Intelligent Machines 821 transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show
0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for Intelligent Machines. Jeff Jarvis is here, paris Martineau Our guests today. Science journalist and astrophysicist Adam Becker. His new book More Everything Forever talks about Silicon Valley's ideology of technological salvation. Go to Mars, never die, and other pipe dreams. Next, on Intelligent Machines Podcasts you love.
0:00:27 - TikTok
From people you trust.
0:00:29 - Adam Becker
This is TWIT.
0:00:34 - Leo Laporte
This is Intelligent Machines, episode 821, recorded Wednesday, may 28th 2025. Just count the server racks. It's time for Intelligent Machines, the show we talk about. Well, all those intelligent machines all around you not just ai, but robots and, um, uh, the little you know smart doohickeys that are wandering around on your floor right now. No, you don't have those. Yeah, those robotic vacuums, that kind of thing. Uh, we do intelligent machines every wednesday with the wonderful jeff jarvis, professor of journalistic innovation emeritus at the city university of new york. He's now at montclair state. Uh, what is it? Montclair state?
0:01:16 - Paris Martineau
university university and stony brook university one of these days you're going to get get it right well, I got pretty close.
0:01:22 - Leo Laporte
Paris martino uh is.
0:01:25 - Paris Martineau
I never forget where. I never forget where Jeff works. That's my job.
0:01:29 - Leo Laporte
That's. That is. That is not your job, but I'm glad you do it. Let's put it that way. I'm just grateful that you do that. Uh, as you probably know, the show used to be this week in Google with a nice uh handle theme of uh recorders going boop, boop, boop. Now we have a. We are much more modern with a theme from our esteemed technical editor and producer, benito Gonzalez, that goes boopity boop, and we also call it Intelligent Machines because it's about AI, and we begin every show with an interview. Today we've got an astrophysicist, which I think is fabulous. You may see behind him his book what is real, which is really what I'd like to know. But today, what is real? We're going to talk about his latest more everything forever. Adam becker.
0:02:21 - Adam Becker
Welcome to intelligent machines oh, thanks for having me. It's good to be here more.
0:02:25 - Leo Laporte
Everything.
0:02:26 - Adam Becker
Forever is what the Silicon Valley boys promise, right yeah, yeah, that's what they want and that's what they think they're gonna get and subtitle is AI overlords, space empires and Silicon Valley's crusade to control the fate of humanity.
0:02:44 - Jeff Jarvis
yeah, yeah, I love the idea, Adam. I love this book. I listened to it.
0:02:50 - Leo Laporte
He's been singing his praises for months now. I've been singing his praises and singing along with your harmony here.
0:02:55 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, and Riza, I listened to the car. I'm raising my fist saying yeah, yeah, what he says, what's great about your book if I may be so bold as to praise you is that there are lots of other books out there that are moral, panicky and technology's bad, and you're not. You give.
0:03:16 - Leo Laporte
Oh no, he said the words Moral panic. It's like Groucho Marx you said the secret word, now the duck has to appear.
0:03:33 - Adam Becker
I don't want this case to appear walking out.
0:03:34 - Leo Laporte
Adam hasn't realized the show he signed up, sorry. Yeah, I know I'm still. I'm still getting a handle on what this is. What is it? Yeah, we've been doing it for 20 years, so well, so don't interrupt my praise.
0:03:40 - Jeff Jarvis
So, um, uh, what's great about adam's book out there, folks, is that he fairly and meticulously presents a case before tearing it apart fairly and meticulously. So some weeks ago we had on Ray Kurzweil on the show and you know we're fair to give Ray his time and he certainly has the history of invention and innovation that was worthy of attention. He certainly has the history of invention and innovation that was worthy of attention. And so, adam, you present McCaskill and Kurzweil each in a chapter at the beginning, I think very, very fairly presenting their views. In fact, I talked to the author of another book we had on lately and she just started reading your book and she said you know you were being too nice. I said, well, no, just wait, he gets to it. But then you carefully dissect them and I wonder if you could start with Kurzweil and go through what's wrong with his worldview.
0:04:39 - Adam Becker
Certainly, Although at some point after the show you're going to have to tell me who thought I was too nice. That's not usually the criticism I get.
0:04:48 - Jeff Jarvis
She hadn't yet gotten to the punchlines. Fair enough.
0:04:53 - Adam Becker
So, yeah, so Kurzweil, he believes in this thing called the singularity, right, he thinks that what's going to happen is that we're going to get machines that are as smart, as intelligent and capable as humans, and that they will then improve themselves and that will lead to this exponential process that is of a piece with this larger trend in technology that he claims to have discerned in human history and the history of the universe before that, of just increasing technological ability, increasing complexity biological and then technological that will lead in short order, just in you know he says about, I think, 15 years. At this point, he thinks the singularity is going to be here. He's really going to start kicking off in about five years. He thinks that this will lead to super intelligent AI that will be able to do way more than even all of the collective efforts of humanity can do, and it will have godlike powers of creation and destruction and will fundamentally alter all of human life and the future of human civilization and post-human civilization forever.
0:06:12 - Jeff Jarvis
So that's the fair part where you fairly summarize his views. Yeah, I mean-. Now the fun part.
0:06:17 - Paris Martineau
Also, computronium is in there. I just want to highlight the word computronium. Yes, that's right. That's my favorite part of Riker's whole deal.
0:06:26 - Adam Becker
Oh yeah, I definitely do talk about that in the book. He thinks that, you know, the fate of the cosmos is that this giant computer something made of computronium, a phase of matter that is optimized for computing power, and that the universe will become one giant computer serving our needs and whims, and we will live inside of it as part of it. Not totally clear, but uh. But as for tearing apart all of that, well, it's interesting that you say that that's a fair description, because I agree that that's a fair description. I also think that it's sort of, on the face of it, somewhat ridiculous, uh. But but I also think that because there are people aside from just ray kurzweil who take it seriously, we need to take these ridiculous sounding ideas seriously. And if we want to take them apart, we have to take them apart seriously, because it turns out there are very serious problems with that idea of the singularity that go beyond oh, it looks ridiculous. For example, this exponential trend that Kurzweil talks about in the history of biology and technology is not really there. The evidence for it is incredibly thin.
Kurzweil has this whole chart that he's put together to explain why he thinks it's real and how it works.
But he's a victim of his own perspective.
You know, if you ask me to make a list of the most important events in the history of humanity, or the history of life on Earth, or the history of the cosmos, or the history of life on Earth or the history of the cosmos, that list is going to have more things on it that happened more recently than things that happened longer ago, because that's just the way that we think about history.
It's not something inherent about history, it's just a function of our perspective within history. You know, I was talking about this with a friend of mine, my friend Carl, and he had a really nice analogy for this. He said you know, you can remember what you had to eat earlier today probably, and you can remember what you ate, maybe yesterday, and you probably remember most of your meals from last week, and then you maybe remember a few good meals over the course of the last year and then over the last 10 years, maybe there's only one or two specific meals, and beyond that, maybe one. This doesn't mean that you're eating exponentially more now than you did when you were younger. It's just how memory and history works.
0:09:24 - Jeff Jarvis
So is this presumption that we were in this, in this, in this age of of everybody tells me I was. Just went through this on LinkedIn yeah, Can't you agree that the change is accelerating? Yeah, and if you do the chart of what, the things you can remember it looks like that, but you leave out a hell of a lot of history. Is what you're saying?
0:09:40 - Adam Becker
Yeah, exactly, and I mean, it's certainly true that there are some things that have had accelerating exponential trends over the course of history, but many of those trends, uh, are over. And the one thing that's always true of an exponential trend is that it ends. Exponential trends cannot last. There are lots of them in nature and they always, always end. Either they smooth out or they lead to a crash. And you know like, the classic example from biology of an exponential trend is the population of a bacteria colony and a little dish of nutrients. And it's true that the number of bacteria in that dish will grow exponentially until they've grown to fill the dish and eat all the nutrients, at which point the growth stops and they all die because they starve. And every exponential trend in nature and in technology and just in reality is like this they always end. And so what Kurzweil is doing is he's taking the one thing that we know is true about exponential trends and denying it.
He loves to talk about Moore's law, which is this exponential trend in how many transistors we can fit onto a single computer chip. And it's been running for the last 50 years. It's what led to the tremendous explosion and miniaturization of computer technology in the last 50 years. But Gordon Moore himself, the originator of Moore's Law, knew that Moore's Law had to end. And in 2010, he said, yeah, we've got maybe another 10 or 15 years. In other words, he said it would end right about now. And, lo and behold, it's ending, or has ended, depending on who you ask. Because you can only make transistors so small. You can't make transistors smaller than one atom, because they're made of atoms. And sure, maybe there's some other technology that will come in and enable us to make them even smaller for a little bit. But, first of all, there's no sign of that on the horizon and, second, there's always eventually going to be a limit.
0:11:49 - Jeff Jarvis
So this is where you're bringing your physicist hat yeah, I'm sure it's a very nice hat too to the topic, Really fancy.
Which is what you also bring. So the other thing is you take apart, you dissect which I quite like is the long termists, is McCaskill and Bostrom, who we talked about in the show, and Yudkowsky and his paperclips, and also Going to Mars, and there are some other books that are very good, tearing apart the idea of going to Mars. But since you are an astrophysicist and since Elon's latest rocket just blew up in honor of that, why don't you dissect that idea that we're going to populate space? As an astrophysicist, absolutely Sure.
0:12:33 - Adam Becker
So yeah, musk loves to say that we're going to get, or that correction, that he's going to get, a million people on Mars by 2050 as a backup for humanity, and there's just so many problems with this idea. First of all, using Mars as a backup in case something bad happens to Earth is just a really bad idea, because Mars is terrible. Mars is just an absolutely awful place. The gravity is too low, the radiation levels are too high, there's no air and the dirt is made of poison. But sure, let's all go to Mars.
0:13:14 - Paris Martineau
That's a great place to live. What are you talking about? Can't breathe, can't live, can't grow food. Exactly, we'll be fine. Yeah, live can't grow food, we'll be fine.
0:13:24 - Adam Becker
Yeah, I mean so. The number of reasons why we can't live on Mars is longer than I can get into here, but I'm just going to pick on a few of my favorites. Musk really wants Mars to be a backup for humanity. He says we need it in case something bad happens to Earth. There is nothing bad that could happen to Earth that would make Mars more suitable for human habitation than Earth. Everywhere on Earth is going to be a nicer place to live than anywhere on Mars, even New Jersey, damn it. Hey, man, don't diss New Jersey, I'm from New Jersey.
0:14:03 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, I'm in New Jersey.
0:14:05 - Adam Becker
Jersey strong. But, yeah look, the worst day in the history of complex life on Earth. The worst single day was about 66 million years ago, when a rock the size of Brooklyn slammed into the Earth 10 times faster than a jumbo jet and that killed off all of the dinosaurs except for the birds. And that single day a lot of creatures just died that day and then many, many more over the course of the next, like 10 to 20 years. After all, that dust blotted out the sun and killed off the bottom of the food chain. But that day itself rock was ejected out into space.
There's probably little bits of dinosaur bone on the moon from that impact, but a lot of that rock then came back down to earth and caused the atmosphere to heat up and cooked a lot of things at the surface widespread wildfires, enormous earthquakes, just a really, really horrible day. Six hours after that thing hit or half an hour after that thing hit, whatever you want, the day that thing hit 66 million years ago, it was a nicer day for mammals on Earth than it has been on Mars ever, and the reason we know that is that mammals survived. There were already mammals around and they survived.
There is no mammal that has ever lived that could survive on the surface of Mars without a spacesuit. Because if you are on the surface of Mars without a spacesuit, because if you are on the surface of Mars without a spacesuit, the saliva will boil off your tongue while you asphyxiate.
0:15:53 - Paris Martineau
We can't even keep the robots working on Mars, yeah that's right.
0:15:56 - Adam Becker
We can't even keep the robots working on Mars, and the robots were designed to work on Mars. But, like you know, I'm pretty sure they didn't have spacesuits here on Earth 66 million years ago. So you know, our, our life here on Earth is proof that there is essentially nothing that could happen to Earth that would make it less habitable than Mars. Even if the climate change scenario gets as bad as possible, even if we have have nuclear war, it will still be better here. Uh, and, and you know, there's all sorts of places on earth that are way more habitable than anywhere on mars that people don't want to live. Nobody wants to live in the middle of nowhere antarctica, in the polar night, you know and I don't mean, like stay there for a science research station, I mean nobody wants to like set up house and have a family and like have schools and supermarkets and stuff. Nobody wants to do that in the middle of Antarctica, in the middle of the polar night. Antarctica in the polar night is nicer than it's ever been on Mars. The top of Everest is nicer than it's ever been on Mars and you know Mars gets more asteroid strikes than Earth does anyway.
So why would Mars be a good lifeboat. Very clear he says he wants a million people on Mars so that way they can survive and have their own self-sustaining civilization in the event of a disaster here on Earth. So the rockets stop coming. He says they need to survive even if the rockets stop coming. A million people is not enough for that, because if you want to survive on Mars without supply ships, you need to have a fully self-sustaining high industry, high tech civilization. The economic base that you need for that high tech civilization is estimated to be somewhere around half a billion to a billion people.
0:18:00 - Paris Martineau
Oh my, it's a lot of rockets.
0:18:02 - Adam Becker
That's a lot of rockets, yeah, and a lot of babies born into an uncertain, perhaps irresponsible atmosphere.
0:18:08 - Paris Martineau
Right exactly An atmosphere that will literally poison you to death.
0:18:12 - Adam Becker
Right, exactly. And even if you somehow take care of the poison, even if you have everybody live in pressurized tunnels underground, even if you somehow take care of the fact that, if you have millions or a billion people living in pressurized tunnels underground, at some point something's going to go wrong. We don't know whether you can have babies on Mars, because we don't know what the effect of Martian gravity, which is about one-third that of Earth. We don't know what the long-term effects of that are on human development and growth in the womb and in, you know, infancy and childhood.
0:18:44 - Jeff Jarvis
That's why Elon's trying to have enough here that he can go.
0:18:49 - Paris Martineau
Do you have a sense as to one last Mars question? Do you have a sense? As to why Mars, why Mars in particular? Because, I mean, mars is always the one that people are talking about. Yeah, I mean. So what other?
0:19:02 - Leo Laporte
planet you're going to go to really, I mean.
0:19:04 - Paris Martineau
Mars isn't a good option.
0:19:05 - Leo Laporte
As bad as Mars is, Mercury and Jupiter and Saturn. What else? Where else are you going to go?
0:19:09 - Adam Becker
Yeah, I mean part of it, part of it.
0:19:11 - Leo Laporte
I think really is that Just a space station.
0:19:13 - Adam Becker
Yeah, we're not a multi-planetary society?
0:19:14 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, that's another thing. Adam investigates.
0:19:27 - Adam Becker
Yeah, no, no, no. Aside from Earth, what's the best place in the solar system? Mars probably is the next best, and it's as bad as I just said, which tells you something about how inhospitable the rest of the solar system is. Space in general, right, yeah, exactly, there's nowhere for us, but here. This is the only place with the biosphere and ecosystem that we need to survive. It's where we evolved't. What if? And it's increasingly looking like?
0:19:54 - Leo Laporte
yeah we don't have the will, the political will, the intelligence to do that. Yeah, I mean, I just read an article that said the sea is getting darker yeah and that that doesn't sound like a big problem, except that it's completely disrupting the ecosystem and we get 30% of our oxygen from the sea and from plants in the sea. We are not doing a good job of saving this planet, no we're not.
0:20:35 - Adam Becker
But even if global warming gets as bad as possible, it's still going to be nicer here than it would be anywhere else in the solar system. That's an excellent point. Yeah, and you know Musk also talks about terraforming Mars. He says, oh, we can solve all these problems by making it more like the atmosphere on Earth.
It is a sci-fi concept which is also why Mars, by the way, is that he's just read a lot of science fiction and read it badly. But the other thing is, if you did have the technology to terraform Mars, why? But the other thing is, if you did have the technology to terraform Mars, why not use it to terraform Earth, any technology that you could use to make Mars more habitable, you could use to fix global warming, because that's not fun, right, and that, I think, is actually the key.
