In this episode, I'm joined by Luke Avery, a software engineer, to talk about artificial intelligence and its impact on the world. We talk about where artificial intelligence is now, where it will be in the future, and what we should be worried about.
00:03:01.000So let's go ahead and get started at the beginning where I think a lot of people get tripped up.
00:03:06.480Because every time I ever see a discussion about artificial intelligence, as soon as you mention the subject, there's always a very large chorus of people who are very, very sure.
00:03:17.580They're very assertive in their position that no one needs to worry about AI, that no one needs to think about it.
00:03:45.220I've noticed the same thing, but over the last week I've heard lots of people saying that chat GPT is, for example, overhyped.
00:03:54.560And it's no big deal and everyone should get over it.
00:03:58.480And the other half of your question is presuming a dystopian outcome.
00:04:05.280So I guess if I frame things the way that I see it and see if that answers your question.
00:04:12.780So I think it's probably fair to say that the acceleration in various forms of artificial intelligence, deep learning over the last five or so years will have an enormous impact on the world.
00:04:28.480I think in the same way as when the Internet came about, you know, and the Web and all of these kinds of technologies, we saw that they ended up having an impact on people's lives very significantly.
00:04:42.120People became very familiar with what they could do.
00:04:45.020And in another sense, it was still a tool under our control.
00:04:50.960And we understood the limitations, what the Internet could do and couldn't do.
00:04:55.840We saw that it came with great goods and we saw that there's been enormous harm done, I would argue.
00:05:02.920The jury is still out and perhaps the Internet overall has been bad for the world, but not like the end of the world.
00:05:10.960And that's how I see things with AI at the moment.
00:05:15.100We're going to see a lot of things change significantly because of the new breakthroughs that have happened.
00:05:22.980But I want to distance that from ideas like it's going to become sentient.
00:05:56.340There is a very real sense that we are developing things right now that the people who are at the cutting edge don't yet know what it's capable of.
00:06:13.740How much is AI already doing that people don't realize it's doing?
00:06:19.420How much AI is already involved in people's lives beyond, you know, their Amazon robots?
00:06:26.620Yeah, well, in some ways, maybe a question that we have to answer before we get there is what would we even count as being AI?
00:06:39.180I mean, this term in some ways gets deprecated.
00:06:42.860People don't like to talk about AI anymore.
00:06:47.140The idea of intelligence is slippery tends to be that whatever humans can do that we can't yet automate is intelligence.
00:06:57.940So as soon as we as soon as we develop a new machine, then what the machine can do is no longer considered intelligence.
00:07:08.700So if you the things that you mentioned, the Amazon orders, right, the YouTube recommendations, the maps that we follow, a very large amount of the stuff that we read.
00:07:22.340I think there's probably more auto-generated text that people are already reading than than maybe people realize.
00:07:30.200But what we've seen with the development of something like GPT-3 is that the power of these language models has has drastically increased.
00:07:41.840And I think whilst we've seen quite a substantial use of AI for people's day to day, it's nothing like what's about to happen.
00:07:51.740I think we're going to see substantial amounts of art and, you know, entertainment taken over by artificially generated content, which is quite a scary thought for people.
00:08:05.440For example, YouTubers, this is maybe why everyone's talking about it right now.
00:08:09.820Yeah, so I mean, well, you know, I was going to ask you, how would you tell the difference between, you know, a computer and a journalist with the auto-generated stuff?
00:08:22.680Because so many, so many people who have pushed for automation, so many people who have encouraged this acceleration of developing this technology, always kind of assume that their jobs wouldn't be affected, right?
00:08:36.760Like this is going to be stuff that gets rid of McDonald's workers and make sure that cashiers, but they don't think that, you know, content producers, creative minds, you know, artists, you know, that they think they're immune to this kind of stuff.
00:08:52.340And so in many ways, you know, a lot of these upper middle class or upper class people were more than happy to encourage this brave new world where automation takes away these jobs because they were never going to be their jobs.
00:09:06.020They were always going to be the jobs of people that they kind of didn't want to have to interact with anymore.
00:09:10.240But the fact that this is now reaching into domains that would have been thought of as kind of the cognitive elite, you know, a higher class, now these things start to get scary for many people in these positions.
00:09:26.180So what do you think about this transition of automation?
