education schools universities You chart all these things out and basically they're all basically straight lines down over 50 years Right, and there's there's there's two ways of interpreting that one is you know greater levels of disillusionment and cynicism that are incorrect Then the other is actually people are learning Right who they can and can't trust And then of course the theory goes to start in the 70s because of the hangover from the Vietnam War and then Watergate And then a lot of the hearings that kind of exposed government corruption in the 70s that followed right and then it just sort of Sort of downward slide the military is the big exception the military took a huge hit after Vietnam and then actually it's the one that has like recovered sharply and there's like a cultural change that's happened where you know We we as Americans have decided that we can have faith in the military Even if we don't agree with the missions that they're sent on so that's the exception But everything else is sort of down down into the right The two that are like the lowest and have had the biggest drops our Congress and journalism Right and so that the population app and they're they pull like 10 15 percent in the population Wow And so most people are not looking at these things like oh, yeah These people are right about most of these most people look at these things being like, you know, that's that screwed up now People have to decide what to do with that Right because what you see is the faith in Congress is pulls it like 10% but faith in your local congressperson pulls it like 90 percent Right, which is why? incumbents keep getting real, you know Congressional incumbents almost always get reelected right and you'll have these you know, congressmen who are in there for 20 terms Right 40 years right and so at some point people have to decide they have to carry it over Right It's not internally consistent Right and you're not gonna get the change that you want from Congress unless a lot more people all of a sudden change their mind about The incumbents. Yeah, they keep reelecting But anyway, the the reason for optimism in there is I think most people are off the train Right already right and quite frankly I think that explains a lot of what's happened in politics in the US over the last 10 years like whether whether people you know Support or don't support the kind of you know, the various forms of populism on the left or the right I think it's the citizenry reaching out for a better answer Than just more of the same and more of the same being the same elites in charge forever telling us the same things that we know Aren't true. Well, that is one of the beautiful things about social media and the beautiful things about things like YouTube where people can Constantly discuss these things and have these conversations that are reached by millions of people I mean just a viral tweet a viral video something You know someone gives a speech on a podcast and and everybody goes like what you're saying today. I didn't know that's how it worked Oh, this is what we have to be afraid of so when they start saying it's for your own protection This is why and then the Marc Andreessen clip plays and everybody goes Okay That's that gives me hope because that's something that didn't exist before. Yeah, that's right You can even take it a step back further. See if she even pre social media is there was a big opening in the 80s with It talk radio They got people very mad at the time Things were being said on it that weren't supposed to be said Cable TV was a big like opening to it Before that actually in the 50s. It was paperback books a lot of alternate, you know points of view You know basically Took took took sort of flower in the 50s and 60s flowing out of paperback books and then newsletters That's why I say the Soviets outlawed mimeograph mimeograph machines, right? I'm sure earlier photocopiers, but like, you know There was a whole newsletter phenomenon and a lot of movements in the 50s 60s 70s And so it's basically it's this is sort of this sequential way look at it It's basically way to think about it is media and thought centralized to the maximum possible level of centralization and control right around 1950 Right where you basically had three television networks you had, you know one newspaper per city you had three news magazines Right. You just had your two political parties, right? You just like everything was like a locked in hard, right and then basically Technology in the form of all of these media technologies and then all the computer and bright information technologies underneath them have basically been Decentralized and unwinding that level of centralized control More or less continuously now for 70 years So as I think it's been this this this longer running process and by the way, I think it you know It's it left to its own devices. It's going to continue right? This is the significance of AI like What if each of us has a super sophisticated AI that we own and control? Because it either comes from a company that's doing that for us or it's an open source thing where we can just download it Use it and what if it has the ability to analyze all the information and what if it has the ability to basically say, you know Look on this topic. I'm gonna go scour the internet and I'm gonna come back and I'm gonna synthesize information I'm gonna tell you what I think right? It's the AI right so that that would it would be logical that that would be another Step down this process. Yes, right and by the way, and maybe the most important step of all, right? Cuz it's the one where it can actually be like, okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna be able to legitimately think on your behalf Right and help you to conclusions right that are factually correct. Even if people who are empowered don't want to hear it If it seems to me that you have more of a glass half-full perspective on this Are you? Open-minded and just sort of just analyzing the data as it presents itself currently and not making Judgments about where this is going or do you generally feel like this is all gonna move in a good direction? so my day job is to We meet every day all through the year with all these incredibly smart kids who have these incredibly great new ideas And they want to build these technologies and they want to build, you know businesses around them