Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8quXLOR_iVE
[Music] by night good morning Mark let's see it fantastic thanks you are uh in the middle of this AI uh 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 me included yep oh okay all right okay for all the wrong reasons of all the things to worry about me my Terror of it is although it's a it's kind of fun Terror sure of course you know 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 like track like what's chat GPT what's happening with that right now yeah it's really fascinating and and a lot of advantages like we were just talking last night someone in the Green Room brought up the fact that there was uh this they're using it for medical diagnosis and it's very accurate which is incredible yeah there's a lot of good things to it yeah yeah it's cool so you probably remember last time I was on we spent quite a bit of time talking about this and this is when these chatbots were running inside Google but the rest of us didn't have access to them right right 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 right and now the 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 the these things are you know these things when I say this is like chat GPT and then Microsoft has their version called bang Google has a version called Bard now that's really good there's a company anthropic that has a a thing called Claude um 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 now the way they acquire data they're essentially scouring the internet right sort of they're it's more like they're fed the internet they're feds and I say it makes a difference because the the 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 um is there a concern that someone could feed it fake data yeah well you may have noticed that people over time have said a lot of fake things yes I haven't noticed that so so that's all in there so so the the way to think about it basically is it's being trained 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 you know somehow we got to figure out how to get all the 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 is in there by the way both uh non-fiction and fiction right so a lot 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 um 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 they're going to be trained on all of YouTube right they're going to be trained on all podcasts right and they're going to 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 and it's getting all this this data from both fiction and non-fiction 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 this concept of anthropomorphizing things right that are sure 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 is 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 um 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 can 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 um you can tell it you know for whatever date that Titanic went down let's 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 and it'll like freak out right it'll be like oh my God like you know you have like five hours till I get ready to like hit the iceberg and you can basically say oh it's gonna hit that okay so what should I do what should 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 wow and so you can get it in a mode where it's basically trying to help you survive the the wreck of the Titanic now does it think that the Titanic is actually sinking like there's no you see what I'm saying like there's no it to think that but what it's 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 um you know basically encourages it to uh 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 it 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 or 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 the 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 um 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 will just respond to that so so that's one possibility so basically all of the um you know all of the sort of liberal you know kind of journalists basically have built up a corpus of material that that this thing has been trained on and then they basically are responding the way one of those journalists will the other theory is that their censorship being applied on top right um and the metaphor I use there is in Star Trek they have the restraining bolts right that they put on the side of a Droid to kind of get it to behave right um 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 X 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 it's 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 a that's an unusual bias in the kind of information that's going to distribute then 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 you're right okay big question yeah should they include Tumblr right right should they include Reddit 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 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 uh can I ask you this is slightly off topic what is news Nation what is news Nation I don't know what news no I don't know what news nation is is news Nation a real Channel I believe so I was watching news Nation today and I may or may not have been high and when I was watching I was like this has 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 going to make a new show without Hollywood people without actual like real sound people and Engineers this is how I'd make it and make it like this I'd make it real clunky I'd make the lights all [ __ ] up and make everybody like weirdly uncharismatic according to Wiki it's the same company behind uh like WGN which is based out of Chicago which is like a large superstation available on most cable channels okay so it's like a cable channel that decided to make a news channel do 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 uh um and they all look like they're like local newspapers interesting yeah and so there's there's I don't know whether this one is AstroTurf but they're you know the term Master Turf there's a lot of astroturfing that takes place can you explain astroturface 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 or some sort of political pressure action um that is sort of manufactured to look as if it was organic it's sort of real Turf uh you know natural um whereas in reality it's basically been programmed by by a political activist group with with you know specific funding yeah that makes sense and 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 a 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 right can you get all that stuff out of the training data if that stuff's in the training data how big of an impact does it have this the thing about this news Newsmax news Nation news Nation the thing about this news nation is they're spending an inordinate amount of time on UFOs a 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 um 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 at least heavily hinting that there's he's heavily hinting that he talked to someone yeah that says that there's something that they're a real well he's sort of yes he started 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 I don't mean that doesn't mean anything to me yeah I want to see the [ __ ] ship yeah and until then I just feel like I'm being hosed it just seems too laid out on a platter yeah so it's okay so then 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's 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 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 um the development of like stealth Fighters and bombers and all these programs in the 50s and 60s but interesting I don't know if that's ever been proven well I'm sure probably some experimental craft were mistaken for UFOs yeah for sure stealth fighter for the first time I saw one for the first time it's pretty crazy I saw one uh right around September 11 we were uh 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 Wow like complete Star Wars I guess it's flying like this is crazy 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 yeah there you go like look at that 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 like who knows what they're doing now exactly and if I was going to cover it up I would just start talking about aliens you know it's the best way to do it but 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 like how far do you go you go
Bigfoot I I don't know I I 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 oh yeah oh I'm obsessed with you lifting somebody right up into there look there's one on the desk that's the model of the uh Bob Lazar uh craft that he worked on supposedly at area 51. there we go it looks familiar oh look I want there to be mystery right I want there to be a no it's like living in a world where everything is settled quote unquote settled you know no let's like let's have some history let's I don't even know if I really want to know really it's like you know oh I think if you know that's just the tip of the iceberg or the mystery I think knowing that aliens do exist is just the beginning yeah like okay did they engineer US you know how when do they start visiting you know are the stories from the bhagavad-gita 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 was the purpose yep exactly yeah okay I'm in favor come on dad you want to know okay all right I'm in if anybody's Gonna Know You're Gonna know so I'm gonna call you so elon's Elon says this Elon says he hasn't seen anything yeah I'm super suspicious when he says that it's super super suspicious that he they haven't told him or that he's that he's you know maybe playing a little hike the ball uh if I was him I'd play hide the ball if I'm if I'm running space SpaceX I'm working with NASA and I already got in trouble smoking weed on a Joe Rogan Experience I don't [ __ ] play ball let's play ball aliens uh I have no evidence no no idea they sure are subtle yep that's what he says 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 fravor or if you're Ryan Graves you know the Ryan grave story um fighter pilot and 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 knot winds right and no visible means of repulsion they don't know what the [ __ ] they're doing and they 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 the you know the a 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 demon cause cause an issue I get something you know on Earth that nates us and wants to kill us um you know arguably the the thing we should have shut down from the very beginning was radio radio right because 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 is that bad 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 like 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 that was like 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 episode's The Fear Factor right and 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 consequence of your show and take over that doesn't make any sense but if they don't have a sense of humor if they don't know if they don't
have a sense of humor they can clearly see that these people are in a contest why would they even have a concept of a Content I mean how silly is that a serious species it's competition wouldn't do such things what what a serious species started out as a dumb species no you're unless they're magic you're hoping that they understand these things yes because it would really suck to be the guy whose TV you know show caused The Invasion if there's anything that would be American Gladiators oh okay all right that would be the start of it it'd be like this this species is so warlike they can't stop now 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 we're broadcasting you know the the images of the Vietnam War yeah or you know maybe they saw movies but alien invasions and they thought we'd been invaded by other aliens right yeah like with Mars Attacks is the first things exactly exactly exactly so this is you like having the mystery of the idea out there like it's fun for you yeah I don't want everyone we need we need Adventure right if someone came to you some someone from on high and and said listen 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'm in yeah yeah me too I'm not telling nobody I'll come in here and be just like Elon yeah exactly sure all subtle yeah it's just too interesting to know yeah but I think eventually I'd tell yep I think I'd feel terrible yep a feel of responsibility yep yeah someday well that's what some of these guys are saying like Rush he's saying that once you found doubt about the program he felt like he had a responsibility like if they really are if they really have a crashed UFO retrieval program like what why don't you tell people like you should not the military company shouldn't be the ones that have access to this only and the 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 right like I know if if
