Capitalism Is Dead: The Rise of the AI Surveillance State | Erik Cason

Erik Cason (0:02)

The AI story and the Bitcoin story marry up in the final act. I very much believe that like we are at the phase in AI, that like this is full on human experimentation at this point in time. Like I think the primary product that they're the most interested in selling is AI psychosis. I do think we'll get the dark dystopian view for people who don't get AI and I've taken a Luddite's approach to it, been like this is too powerful, I can't deal with it, I don't understand it. Like that's how you'll get frontier level AI that traps you in a way that you're in a hall of mirrors, you can never escape. On the other side, you'll have free people that have their own self-sovereign personal AIs that answer to them and them alone. This is unequivocally the most powerful tool that humanity has ever been given. The question is, is it going to work for you and be loyal to you, or is somebody else going to own it? Like I hold Bitcoin because I know how this story plays out. I also know at some point, the only way that I'm going to be able to pay for access to models in China, because the Americans are absolutely going to cut us off from that, is that I'm going to be able to route through Tor, and I'm going to be able to pay for the model in Bitcoin.

Danny Knowles (1:08)

I want to start as somewhere different, Erik. I'm going to give you two potential future scenarios. We have the utopian future scenario where AI leads to cures for diseases, scientific breakthrough. We have abundant energy. We have abundant natural resources. The world is beautiful. It's always sunny.

On the other side, there's the dystopian potential future where there's control, surveillance, autonomous drones roaming the streets, complete control over thought, and worst-case scenario, AI kills us all.

Which of those two scenarios, first of all, do you think is most likely? And then, which one do you think we are closest to right now? Which path are we on the way down?

Erik Cason (1:55)

I like how you actually line this up because we just had Michael Millerman here a couple of weeks ago who's a philosopher that I've both read and that Jesse studies with. And he was pointing out that Alexander Dugan has like an astrological way of sort of reading and understanding the world. And AI is deeply astrological, particularly from Sam Altman, Dario. All of them are pushing an actual narrative of like, this thing's dangerous, it could end the world, but we'll cure diseases and cancer, and that's just getting started. So first to tee it up, this is an astrological vision that's being fed to all of us.

Danny Knowles (2:28)

What does that actually mean, sorry, that word?

Erik Cason (2:31)

It's the religious idea of dealing with the end of times and how the end of times unfolds.

And so using that as sort of a way of viewing and understanding the world in crisis is historically essentially how most religious movements saw and understood when they encountered crisis. And so that's the same thing that's being done today, but the volume is cranked up in a new and different way. And in some ways, we could actually say it truly actually is astrological and that's actually one of the ways that I view it as well. And I view it that way because AIs fundamentally, in a lot of ways, AIs actually kind of the oldest technology because it's really the linguistic first and foremost. And so you're really kind of dealing with magic in a particular way. And like when I say that, I mean, in the deepest ideas of what magic is and how language is something that can actually conjure things out from the imaginary into the real. And it's also very important to highlight that like the imaginary is not the non-real. And like that's a particular point that D'Adara is very pedantic about.

Danny Knowles (3:35)

Wait, you got to explain that to me. The imaginary is not the unreal.

Erik Cason (3:39)

Yeah, because like it's through the imagination of things that, you know, we can think of the idea of a train and be like, well, hey, if I like keep all this water and boil it together, I can do this thing that like then charges us. And like, whoa, look, we invented a train. And like that didn't, we didn't just like spontaneously put the train together. We like used our thought and reasoning in order to like make something imaginary into the real.

Danny Knowles (4:03)

And so, but like to get back to that original question.