or they want to open source them Or they want it, you know, whatever but they want to build the they want to make these new things happen You know, they have they have they have visions for how the world can change in these ways They have the technical knowledge to be able to do these things There's a pattern of you know, these kids doing amazing things Apple Apple just passed today Apple just passed Apple alone just passed the entire value of the entire UK stock market right So an Apple was two kids in a garage in 1976 Yeah with a crazy idea that people should have their own computers, which was a crazy idea at the time, right? And so like it doesn't you know, usually it doesn't work But when it does like it works really really well And this is what we got in the microchip and this is how we got the PC and this is how we got the internet And the web and all these other, you know, all these other things And yeah, here we go. Yeah, tough three trillion Yeah, yeah, so it's the the comparison I think is to what they call the footsy 350 which is the 300 the 350 largest UK companies that's bonkers Yeah And so when it works like it works incredibly well Right and so and and we just we just happen to be you know by being what we being where we are and you know Doing what we do we're at ground zero that and so all day long I meet and talk to these kids and people who have these ideas and want to do these things and so I And so it's why I can I can kind of I can see the future kind of in that sense Which is I know what they're going to do because they come in and tell us and then we help them try to try to do It so if they're allowed to do what they plan to do Then I have a pretty good idea of what the future is gonna look like and how great it could potentially be But then I also have the conversations In Washington and I also have the conversations with the people who are trying to do the other things and I'm like, okay Like this is like for a very long time tech in the US was considered just like purely good Right tech was everybody was like up until like basically the 2000s 2010s Everybody was just kind of pro tech pro whatever people got excited about new things every once in a while People get freaked out about something. But mostly people just thought you know invention is good Creativity is good Silicon Valley is good and in the last 15 20 years like It's gotten these all these topics have gotten very contentious and you have all these people who are very angry Right about about the consequences of all this technological change And so we're in a different phase of the world where these issues are now being fought out not just in business But also in politics And so I I also have those conversations and those are almost routinely dismaying Like those are not good conversations And so I'm always trying to kind of calibrate between what I know is possible versus my concern that people are gonna try to figure Screw it up when you have these conversations with people behind the scenes. Are they receptive? Are they aware of the The issues what you're saying in terms of just just freedom of expression and the future of the country There you might bucket it in like three different buckets. There's a set of people who just basically don't like Silicon Valley tech internet free speech capitalism free markets Like they're very political. Some of them are in positions of high power right now and they're just opposed They're just against and they're trying to do everything they can I mean, they're trying to outlaw crypto right now They're trying to like do all kinds of stuff They're trying to be the same people trying to censor social media like they're just very opposed and there's I I mean I don't know. Maybe there would be a point and talk. I myself don't spend a lot of time talking to them because it's not a Conversation just getting yelled at for an hour There's that really how go. Oh, yeah. Yeah, they're very angry. Like there's a lot of there's a very large amount of rage in the system a lot of it directed at tech Then there's a set of people who I would describe I don't know if open-minded is a wrong term But like I would say they are honestly and legitimately trying to understand the issues like they're kind of aware that they don't fully understand What's happening and they are trying to figure it out and they do have a narrative in their own mind of they're gonna try to Come to the right conclusion. So there's some set of those those usually aren't the senior people But there are people like at the staff level who are like that Dreamers what's that dreamers? Yeah. Yeah, like You know the best the best of the bunch right like the you know open-minded Yeah, learning curious You know, it's like anything else in life you sit down with one person and like you're in they just like you have a conversation They ask you questions you ask them questions There's other people you talk to where it's just like they're not interested in what you think and that's just very clear that they're not Interested in what you think and so that plays out there also And then there's a third set of people who are very actually pro Capitalism pro innovation pro tech, but they don't like us because they think we're all Democrats Oh So a lot of our natural allies on these issues are on the other side of where the majority Silicon Valley is majority Democrat Democratic right and so there's a fair number of people who would be our natural allies If not for the fact that Silicon Valley is like 99 99 percent Democrat Right. And so there's part of the issue the valley has like we don't have any natural allies Like tech tech doesn't have any actual allies in DC because the the Democrats basically think they control us Which they effectively do because the valley is almost entirely Democrat And then the Republicans think that you know, basically they would support us except the world Democrats And so we can go f off and so there's a trap that's developed that is hard to figure out what to do with How do you get around that one? That one's a hard one I mean that I don't know that that seems People last thing I want to do is argue to people especially in public that they should change their politics So and look people feel very strongly Obviously people in tech feel very strongly about politics including many political topics that have nothing to do with tech And so asking