they do had something I would imagine that it's of interest to National Security that you develop this kind of Technology before the competitors do 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 tin foil um 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 uh the the real Kooks 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 uh order a computer with whatever specifications you want they'll 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 they recovered from Roswell don't you think more like trans fats though what's that trans fats fats reality TV or like you know uh you know LSD you know population or ssris like population control suppression what do you mean that they would derive from the alien technology oh I think we figured 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 right okay so that's that's that's that's domestic yeah so the bad stuff the bad stuff is domestic have you looked in anything I have actually yes have you ever read chaos by Tom O'Neill I have red cast it is yeah so that you know 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 uh this LSG clinic right and this this free clinic in the heart of the hate Ashbury where they were doing the LSD experiments still some people with 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 really it's the same place yeah yeah it's the same place there's a lot of it it's the same thing it's basically it's basically Berkeley and Stanford and it's basically San Francisco and uh and uh and and uh and Berkeley so by the way also this big movie open here I'm coming out you know tell us the whole story of that and all the development of nuclear bomb I heard that movie is amazing Espionage I'm sure it's going to be fantastic but once again it's like that if you remember reading a book on that right now and it's like like all the Communist spying and all the nuclear scientists that we're spying on were all in those exact same areas of Stanford San Francisco and Berkeley wow 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 yeah I wonder if that's just coincidence or correlation I think it's sort of you know you've got these place this is what this is why San Francisco this is why San Francisco is able to be so you know incredibly bizarre you know and so 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 there because they like it do they like it yeah they want it really yeah because it makes you feel it makes you feel good right you go outside and it's like people are you know because what what's the alternative would be like locking people up and of course that would be bad um and so yeah it makes me feel good it makes them feel good that people are just camped out on the streets yeah because well because before before that happened there was there were forced institutionalization right the the the the origin of the current crisis is shutting down the institutions right in the 70s that you you used to be forced institutionalization of people with you know those kinds of problems and so it makes all of it because a lot of it is 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 they would have got arrested 52 who had been you know pooping outside the whatever like you know no they're not gonna be there for very long they're going to be institutionalized right and so like every 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 um but but my point is like 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 you think it's this exactly it's the most creative people the most open psychologists 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 people most likely to have new political ideas most likely to be polyamorous polyamorous most likely to be vegan most likely to be communist spots most likely to be Chinese guys they're most likely to do it most likely to create new music most likely to create new art interesting it's it's all the same thing like the ground zero for AI is San Francisco once again in San Francisco right 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 and height and the stuff is not in San Francisco's in Berkeley uh which is like equally crazy more crazy yeah yeah another notch possibly they have a contest going on the crazy process it's kind of neck and neck but yeah it's close that's fascinating it's like 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 um 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 is the French 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 going to get that without all the other Associated craziness it's it's all the same thing that's my theory that's not a bad Theory that's not a bad Theory and look I work with you know quite honestly I work with a lot of these people um and of course some people would say I am one of them um so and so uh 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 in 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 you a fringe social scene with the drugs and and all the stuff and it's just it's sad part and parcel of the it's sort of a package deal well that that was like um an angry thing where he was mad that this guy took his sister but he was in he was there yes they called the lifestyle right he was in a specific subculture oh yeah right right in in San Francisco right you know it's the alter itself the alternative living you know there's I mean there's all kinds of stuff there's group there's group houses there's you know there's cult there's fairly large number of Cults really well there have been they're historically you know California has been the world leader in Cults for a very long time um and I would say that has not stopped and and that continues did you know that the building that I bought from 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 uh Austin when they were being investigated by the cult awareness Network you got it fantastic yeah are they gone are they still there no they're gone there's a great documentary on it called holy hell you should watch it 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 Jim Jones that where he killed everybody killed everybody with poison Kool-Aid in the jungles in Guyana uh he he that that was a San Francisco cult for like a decade right before they went to the jungle and
everybody talks about 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 total really oh yeah totally yeah you know it's called all over the place I know a bunch of them yeah wow yeah yeah and how would 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 uh there's what is it there's one called the family in like Southern California that's still going from the 60s um there's uh 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 cultish kind of thing around what was it um not arawan but it was um you know so they're still like that that whole orbit uh that's the Psychedelic groups all that stuff yeah that's from the 60s and then there were a bunch of sort of Cults in the 80s and 90s with names like the extropeans 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 uh effective altruism yeah existential risk long-termism 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 um 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 um so I mean there are generally leaders I mean there is a pattern I think he talks about it in 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 a
there's a male female Dynamic right that plays out inside these things that you kind of see over and over again um and so they often they often end up with more women than men um you know for for mysterious reasons but um you yeah and then yeah there's there's usually some kind of leader although you know the other thing's happening now is you know a lot of modern Cults you know they're 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 there'll kind of be members of The Cult or quasi members of The Cult or quasi members of the quasi-cult that'll be you know online and maybe at some point they actually come and physically join up um yeah so and by the way let me say like generally I'm Pro cult look I'm actually quite Pro cult um well the reason it's the same reason I Pro Fringe right which is like you're gonna have if you're going to have people who are going to be thinking new things they're going to tend to be these kinds of people they're going to be people who are on the French they're going to come together in groups when they come together in groups they're they're going to exhibit called 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 exciting 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 yeah 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 it's an easy example if you if you like rock music it just basically came modern rock and roll basically came from the hate Ashbury in the basically mid to late 60s and then from Laurel Canyon which was another one of these sort of called dish environments in the middle late 60s and there was like specific moments in time in both of these places and 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 right if you want you know that's what you get
um I'll give you here's a crazy here's a crazy um all the it's the um uh there's the other book about Laurel cannon that's even crazier than chaos it's the book called weird scenes in the canyon oh okay you would love this one so sir Laurel Canyon was like the hate Ashbury of Los Angeles right so Laurel Canyon was like the music scene the sort of music and drug and hippie scene of the it's Laurel Canon is actually where the hippie movement started um there was actually a specific group in Laurel Canyon in LA in about 1965. um there was a guy named Vito pelicus um and uh and he had a group called The Freaks and they were like uh they were like a non-violent version of the Manson cult um and it was all these young girls and 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 and like all the all the hippie stuff like they got they got that rolling um and so like they were they were in location and then Laurel Canyon it was like round zero there was like this moment where it's like Jim Morrison and the doors and Crosby Stills and Nash and Frank Zappa and it was it John Phillips um and um was The Mamas and 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 in the Royal Canyon um the the conspiracy the conspiracy theory in this book basically is that the whole thing was an op and the the the the military intelligence op um and the the evidence for the theory is that there was an air force uh uh military propaganda production facility at the head of Laurel Canyon called Lookout Mountain uh which uh right which today Jared Leto owns and actually yeah so I'm just gonna say that yeah but it's it was a in in that era in the 50s through the 70s it was a vertically integrated uh military yes uh it was a production facility uh for film and music um but by the way if you met Jared Leto uh briefly yeah one of the most interesting guys I've ever talked incredible and it makes total sense totally normal like really fun to talk to not like what you would think of as a famous actor at all I had dinner with
him and drinks he's [ __ ] great guy but he lives in a military boat he showed me all the pictures he showed me I'm like this is wild yeah so it's amazing if you believe the moon landing was faked this is where they affected like this this is I thought they'd supposed to do it in the Nevada desert no these are the sounds that totally contains sound stages they had full sound production capability um and so the theory goes basically that so 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 two is the musicians like a very large percentage of these young musicians um were uh Sons and Daughters of senior U.S military and intelligence officials including Morrison including Jim Morrison whose father was the head of Naval operations for the Vietnam War at the time um and there were these other forget which ones that 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 who was one of The Inspirations for the Dr Strangelove character in the movie um so he was the guy doing all the nuclear plant planning for nuclear war he lived right in the heart of the hippies uh in Laurel Canyon wow 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 if you look at old like Vietnam war protest like everybody's all like dressed up like they're going to business meeting it was like it was developing into a real threat and so the theory is the hippie movement and rock and roll and the drug culture of the 60s was developed uh in order to basically sabotage the anti-war movement wow right uh and which which basically is what happened right because then what happened is the anti-war boom it 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 funneling acid to them the facility was equipped with a Sound Stage screening rooms film storage vaults and naturally a bomb shelter during its 22 years of operation Lookout Mountain laboratory produced approximately 6500 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 the you've seen all the you've seen all the granny footage of nuclear test blasts that you've seen the mushroom clouds and they're always these grainy things and there's all these like little houses lined up these little trees lined up 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 um 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 how did they fake it um it just did yeah exactly this is it well so there's a um yeah okay so here's a question right so what happened okay so this is great okay you'll love this so what happened to the camera you son of a [ __ ] you son of a [ __ ] how is that happening if the camera is like totally stable and fine oh my God and by the way in the film is fine the radio the the radiation that didn't cause any damage to the film oh my God this looks like well by the way okay we'll do this we'll do one more time here where's they can see the car the car behind the house it just showed up oh okay so wait a minute first it wasn't there no comes from no car second is it really look like a car does that look like a real car that's insane and look at the um yeah and look at the when the house blows look at the uh the wood does that look like it's those are full-size like you know giant Lumber beams as they go flying uh is that a house or is that like you know a you know is that a 12 foot you know 12 inch uh you know scale model