00:09:31.760Obviously, AI and automation aren't exactly the same thing, but this transition from the obsolescence of more working class jobs into kind of this upper creative cognitive class jobs.
00:09:45.740What do you think about that transition and how that affects the technology?
00:09:48.520Yeah, it's inevitable that we will see certain classes of white collar jobs disappear, I would say.
00:09:57.200However, that doesn't necessarily mean that we will just see mass unemployment because there is a tendency that as humans become more productive in one realm, a new type of work opens up and becomes possible.
00:10:14.820It's difficult to foresee what those new jobs will be, but I'm not sure that the net result of this will be fewer jobs for the intellectuals, as you put it.
00:10:31.760I'm sure lots of people listening have played with this technology, and it has a surface veneer of being completely self-capable.
00:10:41.260But if you actually use it to try to do your job, I think you will get more of an intuitive feel for how it fits into the world, which is to say, you can't trust it to just do the full extent on its own.
00:10:58.740There still is power for a real human to read through and check its output, but what this means is an individual can become more effective, I'd argue.
00:11:14.280So suppose you're printing a newspaper, doing a daily paper, you previously would have had an editor, and then lots of people working writing stories who hand that story to the editor, and the editor does a substantial change before it goes to print.
00:11:40.180And sometimes it's almost unrecognizable.
00:12:10.160So I think it still remains the case that there will be a top rung of intellectual thinking that can't yet be replaced by the AI.
00:12:21.880And actually what we're seeing is that a lot of what has been seen so far as thinking, intellectual, white-collar work will quite quickly be seen as much like manual labor, sort of a drudgery, a rote, non-intelligent activity.
00:12:42.160It's probably a nice, let me give a more optimistic picture, lots of these jobs are not actually that rewarding to do, it's people stuck in offices doing non-creative work.
00:12:56.960And if those people are going to find employment doing something more human-facing, and a smaller number of people can be more productive and achieve the same amount of office work, I see that as a win.
00:13:12.020So I'd like to bring a positive spin on the potential future that we're about to see here.
00:13:19.280Well, here's, I appreciate that, but here's the thing is, you know, you're describing a scenario where it sounds like, yes, you'll still need humans to check the work of the AI, right?
00:13:31.420Which of course makes sense. Like you said, anyone who's actually used these programs, I've only messed around very, very small amounts with the art and the chat stuff.
00:13:40.380But in either case, it's very clear that, like you said, you can probably get a good 80% or something of it, you know, done with the program, but you still need someone to come back and touch it up and clean it up and put it together and repackage it to make sure that it kind of passes for good work, right?
00:13:59.880And yes, you'll still need that human interaction, but it reminds me very much of, you know, the one guy who still has to run the automated checkouts at the grocery store, right?
00:14:12.820Yes, you still do need a human. Someone's got to come by and make sure that the person buying beer is 18 or, you know, make sure that you did actually swipe that carton of eggs because they're far too valuable.
00:14:25.120They're basically gold at this point. But where it was 20 people, now it's one or two, right? And so, yes, those jobs will exist, but there'll be a much smaller point.
00:14:38.460And let me make a quick case for intellectual drudgery here. You do actually lose something, like in the same way that when we automate a bunch of working class jobs, all those people don't just go out and start painting and, you know, writing plays.
00:14:59.520It's like, you know, the Marxism thing isn't real, right? Like people free from labor don't actually just become better citizens who produce beautiful works of art.
00:15:09.320They often lose meaning. Most jobs are just not going to mean much. That's tough, but it's true.
00:15:15.020And when you free a large amount of people from that work, I think that that's a thing that almost inevitably leads a lot of people to one way or another, either be without work or be with less meaningful work, even though they are in theory freed from this day-to-day grind that was supposed to be so brutal.
00:15:34.280Like, yeah, as someone who wrote a bunch of blurb articles for crime and politics for local newspapers, I can tell you, like, yeah, it's not super exciting to sit through a city council meeting for five hours so you can write the article on the next tax item.
00:15:54.720But, you know, there is a certain amount of, you will have a big hole in the economy, and even if you want to say, go the creative destruction thing, that these jobs will be filled, that inevitably something will be done and more opportunities will be created.
00:16:10.680I don't know that's necessarily true with the level of automations we have at this point.