somebody to change their views on some other political issue so that it's better for tech It's not something not an argument that flies. So wow, so there's a yeah, there's a bit of a stall there but Yeah, it goes back to yeah people gotta people have to decide what they want You seem like you enjoy all this madness though. You really do. I'd rather be in the middle of it than not Yeah, it would be very frustrating to be on the outside It'd be even more frustrating than Being involved in it what look here's everything these issues these issues become really important, right? Like I'll even I'll even credit the critics with the following which is yeah Look mark like tech was a backwater tech didn't matter Until the internet showed up like and now it matters a lot because like it's the future of speech and politics and control and all These things and so all of a sudden it's like these big important topics We're gonna be talking about warfare like AI is gonna like really change how like weapons work, right? Like basically every important thing happening in the world right now has a technological component to it, right? And it's being altered by the changes that are happening, you know caused by tech And so the other argument would be marked like grow up Like of course these are all gonna be big fights because these are now you're now involved in all the big issues Yeah, and maybe that's just the case. Well, that seems to definitely also be the case. Yeah it's just People are always so scared of change and change today when we're talking about this kind of change You're talking about monumental change that happens over a very short period of time. Yep Yep, yes, that's a big freak out. Yes Yeah, I mean, what are we looking at in 50 years? Really? Yeah You enjoy it I love that you enjoy it though Douglas You know the book hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy Douglas Adams who wrote that book he once had a formulation He said he said this is all generational. He had a different theory than all he says all generational It's all age related and he said if you're people react to technology in three different ways if you're below the age of 15 Whatever is the new thing is just how the world always worked If you're between the ages of 15 and 35 Whatever is the new thing is exciting and hot and cool and you might be able to get a job and make a living doing it Anything if you're above the age of 35, it's whatever new is happening is unholy It's sure to bring about the downfall of civilization right apocalypse and calamity I guess that's true in culture true in music. It's true in movies video games. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, so I think maybe what just has to happen is just time needs to pass You know, maybe you know the fight the fight the fight is always, you know, I don't know It's like whatever the new thing happens the fights always between a bunch of 50 year olds or something Do you resist any technology in your own personal life? That is a good question. Um, I don't personally And said that we do have an eight-year-old and he does get the screen time but it is it is controlled So we're a little bit, you know, we were you know, we use it as a tool We're not absolutists like we're not you know There's some people running around to do want to keep their kids off all this stuff Which by the way is not the craziest view of the world in the world, right? But we want him to be you know fully up to speed on we want him to be an engineer, you know Not that he has to spend his life doing it, but we want him to know how to use technology and move it It's also fun for kids. It's just if you teach them discipline and you know Engage them in other activities so that they do physical things and run around have fun be outside He does MMA. Oh, no kidding full Brazilian jiu-jitsu he's doing full of four MMA full. He's doing his full sparring He and his his coach dress up in the full body Fits and like wailing each other And choke each other out. So okay. Enjoy watching that. It's absolutely fantastic And he loves it. That's when I keep watching the videos, you know, cuz it's you know, he's up against He's like, you know half the time is with an adult sparring and he's just like he just goes like right in there that's crazy, so So the tech story that I've been thinking about a lot is it's the the Douglas Adams thing is so, you know Chat GPT comes out in December. I play with it for a few months. I'm trying to wrap my head around it I'm like, okay, this is this is good. And so I'm like, okay My my eight-year-old's like super curious and he wants to learn all these things He's all you know, it's asking questions all the time and half the time. I don't know the answer So I'm like, okay, I install it on his laptop and chat GPT on his laptop And I like I like I set up this time aside and I sit him down on the couch and I'm like, okay There's this like amazing thing that I'm gonna give you right? This is like it's like the most important thing I've ever done as a father Right that I've like brought like fired down from the mountains and I'm gonna give you AI right and you're gonna have like AI your whole life to be like with you and teach you things and He's like, okay, and I was like, well you ask it questions and it'll answer the questions and he's like, okay And I was like, no like this is a big They didn't used to do this like now it does this and this is amazing and he's like Okay, and I was like, why aren't you impressed? And he's like, it's a computer Like of course you ask it questions to give you answers. Like what else is it for? And I'm like, okay, you know, I'm old The Kids are gonna just have a totally different point of view on this right? It's gonna be it's gonna be normal Do you know answers to things? Yeah, yeah, completely normal and it's gonna be by the way, it's gonna be normal. It's gonna be exciting I think it's gonna I think it's gonna make I think it's be great like for kids I think this is gonna be fantastic Well the positive aspect just for it forming people and whatever it is Whether it's a medical decision or whether it's a mechanical thing with your car I mean, that's pretty amazing Yeah One of the fun things you can do with with with shed GPT is you can you can say explain X to me and then you Can say explain X to me if as if I'm 15 And then you can do it as if I'm 10 And you can actually