AGI Is a Conspiracy Theory (E347)

I’m listening to this again today because I’m struggling with a little dilemma. My highly intelligent father has become enamored with ChatGPT and I am worried, to say the least. He has spent the last month in almost constant “conversation” with the paid version of the app, and has asked it to proofread his linguistics book… He’s never been diagnosed as being autistic, but as his daughter and as a neurodivergent person myself I think that I recognize a fellow traveler on the spectrum. I don’t know how much or whether to try to interfere here.

Coming in way late on this but it annoys me so much when people say we'll make computers that are smarter than us, because COMPUTERS ARE ALREADY SMARTER THAN US. A Casio calculator is better at maths than I am, obviously it is! In this domain, it is objectively smarter than I am! It's a bunch of computer nerds who know a lot about algorithms but nothing about psychology or what makes up 'intelligence' and it annoys the hell out of me because half the stuff they say about this topic makes no sense. They're so focused on being amazed by LLMs they don't bother to think about what they actually mean by intelligence

Why is Jake even involved in this podcast? What does he offer?? You give him way too much airtime to talk about absolutely nothing. He’s a drain on an otherwise brilliant show.

That AI in Flight of the Navigator was a dick. He body shamed that poor gas station attendant and every husky kid was called Bloombo for years.

The voice on that intro sounded so Julian that hearing it read by Travis gave me whiplash.

I'm sorry but this episode made Jake look like he's only ever seen 3 things in his childhood and then never experienced any other source of media. Even if I don't use stuff from anime, video games or comics/manga how could he forget stuff like kit from knight rider or data and Ems from star trek or the tardis from Dr who

Please... just like 10% less gaming talk. Some of your listeners have jobs

...various...squids?

What is with Jake on this episode lol. I am listening to him telling the beans stalk story haha.

Someone get unc a new compooter

Bicentennial man

The advancement of the public acceptance of use of AI to me mirrors the use of hobby drones. Hobby drones emerged all of a sudden over night in early 2000s or probably sooner. And then fast forward and drones warfare is the norm. I feel like as the public uses chatgpt sora and other personal use AI tools it will only make it easier for industry titans to normalize the use of AI on a larger scale in major fields of our economy to the point where people will have no clue what it was like BEFORE AI entered those fields.

The giant data centers that AI requires are being built in vulnerable communities who across the board are against these developments, which not only will destroy natural resources but also will have health costs for the community and use more water and electricity than any of these places can handle because they are already unreliable. Rural and urban areas are basically being bribed to allow these to be built in their jurisdiction, because they need the money. AI is being used to assess and build up our arsenals of nuclear weapons. I am guilty of using chat GPT for arranging data or writing walkthroughs for data analysis; or if I need an answer that requires multiple sources. This is directly tied to the enshittification of Google which no longer produces useful results, mostly just AI generated websites. So now we are caught in this loop where now you can't fact check AI using search engines, so you just end up doing the research yourself (but now they know everything about you). When it does give you a shortcut, your employer considers this your normal workload and continues to add and add because all that matters is production.

I’ve recently worked in education at the university level and lemme tell you, it’s a bloodbath out there. ChatGPT and its ilk are like the cherry on top of America’s No Child Left Behind policy. Young people have basically no critical thinking abilities now.

I think Jake’s losing his mind

Star Trek and ender's game are both examples of positive AI. The ships computer is basically a general AI. Although you could argue that the Borg are the opposite 🤣

I think some of the questions that came up have relatively simple answers: (1) Why does AI need to be sold by trillion-dollar companies? Because the data centers actually cost that much. It can't be developed for frame rate apps for individual consumers. It has to get sold to the corporations. (2) What will the corporations expect AGI to do? They hope to do to white-collar work what reindustrialization did to blue-collar work in the 1980's - that is, offload anything involving communication and judgment onto computers. The apocalyptic framing of "AGI will eliminate millions of jobs" is not a warning, it's advertising!

Us humans are still really impressed by videos

While I agree that the entire industry may be overestimating the proximity to AGI, I think it's strange to think that these systems won't get there. I use ChatGPT a lot for work and it does not at all seem far fetched to imagine these systems being able to do anything I can do on a computer. It's already more competent than several of my coworkers.

Hey, I'm from Davenport, Iowa! Bernie knows my name! 🤣🤣🤣🤣

The original "I, Robot" stories had someone discovery robots had secretly taken over the world but were doing such a good job of it that they might as well let them keep going

I want to go live with Jake in the amaejing golden age of prosperity hee hee

Pretty good ep! It is interesting how many parallels there are. I do a podcast interviewing people about their AI psychosis, and there are a lot of parallels between that and the conspiratorial mindset often times. Things I’ve noticed from being a fan of your guys show.

AI is the new COVID. I now hate a whole lot of people I used to think were smart and it’s happening everywhere.

