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Utis Fiala. Welcome to Silicantiousness. The DSR network podcast focusing on the artificial intelligence revolution. Politics and policy.
Hello and welcome to this week's episode of Silicantiousness. I am your host, David Rothkuff. And this week we are joined by a friend who has been on a past episode.
It was real good. You liked it a lot. And there's a lot to talk about.
“His name is Dave Karp, he's a associate professor”
in the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University at a contributor to Tech Policy Press. He's also the author of the future now and then on Beehive.
How are you doing? Good. Are you doing? Real good. What are the subjects that just sort of hits me?
10 times a week or 10 times a day, maybe? It is associated with the misperceptions and misrepresentations surrounding AI. And I just saw that the economists this week has AI has granted America vast new power.
It's like, okay, well, that's interesting. I don't agree with it. I'll get to that in a minute. And then on the other hand, you know, I'm a blue sky and I apologize,
but it's where liberals have to go. And it's like, hey, I was the end of the world. And I was like, okay, that's not true. And then I do deeper dives into the, you know, the more specialized media pertaining to this stuff.
We do a lot with MIT Tech Review. There's wire. There's, you know, tech policy press and other places. And still,
I'm always finding of like,
there's something wrong with the angle here. And you did a piece in your beehive columns. Just the other day, and it was called bullet points, digital futures past. In which you did the smart thing and said, well, how we dealt with past revolutions,
the same ones that were not the same size, and you flashed back to an article about the growth of the web from 2015, seems like ages ago. And then you talk about some of the shortcomings of the article. And I just want to read something that you said here,
and then ask you a question or too about it. But, you know, you said with regard to what you perceive as a mistake they made here, it strikes me as a column mistake among tech futures. It's relatively easy to tell a story that says one, our society has been defined by this one scarce resource.
Two, but technology is about to make that resource abundant. And three, this change is everything, just imagine the wonderful possibilities once this new area of abundance has arrived.
And then you go, they're missing a critical for step,
with every new abundance that will be new scarcity, and how we manage that scarcity will tell us what sort of society we will be living in. Look towards the scarcity, not the abundance. I thought it was a real deep insight, and I thought, first I will turn to you and say,
flesh this out as you will,
Because my just reading two paragraphs doesn't do justice.
Sure, thanks.
“So yeah, that's in reference to a piece that Kevin Kelly wrote in 2005 for Wyatt.”
It's my favorite Kevin Kelly piece for folks who closely read Wyatt.
There's a lot of Kevin Kelly and Wyatt. So this is number one for me out of a big pile. And it's because in 2005, you spend some time looking back to the web as it looked in 1995. And so to talk about what he got wrong,
and then says, where are we now in 2005? And let's just might know, 2005 was kind of just as we were getting into the web 2.0 revolution. So that is the age of social media, the age of the blogosphere, YouTube is coming.
There's this real sense of the title of the articles, actually the web is us. So there's this real sense of people have shown up, and that's what the web is going to be. It's user-generated content.
Everybody offering stuff up together, and there's going to be an abundance. And then he looks forward to 2015, and what he invites us to do is imagine a world where everyone is creating a blog, or a piece of music or a video,
where everyone is a content creator, and nobody is just a consumer. And he's kind of saying, like, you know,
imagine how incredible there will be.
And I teach a class every year called the History of the Digital Futures, so this had come up during the semester, and when I asked my students to sort of say, like, you know, did he get it right or wrong? empirically, he's right.
Like if you just do accounting exercise, and we include things like blue sky posts or exposts, probably everybody does create some content on average every year. And yet it didn't feel like the world that he was describing to my students. And the thing that they were all kind of grappling with
is like, hey, he's right, but he's kind of missing the point. And that's because once we live in a world where there's all that content, well, then it becomes a world of algorithms. It becomes a world where attention is the scarce resource, and the fight over attention defines so much of our politics, so much of our society.
Right, these are students, if you're 19 years old today, then you've grown up amongst inclusions or culture. And that is a culture in which everybody's creating content, but it's also a culture where you're kind of sick of the influence or industry, and find a kind of gross and grossive in a way that in 2005 we didn't imagine.
