Ross Douthat

The last two.

How do you sustain mastery in an environment where...

most humans experience AI as if it is a peer and a potentially superior peer.

To me, this is the crucial question, right?

Listening to you talk, my question is, are these people on my side?

Are you on my side?

And when you talk about humans remaining in charge, I think...

You're on my side.

That's good.

But one thing I've done in the past on this show, and we'll end here, is I read poems to technologists, and you supplied the poem.

Machines of Loving Grace is the name of a poem by Richard Brodigan.

Yes.

Here's how the poem ends.

I like to think it has to be of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace.

To me, that sounds like the dystopian end where human beings are re-animalized and reduced and, however benevolently, the machines are in charge.

So, last question.

What do you hear when you hear that poem?

And are you, if I think that's dystopia, are you on my side?

Knowing the poet himself, then yes, I think that's a reasonable interpretation.

Okay.