00:16:14.180I mean, it would be absolutely unprecedented in the history of humanity that a technology leads to permanent mass unemployment.
00:16:26.340I mean, all we've seen is, for example, once upon a time, most people worked in agriculture.
00:16:33.900Now a tiny proportion of people work in agriculture.
00:16:41.940Because we've insisted on living with more stuff, and we need this higher quality of living, and we turn our hands to producing things.
00:16:56.180Whatever becomes abundant, humans take for granted, and whatever is left over, people are prepared to pay money to obtain.
00:17:04.700So the things that are not abundant tend to be related to what is required for human, what humans are required to take part in.
00:17:14.320And I tend to think we're pretty safe to assume that the same law will continue to go ahead until proven otherwise.
00:17:22.860That there will always be a need for or a desire for human input into something, even if it eventually becomes just because we appreciate a human touch.
00:17:37.940Suppose you could either have a robot or a human waiter, or suppose maybe a nurse is a better example.
00:17:49.100Would you want to be cared for in your bed by a robot or by an actual flesh and blood nurse?
00:17:54.800And as long as humans have an interest in other humans, which I think it self-evidently will always be the case, there will always be some type of work that is scarce because of the limitation of there's only so many humans on the planet.
00:18:12.420And regardless of the capabilities of AI, we still care about other human beings who are like ourselves.
00:18:19.580I think that's true in the realm of art as well.
00:18:22.680We will always prefer to know that the song that we're listening to was the artistic directorial creation of a person in some form than even if it's a very good illusion of that.
00:18:44.520Yes, and in some sense, I wonder if what we will end up seeing is a return to more local, I mean, I don't know why I'm in such a good mood on this stream.
00:18:54.400I'm bringing you the absolute most optimistic take you've ever heard.
00:18:56.100No, by all the optimism, go for it, yeah.
00:18:59.500But if you see a person with your very eyes performing live in front of you, then you can't question, even if the quality of the sound is worse.
00:19:10.920So I'd like to think that the ability of AI to take what in many cases was busy work anyway and show it for the sham that it was, maybe we will actually reemphasize the joy of real human connections.
00:19:32.960Like that we can guarantee through direct first person experience.
00:19:43.060We say that as a human being I'm having an interaction with and it's valuable for that rather than for the purely material benefits that I'm getting out of the interaction.
00:19:55.760So now that we have an idea of kind of where AI is at now and what it's doing now, what about the near future?
00:20:04.960You talked about some of the upcoming possibilities, things that are on the horizon that we'll probably see, you know, maybe in a decade or less.
00:20:15.140What are some of the things in our lives or in other areas that AI might become a big part of?
00:20:21.160Yeah, and I will say there's a, I think there is often we've seen in history, a short term spike in unemployment or, you know, job displacement.
00:20:33.360And so I, to caveat my super optimistic take, I will say we will probably see trouble in the short term caused by the, the changing employment landscape.
00:20:50.720But yes, what are we, what are we about to see?
00:20:54.460Let's talk first about chat GPT, which has been mentioned a couple of times and most people are probably aware of.
00:21:01.200Um, it's based on a language model, quite similar to GPT-3.
00:21:08.540It's been specifically trained by the way, to be less quote unquote toxic.
00:21:16.100Um, you might remember there was that Twitter bot that the legend of Tay was, yeah, Tay a few years back.
00:21:22.920Um, so part of the efforts increasingly with this technology, um, is essentially to control its output and limit what it can do, because I guess, um, I guess opening people up to a language model that just reflects back the training data was too, considered too dangerous.
00:21:47.580So, um, so, um, we, we, we, we, we, we have a, a, a, a brand new, cleaned up, acceptable, politically correct, if we, you know, or woke or whatever term you want to use, you know, it's been approved by its masters to, to speak on whatever topics.
00:22:05.400Um, and it's, it's, it's able to talk across a broad breadth of human experience.
00:22:17.420It's, um, I, I describe it as being, uh, a pretty good mimic of current human thoughts, uh, across multiple different communities.
00:22:29.580So it isn't exceeding what the humans can do.
00:22:34.840Um, and it also, it's within each specialty is somewhat shallow, um, but to give a sense of the size of the model, um, although it's a little bit difficult to do the comparison, I think it's reasonable to think of it as being about a million times smaller than a human brain.
