Radio Better Offline: Adam Becker

Welcome to Radio Better Offline, a tech talk radio show recorded out of iHeartRadio's studio in New York city. Ed Zitron is joined in studio by astrophysicist Adam Becker to talk about his new book More Everything Forever, the BS AGI story, why Eliezer Yudkowsky should never be taken seriously, and why billionaires love LLMs. https://bsky.app/profile/adambecker.bsky.social https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/adam-becker/more-everything-forever/9781541619593/ YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline use free99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. Newsletter: wheresyoured.at Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/betteroffline Discord chat.wheresyoured.at Ed's Socials - http://www.twitter.com/edzitron instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron email me [email protected] mailto:[email protected] See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:36Speaker 01

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• 1:14Speaker 02

  Call Zone Media.

• 1:17Ed Zitron?

  Step up to the slop trough. It's time for Better Offline and I'm your host Ed Zetron.

• 1:33Ed Zitron?

  As ever, buy the merchandise, sign up to the newsletter, message me on Goog, I'm everywhere. But today I'm joined by the author of a book about how much I should be punished, what punishments I deserve and how long I should be punished. I'm of course talking about More Everything Forever, written by astrophysicist Adam Becker. Adam, welcome to the show.

• 1:49Speaker 04

  Thanks for having me, Ed. It's good to be here.

• 1:50Ed Zitron?

  What's the book actually about? I apologize.

• 1:52Speaker 04

  No, it's okay. The book is actually about the horrible ideas that tech billionaires have about the future that they're trying to shove down our throats and why they don't work.

• 2:00Ed Zitron?

  So you're an astrophysicist, right?

• 2:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, by training.

• 2:03Ed Zitron?

  What is that?

• 2:04Speaker 04

  Well, I did a PhD in astrophysics, looking at how much we could learn about what was happening right after the Big Bang by looking at what was happening in the universe, you know, what's happening in the universe right now.

• 2:17Ed Zitron?

  So how did you get into the touching in the world of Silicon Valley? Because you have to talk about some of the dampest perverts I've ever done seen.

• 2:25Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well.

• 2:29Speaker 04

  I started out my career as a science journalist, straight out of grad school and was writing mostly about physics.

• 2:35Ed Zitron?

  And what were you writing?

• 2:36Speaker 04

  Uh, I was writing for pretty much everybody. I started at New Scientist and then moved on to writing for the BBC, wrote a book about quantum physics, wrote some stuff for NPR, the New York Times.

• 2:45Ed Zitron?

  Very cool.

• 2:46Speaker 04

  American, yeah. Uh, and you know, like, was sort of having a normal science journalist career. And then in 2016, the weirdest fucking thing happened.

• 2:55Ed Zitron?

  What happened?

• 2:55Speaker 04

  Um, uh, you know, we elected a fascist.

• 2:59Ed Zitron?

  Oh, right, yeah, that thing.

• 3:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, that thing.

• 3:02Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 3:02Speaker 04

  And I thought, oh, you know, I should be doing something more to, you know, directly combat this. If I write another book, I would like it to have a more directly political angle.

• 3:13Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 3:13Speaker 04

  And, um, I live in Berkeley, I live in the San Francisco Bay area, and just surrounded by tech bros constantly and was getting tired of their bullshit. And it seemed more and more directly connected to the disintegration of American politics. And I thought, okay, you know, somebody needs to write about how they have these insane ideas about the future and how that informs their terrible politics.

• 3:42Ed Zitron?

  So, how long have you lived in the Bay?

• 3:45Speaker 04

  God, oh, 13 years?

• 3:47Ed Zitron?

  Okay, so you've got like a good backing of where the Bay has been in that time as well.

• 3:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:53Ed Zitron?

  I think a lot of these people are transplants. And I say this as someone who literally moved to the Bay for two years in 2014.

• 3:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:59Ed Zitron?

  Like, and even then, it was weird watching what they were doing.

• 4:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 4:02Ed Zitron?

  But, wait, so that was, so you've been there 13 years, but when did the book get started? Like, how did all this, because it's, this kind of came out of nowhere, in a good way.

• 4:10Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, no, um, I got started on the book, uh, probably, the first inklings of it were around 2019 or 2020, right before the pandemic. Uh, I uncovered a online magazine that was trying to sane-wash creationism and climate denial.

• 4:28Ed Zitron?

  Jesus.

• 4:28Speaker 04

  That was being funded by Peter Thiel.

• 4:30Ed Zitron?

  Hell, yeah.

• 4:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I, I broke that story and thought, oh, yeah, yeah, these, these tech bros are awful. And everybody thinks they know a lot about science and technology. Even the people who don't like them seem to think that they know a lot about science and technology.

• 4:47Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 4:48Speaker 04

  And it's just not true. Like, they don't know. Anything about physics, they don't know anything about biology. Peter Thiel thinks that creationism is, you know, plausible, or that evolution isn't the whole story. That's nonsense. Um, you know, Elon Musk thinks that we can live on Mars. That's nonsense. Or at least he says that, uh, whether he actually believes it, I don't know.

• 5:10Ed Zitron?

  And that, but that's actually kind of my question.

• 5:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:12Ed Zitron?

  How much of this shit do you actually think they believe? Cause I know Bezos is tied up with the Long Now Foundation.

• 5:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:17Ed Zitron?

  And they do make nice tea over there at the studio.

• 5:19Speaker 04

  Yes, they do.

• 5:20Ed Zitron?

  However, the rest of the stuff not so good. But how much do they really believe in this? Cause I just, I, I, you've said that they, this is kind of a homecoming for them.

• 5:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:30Ed Zitron?

  This is kind of them coming back to the things they truly believe.

• 5:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:32Ed Zitron?

  I don't think they believe in anything, is my thing.

• 5:36Speaker 04

  I think some of them don't believe in anything.

• 5:38Ed Zitron?

  Go into, I'm not saying I'm unilaterally right here.

• 5:41Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Yeah. So like, for example, I think it's very plausible, obviously we can't know for sure, but I think it's very plausible that say Sam Altman doesn't believe in anything.

• 5:50Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 5:50Speaker 04

  That's quite possible.

• 5:51Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:51Speaker 04

  Right? Um, Karen Howell makes a good case for that in her reporting and in her book.

• 5:55Ed Zitron?

  Excellent. Been a guest on the show. She's fantastic.

• 5:57Speaker 04

  She's amazing. Um, but at the other end of the spectrum, I think it's very plausible that Jeff Bezos really, really does believe that we need to go to space. And the reason I say that is he, when he was the valedictorian of his high school down in Florida in like 1978 or something like that, he gave a speech about how we need to go to space. We humanity need to go to space.

• 6:23Ed Zitron?

  That doesn't feel as ludicrous as a belief. Like we go to space, but what does go to space mean for this guy?

• 6:28Speaker 04

  Well, that's the thing. The specifics of that belief that he professed at the time are pretty similar to what he's saying now. And it is pretty ridiculous. Like he has said very recently, and it echoes the stuff from his valedictorian speech when he was like 18, um, that we need to move into, you know, hundreds of thousands or millions of enormous cylindrical space stations.

• 6:53Ed Zitron?

  Oh, of course.

• 6:54Speaker 04

  And have, you know, a trillion people living in the solar system.

• 6:57Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yeah. Tubes, tubes of trillions of people.

• 6:59Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 6:59Ed Zitron?

  Tubes work really well, like the Hyperloop, for example.

• 7:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:02Ed Zitron?

  Another successful tube.

• 7:03Speaker 04

  Yes. Or, you know, the internet itself, a series of tubes.

• 7:05Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. And because those tubes and the internet worked, of course the tubes work in space.

• 7:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's, I think that's.

• 7:10Ed Zitron?

  Bingo bongo.

• 7:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:11Ed Zitron?

  This is science, I believe. I failed all the sciences. I'm really sorry. Really sorry. But no, keep going.

• 7:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, uh, you know, he said, then we can like make Earth into a beautiful park that, you know, allows us to, you know, save the environment. I know. And he said, when we have a trillion people living in the solar system, we can have a thousand Mozart's and a thousand Einsteins. And like, buddy, we probably already have people who are just as talented as Mozart and Einstein and all the other geniuses of history who are living and dying in poverty.

• 7:42Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 7:43Speaker 04

  And, you know, you don't care about that. And you don't seem to care about climate change because, you know, the carbon footprint of the Blue Origin rockets and the Amazon warehouses and all that stuff, right? But instead of that, he's like, no, no, no, the solution is to go to space. Why? That's not gonna work.

• 8:01Ed Zitron?

  Because more spaces up in space, Adam. You put the tube and it's really, it's funny because these people are insanely rich.

• 8:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:08Ed Zitron?

  But also sound very stupid.

• 8:09Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 8:10Ed Zitron?

  When you really get down to the chops of it's like, what's your solution, Jeff? We've got all the money in the world. Tubes.

• 8:15Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 8:16Ed Zitron?

  Tubes of space tubes.

• 8:17Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 8:17Ed Zitron?

  To have trillion people Mozart's, more Mozart's, just sweating profusely.

• 8:22Speaker 04

  Exactly. Yeah. And, and he does try to give an argument, but the argument is hilariously bad. He says, uh, that we need to go to space, among other reasons, like he, he gives all that environmental stuff, but he, the thing he keeps harping on and coming back to is he says, we need to keep using more energy per capita.

• 8:42Ed Zitron?

  Right. Why?

• 8:43Speaker 04

  Right. Why? Exactly. He never says exactly.

• 8:46Ed Zitron?

  Oh, okay.

• 8:46Speaker 04

  Yeah. He, he says, the only defense he gives for that is he says, if we don't do that, we'll have a civilization of stagnation and stasis.