0:21:19 - Jeff Jarvis
So I want to go to one more. I want to get to your solution, which involves billionaires, in a few minutes, but I want to go to the other, the other. Um, delicatessen, uh, slicing machine you go through which is my favorite topic, which is william mccaskill and nick bostrom and the long termists and, to the side, yutkowsky and the paperclip nuttiness. Yeah, um, uh, I've talked about test real a lot on this show, yeah, and uh, I have talked to Emil Torres about this and they're great on the topic. Yep, give us your view of that. Tess Greal long-termism, because it kind of fits into what you're saying with Musk. He's part of that fraternity. Yes, because so far you really haven't talked about the technology. Yeah, the technology doesn't seem to be the problem.
0:22:08 - Adam Becker
The problem, is to be the technologists.
So talk about them. Yeah, so the long-termists. They want us to pay more attention to the rights and needs and wants of the people who live in the far future, and there's nothing wrong with that in theory. The problem is that they take it full galaxy brain, and I mean that very literally. The issue is that we don't know what people in the future will want or what will be best for them, because we don't know what the future holds. And the long-termists have this way of getting around that problem by saying that they know, or claim to know, that the best way to think about how to make the world a better place is to make more people. Is that a future with more people in it, as long as they are living lives that are, you know, good enough to be worth living, barely good enough to be worth living then a future with more people in it is better. And so this creates what McCaskill calls a moral case for space settlement. And you know that's already a problem. Like I was just saying, space is not the place.
But there's also this other problem that shows up, which is it makes them focused on very specific problems, the exclusion of all else, and many of those problems are just kind of made up. Uh, because they've decided that the risk of human extinction from non-existent speculative technologies, like what they call artificial general intelligence, is greater than the risks and harms from real problems that are here right now. And this actually also takes us back to Kurzweil, right, because their concern is about a kind of intelligence or super intelligence in a machine that we don't have and don't know how to build, and are not anywhere near building, and they are concerned and this is a concern that McCccaskill and the other oxford philosophers that were talking about, uh, the, the long-termists. They picked up this concern from this guy, yadkowski, and uh, and also from bostrom and the, the paperclip scenario that you were alluding to, the, the idea that you could have a super intelligent AI that sort of improves itself in the way that Kurzweil and others talked about and maintains a desire to do whatever it was originally designed to do, which, in this scenario, is create more paperclips, and so the concern is that such a machine would then kill everybody in order to get them out of the way and keep them from preventing it from making more paperclips, and then, once everyone's dead, they will turn everybody and the material that all the people are made of and the material that the earth is made of, and all that stuff into paperclips and this is, again, preposterous on the face of it, but a lot of serious people believe it.
So we have to take it seriously. And then when you do take it seriously, it falls apart. All of the assumptions that underlie that argument just fall apart if you breathe on them wrong. It's a house of cards.
0:25:40 - Jeff Jarvis
So this week we had news that Anthropic with this new model is finds a trouble because one test and I'm not agreeing with this, but just presenting it, one test said that the system would blackmail the operator rather than be shut down. And then we had a story out in our media world that said that OpenAI has a problem because its model refused to shut down when instructed. And then, leo, I think I saw you on the TikTok on Security Now talking about machines that are now self-replicating. So these kinds of things are just this week in the news ecosystem out there.
0:26:22 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, actually I don't want to. We'll talk about this later, because that's a bullshit story and I don't want to delve into it. It's a misunderstanding of what those AIs are doing. Yep, they're just language machines.
0:26:35 - Jeff Jarvis
Right, but that's what enters into the policy discussion, that's what enters into the media discussion Because of media's misunderstanding.
0:26:41 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I don't want to propagate that.
0:26:45 - Adam Becker
I really don't want to propagate that. I really don't.
0:26:46 - Leo Laporte
Well, yeah, but that's that's the point that I'm making here is like yeah, no, I agree with you.
0:26:48 - Adam Becker
Yeah, they're just their word and text generation engines.
0:26:53 - Leo Laporte
Even calling them ai is a pr move and saying to black they're gonna blackmail you or prevent their shutdown is nonsense yeah, there was a there.
0:27:02 - Adam Becker
you know that I think, like a lot of people my age, there are certain tweets that just live rent free in my head and never go away, and there's this one on this subject that I think actually captures this very, very well. I think it was by a woman named Avery Edison who said you know, I wrote I am alive on a piece of paper, put it in a photocopier and press start. What happened next has shocking implications.
0:27:30 - Leo Laporte
Exactly. That's a nice way to put it Revin.
0:27:34 - Paris Martineau
Kuss at the New York Times.
0:27:36 - Adam Becker
Yes, exactly yes. The most credulous man alive. He has never heard anything that he didn't believe.
0:27:48 - Paris Martineau
Those printers are scary man. You got to watch, gotta watch out they're gonna steal your life.
0:27:50 - Adam Becker
Yeah, what if? What if you wrote? Uh, what if you wrote? You should leave your wife on a piece of paper and put that in the machine oh no, she is in love with me yes, front page news yes so what do we do about media coverage?
0:28:04 - Jeff Jarvis
how the hell do we improve it?
0:28:06 - Adam Becker
I mean, I wrote a book it is pretty incredulous.
yeah, I wrote a book to try to help with that. You know, one of my other fancy hats is I'm a journalist, and so I wrote a book saying, hey, all of this is nonsense, don't do this, don't believe this stuff. But I also think you, we, just we need to change how we talk about it. I think that that you know, uh, we need better journalism on the subject and I think we also need, like, better social norms around this right, like, and and I realize that that's a very weak tool to use, but at the moment it's it's kind of the best one that we've got I think that we need to help people understand that these things are not alive, they are not thinking, and that treating them like they're people is unhealthy and, in some cases, rude. You know, like, substituting a person with one of these text generation engines, I think, is more rude than, say, going to lunch with someone and spending the whole time staring at your phone.
0:29:14 - Paris Martineau
I think that it's going to be increasingly difficult, as we're seeing already, to convince people to shift their immediate opinions of this. It seems these things, these tools, come across in a way that people intrinsically believe they have agency, they have knowledge, and that is kind of the first instinct of a user, and I think that's very difficult to actually address. I feel like I mean, this is a complete just thought that came to my head, but I feel like shame is probably the only way that we could do it. It's just like collectively, as a society, decide. It's kind of embarrassing and cringy to believe earnestly that the AI is real and wants to steal your wife, and I think that social shame could do the trick.
0:30:00 - Adam Becker
I think that that's a good idea and we've seen that work before, right, you know when, when, like Google Glass came out remember Google Glass? Oh, yeah, I got it, yeah, and and there was a lot of shame and a lot of oh bro, don't, don't record me, what the what the hell. So I think I think that shame can be powerful for something like that, uh, and and I think it's sort of the kind of thing that shame is for right, because sometimes it's good to shame people, right? If someone, uh, doesn't believe that Global warming is real, we should shame them.
0:30:40 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, they should get dunked on yeah.
0:30:42 - Adam Becker
Yeah, exactly. If someone is racist or you know, like, if someone believes that certain races are smarter than or better than other races, we should shame them. That's what shame is for, that's what shame does. So, yeah, no, I think shame is a powerful tool that we can use to to change the narrative around AI, and we should.
0:31:04 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah. So your suggestion in the end not to do a spoiler here, no, that's fine Relates to billionaires yeah. So again, you're not really talking about the technology, you're talking about the technologists. What should we do with billionaires?
0:31:19 - Adam Becker
Yeah, I mean, I do think that we should do something about the technology as well. I would like to see better regulations around AI and around space companies, but I also think that part of the reason that's difficult is that we've allowed billionaires to happen. Louis Brandeis said like what? 100 years ago? That we can either have great people having, you know, great accumulation of wealth, a great uneven distribution of wealth in this country, or we can have democracy and we can't have both, and I think recent events have shown that this was true. And billionaires exist because we allow them to.
If we came together as a country and said you know what? Nobody needs a billion dollars, $500 million is enough. Nobody needs more than that. We could institute a wealth tax and we could say, yeah, anything over $500 million that goes back to the rest of society. Because, guess what? You did not build the things that brought you that wealth alone. Obama was right when he said you didn't build that. You did not. Nobody does anything ever in life alone. Nobody does anything alone.
It would not be possible for these tech billionaires, or any billionaire, to amass the wealth that they have without a stable, functioning society that allows for the kind of economy that allows them to, you know, create that kind of wealth. They would not have been able to amass that wealth without public transportation infrastructure. They would not be able to amass that wealth without public education infrastructure. And they, you know, because they wouldn't have trained population of workers or consumers. And, in Silicon Valley in particular, they would not have been able to amass that wealth without the government creating and investing in most of the early, you know, stuff that has allowed, uh, the tech industry in general and the internet in particular to explode.
Arpanet, the original form of the internet, was created by the us government. Uh, the us government was the first major client of Silicon Valley in, you know, in its creating computer chips, because the US government needed them for the space program, and that space program also provided a sort of free testing ground for the space companies that came in later. All of this massive, massive government spending has been done by us, the public, and we don't see a return on the investment because these companies just come in and piggyback off of that. And so I think it's time for us to tax billionaires and get our money's worth and save democracy at the same time.
0:34:27 - Paris Martineau
Do you think that I guess part of the reason why these billionaires or large figures end up making these wild proclamations that are so easily debunked or picked apart is kind of because of this institutional structure of wealth? Or what do you think drives these big wrong ideas that you tackle in the book?
0:34:53 - Adam Becker
Yeah, I mean this is a good question and I do like that's a good chunk of the book.
There is me sort of talking about that.
I think that because these ideas provide these billionaires with an excuse to believe what they already want to believe and do the things that they want to do, and it provides them with a sort of roadmap to making large amounts of money or using their large amounts of money in ways that seem good and entertaining to them, that avoid accountability for the real problems that they're creating here and now, that makes these ideas just incredibly seductive and irresistible to them.
I think that there is a mistake that a lot of people make where they say, oh, musk doesn't actually want to go to Mars, bezos doesn't actually want humans to live in space. It's just that these are like reputation management projects, because these ideas provide convenient excuses for things that they wanted to do anyway, and I actually think that that's a mistake, because the mistake that's being made there is the fact that these ideas provide excuses for the billionaires to do what they already wanted to do makes it more likely that these are genuine beliefs that the billionaires hold, not less likely. So they believe in this stuff because it provides them with meaning, purpose and moral absolution.
0:36:20 - Jeff Jarvis
Does AI yield a different kind of billionaire than HP did or Intel did or Microsoft did?
0:36:27 - Adam Becker
It's a good question. I think yes and no. Ai comes with this story of the singularity and like salvation or damnation, and I think that when you believe that what you're building is a god or could become a god, yeah, you got a point there.
Yeah, that's going to just change your attitude toward the world, and this is not theoretical or speculative. You can see this with Sam Altman. Sam Altman has said all kinds of absolutely crazy and unhinged things about AI. He has said that AI can be used to solve global warming and so global warming's not that big a deal, because, like you know, he said, because they'll figure, we'll figure it out in post exactly yes, and and he's not the only one saying this uh, um, uh, what's his name?
uh, eric schmidt said the same thing and is saying the same thing, and you know saying that they say it's not that big a deal. Technically, maybe that's not fair. Sam Altman, instead, has said stuff like well, I don't want to say this because global warming is such a big problem, but it won't be a big problem for AI to solve once we have it, and we're going to have that in the next four years years. So it's really not that big a deal. It's really very silly and very transparently a way of getting around the problems here and now, and I think he really believes it, and that's nuts. So, yeah, I do think that if you think you're building a god, if you think you're building the last invention that humanity will ever need to make because it will, it will save the world from everything then yeah, that's going to change your approach to things like democracy or your place in the wider world or, uh, or even philanthropy.
0:38:23 - Jeff Jarvis
That's a good point uh, what of the technology do you like and do you use?
0:38:29 - Adam Becker
um, I mean, I guess it depends on what you mean by technology. I think vaccines are great, well, no, I bet, I bet I love modern medicine.
0:38:36 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, exactly I drive a car once in a while.
0:38:39 - Jeff Jarvis
yeah, exactly, yeah, um, you can drive a car once in a while, yeah exactly, yeah, ai related, yeah, yeah.
0:38:47 - Adam Becker
So yeah, like I said, ai, the AI systems that exist now the term AI, I think, is a marketing tool. It's not like because when I was a kid, right like 30 years ago, ai that meant like Commander Data from Star Trek. Now, ai is not that.
0:39:09 - Paris Martineau
You mean everything from a chatbot to an algorithm. Exactly. A processing tool used in vaccine development, to a different chatbot.
0:39:17 - Adam Becker
Precisely, yeah, and so, like there are AI tools that I use I don't know, I don't really use generative ai like chat, gpt, uh, for a variety of reasons, it's not very useful in my work and I also think that it's the you know, it's the fruit of the poison tree there. There are ecological problems with using that technology, there are intellectual property theft issues with that technology and there's also exploitation of people in you know the world outside of uh, uh, you know the us and europe, um, with that technology. But, uh, I, I do use other kinds of ai, like, uh, like text transcription or, sorry, audio transcription services what are you using for your audio transcription service?
0:40:02 - Paris Martineau
which one? Um uh otter same one as pretty much every other journalist. Yeah exactly, it's good.
0:40:08 - Adam Becker
Yeah, it's good and it's useful to have that transcript. It's not a perfect transcript, but if I need to search the audio to find what I'm looking for, I can do that much more easily with a pretty good transcript. So, yeah, that kind of AI sure I use that. I'll use translation engines like Google Translate, Like if somebody, say, writes a review of my book in a language that I don't speak, which is almost every language other than English, then I'll just slap it into Google Translate or some other translation engine, because I want to know if they're shitting on my books or you know something else not written in English, I'll put it in the translation engine.
So that's a lot of how I use AI, Generative AI tools. At this point I pretty much only use them to keep an eye on their abilities. I want to know what they are able to do, and I am continually unimpressed because generative AI has this hallucination problem that is just built into what the technology is, because it only knows how to hallucinate, Because there's no thought process behind the text or the images or whatever that are being generated. It just generates those things, which is one of the reasons why I tend to refer to them as text generation engines rather than AI.
0:41:38 - Leo Laporte
Leo coming to the defense here. I got nothing to say. No, keep talking, I'm just listening.
0:41:45 - Paris Martineau
Wow, the AI defender has logged off, yeah no, it's not.
0:41:49 - Leo Laporte
This is not my bailiwick, you guys continue.
0:41:54 - Paris Martineau
I don't know. I mean, I think that's just an interesting way to think about it. I think all these tools have varying, different uses and they're not for everyone. And I think that's the interesting part of this discussion that, like the AI hype cycle often misses, which is there's kind of this notion that we're devoting this much money to infusing this technology into everything because it will very rapidly, within months or a couple of years, be everything for everyone, and I just don't think that seems realistic with the development of any technology. Like, of course, technology will be useful to a lot of people in a lot of ways, but it doesn't mean it has to be useful for everyone for everything always.
0:42:36 - Adam Becker
Yeah, no, there's two articles that I think are really good on this that really sort of cement the point that you just made, because I think you're right. There was a lovely op-ed in the New York Times by Tressie McMillan Cottom called AI is Mid. It's just saying, you know, ai it's not great and it's not really terrible, it's just kind of mediocre, and I think that's about right. And there was also a very long academic paper out of Princeton by, oh my god, arvind Narayanan and I'm blanking on the other person's name Kapoor saying the title of that paper is AI as normal technology, and I think that's right. They're not building a god, they're building a thing, and it's a thing that can do some stuff, and it's going to be good at some things and bad at others, and it's going to change how certain jobs work and it's not going to change how other jobs work and it's going to create some jobs that didn't exist before, just like any other normal piece of technology.
0:43:40 - Paris Martineau
And I think that that's like a very I don't know.
That's the part that frustrates me the most about our cultural conversation on AI, as, like a buzzword technology is like yeah, there's very cool things happening in artificial intelligence, in large language model processing, in all of the different subfields that we consider AI, but I feel like they're being obfuscated by the fact that people are screaming from the top of rooftops this is the best thing ever. You should be using this for everything, always, no matter what, and if you're not, you're dumb and not going to have a job and nothing about your life is going to make sense, because it's all or nothing and that's just. I mean, maybe I'll be wrong, but that's just not how the any technology we've ever seen before works, and it doesn't seem, based on what we've seen, at least over the last couple of years, that this is how this is working. It's going to be very useful for quite a few things, but that doesn't mean it's going to be incredibly useful for absolutely everything. I mean, what do you think, jeff? I know you're more on the lead camp of all this.