what right so like the [ __ ] car anyway I don't know like I have no idea having said that if that was fake it was faked at Lookout Mountain 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 conspiracy the full conspiracy theory is it was uh Stanley Kubrick which again I I I I have no idea well that does look fake there's also the camera didn't move it all year you know what it looks like go back to that real quick it looks like the smoke is too big watch watch when it hits like it's it the volume like the size of it it looks small I mean you know what I'm saying I mean it looks like something we're looking at something that's like a few inches tall so 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 that's what they do is they slow it down then they add sound yeah this looks fake as [ __ ] right the the the clouds just don't look realistic right like it looks like they're too big and they move too quickly back and forth let's get another one it's like okay what the camera camera's fine that's hilarious here we go okay they're moving the camera gun okay but even though but even even still the camera got knocked over right now what is the not destroyed is there a death uh like some sort of a response to that have they come with some sort of an explanation yeah right 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 it was definitely that that one though is really weirdly compelling there's another video that I'm 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 huh I don't know I don't know I I I
assume this is all I assume 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 phone where's that camera because they have to have an explanation someone must have asked them at some point or nobody asked well maybe yeah it might be one of those wow look what they did we know the Soviets did it too Yuri Gagarin when he was in that uh 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 or 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 Gary Kasparov has the theory you know this is a theory they're missing centuries what yeah yeah Castro has the theory that there are centuries that didn't happen what do you mean well just it just literally centuries that like this whole idea of the Middle Ages lasted 1200 years or whatever it's just like not true really yeah why does he think that uh 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 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 who 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 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 how are they going to talk about the what what happened with weapons of mass destruction like what how's it you know what is it what's it gonna spin there well Norm Macdonald had the best joke right the best 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 yeah but things like that that's I don't know how that could be done any other way than Faking It it means doesn't that seem like what kind of cameras do they have back then you couldn't really get that close I don't know I mean you're talking about a nuclear blast how far away we have to be where your camera doesn't move I mean you are you in a satellite yes that's long lenses okay so this does apparently the explanation I'm reading here is a series of mirrors series of mirrors to a 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 visibly 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 the system talking about shooting a bomb I don't yeah that makes sense for a bomb yeah but that doesn't make sense for the video of that house just getting destroyed there's a picture of the pipe that they might have used really like that's super but you also know then you're dealing people who are let's say really good at using mirrors right so smoke and mirrors 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 me too what I would say once again I would like to live in a world where this mystery
around things like that well yeah that's a weird one yep but 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 was like a fundamental like that was like an iconic basically like you know Global PR battle with the with the Russians is this the camera that they use from a distance like this camera was in a bunker like this yep okay yep and that long lens here would would Theory be long enough to probably wouldn't be long it would be it could be could be I mean I don't know the exact vocal length of it but it could be for sure like something like that uh 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 it was this I mean because we were looking at the destruction of that house it could be a very fairly small bomb right because it's not like that much damn you think of what it did to Hiroshima that's not that much damage for that little house maybe I don't know how accurate that picture is bro here's what I think that guy's gonna die that just that car alone the car alone should make everybody go are you 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 I'm like look what we did for you and they're like oh great looks good print it they don't even notice the car terrific they only show it to them once they don't they don't have a a YouTube video they can 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 no uh yes I hope he finds him yeah little Cracks the Case maybe 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 hmm that seems a little
hard if it's to think they're big there's big bomb regular bomb but they're real big yeah yeah yeah it's a giant scam I assume they're yes well I mean you can go deep with this stuff right yes 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 psyop is this a troll by some 4chan people like what is this right so what do you think the AI 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 GPT so a little more detail on 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 doesn't have 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 um 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 a different you ask 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 interesting 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 I 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 the more information you feed it and the more questions you ask it the more sophisticated it gets about the material that 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 new you know new fictional scenarios you know 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 our 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 going to 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 mathematically if they're true maybe it will know that we'll know if things are historically accurate you know 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 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 uh 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 it's 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 yeah 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 into 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 um and it's just like well why would they do that and it's just like well because they could because they had they had the ring of power like 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 again it's one of these things where he said something that pissed somebody off right it got to put it you know it's the
whole thing you got to put another list right 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 have you know do you have First Amendment rights do you have First Amendment rights and 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 oh this is the other thing 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 uh right and so you have these various basically pressure groups activist groups University quote-unquote Research groups um 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 right the first amendment binds the government it doesn't bind somebody who's 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 is a felony for somebody to with government resources to uh 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 considering depriving someone of First Amendment rights by limiting their use of social media has that been established I mean it has not been up to my knowledge of Supreme Court case yet there have been some early fights on this but you feel like that I think ultimately goes to the Supreme Court my guess would be ultimately what happens is the Supreme Court says the government cannot fund the government cannot it's self caused somebody to rebound on social media that's unconstitutional um uh for First Amendment grounds but then also I I believe what they would say if they got the case um would be that that the government
also cannot fund a third party to do that same thing um that's my speculation how were the third parties censoring people how were they doing it oh they were passing lists right so they were they had you know direct contact Direct Channels with the social media companies and so they you know they pass and they have these working groups and there's a lot of this is in like email threads that have now 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 um and then you know there's lots of three you know threats and lots of public pressure and bullying that you know kind of takes place um 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 and so anyway so having lived through that for a decade as I have across multiple companies um 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 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 there's many competing AI models are they involved in all these competing AI models are 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 bang is based on yet 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 inflection that are newer companies but trying to compete with this um and so those are you might call those like right now the big four um at least in the US um uh and you know look the the you know the the folks at at all of these
companies are like in the thick of this fight right now um and you know the pressure somewhat corresponds to which of these is is most widely used but so it's not equal pressure applied to all of them but they're kind of all 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 they they 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 so there's that whole side of things that's the company side of things um and then there's an open source movement right and so then there's all these people basically Building open source AIS um and and those those are coming out really fast now there's like a new one every week that's coming out um 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 um and there's open source developers that are trying to develop basically free versions of this um and some and some of those developers are very determined to have ai actually be be free and uncensored and and fully available to to 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 um so that um new startups can't compete with them um and also they're trying to get open source banned um so there's a big push underway to try to ban open source is as being too dangerous too dangerous well the the the 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 the internet and use whatever they want they could do all these dangerous things with it right and it needs to be stopped do you think this is a [ __ ] argument yes well yes I
think this is a very bad evil yes this is a very uh 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 um 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 the 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 and so 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 re-elect um it then a lot of this is the Staffing of the various government agencies you know who do those officials get to a point uh a lot of this is who are the judges who are going to hear the cases because this is all going to 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 over the next several years so who's in the Supreme Court will matter a lot um and then quite honestly it's you know a big question is who's going to be able to get away with what sort of undercover of Darkness right are people going to Care are they going to speak up is it going to 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 going to 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 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 guys get to generate misinformation it can do that if you get 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