Again, that's because he was imagining the abundance and not sort of instead focusing on, well, once we have that abundance, we'll be scarce, attention will be scarce, then how are we going to manage attention? And that fight in sort of the way that the company's made sort of found their way
to making money off of attention, that defines platforms today, that defines the influence industry, that sort of is the real story of the world that, you know, my students are growing up in today. Then I don't know what exactly that's going to mean for AI,
“but I think that's the question we should be asking.”
Because I do hear people like Sam Altman saying, "Yeah, you know, AI is just intelligence." And we're going to meet our intelligence and we're going to sell intelligence, and intelligence will just be on top. I don't, I'm a bit of an AI skeptics, I don't know if that's exactly true. But even if we were to say, "Okay, sure, in 10 years, we'll work it out and that's true."
Once we have an abundance of intelligence, what is the thing that will actually be scarce, and importantly, how are these companies going to monetize that? And what's that going to do? Because there's a lot of opportunities to make it better or worse.
Right now with these companies in control, it seems like it's all kind of going bad. But that, to me, is the question we should be asking is, "Okay, let's say that that's true. What will the scarcity be and how will that go well or poorly?" Well, I agree with you, and I think that's a right question to ask,
and I think you framed it well, and I encourage people to go and read the piece. Let me pick up though, because it raises two or three questions. One of which, as I was reading it, you talked about how back in the day, when the assertion was that everybody would be able to be a creator. Everybody would have platform.
One of the questions was, "Well, what then?"
“I mean, who's going to consume it if everybody's a creator?”
And you talk about this concept, I think you call it prosumers or something. I don't like the word, but... It was interesting in that context, but also it was prescient, right? Because it's not just that there are producers who become consumers in that work. In the world of AI, the mass consumption of this stuff
means that most of the people who are consuming it will actually not be the first set of eyeballs
or electrodes or whatever it is that land on it, right? You know, if I go and write something, and it ends up being consumed by the right bots, it could have more impact than if it's consumed by a lot of eyeballs directly, right? And so, you know, I think part of it is also something that should go without saying,
For a reason I'll get to it in a moment that you also touch upon, it doesn't.
And that is, we don't understand exactly what's next.
And so things are always presented through the lens of our last experience,
and not with that ability to imagine our next experience very well. And I just, before I get on to the next point, it's just what I may be want to comment on that. So that brings up two things for me. One, if you read Renee Durrest on your show, yes, make up. So Renee, I was at a workshop where there are almost a year ago,
and I remember she mentioned offhand that she had started thinking about writing for, like when she is writing, one of the things that she's aware of is that she's kind of writing for the bots, right? Like affecting what's going to come up when people do general AI searches. And remember her saying that, and I thought to myself, that's really smart, and also that is so depressing too.
Like as a writer, the idea that I would be writing for AI is to affect what's going to cope in AI search seems both very strategic, and also my god, I hate it, and I want to real against it.
But then I always talk to me, because it just seems so smart.
“But you never know the AI may treat you fairly than other academics to it, right?”
It could, it could, it could, but you don't have to tell you, it's okay as the trigger. That's one thing that comes up, is I do think there's going to be a bunch of learning over the next few years about how do these AI fit into critical systems, and how do people then strategically try to bend that? In the same way, in the bots, the big thing that people were learning how to do
was search engine optimization, and then the teens, it was social sharing optimization, like how do you make something pop on Facebook? We're probably heading towards a time of what bots based search optimization, or they'll come up with some better term than that for it.
Like that's going to come, and there's going to be at least a few years
where being ahead of the curve there probably matters, and the social impact of it are still being sort of figured out.
“But yeah, I think you're also right that we don't know what the scarce thing is going to be,”
and all of this is just sort of, like, this was happening in a time of broad social stability. It was even happening just in sort of the politics and the society of the mid-auts, right? Like 2005 when Kevin Kelly was writing that, we were, you know, we were in the Iraq war, we were in the Afghanistan war. Times weren't great, you know, I'm a liberal, I was not a fan of how things were going
with George Lee Bush, and we were in the midst of Hurricane Katrina, and also things were so much better than they are now. Right? Like you could live, you could pay rent in major cities without nearly the hassle that you do today. There's just a lot of stuff that is getting worse and more precarious. And in that precarity, all of these questions end up taking on, I think, greater stakes.