Hi QAA team! While I enjoy the copious amounts of quality content you put out, I kinda feel this ep dropped the ball somewhat - a feeling strong enough that compelled me to read the article + go over the ep transcript. I think there’s quite a lot that could be said about the level of structure/research that could have been done on the topic. This is not the first ep put out with AI/LLMs as a main subject, and we are late enough in the game that critics have put out enough work to enable a tech/business layperson to begin to come to grips with the topic. But this is a comments section so I’ll forego all that to say that there ARE actual conspiracy theories about our current AGI fiasco!

The reason they can’t justify their trillion dollar industry exclusively around making shitty tom and Jerry videos is because the generation of those shitty tom and Jerry videos requires the water we need to live. Since they are stealing the earth’s drinking water for their bullshit, they have to promise an end result that will make all of that okay.

I hate every kind of techno-mysticism with a passion

This was good.

🔥

As a fellow elder Millennial, Flight of the Navigator was my "play it til the VHS dies" movie. For a long time I thought it was some bizarre fever dream because NO ONE ELSE I KNOW HAS EVER HEARD OF IT! Glad to know Jake has had the same hallucination as me. 10/10 movie, highly recommend.

Everyone forgets about LCARS from Star Trek. I was watching "Elementary, Dear Data" from season 2 of TNG. Geordi walks up to the arch in the holodeck and says "Computer, in the Holmesian style, create a mystery that will confound Data, with a villain who is able to defeat him."

Anyone else having an issue with the RSS feed not populating in iTunes? (I'm on a PC.)

Great ep. I have always been a weird loser Luddite so figured my general scepticism of AGI was due to that. But this ep gives me confidence that my initial vibe check of AGI was correct. It feels like something silicon valley freaks made up to make money.

35:00 ... Sorry Jake. But humans aren't impressed by video, as much as they are impressed by fiction. Just in general, all the AI hype is just belief in fiction. All the crusades, just belief in someone's ability to sell the fiction of taking the "holy land". We can't even make smarter humans at this point, our "geniuses" are mostly hype salesmen who say "look at all this money I have, it proves how smart I am." Nevermind their inability to stay married, or the addictions they struggle with. It's all fiction! (Please get Julian to shout that for me)

Jakey, you suggested the visual arts studios are going to be devastated by this. Are you going to sit through an AI generated movie? I would suggest the current industry just has to wait out the novelty value of AI "content". No one really wants to watch an AI movie. Our higher brains can't watch more than a 5 min of AI slop.

If Julian was on this episode he would have mentioned that the major reason that money is flooding into this tech is that capital sees a potential way to radically lower labor costs. Because of that there isn't really a limit on how much they should spend to achieve it. They don't have a handbrake for this kind of thing.

Re: your question about benevolent AI. It's Jarvis. They want Tony Stark's Jarvis from the RDJ Iron Man films. Natural language input into a subservient system that gets your intention perfectly every time. I've been saying this for years about some rather naive approaches to Digital Humanities Research in my particular field and it's the same thing here. They want a personal Jarvis.

Who the fuck wrote this description. Have you all had a psychotic break? 🤷‍♂️

Idk y ppl are like if AGI becomes smarter than us we are doomed, just pull the plug man, it cannot run on air

Really cool you're covering this! As for benevolent AI in culture, it's pretty common outside of film and some titles seem to have a genuine impact on how people like Musk see the potential for AGI. Zuckerberg and especially Musk are fans of Iain M Bank's Culture (1987 onward) series of novels, which features an utopian anarchist society administrated and watched over by massively intelligent AI minds. Musk famously names his drone ships after the ones in this series. Halo (2001) has it's (initial benevolent) AI Cortana, that Microsoft later named their Windows AI companion after. The oldest example I can think of, though likely still quite influential, is Heinlein's The Moon is Harsh Mistress (1967) which involves an anarchist rebellion on the Moon aided by a friendly AI named Mike that manages the space colony.

Jake, you should watch The Wild Robot (or read the books) — that’s an AI good guy.

Interesting that you guys didn't cover the data aspect of the AI hype. The only reason why the big companies have managed to sell AI investment to technocrats around the world isn't because of the conspiracy theory-esque AGI boom is because they think it necessitates the consolidation of literally all the information in the world. The real conspiracy is that the models they're developing are really fucking good at processing data, and the tools they're making *right now* are very effective at managing large populations. The AGI spookathon is for the masses and private equity, but the tools (such as Palantir) are a way of making these companies a necessary part of governance and thereby solidifying their permanence, or making them "too big to fail".

I like the Beavis and Butt-head reboot.

The Culture series by Iain Banks is a good series of entertaining (but also rather thoughtful) books in which benevolent AI and its implications are big features.

Anyone got any old qanon anonymous merch kickin around? I need that unc drip

another AI episode. so glad they have a guest this time.

Liv Agar

Let's go! Hoping for more 2k talk.

First! So pumped for a new episode "If you've created a sentient AI, that's not the history of man, that's the history of gods" -Ex Machina