Ed Zitron

Hello and welcome to Better Offline.

I'm, of course, your host, Ed Zitron.

That's right, I'm back, all of you.

And to be clear, when I said I was having wisdom teeth surgery, I meant I was having more of them added to make me more powerful.

The operation was a success.

I apologize also for doing this week in reverse with the longer episode on the Friday and the monologue on the, well, I guess Tuesday, I guess.

I had to put out OpenAI's financials at the last minute, and well, here we are.

Subscribe to the newsletter, ideally the premium, to support your local Zitron.

And as ever, if you have anyone else's financials, you can catch me on ezitron.76 on Signal.

It's going to be in the episode notes.

Anyway, today, now that I'm done drinking milkshakes, I'm joined by the wonderful computer science professor and writer Cal Newport to talk about AI, but specifically to talk about what he calls doom trolling in one of the best pieces I have read on AI ever.

Cal?

You haven't lost $11 billion or anything.

You need to get those numbers down.

I only write about bad companies.

Yeah, you moved it to an SPV.

But let's talk doom trolling, because you have this fantastic piece that talks about the fact that all these companies, Anthropic, OpenAI, even DeepMind to an extent, just keep selling things based on the destruction that AI will allegedly cause, though they appear to be talking about another kind of technology entirely when you think about it.

We're like, what the hell are you talking about?

But they're going to go 2,000 miles an hour at some point in the future.

Yeah, we would just ban them.