get it it can actually do it all the way down It kind of works down to about age 3 so you can tell it explain quantum mechanics to me like I'm a three-year-old Like it will Yeah, yeah, it's not I taught him how to do this because I'm like you just you know, you can have it You can dial it up or down. How does it explain quantum mechanics to a three? Uses like all these metaphors of like, you know, you've got a stuffed animal over here and a stuffed animal over there And it wiggles and then that one wiggles Right. And so it's like oh, you know three year olds like okay So, yeah, no so as a tool You know, there's all these fights happening I guess what back to school is coming up in a couple months here and you know There's all these fights already emerging over like whether students in the classroom can use GPT and yeah There's all these you know Sites that claim to tell you whether something's been generated by AI Like so the teacher can in theory can screen to see if something's been you know student has it an essay In theory, there's a tool that will tell you whether they got it from GPT, but it doesn't actually it doesn't actually work There you go. Here it is. Can you explain quantum cancer three-year-old? Sure I'll do my best to explain quantum mechanics in a simple way for a three-year-old to understand Imagine you have a toy to be in two places at the same time It's like having a teddy bear that can also be in your bed and in the living room at once very strange, right? Well in the world of very tiny things like atoms and particles they can do something similar They can be in two different places at once just like your special toy. This is called superposition Now let's talk about something else imagine you have a toy car that can go through walls without crashing It could pass right through them as if it wasn't even there. That's pretty amazing Isn't it? Well in the world of tiny things particles can something it can do something similar They can pass through solid objects without any problem. This is called tunneling Wow Pretty cool. Yeah Pretty cool. Yeah in terms of education in terms of just informing people. I don't think there's anything I mean, it's it's one of the most promising things ever by far And by the way, this is something for people's entire lives, right? This is just for kids, right? This is for anybody who ever wants to learn anything the real fear the overall fear Is that what human beings are doing with artificial intelligence is creating something that's gonna replace us? Yeah You have no fear of that. Yeah, I don't what about a hundred years from now. It's a tool a hundred years I don't know and the first clue is gonna have hundred years from now, but it's not gonna be this. That's the fear is that we're Sewing the seeds. Yeah, this is an old. I mean like this is an old this is an old fear Yeah, like the fear of the end of the world. This is like the fear of yeah, the not the non-human Yeah, like in Judaism They have this they have a version of this in Judaism called the golem the sort of legend of the golem It was sort of this thing. It was like it was the Warsaw ghetto at one point in this rabbi figures out how to contrarupt this Basically this giant basically creature made out of clay to bit go smite You know the enemies and then you know, of course, it comes back around and starts killing, you know his own people You know the Frankenstein's monster, right? Right same thing So there's always this yeah, there's always and look at the it's very human, you know, it's a self-preservation You know kind of thing but you know, look we build tools I mean, what's the thing that makes us different from animals right as we have intelligence and we build tools Tools can be used by the way for good and bad things right like a shovel can be used to take a ditch or like Bring somebody or the head or and so all these things, you know things things things do have two sides But over time, you know, the tools that we built have created a much healthier safer better world Is that a lot of people right? I mean look human population is like, you know Gigantically as a consequence of all these tools we've developed So right so the exact opposite thing has happened for when everybody's been afraid of the whole time But it is interesting whenever there's a discussion on these things. It's never framed that there's two sides It's always framed. This is what we're scared of. This is what the danger is. It's not Part of the beauty of this is that there's danger and it's also there's incredible promise that's attached us as well Like everything else like matches no one's advocating for outlawing matches, but you could start a fire So the original myth on this so the way the ancients thought about this so Excuse me in that Judeo Judeo Christian Philosophy they have the this concept of the logos the word And so it says the very beginning of the Bible in the beginning there was the word the word was truth And then basically the universe kind of comes from that So this concept of like the word which is sort of knowledge right and then an Adam and Eve It was you know Adam and Eve eating from the tree of knowledge Right and then when they ate the you know the apple the you know Satan fooled them in eating the apple and then they had the knowledge like secret knowledge the Greeks had a similar concept They called technique which is the basis for the word technology But and it met sort of it met it didn't mean technology per se it but it meant sort of knowledge and particularly knowledge on how to do things right so sort of the beginning of technology and The the myth that the Greeks had so the myth that the Christians have about the danger of knowledge is Garden of Eden again. He kicked out the garden garden of Eden to the downside right that was viewed as a tragedy right in that religion The Greeks had what they called the Prometheus myth and it had to do with fire Right and so and the myth of Prometheus was a central Greek myth and the myth of Prometheus was Prometheus was a god cut kind of character in the mythology who went up to the mountain Humans didn't have fire He went up to the mountain and the gods had fire and he took fire from the gods and he brought it down and gave It to humanity and in the myth that was how humans learned to basically use fire right as a tool As punishment for bringing fire to humans. He was in the