The Auron MacIntyre Show - August 23, 2023


The Destruction of Human Agency ｜ 8⧸23⧸23

Topics
bureaucratic interactions First Freedom Challenge
Hosted by
Auron MacIntyre
Mentioned
Joe Kennedy C.S. Lewis Susan
1876： America's Most Disputed Election ｜ Guest： Ryan Turnipseed ｜ 8⧸22⧸23 How to Think About Twitter ｜ 8⧸24⧸23

Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

155.97

Word count

1,682

Sentence count

98

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In the age of the masked man, learning to interact with bureaucracy becomes far more valuable than learning how to be human. And to celebrate that victory, the First Liberty Institute created the First Freedom Challenge. They want people to fill local stadiums and pray after the game, just like Coach Kennedy did on his first game back in 1971.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 We hope you're enjoying your Air Canada flight.
00:00:02.320 Rocky's Vacation, here we come.
00:00:05.060 Whoa, is this economy?
00:00:07.180 Free beer, wine, and snacks.
00:00:09.620 Sweet! 0.95
00:00:10.720 Fast-free Wi-Fi means I can make dinner reservations before we land.
00:00:14.760 And with live TV, I'm not missing the game.
00:00:17.800 It's kind of like, I'm already on vacation.
00:00:20.980 Nice! 0.94
00:00:22.160 On behalf of Air Canada, nice travels.
00:00:25.260 Wi-Fi available to Airplane members on Equipped Flight.
00:00:27.320 Sponsored by Bell. Conditions apply.
00:00:28.580 See AirCanada.com.
00:00:30.000 Interfacing with enormous soulless bureaucracies has become a regular feature of life in the modern world.
00:00:44.080 Getting medical care, going to college, finding a job, and stopping that annoying recurring charge on your credit card from a forgotten subscription
00:00:51.160 all require filing endless forms and interacting with automated systems or humans that are trained to behave like automated systems.
00:00:58.340 We live in a world where the vast scale of human organization has made personal interaction impossible.
00:01:05.180 Bureaucratic organizations demand interchangeable actors and predictable outcomes so that they can operate at scale,
00:01:11.240 but organic human exchanges are messy, chaotic, and tend to be shaped by the moral and cultural particularities of individual communities.
00:01:18.520 This is why our current ruling class seeks to create the rootless cosmopolitan individual, 0.70
00:01:23.860 the universal man from nowhere who can be molded into anything.
00:01:28.500 In the age of the masked man, learning to interact with bureaucracy becomes far more valuable than learning how to be human.
00:01:34.580 Anyone who has sought a redress of grievances from a major corporation has had the same experience.
00:01:41.220 A woman with a thick Indian accent who claims to be named Susan takes the caller through an endless parade of inane questions 0.97
00:01:49.020 before informing the customer that there is little to nothing that can be done.
00:01:53.380 The call center worker has no agency or accountability.
00:01:56.780 She is only allowed to answer from a pre-written script.
00:02:00.440 The entire purpose of the charade is to grant the customer the illusion of interaction
00:02:04.620 while ensuring that no unpredicted outcomes are possible.
00:02:07.960 Increasingly, this is not just the standard mode of interaction with customer service,
00:02:13.400 but the only way a human will interface with the many different institutions which rule their life.
00:02:18.720 Human resources, the Department of Motor Vehicles, the Internal Revenue Service,
00:02:23.440 health insurance providers, even dating apps.
00:02:26.360 Every human interaction is mediated by a standardized process used to sort and categorize the individual,
00:02:33.120 minimizing the amount of agency exerted by any single actor in the process.
00:02:37.960 We tend to understand intelligence as something particular to individual human beings,
00:02:43.120 but a more abstract understanding is useful when trying to think about the modern world.
00:02:48.560 In many ways, bureaucratic organizations mimic an intelligent mind.
00:02:52.940 In the beginning, these structures are established to serve a specific purpose,
00:02:56.680 like making a company more profitable,
00:02:58.340 but over time, they respond to incentives that create divergent interests.
00:03:03.700 Standardization maximizes the efficiency and reliability of the bureaucracy,
00:03:08.440 but humans are not organically homogenous.
00:03:11.000 So as a mass organization becomes more effective, it also becomes less human.
00:03:16.340 New ways of thinking and interacting are developed to serve the efficiency of the organization
00:03:20.800 instead of the human behaviors native to the founders of that institution.
00:03:25.660 Eventually, training humans to interact with bureaucracies becomes more effective
00:03:29.660 than training bureaucracies to interact with humans,
00:03:32.280 and a positive feedback loop for technocratic expansion is created.
00:03:36.740 Did you feel it, guys?
00:03:38.120 There's been a seismic shift in the legal system.
00:03:40.620 An oppressive legal precedent in place since 1971 was recently overturned by the Supreme Court.
00:03:46.320 The Americans who benefit the most are people of faith, so we need to get the word out.
00:03:50.860 It happened because high school coach Joe Kennedy used to take a knee in prayer on the field after games,
00:03:56.700 until praying in public got him fired.
00:03:58.520 But now the legal precedent that got him fired is gone,
00:04:01.300 and to celebrate that victory, the folks over at First Liberty Institute created the First Freedom Challenge.
00:04:07.280 They want people to fill local stadiums and pray after the game,
00:04:10.780 just like Coach Kennedy on his first game back, Friday, September 1st.
00:04:15.100 Here are three things that you can do to promote the First Freedom Challenge.
00:04:19.120 One, sign up at rfia.org and commit to praying on September 1st.
00:04:24.460 Two, record a short video message challenging people to take a knee in prayer with Coach Kennedy.
00:04:30.060 And three, share your video on social media.
00:04:33.140 Let the world know that the freedoms intended by our founding fathers are back.
00:04:37.280 Join me and take the First Freedom Challenge.
00:04:39.720 Sign up at rfia.org.