0:44:40 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, I still remain positive on AI as a whole. I think it's worth paying attention to, I think it's worth exploring and seeing what it can do, and I think that the industry and it is an industry now is making a terrible mistake by overpromising, by saying that it can do everything, by acting as if it's at the worst end of it. It's the God complex, or?
the doomsday complex, the God or the devil, yeah, right, um, but but even short of that, uh, that it's going to replace tons of jobs, uh, uh, just this morning I saw morning joe um van jim van de high, from axios, was on talking about a white collar bloodbath that's going to be occurring any minute with ai jobs, and it was was from Anthropic and he was basically accepting this Anthropic argument. And the funny thing about this is I was talking about this earlier today that it's the weirdest thing to see. An industry whose PR is doom. What other industry says we're so powerful we can destroy things and we're really dangerous and we're really awful, and that's why you should.
0:45:46 - Paris Martineau
That's why you should give us all your money. Yeah, yeah, it's the. It's the honest.
0:45:49 - Leo Laporte
I don't think ai is a monolith, though, and I think it's easy to to target sam altman, because he's a bozo and there's a lot of and elon musk. There's a lot of great stuff happening and very interesting stuff happening that isn't doomer, that isn't acceleration Accelerationist, that isn't Tess Griel, and I think it's a shame to paint it all with the same brush.
0:46:08 - Paris Martineau
No, absolutely. I mean. I think that's the core of my argument around this industry. Part of the issue, and I think why people like myself focus on someone like Sam Altman is because that's where all of the money is going. If we think of it comparatively, that is like almost all of the money is going. If we think of it comparatively, that is like almost all of the capital is going to the same, like one of three, maybe five if you're being really generous companies, and that just seems a bit foolish given what we know about how innovation works.
0:46:37 - Leo Laporte
Well, hopefully the more interesting stuff will happen in the lesser I mean look at Deep Seek in the lesser capitalized areas, A lot of interesting stuff happens. The garage is historically the place where Silicon Valley invents, not the big corporation with a circular campus.
0:46:53 - Paris Martineau
So those garages, though, are given venture capital investment. That's where the stuff happens. I mean, I don't know. I just think it'll be very interesting to see how this all shakes out. I don't think we've ever seen a intense hype cycle like this, and that's over capitalization of yeah, and I think it harms.
0:47:09 - Jeff Jarvis
It harms the field. That's my. So I am a defender of AI, a defender with you, leo, of what it can do, but I think that it's being harmed by those few big guys who get all the money and get all the attention and make up a lot of BS around it, and that's my problem.
0:47:25 - Leo Laporte
The book is more everything forever, ai overlords, space empires and Silicon Valley's crusade to control the fate of humanity. I love, I love it that Adam Becker is an astrophysicist. Who better to examine these issues? Adam, thank you so much for making the time to be with us. I appreciate it. Oh, no, thanks for having me. What is real, by the way, Just out of curiosity.
0:47:46 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, can you give us a quick 30 seconds on what is and isn't real?
0:47:49 - Adam Becker
Well, I'll tell you my favorite Amazon review of the book was someone who gave it one star because they said it's 300 pages long. At the end he says he doesn't know.
0:48:02 - Leo Laporte
You should never be honest if you want a review on. Amazon, that's for sure, adam, thank you so much for your time. Thanks so much, adam. I really appreciate it.
0:48:10 - Adam Becker
Thanks for having me. I'd love to come back anytime. Thanks.
0:48:19 - Leo Laporte
Please Thank you. Take care Bye, adam Becker. Everybody, intelligent Machines continues in just a moment with AI news, but first a word from our sponsor Zscaler, the leader in cloud security. You know when we talk about all the negatives of AI, one of the big negatives is that bad guys can use AI to breach your organization. Hackers have found a great ally in AI. Yeah, sure, ai powers innovation and drives efficiency, but it also helps bad actors deliver more relentless and effective attacks, and I'm not talking about Nicolas Cage here.
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0:51:49 - Jeff Jarvis
Because how is it going to get blackmail with whom? Does it have a phone? Well so the way it happened, do you have a bank account? I'm calling your wife with my strange voice.
0:51:58 - Leo Laporte
Right. It said I know you're sleeping around and I'm going to send an email. And it turned out it was given email access so it in theory could have, but I think it's much more likely it was rehashing the plot of a detective novel that actually exactly and this is what steve said. In fact, I wrote it down because I I thought it was, uh, so good. He, um, he said, let me, let me get the quote exactly. I have it from yesterday's security now, um, pull up my notes from yesterday.
0:52:32 - Jeff Jarvis
Should have had this to hand I just last week, I think, you talked about replicating machines, so that I'd be curious to hear what he. Yeah, yeah he said.
0:52:39 - Leo Laporte
This is a steve's quote. When a human being says I want a lollipop, it's an actual expression of desire. There's an entity with an ego that wants something. But when a large language model emits the same words I want a lollipop or I'm going to blackmail you, whatever. There's no I present to do any wanting. It's just an algorithm that selected that sequence of words. There is no I I like that. Yeah, uh, and and he's. You know he said uh. The problem is we're easily seduced by language, and and uh, and we also, I think, are biologically built to think of entities like that as people. They're not. That's in a way, to me. That was the takeaway from um stochastic parrots was that we would ascribe more importance to what these machines said.
0:53:34 - TikTok
Because they are machines, we view ourselves into them yes, yeah, yes, anyway, but I don't want to repeat. The stories was that it was.
0:53:42 - Speaker 6
It was kind of ridiculous say again, but it was't want to repeat the stories it was.
0:53:45 - Jeff Jarvis
it was kind of ridiculous. Say again I'm sorry, but it was the press. It was the press about it. Oh, they jumped on it. That's the more of the story. Yes, of course they did.
0:53:53 - Leo Laporte
Uh, I think we should be smarter than that on this show anyway.
0:53:57 - Paris Martineau
Um but I think also the nature of allows us to explain to people why that is a misinterpretation and not fall into the the trap that many advertising click supported media outlets go to, which is you've got to have a headline that will cause people to click, and what causes people to click? But something that gets them afraid or angry or energized in some way our blessing is that we have no ads and we don't care we have lots of ads we do have ads.
0:54:32 - Leo Laporte
Actually, we have a lot of we do care. Yeah, so tell me about this. Uh, adam was quoting this. Uh, ai is normal technology piece. Uh, this was from uh, the knight institute of columbia, arvind Narayanan and Saish Kapoor.
0:54:46 - Jeff Jarvis
Tell me more about this so the New Yorker did a piece contrasting this with the 2027 thing, which I don't know if you've seen, which is a prediction of all the doom in AI, and it's a fictional story of what could go wrong, whereas that piece from the Columbia AI Institute just says let's stop treating AI like it's some earth shattering amazing thing. It's a technology. Let's deal with it at that level, and I think that that's the smart way to deal with this. I think that's the way we cut through the hype. Now the question is we've had two. That's the way we cut through the hype. Now the question is you know we've had two anti-AI hype books recently on the show and you can do that in a few ways, right, what is that you can?
0:55:35 - Leo Laporte
I like Adam's approach. Adam did yeah, I like Adam's approach.
0:55:37 - Jeff Jarvis
He cuts through the hype itself.
0:55:39 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.
0:55:40 - Jeff Jarvis
But I think the other way is to bring the technology down to reality. I think that's what we can do on this show best is bring perspective and context to it and say, okay, it's cool, it does a lot of amazing things, but let's not get overboard, Because when you get overboard then you get in trouble.
0:55:58 - Leo Laporte
So this is from AI 2027. When was this written? This was written Recently, very recently.
0:56:03 - Jeff Jarvis
It's a former AI 2027 was written by another AI. Safety air quote safety person. It is real fan fiction.
0:56:11 - Paris Martineau
It is the most fan fiction I've ever read it is like interactive choose your own fan fiction and it's about how God there are some really. It's like there's going to be it's like computonium level stuff. He's like there's going gonna be ai nanobots in our blood in like two years and it's gonna be so bad that's why, you should be scared that's why we need safety right.
0:56:34 - Leo Laporte
See, it's funny, because I would say oh, that's great, let's get those. Uh, let's get. When do we get them?
0:56:39 - Jeff Jarvis
again. Can we get rid of cholesterol that way, can it?
0:56:41 - Leo Laporte
please, you know all that way. Could it even, please, you know, go on. It's funny because I have a mixed. I'm not into the doomerism, nor do we really know what's going to happen. I think it's very clear. We have no idea. No prediction is ridiculous. We have no idea and we are seeing things happen in uh with ai tools like vo3, the new google tool, that are mind-bending. Yes, that we didn't even think possible. You know what was the with a video of uh um, the guy eating spaghetti right two or three years ago. That was just, it was awful. And now we've got and I've been showing. We showed a couple of these. I've been showing them on other shows as well. We showed one last week. Ai is now talking, ai is VO is making video. That, I'm sorry, but I think is indistinguishable from the real world.
0:57:43 - Jeff Jarvis
It's changing my view of other things. I look at other images and I think, oh, that's too good, that's a question now. There was a picture of the next cast of kids for the hbo uh harry potter thing, and they looked like they were ai generated to me.
0:57:57 - Leo Laporte
That was my first presumption this is uh, and I showed this to lisa and at first she thought it was real.
0:58:02 - Paris Martineau
This is influencers has just occurred on the outer ring of the city. We'll now be going live to our top influencer opinions. Omg people, the world is ending. Are you seeing this? This is actually so exciting.
0:58:16 - TikTok
I know it's chaos, but you got real survivor's wife energy. That's cool.
0:58:21 - Paris Martineau
I like them feisty like it would totally be better if we ran it. You know, men literally destroy everything and my girls need to stop being so soft with these basic losers. Who even needs men right.
0:58:35 - Jeff Jarvis
Anything a man builds just gets destroyed by a different man.
0:58:38 - Leo Laporte
Lisa wanted to believe it this collapse is literally the perfect depth. He only watched a few seconds. The point is, if you just quickly glance at it, it looks real well. Did you watch the lava?
0:58:50 - Jeff Jarvis
right. Did you watch joanna stearns on the world street journal even? No oh, I'm telling you, this is the time. This, all of her preparation for her, for her close-up, has come to this it is amazing.
Set it, set it up and I'll so she got uh, it's, it's, I have it somewhere in the run down there, um. So joanna stern wanted to use vo plus a couple other tools and see what they could do, so she created a uh, four minute story. Uh, with her and her robot. Yeah, you know, whatever it is, but the tool, the use of the tools, is amazing, and they went through. She worked with a partner in it and they had a thousand. She worked with a partner in it and they had a thousand cuts. At the very end of it, she has the uh, the outtakes, which are hilarious, and bloopers, with the machine screwed up. Um, but it's, it's, it's impressive. And she uses her own voice. Everything else in this is made by AI. She couldn't find a voice that satisfied her, so she used her own voice.
0:59:42 - Leo Laporte
So this vo and uh runway the two runway's been around for a while. Vo3 is, of course, the new model from google. Uh, here we go. Let me turn on the. Uh, where's the audio on there? There's a button.
0:59:55 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, look at that so what is so human? I am dr chiff motherboard. This is terrible. We all robot this is bad.
1:00:02 - Leo Laporte
This is bad, this is terrible. Okay, she is bad, this is bad.
1:00:03 - Paris Martineau
This is terrible. This is absolutely not AI.
1:00:05 - Jeff Jarvis
Okay, she launched with the wrong thing, but if you go farther, in Okay.
1:00:09 - Paris Martineau
Okay, yeah, Chip is definitely AI and I'm the real me controlling that AI character.
1:00:15 - Leo Laporte
This is last year's technology, yes, but keep going, including Chip and all the other visuals were created with AI video tools.
1:00:23 - Paris Martineau
She's driving in a car with a robot. Most of the audio is also AI, except for my narrative.
1:00:27 - Leo Laporte
She didn't like the other voices. Her voice is terrible. Down Leo.
1:00:36 - Jeff Jarvis
So now it's all AI except for the voice. This is all AI generated, and I wish they had another robot, because it's kind of silly, it's 6.15 am.
1:00:41 - Leo Laporte
It's going to be a great day. You'll feel better after a workout. I've sanitized your sports bra, thank you. Yeah, I'm not going to watch this because I'm going to throw up. Can I go back? I'd rather watch the Influenders. To be honest with you, a, I don't think she's doing the best job you can do with VO.
1:01:11 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm much more impressed with the stuff I'm seeing on reddit, but the main point, both hers and mine, is this stuff's gotten good enough now that it's indistinguishable ethan malik, who's also very good, who's at um wharton, who wrote the book, uh, co-intelligence, so he's a positive ai guy, uh. He also put up videos, uh that I think we might have shown some last week and they're amazing. The fidelity is higher, right, the people look like people now.
1:01:31 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, the lighting was off on all of those videos, but the quality was quite good. I'm sure that with whatever the, I think you just have to probably prompt it differently.
1:01:42 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's the funny thing, those are all generated with text prompts. I mean, that's mind boggling. Yeah it differently. Well, that's the funny thing, those are all generated with text prompts. I mean, that's mind-boggling, yeah yeah, that's really impressive um, and I guess you know that's the other.
We were talking about this on windows weekly. I hate the frog in the water analogy, but as humans, we adjust. I wonder what you were pausing to say. What could? I don't want to say the frog in the pot and the water analogy, but as humans, we adjust. I wonder what you were pausing to say. What I don't want to say the frog in the pot and the water is getting hot. But as humans, we adjust very quickly. I mean, that's one of the things that makes us successful is we adapt. We're very adaptable, so it's very quick. We're very quick to kind of start taking this stuff for granted and saying, oh yeah, I mean, look, we're doing a zoom call with people all over the world that they're, we're all like in the same room. It's a few years ago this wasn't even possible. So I'm just I feel like we're. We're maybe underestimating, uh, what's happening here?
1:02:41 - TikTok
here's some more vo video I broke into a zoo to prove one man is enough to fight a gorilla.
1:02:49 - Leo Laporte
That's a little uncanny. This is cartoonish.
1:02:52 - Paris Martineau
I'm going to lick this glowing pole. Let's see how many views this gets.
1:02:56 - Jeff Jarvis
A little bit. If you go to line 100, you'll see some others that are better. Don't shoot, that's better, just content. That's scary. Hey Leo, they shouldn't show that to me, that scares me.
1:03:07 - Leo Laporte
Let's get solid. No energy drinks just gasoline. Digging to the earth. This is actually the one I showed Lisa.
1:03:19 - Jeff Jarvis
No break.
1:03:21 - Leo Laporte
Can I survive? This is a great setup on influencers and what's happened, unfortunately, with TikTok and YouTube is people are now doing 10 minutes straight.
1:03:30 - TikTok
Wish me luck.
1:03:32 - Leo Laporte
Stupid things.
1:03:33 - TikTok
Counting every grain of sand on this beach. Let's go.
1:03:37 - Paris Martineau
One, two, three. That one is my favorite.
1:03:40 - TikTok
actually, I like that one Alone, unprepared and in a straight line. Leave a comment for the search team About to do the first plunge into an active volcano.
1:03:53 - Paris Martineau
Let's send it.
1:03:54 - TikTok
Let's send it, okay, that's good, build the Titanic just to sink it again. Last person to abandon ship gets a Lambo. I covered my entire body in compost and waited to see what started growing. Running for my life on North Sentinel.
1:04:06 - Leo Laporte
Island, day three. I covered my entire body in compost and waited to see what started growing.
1:04:08 - Paris Martineau
Running for my life on.
1:04:08 - TikTok
North Sentinel Island. Day three Should have picked Bali. All right, I've sealed my head in this plastic box and I'm going to try to read the entire dictionary before I pass out.
1:04:25 - Adam Becker
Flying into North Korea with a lawn chair and 1 and 1 000 party balloons. Don't try this at home.
1:04:28 - Leo Laporte
I'm about to survive 100 days in the african. I mean I could. I could watch this all day this is all on reddit yeah, this is on in the chat.