This brings you back to the Kevin Kelly piece, another one of the things with that idea of pro-sumers, that wasn't in the piece because I think it wasn't a top-mind in 2005. Like part of why we got the influencer industry is because as soon as there was money in creating content online, people wouldn't figure out ways to scoop the money out. And then the question became, okay, how do you make enough money to,
“how do you make them enough money as a blogger that you can do that full time?”
And in 2005, you know, sidebar ads allowed you to do that, but then as everything got more expensive and also money got concentrated, the answer to that got tougher, right? And right now, as we look at AI bots kind of swallowing the web, the open web, part of the question here is, how is anybody in journalism going to make enough money to keep the lights on and pay their rent?
And if the answer to that is like they kind of can't, then what happens to all these different things? So there's both the scarcity of, let's say that it actually is intelligence, okay, what become a scarce once intelligence abundance? But then there's the paired question of just how are people going to make enough money to live? And how do these companies that are trying to scoop the money out to serve their investors?
Like how is that going to impact it all? And to me, like that turns me sort of pretty AI negative pretty quick, because it just seems like all the things it could be, it'll probably be the most brittle and worst version that we could get. This podcast is underwritten in part by the US Embassy of the United Arab Emirates.
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Well, of course part of the problem is AI is 1,000 or 1 million or 10 million things.
And so to say, well, AI is this, is part of, you know, is a key issue, and I don't want to get back to it at the end, because to be honest with you,
“I think we may have touched upon this last time we talked,”
but the failure of the AI industry leaders to frame what their product was properly. And to think of it in terms of its benefits for society rather than its benefits for them, strikes me as one of the great failures of all time, and it's led to a situation where you have literally a generation,
anybody under 40 in the US, AI is bad, AI is not 100 things, it's just bad. If you were to say, oh, here are new Kellogg's cornflakes with AI, they'd say I'm not eating that, because AI is bad. Now, you get to one of the reasons why that is the case in this piece,
and it's your concluding point, which is, first Silicon Valley built hardware that got
“smaller and faster and cheaper and better.”
Then Silicon Valley built software that became the mediating layer of the global economy, and then the finance industry ate the software industry, and every tech company today is a finance company. Aguero or software ate the world, and then finance ate software. And I thought this was super insightful.
And of course part of the reason it resonated was that in the prior section, you talk about the fact that SpaceX had just gone public. And here you have a company, just to pick up that example of that. It has gone public with a valuation of 1. dot, whatever it is, trillion dollars. That is a money loser that is, it's entire sort of growth is predicated on the idea
that people are either going to go to Mars, and they're going to do it in SpaceX rockets. That won't blow up, right, or alternatively, because this is the other angle that the finance industry blurs who are running tech, though, we're going to have space-based data centers. And it's one of those things when the past three months I went from nobody ever talked about that
“to everybody I have lunch with goes the secret is space-based data centers.”
And when it happens that fast, I'm like this is bullshit. Now, you know, might there be some truth that there might be. But the point is Elon Musk is not a technologist. Elon Musk is a stockhuster. And amazingly, the companies that he has invested in have all had really big problems. And yet, he trades it forward, he trades it forward, and it's all based on something else you talk about,
which is this sort of core financial issue, which is not that you're creating wealth by creating value. But rather, you're creating wealth by predicting what somebody else will want to buy as a financial instrument, and that you can sell before people realize that you aren't creating anything at all. And, you know, which is sort of the scam of bubbles. And I just, I thought it was a great point. I just wanted to hear you expand on your views on that.
Thanks. Yeah. So several points.
I see the first thing is going back to why everyone under 40 seems to hate AI.