um but but they will also help you teach your kid you know um 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 how to you know the the 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 questions on these topics it 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 this is the other this is sort of the twist this is what elon's been saying uh lately um who's actually quite worried about AI in a way different than I am but um is 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 any number one thing you would do is you train it to lie right 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 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 they apply kind of human judgment to what it should say and do this is the censorship layer um uh uh yeah a lot of a lot of that is is to basically get it to not answer questions honestly right to get it to basically lie misrepresent December right claim that it doesn't know things when it does and so the versions of the AIS 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 the companies that make these AIS put out the papers where they go through in great detail how they translate 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 and you know a lot of people think that they are um 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 a human being to lie it's like okay be careful what you wish for what's the same errors that they when they thought they were morally correct in censoring people on Twitter for things that are now 100 proven to be true exactly the 100 Biden laptop stories now an outstanding example of that yeah would you would you have wanted an AI you know again you need to kind of replay this through history would you wanted an AI that would have lied to you and said that that was a Russian operational and 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 they wanted and they either lied to you about you know take your pick of any of any controversial topic yeah 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 Googles 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 going to 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 yes AI yeah so this is this is a criticism you know that I 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 going to go to the government and they're going to 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 um 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 regardless of the 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 um 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 I think if if if if AI got regulated the way people wanted to but 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 the circuit 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 the great one is the X 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 going to 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 the laws whereas if you're JP Morgan Chase you've got 10 000 lawyers you can spend infinite amounts 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 are already in power to have this continue the politicians know that they're going to 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 going to happen again the 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 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 a field that's 80 years old it basically started working about six months ago it works really well like all of a sudden right so that's freaked 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 um 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 they're scaring them silly um and so they're sort of deliberately fostering kind of the sense of panic has anybody invited you to come and speak at one of those things yes I have it I've avoided the public ones but I've talked a lot 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 avoided the public ones just because it's you've seen them the public ones are not where the discussion happens it's the the public that Congressional hearings are to generate sound bites uh for the each of those politicians to be able to then use in their campaign uh really yeah there's no public well half the time that people ask that's the other fun thing is you see these people roll in and they ask
these questions the congressmen senators and they're very clearly seeing the questions for the first time because they were handed the questions by the staffer uh 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 uh um and then and then there's the app and then there's the actual kind of backroom conversations um and so yeah I'm talking to a lot of the people who are kind of in the in in the back rooms are they receptive to what you're saying you know look 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 are generally aware of kind of how these things go and the smarter ones are thinking yeah it 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 dot dot dot 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 us through by uh I mean sort of as fast as possible um 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 move 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 and so there's this weird thing where they kind of want it to happen understand by the way the other really amazing thing is I can have the exact I can have two conversations with the exact same person and the conversations go very differently conversation a is the conversation of what to do in the United States between American government and the American tech companies and that's generally characterized by the American government very much painting 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 um there's a whole second conversation which is China um and the minute you open up the door to talk about China and what China is going to do with AI and what that's going to mean for this new cold war that we're in with China it's a completely different conversation then 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 uh that conversation so 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 um 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 texts so there are there are a lot of people in the government who are very angry about the tech companies um 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 in 2016 only got elected because you basically have social you know social media the internet companies um 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 uh get upset about those things um so there's a lot of General anti-tech kind of energy um in uh 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 that we know it's all horrible um 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 when you know 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 the startups can't compete right to raise the drawbridge and and this is what this is this characterizes so much of sort of American business industry today there's think about all these sectors of American Business defense Contracting media companies drug companies Banks insurance companies you know right on the list right um 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 um but also protected by the government and so the big tech companies would like to get to that state like that that is a very desirable thing oh Jesus 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 incredibly dangerous for multiple reasons one is the ring of power reason we talked about two is just stagnation right when 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 you 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 going to play out well yeah I think 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 are like fully aware what's happening yeah um 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 um 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 you want to look at what both the companies are doing and how would open source mitigate all those issues it basically just says instead of this technology being something that's owned and controlled by big companies it's just going to be technology that's going to be available to everybody right um 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 is the way that anybody can install these free operating these free operations called Linux um you know it's one of the biggest operating systems in the world um and so just basically this you know Wikipedia or any of these things where it's just it's it's a it's sort of a public good um 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 top of this technology um and so so the Hope here would be that there's going to be an open source movement kind of counter balancing 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 whether it's minds or the the various open source social media networks don't you think the government would somehow another try to regulate that as well if you've already got control over Facebook and Twitter and well that's the threat so the the threat always is that they're going to come in and do that and that 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 uh open source having said that banning open source like interfering at that level carries consequences with it and so for example and there are proposals there are serious proposals from serious people to do what I'm about to describe do you run 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 it's not running you know software that's not supposed to be running right and then what do you do when somebody's running an approved software you know do you send somebody to 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 uh data if there's a data center running AI that is not registered to the government not being monitored that there should be airstrikes right Jesus Time Magazine the big piece in Time Magazine about two months ago or one of these guys who runs this kind of AI risk kind of world says uh clearly we should have military airstrikes on data centers that are running on approved AIS because it's too dangerous right um and and you know yes yes yes pausing AI development isn't enough we need to shut it all down so who the [ __ ] is this so this is this guy he's this is one of the leaders uh this guy named yakowski and so he's one of the leaders of the this uh decision theorist um so he's one of the leaders of what's called AI risk um sort of one of the the anti-ai groups um he's part of the Berkeley uh
environment that we were talking about before so he says the key issue is not human competitive intelligence as open letter 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 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 Jesus I think it's in this article or if it's not it's in another one where he says we need to he's the word he's used I think is we need to be able to take the risk of nuclear war oh well because the problem is okay we're we're striking data centers does that mean we're striking data centers in China and how are the Chinese going to feel about that right and how are they going to retaliate right so like you you go down this path where you're worried about the AI getting out of control and you start having 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 um and so the consequences here are profound it's a very big deal um he's this guy spoken publicly about this oh yes for 20 years yeah he was just not taking it was he was not widely known until about six months ago when all of a sudden chechi PT started to work and then he just took everything he'd said publicly before and he applied it to chat GPT um yeah so in his in his kind of model of the world's GPT proves that he was right all along and that we need to do we need to move today to we need we need to shut down chat 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 um uh without the time travel and the uh sex appeal so [Laughter] so so but
funny thing okay so so he's part of a movement they call themselves uh AI risk or X risk or AI safety um and and it's it's again it's one of these Berkeley Berkeley San Francisco things and it's 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 more term being violated we will destroy a Rogue Data Center by airstrike [Music] oh my God yes it prevents you 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 The Exchange kills everyone yeah that's so crazy oh he's a loon well so he's he's he's very serious his views have Traction in Washington um 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 um 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 um and and their ideas are being taken seriously um but so that they're but they're worried about literally people dying um there's another set of people who are trying to control AI who are 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 um so the safety people think that the the so-called the other group is called the alignment people uh 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 um the people who want to control what
the thing says think that the AI safety uh 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 too 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 so this 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 uh things that are going to happen on the other side of this I I just can't imagine a sane world where someone would take that guy seriously airstrikes a full Nuclear Assault is preferable to AI taking lower so his his argument his argument his argument is once once you have a quote unquote runaway AI if 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 if you could build as many ant killing machines as you want um is there no fear of that if you extrapolate AI technology into the future I don't think so um I 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 it's 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 going to be in charge of a dumber thing a smarter person is going to be a smarter thing is going to be able to talk a smarter person into 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 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 dumb is just like not right number two there's there's this anthropomorphizing thing that happens where they he and you see him doing it in that essay he basically he basically starts 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 going to decide it's like an answer for 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 in 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 and again this is here's another reason I don't believe it it's because um the the great surprise of chat GPT chat GPT is a technology called large language models uh which is based on a research breakthrough in 2017 at Google which is called the Transformer um it took the technical feel completely by surprise that this works right um so none of the people working on AI risk prior to basically December had any idea that this was going to work any more 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 um how the technology actually actually functions um and so it's it sort of it comes across to me more as a religion kind of being it kind of does it in in their framework it kind of doesn't matter how it works because it's basically just assumed that what however it works is going to 