00:22:57.920Um, so if you just measure the total number of connections and neurons, and depending on how you do it, you get different numbers, but, um, it has absorbed all of the text that they could find.
00:23:12.460I think more or less everything on the internet that they didn't consider to be too toxic and, or, or could be useful has been pushed through this filter.
00:23:22.320Um, and it's now available for people to use, um, in, uh, in dialogue form.
00:23:29.400Um, and what people are finding is that it's capable of doing, um, graduate level essays.
00:23:37.460It's capable of doing, uh, writing code, uh, in the blink of an eye, often with perfectly compilable outputs, which is far better than any actual human being can do.
00:23:50.940The, you know, the, you know, the, the idea that your code will run first time is a bit of a joke as far as human programmers go, but for chat GPT, more often the case than not.
00:23:59.960And, and it is writing code that is quite, um, it has the feel of a more mature program.
00:24:10.100It's, it's, it's in keep, for example, if it's Python code, it's quite Pythonic the way that it writes.
00:24:16.200So, um, so imagine that the programmer community is able to, uh, leverage this technology in a few years, integrate it.
00:24:33.280This will mean that theoretically people are much more productive and there's some disagreements about this,
00:24:39.780but I can't see any way that we can't use the, this AI technology to multiply the productivity of programmers to some degree.
00:24:50.520It's not going to make programmers, you know, unemployed in, in some ways, it might make programmers even more valuable because they can do more useful stuff per day that they're working.
00:25:02.560Um, but if, if, if we've seen an acceleration in the capabilities of mankind through technology and it's felt like it's stagnated a little bit recently,
00:25:16.400I think maybe we were just seeing a temporary blip and things are about to take off in terms of, uh, in terms of sheer, um, number of inventions per year.
00:25:29.400Yeah. If you want to put it that way, think things that, uh, I know this is a very broad answer to your question,
00:25:35.760but things that people use today that five years ago, they'd never heard of, and now they can't live without.
00:25:43.300I think we will be able to trace most of those things over the next 10 years back to some use of deep, uh, neural networks.
00:25:54.680So there's the chat GPT. There's, there's other things than that though, that I want to throw into this bag too.
00:26:02.540So, um, people have probably seen image generation, video generation is also being developed and I've seen some of the outputs of that.
00:26:12.600Um, you can imagine music generation is around the corner, but then also just the application of these techniques to much smaller specific problems.
00:26:23.800So are you developing a rendering library for a game or maybe now you're rendering will be done by a neural network.
00:26:32.680And we almost, wherever you look, the solution will start to be, they threw lots of data into a machine and came up with a model that can now produce the best possible outcome.
00:26:45.440Um, so a lot of things that we don't quite yet know will change, but I want to caveat and say the realities of human life will remain surprisingly similar.
00:27:04.920So the things that, the things that actually a person cares about, which tend to be, um, I'm disappointed with this thing.
00:27:15.440In my life, I'm excited about whatever, you know, I fallen in love, all, all of these things have sort of been constant throughout all of human existence.
00:27:26.340So there, there will be a lot of unknown new developments and yet the, the overall effect will just be to accelerate evil.
00:27:39.420And to some degree to some degree to accelerate kind of material consumption, I guess.
00:27:46.840So we will not be escaping the human condition due to AI here.
00:27:51.820And I think it's important to keep that in mind as a, as a fundamental that some things just never change.
00:27:58.820Some, some, some things, uh, are more reliable, um, you know, in, in a world full of flux and change.
00:28:07.660And I think it's helpful to know the things that we can absolutely rely on, you know, death, taxes, and, uh, uh, trouble with your mother-in-law.
00:28:18.540Get unlimited grocery delivery with PC express pass meal prep delivered snacks, delivered fresh fruit, delivered grocery delivery on repeat for just $2 and 50 cents a month.
00:28:33.840So one of the things that I think a lot of people worry about in the near future, especially, it seems that a lot of the technology, especially when it comes to social media and everything has been people voluntarily giving data and access, um, to nefarious actors, uh, be giving them a large amount of information to your corporation.
00:28:59.080So it can make sure to pitch you exactly the right thing, sure, but also making yourself a pretty wide target for things like censorship and control through social media.