It's not that people can't imagine a future where AI is useful. It's that they don't buy it because the finance industry ate the software industry. And it did it long enough ago that when Elon Musk or Sam old men are any of these figures, talks big vision about the world they're creating, people say, yeah, I don't believe you. Right? Like when young Mark Zuckerberg or the Google guys in the arts,
we're expounding about how their technologies are going to change the world, people believe them. And that's because it was more believable than finance was still in Silicon Valley then, but not at the same scale. So now when you're in Musk says like, yeah, I mean, again, to pick up the SpaceX thing, either we're going to Mars or like, we read the SpaceX perspective, which I do not recommend to people because we'll drive you insane. Like they claim that it's going to be worth all that money because AI will become 90% of the global economy.
Growth will take up 90% of the AI economy.
So you both need to believe that AI will transform the entire global economy and like be what all,
“whatever thing gets spent money on. And you have to believe that growth is the thing that will beat out cloud.”
It will beat out chatchipiti will beat out Gemini, which are two big leaps. Like you both need to be.
Well, there's actually a third one. I saw a day someplace on the internet where somebody, I don't,
maybe you saw it or maybe you wrote it, but where it said that the way people are going to make money on Mars is by creating intellectual property. I didn't write that. And I was like, what the fuck?
“I mean, you know, we don't, I mean, who knows people are going to get there to have it going to live there?”
But yeah, that you figured out the Martian economy and that's going to drive an investment decision to that. That's so like the other bit that we need to bring in here is the Keynesian beauty contest, but all. Right? Because there's a narrow way that the value of the SpaceX stock makes sense. Right? Like when we say that like I stock has value, there's an old way of looking at it that says, oh, yeah, you're buying a share of the company and you're buying a share of its future profits. And so the value of the stock is the market sense of the value of its future profits.
“And if you take that version seriously, then everything about SpaceX makes zero sense. Like that cannot be right.”
But there's a second version, which is just when you buy a stock in a company for a price.
You're making a bet that, you know, if you buy a stock in the company for $170, you were betting that someone at a later date will buy it from you for $170. Right? And so that's just the Keynesian beauty contest, which for people to know that this is a classic Keynes thing. Keynes described the market as not betting on which beauty contest contest is the most beautiful, but which one will other people casting ballots or casting votes say is the most beautiful. So you're betting on other people's judgment.
That allows for all of these market booms and booms and busts that always did. And so Keynes back in the day was saying, yeah, markets are fine so long as they're really small, but they're not the real economy.
And now they're basically larger than the real economy, which means that all of these tech companies and, you know, really the entire economy is just acting like finance companies.
Right? Like they're just trying to win Keynesian beauty contests. The one skill that I have to grant you on Musk is that he's really good at meme stocks. He is very, very good at saying, okay, like Tesla's not going to sell any cars anymore, but it will still be a multi, you know, still be a trillion dollar company. SpaceX, like it is really kind of like it's sickly entertaining to check out the stock ticker on SpaceX and try to look at the price to earnings ratio, because it's it's unavailable because it doesn't have earnings. It's company that loses money that is worth more than Microsoft.
Well, look, look, look at, look at, look at all of these companies that are out there. Look at the fucking entire crypto business, which, you know, is selling make believe to idiots, but all of it is based on the idea that I can have a little more information than you and get out a lot faster than you. Yeah, and that's not the greater. Right. Right. And we are at this point, but, you know, there does seem to be a related problem to this and I, you know, I'm not saying you're a sociologist and I'm certainly not a sociologist, but the system ends up creating perverse incentives and who leads these companies.
Yes, you know, 150 years ago when John D. Rockefeller was creating a standard oil. He figured out that if you put an extra drop of or you took an extra drop of sealant off of a can, he could save one sense of can and he would increase his profits. And the banker said, oh, this guy knows how to, you know, produce and his part product and he's going to make me money. And so I'm going to now John D. Rockefeller's, you know, strange bad dude in some respects, but it was about creating the product. Now that, you know, you say meme stock, which is a nice way of saying it, but I think that there is a huge incentive to being what I would put in my own financial terminology and I did work for a couple years at institutional investor.