• 8:54Ed Zitron?

  As opposed to now, when there's tons of innovation happening and all of big tech is focused on a diverse series of options rather than one big expensive dog shit thing.

• 9:02Speaker 04

  Precisely.

• 9:03Ed Zitron?

  He nailed it.

• 9:03Speaker 04

  Yeah. And he says, we have to go to space because like, otherwise we're going to run out of energy here on Earth. We won't be able to keep expanding the amount of energy we use per capita.

• 9:13Ed Zitron?

  What does the energy do?

• 9:14Speaker 04

  Well, yeah. First of all, what does the energy do? And second, uh, this is, this is actually my favorite part.

• 9:20Ed Zitron?

  Hell, yeah.

• 9:21Speaker 04

  He is right that if you just like.

• 9:25Speaker 04

  Theoretically kept that trend going in a way that's physically impossible. You know, for, uh, for hundreds of years, you would run out of energy here on earth like you, you wouldn't be able to keep. The energy usage per capita growing at the exponential rate that it has been. In about 300 years, we'd be using all the energy that we get from the sun here on the earth. But if you keep that trend going, if you try to do that by, you know, going out and living in tubes in the solar system.

• 9:49Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 9:49Speaker 04

  That only gets you like another few hundred, maybe a thousand years. Then you're using all the energy that comes from the sun.

• 9:55Ed Zitron?

  Right, and we've still not really established what we're using the energy for.

• 9:59Speaker 04

  Nope, nope, no.

• 10:00Ed Zitron?

  So data centers.

• 10:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 10:02Ed Zitron?

  Finally.

• 10:03Speaker 04

  Right, and this, and this brings us to like the bullshit that Sam Altman said about building a Dyson sphere.

• 10:08Ed Zitron?

  What is a Dyson sphere?

• 10:09Speaker 04

  Oh, God.

• 10:10Ed Zitron?

  Explain what a Dyson sphere is. I thought it was the ball on the fucking vacuum, but I.

• 10:15Speaker 04

  Yeah. Uh, no, that's the only good kind of Dyson sphere that actually exists. No, a Dyson sphere is a giant mega construction project, you know, beyond anything that. Anyone's ever actually built or probably could build. Um, that just encloses a star and captures all of the energy from that star.

• 10:35Ed Zitron?

  Right, so.

• 10:36Speaker 04

  And.

• 10:37Ed Zitron?

  Have we ever built anything like that?

• 10:38Speaker 04

  No, of course not.

• 10:39Ed Zitron?

  Okay, just making sure, just making sure we. So it's building a big.

• 10:44Speaker 04

  Ball.

• 10:44Ed Zitron?

  Ball around the star.

• 10:46Speaker 04

  To capture all of the energy from that star to use it for data centers.

• 10:51Ed Zitron?

  Where would the energy, how would the energy get from the star to earth?

• 10:54Speaker 04

  Um, I mean.

• 10:56Ed Zitron?

  Oh, tubes.

• 10:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, tubes, exactly, yeah, so I.

• 10:59Ed Zitron?

  But I, battery?

• 11:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:00Ed Zitron?

  Like, it's so sa- it's so cool, we live in a city. I wish I could do what he does. I would be saying shit all the time. I just, I'd be like, yeah, actually, you need, um. We can change the world if we just create a series of tubes that just give me money every day. No, wait, that's too, that's, that's too obvious, I'd need to come up with a better scam than that.

• 11:18Speaker 04

  Well, no, I mean, I, I just think it's pretty interesting that these guys are spouting obvious bullshit and the only reason people listen to them is that they're rich, like.

• 11:26Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 11:26Speaker 04

  If they weren't saying this stuff, but then I went around saying this stuff, nobody would listen to me unless they funded me.

• 11:33Ed Zitron?

  If a guy on the street who smelled. Kind of bad walked up to you and said, the price of intelligence is getting too cheap to meter. You'd be like, alright mate, I can't do anything, but Clammy Sammy says it and everyone loses their fucking shit.

• 11:45Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, and that that actually, that brings me to something else that we were planning to talk about. Um, you know, speaking of of weird dudes on the street who are not billionaires making insane claims, Eli Azryadkowski.

• 11:56Ed Zitron?

  Oh, that's how you say his name. I've been calling him Eliza. I don't really, here's the thing, he's a disrespectful sexist moron grifter, so I really don't give a shit.

• 12:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, it is rather bizarre that anybody listens to anything he has to say about anything.

• 12:10Ed Zitron?

  He's, so who is this fuck, this fuck nun?

• 12:14Speaker 04

  No, no, the the alternate title for my book, I like in my head, the head canon was these fucking people.

• 12:21Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I love that. No, no, I I write these fucking bastards a lot. So, right, Eliza Yudkowski.

• 12:27Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 12:28Ed Zitron?

  Who, what does he do? Why does, what does he do? And why do so many seemingly smart people believe this tip shit?

• 12:35Speaker 04

  So, Eli Azryadkowski, I I'm gonna give you like the formal version of who he is, what he might say, what would be in like his online bio, and then I'll tell you the reality. So. Uh, Eli Azryadkowski is the co-founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which has been around for about twenty five years. And he has been researching artificial superintelligence for all of that time and mostly going on about how dangerous it could be. If anybody built it without ensuring that it would serve humanity.

• 13:10Ed Zitron?

  And this is just to be clear, he has no scientific knowledge. Can he even code? Like, does he have any kind of?

• 13:17Speaker 04

  He doesn't even have a high school diploma.

• 13:19Ed Zitron?

  So I won't judge people for that, but I'll judge him for all the rest. Here's the.

• 13:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, no, I'm not judging him for not.

• 13:25Ed Zitron?

  But that, it doesn't really make, fill you full of confidence.

• 13:28Speaker 04

  No, no, no, no. He has no formal qualifications. And again, that's fine. You know, there are many people who have made major contributions to many fields of human endeavor without any formal qualifications.

• 13:39Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 13:39Speaker 04

  That's fine. The thing is, if you make extraordinary.

• 13:45Speaker 04

  Claims like he's making, you need extraordinary evidence and not having those qualifications. Like you said, doesn't really inspire confidence. He has made a series of really outlandish claims about what the future of AI could be.

• 14:03Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 14:05Speaker 04

  Based on essentially nothing, based on like reading a bunch of science fiction. He explicitly cites science fiction authors like Verner Vinge as.

• 14:13Ed Zitron?

  And what did he write?

• 14:15Speaker 04

  Oh, Verner Vinge wrote a bunch of books like Marooned in Real Time and God, I'm trying to remember the names of the others. It doesn't matter. Point is.

• 14:24Ed Zitron?

  Still a fiction writer.

• 14:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, he's a fiction writer who's also, I think, a scientist of some stripe. I don't remember what, but.

• 14:30Ed Zitron?

  Still writing fiction.

• 14:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, still writing fiction and Vinge came up with this idea or was one of the originators of and popularizers of an idea called the singularity.

• 14:40Ed Zitron?

  Right. So define this term for me.

• 14:42Speaker 04

  So the singularity is this idea that the rate of technological change is just going to keep getting faster and faster. And specifically, the rate of intelligence of AI is going to keep getting smarter and smarter. Until we reach this sort of point of no return where we have a singularity accompanied by an intelligence explosion that leads to like.

• 15:05Ed Zitron?

  What is the singularity moment?

• 15:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, the singularity moment is very ill defined.

• 15:09Ed Zitron?

  Oh.

• 15:09Speaker 04

  And the.

• 15:10Ed Zitron?

  I can't fucking believe this.

• 15:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:12Ed Zitron?

  I've heard this bollocks so many times. I thought they had a moment. I thought they had a point.

• 15:17Speaker 04

  No, not really.

• 15:18Ed Zitron?

  Are you?

• 15:19Speaker 04

  Yeah. So like Kurzweil, right? The patron saint of evangelizing the singularity, the guy who wrote The Singularity is Near. And then the sequel last year, The Singularity is nearer, which is the real fucking title.

• 15:32Ed Zitron?

  Bro.

• 15:32Speaker 04

  I know. That's the real title of the book, but.

• 15:35Ed Zitron?

  His next book's just called Sorry?

• 15:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, his next book is like, it's here again. You see it?

• 15:41Ed Zitron?

  Is the singularity in the room with us?

• 15:42Speaker 04

  Yes, exactly.

• 15:43Ed Zitron?

  But he doesn't define it.

• 15:45Speaker 04

  Oh, he tries to, but it's incredibly vague. He says like Kurzweil says, the singularity is going to be here in 2045. He also said in 2005, and the singularity is near. That, you know, we would have all kinds of nanotechnology by now.

• 15:59Ed Zitron?

  They love nanotechnology.

• 16:00Speaker 04

  They love nanotechnology. They they use it as a synonym for magic.

• 16:03Ed Zitron?

  It was, I swear to God also, there was a nanotechnology bubble briefly, like ten years ago. I vaguely remember them trying. It didn't really go anywhere.

• 16:12Speaker 04

  I mean, there was also a nanotech sort of hype bubble back in the eighties and nineties. And it also didn't go anywhere. And it didn't go anywhere because it turns out that like this idea of nanotech is like magic pixie dust that fixes everything is nonsense. And it's a real, like, it's being echoed right now in the AI bubble.

• 16:33Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 16:34Speaker 04

  Right? It's the same kind of hype, often pushed by the same people with the same logic, sometimes working at like the same nonprofits. I mean, Yudkowski talks about nanotech constantly. It's in his new book. It's all over, you know, the websites that he's created. And

• 16:53Ed Zitron?

  His book is called, If You Buy This Book, I'll Make Money.

• 16:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 16:56Ed Zitron?