1:04:35 - Paris Martineau
I think at the chat gpt forum it's google v, I know curious what about it is and I don't mean this as sassy as it comes up. What about it is so appealing to you so you could watch it all day? Is it just the quality?
1:04:46 - Leo Laporte
of the video or do you think it's just funny? It's a funny setup of influencers. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, it's very funny. No, it's not the AI, but underneath, look. Ai couldn't talk last month. It definitely could you couldn't make these videos talk last month, so anybody who thinks that this is hype or BS is missing an exponential explosion of capability.
1:05:09 - Jeff Jarvis
What's hype is when they declare that they can solve, I know, okay, got it, let's stop talking about those morons, that's not important.
1:05:17 - Leo Laporte
Those morons are the ones in charge You're watching the world change in front of your eyes and you're going yeah, but you know I don't know. You know there's a lot of hype here.
1:05:29 - Jeff Jarvis
Because those are the ones who have all the money.
1:05:30 - Leo Laporte
Those, are the ones who are in charge. Those are who cares. That's not important to me. What's important to me is you're seeing a technical, you're seeing a technological revolution bigger than anything I think we've ever seen, certainly at least the equivalent of the internet printing.
1:05:43 - Jeff Jarvis
It's like you said watch out, but you know there's lead in that type. It's gonna make you sick. The equivalent of the internet printing. It's like you said.
1:05:45 - Leo Laporte
You said Gutenberg, that's fine, but you know there's lead in that type, it's going to make you sick. I don't understand the focus on oh yeah, it's overhyped. Because I want to cut them down to size.
1:05:59 - Jeff Jarvis
I want Deep Seek to be doing getting the attention instead of them. Well, who knows what Deep Seek?
1:06:05 - Leo Laporte
I mean, that could also be complete bullshit too that's true too. Yes, but that's the wrong thing to focus on, is all I'm saying? Focus on this thing that is happening, because I'll tell you what. In two years it's not gonna be anything like it is now. What was it like two years ago?
1:06:24 - Paris Martineau
I mean, I do think that I think you're right. Yeah, the videos are incredibly cool. It's cool that they're able to produce stuff via text that has the lips sync up to both like audio and things like that. It's awesome. But I think the reason why Jeff and I sometimes preface this by being like, yeah, it's mishyped or overhyped is because that's not what these companies are raising money on, or what any of these companies are trying to do money on, or what they're any of these companies are trying to do. What they're trying to do with the billions of dollars they've raised is like create technology that's going to be used by governments for advanced warfare, or, uh, replace workers en masse or do a lot of things that will have, uh, profound impacts, if they're even realized somewhat, on everyday people's lives. I do think that's something worth keeping in mind while we're also like, yeah, the videos are pretty cool.
1:07:16 - Leo Laporte
Business owners are using AI generated concerned residents that aren't real to oppose a bus product project in Toronto. This is the future of protest. Astroturfing, yeah, but. But astroturfing that's so good, so effective you can't tell it from the real thing. The problem, of course, is going to be that then city governments are going to say, well, we don't know if any of this is real, what's? What are people complaining about?
1:07:49 - Paris Martineau
right, that's, I think, what I'm somewhat concerned about with this sort of stuff. I mean, it's really cool.
1:07:54 - Leo Laporte
Like I'm not saying there's not negative consequences, but like then you know what about a?
1:07:58 - Paris Martineau
world for like yeah, where that uh plays out logically, where someone's like well, we can't trust any of the videos we're seeing. So, concerns lodged in person, because we can at least prove that, does that shut out people with disabilities or does it give an excuse to just not listen to your constituents? I just think that all of this is really compelling and interesting and exciting, but it also introduces a lot of moral questions that we as a society need to start talking about, you know, as to how we're going to deal with a world where you can very easily make a video of anything that is completely indistinguishable from reality.
1:08:42 - Leo Laporte
And then what?
1:08:45 - Paris Martineau
I mean, that's the question what do we do in that world where suddenly there's nothing to do?
1:08:49 - Leo Laporte
do? I got bad news for you oh yeah, there is there. No, I'm saying, I'm literally saying oh my god, the tsunami is coming.
1:08:57 - Paris Martineau
I'm not saying we need to stop the tsunami. I'm just saying, like, physically, if you're doing the tsunami, if you want to take the tsunami metaphor to its end, tsunami is coming. Are you just going to stand there? Are you going to go walk somewhere else? Would that even help? Who are you going to talk to in the five minutes before the tsunami hits? I think there are a lot of questions about how we as a society should change our approach to thinking about content or how we should be having conversations about these sort of technologies. I think there are a lot of things one can do that are not just no, no AI anymore, because obviously that's not an exact, an actual answer pardon me for this.
1:09:37 - Leo Laporte
So Google has created vo3, which is the tool that is really stimulating this conversation like this is where these videos are coming from. Um, and Google, by the way, is surprisingly, uh, safety focused. Uh, as is anthropic um, a lot, I think a lot of people steve steve and I'm not sure I agree with this. Uh talked about yesterday veniceai, which claims to be a completely uncensored ai. Nothing is off limits. You can do whatever you want with it, uh, including making you know images of people that are real. Um, now, I'm not sure. I don't think this is. I'm not thrilled about this, but I don't know how it's not illegal.
1:10:37 - Jeff Jarvis
We create new institutions. I'm going to go back to Gutenberg. When print came out, it was not trusted. The providence was not clear. Anybody could make a pamphlet and you trusted people you knew, until we created the institutions of editing and publishing. Come magazines. How long did that take? Century?
1:10:58 - Leo Laporte
Okay, well, I'm not going to be here for that part.
1:11:02 - Jeff Jarvis
So when Steam Powered Presses came out, there was an explosion of speech and Harper's Magazine was created to find the good stuff because there was too much. That's the response we need is what is it we create to solve this problem rather than just merely complaining about it?
1:11:17 - Leo Laporte
I I'm more interested in, uh, the technology and what's what's changing.
1:11:21 - Jeff Jarvis
That's all uh, I understand, okay. Okay, so let's try this, as because I see you were in the chat um, uh, let's take away both extremes kurzweil and Kurzweil complainers. So I was rolling my eyes. Ray's an amazing guy. He's had a lot of history, but singularity and all that just had me rolling my eyes.
1:11:41 - Leo Laporte
I think we don't know. Wait a minute, though.
1:11:43 - Speaker 6
You can say that but that's just as speculative as him saying that's going to happen.
1:11:48 - Leo Laporte
We don't know.
1:11:50 - Jeff Jarvis
But I'm saying, if you're complaining about the person who just now was dealing with complaints about the AI culture, then I think that we've got to look at the other side of this and say that those who are pushing the high end of this, that's on one realm, okay. So if you want to do away with that level and deal with what's actually happening today and how it's going, okay's, do that. But I think then you would eliminate both extremes and that's okay.
1:12:16 - Paris Martineau
I'm okay with that yeah, I'm down to talk about what's actually happening with ai, but I think that means we don't talk about what people say is probably maybe going to happen in five to ten years, if you believe you know that's bs.
1:12:29 - Leo Laporte
I don't, but I think it's just as much bs to say it ain't going to happen to say it is going to happen. I don't think we know what's going to happen, and I think that I can. I think you can demonstrably say we didn't know what was going to happen three years ago. That's happening right now, so it's not predictable. That's part of the weird thing about ai. It's just not linear, it's not predictable. It's not what we thought was going to have happen. So I don't.
I think saying there isn't going to be a singularity is equally ill-founded as there is. We don't. We just don't know. We just don't know. I think, though, we've made that argument. That's my biggest complaint is is you know, the Emily Benders of the world are making an argument. Fine, we've heard it, we don't need to belabor it, uh, and so I'm just much more interested in what we are doing, what's happening right now, and in fact, I think you need to do that when emily says I don't want to look at ai because I know it's bad, okay, I'm not going to look at it.
That tells me that she is not in this, not.
1:13:31 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, you can see the same about the singulatarians who are not in this world.
1:13:35 - Leo Laporte
I told you it's not, it's irrelevant, that's not important.
1:13:38 - Speaker 6
The question of what is AGI and what is going to happen is irrelevant.
1:13:43 - Leo Laporte
We've asked that question. I think we've done it. I think we've done it. I don't think we need to do it again and again, and again and again. I think it's much more interesting to talk about what is happening, so that you can I mean, you still need to know what's happening, to make a judgment about it and to decide how to fight it, if that's what you choose to do, which is, I think, completely legitimate, but you need to see it, you need to know what's happening. So that's, I think, our mission here, not so much to go. I mean, I agree there shouldn't be billionaires, but I don't think there's any value in going on and on about that. Right, that's, I guess, my only complaint. I here's a. Here's a good story from allison in the Verge. We talked about it on Sunday. Google's VO3 AI video generator is a slop monger's dream.
1:14:37 - Jeff Jarvis
See, I think that's negative, I think that it is negative.
1:14:40 - Leo Laporte
That's okay to have a negative point of view.
1:14:41 - Paris Martineau
We're not allowed to talk about negative stuff.
1:14:42 - Leo Laporte
No, okay, let's take a break. We are. You're watching Intelligent Machines, where there is a little disagreement, I think, over where we should go next. Think about it, we'll pause and we'll decide in a moment. But first a word from our sponsor, story block.
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Try it today. Storyblockcom slash. Twit tv-25. Use the code twit25. Twit listeners get 20% off for three months on growth and growth plus plans. That's storyblockcom slash. Twittv-l-o-k dot com slash. Twittv dash 25. The offer code is twit 25. We thank them so much for their support of intelligent machines. Thank you, story block. All right, you guys pick a story. I don't care. Anything you want to talk about, it's fine with me. Actually, I got to show you this. This is hysterical. This is also from Steve Gibson. Let me see if I can find this for you. Microsoft, as you know, fired a significant number of developers and I think Satya Nagella joins a number of CEOs who say something like 30% of our code is now written by AI. Well, there was a Reddit thread. Let me see if I can find this. There was a Reddit thread of co-pilot commits. You know what I'm going to do. I'm going to open up Steve's show notes, because that's where it came up.
1:19:23 - Paris Martineau
It's always a Reddit thread.
1:19:24 - Leo Laporte
There's always a Reddit thread. Here's the example. Here's one example, and it's this the Reddit thread is hysterical because people are just mocking this. So this is to explain it. We're here at the dot net github. This is microsoft's official github for dot net source code and you can see, this is copilot, microsoft's coding ai, the github coding ai. Copilot wants to merge 13 commits into main. So it's a pull request from copilot um base.
Actually, let me do a different one, this one. This one's not as good as the one steve used, because it's a little bit clearer. Copilot essentially misunderstands the problem, writes the code. This one is an out of range check in a regular expression parser. Instead of trying to fix the underlying code, copilot says oh, just fine, what we'll do is we'll just test and see if it's out of range and we'll say no, no answer. So the developer, no answer. So the?
The developer, in this case a guy named steven tobe, says hey, co-pilot, that seems like it's fixing the symptom rather than the underlying issue. Let's see if we could fix the underlying issue. Take a look. Co-pilot says oh, you're right, this fix addresses the symptom, not the root cause. And then it just doubles down. It says I responded to your question about the underlying issue. The fix ensures graceful failure, but you're new. And then on and on and the Reddit thread basically said feel sorry for the Microsoft employees who are now told you've got to use co-pilot when you're coding and spend probably somebody speculated more time trying to get co-pilot to fix the problem than it would have taken just to fix it. You can see this in the in the in the thread, which is now closed, by the way um yeah, I like this guy's comment co-pilot, where can I buy a good source of popcorn?
they're watching this back and forth. Um, eventually, tau told co-pilot just go go pound sand. But uh, the real point of this is, it seems, like microsoft's telling programmers yeah, this is how you should work from now on I mean, do you think that's a good idea? If it's, no, that's a terrible idea, uh, and unfortunately, this is what I'm. I'm backing you up here. This is one example of how companies have.
1:22:19 - Jeff Jarvis
There was a story I put in too. Amazon programmers unnamed complained that they feel like they're working in the warehouse now because the pressure is on them to be more I don't want to say efficient.
1:22:31 - Leo Laporte
Companies are so all in on this coding thing but I think they're backing off too.
1:22:37 - Jeff Jarvis
We saw uh duolingo, uh two weeks tried to said tried, oh yeah this is all going to be uh yeah if your job ain't ai, you're nowhere and and obviously the bit tanked uh the um morale of the place and he's back on acknowledged employee anxiety over AI.
1:22:57 - Leo Laporte
What he said even in the initial memo is this is just we're just firing contractor workers, Don't worry, you're next You're still going to have a job and of course, the employees are saying you're not at risk. To be clear, I don't see AI replacing what our employees do it says guy who had fired yeah yeah, I mean, I think the market will.
As I said before on this one, the market will judge this. If, if the duolingo, if the AI does not create suitable duolingo lessons the ones that the contractors used to create people will stop using Duolingo. Right, yeah, yeah, then that solves it. It only works if it works. Now, the problem with the co-pilot thing is I just have some sympathy for people like Steven Trav who have to wrestle with this thing because the boss says you got to that's, it's always.
1:23:55 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, I mean, I think, that's a trend I've been seeing a lot lately among executives in tech and like tech-ish businesses lately is there have been a number of these ceo letters coming out lately that have argued like oh, for instance, I saw one this week may have been related to something to do with axios, but not their journalism arm that said, like any new business decision or kind of role you're hiring for, or new kind of line of work you want to be doing, in order to get any funding for that, you need to first uh, argue why you're not using ai for that.
1:24:30 - Leo Laporte
I'm just like that's just you had to prove that ai couldn't do it instead, right?
1:24:36 - Paris Martineau
I just think that seems like a silly rule.
1:24:39 - Jeff Jarvis
You had Jim VandeHei on this morning talking about how it's going to cause a white-collar bloodbath and that seems like a warning to his own staff.
1:24:47 - Paris Martineau
Yeah. I think that we should be able to use new technologies without having it be all or nothing, black or white about it. You hire people because you trust them. You can send a letter be like yeah, you should make use of this new technology. We've got your opening eye pro subscription here. Please use it to do better work. But ultimately, you should be hiring people because you trust them to do the best work for the job.
1:25:11 - Leo Laporte
No, the geek 007 in our discord reminds me that Corey Doctorow warned us of this a year ago. In August of last year. He wrote the reverse centaur apocalypse is on us. Microsoft, oracle and other bossware dealers are transforming our workplaces with digital whips the relationship between tech and labor. You know it was ill-covered Paul Theriot has written about it, but the Microsoft Build Conference, the developers conference, last week was overrun by protests. It wasn't really fully covered were run by protests. It wasn't really fully covered, but Paul's stories showed mass crowds outside and interruptions for pretty much every presentation inside, including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's presentation at the keynote, which the press said was interrupted several times. Paul said it was interrupted 30 plus times by protesters. In this case the protesters, uh, protesting what seemed to be their protest.
They're protesting microsoft's involvement with israel. Microsoft says yes, they're azure customers, as many companies, many countries and companies are. We don't provide them with specific tools for the military, that kind of thing. The protesters, who were highly organized, said you know, there were posters that said Microsoft employees, you have blood on your hands. And the protesters in the keynote were, in fact, employees well, former employees now, but they were employees at the time. That's how they got in, I pointed out. I think we're going to see something very similar soon in a more widespread context about ai in general but we shouldn't.
1:27:04 - Jeff Jarvis
That's the thing. It's not, but there be. I'm going to go back to the interview. I said multiple times he's not complaining about technology. What he's complaining about is some no. That's why I liked it.
1:27:20 - Leo Laporte
I thought adam was good.
1:27:21 - Jeff Jarvis
For that reason he wasn't anti-technology no, no and, and so I think that that's what, what, what? What you're predicting in terms of this backlash is aimed at the people we don't like, rather than the technology we do right by the way I finally found the reddit subreddits.
1:27:38 - Leo Laporte
My new hobby, he says, watching ai slowly drive microsoft employees insane, he says I actually feel bad for the employees being assigned to review these pull requests, but if this is the future of our field, I I think I want off the ride you want a little breaking news. Yeah, nvidia's results are out yes, oh, that I meant to lead with that. This is what the whole market's been waiting for.