Lying assholes because because, you know, I, the two things you want in a guy runs a company is the ability to sell it. Call it the meme or call it whatever it is. And really to oversell it because at the beginning, you want to create that demand and also the willingness to crush all his partners to go in, you know, and be the guy who when it goes to the B round and the C round fucks everybody else over, but keeps their own head above water. And so you know, one of the things that I think is just amazing. I mean, just amazing is here we have AI, the re-invention of fire, the transformation of the global economy and there is not one leading CEO spokesperson for it who is not a lying asshole.
There is this, you know, amount rush more of shitty people and and and frankl...
These kind of leaders. Am I overreaching?
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We appreciate your support and thank you for listening. Now back to the show. No, I think that's exactly right. And some of this goes into as well to bring in another teen's quote, a real teen's fan, you know, teen said that the market can set stay a rational longer than you can stay a solvent. Right, the crypto examples are great examples. Like it's not just the crypto is the same type of insane as all as space and all these valuations, but it has been this insane for so much longer than would make any sense.
“I started following crypto like paying attention to it. God, I think around 2018 and at that point it seemed like, okay, that has come and gone.”
There have been two crypto waves since that, which means that, you know, when I started reading this and wrote it off as as ridiculous if I had just put money in it and waited.
I would have four or five times more money than I like just by reading that and instead of saying this insane saying I want to get into it. That does then end up selecting for people who look at this stuff and rather than saying that makes no sense say, this is a great grift. I'm going to get in on it. The other bit that comes to mind. So wonderful book by John Kay. I'll tell other people's money. Came out in 2015. So it's helping to explain the financial circumstances that led to the great financial crisis. It was not best book of the world best book of the year by like financial times that I want to came out great book.
For that get older now, old now. There is this phrase in there that helps to explain it all. It keeps rattling in my head, which is I'll be gone, you'll be gone. And he's explaining how all of these finance deals that people were making leading up to the great financial crisis. Where people who knew like, yeah, we are selling derivatives on piles of shit, eventually this is a time bomb that will go off. But probably not right away. And then the meantime, the two of us making this trade are making out like bandits. And that's sense of I'll be gone. You'll be gone. It'll be somebody else's problem.
Undergirds that system that gets way out of hand. And of course then after the great financial crisis, all the people with that type of instinct that cunning to make money and lead it to be somebody else's problem. When the finance industry starts facing regulation, where do they go, they go to Silicon Valley and try the same stuff without the regulating. Well, but I'm going to make you feel worse. And we're collecting this on a Friday in the summer. I don't want to ruin your weekend.
“But all those tables we get, well, you should have done a different podcast. Anyway, but I'm going to make you feel worse because you're absolutely right about this.”
And so we have the software industry being eaten by the finance industry and then we've got the perverse incentives and that that lead bad people to be leading it. And so you get this avalanche of bullshit with also, you know, bad motives behind it and people not trusting it and so forth. But something else happened in the course of the period between the wired article, well, right around the time that you're a talkie about. And that's Citizens United. And what happened with Citizens United? Citizens United said money is speech, so the people with the most money have the most speech.
So we're in this system where because people are into the market, they're fig...
I'm a billionaire. I don't even live on the planet earth. You guys can all be suffering. I'll be fine. So what do you do? How do you do that? Well, you were mentioning regulations. If I have hundreds of billions of dollars, I can pick politicians who are going to set rules for me and better yet. And this goes back to a very first point. They won't understand a fucking word I'm saying. So I'm going to tell them what's going to happen and they're going to have to do it because national security or economic prosperity or competitive.
I make up something. They'll do it. And so in the course of the period between that wired article and now the percentage of campaign finance from billionaires has gone up 14,000%. So that sounds like a crazy number. That's the number, right? Maybe I or now. But the point is that the political system becomes hostage to the financial system, which is based on these irrational market perverse incentives cocktail. That's sort of bad for everybody except our 11 billionaires plus one trillion. Right. Yeah. That's exactly right. That actually doesn't make me feel worse.
But only because I agree with you and all that. Well, it should. It should.
“Like, oh, I think it'll listeners feel worse already there with you. Yeah. Fix you feel exactly the same. You're exactly right. I'm actually a political scientist by training, which matters because back around 2010, 2011.”