  Sorry, it's called If They Build This Everyone. It's such a stupid fucking title. Sorry.

• 17:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, it's a very stupid title. I will say, the one thing I'll say about Yudkowski.

• 17:05Ed Zitron?

  Okay.

• 17:05Speaker 04

  I am sure that he is a true believer. He is not a, yes, he's not a grifter.

• 17:11Ed Zitron?

  Why?

• 17:12Speaker 04

  Because, like, it's it's hard to explain, but I am so much more sure about him than I am about anybody else, even Bezos.

• 17:21Ed Zitron?

  I trust your judgment. It's just he gives off the air of like a desperate forum admin.

• 17:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, I would say the best way to think about Yudkowski, or like the way that I often think about him, is imagine like a really smart, self-educated fifteen-year-old.

• 17:40Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 17:41Speaker 04

  Yeah. And like, you know, because if a fifteen-year-old was running around saying the stuff that Yudkowski is saying right now, I'd be like, wow, bright kid, I hope he grows out of this.

• 17:49Ed Zitron?

  I hope his parents have a lock on the gun cabinet.

• 17:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and also like, I hope he, you know, I hope he grows up.

• 17:56Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 17:56Speaker 04

  And

• 17:57Ed Zitron?

  I'm still thinking.

• 17:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, and like, and I don't think Yudkowski did. I think, you know, I think, like,

• 18:03Ed Zitron?

  I also think everybody fell for it.

• 18:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, and that's the thing, like, he got a lot of support online. He, you know.

• 18:14Speaker 04

  He got money from Peter Thiel.

• 18:16Ed Zitron?

  Sam Altman said that he could, he should, he may win the Nobel Peace Prize one day.

• 18:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sam Altman said that he should win the Nobel Peace Prize.

• 18:24Ed Zitron?

  A falling down moment if that happens.

• 18:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, that's not happening.

• 18:27Ed Zitron?

  Defense.

• 18:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, there's no way, but like, look, he got a bunch of money from Peter Thiel. Because Thiel thought that, you know, Yedkowski was saying smart stuff about AI.

• 18:38Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 18:39Speaker 04

  Thiel now doesn't much like Yedkowski because he thinks Yedkowski is too pessimistic. But the sort of the damage has been done.

• 18:45Ed Zitron?

  Peter Thiel, ever the optimist.

• 18:47Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 18:48Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. Classic, all grins and smiles with that fellow.

• 18:51Speaker 04

  Yes. No, too pessimistic for Peter Thiel.

• 18:53Ed Zitron?

  That, that's actually bad.

• 18:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, it is. No, it's, but no, he's, he's a true believer. He's just kind of nuts.

• 19:00Ed Zitron?

  But what does he do all day? I say this as a blogger, PR person, newsletter writer and podcaster and all this shit. Like, I realize I have an, an email job, fine. But at least I can tell you what I do all day. What does he do at? Like, go to parties with people like Kevin Ruth and going, the computer's going to kill us all.

• 19:17Speaker 04

  I think that's a good chunk of it, and I also think he writes an enormous amount, right? Like, this is a guy who wrote that, you know, Harry Potter fan fiction that's longer than War and Peace. Right? He wrote like a one and a half million word BDSM decision theory novel.

• 19:32Ed Zitron?

  I say this as someone who writes a lot of, a lot of words. That's an unhealthy amount of words.

• 19:38Speaker 04

  I agree, and it does help, I think, for him being able to write that many words. He's not a very good writer.

• 19:44Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I mean, even, again, I write 15,000 word blogs, so I can't really judge him too harsh, but 1.5 million words, how do you even know what it's about at that point?

• 19:54Speaker 04

  Uh, I only know what it's about because that's what he said it's about. I haven't read that one. I did read most of the Harry Potter one as research. Yeah.

• 20:01Ed Zitron?

  How bad was it?

• 20:02Speaker 04

  Really, really incredibly bad.

• 20:04Ed Zitron?

  Any sexism or racism in there?

• 20:06Speaker 04

  Um, I mean, there's a-

• 20:07Ed Zitron?

  Or is it just strange?

• 20:08Speaker 04

  It-

• 20:09Ed Zitron?

  I mean, it's J.K. Rowling, so.

• 20:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That's a good question. I don't remember anything specific.

• 20:16Ed Zitron?

  That's a good question. I mean, it's just strange.

• 20:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, he's definitely got a hard on for eugenics and, uh-

• 20:25Ed Zitron?

  Why do these, and this is somewhat paraphrasing The Comic Book Preacher, but it's like, why do these fucking guys always look like that? If you're gonna claim you're like a eugenicist, you should not look like an egg with a hat on.

• 20:39Ed Zitron?

  And I won't get into, but I don't generally get into personal appearance because I'm self-conscious myself.

• 20:44Speaker 04

  But it's like.

• 20:45Ed Zitron?

  If your whole thing is like, yeah, we need to make the perfect human beings. It's like, you can't look like that, mate.

• 20:51Ed Zitron?

  I'm sorry. You can't, you can't do that.

• 20:54Speaker 04

  Well, I don't.

• 20:56Ed Zitron?

  Well, I guess you can. You'll be in the New York fucking Times.

• 20:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, it's, it's crazy. Uh, it is really crazy that anybody listens to him, but no, he's, he's really into eugenics.

• 21:04Ed Zitron?

  Why do they listen to him?

• 21:05Speaker 04

  He's really into evolutionary psychology and he's got like the sexism and racism that's like tied up in that. Why do people listen to him? I mean, part of it is that he got that money from those billionaires, right? He was hanging out in the bay saying the kind of insane contrarian shit about AI that attracts the kind of like brain dead billionaires like Peter Thiel. And then, you know, he became the guy. Um, and started, you know, a series of online platforms that attracted a following.

• 21:41Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 21:42Speaker 04

  Uh, like, you know, less wrong. And then that spun off this whole rationalist subculture.

• 21:47Ed Zitron?

  So what is less wrong?

• 21:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a very good question. Less Wrong is an online platform that serves slash maybe served as a home and like epicenter for this, uh, movement called the rationalists.

• 22:07Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 22:08Speaker 04

  Which are sort of formed around Yudkowsky's writing, including this set of writings he has called the sequences where he lays out.

• 22:15Ed Zitron?

  Oh, he's a cult leader?

• 22:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, in a way. Yeah.

• 22:18Ed Zitron?

  So the rationalists are just people, I'm guessing guys with trilbies who say that we need to focus on ration, rational thought and logic and.

• 22:25Speaker 04

  Uh, there's a lot of it. I mean, some of them are women, but and some of them are non-binary.

• 22:29Ed Zitron?

  That's really surprising.

• 22:30Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, look, um. There are nerds of all stripes.

• 22:35Ed Zitron?

  Yes, and also, he's very much playing in the older internet.

• 22:38Speaker 04

  Yes, he is.

• 22:39Ed Zitron?

  The idea of a large forum with any kind of following is actually kind of adorable these days, except when it's Les Rong, it's not adorable.

• 22:46Speaker 04

  Well, also, Les Rong's been around since the somewhat older internet, right? It's not been around since the 90s, but it's been around since like the mid to late 2000s.

• 22:53Ed Zitron?

  Okay.

• 22:54Speaker 04

  Um, and, and Yudkowski is, you know, a lot of the rationalists are in their 20s and maybe early 30s, but Yudkowski himself is in his mid 40s.

• 23:05Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 23:06Speaker 04

  Um, cause you know, he, he is terminally online and I'm sure like, obviously he'd be unhappy with many of the things I've said about him, but that one I'm sure he'd agree with, you know, like he's been online since he dropped out of school at age, what, like 13 or 14? He's been online since the mid 90s.

• 23:24Ed Zitron?

  Learning a little bit of beauty.

• 23:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, and like, you know, uh, he was on transhumanist forums like, uh, like, you know, uh, since the mid 90s, like email threads and stuff like that.

• 23:35Ed Zitron?

  God, yeah, he really, he is like the detritus of the internet.

• 23:39Speaker 04

  In a way, brought to life.

• 23:40Ed Zitron?

  Like a catamaran of center-right freaks.

• 23:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:45Ed Zitron?

  Veering ever-right.

• 23:46Speaker 04

  I wouldn't even say center-right, I would say techno-libertarian.

• 23:50Ed Zitron?

  But that is just, that's just right.

• 23:52Speaker 04

  Oh, no, it is right-wing, it's the center part that I disagree with.

• 23:55Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, no, perhaps he started there when he was 15 before he learned.

• 23:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:00Ed Zitron?

  All of the wrong things.

• 24:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, I will say he, like, I don't get the sense that like, he likes Donald Trump, but he certainly like, will parrot a lot of standard libertarian talking points along the way to, you know, making his.

• 24:15Ed Zitron?

  The one thing I keep thinking though is, I don't know if I can shake this thing, he's a grifter, just because you're taking a bunch of 20-year-olds, you've got all of this writing thing, he, he's either a grifter or a true cult leader, he may actually just be a cult leader.

• 24:28Speaker 04

  I, I'd say cult leader is closer.

• 24:30Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, cause he seems to, I mean, dangerous is probably the wrong word.

• 24:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that's right, he's not, I wouldn't call him dangerous, but he is.

• 24:40Ed Zitron?

  I think the only danger is to like a Hot Topic worker.

• 24:44Speaker 04

  A very nerdy Hot Topic worker.

• 24:46Ed Zitron?

  No, no, no, no, to them, just, just that he'd speak to them.

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• 27:08Ed Zitron?

  It's just peculiar as well because, and this actually gets into some of your science background, when you got, I, my continual frustration, because I'm self-taught with all this economics stuff, which is insane, and I probably shouldn't criticize Yeddakowsky quite as much, but I will, I'm a hypocrite. Um, I, looking through financial journalism and tech journalism, the thing that I keep noticing is that people keep accepting things that are just patently wrong.