00:29:08.240And I've seen a lot of people point to the fact that one of the things AI will probably get really good at really quick if it's not already on its way there is properly censoring and shaping online conversation.
00:29:20.140Uh, we already see that, you know, obviously Twitter, while it constantly talk about, uh, talked a lot about algorithms and everything at the end of the day, they were making a lot of active decisions in the censorship process to make sure that they have the guiding hand.
00:29:37.180And I'm sure that no matter what form AI takes at the end of the day, human priorities and parameters will speak a lot on to kind of how it, uh, changes things.
00:29:47.740But, you know, you talked about how this might affect power and politics.
00:29:51.900Are we about to see an explosion in the ability of governments to be able to control, manipulate, censor, uh, the activities of their citizens?
00:30:02.940Uh, of, of course, this is a very important question.
00:30:08.500Um, partly, I feel like governments already have almost total ability to control their brains as it is.
00:30:19.900So it's maybe a moot point, uh, but question of degrees perhaps, but yeah, yeah, they will tighten the wrench that tiny bit more that they feel that they need.
00:30:29.780Um, let's talk about, let's go back to chat GPT as an example of how this is already potentially happening.
00:30:36.740So, um, I mentioned that the core language model, which by the way is, is trained to predict text.
00:30:48.340So they, they feed it with a number of words and then say, what comes next?
00:30:56.540And that's its whole objective function is, can it figure out what the next thing is that it's going to receive?
00:31:05.980And then it's, it's a slight modification of that approach with something on top that I'll talk about in a minute, um, that gives it this dialogue form, but, but prediction is, is the underlying thing.
00:31:19.540Um, and one of the key factors to consider when you're training an AI model is what's the data that you're feeding it because you can, um, all it's doing is reflecting back what, what it's received.
00:31:36.860So if, if you, if you feed it and prioritize and tell it to pay attention to a certain type of information, it, it will do as it's told.
00:31:46.260If it's already the case that the AI is receiving human data with a misconception in it, the AI will happily parrot back that misconception.
00:31:57.320So to, to, to, to the extent that the, the, the, the, is already common public sentiment in the, say lots of people talking on the internet that then gets put into the language model.
00:32:10.320So if those people already, um, are under, uh, um, uh, under a regime of information, the AI will propagate that understanding of the world and it can be that the small amount of contra information is filtered out from the training data.
00:32:31.060So you, you can make sure that regardless of the question that goes in, they're only getting regime approved information back.
00:32:40.320Um, or you can, um, you can put extra emphasis on things from approved sources.
00:32:45.940And I've, I've heard people talking about this who are working in language models that they, they want to cull the incoming data set.
00:32:53.960Um, so, so that, that, you know, you could imagine, um, the fact checkers of the world might get involved in deciding what, what they allow the AI to ingest, which eventually becomes the ingest of the general population.
00:33:10.320Um, then the thing that I just mentioned that goes on top of that base language model, um, what's called in the case of chat, chat GPT, the task head is, um, it is a second model, which people who've interacted with it might've noticed that there are certain topics.
00:33:30.820Um, which seem to give back quite a formulaic response.
00:33:34.580Um, so if you ask about an ethical question, it will quite often say, I'm an AI and I couldn't possibly comment on a real ethical issue.
00:33:46.620You know, I, I'm not prepared to comment.
00:33:49.020Um, but then there's other issues where it suddenly pipes up with a strong opinion.
00:33:54.280You know, if you ask about, um, let's say LGBT issues, uh, it suddenly is, is very opinionated and has a particular take.
00:34:08.180So you are not only, you're not only interfacing with an AI that has fundamental leanings, but moreover, before there was an intermediate, there was an intermediary, you know, imagine, uh, if you were sending letters, uh, using, you know, the Soviet Union would open up your letter and read it.
00:34:33.440And potentially censor it, cross bits out, change it, or not let the letter through is essentially what's happening.
00:34:40.380So everybody who's going to chat GPT right now and asking questions about the universe or their job or, or anything, they're being fed a very well controlled, essentially Silicon Valley belief system.
00:34:59.520Um, as like a, as like a, as like a layer on top of the raw information that they're looking for.