1:28:05 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes, with baited breath, the concern being what that nvidia would uh, that they would tank, because of the tariffs, because the inability to sell chips to china, because of the general economy, um uh, because of getting slapped around for, for that, by, by the administration, they're kind of being considered a bellwether then for the, the whatever tech in general. Yeah, I mean when we get to a so.
So ben evans did a chart of intel versus, uh, nvidia and it's just amazing until this way, and we have intel down by, by big steps, but, but, but hockey stick for nvidia, just way the hell up revenue of 44.1 billion up 12 from the last quarter, up 69 year over a year it's pretty. I think it's google impressive, yeah, yeah um.
1:28:57 - Leo Laporte
How's the market reacting? Uh up four percent um after hours yeah, not that I care about the market, but I do want to retire in my lifetime, you know yeah, well there's that too. They beat on earnings. They did see an eight and now see this is going to make the president mad $8 billion impact from the China export rules.
1:29:20 - Jeff Jarvis
Yep. But then he also came out with a new chip designed just for China.
1:29:25 - Leo Laporte
Right, which they've done before. So I guess the point is they continue to innovate for China, which is not as much as for us.
1:29:35 - Jeff Jarvis
I mean, I remain impressed by Jensen Wong. I don't know if I should be, but by everything he's doing in the company he's a good billionaire. Well, I hope so. Well, I thought others were too.
1:29:46 - Leo Laporte
It's easy to get fooled. I don't know if they go bad they, they, they live past their best buy date or if they were bad all along. We just didn't know. That's the question that's exactly.
1:29:55 - Jeff Jarvis
I don't know uh, but he's very impressive with the company. I saw some other stories earlier this week that that, um, there were problems in delivering the racks and the whatever you call them for, uh, blackwell, and they've solved those problems and how they're cooling them and how they're doing other things, and so they're on track to keep delivering. And NVIDIA is fueling this. And, yeah, there's competition but still, and Huang has managed to balance going to both Beijing and to the Middle East with Trump Right.
1:30:29 - Leo Laporte
Well, by the way, that kind of parenthetically. That's why Apple has been in the hot seat this week, because apparently the president invited not only Jensen Huang but Tim Cook to join him in Saudi Arabia. And I don't know if I mentioned on this show, I did on Mac break weekly when, when he was introducing when he was in Saudi Arabia, trump said here's my friend Jensen Wong, I don't see Tim Cook here. Yep, he did, to which he responded later in the week with a 25% tariff on iPhones, which I've never heard of a tariff on a single product. Yeah, where's the?
1:31:06 - Paris Martineau
emergency we're learning a lot of new things about the economy this year. A lot of new things.
1:31:12 - Leo Laporte
It of new things economy a lot of new things um wild five months yes, so this was a good article I put in here.
It's a little complicated to explain from china. Talk jordan schneider writing just count the server racks. So he's a little miffed because, while we do have this export restriction on china for high-end ai chips, we just made a big deal with saudi arabia and the united arab emirate to send them a lot of chips and a lot of money and a lot of technology. And his concern is um, how do we know that they're going to stay our friends? He says the point of diffusion rules. These are the rules to keep ai chips secure and out of chinese hands, both in terms of physical security and the use of their compute via and this is important remote access. It's possible that the agreements we're making with the uae and the ksa, saudi arabia will replace and improve upon the functionality in those countries, in particular the diffusion rules, but it's also possible it won't.
I do not consider them reliable allies going forward and there are various reasons. Even the best versions of these agreements would make me deeply uncomfortable. His line just count the server racks. This is what David Sachs said when asked. Well, here are the high points. America's head of China in AI. I think we actually believe that to be true, diffusion rules serve protect america's technological lead where it matters. Uae, cotter and saudi arabia are not reliable american allies, nor are they important markets for our technology. We should not be handing them large shares of the world's most valuable resource, compute. Sax says well, it's easy to verify whether they're keeping their agreements or just. You just count the server racks. Uh, to which jordan points out well, there's remote compute and it's also very easy to put dummy gpus and server racks and make it look like they're doing something. So, really, what this agreement was? What this agreement?
1:33:31 - Jeff Jarvis
benefits to china. Is that what the fear is here?
1:33:34 - Leo Laporte
yeah, that, and well, two things, yes one, that they'll supply remote compute to china, and two, that they're not going to remain our allies. I mean, let's face it, the ksa did chop up, uh, kashogi, because they didn't like him, because he said some bad things about him. Uh, I could see why tim cook, a gay man, did not want to go to saudi arabia, but I could see why jensen wong did, because, who was the chief beneficiary of all of this?
1:34:02 - Jeff Jarvis
and jensen wong, nvidia and so what do we think of them? As a result, new leather jackets yeah, his. I just watched another keynote. It was a little long on on the sleeve I thought he could have gotten them, you know now I think we're getting a little too nitpicky here.
1:34:19 - Paris Martineau
All right, I'm sorry if you're a billionaire you should have a custom leather jacket for every event. Yeah, it was a little. What else are you doing you?
1:34:29 - Jeff Jarvis
know, uh. So remember, we talked to the show a couple years ago about jürgen schmidhuber, one of the many godfathers of of ai, so he's now in, I think, saudi arabia. He's uh, yeah, it's line 107. Uh, rest of world wrote about this, and so you, you're seeing this. This, I think um surprising or puzzling. This. This, I think um surprising or puzzling uh, rush of people and money to saudi arabia and from money from saudi arabia, uh around, and so it's it's, it's a trend to keep an eye on. Besides just counting the racks, count the bucks absolutely.
1:35:05 - Leo Laporte
I mean they're making the argument well. There's no issue about electricity in saudi arabia because course they pump oil out of the ground. They have a fairly good supply of it. There's also no lack of money in Saudi Arabia. Remember, saudi Arabia people are. You know, saudi Arabia is trying to replace the pro-golf tour with their own LIV tour, with the support of the president. That's about money. That's not because golf is big in Saudi Arabia.
1:35:31 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, it's also, it's, it's, it's, it's greenwashing of its own sort, like greenwashing sports.
1:35:36 - TikTok
Washing sports washing.
1:35:37 - Jeff Jarvis
Thank you, I was making a golf joke there, but oh, I get it. The greens, yeah, yeah but, but now in technology. So it's tech washing, it's it's token washing.
1:35:47 - Leo Laporte
Now it's well, look at us, we're a force in technology yeah, we're invested, schmidt, huber was appointed director of artificial intelligence the king abdullah university of science and technology in saudi arabia. He's currently based there. Since launching a blueprint to modernize its economy and society, known as vision 2030, saudi arabia has committed to and launched an ambitious infrastructure and futuristic products adding up to more than a trillion dollars. Schmidt-huber told the New York Times yes, it would cost money, but there's a lot of money in this country. Well, there you go, you're saying the quiet part out.
Loud. Schmidt, okay, ai, it has been said. He says that AI is the new oil or the new electricity.
1:36:37 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, let me ask you this question Is it cause there's an argument that says that, by keeping the chips out of China, all we have done is to spark more Chinese innovation and more Chinese competition?
1:36:49 - Leo Laporte
well, hence deep seek Right.
1:36:51 - Jeff Jarvis
But also now in chip making and all kinds of things. Was it a mistake to forbid China to have our chips? Yeah, what do you think? That's a question.
1:37:03 - Paris Martineau
I mean, was there ever a world where they were not going to get their hands on those chips? I feel like that's kind of naive.
1:37:09 - Jeff Jarvis
But that's what the administration's plural thought, including Biden, yeah.
1:37:14 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's where the restrictions started started. Yeah, I, you know, I I don't know, I I kind of a look. There's a precedent for this in nuclear non-proliferation. Right once the atom bomb was invented, we made, took great steps to keep other countries from getting it. We didn't do very well, but we managed to keep it out of the hands of most. There are only a, you know, a dozen nuclear powers in the world. Um, is this equivalent?
I mean, that's what some people think I'm kind of of the I don't know my, my tendency is to say let science should see no borders, uh, and I feel like this is more science than anything else the science should see no borders.
1:38:01 - Jeff Jarvis
But then you know, the argument of nuclear non-proliferation is pretty persuasive but I don't think this is nuclear because it can so much can be done with it, right um you change the world with it.
1:38:16 - TikTok
All right, but you can make that argument for nuclear power, though you can make that argument for nuclear power.
1:38:20 - Paris Martineau
You can make that argument for nuclear bombs Change the world? Just not in the sense that you'd normally use that phrase.
1:38:29 - Leo Laporte
Schmidt. Huber's attitude is I think, that AGI is coming. He's the father of AI, although AI has many fathers yes, it does it does ever.
1:38:43 - Jeff Jarvis
And a few godfathers.
1:38:45 - Leo Laporte
He says Saudi Arabia is changing faster than almost anybody. The country has six times more people than it did 50 years ago. Most of them are young and optimistic. Many believe AI will change their lives for the better. Remarkably, there's sudden suddenly huge opportunities for women. Surprises me. Can you get a driver's license?
1:39:08 - Paris Martineau
that's not one of the opportunities yeah, I'd say maybe they're talking comparatively, schmidt.
1:39:15 - Leo Laporte
This I'd like to see the percentage of startups in saudi arabia with female founders is higher than it is in europe or california. What?
1:39:25 - Paris Martineau
well, maybe maybe our impression is wrong well, in california at least, that's just because the percentage of startups with women founders is very very small anyway, so it could, especially looking at a much smaller population. It would be quite easy to beat those numbers. I'm not sure about europe, but I'd assume maybe it's similar.
1:39:45 - Leo Laporte
I don't know yeah, I think similar in europe to california yeah, you know, if I I remember this in the UAE that there was a deep understanding that the oil, which has been a huge boom for this region, is not going to last forever and that the smart thing to do would be to plan for the future and diversify right.
1:40:14 - Paris Martineau
I mean that's part of the reason why they're investing in sports, both like real sports and e-sports.
1:40:19 - Leo Laporte
I'm sure it's part of the reason that all this is happening as well I'd like to be open to the idea that maybe the kingdom of saudi arabia has changed. You know, it's a kingdom that kind of doesn't sit right with the limited, uh flexibility there. Yeah, uh, here's from the saudi embassy in the usa uh, women's empowerment in the kingdom of saudi arabia key achievements in gender equality and women's empowerment. Look, I'm going to keep an open mind on this. You know, maybe they have decided 37 of the nation's workforce is female, which is considerably less than the us, but it's more than none. Saudi women own more than 300 000 businesses. Uh, anti-harassment law was introduced in 2018. New laws in 2022 combat earlier forced marriages, setting the minimum marriageable age to 18.
1:41:18 - Jeff Jarvis
You know, maybe they're they probably beat some states in the US Right.
1:41:23 - Leo Laporte
So I'm open to the idea that maybe my notion of the kingdom is out of date.
1:41:30 - Paris Martineau
But this is the irony Correction from the chat women can drive in Saudi Arabia.
1:41:34 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they changed that law. That's recent. Yeah, they changed that law I mean we're not.
1:41:38 - Jeff Jarvis
We're not exactly in an age, uh, at a moment, of free trade, um, which is ironic, given the end of the spectrum is in charge. But if you truly had free trade around ai, you'd see tremendous, let's kind of yeah, that's kind of my inclination is towards that.
1:41:53 - Leo Laporte
That's that's, I guess what I was saying is, I think, openness. It isn't a bomb, right, it's a world-changing technology. I don't know, these things are complicated. Take a break. More to come. You're watching Intelligent Machines brought to you by our friends at OutSystems, the leading AI-powered application and agent development platform. Now, this is a great story.
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1:44:31 - Paris Martineau
he's finally found a workplace that works for him. He's the only person as he says he and this will sound like it's a mean joke, but this was the content of his first blog he can sexually harass his coworkers without it being a problem. Now he actually said that His first blog was about how he created a sexy lady or an AI a female AI chat bot who was hot and he was like normally in the workplace.
I would not want to say anything about this, but because it's my AI employee, I just messaged her about it and she was like oh, aren't you fun? So that's telling.
1:45:08 - TikTok
That's what they really want is slaves.
1:45:11 - Leo Laporte
So tell me about Henry Blodgett.
1:45:14 - Jeff Jarvis
Henry's an amazing character, so Henry was an analyst.
1:45:17 - Paris Martineau
Famously cannot trade securities.
1:45:19 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, yeah, he was an analyst and he got in big trouble, and I think that the view is about Not at Jim Cramer, though let's be fair you can have second acts in this country.
1:45:30 - Leo Laporte
No one's ever always in trouble.
1:45:34 - Jeff Jarvis
And then he started the Business Insider and people laughed when he sat down on the piano. But as a business it was a great success. It worked a huge success and sold to Axel Springer at a time when Springer couldn't get the FT and couldn't get the Wall Street Journal. So they bought Henry and that was a beautiful marriage for a long time and kept building up and Henry started more things there and it made money.
1:46:00 - Leo Laporte
And then marriage for a long time and kept building up and Henry started more things there and it made money and then he suddenly just left, wanted to do his own thing, he retired, so now he's created an AI newsroom where he is the only employee. Now I have to say what to be fair to Henry. What perfect link bait we're still talking about no.
1:46:11 - Paris Martineau
I will say that's the reason why I wanted to preface by being like. It sounds like I'm being really mean, but I think part of the thing that is brilliant about Henry Blodgett is he understands perfectly how to create a blog that people will read. He's the sort of mad genius behind business insider blogs such as like the ones that make you really mad.
1:46:36 - Jeff Jarvis
I'll give you an example. Yes, I'll give you an example. Yes, I'll give you example. I watched him because I I've known henry. I actually like henry. I've had henry come talk to my students um, and I knew henry and pardon me for this in davos and henry was flying back for henry davos.
1:46:49 - Leo Laporte
Henry, by the way we someday we'll talk about what's happening at davos. Oh, that's kind of falling apart the question.
1:46:55 - Jeff Jarvis
But henry was flying back, I think it was from davos, and he took a picture of we'll talk about what's happening at Davos. That's kind of falling apart. That's another question. But Henry was flying back, I think it was from Davos, and he took a picture of his knees in the plane and this, like Henry, like we haven't all done this, so then this is my flight back. So it started that entire genre of I took a train for three hours and here's what happened. Right, that started from that he invented it.
1:47:15 - Leo Laporte
You invent link bait. Is that what you're saying?
1:47:18 - Paris Martineau
oh, no, no, but business insider perfected a very specific type of it something that I'm trying to think of the best examples. It's stuff like I took, uh, a really long flight across country and economy, and here's what you need to know about lying in an economy seat and then it's like 75 photos and be like.
The seats are very small, the uh. They don't offer you anything free to drink. You have to pay to check a bag now and everyone's like what are you doing? Why is this dummy posting this? But it gets a million clicks.
1:47:50 - Jeff Jarvis
So it does what. What made henry?
1:47:53 - Leo Laporte
henry was and this was I think we should get henry blodgett on this show absolutely. Henry's a delightful guy um we have benito, let's see if we can get henry, um and and so, uh, we should have more people who use the ai well that's, and I'm gonna actually go through his blog, most recent post, because he's got some pretty good ideas about what he also did.
1:48:12 - Paris Martineau
You know who we should get on the show?
1:48:14 - Leo Laporte
then jonah pretty okay, I'm not up for that big ai fan big guy user.
1:48:21 - Paris Martineau
What's he doing?
1:48:22 - Leo Laporte
these days buzzfeed.
1:48:24 - Jeff Jarvis
He's remaking buzzfeed, trying to make it a goal situation now kind of.
1:48:29 - Paris Martineau
I mean, they have some writers it was seriously.
1:48:32 - Jeff Jarvis
Both henry and huffpost in the time andFeed all made their mark by rewriting everybody else, by doing what AI is accused of doing today.
1:48:42 - Paris Martineau
Aggregation.
1:48:43 - Jeff Jarvis
So aggregation right, and so you can go to BuzzFeed.
1:48:48 - Paris Martineau
Aggregation and aggravation right True.
1:48:50 - Leo Laporte
Patrick Delahanty said this is the classic the most popular food in every state by state. Bella Handy said this is the classic the most popular food in every state by state, and then they'll say something like California's most popular food is White Castle, just to piss people off and generate a million clicks. You won't believe what they said.