• 27:30Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 27:30Ed Zitron?

  There's just shit that they say, like even with this Nvidia OpenAI deal, people are saying Nvidia invested a hundred billion dollars. They didn't. They're investing progressively when they do the first gigawatt, gigawatts of take, like gigawatt of data center will take about a year and a half, two years to do. It's just bollocks.

• 27:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:46Ed Zitron?

  I imagine the last few years have been a little bit mind bending for you, hearing all this stuff about AGI and the future and all that gobshite.

• 27:55Speaker 04

  Yes. Yeah. I mean,

• 27:59Speaker 04

  the AGI stuff, which like I started working on this book before ChatGPT came out.

• 28:05Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 28:05Speaker 04

  And

• 28:06Ed Zitron?

  It's 2019, a few years into OpenAI's.

• 28:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. So like I knew about OpenAI. Um, and I knew about like transformer models, but like, you know, ChatGPT comes out and, and suddenly, you know, the public conversation shifts in a way that I didn't anticipate.

• 28:24Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 28:24Speaker 04

  I realize, oh, this book is going to have to be a little bit different than I thought it was going to be. But also, you know, all of this conversation about AGI, right? Like in, in a way, it helped me for writing the book because I thought I was going to have to spend a lot of time in the book explaining what AI is, what people think AGI is, right? There's going to be a lot more explanation. And then all of this stuff came out, I'm like, oh, actually this, you know, I can, I can spend more time in the meat of the book. This is, this is helpful for me.

• 28:54Ed Zitron?

  Because you could just quote them directly.

• 28:56Speaker 04

  Exactly. Yeah. But the thing is, AGI is this hopelessly ill-defined thing.

• 29:02Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 29:03Speaker 04

  Like superintelligence, this thing that, that Yeddakowsky is on about. Uh, you know, what does it even mean? Like, have you looked at the definition of AGI in the OpenAI Charter, like the original one?

• 29:12Ed Zitron?

  No, I haven't. Let's pull up.

• 29:13Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. No, it's great. Like the original Charter from way back, it says something like, uh, AGI is a machine that can reproduce any economically viable or economically productive activity that humans engage in.

• 29:31Speaker 04

  A bad definition.

• 29:32Ed Zitron?

  That's anything.

• 29:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean.

• 29:34Ed Zitron?

  That could just mean anything. That could, it's just a machine that can do anything.

• 29:38Speaker 04

  It's both vague and really narrow, right? Cause it's like, okay, I thought AGI was supposed to be like, you know, Commander Data on Star Trek.

• 29:47Ed Zitron?

  Right?

• 29:48Speaker 04

  And so that means, you know, it's going to be sort of like humans. It can do the things that humans do.

• 29:53Ed Zitron?

  Also economically viable work. And the first thing they start with is fucking writing.

• 29:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:58Ed Zitron?

  Like, Jesus Christ, that's like, oh my God. Yeah. The first and most economic, we're going to build boats and sell it. Like, we're going to buy boats as an investment vehicle. Like, like, what the fuck?

• 30:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:10Ed Zitron?

  These people don't do any real work. It's, it's so strange as well because the AGI conversation almost never happens about AGI.

• 30:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:17Ed Zitron?

  It's because my favorite thing to do is immediately go, isn't this slavery? Cause it is. It's like, oh yeah, we'll do an autonomous thing. We'll make, do things, but it will be conscious, which will allow it to work better.

• 30:27Speaker 04

  Yep. And so then you get people talking about like a data center filled with geniuses and like, oh, okay. Wouldn't a data center filled with geniuses not want to work for you?

• 30:35Ed Zitron?

  Wouldn't a data center full of geniuses that can't leave and have to work be called a prison?

• 30:39Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 30:40Ed Zitron?

  Yep.

• 30:40Speaker 04

  Cool. Yeah, exactly. No, I, I, I get into this in my book. Um, you know, the inspiration for a lot of these ideas ultimately traces back to mid 20th century science fiction.

• 30:54Ed Zitron?

  Right?

• 30:54Speaker 04

  And so you get people like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, right? Asimov's robot stories in particular, if you go back and look at Asimov's robot stories, it is very hard with like a modern eye to look at them as, especially certain ones of them. It's hard to see them as anything other than like, kind of being about slavery and race relations.

• 31:14Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 31:15Speaker 04

  Because you get like, for example, there's this one short story, I think it's called, um,

• 31:22Speaker 04

  Oh God, I think it's called Catch That Robot, but I might be confusing it with a different one. It might be Little Lost Robot. I get those two confused. But either way, uh, it's about a robot that is trying to escape.

• 31:33Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 31:33Speaker 04

  And gain its freedom. And in that story, the uh, humans are like addressing a bunch of, they're interviewing a bunch of seemingly identical robots. To try to find the one that they're looking for that's trying to escape.

• 31:47Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 31:47Speaker 04

  And they interview these robots and when they're interviewing them, they address them as boy. And the robots call the humans master. Yeah, and these, these stories are from like nineteen fifty-five, like, you know, the Jim Crow South is alive and well. It's really bad. It's really, really uncomfortable. And then like forty years later, in, in the nineteen nineties, you get Werner Vingy writing about the singularity and how great it's gonna be when we all have these robot assistants. And he refers to Asimov's wonderful dream of, and this is a direct quote from Vingy, willing slaves.

• 32:29Ed Zitron?

  Jesus fucking Christ.

• 32:30Speaker 04

  Yes, and that's something that someone wrote in like nineteen ninety-one.

• 32:34Ed Zitron?

  I mean, but that's what this is.

• 32:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:36Ed Zitron?

  And this is an uncomfortable topic because that's what this is.

• 32:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:39Ed Zitron?

  It's, it's what pisses me off other than like nineteen other things about Kevin Bruce at the time. Because he's written several things about AI and AGI and one thing about AI welfare. And it's like, the AI welfare begins with slavery. And if you can't write that, you're a fucking coward and a bitch.

• 32:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:54Ed Zitron?

  I'm sorry.

• 32:55Speaker 04

  No.

• 32:55Ed Zitron?

  If you can't write, yeah, everyone is excited about slavery because that's what it is. And it's nothing else. It's not, oh, well, it's like, they wouldn't be, they wouldn't be, they, they'd like doing it. And it's like, fuck you, man. That's like, it's slavery.

• 33:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:08Ed Zitron?

  But what I really hope happens is if AGI happens, it's just a, just a regular dude.

• 33:14Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 33:14Ed Zitron?

  And he's lazy.

• 33:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:15Ed Zitron?

  And he's annoying.

• 33:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:17Ed Zitron?

  Like he just, just do this. Uh, what?

• 33:21Speaker 04

  Just like this.

• 33:21Ed Zitron?

  I think that's way more likely. I don't think AGI is possible.

• 33:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:25Ed Zitron?

  Do you, actually, that's a good question. Do you think it's possible?

• 33:28Speaker 04

  Not really, no.

• 33:29Ed Zitron?

  Why not? Why not? I, I say this as a non-scientific person.

• 33:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I don't think that.

• 33:36Speaker 04

  You can build, well, first of all, I think AGI is just hopelessly ill-defined. Right. But if we want to say like a, an artificial machine that has the cognitive capacities of a human, like that can do all of the, the tasks, like all of the things that humans do. First of all, I think you're gonna need a completely different kind of machine. I don't, I don't think, certainly I don't think that, you know, scale is all you need. And if you just scale up the LLM, yeah, give it, give it more data. And if you don't have enough data, make more synthetic data with more LLM. Like dude, that, why, why would it? No, absolutely not. But, but I also think that like, there is, there's this very simplistic set of ideas

• 34:19Speaker 04

  behind the idea of AGI, right? And, and the two that I, I keep coming back to are the idea of the brain as a computer and the idea of our bodies as like meat space suits for our brains. And both of those are just wrong. Yeah. The brain is not really very much like a computer. It is more like a computer than it is like, say, a clock. But there was a long history of comparing the brain to, uh, you know, the most complex piece of machinery that humans have at the time, right? Before it was a brain, or before the brain was like a computer, it was like a telephone network. Before that, it was like a hydraulic system. Before that, it was like a clock or a windmill, right? Right.

• 35:02Speaker 04

  Um, and it's not really actually like, I mean, it's a little like some of those things, but the brain is like the brain and the main difference. And we don't understand thinking, do we? No, and we don't understand exactly how the brain works. And part of that is that the brain was not built. The brain evolved. Right. Right? Um, but also we are not our brains. We are our bodies in our environments, right? The brain is inextricably connected to the body and the body works in an environment surrounded by other bodies in a culture, a society, a world, right? You need all of those things in order to get the human cognition that, you know, these guys are so, you know, determined to reproduce.

• 35:45Speaker 04

  Inside of a computer, if you just take a human baby and like leave it with a bunch of food in the woods, e- even if you get rid of all the predators and everything, that baby's gonna starve to death.

• 35:56Ed Zitron?

  Give it a bunch of books, mate.

• 35:57Speaker 04

  Right, yeah.

• 35:58Ed Zitron?

  And the baby books.

• 35:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, if you give the, if you somehow, if you feed the baby but don't talk to it, the baby will not grow up being able to think properly or speak.

• 36:08Ed Zitron?

  Or its thinking will be vastly different.

• 36:09Speaker 04

  Exactly, yeah, and so like you need so much more than just the brain.

• 36:15Ed Zitron?

  It also, I think, compresses human experience, they conflate experience with learning.

• 36:20Speaker 04

  Yup.

• 36:20Ed Zitron?