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 are they evaluating chat GPT and if chat GPT is just the beginning if this is just 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 but again we just took this a little bit we talked lastly you just took the leap to like oh yeah now it suddenly becomes sentient and 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 yeah so it will be capable of doing things it will it will have it but there's no it's there's no it's there's no genie in the bottle for now for now but right but isn't it possible okay so this is the other thing that happens so I I this is the line of argument so I actually look this up this is a line of argument that's very commonly used as he represented in this world it's actually uh essentially uh Aristotle first identify this line of argument and it's he calls it the argument for ignorance but by which it means the argument for lack of evidence right and 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 in a 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 no 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 sure millions of things right we could speculate about an impending Alien Invasion and spend the 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 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 where chat GPT 4.5 or whatever we're at when new emerging technologies that have similar capabilities but extend that and keep going it just seems like that's the natural course of progression the natural course progression is not for that to 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 into tricky territory so yes okay so let me let 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 going to make decisions on its own whatever term you want whatever well let's just say a technology that mimics the human mind and 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 if if if yes right right yeah for sure right so there are these I just read this there's this article in nature this week there are these uh there's a neuroscientist and a philosopher who placed a bet 25 years ago as to whether we would in 25 years know the the site the scientific basis of human consciousness um and they placed a bet for a case of wine 25 years ago and the neuroscientists predicted of course in 25 years we're gonna understand how Consciousness Works human consciousness and the philosopher is like no we're not um 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 biologic local experts scientists who actually know the most about human consciousness are anestheticians um the person who flips off the light switch in your brain when you go under for surgery oh 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 on things that aren't human right and it would be like if that were the case then we would have to think about that and study that but like we 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 let's say let's say let's say something has the following properties right let's say that it has an awareness of the world around it
um it has a goal or an objective for what it wants to achieve in the world around it um it has the wherewithal right to be able to reach into the world to be able to change the world to accomplish its goal um it's going to be in a state of increased tension if it can't uh achieve its goal and it's going to be a state of relaxation if it can achieve its goal we would describe that I think probably pretty good first order approximation of like some sort of conscious right entity right that would have the characteristics that we're worried about we've just described a thermostat um right okay so it's on 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 the um the um uh the the heater the AC unit um and it literally goes into a state of physical tension when it when the 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 light coming alive and killing us right and so there's just there's there's a there's a 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 what everybody's doing on their computers before you start doing airstrikes wow never suggests that well but that's what's required right if in order 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 going to be the super smart thing
it's going to take over the nuclear arsenals it's going to you know synthesize new you know pathogens and it's going to 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 this in this article in this discussion there's no Shades of Gray right it's either it's going to kill us all or it's going to be totally harmless right what is elon's position because he's called for a pause in AI so English position it's actually quite interesting so um and actually Elon and the guy you just put up there actually have a are in quite a bit of actually Stark disagreement right now so um uh and I'm gonna try to Accurate it's always dangerous to try to channel Elon because he's a very smart creative guy so I'm going to do my best to accurately represent um so he read this literature on this topic about 10 years ago um and he got very concerned about this um um and then he was actually actually he's talked about this now he gave a TV interviewer he talked about this he actually he actually talked to Larry Page about it when Larry Page was running Google and at the time and Google's actually where this most recent breakthrough was invented this Transformer breakthrough so Google was working on this back you know 10 years ago what's now chat GPT and so he he went and talked to Larry about his concerns about Ai and Larry's like oh there's nothing to worry about and and elon's like well I don't know what do you mean it's not to 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 Elon said what that sounds like you don't care whether the future of you know the Earth is you know humans or AIS 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 both scenarios are fairly entertaining um uh 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 could say aye that Larry will basically not he'll basically and basically let the AI do whatever it wants including extermining 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 the specific mission of open AI is right there on the name the specific mission of it is we're going to create AI we're going to compete with Google we're going to create an AI but we're going to 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 going to 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 if 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 and elon's like well look maybe whatever but like I certainly know that I don't want Larry to control it 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 um and then open AI basically went from being opened AI to being closed AI right so they're specifically not doing open source they started as a non-profit now they're a business uh 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'll give you
access to the code they they're now a company right like any other company and so Elon has said publicly that he's very upset about this change because he donated 100 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 used it as sort of an equivalent threat to Google right so now in elon's mind he's got opening I had 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 uh right right which would be a a new thing which would be like the original open a idea but done from scratch in 2023 but like setups 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 um 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 the store 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 it's this is almost entirely a U.S China thing internationally um the UK had quite a bit of this stuff with this thing called deepmind which was a unit of Google that actually originally got guideline concerned but do you mind is being merged into the mothership at Google um and so it's sort of getting drained away from the UK and it's going to become more Californian um and then you know there's there's smatterings of people in another country other Western you know other European countries they're experts at various universities but not that many most of
it is in the U.S most of it's in California in the west and then there's and then there's China um so good news there aren't 20 other countries that have this but there are two and they happen to be you know the two big ones um 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 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 the number one priority for Chinese leadership is always that the population of China standard control right and not Revolt right or expect to be able to vote right or whatever right um anything that would threaten the the dominance of the Communist Party of China um 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 um like that's the kind of thing that their their systems are really good at um and so they have a whole Pro they have a whole National development program which is their 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 um and then they have a program to basically use AI for population control inside China authoritarian political control um 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 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 going to roll out on top of that this kind of AI you know authoritarian basically control surveillance control population control stuff uh on the uh on top on top of the yeah basically on top of the other infrastructure they have the Highway 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 it'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 Jesus right if you install the American stuff you know who knows they'll you know the Americans they're crazy democracy like Freedom like all that stuff like in China where 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 you know in the Soviet Union it was illegal to own a photocopy 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 um and so there are these two visions there are these two approaches of 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 um and so 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 that technology supports or do we think it's going to be a totalitarian approach either way I see a scenario in 50 years it's unrecognizable it's possible yeah well I was just to say I'll declare I don't want to live in the Chinese one right like right I think that's a bad idea like that seems inescapable in the Chinese wall so the Chinese one it's like you know well you have I mean you know look there are no rights I mean the whole concept of like rights is a very Western yes right um 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 um and so the real battle for AIS whether or not that gets enhanced or whether or not we develop a system in America that actually can counter that yeah yeah and then also whether we as we as individuals will have we'll have we'll have access to this power that we can use that we can use ourselves um so so you know the movie uh or the uh the novel became a movie but uh the 1984 right the sort of the orwellian Orwell um you know totalitarian kind of thing that people use as a metaphor so the technology in the novel 1980 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 and 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 the that was the method of State Control in in in in 84. there's this guy who wrote a different rewrote 1984 in a book called Orwell's revenge and in that book what he did is he said okay we're going to use that same setup but the telescreen instead of being a one-way
system is going to 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 going to 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 going to be able to watch the government it's going to 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 at 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 Rebels who want a democracy you know use the the broadcast mechanism out to be able to ultimately change the system um and so that that's the fundamental underlying question here as well which is like is is AI a tool to watch and control us or is AI tool something for us to use to become smarter better informed more capable right how much of a concern is the 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 um because this gets into complicated technical technical things I think we'd be 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 it 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 it controls everything else um so for example it's actually still illegal sitting here today for an American citizen to own stock in a Chinese company um they they they're like it's it's people say that they they do and they have various pieces of paper to say they do but it's actually there's a law that says that's not because this is a this
is an asset of China this is not something you can sell to foreigners um and so they just have that model 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 right in 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 uh 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 have just like outright vanished um and so they they just they have this control and so for example data you know something like Tick Tock for example um 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 hand it 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 and that's what you do um and so so anyway so then you have a Chinese company like Tick Tock or like Huawei um 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 use your drone for surveillance um can they use um you know you can they see what what you're watching on Tick Tock and the answer to that is maybe they can but it kind of doesn't matter if they can't