myth. He was chained to a rock For all eternity and every day his liver gets picked out by an angry bird and then it regenerates overnight And then it gets picked out again the next day forever Like that's how much the gods felt like they had to punish him Right because and of course what were they saying in that in that myth what they were saying is okay fire was like the original Technology right and the nature of fire as a technology is it makes human civilization possible You can stay warm at night. You can fight off the wolves, you know You bond the tribe together right every culture has like a fire central thing to it because it's like the center of the community You can use it, you know to cook meat, right? Therefore you can have you know, you can you'd have a higher rate of your kids are gonna survive and so forth Be able to reproduce more But of course fire is also a fearsome weapon and you can use it to burn people alive you can use it to destroy entire cities and so like it got it's fashion because it got that idea of information the information technology in the form of even fire was so scary that they encoded it that deeply in their mythology and So I think what we do is we just like play that exactly like you said They we play that fear out over and over again because in the back of our head It's always like okay, this is the one that's gonna get us, you know. Yes. I know that the previous 3,000 of these things that actually turned out fine Right. Amazingly even nuclear weapons turned out fine, right? Like nuclear weapons almost certainly prevented World War three Right nuclear weapons the existence of nuclear weapons probably saved on the order of 200 million lives Right. So like even nuclear weapons turned out. Okay, right? But yet after all of that and all the progress we've made like this is the one that's gonna get us Yeah, it's so interesting because that conversations never had you Were we only hear the negative aspects of it? Yeah, that's right Because these are complex nuanced discussions and it has to do with all sorts of aspects of human nature and control and power structures And it's just they're very complex conversations. Yeah, well then people try to hijack them, right? Yeah, great. They get used Yeah, and that's where yeah, that's right. I don't mind like somebody who's like there's this concept I talked about the The the the Baptist and the bootleggers. So there were two groups of people in favor of prohibition of alcohol There were the Baptists who were the social activists who thought alcohol was actually evil and was destroying society And then there were the bootleggers which were the people who were gonna make money Right if alcohol was outlawed, right? And so and this is what you often have is you have a can win There's one of these social movements that wants regulation you often have this union of the Baptist and the bootleggers And so the Baptists, I don't mind like the true believers who are like worried about, you know, XYZ. It's like, okay Let's talk about that. Let's figure that out. It's the bootleggers that like driving crazy, right? Liggers who pick up that argument. Yeah, and then are you know working behind the scenes to achieve, you know, basically self-interested ends well, I Have hope I really do I mean I like to dwell on the negative aspects of it's because because it's fun But one of the things that I have hope in is that there are conversations like this taking place Or this is a very kind of unique thing in terms of human history like the ability to independently Distribute something that reaches millions of people that can talk about these things So these this can get out there and then other people hear this and they'll start their own Conversations about it and articles will be written and more people discuss it and then look at this more nuanced perspective because I think it Is something that's incredibly complicated and you can't deny that just what chappity can do chat Gbt could do right now is extraordinary and very beneficial Even if they just stopped it right there. Yeah, I mean just right there, but it's not going to stop there I see something crazy. Yes, can I ask for something to be pulled up? Sure Twitter? Go to Twitter. This just came up today Because we've been talking about tax we've been talking about chat GPT. So let's look at let's look at images for a moment So we're gonna do a search do a search on mid journey And then Chihuly the artist CHI HULY CHI CHI HULY HULI Yeah, right there that one, okay That's pretty good. But let go go two more go two more node of it stay on that one But go to that image the shoe right there. There we go Okay So so this is mid journey. So this is the app that lets you create images Describe words you describe words and it creates images. It uses the same technology as chat GPT, but it generates images This is that the prompt here was something along the lines of a Nike shoe in the form of this artist called Chihuly Who's his famous artist who works in basically blown glass is his art form And so this is a Nike shoe rendered in blown glass Multicot and Chihuly is famous for using lots of colors. And so this this has all the colors So this does look exactly like his shoe would have looked. Yeah, this would be Chihuly Yeah, this is Chihuly, you know skirt billowing, you know billowing skirt Yeah, this is Chihuly it's Chihuly, you know, like statue of an avocado, right Right, and so it's an avocado made out of stained glass. Okay, so just look look here for a moment though No, go back to go back. It's a yeah, just go back to go to the avocado for a second Okay. Okay. Look at the shadows Look at the detail in the shadows Look at the detail of the shadows with the sunlight coming through the window Okay, now go back go back to the shoe because this one blows my mind Okay, and then zoom in on the reflection of the shoe in the bottom down there, right? It's like you see it's like perfect Right. It's like a it's like a perfectly corresponding reflection Okay, this entire thing was generated by mid-journey mid-journey the way mid-journey works is it predicts the next pixel? It basically ran this algorithm basically It used the prompt and then it ran it through the neural network and then it predicted each pixel in turn for this image and This image probably has you know, a hundred thousand pixels in it or something or a million pixels or