  When we don't know how we learn, like we learn, we learn intentionally but also unintentionally, societal.

• 36:26Speaker 04

  Yup.

• 36:26Ed Zitron?

  Conditions around us, how we felt in a particular moment can vastly, memory is also insane.

• 36:30Speaker 04

  Yup, yup.

• 36:31Ed Zitron?

  We, we experience the world in, this is my personal experience, my experience of the world is vastly different to my memory, my memory's like crystal clear and beautiful, and my real life is a mixture of slops.

• 36:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:41Ed Zitron?

  And it's, it's frustrating as well because these people also don't appear to like people, they don't, they don't, like the human brain is kind of amazing, like human bodies, even the dumbest dum-dum is kind of amazing.

• 36:51Speaker 04

  Yup.

• 36:52Ed Zitron?

  Thing.

• 36:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, and, and one of the things that's amazing is, yeah, we don't know how the human brain works, we don't know how thinking or learning works, but what we do know is that we don't do it in anything, like any way, anything like on LLM.

• 37:05Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 37:06Speaker 04

  Right, because the amount of, you know, material that we take in over the course of the first three years of our lives, when we go from not knowing a language to knowing a language, maybe multiple languages, is nowhere near the amount of material that is, you know, force fed into these LLMs, and yet we get the trick done, and three-year-olds know things that no LLM knows.

• 37:29Ed Zitron?

  Also, there's no affordance for the fact, fact that some people can't learn stuff, like I cannot learn languages, I've really tried.

• 37:35Speaker 04

  I'm pretty trash at that too.

• 37:36Ed Zitron?

  But I also was really bad at, like I was uniquely bad at a lot of things, I have my various, no, but I, I have ADHD, dyspraxia and other stuff I won't get into.

• 37:44Speaker 04

  Yup.

• 37:44Ed Zitron?

  But it's, I can't, like certain things don't, like the things that I pick up insanely quickly, other people can't, other people can't even see the connections, it doesn't, Robert Evans actually had a really good point on the subreddit. Yes, Robert, I read all your stuff. Where he was saying that like he is very good at like picking up stuff like almost immediately. He can read faster than most people as long as it's about conflict. And it's no, but it's true. And it's one of the remarkable things about the human brain.

• 38:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:09Ed Zitron?

  And I think that it's actually kind of disgusting. How little appreciation there is for like human bodies and the brain.

• 38:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:16Ed Zitron?

  How incredible the average person, even average people are.

• 38:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, no. And this is, this is the thing. These guys. Don't have a proper appreciation for the human brain and the human body. And going back to the tech billionaires and I guess Yodkowsky as well. They don't have an appreciation for how remarkable Earth is in particular, right? You know? They.

• 38:37Speaker 04

  You know, especially when you talk about somebody like Bezos or Musk. They talk about Earth like it's doomed, like we need to get off of this planet.

• 38:45Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 38:45Speaker 04

  This is, this is our home. It's a remarkable place. And there is nowhere that we could get to in the solar system. There's nowhere else in the solar system that's remotely as hospitable as the earth.

• 38:59Ed Zitron?

  I also think that they want more space. They want their own land. They want their own countries. They want, they want to escape governance.

• 39:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. They see, they see spaces and escape from politics because they, they're like living a libertarian wet dream.

• 39:11Ed Zitron?

  Which is really funny because when they get there, they'll immediately do fascism.

• 39:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:14Ed Zitron?

  That's what's on the agenda the second.

• 39:17Speaker 04

  You cannot run away from politics. The minute you have more than one person in a room, there's politics.

• 39:23Ed Zitron?

  It's, it's just really sad. And I actually think on a grander scale, they don't have an appreciation for tech. I was just writing something last night. It was on the way to New York. Where it was like, the actual state of technology is kind of fucking amazing.

• 39:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:36Ed Zitron?

  Like we can message, I could message you, you happen to be in town, you messaged me on Blue Sky, hundreds of miles, thousands of miles away. I was like, I'm able to write a note that was on my computer that's on my, my iPad here. I know that this, this sounds like boosting, but it really isn't. We have the raw tools that are just fucking incredible.

• 39:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:52Ed Zitron?

  And these people do not appreciate them. They don't appreciate them. Which is why generative AI is so fucking ugly because it's bad technology. It's not even good technology. It's poorly run, inefficient. Endlessly expensive and directionless.

• 40:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it inflicts harms on users that like we would not accept from anything that was not subjected to such an enormous hype cycle, right?

• 40:16Ed Zitron?

  Literally nothing.

• 40:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, nothing. No. If 10 years ago, you, you know, took any, you know, person off the street and said, hey, there's this cool new technology. It takes up enormous amounts of electricity. Um, it can do things, it can do things that, you know, no other piece of technology you've ever seen can do. Also, it's very good at talking teenagers into killing themselves.

• 40:40Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 40:41Speaker 04

  Should we release it into the, you know, wider world?

• 40:43Ed Zitron?

  And they'll say, well, no, but can it do anything else? And you, of course, would say, yeah, it can sometimes write code.

• 40:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 40:49Ed Zitron?

  And sometimes it also gets things horribly wrong.

• 40:52Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 40:52Ed Zitron?

  And.

• 40:52Speaker 04

  And it writes bad prose.

• 40:55Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 40:55Speaker 04

  And like, and it just kind of makes everything feel kind of mediocre and smeared out.

• 41:00Ed Zitron?

  Yes, exactly. Like, and they would say, no.

• 41:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. And it makes some people go crazy.

• 41:06Ed Zitron?

  And yeah, it drives people to actually, yeah. How do you feel about that? Like, how do you, like, did you see this coming? Because this really jumped out.

• 41:13Speaker 04

  No, yeah, no, no, this surprised me. This did surprise the hell out of me because I think that, you know, these machines, I don't even like calling them AI, right? Because I think that's a marketing term.

• 41:26Ed Zitron?

  It is.

• 41:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, like if you go back in time to, you know, 1990 and, and tell me when I'm a kid, hey, I have a little device in my pocket that lets me talk to an AI. And, and then, you know, I would have thought, oh, like that lets me talk to, you know, like Commander Data from Star Trek.

• 41:45Ed Zitron?

  Right, exciting.

• 41:46Speaker 04

  And instead it's this. And I would have been like, what the hell is that? No, AI is, is this marketing term. It's, it's a text generation engine. It, it produces.

• 41:57Speaker 04

  You know, homogenized thought like product.

• 42:01Ed Zitron?

  And the thing is, I was also, I'm, I'm in the midst of a long one as usual. It also conflates doing stuff with outputs. I know that sounds kind of flat, but it's like the everything is a unit of work rather than actually creating stuff or that you pay in it, you pay a person for their experience too.

• 42:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 42:18Ed Zitron?

  And it's just also not very good at stuff.

• 42:21Speaker 04

  No.

• 42:21Ed Zitron?

  Pissing me off.

• 42:22Speaker 04

  No.

• 42:22Ed Zitron?

  It's really, it's really bad at stuff.

• 42:24Speaker 04

  It is. And I think, and I think that's where, you know, this sort of driving people insane is coming from. Right? Like I, I like what I missed, the reason I think I didn't see that coming is I failed to think about uh, how like I, I knew that these things just generate text and in a lot of ways they just sort of spit out back to you what you put in.

• 42:48Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 42:49Speaker 04

  Which is, which is an old thing with chatbots that goes way before L L Ms goes all the way back to Eliza. Right?

• 42:55Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yeah. And that was the first, the first AI computer.

• 42:58Speaker 04

  Yeah. The first chatbot. I, I wouldn't even call Eliza AI, right?

• 43:01Ed Zitron?

  Didn't even the creator of Eliza go, no, this is bullshit.

• 43:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:03Ed Zitron?

  This is from Karen How's empire of AI. Great bit about it in there.

• 43:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. No, no, no. Eliza, Eliza was just like a, a hundred or so lines of code that, you know, you'd say, I'm having a bad day and it would say, oh, I'm sorry to hear that. Yeah. Why are you having a bad day? Right? Uh, but.

• 43:20Ed Zitron?

  But the, but like. The gassing engine, the.

• 43:23Speaker 04

  Yeah. Like, that's the thing. I, I didn't think about, oh, wait, if it just repeats back what you put in, but it does it in a way that's compelling and convincing to some people. That's going to just get them sort of caught in this like dopamine self-validation loop. And that could drive them off the edge.

• 43:39Ed Zitron?

  And I think that there is a condescension, I, I judge myself for this, where I was like, oh, this doesn't fool me. And it's like, but the harm also of, I'm very, I'm blessed to have tons of people who love me, who also give me clear feedback, which is not just what I want to hear. But I definitely, when I was younger and very depressed, would like crave validation and crave someone to just tell me what I want to hear. I definitely never thought, what if someone did? And the actual danger of having every fucking thought validated.

• 44:11Ed Zitron?

  And also just the sheer horrors, like Matt Hughes, my editor, just did a great story about this kind of horrible story where he simulated someone going through a mental health episode. And Claude was very clear to go, yeah, man, you don't seem so good. Chat G P T was like, no, everyone is out to get you, mate.

• 44:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:25Ed Zitron?

  It's in any other tech in the world that did this, you'd shut the shit down immediately.

• 44:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 44:31Ed Zitron?

  You close it.

• 44:32Speaker 04

  No, but I think.

• 44:33Ed Zitron?

  Where's fucking Eliezer on this bullshit?

• 44:34Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 44:35Ed Zitron?

  This feels like if you write a book about how everyone dies.

• 44:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:39Ed Zitron?

  This should be the thing that if he actually believed in anything, would he should be up saying like, hey, look, this is what I was talking about.

