Joe Allen

Well, if you look at the overall trend at Amazon, it's been automation, automation, automation.

Anybody who's worked at Amazon knows that your entire job basically is to have an algorithm put in your head like a parasite and commanded every step of the way.

So a normal Amazon worker, to the extent that they're still useful, they are constantly following directives from their smartphones or any other device.

They're monitored, they're surveilled.

Everything they do is tracked analyzed and there's an attempt to make it more efficient the ultimate state of efficiency as Amazon and Elon Musk and Sam Altman on and on and on the ultimate state of efficiency is to replace humans altogether they

Frame it as if this is a necessity.

If we don't automate, China will.

If we don't deploy AIs across the entire country, China will.

If we don't create godlike superintelligence, China will.

That's always the justification.

It's valid to some extent, but all of this is being driven by American companies, and Americans have absolutely woken up to the problem.

I worry that some will be easily persuaded.

Yeah, and you know me, Steve.

I mean, I don't just hang out in and around venues.

I'm always getting out and wandering among the people, so to speak, even street people.

And I can say that from the middle class down to the homeless and on up to the upper middle class and even some of the oligarchs themselves, there's everything from a sense of alarm that this is coming on too fast to take on any kind of sensible way.

Among many, there's abject terror that it will not just replace jobs, it will replace relationships, it will replace the family, it will replace education, and ultimately will create machines that are capable of making decisions on behalf of humans, even the decision to kill.

I think the reason people understand it isn't because of tech coverage in the media or our coverage.

I think the reason people understand it is that now they have children.

They have spouses.