something And it basically was it's like an auto complete it was predicting each pixel But in the process of predicting each pixel it was able to render Not only colors and shapes and all those things but transparency translucency reflections shadows lighting Like it trained itself basically on how to do a full 3d rendering Inside the neural network in order to be able to successfully predict the next pixel And how long does that might that take to generate that takes to generate on the on this on that when you're running the system Today that would probably be I'm getting gas 10 or 15 seconds There's a newer version of mid-journey a turbo version that just came out where I think it cuts it down a couple seconds Now the system that's generating that Needed, you know many years of computing power Across many processors to get ready to do the train the training that took place But but they actually generate that in seconds took a few seconds. Okay. So here's here's another amazing thing The price the cost of generating image like that versus hiring a human artist to do it is like down by a factor of 1000 somewhere between a factor of a thousand and ten thousand if you just kind of run the numbers like to hire an artist to Do that at that level quality would cost in the order of a thousand ten thousand dollar more dollars or you know time or human? effort than doing it with the machine Same thing is true of writing a legal brief The same thing is true of writing a medical diagnosis. The same thing is true of you know, summarizing a book like any sort of you Know knowledge summarizing a podcast You know any any of these things drafting questions for a podcast? You know basically pennies right to be able to do all these things versus you know But potentially a hundred or a thousand dollars to have a person do any of these things Hmm So we've dropped the cost of a lot of white-collar work by like a factor of a thousand Right. Guess what? We haven't dropped the cost of like at all It's all the blue-collar work Right. So we do not have today a machine that can pick strawberries that it's less expensive than hiring people to pick strawberries We don't have a machine that can pack your suitcase We don't have a machine that can clean your toilet We don't have a machine that can cook you dinner Like we don't have any of those things Like for those things the cost of the machine and the AI and everything else to do those things is far in excess Of what you could simply pay people to do. Hmm, right? But so so there's the great twist here is that in all of the Economic fears around automation It's the fear has always been that it's the mechanical work that gets replaced because the presumption is people working with their brains Right are you know, that's certainly not what the computer is gonna be certainly computers not gonna make art, right? So the computer is gonna be able to pick strawberries You're just gonna be able to make cheeseburgers, but obviously it's not gonna be able to make art and actually turns out the reverse is true It's much easier to make the image of that shoe than it is to make you a cheeseburger Of course because it has to be automated physically physically, but not just around but it move around but not just physically which is like Okay, like what happens if the stove catches on fire, right? Right, like, you know, okay, like what you know What shape how does the suitcase unclassed suitcases on class differently like it all though? Yes all the like real-world stuff How do you plumb a toilet right? like you know what happens when you get in there right and what happens if the plumbing is all screwed up and so The great irony and twist of all this is it when the breakthrough we all thought in the industry We all thought when the breakthrough arrived it would arrive in the form of robotics That would cause you know, they would the fear would be it would cause unemployment among basically right the less You know to quote-unquote lower skilled people or less educated people Turns out to be the exact opposite. Well, that's Andrew Yang's take on automation, right? The need for universal basic income. Yeah. Well, yes, therefore the need for communism Which is immediately where it goes but think before you think about that though think think about what this means in terms of productivity So think in terms of what this means about what people can do Right. So think about the benefit including the economic benefit So all of everybody always thinks of this as producer first you want to start by thinking this is consumer first Which is like as a customer of all of the goods and services that involve knowledge work the price on all of those things Is about to drop on the order of like a thousand X, right? So everything that you pay for today, right that involves white collar work Like the prices all those things are going to collapse by the way That's the the the collapse and the prices is why it doesn't actually cause unemployment Because when prices collapse it frees up spending power and then you'll spend that same money on new things And so your quality of life will rise and then there will be new jobs created that will basically take the place of the jobs You got destroyed But what you'll experience is a dramatic hopefully a dramatic fall in the cost of the goods and services that you buy Which is the equivalent of basically giving everybody a raise What about artists rights because one of the arguments about art is that you're taking this? Midway you're taking this AI Program and it's essentially stealing the images of the style of artists and then compiling its own But that the intellectual work the original creative work was responsible for generating this in the first place So even though you're not paying the illustrator You're essentially using that illustrators creativity and ideas to generate these images through AI Right and in fact, we just saw an example of that Yes based on we actually named a specific artist really right who'd certainly did not get paid right as a consequence of that Yeah, then the algorithm the algorithm knew who Chihuly was so it had clearly been trained on right his art before otherwise He wouldn't the algorithm would not have known to do it in that style So I think this is going to be a very big fight And this is probably going to go to the Supreme Court those cases are just starting now I think the