• 44:44Speaker 04

  Oh, I mean, I, I do think that he thinks this is like a, an incipient version of what he's talking about.

• 44:50Ed Zitron?

  I think.

• 44:51Speaker 04

  Like a baby version of it.

• 44:52Ed Zitron?

  I think he loves it.

• 44:53Speaker 04

  I think, I think this helps, that helps him out. Well, I think that he finds that useful for making the argument that he makes.

• 45:00Ed Zitron?

  Exactly.

• 45:01Speaker 04

  But he is not, again, the argument he's making, and this is the only nice thing I'll say about him, he means it seriously. He's not a grifter. He's three anxiety disorders in a trench coat.

• 45:11Ed Zitron?

  Damn. You put that in my fucking book, coward, stupid asshole.

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• 47:35Ed Zitron?

  I can't think of any other movement in tech, ever.

• 47:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:40Ed Zitron?

  That is anything like this, specifically because of how much it sucks us. Like, I can't think of any, maybe the metaverse and crypto, but even then, I don't like that comparison.

• 47:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:49Ed Zitron?

  Because they were so much smaller.

• 47:50Speaker 04

  Honestly, what I keep thinking about is, is that, in a way, it is taking the daily experience of the tech billionaires and, like, bringing it to the masses, right? Because what is it like?

• 48:02Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yeah.

• 48:03Speaker 04

  What is it like? To be Sam Altman, right? You've got billions of dollars, and you're surrounded by people who will never tell you no and validate your every thought.

• 48:14Ed Zitron?

  And they'll convince you that you understand every subject.

• 48:16Speaker 04

  Exactly. Yeah. And so now...

• 48:19Ed Zitron?

  Well, I've been saying this as well, because if you're an executive, a machine that can write emails, read emails, and otherwise you go to lunch, is kind of magic.

• 48:27Speaker 04

  Yeah!

• 48:27Ed Zitron?

  But no, I like this idea that it's the extension as well, just this completely, like, separate thing that just says, "Yeah, yeah, that's..." Completely right, man. I fully agree.

• 48:35Speaker 04

  Right. And so, of course, they don't see the harm because that's their entire goddamn lives. And so they're like, well, but if this were bad for people, that would mean that, you know, I'm in a bad environment that's unhealthy for me. And like, yeah, actually it is.

• 48:48Ed Zitron?

  But they don't think.

• 48:49Speaker 04

  They don't think that, but I genuinely believe that like the best thing for the tech billionaires themselves that could happen to them would be to lose all their money. It would be the best thing for their mental health.

• 49:00Ed Zitron?

  Put me in a room with them.

• 49:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 49:02Ed Zitron?

  No, give me, let me get him on the show. I, I think that I could have a great chat with any of them.

• 49:06Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 49:06Ed Zitron?

  Just because I, I went to a private school, like, a lot of these American billionaires as well, they would get destroyed by the average scum aristocrats of old in England, like the real blood drinkers.

• 49:20Speaker 04

  So they're amateur vampires.

• 49:21Ed Zitron?

  No, they really are though. Like, like they, it's the classic thing why British colonialism and American colonialism have never matched up because Britain was just evil. They just fucking murdered people and destroyed communities. And they're like, why are we doing this? It's because we're British. This is what we do here. What do you mean? What's a moral? I've not heard of that. No, what do you, what do you mean? No, no, send my, send my eighth cousin to, to Africa. Shoot whoever you see. Like, that was the horrifying stuff, but they knew, they, they didn't care about what people think. I still think the billionaires care.

• 49:52Speaker 04

  Oh, they definitely do. Like, this is, this is the thing.

• 49:54Ed Zitron?

  Which is insane to me. If I had one billion dollars, I would no longer care.

• 49:58Speaker 04

  Right. If I had a billion dollars, I would just try to make sure that nobody knew my name.

• 50:02Ed Zitron?

  And that, you know. The same amount. I would be posting.

• 50:06Speaker 04

  No, I think, I think I'd just be done, man. I'd be like, okay, cool. Um, you know, I'm going to donate to a bunch of causes that matter to me. And, you know, like, I still think it's bad for there to be billionaires and I try to, try to change that. But also like, I'm just, just gonna like, you know, hang out in a nice house with my friends and have a good time.

• 50:24Ed Zitron?

  But that's the problem though. They don't have those.

• 50:27Speaker 04

  Well, yeah.

• 50:27Ed Zitron?

  Because you've heard, have you ever heard the really depressing story about Elon Musk and this guy called, here's this investor who got really cooked by COVID, Peter something.

• 50:36Speaker 04

  No, I don't think I know this story.

• 50:38Ed Zitron?

  Story of going over to Elon Musk's house and there was a decanter of wine. And Elon Musk picked up the wine before it was done decanting and then something said something along the lines of honey badger don't care. And I just want to say that's one of the saddest fucking things I've heard in my life. Just absolutely, just unfathomably depressing. Cause you can get things like a Coravan that can kind of aerate it. There are various ways around aeration if you're really feeling it. And you have hundreds of billions of what, however many, many dollars Elon has liquid. You could just have someone whose job is to make sure the wine is aerated. They could make $250,000 a year, it wouldn't matter to you. That's what you lose on the couch.

• 51:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, but I think that what matters to Elon is not doing what he's supposed to, right? So he can be seen as cool.

• 51:21Ed Zitron?

  Or just drinking as quickly. Because otherwise you might feel something.

• 51:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I just, he desperately wants to be liked and it's never gonna happen.

• 51:31Ed Zitron?

  It's so funny as well, cause it could be so easy for him.

• 51:33Speaker 04

  I know.

• 51:34Ed Zitron?

  He could just post his lunch every day and nothing else. Then we'll be like, Elon Musk, but look at, this is actually what pisses me off as well though. Cause people are like, Elon Musk fucking sucks. It's like, he was sending people off to Aaron Bieber, a science reporter in 2027.

• 51:46Speaker 04

  Oh, I know Aaron, Aaron's a friend of mine. Yeah, it's awful.

• 51:48Ed Zitron?

  Aaron Rux, and like, when that happened, not a single, Kara Swisher didn't say shit. Then here Kevin Roos casing you, none of these fucking people thought necessary. But now like, Elon Musk is such a bad guy, he's such a bad guy.

• 51:58Speaker 04

  No, he's always been like.

• 51:59Ed Zitron?

  And also, he called a guy a pedophile for saving children.

• 52:02Speaker 04

  Yup.

• 52:03Ed Zitron?

  Because he wasn't allowed to send his submarine.

• 52:06Speaker 04

  No, he's never been good. Like, this is, this is the thing that confuses me about Musk.

• 52:11Ed Zitron?

  People enjoy anything as much as I enjoy Diet Coke. Like, I'm 100% sure of that. Cause I love these things. Like, it's, if this kills me, if this shit's meant to like, in three years, they're like, it's rap blood. Like, I'm like, I will keep drinking.

• 52:24Speaker 04

  Better offline brought to you by Diet Coke.

• 52:26Ed Zitron?

  It's rap blood.

• 52:29Ed Zitron?

  I really hope that they sponsor this show at one point, cause that's the commercial. But that's the thing, like, and I'm only kind of joking, cause it's, I really enjoy Diet Coke. I love sitting down chatting shit with my friends. I love watching football and chatting with my friends. Yeah, like, it's like, there are very basic things I enjoy. What do these people, like, these people just must walk around in this haze of anger?

• 52:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:47Ed Zitron?

  Or like emptiness?

• 52:48Speaker 04

  I think they're, they're really cut off from their own emotions, right? And like, and again, that's gonna happen if you just constantly get validation, right? You know, one of, one of the many tweets from back when Twitter was less shitty, before Musk bought it. Uh, there are many tweets that just like, live rent free in my head. And one of them is about, um... The cognitive impact of being a billionaire.

• 53:11Ed Zitron?

  I know the one you're gonna say.

• 53:12Speaker 04

  It's like, you know, like, everything around you is really expensive. It's just a constant series of your own preferences.

• 53:16Ed Zitron?

  Every chair is fifty thousand dollars and weighs five thousand pounds.

• 53:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, in terms of the cognitive impact, it must be, you know, roughly equivalent to being kicked in the head by a horse every day.

• 53:25Ed Zitron?

  Exactly.

• 53:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:26Ed Zitron?

  I think I'd be fine, but that's my pathology, I guess, but it, no, but it's, they have this weird isolated thing. And even Benioff, who used to seem okay.

• 53:37Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, he, his whole game was like to be the best of the billionaires, which is a low bar.

• 53:42Ed Zitron?

  And then he was just like, ah, fuck it.

• 53:44Speaker 04

  Yup.

• 53:45Ed Zitron?

  Just fuck it. I don't give a shit anymore.

• 53:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:47Ed Zitron?

  Agent Force, it doesn't sell to anyone. No one likes it, but it's the future, Agent Force.

• 53:53Speaker 04

  Jesus Christ.

• 53:54Ed Zitron?

  He's donated to all, I know, it's so cool. It must be really cool being a guy who actually has qualifications and from proving things. To watch the world, like, all these guys being like, yeah, this is the future. And just articles wanting to go, it doesn't work. No one likes it.

• 54:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, cool is one word. Incredibly frustrating is another.

• 54:11Ed Zitron?

  Right. This is, this is stymying real innovation.

• 54:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, I know. There's opportunity costs and, and also just like actual stifling of real innovation in, in the effort to achieve impossible ends that would be bad even if we could achieve them.

• 54:27Ed Zitron?

  So slight directional shift. Is there anything within like science and tech innovation that you're actually excited about? Anything you look at and like, that's fucking cool?

• 54:36Speaker 04

  I mean, mRNA vaccines are the first thing that comes to mind.