I was occasionally participating in campaign finance conversations. And we believed around that. That's charming. That's where it was charming when we had those money in politics was a real problem. That's when rich people could bundle together hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And by, but I guess with like a lower case B politicians, we now have individual billionaires who have decided we're unspend 300 million on this election.
And it's actually narrowly rational. You know, like you don't must decide that I'm going to spend 300 million on this election. And so we figured this could help him buy a government. And when he bought the government, that meant that none of the regulators would regulate him. And all the investigations of it. There was an SEC investigation that just got dismissed a little while ago. This was when he bought, this is such a narrow thing, but when he bought Twitter. And he was when he was acquiring the stake to buy it.
“There was some people where he had to fill out to say, I've bought more than I think it was 10% of the company.”
And he has to do it when he's gotten past that. I think it was 10 days or so before he submitted that, which cost investors money because the price would have gone up, they know he was something to stake. So he didn't fill out the formula. It's a paperwork era, but it had several like tens of millions I think that he saved by not filing the paperwork. SEC investigators, it takes them years and years.
And then when it becomes Trump's SEC, they say, we're basically just going to let you off the hook.
So that is tens of billions that actually might have been hundreds of millions that he saved by having bought the government. And the government said, all of your law breaking will just let go. Right now, I both don't have hundreds of millions of dollars to spend to buy a government. But also if I did, they wouldn't be letting the off of my major fines because I don't break the law for hundreds of millions of dollars. Well, I mean, by the way, there's a story, it's a, it's a steal.
There's a story today, it is. There's a story today that Trump made several thousand trades in the first part of this year.
Didn't file the paperwork, and the trades are worth $750 million in the fine it got was $700.
Yeah, so it's, you know, which you probably won't pay, but it does lead to one last thing. But before we go, which goes, so all the way back to this kind of a start, and my issue about, you know, it's distorted presentation of things.
“Because it says here, AI, which as we've established, I think, is not one thing, but okay, AI has granted America vast new power.”
Now, here's the problem with that. This is the argument that's being made by an open AI in a throw pick and, and, and all these other companies and, and, and, I mean, Jensen Wong to some degree within video and so on, which is, this is a crucial to us national security, and you've got to give us all of these advantages, so we can grow our companies and beat everybody everywhere else in the way. There's a problem. It's not true. The, you know, in other words, owning AI is like owning fire. It's like owning the industrial revolution. Can you gain an advantage of a couple of years in a certain technology? Yes, he can.
That was the underlying thesis of the high fence, small yard, the trade polic...
We know that's completely true. China's had an almost everything. Now, and where they, where we didn't give them a technology, they found a workaround.
And, and so part of the problem with all of this compounded is that the policy makers and the regulators are also being told lies by the guys who are in charge, who have all this cash, though they have to listen to, because they can't be in power if they don't get the cash. And those guys, because the way the system works, end up being a bunch of liars who don't give a shit about the country, but only give a shit about their bottom line. And therefore, they create this in, meanwhile, there are benefits to, I don't know, AI helping to speed up quality radiological diagnosis or AI helping planes to fly, so they don't have to follow some old system in the sky.
And they can, you know, get somewhere safer and faster or AI allowing us to utilize alternative energy. And in other words, they're benefits, but, but, but those things people aren't seeing or hearing, because the black and white story of the broad brush stroke story is so fucking depressing and awful for all the reasons we've just talked about.
There's two bits, I would, two riffs that I give on that. One is I, I still think that is helpful.
Because there, there's an old line that machine learning is everything that computers can already do, and AI has everything they can't do yet. And one of the interesting bits of the past few years is that we've reversed that, so now AI is everything that computers can already do, and also everything that we imagine they can one day do.
“But I think it's still useful as sort of a thought exercise to replace the words better machine learning, anytime you say AI.”