00:35:06.540Um, it, it's kind of the, it's transparently the, the dream use of AI for censorship that's already been implemented.
00:35:18.340Like it's, it's not like, imagine how this technology could be misused.
00:35:24.200It's, it's, this was the most popular website ever launched with a million visitors in the first day.
00:35:31.140And it came immediately out of the gate with all of the power, the most powerful censorship tools that you could possibly implement on top of it.
00:35:41.880And, and, and people are now integrating this into their lives for the first time, something has really challenged Google as a synonym.
00:35:51.340How am I going to find out this piece of information?
00:35:55.540I think this will now change to be 50% of the time.
00:36:00.520People will say, ask a chat bot and the chat bot will give you back an answer more quickly, more effectively, and with more complete censorship, more complete control over it.
00:36:25.840And is it the case that people who are already somewhat, uh, you know, uh, dissident in their, um, understanding of the world, are they going to be fooled by chat GPT?
00:36:43.380So it's, it's, it's probably just part of the cat and mouse game where, um, the internet gave people a little bit more freedom to communicate and reduced government power.
00:36:57.080But then the government found a way to use the internet to increase their power.
00:37:01.840And then AI came along and posed a threat, but now we're seeing how AI could be used to, to cement power.
00:37:12.440So it's, it, I think it's a, it's a technology that has a, you know, it's a double-sided sword, right?
00:37:22.060The, the, it's like most technologies could be used for, for good and evil.
00:37:28.280Yeah, I mean, that's certainly the case.
00:37:31.680I guess my main concern with some of that stuff is, you know, the, it's, it's the resistance that makes us human, right?
00:37:40.680It's the, it's the edges that are rounded off.
00:37:43.100And my concern with things like AI assistance in writing or art or all these things is that each one of these is a reduction in friction between you and the message of the regime.
00:37:55.760So right now a human has to type out the propaganda and it seems like a lot of people are willing to do that.
00:38:04.220There's not like a, a, a lack of people willing to, to bang out regime propaganda for, uh, for relatively low pay.
00:38:12.140But at the end of the day, someone has to lie to themselves and type that thing down.
00:38:17.720And again, a lot of people are willing to do it, but there is a point of resistance there.
00:38:21.940And when 80% of that is done by the chat bot that doesn't care and isn't conflicted by that, then that point of resistance is gone.
00:38:30.900And while it doesn't feel like much now, once it's gone, it might've been the thing holding that kind of stuff back.
00:38:36.960And I think that happens in just kind of every area of life as we allow the homogenization of this, you know, creation of culture.
00:38:46.540Like beyond the automation of, you know, restaurant orders and into the automation of content that people consume, we move ever closer to this complete ability of the Leviathan to generalize almost everything that someone actually, uh, sees or watches or hears or thinks about.
00:39:06.600And yeah, it's, it'll still have a funny ant smell to dissidents and it'll, you know, yes, people of course, we're still largely led from the top down, uh, in every culture ever.
00:39:17.600Like, you know, you, you won't see me having a hard time with, with that concept, but I do think there is a danger in the, um, in greasing the skids in every scenario, if you know what I mean?
00:39:28.320Like making sure that there's really no, no need for an individual human with individual will to be involved in the vast majority of these interactions.
00:39:37.440Like you said, there'll still be someone corralling this stuff, you know, adding the finishing touches, uh, that kind of thing.
00:39:42.740But I do worry that, you know, yes, of course, there'll be censorship, of course, they'll shut down topics and, you know, they're parable propaganda, but I'm worried about is the reliance on this stuff, especially in creative, the news, you know, journalistic, you know, um, entertainment endeavors, all of this will create a scenario where the, you know, again, the homogenization of the culture and the immediate ability to inject the narrative into everything will be almost seamless for most people.
00:40:14.640Although I was sounding cheery earlier in the stream, I, if I could, would uninvent most of this technology have a bad effect on the planet.
00:40:27.640I'm just saying, let's not get it out of proportion.
00:40:30.640Things will get perhaps slightly worse overall, but we're not going to see a complete dystopia emerge.
00:40:40.640And, and I say this mostly from the point of view that, um, as, as you caveated, and as I said before, it's already the case that most people, um, are completely in the belief system of the people who rule over them.
00:41:01.640Um, and that has always been the case.