00:04:42.600 That's rfia.org.
00:04:45.100 Much ink has already been spilt over the question of whether artificial intelligence
00:04:49.680 can really become a Skynet-style supercomputer that rules the world.
00:04:54.620 I'm no expert in the field, but it's hard to pretend that early iterations of the technology
00:04:59.240 aren't shaping the world around us.
00:05:02.680 ChatGPT is a large language model used by many to generate all kinds of text.
00:05:07.220 While it still has clear difficulty with creative endeavors like poetry or compelling fiction,
00:05:13.360 the program is great at producing the kind of formulaic boilerplate favored by technocracies.
00:05:19.540 As human organization has become dominated by bureaucratic leviathans,
00:05:24.300 employers have already been selecting for the ability to effectively navigate these Byzantine managerial structures.
00:05:30.620 Instead of humans talking to other humans, bureaucracies talk to other bureaucracies
00:05:36.100 through people who are trained to think like and to anticipate the needs of this form of artificial intelligence.
00:05:42.800 While some people have perfected this skill, many others find it difficult and can use ChatGPT
00:05:48.080 to generate the kind of response that bureaucratic organizations prefer.
00:05:51.780 The world of insurance provides the perfect practical example of this phenomenon.
00:05:59.000 Insurance is the most infuriating form of bureaucratic structure,
00:06:02.440 predicated entirely on making heartless and brutal calculations
00:06:06.020 and attempting to deny benefits to as many of your customers as possible.
00:06:09.760 When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most?
00:06:14.260 When your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the grainy mustard.
00:06:19.100 When the barbecue's lit, but there's nothing to grill.
00:06:21.780 When the in-laws decide that, actually, they will stay for dinner.
00:06:25.500 Instacart has all your groceries covered this summer.
00:06:28.120 So download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes.
00:06:31.700 Plus enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders.
00:06:35.420 Service fees exclusions and terms apply.
00:06:37.720 Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver.
00:06:41.180 Every interaction is meant to frustrate or confound the average person.
00:06:46.320 A friend of mine operates a business that needs to regularly bill insurance for their services.
00:06:50.980 And this requires the mind-numbing task of generating mountains of paperwork
00:06:55.620 while formulating responses in exactly the right way to compel compliance from the bureaucracy.
00:07:02.200 The business now regularly uses ChatGPT to generate its responses to insurance companies
00:07:07.360 because it does such a great job of predicting what another soulless artificial intelligence would like to hear.
00:07:13.240 Humans no longer talk to humans, or even faceless bureaucracies,
00:07:18.660 but deploy artificial intelligence to negotiate with other artificial constructs on their behalf.
00:07:26.080 If it feels like humans are making fewer and fewer of their own decisions, that's because they are.
00:07:31.520 We are told that we live in a liberated age where a whole host of civil rights and social advancements
00:07:38.680 free us from the natural human bonds that once enslaved us.
00:07:43.240 Our duty to families, churches, or local communities has been dissolved
00:07:48.040 and we are free to pursue the identity of our choosing.
00:07:51.780 But of course, no one forms their own identity.
00:07:54.260 Identity is constructed by social interaction,
00:07:58.060 and those who have been separated from organic social organizations
00:08:01.780 which would have shaped their self-image
00:08:03.920 will instead become plastic in the hands of larger forces.
00:08:08.680 By destroying competing forms of social organization,
00:08:11.940 massive bureaucracies seek to remove the rough human edges
00:08:15.060 which create friction in their efficient machines.
00:08:17.760 The cultural and moral specificity of organic human social organization
00:08:23.460 are a barrier to the efficient operation of these hyper-agents
00:08:27.240 who stopped serving human needs long ago
00:08:30.220 and now see natural human behavior as a detriment to their operation.
00:08:35.500 Individuals may have been granted the illusion of choice,
00:08:38.600 but their entire perceptual matrix is shaped by artificial forces
00:08:42.960 which they cannot hope to control.
00:08:44.840 In his shockingly prescient essay,
00:08:49.280 The Abolition of Man,
00:08:50.680 C.S. Lewis warned against the use of social engineering
00:08:53.420 to change fundamental human behavior.
00:08:56.740 The author saw the modern obsession with using science
00:08:59.960 to quantify and disenchant the world
00:09:02.060 as an inevitable road to disaster.
00:09:05.500 Once humanity, or whatever artificial constructs it created,
00:09:09.260 learned to train fundamental human behaviors out of mankind,
00:09:12.620 there would be no one to pass those attributes on to the next generation.
00:09:18.320 It would mean the abolition of man
00:09:20.420 and the creation of something wholly artificial in its place.
00:09:24.940 Our modern governments and corporations have adopted the nudge strategy
00:09:29.440 designed to reliably shape human behavior
00:09:32.300 to fit the preferred patterns of bureaucratic compliance.
00:09:35.520 Those who think like machines and conform their behavior 0.98
00:09:39.340 to the preferences of artificial constructs
00:09:41.960 are now selected over those who think and act like human beings.
00:09:46.980 Nations have stopped serving the interests of particular peoples 0.98
00:09:49.880 and have instead become economic zones
00:09:52.360 full of fungible biological units
00:09:54.680 operated in the interests of artificial constructs.
00:09:57.540 If humans do not become intentional
00:10:00.300 about the way they interact with technology
00:10:02.760 and construct their social organizations,
00:10:05.500 that which emerges on the other side
00:10:07.560 may not be human in any meaningful sense.
00:10:10.880 Thanks for watching, guys.
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00:10:43.620 Thanks for watching, guys.
00:10:44.800 And as always, I'll talk to you next time.