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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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How's it going, boys? Hey, Niall. It's the same thing with Slow Hands. Slow Hands is not about anything else really, is it? You know, our taste so good can't be about food.
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You too, Joe.
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Chapter 2: What is the concept of doom trolling in the AI industry?
How you architect it? Like what, what, what allows it to do it? And their answer is, we don't have to figure that out. The AI will, right? Now this is perfect.
Not the history.
We can history lesson this, this, although this goes all the way back to the 1960s. So there's a, there's a statistician applied mathematician named IJ Goode. And he wrote a paper. It was really like an information theory paper. But he wrote a paper where he said, if we think about it, he called it ultra intelligence. Really, all you have to do is build a machine smart enough to improve itself.
And then that machine will improve itself. That machine will improve itself. And then we'll get to ultra intelligence. So we don't have to figure out how to do it. The danger lies in just making the machine fast enough. So it was like a bit of a semi-thought experiment. That became the ur-document of what I call like the philosophical superintelligence cultists.
So this sort of where the philosophers took this idea away from the technologist and began turning it into a sort of digital era scholasticism where they sort of abstracted away all technical details and just started building list of list of list of list of all the different things that could happen.
They just did a bunch of thought experiments about superintelligence and recursive self-improvement. They then merged with the utopian singularity people that were coming out of sort of Kurzweil's orbit. And you kind of created this group that was non-technical. This is not engineers.
This is philosophers, ethicists, and sort of gadflies and speculative fiction writers and fan fiction writers like Yukowsky. And they kind of created this sort of doomerist utopian cult. And then what happened is that group was like, we should create a nonprofit to look at these ideas. And we'll take Sam Altman and put him in charge. We'll call this OpenAI.
And then suddenly they were like, oh my God, this GenAI thing is working better than we thought. And we have now a, one of the, you know, someone coming out of this general kind of cultish, let's, eschatological, you know, in times you could come through computers was suddenly and accidentally in charge of the most important company in AI.
And one of his, you know, lieutenants left to start his own company and his name was Dario Amadei. So these, the two major players we have in AI right now come out of philosophical super intelligence, which uses this idea of RSI. And it's like a, it's like a parable. It's like an abstraction. This is not like a serious, it wasn't like a technical concern. It was a,
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Chapter 3: How do AI companies use fear to market their products?
This makes no sense. No company ever in the history of companies was ever trying to troll their own customers to be afraid of their products. They're treating their technology like a religious object. Like we are underestimating the weirdness of these people. And when we put that into focus, it completely changes, I think, our own psychological relationship with what's going on right now.
Yeah, and I fully agree that... I think it's a distraction as well from the actual reality of what these things are. And I think it's a deliberate one. I naturally fall on the side of just thinking these people are deeply cynical. I've met people who think that Dario Amadei believes this stuff. I actually don't. I don't think they believe a fucking thing.
I think that however you feel is however you feel. But I think that they... correctly realize that they could very easily make people talk about something that doesn't exist just by mentioning it. I saw a bunch of headlines that were like, wow, Anthropic sees the path to self-building AI. No, they don't. Other than the fact they had a single sentence saying, I see the path to this.
They don't have any proof. They don't have anything. And yeah, you're right. These people are weird. I have seen people on XTheEverything app, Twitter, actually posting that we are in AI 2027, that everything matches up with AI 2027.
I want to be clear, and the reason I mentioned this is I just brought this up, is that in early 2026, in AI 2027, they say that Agent 1 has already started doing its own research. That's not happening. None of that's happening. In fact, none of this is happening. These people are just weird fantasists.
I think while there's the poison of the philosophers in them, I just think that Wario Amadei and Sam Altman both, I think that they both realize that journalists are easily conned, that investors are easily conned, that you can just say shit and anyone will print it and believe you because you're a CEO.
I don't know how to answer that question because the more I look into how quasi religious and cultish this sort of philosophical super intelligence community is, the more I get confused about what these people actually believe. So go spend time in Silicon Valley.
Go spend time with ā I think just to be abundantly clear, I don't think everyone is cynical. I think they've been easily conned, but I don't think that they're cynical.
No, I could believe that as their companies got larger and their leadership roles got larger, that they have stepped away like, oh, this was a little naive. That's possible. But also I saw a news report today that Dario, I don't know if this is true, so there's a headline I haven't read yet, that he has like one direct report.
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Chapter 4: What ethical dilemmas arise from the fear-mongering in AI?