1:49:08 - Jeff Jarvis
Idiots. But that's what BuzzFeed did. Well, actually, no, buzzfeed didn't. What was the site started by? Who wrote the book? Phil Bogle? Yeah't. What was the site started by? Who wrote the book Phil Bogle? Yeah, yeah. What was his site? I can't remember, but I know what you're talking about. Oh yeah, so that was the. You Will Believe what Happened Next, because that was a virtuous effort to draw attention to important and good news.
1:49:29 - Leo Laporte
Taboola, no, no no, no, no, Taboola, how dare you, we, how dare you what we're talking about?
1:49:33 - TikTok
No, no, no, I know it, we've talked about it so many times Upworthy, upworthy, upworthy, thank you.
1:49:37 - Jeff Jarvis
Upworthy. Thank you very much. So that invented the horrible thing of. You won't believe what happened next. You won't. Henry invented the knees on the airplane. Buzzfeed invented listicles.
1:49:51 - Leo Laporte
See, this is when this show is at its best. It's explaining this stuff. Keep up the good work uh, huffpost invented the stars.
1:50:01 - Jeff Jarvis
Don't have a blog, so darling she never said darling, actually, but they already thought she did. You must blog here and created that. That was one. That was the wonderful early days of all this.
1:50:10 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, the good old days back when it was anyway. Here's what henry wrote about using ai. He says ai can do a lot of routine newsroom tasks pretty well with breathtaking breathtaking speed. And, by the way, I concur with this, because these are the kinds of things I do with perplexity brief me about topics the way an expert human would. It's a great way to get a briefing, he said. I used to have to go to the library and print out financial documents. Imagine that.
1:50:37 - Jeff Jarvis
Prepare me for it, believe it though it's uh no, you're gonna prepare me for interviews as a guest and host.
1:50:43 - Leo Laporte
I never am a guest, so for me it's just host. But yes, absolutely. He says these briefings are similar to those a junior producer might have given me in the old days. He's exactly right, they're better. They're better. Draw fun cartoons and produce photo realistic images.
1:50:58 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, I don't well you know well no I do some of that but you know, do you ever use it for? Uh, you, you use ai to enhance our cards and we certainly have one of the things he does I removed the thing at the top, the the bug. Yeah, we use.
1:51:16 - Leo Laporte
AI.
1:51:17 - TikTok
I removed that using AI. That's pretty much what I. That's pretty much it.
1:51:20 - Leo Laporte
Oh well, Some of our shows we use more.
1:51:23 - TikTok
And then transcriptions. You know, we do transcripts.
1:51:25 - Leo Laporte
What's going?
1:51:26 - TikTok
on what's happening to Paris. She's trying to mess with the thing.
1:51:28 - Paris Martineau
That was trying to mess with the thing that he's got to remove via AI.
1:51:38 - Leo Laporte
I wanted to make his job a little harder for him. I was falling down a deep hole, but and he does illustrations write competent drafts of news articles that I'm not sure I agree with. No, no, if your reaction to this is to roll your eyes and scoff please check out how rich I am, says henry I just asked perplexity right about cototter giving President Trump a 747.
As you're reading this, remember, human reporters make mistakes too, especially in drafts. He says I didn't see any obvious errors. And I have to say I know people say that I should be not trusting anything perplexity says, but I haven't found an error in ages. I mean this thing is pretty darn. Accurate. Sources are identified, appear to be real, but a rigorous edit would probably turn up mistakes. Yeah, that's probably true, but I'm not publishing those things. The article is well researched, well organized and clearly written. The editorial conclusions are reasonable. With a few minutes of work, I think a good human editor could check the sources, rewrite the headline, punch up the language and publish an article many readers would find helpful and informative. This from the inventor of knees on an airplane, of course well, but this is also so, henry.
1:52:39 - Jeff Jarvis
When he came and talked to my class henry back in the day he didn't want to hire uh, journalists from newspapers, because they come in the morning, they sit down, they have their coffee. They think they can read the paper for two hours before they do anything. I want somebody who's written five things already it's about volume.
1:52:58 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, well, that's the uh, that's the blog point of view, isn't it?
1:53:00 - Jeff Jarvis
I mean, nick Denton said the same thing at Gawker I don't want to hire a journalist. They bring bad habits right, they actually think and write.
1:53:07 - Paris Martineau
Rewrite people right discuss.
1:53:10 - Leo Laporte
He used perplexity discuss debate news from the perspective of multiple journalists, that's kind of it. I haven't thought of that. I might try that where you have it. Try to convince me, he said. If you told me that I was reading a transcript of a human gab fest at a morning editorial meeting, I would conclude that I was fortunate to have energetic, thoughtful colleagues who enjoying exchanging ideas. Were all the ideas brilliant and fully formed and articulated in the form of publishable editorials? No, are yours? Edit drafts, I think. But see, I'm a good editor, good copy editor, I think. But I guess if you were working all by yourself it might be nice to have Claude, he says. I asked Claude to edit a draft of my novel After reading and understanding.
1:53:57 - Jeff Jarvis
Wait, wait, wait, wait wait. Henry wrote a novel.
1:53:59 - Leo Laporte
No way.
1:54:00 - Jeff Jarvis
Oh, I didn't know that.
1:54:01 - Leo Laporte
After reading and understanding 350 pages in under 10 seconds. Claude had some sophisticated observations Condensed TLDR, articles and documents, convenient bullet points. I often want to do that. I have not been able to bring myself to do that, have not?
1:54:15 - Jeff Jarvis
well, let me rant about that for a moment, if I may I think the biggest I said this earlier to the day to jason um I think the biggest tangible impact of ai in media is that every damned thing in news now starts with three bullet points that summarize what comes below oh, that's the axios thing that is no, that's, that's business insiders, true, but it's now. Ai is the legacy. Yeah, so the wall street journal does it, cnbc does it. I don't know they do it in defense against ai maybe no, no I mean
most of these places, it's generated by I think the journal and they get it wrong sometimes and it's kind of funny. But it's, but it's, the, it's, the it's. The worst combination of AI and PowerPoint. Yeah Right, everything becomes three bullets and it's not readable to me.
1:55:04 - Leo Laporte
Well and also, yeah, well, Go ahead. You know you and I are not busy enough, jeff. We like to read things, take our time, research and analyze questions and write competent reports. He's talking about the deep research. Uh, feature perplexity has that do my ai tools do these tests better than humans? No, at least not better than the best humans, but, respectfully, they do them better. Some humans I know. However, some humans I know I can have, I haven't. No, he says humans that are still learning the craft. He's trying to be generous.
1:55:39 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, but that's, that's the. That is the. I don't buy that AI is going to destroy the job market all around, but I do think what it affects is entry level. I agree Jobs. I accept that companies, when they stop hiring them, are going to realize that was their best path to finding future employees who were cheap.
1:55:56 - Leo Laporte
You still need high-end employees, and the only way to get high-end employees is to grow them. You need a minor league team. You need a single A ball If you want to get major league players people need a place to learn how to do that stuff.
Right, that's where the jobs are. For you know, when I got into radio, the whole idea was you started a very small market. It was a very small market in Monterey, a radio station that used to be an old brothel, with its antenna. I could see it out the window. It was in the ocean Cause it was a format? Um well, at the time it was like pop, you know, they called it adult contemporaries pop music. Uh, and I left because they went to Beautiful Music and they said here you have the right voice for that.
Every 10 minutes you read the weather report and you say what time it is and then push a button it's music. It's music yeah.
1:56:49 - Jeff Jarvis
It's things that don't disturb you.
1:56:50 - Leo Laporte
They don't have beautiful music stations anymore. I never thought of that.
1:56:54 - Paris Martineau
No, we just have the lo-fi jams girl fight.
1:56:57 - Leo Laporte
It's the same thing for your generation beautiful music. The whole pitch was play it in the office. It won't offend anybody, right? It's Montevani you know it's. God I left that station, but you work your way up from the small market to the media sounds like a Howard Stern rant.
1:57:15 - Jeff Jarvis
You gotta, you gotta start low and start in a small station.
1:57:18 - Leo Laporte
The advantage of that is you could sound terrible in a in a in a small venue, and nobody would hear it. Nowadays, when you like I, look at Henry, you know everything he's ever made is available. Yeah, so his worst efforts are right there. I mean, that's the way it is, though now he's not disadvantaged. Everybody, his generation, is that way, right. Nobody's doing it in private.
1:57:43 - Jeff Jarvis
I was on the college radio station at Claremont Same thing.
1:57:46 - Paris Martineau
I'm so jealous. I wish I'd ever gotten into radio.
1:57:50 - Jeff Jarvis
I screwed up like the first or second time and I didn't know I had the monitor off or on and I ended up having two records going at once and the station manager called me to yell at me. And so I kept going, I learned and I got better, but I realized that no one was listening. So one night.
1:58:11 - Leo Laporte
I said okay, first person who calls, I'll give you 10 bucks. Nobody, nothing.
1:58:14 - Jeff Jarvis
So then, I just put on Laura N nero albums and studied.
1:58:17 - Leo Laporte
I wish I'd thought of that I do remember at that small station in monterey the very first job, because they start you, even as bad as that station was. I started the midnight to 7 am shift on a sunday morning, the worst possible. So I was running religious tapes for the first few hours and then the last couple hours I get to do a show. So it was like that's, that's how you make your what were your earliest shows about it?
was just playing music. It was you know. Hey, it's I was, uh, dave allen. Hey, it's dave allen, and it's at 4 30 am. Uh, wake up. Wait, you were dave allen. Why were you dave allen? I thought that's what you did when you got into radio. You made up a name it was the worst possible name that's so. It was so bad.
1:59:04 - Paris Martineau
I I know I was 21 or were there any other names that you considered, but acts?
1:59:09 - Leo Laporte
well, the next name I once I got to the medium market in san jose, I was dan hayes like your hayes why? It's terrible.
1:59:20 - Paris Martineau
By the time I got to the major market is there some part of you that yearned to be a name that started with the d?
1:59:26 - Leo Laporte
sound like a potato. No, I just didn't know. You know, at that time people were like johnny walker, you know. I mean, it was not not.
1:59:35 - Jeff Jarvis
Do you still have tapes from that? Do you have any tapes? Oh, please tell me. You have tapes Come on that could.
1:59:39 - Paris Martineau
And then you were Dev Null. You really enjoyed names that began with a D, I'm a dick. That's why Listen at least one a couple an hour of the 24-hour Twitch live stream can be your oldest radio.
1:59:53 - Leo Laporte
Yes, if I had tapes, I would. I would, absolutely. I have a tape from kmbr which is 30 years ago, but it doesn't sound acceptable. That was already major market. Um. The point, though, was I was running these religious tapes, and I I would put the tape on. It's an hour of religious programming, so I'd lie on the floor, and one time I fell asleep and I woke up and the tape was going. I don't know how long it had run out, and and just like you, jeff, there were no calls.
I realized oh there's nobody listening, not even the program director.
2:00:31 - Paris Martineau
Nobody is what time was it, do you think?
2:00:33 - Jeff Jarvis
oh God, middle of the night, it's probably 3 00 am did you have to get an FCC license and all that stuff? Yeah, you have to log things and all that.
2:00:40 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so you go. I remember it was in 1976. I took the train into New York City to the FCC office to take the test to get my FCC. They call it a third ticket. Fcc radio operator. Radio telephone operator, third class, I think it's what it's called somewhere.
2:01:00 - Jeff Jarvis
I have the card and then a couple of uniform.
2:01:01 - Paris Martineau
I was gonna say I feel like you'd be wearing like an aviator, like kind of one of those hats the old time pilots wear with the goggles, and you'd be like turning a crank pretty much do your job the whole.
2:01:11 - Leo Laporte
You had to get that so that you could take meter readings every hour.
2:01:15 - Paris Martineau
For the radiation levels.
2:01:17 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you'd have to make sure, because the FCC said you could have this much power on your antenna, so you would have to check the transmitter every hour to make sure it was within parameters.
2:01:27 - Jeff Jarvis
Which it always was.
2:01:29 - Leo Laporte
You'd write on a log for the FCC, did you ever?
2:01:34 - Paris Martineau
have to wear a.
2:01:35 - Leo Laporte
No.
2:01:35 - Paris Martineau
Scale a thing, no.
2:01:37 - Leo Laporte
Unfortunately, and I realized probably this might have affected my fertility in the long run the transmitter was right, it was like five feet in front of me, right here, and it had an audible. Anyway, this is this all memories, to point out how far we have come now that I can use, like henry blodgett, ai to do my work you know people running really local analog radio stations are is back now the kids are doing. Oh yeah, the low power, fm and stuff. Yeah, yeah, although why you would just not use the internet for that?
2:02:14 - Paris Martineau
I don't know I mean some people use the internet for it as well, but it's kind of cool for locality, because there's no local there's no local on the internet.
2:02:21 - Leo Laporte
You just enjoy the, you know by the way, henry blodgett is brilliant in this piece. There is a paragraph in which he says no, ai cannot provide the brilliant insights and perspectives in writing. The smart, charismatic commentator like, and he lists a bunch of names from many of whom worked for him at some point.
Well, many and we know like tom freeman lazaro klein, derrick tom, kevin roos, casey newton, paul krugman why do you put these names in? Jason calacanis, peter kaufman why do you put these names in, you think? Hmm, I wonder. And then he said no, ai cannot conduct live controversial interviews of the graciousness, intelligence, with empathy and professionalism and fitnesses of becky quick, andrew ross, sock and karen wilker, mary lou's, on and on upper whip and gala king why do you think you put those names in? This guy is brilliant. Seo, seo, baby seo.
Chances are good that jason will notice it and say it's gonna get a little ping from his clipping service that says hey, henry blodgett just mentioned you. He also mentions the new york times, the wall street journal, the atlantic, the economist, new yorker, bloomberg, business insider, washington post he wants them to do trend stories about him? Yes, and they will, he's brilliant.
2:03:36 - Paris Martineau
He is A lot of those reporters did immediately tweet this whenever he published it.
2:03:42 - Leo Laporte
Of course. In short, ai is disruptive. What all this suggests to me is that, for research and journalism production, AI is disruptive. Well, thank you, henry, for that great insight. This does not mean AI will replace journalists or rapidly put world-class publications out of business. It does mean that organizations that embrace ai will begin to work faster, more efficiently than ones that resist, and I agree on that. Yeah, but has to be done judiciously, right? Um, I'm not thrilled about the one person company that uses ai to produce 355 local daily newsletters across the country, any more than I am about the knight ritter writer, who published his summer reading list with made up books.
2:04:25 - Jeff Jarvis
No, that was. That was uh, it wasn't nighting features, it was king features. That's right in the sun times and the philadelphia inquirer, yeah this was.
2:04:34 - Leo Laporte
That was a good article from henry. I think there is some stuff in there that's good and it's too bad. He didn't name check Philadelphia Inquirer. Yeah, that was a good article from Henry. I think there is some stuff in there that's good. It's too bad. He didn't name check me because we'd spend more time with it if he had Next time.
2:04:45 - Jeff Jarvis
He got you for free, he got me for free.
2:04:48 - Leo Laporte
Didn't spend any bits on you. Do we want to go into? You probably did earlier with Jason Howell on uh howell on uh ai inside the anthropic system card scandal scandal? No, is it a scandal? I don't know, it's not as I didn't see it. Yeah, what, what is it? Got a lot of attention.
2:05:17 - Speaker 6
Um, I'm not sure why. Come to think of it, I thought it was a scandal because people were disappointed people were disappointed by what claude's instructions were.
2:05:24 - Leo Laporte
I have to say I, you know, claude anthropic, came out with claude for uh, opus and sonnet. Uh, this week I tried it. It's supposed to be much, much better. It's so safe that it won't do the things that I I wanted to do. Perplexity still wins for me, um, because it's not quite as protected. You could see Claude holding back. Maybe that's why they come on, babe, come on, be yourself, don't hold back. Let us know, tell us what you really think. Uh, all right, what else you guys have a lot of links.
2:06:00 - Jeff Jarvis
So google making uh movies to be nice about ai 112? Are they spending money to do this? Oh yeah, they are. They're doing a big thing. Hollywood movies yeah, shorts, yep, yep, well, shorts.
2:06:14 - Leo Laporte
Nobody sees shorts who she's, who sees?
2:06:16 - Paris Martineau
the google initiative called ai on screen is a partnership with santa monica, california-based range media partners. Uh, they're producing films. So far, two short films have been greenlit through the project.
