It's All About That Pace

Jason Howell (0:00)

Coming up next, Jeff Jarvis and I dig into what seems to be a pretty big inflection point for AI safety, at least. Anthropic's Dario Amodei called publicly for global slowdown. You know, it's all about that pace.

A lot of other AI leaders either agreeing with or pushing back, which is the case with Mark Zuckerberg and a few others. China accusing everyone of fear mongering while at the same time, their own spy chief says, AI threatens the party in which we're in. Apple's new watch set to challenge wiretapping laws, or so it seems. I wouldn't be surprised anyways. Smart glasses without cameras. Does that make them any better? And robots and a whole lot more coming up next on this episode of the AI Inside Podcast.

Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of AI Inside, the show where we take a look at the AI that is layered throughout the world of technology in dizzying fashion this week, because my goodness, there's too many stories all related. Making sense of it all was a challenge for me. Let me just be honest right at the top, but we will get through it, and I have a feeling you're gonna get a lot of sense made for you because my co-host Jeff Jarvis is here, and you wrote about this stuff. I love your piece, by the way, which we'll talk about. Yeah, I thought it was great.

Jeff Jarvis (1:36)

Jason, I'm actually coming to you from the bunker.

We're all gonna be destroyed. We just don't know when AI is taking over the world. That's it. Look, it's over.

Jason Howell (1:46)

It's over. Oh, why am I smiling if it's over? But you know what?

Jeff Jarvis (1:51)

Yeah, jeez, jeez, jeez. The stupidity is just...

Jason Howell (1:55)

I need to take this seriously.

Jeff Jarvis (1:56)

Contagious.

Jason Howell (1:57)

Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (1:58)

It's all over and it's driving me, the media coverage is driving me completely bananas. The policy makers are driving me even more bananas.

And the bottom line for me is that AI is being run by the wrong people. It's a neat and wonderful technology and they're ruining it for everybody. Is it...

Jason Howell (2:19)

Let me think about that.

I don't disagree, but they are... They do happen to be the people who have built these tools that are being widely adopted. And so of course they believe they're the ones to lead the charge.

Jeff Jarvis (2:34)

Right. Which is... Which I will confess that I've fallen into that trope trap in the past, right? I mean, I wrote a book about Google because Google figured it out. We should follow what Google does and all that. And I still think there are lessons to be had there. I'm not denying that. But what made Mark Zuckerberg the guy to run our social graph for all society?

Jason Howell (2:54)

No.

Jeff Jarvis (2:55)

Fair point. Right?

Jason Howell (2:56)

Absolutely.

Jeff Jarvis (2:59)

And so it was Google with Transformers that created the possibility of where we go now. But it was a hell of a lot of brilliant mathematicians, computer scientists before that who laid the groundwork and you're right. These are the companies that had the chutzpah to go out to get the money or the resources to be able to build what they built. But that doesn't mean that they're, that they should be the ones in charge of everything then. And yeah, it's frustrating because even with, even Zuckerberg, you know, who, as I write in my piece, there were certain people who were freeze-dried sophomores when he left after his second year in Harvard, and they sound like it's still.

He tried in the right ways. These guys at OpenAI and Anthropic, and certainly at SpaceX, are, I think, harming themselves, harming their industry, harming the technology, harming all of us. And it's frustrating as hell. And the real problem in my mind, I didn't mean to get right into my piece, sorry.

Is that they're being followed too much in media. So we have this doomer, back up a little bit. Reid Hoffman is a very good piece, which we'll get to in a few minutes today, in which he contrasts the acceleration as the doomerers. And I think it's a good description when you want to get to it. The problem that I'm having, as you know, I've said it on the show a million times, and we've had guests on, Emile Torres on the show talked about this.

Jason Howell (4:32)

Yeah.

Jeff Jarvis (4:33)

It's the cult is not getting covered, and the cultish beliefs are what are driving so much of this discussion, and it's happening in the background such that we don't see it. So this week on the New York Times, Michelle Goldberg, New York Times, which I criticize often. Michelle Goldberg had, I think, a really good column saying that the real story that's going on behind here, she said that the coverage is incomplete because it doesn't account for tech leaders' messianic dreams. This goes right into Tescraeel. You've heard me on this show talk about Tescraeel. It's the acronym that was created by Timnit Gebru, the researcher and Emile Torres, stands for transhumanism, extrobranism, singulatarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism, long-termism. But never mind all that. It's a bunch of faux philosophies that guide many of these people. This is what comes from the doomerism is that, oh my god, we are so powerful, we could destroy Earth and we owe an obligation to the far, far, far future of humanity. Not us today. Never mind us today. We're kind of nothing and we want to live forever by the way, and we want to stick chips in our heads and we want to populate Mars and all this stuff. All of this is at one level, a gigantic distraction from the real issues of AI. There are real issues of AI, environmental, educational, labor, economic, societal, but it distracts from all that because it's all this future shock crap.