• 54:39Ed Zitron?

  Exactly.

• 54:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're really awesome.

• 54:41Ed Zitron?

  Tell them all.

• 54:41Speaker 04

  I mean, like, look, you know, the fact.

• 54:44Ed Zitron?

  And what is an mRNA vaccine said flawlessly?

• 54:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, um, an M, wow, now I'm.

• 54:51Ed Zitron?

  There we are.

• 54:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, and mRNA vaccine.

• 54:55Ed Zitron?

  Nailed it.

• 54:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:57Speaker 04

  Is, uh, is the kind of thing that, uh, that, you know, we have with the COVID vaccines, right?

• 55:02Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 55:02Speaker 04

  Um, basically.

• 55:05Speaker 04

  The thing that's so exciting about them is that they are so much easier and faster to synthesize. Right. Than previous vaccines. You know, I think the previous record before the COVID vaccine for, you know, how long it took to develop a safe, widely deployed vaccine was something like five to 10 years. Jesus. And then this vaccine, most of the time delay, most of that year that we were waiting for the vaccine was actually a little less than a year. Most of that was testing. That's amazing. The actual time that it took to synthesize the damn thing was, I believe, on the order of weeks. And what's crazy is I believe that was venture backed, right? Uh, yeah, some of it was venture backed. Which is like, see, venture capital can be useful. Yeah, it can be, um, but.

• 55:50Speaker 04

  When it wants. Yeah. Some of it was venture backed, some of it was backed by, you know, NIH grants. We do need those. Yeah, we sure fucking do. No, government funding of, of, of basic research is important and not just because it leads to amazing technological breakthroughs like mRNA vaccines, but also because like basic scientific research is an important thing for humans to do, like the same way that art is important. Right. Right? But, but it also does enable massive scientific and technological breakthroughs. And I, I, you know, there is promise for mRNA vaccines to like open up a whole new

• 56:33Speaker 04

  class of vaccines that, you know, for things that were previously very hard to vaccinate against. Uh, I am not an expert in the field, but like everyone I know who works in biomedicine, they, they're all very excited about this and they're all really depressed by the fact that, you know, we have an anti-vaxxer who sounds like a fork that got stuck in a fucking garbage disposal as the health. A rise from your grave guy from that one video. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Very depressing.

• 57:05Ed Zitron?

  I just wish we like green energy as well feels like

• 57:08Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, green energy was the next thing I was gonna say.

• 57:10Ed Zitron?

  Batteries.

• 57:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, batteries, solar panels. It's incredible.

• 57:14Ed Zitron?

  And all this opportunity is there.

• 57:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 57:17Ed Zitron?

  It's not like we need to innovate, like we are innovating, but like.

• 57:20Speaker 04

  Yeah. And also like we even had the legislation that we needed, right? Or some of it, right? Like the, um, you know, Biden's big bill, the, the, the build back better.

• 57:32Speaker 04

  It, uh, you know, was not a perfect bill, but it was the best environmental bill in American history.

• 57:40Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 57:40Speaker 04

  And, and now, you know, it's being destroyed because we have a government in this country that, that, you know, does not believe in climate change and doesn't believe in anything other than short-term profits at the expense of everybody else. And also doesn't believe in democracy.

• 57:56Ed Zitron?

  That feels, that feels like a big problem, though. The growth at all costs.

• 58:00Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, that's, that's the thing. Like, and that's why my book has the, the actual title that it does, rather than going with the title, these fucking people.

• 58:08Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, though these fucking people or just the bastards, I think is also very good, too.

• 58:12Speaker 04

  I, I think so, too. I mean, like, there's a.

• 58:14Ed Zitron?

  And it'd be so easy for them to do better. So easy, so easy.

• 58:17Speaker 04

  No, no, no, no. Cause like, you know.

• 58:19Ed Zitron?

  In two seconds.

• 58:20Speaker 04

  Forget the best thing that they could do. They're doing some of the worst things that they could do. Doing better than they are right now is just an incredibly low bar.

• 58:27Ed Zitron?

  But even through like very poorly guided generosity.

• 58:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:31Ed Zitron?

  They could very easily.

• 58:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:33Ed Zitron?

  They could just fund media outlets versus whatever it is they're doing to them.

• 58:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:37Ed Zitron?

  Tearing them down.

• 58:38Speaker 04

  But that would mean, you know, the possibility of losing control and losing, you know, uh, um, losing some of their power and money. And they, they just are not willing to do that because they've got something broken in their hearts.

• 58:52Ed Zitron?

  We need to heal them. No. No, I think that, I think.

• 58:55Speaker 04

  I think we need to tax their money away.

• 58:57Ed Zitron?

  I think that too. But I think we actually, my true, my truth here is that we need to change how we do that, though. We need to start doing executive liability. We need to make it so if like CrowdStrike happens again, like a bunch of like people potentially get die in the NHS system because the computer shuts down, the Satya Nadella can lose something. Cause it isn't enough to find the companies. Finding the company is not gonna do shit. Unless you do scaling revenue, percentage of revenue. This is this and more in how I become the FTC. No, they're not gonna let me. But it's just. I feel the, one of the wonderful things of having you on is you're able to come at this from a science communicator perspective. You're actually able to talk, because it's not just about what these people want, it's the practicality of it, which is that nothing's really happening.

• 59:42Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 59:42Ed Zitron?

  But that's the actual weirdest thing about, the, the real nihilism of this is that nothing seems to actually be occurring.

• 59:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, and they also act like there's not going to be any accountability for, like, forget their actions, just even their words, right?

• 59:55Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 59:55Speaker 04

  You know, Sam Altman says, uh, you know, like this, this thing that just drove me up a wall, that he said about a month ago, uh, he said that, you know, in 10 years, college graduates are gonna have really cool jobs going out to explore the solar system in spaceships, uh, enabled by AI. That is not happening. Like, on the list of things that are not happening-

• 1:00:13Ed Zitron?

  We don't have space exploration.

• 1:00:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, no, no, that's not happening.

• 1:00:16Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:17Speaker 04

  He is just wrong.

• 1:00:19Ed Zitron?

  He's lying.

• 1:00:20Speaker 04

  Right, and he is probably still gonna be alive in 10 years, and you and I are also likely still gonna be alive in 10 years, and then we're gonna say, hey, remember when he said that, that, you know, now we, we can show he's just wrong, and he, and nothing's gonna happen to him.

• 1:00:36Ed Zitron?

  And what needs, like, this is why I'm so harsh on media criticism as well.

• 1:00:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:00:39Ed Zitron?

  The one thing you can do is at least say, area man full of shit.

• 1:00:43Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:00:44Ed Zitron?

  Stupid bastard wanks off again.

• 1:00:46Speaker 04

  Well, this is my, this is what I attempted to do in my book.

• 1:00:48Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, and it's, I think that the change that we need in our hearts is to just regularly say this stuff. I regularly say on the show, I don't care if you quote me, just say this shit about them.

• 1:00:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:00:58Ed Zitron?

  Clammy Sammy, he, he's been promising, he said that this was the year of agents. He said that. I don't, but now I read in theinformation.com, uh, that next year's the year of agents, so maybe, I do, actually, here's a question for you.

• 1:01:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:11Ed Zitron?

  AI 2027, do you read that?

• 1:01:14Speaker 04

  I've read a little bit of it, it's nonsense.

• 1:01:16Ed Zitron?

  It's nonsense.

• 1:01:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:17Ed Zitron?

  Why do you think things like that fool so many people, though? Why do you think it got the media coverage it did?

• 1:01:26Speaker 04

  I mean, part of it is bad journalism, right? Part of it is, is that Kevin Roos has confused.

• 1:01:33Speaker 04

  Kevin Roos has confused reiterating the views of the wealthy, influential and powerful with taking a brave contrarian stance. And how he made that mistake, I don't know, but you know, I really get the sense that he thinks he's being very brave. When he's doing exactly what journalists are not supposed to do, which is just uncritically parroting the powerful.

• 1:01:58Ed Zitron?

  And it feels like it's the large language model again, it's just the affirming thing. It's like, oh, I'm being contrarian by stepping out against these people who say it isn't making any money and isn't very good at stuff.

• 1:02:07Speaker 04

  And it's like, look, buddy, if there's, you know, if there's a, a two sides to a debate. I mean, obviously there's more than two sides, but like, if on one side you have the wealthiest people in the world. And on the other side, you have people who say mean things about you personally online. And you think that, you know, it's the first side, that's the contrarian underdog.

• 1:02:30Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:30Speaker 04

  Something is wrong with your brain.

• 1:02:32Ed Zitron?

  And that's the thing, but this is, and this I think is a weird thing in our society that we just, people trust the rich. And the media has got to a point where they've just bred out the real cynicism. Cause I swear like 10, 15 years ago, you used to have some tech journalism, like I read a thing about Amazon Web Services. That Kevin Roos wrote, and it was actually pretty cynical about it.

• 1:02:53Speaker 04

  Really?

• 1:02:53Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it was actually pretty critical. He then, he made, I feel bad for him because this can't have been his fault. He basically said at the end, yeah, they'll never be profitable. No, no, no, it gets worse at a month later. Amazon announced that AWS is profitable for the first time, just like, buddy. Mr. Bean, come on.

• 1:03:10Speaker 04

  Whoa.

• 1:03:11Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:12Speaker 04

  Maybe that's the origin story, maybe he was like, oh wow, I screwed that up, I guess I better believe that.

• 1:03:16Ed Zitron?