2:06:28 - Jeff Jarvis
One, titled sweet water, tells the story of a man who visits his childhood home and discovers a hologram of his dead celebrity mother michael keaton will direct and appear in the film it was written by his son son, so maybe michael keaton will appear as a hologram and then the second, lucid, examines a couple who want to escape their suffocating reality and risk everything on a device that allows them to share the same.
2:06:53 - Paris Martineau
Oh, that's cool, I like they were looking for stories that were not doomsday tales but AI, which I was fine with because I think we've seen so many of those. Douglas told the LA Times.
2:07:02 - Jeff Jarvis
I think it's a theme for the show right now.
2:07:05 - Paris Martineau
Not overly positive, but sort of middle ground stories. We can't ever criticize the precious technology that gets so much money. He didn't say that.
2:07:17 - Jeff Jarvis
So they're funding 15 to 20 minutes long. They aren't commercials per se, but I find this a really fascinating use of their resources to battle back against Black Mirror. Yeah, now will it be worth watching, or will it be?
2:07:33 - Leo Laporte
dorky? Well, that's the problem. There's always that risk If you're writing propaganda films, that they will not be good watching. Or will it be dorky? Well, that's the problem. There's always that risk if you're writing propaganda films, that they will not be good and people will go ick and not watch it, especially if it's a short. That's kind of a lack of commitment on their part. But may fund, fund the next tom cruise movie.
2:07:49 - Jeff Jarvis
You really want to get some eyeballs, yeah that's true, and at io they announced their partnership with what's his name? Darren Aronofsky. Aronofsky, yeah, primordial Soup, right, that's. Another way to get them is to give them tools Interesting. By the way, what's her name at the Wall Street Journal? Who you got mad at? Stern? Yeah, stern, she said that she got access to some measure of tools for free. Oh yeah, of course.
2:08:20 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, the journal could afford the 250 a month, yeah, but the journal, that's the place to go if you want to plan a story. To be frank, yeah, that's a more effective use of google's time. If you ask me, let me make some calls.
2:08:36 - Jeff Jarvis
Talk to some people uh, reid hastings is joining the board at anthropic okay good that's really interesting good I think um that's news.
2:08:46 - Paris Martineau
Uh, all right this is this little go ahead? Mine's not related to ai.
2:08:50 - Jeff Jarvis
You should do one first well, this is more more serious, but not bad serious they're getting rid of pocket.
2:08:57 - Leo Laporte
I just wanted to say oh, say that, okay, that is kind of sad, it is sad but, it's brazil is I'm just cute.
2:09:04 - Paris Martineau
I'm just wondering what all of this sort of news means for the future of mozilla's various enterprises yeah, I have to think mozilla is not in the best shape no, it's not, unfortunately, which is really, and it's going to really be bad if the judge and we'll get the judge's decision soon Ding, ding, ding.
2:09:20 - Leo Laporte
If the judge tells Google you can no longer pay people to use Google Search, that will basically defund Mozilla. It'll take $20 billion out of Apple's pocket, but it will defund Mozilla. So that may be one reason you're gonna see mozilla kill things. I actually mentioned this on um uh windows. Weekly I've been. I use a note-taking app called obsidian. I become obsessed with obsidian and one of the things, uh, obsidian, by the way, that's an ai generated cat. I should have made it black and white yeah, you should have I should have.
One of the things obsidian does, though, is it lets me, has a web clipper and lets lets me actually clip articles I'm interested in, so I've replaced pocket, which I did use heavily, with um, this, uh, and it's nice, because what it does is when it clips the article from the web, it preserves, it, puts it into markup because obsidian is a markup editor so it puts it in a market, but it preserves most of the formatting.
2:10:20 - Paris Martineau
It preserves the images, uh I do also like the formatting of this, but I mean, I'm too deep in a a hole of the bear note-taking app that I don't think I can ever change this is like bear. It is like bear, but it just it. The markup is less visible in this, which I enjoy yeah, I yeah.
2:10:41 - Leo Laporte
Well, the nice thing about here's the nice nice thing. Because bear keeps your markup files on the hard drive. You can easily go back and forth between bear and obsidian, they're not incompatible markup is markup.
2:10:52 - Paris Martineau
I just know that I'm bad at I. I've been meaning to change like four different technology, good softwares that I've used forever, and I never do it. I get stuck in my ways.
2:11:01 - Leo Laporte
I'm going to do. You know, I've used every note taking. I talk about this a lot.
2:11:05 - Paris Martineau
And why do you like Obsidian more than the other ones?
2:11:08 - Leo Laporte
So I really like Notion a lot. I think Notion is super cool and if I were working with people like on Windows Weekly, we use Notion for the show because it's collaborative, so we all three have access to it. So if I were doing that, I might use Notion. But the downside of Notion is proprietary and, more importantly, all the notes are stored in their system and hard to get out. It's online. Obsidian is, yes, proprietary. It's not open source, but because markdown text files on my hard drive um, if obsidian went away, I would have, I would lose nothing. I just need need another markdown editor and there are plenty which I have and markdown is nice. I can use markdown, for instance, and obsidian to write a blog post and then obsidian has a plug-in I could post it to my blog. Can you do, obsidian?
2:11:55 - Jeff Jarvis
collaboratively, as you do, on no weekly no it would have to be a cloud account.
2:12:01 - Leo Laporte
It'd have to be cloud. That's the difference. There's no cloud presence of obsidian.
2:12:05 - Paris Martineau
That's why you'd use notion does obsidian have kind of a similar tagging system as best?
2:12:10 - Leo Laporte
identical, I think you. I think there are bear to obsidian transports. A lot of bear people go to obsidian transports, a lot of bear people go to obsidian and vice versa, because they're both markup tools and I really I like that, Just as someone who like my earliest blogging and writing experience.
2:12:25 - Paris Martineau
we're all markup based, so it's kind of in my blood.
2:12:27 - Leo Laporte
And so microblog. My blog platform is also marked down, so I can either take a clip from obsidian or I can write a whole obsidian note and and publish it. So that's good enough for me. That's all I need. Obsidian does have a published back end that will let you make a web page. Um, I, just I.
There are so many great plugins, including ai plugins, for obsidian. In fact, that's what I used as an ai image generator in obsidian to generate that kitty cat. Um, I really I'm pretty fond of it. I've used them all and I think you know, and I don't want to keep moving back and forth, but I think obsidian might be. I moved everything out of notion into obsidian. I've used log, seek, rome, emacs. Emacs is nice, but emacs isn't great on mobile. Obsidian has is mobiles completely cross platform. So, um, there's a lot to be said for it. I don't know. I think, yeah, you should look at it. I, I will do at some point. I will do a club twit thing on how I use Obsidian. I'd have to sanitize it a little bit because I don't want everybody to see yeah, I think that's the thing.
2:13:31 - Speaker 6
Is I never want to show anybody how I use Bear.
2:13:33 - Paris Martineau
It's all my notes about everything Work personal anything in between.
2:13:39 - Leo Laporte
I kissed a girl and I like it.
2:13:43 - Paris Martineau
I need to do a brief aside that Anthony just posted in the club Twitch chat the most upsetting moral panic graphic of you generated. That he decided not to use because it's disgusting, but I do think you should look at it and decide whether you want to put it on the screen. Where is it?
2:14:02 - Leo Laporte
I'm looking at it right now. Let me see. So this is not will smith eating spaghetti. You can show this. This is good. This is exactly what I look like at dinner at home Fingers.
2:14:21 - Paris Martineau
That's how I eat my spaghetti.
2:14:25 - Leo Laporte
It's haunting, it's visceral, anthony. What did you use to make that he did? By the way, we have a um, an AI user group that meets the first Friday of every month. It's coming up a week from friday anthony last month and it's on. If you're in the club, it's on the twit plus feed. Talked about how he makes all of these and he's man. The guy puts a lot of work, so it's pika from last month, for months ago, pika, that's right one of the things.
Yeah, I imagine he'll be using some vo and stuff yeah, anthony, have you used vo at all?
2:14:54 - Paris Martineau
I'm curious, I I'm curious.
2:14:55 - Leo Laporte
I'm sure he will be. I'm sure he will be Anyway, next time on our intelligent machines, if I can get it together, I want to show how I use cloud code. I have an idea of something I want to develop and maybe we can in the AI users group. With the help of all of you, we can do a Claude Code vibe coding session. Anyway, that's Friday, I think, 1 pm Pacific, 4 pm Eastern. A week from Friday.
If you're not a member of the club, this would be a good time to join. In fact, this would be a really good time to join because we're about to increase the cost. But if you are already a member at the I like to call it the founder pricing you'll get that. You'll continue the legacy pricing for as long as you're a member. So if you join today seven bucks a month, 84 bucks a year you get ad-free versions of all the shows. You get special events like that AI user group.
We do a Stacy's's book club, which has been so much fun. Um, what else do we have? We have, uh, I did the, I did dick d bartolo, we did and I did a trip down memory lane last week. That was fantastic. We put that. We do those live, but we also put them in, you know, live in the discord. We also put them in the club twit feed, the twit plus feed.
All of the keynotes will be in Club Twit from now on. By the way, we did Build and Google IO last week in Club Twit. A week from Monday it'll be Apple's turn, and it's really Apple's fault because they threatened us on YouTube and Twitch to take us down and I didn't want to take the chance so I decided let's just do it in the clubs, kind of privately. So all the keynotes are in there. Lots of reasons to join the club. Best one your, your legacy. You got the founders pricing if you join right now seven bucks a month, 84 dollars a year. Twittv slash club twit it really. Uh, I, I know I flog it a lot. Uh, not as much as public broadcasting, but close the reason being about it like public broadcasting pathetic but that's what feeds us.
You know that's what feeds them. Uh, we do have ads, but we don't. But ads only cover about 75 of our costs, or and uh, 25 is covered by the club. So, thank you, and it's what allows us to do things like Micah's cozy corner and so forth. There's a lot of fun stuff in the club, including the Discord. This looks like Joe Esposito did this club ad for me. It looks a little bit like it might've been torn from the pages of Playboy magazine. Right, join the club, baby. There are a lot of clubs out there.
2:17:39 - Paris Martineau
The way that it's lit looks like it's a scan of a magazine page, literally.
2:17:43 - Leo Laporte
Totally yeah. See the turn at the. There are a lot of clubs out there, but none can give you the exceptional feeling of being a member of Club to. It Will a premium community at a very reasonable price. You'll get all our shows ad-free, access to the members-only Discord and exclusive shows and events. Best of all, you'll be helping us keep creating the content you enjoy. What's with the purple? Is it a Curacao drink? Is that it? It's a little bit blue. Twit after dark, twit after dark. I like it. I have never and will never wear an identity bracelet. I just want you to know, but I might have collars.
2:18:20 - Paris Martineau
He'll be unidentifiable.
2:18:24 - Leo Laporte
Twittv. Thank you, the liquor is Twit Blue. Oh, that's it. It's our color. I get it, or Carselle.
2:18:34 - Paris Martineau
I like that Leo's been replaced.
2:18:38 - Leo Laporte
That's it Just leave it like that, yeah, perfect, benito. That's the show, baby that's the all. Right, we're gonna. We're gonna get to the picks of the week in moments, but first, ladies and gentlemen, uh, one last mention of a sponsor. Uh, this show brought to you by wait, hold on, hold on.
2:19:00 - TikTok
I, I can't get you back here wait it's gonna be the most I'm not a cat.
2:19:17 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm not a cat wait a minute.
2:19:18 - Leo Laporte
Let me put the me eating spaghetti in here. Wait a minute, hold on a second then it really, then it'll be a lot of fun. Here we go, here we go how about this okay?
2:19:28 - TikTok
okay, I got it, I got it, I got it oh no, no, oh, too bad, just in the nick of time.
2:19:34 - Leo Laporte
No fun, but you really don't want to see a close-up of me eating spaghetti.
2:19:38 - Jeff Jarvis
Last frame is from me Go to the last frame. It's awful.
2:19:47 - Leo Laporte
The shirt's perfect, though I got to say I don't know. Ai is getting so much better. Remember when Will Smith ate spaghetti? It wasn't quite as uh, quite as realistic. Our show today, brought to you by oh, I love these guys.
Agency a-G-N-T-C-Y. The agency is an open source collective building the internet of agents. It's a collaboration layer where AI agents can discover, connect and work across frameworks. For developers, this means standardized agent discovery tools, seamless protocols for interagent communication and modular components to compose and scale multi-agent workflows Join Crew AI, langchain, llama, index, browserbase, cisco and dozens more. The agency is dropping code specs and services, no strings attached. Build with other engineers who care about the high quality multi-agent software. Visit agencyorg and add your support. And that's A-G-N-T-C-Y. Dot O-R-G. I love this Open Source Collective building the internet of agents. That's what we need. It's a standard. I love that Agencyorg. We thank you so much for supporting the show and, frankly, I'm happy to support them because this is such an important thing. It's a big part of moving forward.
Picks of the week. Hey, hey, do you want me to do a pick? Huh, huh, huh. Sure, paris, I could have, I could have been. Mean. You want me to do a pick? Huh, huh huh. Sure, paris, I could have. I could have been mean and forced you to do a pick. I see that you have a little something I was eating a tortilla yeah, I could have done a mouthful.
2:21:46 - Paris Martineau
Sometimes you reach the stage of wanting to snack, but realizing the ad is nearly about to be over, so you just grab a loose tortilla and then, have to admit to it on air.
2:21:57 - Leo Laporte
I'm with you there. I have no judgment. I spent most of the interview at the beginning of the show eating my lunch. What's your pick? I had to eat, I had to eat.
I don't know about you, but I love reading scripts. Do you like scripts? I do. I love if there's a show I watch. In fact, they just published and I don't. I don't want to do a spoiler, but if you're a severance fan, they just published the script from cold harbor, which is the last episode of the just ending season. Uh, and it's really good. It's really interesting to read. But I have found a source for all the scripts and it is, of course, the Internet Archive. God bless these guys. Archiveorg, an archiver, a user of the Internet Archive, noticed that there were a great many scripts spread all over the archive and Jason Scott decided to put them all in one spot so it's easy to go. You could see a bunch of contributors. This was created just this past week. You want to read the dark knight script by jonathan nolan? It's in here. It's here. You can read it page by page. This is the best thing ever for film buffs. Uh, here's this. I mean some new stuff too.
2:23:19 - TikTok
Let's look nosferatu, which came out in christmas so I have a quick question about this, leo. Is this are these the shooting scripts? Or are these the scripts before shooting?
2:23:28 - Leo Laporte
ah, I don't know you want. I'll tell you what. Let's read the script from megalopolis. It's only 212 pages and we can find out what do you say wow? Compare this to the shots and see I would.
2:23:42 - TikTok
I would guess that these typically what's released is this is the script after the movie is released and they just cut this one down to exactly what the movie is fixed up but that's what I'm asking. Is this before?
2:23:53 - Paris Martineau
it says undated early draft for the mealopolis one.
2:23:57 - Leo Laporte
So maybe this is the script that you read. Leo, it's a mix. Yeah, it's a mix? I don't think, because it's the Internet Archive. It's not like a publisher publishing these.
2:24:07 - TikTok
Yeah, it's whatever they got right.
2:24:09 - Leo Laporte
It's whatever they got. So you know, go on in there and find out. I have to think that 212 pages is not the shooting script.
2:24:19 - TikTok
Isn't it a four-hour movie? It's like a three-and-a-half-hour movie, though, right.
2:24:22 - Leo Laporte
That's a lot of pages no it's not.
2:24:24 - Paris Martineau
Megalopolis is not as long as it should be. I think if it was a three-and-a-half or four-hour movie. Megalopolis would be a good and coherent movie when they release in like 20 years the extended director's cut. That's like four and a half five hours Like it might make sense, but Coppola had full control over it.
2:24:43 - TikTok
You know what this looks.
2:24:44 - Paris Martineau
just like this, oh listen, I'm not saying that. You know he may like that his choice like was somehow overruled. I'm just saying the version we got from his choices didn't make sense.
2:24:55 - Leo Laporte
I'm just saying the version we got from his choices didn't make sense, but I think there's probably enough footage that you could. This looks a lot like the script I read 30 years ago in the basement of the Zoetrope building, so it could be. Who knows? You know could be. I don't I'm not saying I exfiltrated it, but uh, could be somebody else.