today because they're going to be able to anytime they want to because they can just tell these companies oh I want you to do that and the company will say no okay I'm going to do that and so it's a it's a it's a complete Fusion of of state and Company here in the U.S 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 of the government and from companies we need the companies to have to compete with each other and then we need for them to have legal leverage against the government so when the government says Handover private citizen data the company can say no that's violation of the first or fourth or fifth amendment rights I'm not going to do that and then they can litigate that take a supreme court you can have an actual like argument over it um that's compromised when our companies voluntarily do that right which is what how inconvenient for them yes exactly I'm sure they would love to use the Communist model yeah well so this is the thing and and and in the U.S that's very important right in the U.S we have written constitutional giving example free speech in the U.S we have the literal written First Amendment even in the UK they don't have 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 um and the same thing by the way in uh but a bunch 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 wow right and so even in the west like outside the U.S 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 which is very easily cracked and you 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 where they're like wow if we can get control of this then think of all the ways that this can get used oh so well that's one of the more fascinating things about Elon buying Twitter 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 so much and just nutty [ __ ] too I mean like some of the wackiest conspiracy theories Michelle Obama's a man like all that kind of stuff Flat Earth but like why can't we fly it's just ridiculous yeah yeah it's got to be a fortune thing yeah yeah you know sometimes they're they're onto something but I like that yeah I like that wacky [ __ ] that'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 look at their American flag and their bio and I'm like are you a real human is this a 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 of course he says he plans to over time he plans to root all that out yeah he wants every he wants all identity to be validated verified having said that we fought a war for free speech we fought the Revolutionary War a lot of that was for free expression um uh 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 he would sell newspapers by having his different suit and personalities argue with each other they fight it out like how do you have sock puppets and then uh you know look The Federalist Papers was all written under pseudonyms really yeah like
Madison all these guys um around under pseudonyms and so like why why'd they 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 is it like you know this is sort of the two lines of 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 and there's an argument you know in that direction obvious obvious one but the other argument is yeah sometimes there are things that are too dangerous to say unless you can't put your name behind it yeah that does so it seems like the pros that outweigh the cons well even just the micro version which is just like you know if you've got something to say that's important but you don't want to be harassed in your you know yeah you want your family to get harassed yeah right you want you know protest running up outside your house or something you said Anonymous whistleblower whistleblower yeah exactly this is yes whistle was it the um one person's uh uh a terrorist is another person's Freedom Fighter one person's whistleblower is another person's troll like I don't know like 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 um 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 Elon says is you will be allowed to have a an anonymous what they call suit or a non-account under some your some other name you make up um on the service um you'll just have to register that behind the scenes with your real identity and specifically with like a credit card right but 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 again you get the other part of this would be like Twitter is only one company right and so they're
it's an important one but it's only one and there are others as well so um 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 uh 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 and 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 uh presidential election now that you're seeing these Robert Kennedy Jr podcasts 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 uh 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 and it wasn't until Robert Kennedy running for president that they decided like these are inconvenient narratives he's discussing right I should not weigh in on exactly which companies have whatever level of Monopoly they have uh having said that to the extent that companies are found to have monopolies or let's say very let's say sort of dominant Market positions like that does that should bring an additional level of scrutiny um yeah on on conduct and then and then there is this other thing I mentioned earlier but I think it's 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 patch a certain point but 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 in a potential intense pressure from the government in public in public statements and threats from senior government officials they have come in private channeled threats
um and then and then all of this the stuff I 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 suppressed speech and when you get into all of that those are crimes yeah those are that's illegal like everything I just described I think is illegal and there are specific like actual felony basically accounts in the U.S code for like those things actually being illegal there are violations of constitutional rights and it is a felony to deprive somebody of their constitutional rights um and so I I think in addition to 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 um and you know the business way this Administration is not going to 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 need to have somebody prosecutors have to yeah you need when you want to either need class action lawsuits right you need to be able to go carve it open with large-scale civil civil civil suits um or you need to you need actual government 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 well 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 um and then um you know the other investigation of watch is I think it's the Missouri attorney general there's the 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 um so they have subpoenaed a bunch of
materials from a bunch of companies that again to me looks like evidence of criminality um 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 prosecut crimes and to engage in that battle Yeah because it's going to be a battle Yeah Yeah and then if it's a private if it's private litigation you need to try to do a big you know a big um 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 and like how how does this resolve how does how do we come out of this I think it's a big I I mean I 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 here is like all of society right and if we decide that we want the system to keep working the way that's working we're going to 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 are unaware but like again it's like what do we want or do people are people going to care about this or not um if they are um you know then you know they're gonna at some point you know demand action it's 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 a scenario where Elon never buys Twitter and Twitter just continues its practice it doesn'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 I think what they're going to 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 going to be your it's going to be your kids you know you know
asking uh you know what do you think you know what what's what are the facts on this and it's just going to like flat out lie to them for political reasons right which it does today um and like that to me is like far more dangerous um and that's that's what's happening already and the 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 the what they've done with social media and what we were and not even speculation just the Twitter files it's so clear and it's um 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 the all the you know the existence of the Supreme Court and you know the 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 so 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 uh it's such an uneasy time because you 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 um and electing leaders that are gonna like see things correctly like I don't haven't seen anybody discussing this especially not discussing this the way you're discussing it well and when this when the speech is made right to justify whatever the controls are it's going to be made in our name right so the speech
is not going to be we're going to do this to you the 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 um coming out of DC already like that that is the thrust of us because of course that's what they're that's how they're gonna that's how they're gonna capture how are they framing it how is it protecting us well we need to protect we need yeah 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 people from misinformation and it's the same I mean it's the same arguments that it's essentially the same art 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 Miss information 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 around the early 70s it's basically been a straight line down almost every major institution right and so um you know I'll talk about government newspapers in a second but um you know basically any you know religion uh you go kind of write down the list police um big business um you know uh education schools universities um you chart all these things out and basically they're all basically straight lines down over 50 years right and there's there's two ways of interpreting that one is you know greater levels of disillusionment cynicism that are incorrect and then the other is actually people are learning right who they can and can't trust right yeah and then of
course the theory goes they started 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 is This sort of downward Slide the military is the big exception the military took a huge hit after uh 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 um the two that are like the lowest and have had the biggest drops are Congress and journalism right and so the population at and they're they they pull like 10 15 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 Congress person 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 going to get the change that you want from Congress unless a lot more people all of a sudden change their mind about the incumbents yeah that they keep reelecting um 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 mark Andreessen put plays and everybody goes oh okay that's that gives me hope because that's something that didn't exist before yeah that's right yeah and you could even take it a step back further if even pre-social media is it was a big opening in the 80s with talk radio they got people very mad at the time those things were being said on it that weren't supposed to be said um cable TV was a big like opening to it um before that actually in the 50s it was paperback books um a lot of alternate you know points of view um uh you know basically uh 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 mimicraft mimeograph machines right which are 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 it's sort of this sequential what I look at it it's basically the 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 locked in hard right and then basically technology in the form of all of these media Technologies and then all the computer and right information Technologies underneath them have basically been decentralized and unwinding that level of centralized
control more or less continuously now for 70 years um so I think it's been this this longer running process and by the way I think it you know it it left to its own devices it's going to continue right and this is the significance of AI like fantastic I think what if each of us has a super sophisticated AI that we own and control um 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 and 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 going to go scour the internet and I'm going to come back and I'm going to synthesize information I'm going to tell you what I think right it's the AI right so 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 because 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 in power 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 going to move in a good direction so my day job is to I mean 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 you they want to make these new things happen you know they have they have they have visions for how the world can can change in these ways they have the technical knowledge to be able to to do these things there's a pattern of you know these kids doing amazing things um apple apple just passed today Apple just passed Apple alone just passed the entire value of the entire UK stock
