Charlie Warzel: The Tech Overlords’ Anti-Humanity Is Catching Up to Them

**Tim Miller** (0:13)
Hello, and welcome to The Bulwark Daily. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Tonight, on the next level, we are live on Substack and YouTube at 9 PM Eastern for primary coverage in Michigan and a bunch of other states around the country.
So tune in, come hang with us tonight, get a glass of rosé or we can check out the next level feed either after we wrap up or it'll be ready for you when you wake up in the morning, if you're early to better. So since we're going all politics on TNL tonight for this show, we're going to venture into the tech world. Excited to bring back Stamp Ryder at the Atlantic, host of the Galaxy Brain podcast, it's Charlie Warzel. Hey, man.

**Charlie Warzel** (0:51)
How are you doing?

**Tim Miller** (0:52)
I'm doing good. I'm doing good. I hear you're kind of duffing it in Ireland last week.

**Charlie Warzel** (0:58)
That's right.
I'm a golfer, somewhat sadly. It's like one of those hobbies that is slowly ruins your life. But yeah, I was over in Ireland. I too am just coming back from vacation, a little jet lag, ready to talk. Elon Musk and Sam Altman, my favorite people in the world.

**Tim Miller** (1:14)
I can't wait. Part of this was what I wanted to have you is, over the course of vacation, AI is just such at the front of people's minds. I bubbled myself from the news, but it was hard to bubble myself from just random conversation about AI, people being upset about it, concerned about it, little funny things that happened, I want to say.
Sam Altman sent a very embarrassing tweet that I want to talk about. I feel like I've given a little short shrift on the show lately. I just want to do open-ended on it. You wrote an article, I don't know, a couple of months ago now, about how people had the feeling of control slipping away with AI. I just want to start a big picture, what's your grand unifying theory about the AI backlash, discourse, etc.

**Charlie Warzel** (1:57)
Artificial intelligence people, Silicon Valley people, have this term that they're using a lot now throwing around called high agency. If you're a high agency person, you're someone who just gets things done. You can go out and you can use, you can marshal these tools to 10x your productivity, 100x your productivity. There are agents coding for you all the time while you sleep, making you money, building you websites, doing research, compiling reports, all that stuff.
The right person can harness this and be more than just a person. They can get stuff done. The opposite side of that is this thing that they keep talking about, called the permanent underclass, which is the group of people who are going to be left behind because AI is going to automate their jobs or they're not learning how to use quad skills or code their own stuff. This is the group of people for whom AI is going to bury them financially and part of their cultural capital, and they're never going to recover from that.
I've looked at that for a long time as really alienating language coming out of Silicon Valley that's going to piss a lot of people off. If you promise to take away people's jobs or call them part of a permanent underclass, that's going to catch up to you eventually. But what I feel like broadly is happening right now, is that these AI tools are useful, but the real impact, the real effect that we're seeing right now is this crisis of agency. It is people fearing that they don't have agency because these tools are going to come and strip it away, or they feel that the Internet and every platform and everything that they do is being so flooded with fake inhuman synthetic slop, whether that's Twitter, Substack, whether that's their Spotify, whether it's these viral marketing firms that are taking bans, like the band Geese, and artificially inflating their view counts.

**Tim Miller** (3:51)
Geese is legit.

**Charlie Warzel** (3:52)
Geese is legit.

**Tim Miller** (3:52)
It was fake.

**Charlie Warzel** (3:53)
I love Geese.

**Tim Miller** (3:54)
Their fandom is legit. Wired is doing great work, but I have a beef.

**Charlie Warzel** (3:59)
This actually gets to the point of the agency crisis, which is that Geese is a band that some people love, and some people, because of the lead singer's voice, hate, and the people that don't like them are looking for an excuse, right? This is fake. This is astroturf.
There's this term the liar's dividend, right? That with so much fake information that's out there, anyone can cast aspersions on something real by claiming that it's fake. AI has supercharged that. What you see in the case of something like that, the little trivial Geese incident, is people saying, no, that's not real. There are millions of accounts astroturfing this thing, and by in so doing people are pulling one over on you. You see this everywhere. You see this with insider trading and prediction markets. You see it with, again, the flood of all the slop and what is happening right now, is as the Internet is becoming more inauthentic, more inhuman, everyone is so concerned that what they are seeing either isn't real or is being manipulated or is being changed. And they don't even have control over what is popular, what is good, what they're actually spending their time looking at and engaging with. It's really messing with people's minds. I think it's causing a lot of ennui and extreme frustration, all of which is being channeled at Silicon Valley because people are like, this is not the future I want. This is not the Internet that I wanted. I don't want to have to run every Substack post through Pangram. I don't want literary prizes being won by people who are using ChatGPT.