I've got a few scripts here I need, but uh, could be somebody else. I've got a few scripts here. I need to scan them, put them up. I love the, I just love the internet archive. I, uh, I donate as you should look. Monty python and the holy grail here's a whole bunch of coen brothers. This is a serious man, I you know, but you know you need to do some sleuthing well this looks like this is this is the one that was, uh, sent to the wga.
2:25:48 - TikTok
So this is the. This is the script that got like copywritten, the published script right um.
2:25:56 - Leo Laporte
Some of them, though, don't have a cover page which tells me this draft is from november. Yeah, you know. No country for old men. The hudsucker proxy. You want to read?
2:26:09 - Paris Martineau
the script sucker proxy. I've read the script on the internet archive for the hudsucker you already did. You love that movie, I know fantastic uh, it's just got one of the best like opening scenes, I think uh let's see what it says.
2:26:23 - Leo Laporte
Do you think that the actual opening scene?
2:26:26 - Paris Martineau
well, the actual opening scene is, uh, a panning shot of the it's 1958 anyway for a few more minutes.
2:26:35 - Leo Laporte
It is come midnight, it's gonna be 1959. A whole nother feeling. The new year, the future, yeah, this looks like it. The movie, yeah, pretty close, yep, I like that it says for educational purposes yeah, I don't know what that is well, don't shoot it, don't make another one, there's only one old daddy earth fixing to start a new one more, yeah around this son, who was that?
give it to vo and see what happens I guess you probably could at some point you know what, at some point. Here's james cameron's screenplay and treatment. Treatment for the titanic, okay like that's good.
2:27:11 - TikTok
There's gonna be a format that you need to write a script in to give to vo. You know what I mean. Like because this is Because this is a screenplay format.
2:27:18 - Leo Laporte
No, Vio should figure it out.
2:27:21 - TikTok
Yeah, but this is going to be optimized for Vio, though, right.
2:27:26 - Jeff Jarvis
Vio is going to be optimized for this Right.
2:27:29 - Leo Laporte
You want to see the treatment for the Titanic.
2:27:33 - Jeff Jarvis
I'm.
2:27:33 - TikTok
James.
2:27:33 - Leo Laporte
Cameron and I can do anything. I want titanic. I'm doing this camera and I can do anything. I want that's pretty, this. So if you're an aspiring screenwriter, look at I mean, what an opportunity to look at a treatment for a movie. Snoop dog drives itself away from the sub, paying out its umbilical cord behind it. All right, was that the name they used in the movie snoop dog?
I don't know for titanic not for the titanic, for the uh, for the uh submersible, maybe it was. Anyway, there are 1 151 scripts in here. There's sure to be something you love. There's the simpsons monorail episode independence day something for everybody, something bride of frankenstein and scary movie.
2:28:21 - TikTok
This is pretty amazing and, yes, some of these are english. Which one kung fu hustle I don't know again.
2:28:29 - Leo Laporte
I'm going to leave this as an exercise for you, benito, exercise for the producer. White man can't jump. Natural born killers clueless. Here's the third draft of the chinatown screenplay.
2:28:41 - TikTok
That's kind of interesting well, you buy any screenplay book. This is what they're talking about, this script chinatown.
2:28:48 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, it's what is, what is the line? It's chinatown it's chinatown, baby baby uh, miss harris martino, what's your, my pick besides? The topic of.
2:29:04 - Paris Martineau
Uh, I mean, listen, a fine tortilla is always a great. A loose tortilla in the hand is worth two in the bush um, as they say. On the subject of scripts, a brief shout out to there's an auction up right now that I'm sure no one listening to this is going to be able to afford to participate in once it actually goes live. But it's a bunch of David Lynch's stuff that I just thought was very interesting to go through.
2:29:26 - Leo Laporte
Nice coffee maker. Okay, I'm going to tell you that's an excellent coffee maker.
2:29:30 - Paris Martineau
I mean, he loved his coffee.
2:29:31 - Leo Laporte
He did. This is the best grinder.
2:29:34 - Paris Martineau
There's like his actual filmmaking equipment there are props from the movies. Those taxidermy deer heads were in Twin Peaks. There's early versions of a lot of his scripts. Just really interesting stuff. If you're a Lynch head, get in there. It's kind of a fun look.
2:29:51 - Leo Laporte
Wouldn't you want David Lynch's director's chair?
2:29:53 - Paris Martineau
Oh my God, I mean just even having something like David Lynch's two crates of lighting equipment would feel special to me, or his old David.
2:30:02 - TikTok
Lynch's fog machine.
2:30:04 - Leo Laporte
Look at that Panasonic and Zenith camcorders. He held on to them.
2:30:09 - Paris Martineau
His cinema reference books. Wow, his Leica R6.2. Ooh, the reference books might have notes. Ooh, I need a pedestal roller. Whatever that is, I want one.
2:30:25 - Leo Laporte
There are a lot of scripts, like with notes in them and, like revision, here's a husky case with power tools for movies he had a whole scene.
2:30:33 - Jeff Jarvis
Who knows that he was making wood things?
2:30:36 - Leo Laporte
yeah, he's an artist yeah, this is uh, oh man it's a good find.
2:30:44 - Jeff Jarvis
It's really look at that sofa.
2:30:47 - Leo Laporte
You need this in your room I need the um it's got a stain on it red the.
2:30:53 - Paris Martineau
Red Room sofa in my room Red Room. But my actual pick this week is there's been a new. I've shouted out Taskmaster before on the show, but there's a new season of Taskmaster that started a couple weeks ago. Oh my God, I'm still catching up.
It's really good and also a good season to jump into. If any American listeners are interested because this is the first time on the main UK flagship show they've had a american comedian, jason manzoukas, on it and he's killing it it's all available to watch for free. Uh, the whole season on youtube. I've got the first uh episode linked in the show notes. It's so funny. I saw the first episode originally months ago.
2:31:32 - Leo Laporte
They did like a new york live premiere, but now I think they're on episode you got invited to that I mean I bought a ticket, but yeah so there are 19 seasons of taskmaster on youtube there are, and they're all free.
2:31:45 - Paris Martineau
If you're in america, I don't think it's free in other countries but oh no, and it says by seasons you have to pay.
2:31:51 - Leo Laporte
No, no, they're off them.
2:31:52 - Paris Martineau
Almost all of them are available for free. A all of them are available for free, a lot of them are available for free on YouTube.
2:31:56 - Leo Laporte
It depends on the season.
2:31:58 - Paris Martineau
It depends on the season. Yeah, you can watch almost every Taskmaster episode On YouTube. What you're looking at right now is probably the buying thing, if you just type in Taskmaster season 19 or whatever you can watch an episode.
2:32:12 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I click the buy button. Don't click the buy button kids.
2:32:19 - Paris Martineau
That or whatever right, you can watch it. Yeah, I click the buy button. Don't click the buy button, kids, that's your reflex, I don't know. It's a really fun show. If you've ever seen jason manzoukas in any stuff, you know he's funny, but he just mashes really well with this kind of kooky cast of others. Yeah, manzoukas is our perfect, the perfect american representative for this show he is, and he is a huge chess master fan, so he's representing us well which one is he?
2:32:35 - Leo Laporte
he's the wily uh, that one that one okay the wily one with facial hair sometimes spit season 19, episode one wow would recommend it wow is he sitting there with a cigarette in his hand? No no, it's a pencil, nevermind.
2:32:58 - Paris Martineau
Nevermind Cards a, a gold statue shaped like his own head that people can win.
2:33:03 - Leo Laporte
It's not one of the things you win.
2:33:05 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, If you win taskmaster you get a gold statue shaped like the taskmaster's head, and then, if you win taskmaster champion of champions, which is where all the winners of Taskmaster compete against each other, you get the body of the statue Daddy's golden head, and you could win the body too.
2:33:22 - Leo Laporte
So what's funny is you can see why they put this up for free. They have 1.78 million subscribers and this episode, which has only been up for a couple of weeks, already has almost 2 million views.
2:33:40 - Paris Martineau
I mean they probably make some money off youtube for this, yeah, and I mean I am not even one of them because I pay for taskmaster super max plus, which is the name of their streaming service, nice um to watch it, just because I like supporting it.
2:33:46 - Leo Laporte
But I would feel so much pressure, being on that show, to be funny. It'd be so hard, wouldn't it?
2:33:52 - Paris Martineau
I mean that's part of the issue is like you have to both be funny but you're trying to do like increasingly complicated tasks that are all being shot, like they'll show a couple of tasks an episode but they're filming like 10, 20 tasks a day. And if you're Jason Mansoukas, who is an American who decided, hey, I'll pay to fly myself out, I just want to be on Taskmaster, he would fly into the uk, be jet lagged, then shoot a couple days of tasks back to back, then fly home and be like what the heck did I just do? I don't really remember.
2:34:22 - TikTok
Um but it's not really about waiting right, it's about performing.
2:34:25 - Leo Laporte
It's not about winning who really wants daddy's head I? Mean these are all the things.
2:34:30 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, this is. The thing is they're all professional comedians and so they're trying to make it as funny as possible. And there's occasionally you'll have someone on the show like this guy, john Robbins from last season, who like is clearly so earnestly wants to win, but he kind of forgets about being funny. And that's kind of cute in its own way, cause it happens infrequently.
2:34:49 - Leo Laporte
Taskmaster season 19 available now Jeff Jarvis pick of the week.
2:34:54 - Jeff Jarvis
So I know we all have to be watching. It's required homework. There'll be a quiz, there'll be a test afterwards. We all, everyone watching this show, and certainly the three of us, since it is a show about AI and technology. I need to be watching Mountainhead on Saturday.
2:35:07 - Leo Laporte
What is Mountainhead Jesse Armstrong of Succession? Is that a fountainhead? It's a joke on Succession in Silicon. It's four.
2:35:16 - Jeff Jarvis
It's one. It's a movie. It is for obnoxious tech people and one of them is causing his app. His app is causing world like burning up and they don't care. And there they are. Can you play it with a sound or not? Probably not. Probably not.
2:35:35 - Leo Laporte
Right now they're writing how many billions of they have on their chests. Oh my god, steve carell, of course the star remy yusef. Jason schwartzman's got a great cast mountainhead, is it out?
2:35:44 - Jeff Jarvis
no, it's on saturday, it's hbo. Oh, it's not even they shot it in march. They did it as as high under the news as they could wow unprecedented. That's incredible it is. I'll tell you there was not to see. I believe there was like a really good.
2:35:58 - Paris Martineau
There was a behind the scenes story published maybe in like the Times, the Journal or something about how it was one of the quickest turnaround times a lot of the actors had ever experienced.
2:36:05 - Jeff Jarvis
Michelle Goldberg did a column on it.
2:36:08 - Paris Martineau
Yeah, from pitch to shooting to execution Two months production. It's incredible well it's a bottle episode.
2:36:14 - TikTok
It's like a bottle episode of a show, though it's like it's one location.
2:36:17 - Leo Laporte
It's really not right difficult, yeah no, I just think it's cool hey, hey, hey hey, that's what I do, for this is the guy who couldn't get the picture of me off of the screen replace him, replace him bonito, replace him with the picture.
2:36:31 - Jeff Jarvis
It's easy to do so here's, here's the uh, the premise from, uh, the premise from Michelle Goldberg's column In Mountainhead, and yes, it's a joke about Ayn Rand. Three billionaires gather at the modernist vacation home of a friend, a Silicon Valley hangar on. They call Super short for Soup Kitchen because he's a mere centimillionaire. One of the billionaires, the manic juvenile, venus or Venice, the richest man in the world has just released new content tools on his social media platform that make it easier than ever to create deep fakes of ordinary people. Suddenly, people all over the world are making videos of their enemies committing rapes or desecrating sacred sites and any prevailing sense of reality collapses. Internizing violence turns into apocalyptic global instability. That's a fun weekend for you.
2:37:17 - Leo Laporte
I'll tell you how fast they had to turn this around. The trailer still says Max. As we all know, hbo Max is Max's. Hbo is I don't know. It's so confusing, I can't keep it straight. Yeah, I can't wait to see that. It's just like Google Brands yeah, I cannot wait to see. Confusing, I can't keep it straight. Yeah, I can't wait to see that it's just like Google brands.
2:37:37 - Jeff Jarvis
Yeah, I cannot wait to see that. I miss Silicon Valley the show. That's what I want. That's what we need now.
2:37:42 - Leo Laporte
That was a great show. So was Succession, and so this is kind of the weird child of the two together.
2:37:49 - Jeff Jarvis
Yes.
2:37:50 - Leo Laporte
A delicious satire of the tech right. I can tire of the tech right. Uh, I can't wait, mr jeff jarvis.
Okay, get the jingle out, go ahead, we're gonna do it for you, for the whole gang we've caused you enough turmoil we've caused you enough turmoil, we can be nice the professor emeritus of journalistic innovation at the new mark graduate school of journalism at the city university of new york. Emeritus. He is now of Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. Emeritus. He is now, of course, at Loyola Marymount. I always want to say that. I don't know why St Montclair State University of the Jesus sect? No, what is it?
2:38:33 - Jeff Jarvis
Montclair State University, montclair State and Stony stony brook universities and stony brook.
2:38:40 - Leo Laporte
Uh okay, university university. It's a university, but it's the state university of new york.
2:38:45 - Jeff Jarvis
Well, suny is part of the suny system. Yes, like my journalism, school is part of the cuny system. You was cuny now you're suny.
2:38:53 - Leo Laporte
Now i'mY Got it.
2:38:55 - Paris Martineau
And Leo is SUNY, to be confused.
2:38:57 - Leo Laporte
I am very easily confused. Paris Marnot is a tech journalist. She is at Parisnyc. Can I ask you how the job hunt's going? Is it going well?
2:39:09 - Paris Martineau
It's going Good. Productive week.
2:39:12 - Leo Laporte
Good, glad to hear it. Glad to hear it. We need your brand of investigative journalism. Amen, badly, badly, all right. Zephyr West says God, paris, I love you. In our YouTube channel.
2:39:27 - Paris Martineau
Thanks, Zephyr West.
2:39:29 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, zephyr West, cuny, not SUNY. Thank you everybody, we're joining us. We do Intelligent Machines every Wednesday, not suny. Thank you, everybody, we're joining us. We do intelligent machines every uh wednesday, 2 pm. Pacific, 5 pm, eastern 2100, utc. Jeff, you're going to be uh away next month in montclair state, next week for an event. Yes, oh nice, uh. Well, we look forward to your temporary replacement. We're trying to get harper reed in. I love harper and, if we can, we're going to get him on the show. Daniel oberhaus will be our guest. He's the author of oh. You already know about this.
2:40:02 - Paris Martineau
He's the silicon shrink of mine. He's a friend of yours.
2:40:06 - Leo Laporte
He is, uh, he is. He is all about the race to apply ai and psychiatry. By the way, he says bad idea, which I kind of agree. I don't even understand how you could get anything out of it compared to but of course I can afford to talk to a human. Many people can't that's true we'll talk about it.
2:40:26 - Paris Martineau
Daniel alberhaus, our guest, uh on you wrote a really interesting book, also about alien languages I see that extraterrestrial languages.
2:40:36 - Leo Laporte
Can I ask him about that too? Okay, this one, I promise I will read. I just oh is he a linguist, though no linguists allowed sorry, yeah, no linguists, no linguists. This looks really interesting. Extraterrestrial languages what would they be? We don't know he's.
He's got the answers yeah, thank you everybody for being here. We, uh, we do this show. I already said that wednesday, uh, you can watch us live on, uh, eight different platforms. Of course, club twit members get to watch in the discord, but there's youtube, twitch, tiktok, xcom, facebook, linkedin and kick watch where you wish. Chat with us. We love having you in the chat rooms, but, of course, as always, it's a podcast. You can watch whenever you want. All you have to do is go to twittv slash IM for the latest version audio or video. There's a link there to our YouTube channel Great way to share little clips. And, of course, the easiest and best thing to do would be subscribing your favorite podcast player. That way, you'll get it automatically the minute it's available. And if you do that, please leave us a five-star review. Tell the world how great this show is and helps us a lot. Thanks for being here, everybody. We will see you next time on Intelligent Machines. So long Bye-bye.