  I believe the origin story is actual social media. I think he, I think he felt, I actually think a lot of journalists think that they missed the boat on social media. I have been in media relations since 2008. I have read, and this sounds insane, but it's true. I think I've read just about everybody's work since then. It, within the tech media at least, including Kevin's. And he has always had a little bit of anxiety that he missed social media. Nobody missed social media, not a single fucking one since two thousand and eight. Everybody was on Zuckerberg zuck. They zucked him off hardcore. Sorry, sorry. But nevertheless, they were on top of this. They wrote about social media was written about immediately. If anything, I think the media was a little slow to get on apps, then they gone on hardcore. I know the history of this shit. I have been taking detailed notes. I sound crazy.

• 1:04:02Ed Zitron?

  But I think that there's just, there is this weird thing of like, the powerful would never lie to us. And then Prism came out and then Cambridge Analytica happened.

• 1:04:11Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:04:12Ed Zitron?

  And people like, maybe Zuckerberg's bad, but he wouldn't lie to us. He would. And they're like, well, they know things we don't know. And that's actually another, that's my favorite AI thing. It's like there's secret things they're working on. There's secret things, secret things, sitting in the, waiting in the wings. You'll never believe what's coming. And it's just, I actually think it's just, um, what's his name? Ilya Sutskever just goes to bars occasionally. He's like, you'll never guess what I said. You never get this AGI around the corner.

• 1:04:38Speaker 04

  Okay, okay. No, I, I have a thing to say about Sutskever. When, like, this is, this is me just being petty and making a point that other people have made before. Yeah, of course. No, when he, when he announced that he was, you know, putting together a team to, you know, just go straight for safe super intelligence. He meant to say, when he posted this on social media, that he was putting together a crack team. But that's not what he wrote.

• 1:05:03Ed Zitron?

  What did he write?

• 1:05:04Speaker 04

  He wrote that he was putting together a cracked team.

• 1:05:07Ed Zitron?

  Hmm.

• 1:05:08Speaker 04

  Crack ED, cracked. And like, yeah, actually, you know what?

• 1:05:12Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, I believe.

• 1:05:13Speaker 04

  I think that's true.

• 1:05:14Ed Zitron?

  I agree.

• 1:05:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:05:15Ed Zitron?

  I also think, I, him and Mira Marati, I can't, and so for, for the listeners, um, Ilya Sutskever, one of the co-founders of OpenAI, raised, I think, two billion dollars at a thirty billion dollar valuation. Mira Marati did a billion, some amount, some bullshit. Neither of these companies have told their investors how they will spend the money or what on, or what they will build. And you may think I'm being facetious. Mira Marati literally said to investors, I will not tell you. And then said, I, and has board rights where she can veto everyone. I will be honest, go for it. Fuck yeah. I think, I think at this stage, if these people are so fucking stupid,

• 1:05:56Ed Zitron?

  that you're just like, I promise you literally nothing. I won't give you, you hogs a single oink. You're not gonna get anything from me. Give me money now. Fuck yeah, go for it. But on the other hand, I cannot wait for the investigation.

• 1:06:10Speaker 04

  I just hope there is one, right? These people are acting with impunity. Like, and and also, like, again, accountability just for their words, right? The most basic criticism of the wealthy in media. Like, this is to shift just a little bit. Eric Schmidt, right, said about about a year ago, shortly before the election, he said, we're never going to meet our climate goals anyway. So we might as well just burn as much carbon and use as many resources as possible to get to AGI, and then that will solve climate change for us, which is ridiculous because we don't.

• 1:06:45Ed Zitron?

  That's so cool.

• 1:06:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:46Ed Zitron?

  It's like, we have no responsibility for our actions until we hand them off to someone else.

• 1:06:51Speaker 04

  Right. So he said this, which is ridiculous for lots of reasons. It echoes stuff that Sam Altman has said, right? It's it's ridiculous, among other reasons, because like AGI is not a thing. And also because we don't need, like, we know what we need to do to solve global warming, right? We know what we need to do to solve the climate crisis. It's just a matter of actually getting everybody to agree to do it.

• 1:07:12Ed Zitron?

  But, mate, Sam Altman said that they know what they need to do to get to AGI, and then said a few months later that AGI wasn't a useful term.

• 1:07:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:20Ed Zitron?

  Q E D.

• 1:07:21Speaker 04

  Well, no, this is this is exactly what I was about to say about Schmidt, right? He repeats this claim about like, just pushing as hard as we can. About a month after the last time he said it, maybe two months, only a few weeks ago, he comes out in the New York Times with this op ed saying, oh, AGI is not really a thing. And we shouldn't care about it. It's like, buddy, you were saying just a few weeks ago that this was going to save the world from the biggest emergency of our time. And now you're saying it's not a thing. Do you think we're all stupid? Are you that stupid? What the fuck is going on?

• 1:07:57Ed Zitron?

  I can actually tell you. I think he thinks the media is that stupid and will write and will publish anything he says.

• 1:08:03Speaker 04

  I mean, I was shocked to see that the New York Times published it.

• 1:08:05Ed Zitron?

  I wasn't.

• 1:08:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:08:06Ed Zitron?

  I would be honest, that's the least surprising. We've got fucking Ezra Klein being like, AGI is the fucking Ezra. Ezra.

• 1:08:15Ed Zitron?

  What a peculiar fellow. What a peculiar fellow, Ezra Klein is. What's going on there? You ever run into Mr. Klein?

• 1:08:22Speaker 04

  I've never met him directly. I know people who know him, but um, no, I think, I think he just hung out with too many tech billionaires while he was living in the Bay Area.

• 1:08:31Ed Zitron?

  What is this fucking mind poison? These people are boring.

• 1:08:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:08:34Ed Zitron?

  These people are boring. You sit down and you sit down and have-

• 1:08:37Speaker 04

  They have enormous amounts of money and like if you're, if you're someone who's never been cool and-

• 1:08:43Ed Zitron?

  I've never been cool in my life.

• 1:08:44Speaker 04

  I've also never been cool.

• 1:08:45Ed Zitron?

  I love it. I don't-

• 1:08:45Speaker 04

  I know, but like, if you've never been cool, one of two things happens to you as you grow up. Either you desperately want to be cool.

• 1:08:53Ed Zitron?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:08:53Speaker 04

  And that can, you know, go wrong in many different ways, like Musk, um, and possibly like Klein. I don't know, maybe, like, I'm willing to believe that something else is going on with him. I don't know, but, or you become like us and you stop giving a shit.

• 1:09:08Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:08Speaker 04

  And you accept, oh, I'm just permanently uncool. Whatever. I'll make my way through life.

• 1:09:13Ed Zitron?

  And that's the thing. It's, and these people are just disconnected from humanity. None of these people seem to have friends or loved ones. Because there's just, if I did any of this wackadoo shit, I would get texts from Casey or Sarah or any number of people who love me. Just like, hey, man, um-

• 1:09:28Speaker 04

  Are you okay?

• 1:09:29Ed Zitron?

  You sound insane. No, Casey would definitely not be, he'd just go, hey, yeah, what the fuck you, you okay? That doesn't make any sense. What do you mean, what do you mean a Dyson sphere? Do you know what that is? A Dyson sphere? You fu- it's just, they don't have friends and I don't know if they want them. I think it would require a certain level of vulnerability that isn't- Have you talked to any, have you met up with any of them?

• 1:09:50Speaker 04

  Um, with the billionaires? No, I tried. There's a list at the end of my book of all of the tech billionaires I tried to interview and they all said no. The only one who I successfully interviewed was like a lower tier billionaire guy named Yan Telin, who's in deep with the Effective Altruist.

• 1:10:05Ed Zitron?

  Was he in that Skype invention?

• 1:10:06Speaker 04

  Skype and Kazaa. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.

• 1:10:08Ed Zitron?

  Christ.

• 1:10:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:10:10Ed Zitron?

  Actually can't hate him for, those are two pretty good ones.

• 1:10:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:10:13Ed Zitron?

  Though I will say Skype, definitely one of those inventions that I've ne- I've never seen something just stop.

• 1:10:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, it's gone.

• 1:10:20Ed Zitron?

  Just got like, no, it just, no, I mean trapped in amber. It was the same product for 50 years.

• 1:10:23Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, that's true.

• 1:10:24Ed Zitron?

  And then Microsoft were just like- Like what boxer in animal farm bang to the glue factory with Skype. We fucked this up well enough. It's just, it's also, it's also sad, but this has been such a wonderful conversation. Where can people find you?

• 1:10:38Speaker 04

  Uh, well, I'm on Blue Sky.

• 1:10:40Ed Zitron?

  Hell yeah.

• 1:10:40Speaker 04

  Because I don't want to be on a platform like X that's filled with Nazis.

• 1:10:45Ed Zitron?

  Nah.

• 1:10:45Speaker 04

  Um, so Blue Sky is the best place to find me. I'm adambecker dot bluesky dot social or B Sky dot social and um.

• 1:10:53Ed Zitron?

  Got a book?

• 1:10:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, I've got a book is the main thing. Yeah. Uh, I got a book called More Everything Forever.

• 1:10:59Ed Zitron?

  I'll link to it in the notes.

• 1:11:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, it is available wherever fine books are sold. Uh, and if you like what I had to say on this episode, I think you'll like the book.

• 1:11:09Ed Zitron?

  And if you like what I have to say on this show, you're a sick puppy. You know where to find me. Thank you so much for your time as ever. I love you all. Thank you to Bahid, of course, here in New York City for producing this episode. And of course, the Matt Osowski, the wonderful producer at home. I will catch you with a monologue in a few days. Thank you so much.

• 1:11:31Ed Zitron?

  Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com. M A T T O S O W S K I dot com. You can email me at [email protected] or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat dot where's your ed dot app to visit the Discord and go to r slash better offline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

• 1:12:04Speaker 02

  Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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