To get to the grocery store, I had to go down Jefferson Davis Parkway. If you're an historian and you leave out half of what the history is, you're not doing your job.
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Yeah, you've absolutely nailed it. It's the pride thing. Again, hadn't thought of that, but you're right. The way that they react when you give... I mean, I just published OpenAI's financials, and the pretzels they're contorting themselves into, the ways in which...
It's ā Silicon Valley has always been this proudly atheistic, meritocratic, rugged pragmatism world, or at least this is how they sold themselves. It's not about your feelings. It's about can you ship co? Is your software good? Does it make money? But something about this is really ā entered into the realm of religiosity.
Not even faith, because faith is a much stronger and more fundamentally sound thing. This is religious cultism... but the God is capital. Like you can say it's AI, but the God is capitalism. It is this idea that the big money people who are constantly threatening you, like they just, they're like, yeah, it's going to kill you. It's going to take everything. I guess it's Pascal's wager as well.
It's well, if I don't know if this is the case, but if they're all saying it, and if I'm wrong, Rocco's Basilisk will drop an anvil on me, I guess.
It's, it's frustrating, but also I don't know what these people will do if the bubble, when the bubble bursts, I don't know why I'm saying if, when it bursts, I don't know what these people will do because their worldview is built around existing outside of reality, almost like that. Just this chat bot will become God will become autonomous.
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Chapter 5: How does the media contribute to the narrative around AI doom?
Yeah. The, the AI God is coming.
But it's so strange as well. I've been writing about Silicon Valley bubble recently, this idea that basically the valley itself is a bubble inflating that will burst going back 10, 15 years because they ran out of new ideas, that they've not had anything good, not had a new smartphone or a new app store or a new cloud computing in a while.
And I think that that's what's fed into this as well, because you've got that kind of desperation that we've run out of big ideas and then added this layer of...
fear-mongering plus childish philosophy yeah very like very much like this shit must have hit so this would hit so hard if i was 12 yeah like i was 12 like holy shit yeah oh i'm using this computer today and tomorrow it will be ultra intelligent i'm so smart for finding this first It's deeply sad. I didn't think I could be more embarrassed by Silicon Valley.
But the fact that these people are being this weird is, we need to call them weird. It's actually kind of unsettling as well. It's unsettling also that you are one of the few people just saying it. that everyone else is acting like this is normal or rational or in any way logical?
Well, I'm trying to activate a bigger crowd here, right? And here's what I think we need. I think your use of the word embarrassing is key because the trend I'm seeing, which I don't like, is this idea of the people who instinctually do not like what's going on with these AI companies are trying to match the intensity and hype of what they're saying, but going the other direction, right?
And so they're like, they're destroying everything, right? Like the environment will all be destroyed by the data centers and all education is going to end. And the idea being is like, I need to be as like... as intense about all of the terribleness that your technology will cause as you are about like the good it will cause where I don't think that's playing into their hands.
I think the right reaction is ridicule and embarrassment. This is where things need to be. If you read an anthropic white paper, you read these things. It's, We're now going to go through, we envision four possible futures for where this technology could come. And then they just make up like four or 12 year old sci-fi.
Maybe the technology will take over, but it will be in more of a sort of a Churchillian mold and we'll wear top hats. And that we could imagine a council of humans, but it would probably be like one third humans and two third robots. And, you know, like just like work, it's just nonsense.
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Chapter 6: What are the psychological impacts of doom trolling on consumers?
justify why I'm spending a thousand dollars a month on tokens. Like, I don't want to hear your report about, you know, Hey Ford, I don't need your report about the future in which we'll have transformers that will like help us police our streets. I am spending this much money on gas for my F one 50. Like, tell me like why that's worth it. Right.
Like just continually bring it back to you have really three products you're selling right now. Great. Sell a product. It's interesting. It's interesting technology. You're making a good product out of it. Sell me. What are the benefits? Why is it worth the money? And I will take for granted ā you better say it's not going to harm anyone because otherwise fix it so it doesn't.
Like that should just be a given.
Yeah, that's your job to fix.
That's your job to fix. And you don't ā and just to throw in another moral argument I put in the New York Times op-ed, it is not actually a moral argument to say there's this thing we want to do that's going to cause potentially a lot of harm and destruction. But ā that guy's going to do it. And as long as he's doing it, I get to do it too. That is what my eight-year-old says, right?