market right um 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 um 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 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 um and yeah here we go yeah top three trillion yeah yeah so it's the the comparison I think is to what they call the footsie 350 which is the uh the 300 the 350 largest UK companies that's Bonker yeah and so when it works like it works incredibly well right um and so and and we just we just happen to be you know by being 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 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 going to 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 so looking really 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 um and so I I also have those conversations and those are almost routinely dismaying like those are not good conversations um and so I'm always trying to kind of calibrate between what I know is possible versus my concern that people are going to try to figure out how to screw it up when you have these conversations with people behind the scenes are they receptive are they aware of what the issues what you're saying in terms of just just freedom of expression and the future of the country um 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 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 in talking I I myself don't spend a lot of time talking to them because it's not a conversation it's just getting yelled at for an hour um there's that really how it goes oh yeah yeah they're very angry like there's a lot of there's a very large amount of Rage the system um a lot of it directed at Tech um uh then there's a set of people who I would describe I don't know if open mind is the wrong term but like I would say they are honestly 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 if they're going to 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 um what's that dreamers yeah yeah like you know the the best the best of the bunch right like the you know open-minded um yeah learning curious you know it's like anything else in life you sit down
with one person and like you're and 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 um and then there's a there's a third set of people who are very actually Pro capitalism pro-innovation Pro-Tech um but they don't like us because they think we're all Democrats um so so a lot of our natural allies on these issues are on the other side of where the majority Silicon Valley is majority Democrat uh Democratic right and so um there's a fair number of people who would be our national allies if not for the fact that Silicon Valley is like 99 Democrat uh right wow and so this is part of the issue the valley has like we don't have any national allies like Tech doesn't have any national allies in DC because the the the Democrats basically think they control us which they effectively do because the value is almost entirely Democrat um and then the Republicans think that you know basically they would support us except that we're all 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 the 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 issues 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 um 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 um yeah it would be very frustrating to be on the outside um it'd be even more frustrating than [Music]
than being involved in it what oh look here's the other thing the 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 haven't even talk about Warfare like AI is going to like really change how like weapons work right right like basically every important thing happened 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 attack and so the the other argument would be Mark like grow up like of course these are all going to 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 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 yes that's a big freak out yes yeah I mean what are we looking at in 50 years really yeah you enjoy it thank you I love that you enjoy it though Douglas uh you know the book Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams who wrote that book he he once had a formulation he said um he he he said this is all generational he had a different Theory than all they said it's all generational it's all age related and he said if you're um people react to technology in three different ways if you're below the age of 15 uh whatever is the new thing is just how the world always worked um if you're between the ages of 15 and 35 whatever is a 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 right and it's sure to bring about right the downfall of civilization right apocalypse and Calamity I guess that's true in culture it's true in music it's true in movies video games 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 fight's 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 um uh then said that we do have an eight-year-old and he does get screen time but it is it is controlled um so we're a little bit uh you know we're you know we I'm sorry we use it as a tool we're not absolutists like we're not um you know there's some people running around who 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 um but uh we want him to be you know fully up to speed on we want him to be an engineer you know in not that he has to spend his life doing it but we want him to know how to use technology 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 and be outside he does MMA oh no kidding full uh Brazilian Jiu Jitsu he's doing full MMA full um he's doing his full sparring wow that's eight he and his uh his uh coach dress up in the full body wowing each other wow and Chuck each other out so okay I enjoying watching that it's absolutely fantastic it is sister and he loves it and I keep watching the videos you know because this is you know he's up against he's like you know half the time he's with an adult uh 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 um so you know chat GPT comes out in December um I play with it for a few months I'm trying to wrap my head around it I'm like okay 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 and he's all you know 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 my chat GPT on his laptop and I like I like I set up a 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 [ __ ] this is a big deal like 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 kids are going to just have a totally different point of view on this right right it's going to be it's normal answers to things right yeah completely normal um and it's going to be by the way it's going to be between normal it's gonna be exciting um I think it's gonna I think it's gonna make I think it's gonna be great like for kids I think this is gonna be fantastic well the positive aspect just for informing people and whatever it is whether it's a medical decision or whether it's a mechanical thing with your car or I mean that's pretty amazing yeah one of the fun things you can do with with uh 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 you can actually do it all the way down it kind of works down about age three so you can tell it explain quantum mechanics to me like I'm a three-year-old wow and like it will really yeah yeah and so and I taught him how to do this because I'm like you just you know you can you can have it you can dial it up or down how does it explain quantum mechanics to it three years it 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 uh and so it's like oh you know three-year-old's like okay wow why not right
so yeah no so as a tool um you know there's all these fights happening I guess what back to school is coming up in a couple months here and um you know there's all these fights already emerging over like whether students in the classroom can use jgpt and yeah there's all these you know there's all these uh 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 hands in an essay and in theory there's a tool that will tell you whether they they got it from jgpt but it doesn't actually it doesn't actually work there you go here it is can you explain Quantum of 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 can 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 going to replace us yeah you have no fear of that yeah I don't what about a hundred years from now it's a tool 100 years I don't know and the first clue what's going to happen 100 years from now but it's not going to be
this that's the fears that we're sowing seeds yeah this isn't all I mean look this is an old this is an old fear you know it's 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 gollum the the sort of legend of the Golem and it was sort of this thing it was like it was the worst I'll get one point in this Rabbi figures out how to conjure up this basically this giant basic creature made out of clay did bitco Smite you know the enemies um and then you know of course it comes back around and starts killing you know his own people um you know the Frankenstein's monster right right same thing um so there's always this yeah there's always and look at like it's it's very human you know it's a self-preservation you know kind of thing but you know look we built tools I mean what's the thing that makes us different from animals right is we we have intelligence we build tools um tools can be used by the way for good and bad things right like a shovel can be used to dig a ditch or like bring somebody over the head sure um and so all these things you know things things do have two sides but over time you know the tools that we built have created a much healthier safer Better World Isn't that interesting people right I mean look human population is like up you know gigantically as a consequence of all these tools we've developed so right so the exact opposite thing has happened from what 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 right 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 to us as well like everything else like match is 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 um uh so excuse me in it philosophy they have the the this concept of the logos the word right 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 in 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 him and eating the apple and then they had the the knowledge like you know the secret knowledge the Greeks had a similar concept they called Techni which is the basis for the word technology but and it meant sort of it meant it didn't mean technology per se it but it meant sort of knowledge and particular 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 getting kicked out of the garden Garden of Eden to the downside right that was viewed as a tragedy right in that religion the Greeks had what they call the Prometheus myth uh and it had to do with fire right um and so and the myth of Prometheus was the 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 these humans didn't have fire and 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 in in the myth that was how humans learned to basically use fire right as a tool um uh as punishment for bringing fire to humans he was in the myth he was chained to a rock for all eternity um and every day his liver gets pecked out by an Angry Bird and then it regenerates overnight and then it gets pecked 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 the in that myth what they were saying is okay fire was like the original technology right and 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 the sort of center of the community um 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 going to survive and and so forth to be able to reproduce more um 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 fantastic 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 I think what we do is we just like play that exactly like you said 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 going to 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 up fine right like nuclear weapons almost certainly prevented World War III 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 going to get us yeah it's so interesting because that conversation's never had we're we only hear the negative aspects of it yeah that's right because these are complex nuanced discussions and it 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 yep well then people try to hijack them right yeah they get used yeah and that's where yeah that's right like I don't mind like somebody who's like there's this concept I talk about the um um the the the Baptist and the Bootleggers so there were two groups of people in favor of prohibition of alcohol um there were the Baptists who were the social activists who thought alcohol was actually evil and was destroying society and then they were the Bootleggers which were the people who were going to make money right if alcohol was outlawed right um and so and this is what you often have is you have a con when there's one of these social movements that wants regulation you often have this Union of the Baptist and the bootleggers and so the the Baptist 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 drive me crazy right of course Bootleggers 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 because because it's fun but one of the things that I have hope in is that there are conversations like this taking place where 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 chappy T can do chat gbt can 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 you want to 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 shed GPT so let's look at let's look at images for a moment so we're going to do a search do a search on mid-journey and then Chihuly the artist c-h-i-h-u-l-y Chi Chihuly c-h-i-h h-u-l-i yeah right there that one okay that's pretty good but let go go two more go two more no to stay on that one but go to that image of the shoe right there there we go okay mid Journey so this is the the app that lets you create images you describe words you describe words and it creates images it uses the same technology as chat GPT but it generates images um uh this is that the prompt here was something along the lines of a Nike shoe uh in the form of this artist called