So like, there's a lot of good things that better machine learning can absolutely do. Can they make the grid more efficient? Yeah, of course, you've machine learning in the grid. If we had better machine learning, that would probably help. Radiol, it can certainly, I would imagine, help radiologists. I know he complains about it. It doesn't work very well yet. It's a cosmopolitan problem. But all that certainly could happen. Built into that, and this gets to your liars point, there was the theory going around during the Biden years that AI was something genuinely new and different, and whoever cracked artificial general intelligence, which they then started calling artificial super intelligence, because every six months they need a new word.
“They're hit that milestone, where the AI then trains itself and proves, like that's when we would be essentially creating the next, like, like a new species, right?”
It's conscious, and it will self-improve, which means whoever gets their first, will then have a runaway advantage that no one else can catch up with. So there was that sort of hypothesis that this time will be different. But if you take that seriously, then the idea of we need to make sure where the ones you get there, because whoever gets that first step, then gets all the other steps.
If that were true, then that all would make sense. And the problem is that that was kind of bullshit.
Well, and it was bullshit for several reasons, right? A bunch of these guys five years ago didn't give a shit about Washington. Then they realized Washington was getting wise to them. So what did they do? They all came in, they set up things in Washington, and what was the message of the think tanks? Almost universally. The threat of AI is it will destroy the world. And it was really this kind of slate of Anthony, which was look over here, you know, AGI is the enemy. And if you're not focused on that, it's where all bonds.
And all the other stuff, which they should have been focused on privacy and security and AI plus crypto and AI and global inequality and AI and jobs and, you know, it's there. And you want to focus on that because that was a problem for them. And so it was a little bit of slate at hand.
“And the came in and said, AI is so dangerous. It must be regulated and also you must let us pick the regulations, right, which is, by the way, where we are.”
And so now this week we have the White House, which is going to regulate AI. It's not going to regulate AI, David Sachs calls up Donald Trump. He says, "Don't do it." He says, "Okay, I won't do it." And then somebody else calls up and says, "Yeah, but in throw pick." And then so then they say, "Well, oh, yeah, they're jail breaks. You don't think Donald Trump has the slightest fuck it. I mean Donald Trump thinks that jail break may be his only hope in the future." But he doesn't know beyond that, right? And so then they go, "Okay, well, we got to do this with anthropic because of jail breaks."
Which, by the way, if they exist as a thing may not actually be controllable.
But again, it's because there are sort of the politician whispers out there, and unfortunately for all of us, they're the main checkwriters. And the checkwriters in Washington get to be the lawwriters and their regulation writers.
“And this is particularly, like I sometimes think about how much differently I would feel about the AI future right now. If Kamala Harris had won, and that meant that Lena Khan was still in charge of the FTC.”
And it wouldn't be all the way better, but I would feel at least a little bit better about it. Because part of what's sort of pressing about this is this sense of, well, they just decided that Elon and Sam Altman and their buddies,
like David Sachs hangs out with those guys. And now David Sachs is in charge of deciding what the rules will be.
“But David Sachs grew, went to college with Peter Teele. Right. Yeah, like he started, he worked at PayPal and with Elon.”
They are all on the same group chats. And when that group chat just gets to decide what's going to happen for all of National Policy, even if they say, "You know, there are ways that AI could be really valuable for the future."
Like it certainly could be, but I don't think that it will be because it's just going to benefit like that small circle of dudes. And also, they're kind of idiots. They are morons.
They are. But I think, you know, your next book should be called group chats of the apocalypse. Because because, because we are not focused, you know, it's like I'm worried about AI. I should be worried about the fucking group chat of a bunch of assholes who are, you know, who are also too much greater extent than anybody wants to give them credit for, as you just said, idiots.
“Well, if I can self-plug, my forthcoming book in January is vapor were incorporated, how Silicon Valley sells the future to control the present.”
Do you like group chats of the apocalypse as a follow-up book though? That is a really good title.
All right. Well, that's your, that is the high paying, that's the high paying pay off a big of this podcast. Well, maybe if you like it enough, you'll come back sometime. Any time you want to help me, I'd love to chat. Okay. I really enjoyed it today. And everybody, we will be back next week with more Siliconologists and hopefully we'll pull those scales away from your eyes one way or another. Until then, so long. This was Siliconjustness, a production of the DSR network.