first one is Getty images which owns a big catalog of photography is actually suing this company mid-journey So that that that that that has begun The argument for why what's happening is improper is exactly like is exactly what you said The argument for why it's actually just fine and in fact not only should be legal, but actually is legal under current copyright law Is what in copyright law is called the right to make transformative works And so you have the total right as an artist or creator to make any level of creative art that you want or expression That is inspired by right or the result of what they call transforming prior works, right? So you have the right to do homages you have the right to do, you know I mentioned that earlier the guy who wrote the the other version of the book 1984 He had the right to do that because he was transforming the work You can make your version of what you think a Picasso would look like exactly You are free to draw in the style of Picasso You are not free to copy a Picasso But you are free to study all of every thought the art Picasso did and should end as long as you don't Misrepresent it as being a Picasso you can generate all the new are you like me to make a to copy a Picasso? Exactly, if you're telling everybody you're copying a Picasso. I don't know you did the artist I mean copyright at some point expires, but that aside. It's the same copyright last Let's just assume for the moment copyrights forever just to make it easy to talk about The artist can copyright that particular image The screenwriter can copyright that particular screenplay if you're not but if you're not generating income from it. Oh I don't know. Yeah, there's car but there's another car about in the copyright law for non Commercial use. Yeah, so there's like academic use by the way, there's also a protection. There's also protection for satire You know there's protection for a variety of things but the one that's relevant here specifically is that is the transformative one because and the reason the reason I say that is because Chihuly never made a shoe right right there was so there's no image in the training set that was a Chihuly shoe Certainly not a Chihuly Nike shoe and certainly not that Chihuly Nike shoe right and so the algorithm produced an homage Be the way to think about it right and as a consequence of that I think the way through copyright law you're like okay That's just fine And I think the same thing is true at chat GPT For all the text that is by the way the same things happening chat GPT the news publishers newspaper publishers are now getting very upset Cuz they they have this they have this fear or they have a fear that people are gonna stop reading the news because they're just gonna Get you just ask chat GPT what's happening? Right, they probably will just tell you and there are lots of news articles that are in the internet Training data that went into training chat GPT right including, you know updating it every day Also if you can generate an objective news source through chat GPT because that's really hard to do So one of the fun things that these machines can do and you can do this a chat GPT actually could do this today You can tell it to take out you it will do what's called sentiment analysis You could you can ask it is this like is this news article slanted to the left or the right is this is this is this is? The emotional tone here angry or like hostile and you can tell it to rewrite news articles to take out the bias Interesting and you can tell you know take take out any political bias and take out any emotional loading and it will rewrite the article To be as objective as it can possibly come up with and so that and again, but here's the question is okay The result of that is that still copyrighted? Right is is that a is that a copyrighted? You know derivative work of the original news article or is that actually now something new that is a transformation of the thing that existed before But it's different enough that it is actually that is actually fine for the machine to do that without without copyright being a problem People when they they're when they encounter objective information like objective news They're always going to look for someone who has an analysis of that news then they want a human perspective on it Which is very interesting. I wonder how AI fits into that So one of the things you can do is that you so you can ask it just straight up give me the left wing view on This or give me the right wing view or by the way You can also you I do this a lot is like you can create two personas You can say I want a left-winger and a right-winger and I want them to argue this out Right it'll do that but here's another thing it'll do is you can tell it to write in the style of any Person whose sensibility you admire right so take somebody who you really Take take take a RFK you could say Analyze this topic for me adopt the persona of RFK and then analyze this topic for me And it will use all of the training data that it has With respect to everything that RFK has ever done and said and how he looks at things and how he talks about things and how He you know whatever does whatever he does and it will produce something that the odds are gonna be pretty similar to what the actual Person is gonna say but you can do the same thing for Peter Hotez you can do the same thing for you know Authority figures you can do the same thing for What would Jesus say right literally literally what would Jesus say wow and it will it's not Jesus saying it But it's it's using the complete set of text and all accounts of everything Jesus ever said and did And it's gonna produce something that at least is gonna be reasonable reasonably close to them. What a bizarre new world We're in the middle of right now exactly and so you can channel it It's a fascinating thing you can channel historical figure you can channel Abraham Lincoln like okay Here's another example for how kids are gonna do this. It's like okay. It's time to learn about the Civil War okay Let's talk to Abraham Lincoln Let's be able to ask him questions right and again It's not like you're not of course actually talking to him Lincoln But you were talking to these sum total of all written expression all books ever written about Lincoln And he's talking back at you right so yeah, it'll happily do that for you Just what is a 20 year old going