He's like, I know, but like he stole the cookies. Why can't I steal it too? So I do not understand this argument. It was in the latest anthropic paper. We're building this technology. It might come alive and we might lose control of it. But how can we stop? Because China is also building the technology. And what if they build it and it comes alive and comes to control?
why don't we get to do it too? What's the moral argument there? This is not like a nuclear deterrence argument that if you somehow destroy humanity first, like what's the advantage there, right? Like what game have you won? So I don't understand that. But my bigger point here is like, yeah, I think we need to activate.
I'm working on a big article now for a trade magazine for engineers, actually, where I'm making this case. It's a cry to cure.
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Chapter 7: How can we shift the conversation about AI to a more constructive dialogue?
You need to stand up and say, that's nonsense. Let's talk about your real technology. I know about this because I think there's a lot of people like me who are on the wrong coast. We're not on the West Coast. We haven't gone to those cult meetings who are like, there's interesting technology here and I want to hear about the products.
And this is actually where you and I maybe even differ a little bit. I end that piece by saying, I'm pissed off because this should have been for a nerd like me, an exciting time. This is a cool technology. It's hard to make products out of it, but we should have been like, it kind of excited about, Oh, I never thought about doing that with this. Oh, isn't that cool? What's going on?
Instead, everyone is terrified. Like you ruin this moment because of God knows why we don't even have to get into it. So I think the right response from like actual engineers who are not part of that cult and, uh, You know, you got to swallow your pride. I get it. You were really excited to your cousin after you use cloud code. Like that's okay.
Swallow your pride a little bit and say, this is doom trolling and it's embarrassing. Can we talk about the real technology like a normal product? There's cool things you can build. Some stuff isn't working. I want to know if my stock market portfolio is going to crash. Like, Let's just be normal. Stop the weird stuff. Just stop it. You're a real company trying to sell real things.
Let's talk about products. I want to spark a revolution to bring things back to normal.
I fully agree. And I even said I was on Chris Hayes' show a couple weeks ago. And I said, I think we should legally ban boosters from using the future tense. I don't think they should be allowed to say if either. I don't think they should be able to say will. I think they should only be allowed to talk about what's coming out today. You can go two weeks in the future, Max.
Yeah.
I think that because when you read any story about AI that's positive, it always speaks in the future tense. It does not speak about what's happening now. And when they do speak about what's happening now, it's the vaguest stuff in the world. It's like it can write or it can autonomously write software. Is the software good? No. Is it stable? No.
Can you even actually do anything with it if you don't know what you're doing? No. Is the code overly verbose? Yes. It's like there are tons of problems with it, but one sentence allows the generalities to grow. And also, I think there's a very obvious reason they don't talk about the present. Because it's kind of boring. It is.
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Chapter 8: What role does venture capital play in the AI industry's direction?
And then you translate that experience of like, I really enjoyed that to, you know, I wonder what salt mine, the AI overlords are going to assign me to. And it's a weird, that, that leap of logic is, How can we just keep it as like, okay, this was really cool that you built this dashboard. We don't have to leap from that to therefore everything Dario Amadei said must be true.
It's not this binary balancing on a fulcrum where we're just looking for like one example. One little piece of evidence will tip it one way or the other. So I think we need to be careful about these elaborations. It's a jagged technology. Some things make more progress than others. Some things are cool. Some things are more narrow than you would think. But like, you know, let's see.
Oh, I built a really cool web-based game in Fable 5, which actually is probably just copying the source code of a similar game.
Yeah.
Does that mean like recursive self-improvement is coming? So what I'm hoping we can do is stop making these leaps of logic and Where if you encounter any sort of feature or have any sort of positive experience with an AI product, that you then leap immediately to the conclusion that everything involved in the prophecy about the future of AI must be true.
Or to put someone like you and me now, it has to be put on the defensive of, I did something positive with AI. All right, Ed, doesn't that now mean everything anyone has ever said about AI is true? Convince me I'm wrong.
I think that logic is backwards, that these grand proclamations of we're going to have self-improving AI, we're going to automate all jobs, used a Carl Sagan quote, those remarkable claims require a remarkable amount of evidence. Why is everyone so quick of like...
This product which you're working on and putting billions of dollars on, of course, you're going to keep adding new features or finding things to improve. That is a given, of course. What technology in the history of world would you have no improvements on if you're spending, you know, $10 to $20 billion a year in R&D? Of course, it's going to have improvements. Why are we leaping from that?
That means that anything you say, any speculative future you give about some sci-fi future is now the default unless we can prove otherwise. So we got to stop that logic too. We should be able to discuss, enjoy, or get around the implications of particular AI features without having to have that shift to a conversation about RSI or widespread job automation.
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