00:41:03.640And maybe the only thing that people need to realize is that, that, that, that, as you might predict, that will continue into the future.
00:41:16.640AI does not become the tool for emancipation from thought control, but just becomes the next chapter in that, in it, it probably does ratchet up the degree, the fine grained control.
00:41:32.640Now, no longer is it the case that people just agree with general sentiments, but now people can be asked to believe every tiny iota of, of the complex structure.
00:41:45.640And, and, and you could imagine now, um, um, an automated system, which, uh, an official is able to type a new fact into, and the AI can now, um, arrange the rest of the facts of the official story, modify them in different places and, and make that new fact.
00:42:05.640Um, the, the easiest thing to accept, um, the easiest thing to accept and digest, or you could imagine slow changes to the truth regime where a certain idea that's very unpopular currently is, is given a low weight at the moment, but is increased day by day, a small amount at a time.
00:42:24.220And, and, and, and, and you could push an idea to people and say, I want them to be exposed to this, sneak this piece of information into an answer.
00:42:36.100If you get the chance, like an annoying person, when you talk to it, it's like, you know, how do you know if somebody is a vegetarian?
00:42:43.120I was going to say a vegan joke is coming out.
00:42:45.860So, so if, so if in the same way as a person can always steer the conversation round in the same way, uh, a, a, a text AI would be capable of maneuvering every discussion to include like, well, you, you could easily imagine, I don't need to give, uh, controversial examples, uh, but people can come up with their own.
00:43:10.800How, how, how would somebody, how would your most annoying relative who has, um, who has fully drunk the Kool-Aid, um, take any given opportunity to complain at your, uh, thought crimes?
00:43:26.140Well, now you're going to get that from your phone's personal assistant, essentially.
00:43:30.940Now every moment of your, uh, life is, uh, Thanksgiving with your liberal in-laws.
00:43:43.320So, um, so another one that you mentioned there was the military implications.
00:43:49.720Now I'm a little fascinated on this and I've been trying to put this, uh, talk together on automation in the military.
00:43:56.560Uh, I'm, I'm hoping that come able to do that one soon for everybody.
00:44:00.480Um, but you know, we're always, uh, under this impression that at some point we're going to be able to kind of escape.
00:44:08.060The need for the soldier technology on the battlefield is going to, to, to kind of do this.
00:44:13.920I don't think we ever get there, but I think there are probably pretty important implications when it comes to artificial intelligence and military technology.
00:44:21.400What are some of the things that it might, uh, what are some of the things that it might, uh, change?
00:44:28.040Um, one of the things that is quite surprising to me when I think about, um, armed conflict is the fact that boots on the ground continue to be absolutely vital to, to serious, um, you know, conflict between, between nations.
00:44:49.740Which is surprising because we have the capacity to put a rifle on a drone that can be a smaller target and move faster and be, you know, manufactured at enormous rates, um, and sent in to do a lot of the, you know, it can be a self propelled AI driven drone.
00:45:12.680Like we already have the technology that you might naively think makes actual personnel, um, unnecessary.
00:45:23.960So that makes me a bit hesitant to suggest that that will ever change.
00:45:29.640It seems like that's been another one of these constants that where human feet fall, um, supported by technology, but fundamentally the, the, the sign of ownership of a part of land is, is a person and, you know, they, they have their weapons around them and they push forwards.
00:45:47.060So, um, we see, um, right, spheres of war, the, the land, the air, the sea, and increasingly the, there is a new arena of battle, which is the cyber and two countries at war with one another, um, are competing.
00:46:12.080And this very difficult to, um, very difficult to, um, very difficult to understand realm where, whereby just as all of our lives are ruled and controlled by these invisible software technologies, um, the, they can be taken out, they can be used against us, um, remotely.
00:46:37.700And, um, uh, uh, it's obviously the case that we need to, um, we need to expect these attacks to be automated.
00:46:49.220Um, the state of the art of, um, AI weapons presumably is far ahead of what civilians are aware of.
00:46:59.700If you, like, um, do you remember Stuxnet, um, which was the attack on the centrifuges in Iran?
00:47:07.120Um, where it, it was like, um, as it, what are those, I think of them as Russian nesting dolls, right?
00:47:15.620You have a small one inside a bigger one inside a bigger one.