to look like that's born today When when they hit 20 like what kind of access to information view of the world? understanding of things instantaneous knowledge What what if any? Thoughts do you have on things like neural link and the emerging technologies of Human neural interfaces yeah, so this is the And this is this is what the AI safety people describe as like the out Or the you know the fallback position or something which is okay if you can't beat him join him Yeah, right right. Maybe we just need to like upgrade everybody's intelligence and maybe right way to do that as a kind of fuse man a machine maybe Yeah, look the technology is very so it's very serious technology It's like the the technology is for real that they're working on like that they and people like them are it's all for real You know people have been working on the ideas underneath this for like 30 years. You know things like MRIs And by the way the thing on this is there's a lot of immediate healthcare applications So like people with Parkinson's right people people who have had you know who've been paraplegics or quadriplegics being able to restore You know the ability to move like that Right being able to fix things that are broken in the nervous system able to reach people able to restore sight to people who can't See if there's some you know breakdown so so there's a lot of very straightforward medical applications that are potentially a very big deal And then there's the idea of like the full actual fusion where it you know a machine knows what you're thinking and it's able to Kind of think with you or you're able to access it. Yeah, I think through it Um, I would just say it's it's all it's exciting. It's it's the field that's moving pretty quickly at this point but we're I think still All right I'm gonna guess 20 years out or something from anything that would resemble what you would hypothesize it to be like But maybe I'll be surprised 20 years ago was 2003 That is true Seems so recent time does fly. Yeah, that seems very recent. They're starting to be able there have been papers in the last six months They're actually people using this technology Specifically the same same kind of thing that we just saw with it with the shoe They're doing they're figuring out how they claim people claim to now know how to do a brain scan and be able to pull out And basically the image that you're thinking of as an image Now this is brand new research and so people are making a lot of claims on things I don't know whether it's actually real or not. There's a bunch of work going into that There's a bunch of work going into whether it can basically get words out Right if you're thinking about a word be able to pull the word out Yeah, so this is the yeah, okay So AI recreates what people see by reading their brain scans a new artificial intelligence system can reconstruct images of a person The images a person saw based on their brain activity. Yeah, so the claim here is that those would be the original images on top And as you're looking at them It'll do a brain scan and it'll feed the result of the brain scan into a system like the one that does the shoes Wow, and then that system produces these you know these images. That's pretty damn close Yeah, so it's like an extrapolation off of the image generation stuff that we've been watching. Yeah, it's pretty close now Excuse me, these are you know, this is this is brand new like is this, you know This is this real right? Is it like the Samsung moonshot? Yeah Yeah, does it you know does it does is it repeatable? Do you by the way, you need to be strapped to a million dollars worth of lab equipment, right? You know, so there's like we're right these things can take a while to get to work But I pretty fascinating if it's applicable though if that really can happen hypothetically. Yeah, exactly Wow Wow, exactly. It's a wild world. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's the the possibilities are very fascinating because it just seems like we're about to Enter into to a world that's so different than anything human beings have ever experienced before All technology driven. Yeah You're in the middle of it buddy enjoying it. Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. Anything more anything more? I Get maybe the picture I leave you with you you mentioned the 20, you know The 20 year old who has grown up having had this technology the whole time and having had all the questions answered I think there's actually something even deeper The AI like the AI that my eight year old's gonna have by the time he's 20 it's gonna have had 12 years of experience with him So it will have grown up with him be a good life coach. Yes It will know Everything he's ever done it will know everything he ever did well, it will know everything he did that took real effort It will know what he's good at it will know what he's not good at. It'll know how to teach him It'll know how to correct for his, you know, whatever limitations he has, you know, it'll know how to maximize his strengths It'll know it'll know what he wants a wonderful understand how to maximize happiness Yeah, like I wonder if I could say mark you are working too much Yeah, if you just worked one last day a week, you'd be 40% happier and only 10% less productive Yep Well, if you're wearing an Apple watch right it will have your pulse and it'll have a blood pressure and it'll have all these Things that live, you know, and it'll be able to say, you know, look when you were in this you know When you're working on this you were relaxed Your serotonin level, you know your serotonin or your whatever oxytocin levels are high Serotonin levels are high when you were doing this other thing your cortisol levels are high. You shouldn't do that Let's figure out how to way to have you not have to go through that again Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, by the way, so, you know sleep, you know, you didn't sleep well Right, right So yeah, and it'll have yeah, it'll have all that right And so yeah, no literally they hit they hit college or they hit the workplace and they'll have an ally Right with them Right even before there's any sort of actual brain, you know without any mechanical without any, you know, sort of actual physical hookup They'll have basically a partner right that'll be with them that whose goal in life will be to make them, you know, it's happy