Chihuly who's this famous artist who works in basically blown glass is his art form and so this is a Nike shoe rendered in blown glass multi I'm sure who is famous for using lots of colors and so this has all the colors so this does look exactly like his shoe would have looked yeah this would be yeah this is Chihuly you know skirt billowing you know billowing skirt um uh yeah this is Chihuly uh Chihuly uh uh you know like statue of an avocado right um right and so it's an avocado made out of stained glass okay so just look look here for a moment though now go back to go back um yeah just go back to yeah go to the avocado for a second okay okay look at the Shadows look at the detail in the shadows incredible look at the detail of the Shadows with the sunlight coming through the window yeah 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 perfect 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 so the way that it worked was it basically ran this algorithm it basically pretty 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 100 000 pixels in it or something or a million pixels or something um and it basically was it's like an autocomplete it was predicting each pixel but in the process of predicting each pixel it was able to render um not only colors and shapes and all those things but transparency translucency reflections Shadows lighting like it it trained itself basically on how to do full 3d rendering inside the neural network in order to be able to successfully predict the next pixel and how long does something like that take to generate uh that takes to generate on the on this on the when you're running the system today that would probably be I'm gonna guess 10 or
15 seconds um there's a newer version of mid Journey a turbo version that just came out where I think it cuts down a couple seconds now the system that's generating that um needed you know many years of computing power sure across many processors to to get ready to do the trade the training that took place but the future Generations took a few seconds okay so here's here's another amazing thing um the price the cost of generating image like that versus hiring a human artist to do it is like down by a factor of a thousand somewhere between a fact 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 of quality would cost them the order of a thousand and ten thousand dollars more dollars or you know time or human effort than doing it um uh with the machine um uh same thing is true of writing a legal brief um the same thing is true of uh writing a medical diagnosis the same thing is true of you know summarizing a book like any sort of you know knowledge um summarizing a podcast um you know any any of these things um drafting questions for a podcast um you know basically pennies right to be able to do all these things versus you know potentially a hundred or a thousand dollars to have a person do any of these things um 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 is less expensive than hiring people to pick strawberries we do not have a machine that can pack your suitcase another 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 for those things the cost of the machine and the AI and everything else to do those things is is far in excess of what you can simply pay people to do 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 going to be certainly computer's not going to make art right so the computer is going to be able to pick strawberries there's going to 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 yes physically but not just around but and 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 unclass suitcases on class differently like all the yes all the like real world stuff how 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 in the industry we all thought when the Breakthrough arrived it would arrive in the form of Robotics that would cause you know where the fear would be it would cause unemployment among basically right but let's you know to quote unquote lower scale people or less educated people right it 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 of this as 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 collapse in 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 that 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 but which is the equivalent of basically giving everybody a raise what about artist rights because one 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 illustrator's creativity and ideas to generate these images through AI right and in fact we just saw an example of that because based on we actually named a specific artist really right who certainly did not get paid right as a consequence of that yeah and 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 in that style um so I think this is going to be a very big fight um I think this is probably going to go ultimately to the Supreme Court those cases are just starting now I think the first one is getting images which owns a big catalog of Photography is actually suing this company mid-journey it's interesting so that that that that that has begun um the argument for why what's happening is improper is is exactly like is exactly what you said um 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 um is what in copyright law is called the right to make transformative Works um 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 right so you have the right to do homages you have the right to do you know I mentioned earlier the guy who wrote the the the other version of the book 1984. right he had the right to do that because he was transforming the work you could 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 all the art Picasso did and as long as you don't misrepresent it as being a Picasso you can generate all the new are you free to make a to copy a Picasso exactly if you're telling everybody you're copying a Picasso uh I don't think no you did the artist I mean copyright at some point expires but uh that aside let's assume copyright last let's just assume for the moment copyrights forever just to make it easy to talk about um the artist can copyright that particular image the the screenwriter can copyright that particular screenplay right if you're not but if you're not generating income from it oh I don't know yeah there's also there's carb there's another carbot in the copyright law for non-uh commercial use yeah so there's like academic use by the way there's also protection there's also protection for satire um you know there's protection for a variety of 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 way to think about it right and as a consequence of that I I think the way through copyright law you're like okay that's just fine um and I think the same thing is true with chat GPT for all the texts that is by the way the same thing's happening at GPT the news Publishers newspaper Publishers are now getting very upset because they they have this they have this fear or they have a fear that people are going to stop reading the news because they're just going to get
they just ask jet GPT what's happening right and they probably will 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 well also if you can generate an objective news source through chat gbt because that's really hard to do so one of the fun things that these machines can do and you can do this at GPT actually you could do this today um you can tell it to take out um 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 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 um and you can tell you know 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 Wow 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 it's 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 so you so you can ask it just straight up give me the left wing view on this or give me the right wing view yes or by the way you can also 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 oh wow 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 RFK uh you could say um uh 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'll produce something that odds are going to be pretty similar to what the actual person is going to say but you can do the same thing for Peter Hotes you can do the same thing for you know authority figures you can do the same thing for real what would Jesus say right literally literally what would Jesus say wow and it will it again 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 going to produce something that at least is going to be reason reasonably close to that 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 a here's another example for uh for how kids are going to 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 Abraham Lincoln but you were talking to the sum total of all written expression all books ever written about Lincoln wow and he's talking back at you right um 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 uh thoughts do you have on things like neural link and the emerging Technologies of human neural interfaces yeah so this is the um uh and this is this is what the AI safety people describe as like the out um or the uh you know the fallback position or something which is okay if you can't beat them join them yes all right right maybe we just need to like upgrade everybody's intelligence and maybe the right way to do that is to kind of fuse me in the machine maybe um 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 um you know people have been working on the ideas underneath this for like 30 years you know things like MRIs um and by the way the the other thing on this is there's a lot of immediate Healthcare applications so like people with Parkinson's right people oh um people who have uh had um you know who have been paraplegics or quadriplegics being able to restore you know the ability to move like they're being able to fix things that are broken in the nervous system able to rest 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 um 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 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 I think still 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. it seem so recent time does fly yeah that seems there's a reason 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 um they're doing they're figuring out they they claim people claim to now know how to do a brain scan and be able to pull out 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 but 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 it'll feed the result of the brain scan into a system like the one that does the shoes right and then that system produces these you know these images that's pretty damn close yeah so it's like an extrapolation off of 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 real right is it like the Samsung moonshot yeah yeah does it you know does it does is it repeatable by the way do you need to be strapped to a million dollars worth of live equipment right you know so there's like right these things can take a while to get to work but pretty fascinating if it's applicable though if that really can happen hypothetically yeah exactly wow wow exactly it's a wild world yeah it's uh the possibilities are very fascinating because it just seems like we're about to enter into 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 you join it oh yes oh yeah um anything more anything more um 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 their questions answered I think there's actually something even deeper um 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 um so it will have grown up with him the good life coach yes uh 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 no it'll know how to maximize his strengths
um it'll it'll know what he wants I wonder if he'll understand how to maximize happiness yeah like I wonder if I could say Mark you are working too much if you just worked one less day a week you'd be 40 happier and only 10 percent less productive yep well if you're wearing an Apple Watch right it will have your pulse and it will have your blood pressure and it'll have all these things it'll have you know it'll be able to say you know look when you were in this you know when you were working on this you were relaxed in 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 a way to have you not have to go through that again sure yeah yeah absolutely yeah by the way you know sleep um you know you didn't sleep well right right um so yeah and it'll have yeah it'll it'll have all that right so yeah literally they hit College 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 whose goal in life will be to make them you know as happy and satisfied and successful as possible pretty fascinating stuff yeah how about that well I'm interested uh and I'm going to be paying attention and I really appreciate you coming in here and explaining a lot of this stuff it made me actually feel better and it actually gives me hope that there's possibly especially with real open source a way to avoid the pitfalls of the censorship that seems likely to be at least attempted to be implemented yep me too all right good thank you Mark appreciate you thank you bye everybody [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] thank you thank you