Five, four, three, two, one, go. So it's not like Wayne's World where you say the two in the win. Silently. Now, Greetings, future fossils.
Welcome to Episode 201 of the podcast that explores our place in time. I'm your host, Michael Garfield. And this is one of these extra juicy and delicious episodes of the show, where I really ratcheted up with our guests and provide you one of these singularity is near kind of everything is connected to everything. Self organized criticality right at the edge of chaos conversations.
Deeply embedded in chapel paralless, where suddenly the invisible architecture of our cosmos starts to make itself apparent through the glass bead game of conversation. And I am delighted that I get to share it with you. Our guests this week are KMO, one of the most seasoned and well researched and experienced podcasters that I know, somebody who's showed the C-Realm was running all the way back in 2006. I found him through Eric Davis, who I think most of you know, and I've had on the show a number of times already.
And also Kevin Wollman, who is a close friend of mine here in Santa Fe, a just incredible human being. He's probably the strongest single supporter of music that I'm aware of. You know, as far as local scenes are concerned and supporting people's music online and helping get the word out, he's been instrumental to my family and I and getting ourselves situated here all the way back to when I visited Santa Fe in 2018 to participate in the Santa Fe Institute's Interplanetary Festival. And recorded conversations on that trip, John David Ebert and Michael Aaron Kemen's and Icky U Sojoon about hyper modernity, two part episode one of four and one of five, I highly recommend going back to that, which is really the last time possibly I had a conversation just this incredibly ambitious on the show.
But first, I want to announce a couple things. One is that I have left the Santa Fe Institute. The other podcast that I have been hosting for them for the last three and a half years complexity podcast, which is substantially more popular in future fossils due to its institutional affiliation is coming to a close. I'm recording one more episode with SFI President David Krakauer next week, in which I'm going to be talking about my upcoming book project.
And that episode actually is conjoined with the big announcement that I have for members of the future fossils listening audience and paid supporters, which is of course the Jurassic Park Book Club that starts on April 29th. We're going to host the first of two video calls where I'm going to dive deep into the science and philosophy of Michael Kriton's most popular work of fiction and its impact on culture and society over the 33 years since its publication. And then I'm going to start picking up as many of the podcasts that I had scheduled for complexity and had to cancel upon my departure from SFI and basically fuse the two shows. And I think a lot of you saw this coming future fossils is going to level up and become a much more scientific podcast as I prepare and research the book that I'm writing about Jurassic Park and its legacy and the relationship it has to be ILM and SFI and the Institute of Ecotechnics and all of these other visionary projects that sprouted in the 80s and 90s.
The transition from the analog to the digital, the collapse of the boundaries between the real and the virtual, the human and the non-human worlds. It's going to be a very, very ambitious book and a very, very ambitious book club. And I hope that you will get in there because obviously now I am out in the rain as an independent producer and very much need and benefit from and am deeply grateful for your support for this work in order to make things happen and in order to keep my family fed, get the lights on here, the future fossils. So with that, I want to thank all of the new supporters of the show that have crawled out of the woodwork over the last few weeks, including Brave Sir Oingo, Brian the Barcheologist, Philip Rice, Gerald Bilak, Jamie Curcio, Jeff Hanson, who bought my music, Kwame, Mary Costello, BR Squared, Nastia Teaches, Community Health Com, Ed Mulder, Cody Koyak, Bob My Music, Simon Heiduk, amazing visionary artist.
I recommend you check out Kayla Peters. Yeah, all of you. I just, wow, thank you so much. It's going to be a complete melee in this book club.
I'm super excited to meet you all. I will send out details about the call details for the 29th, sometimes in the next few days via sub-stack and Patreon. The amount of support that I've received through this transition has been incredible and it's empowering me to do wonderful things for you, such as the recently released secret videos of the live sets I performed with comedian Shane Moss, supporting him, opening for him, including Santa Fe, his two sold out shows at the John Cote Cinema, where I did cyber guitar performances and if you're a subscriber, you can watch me goofing off with my pedalboard. There's a ton of material.
I'm going to continue to do that. I've got a lot of really exciting concerts coming up in the next few months that we're going to get large group and also solo performance recordings from and make those available in a much more resplendent way to supporters as well as the soundtrack to Mark Nelson of the Institute of Eco Technics is UC San Diego Art Museum exhibit, a retrospective looking at biosphere two. I'm doing music for that and that's dropping. The opening of that event is April 27th.
There's going to be a live zoom event for that. And I'm going to push the music out as well for that. So yeah, thank you all. I really, really appreciate you listening to the show.
I am excited to share this episode with you. KMO is just a trove of insight and experience. And he's like a perfect entry into the digital history museum that this show was predicated upon. So with that and also, of course, the moment is just magnificent and for the record, stick around.
At the end of the conversation, we have some additional pieces about AI. And I think you're going to really enjoy it. And yeah, thank you. Here we go.
All right, cool. Well, we just had a lovely hour of discussion for the new KMO podcast. And now I'm here with KMO, who is the most in-veterate podcaster, I know. I know a lot of them.
And I'm going to make that we mean, but you think it means in-veterate. OK, yes. I answered it both. Good.
I mean, you're not yet legless and panhandling. So I prefer to think of it in terms of August estimation. And am I allowed to say Kevin Wulmett because I've had you as a host on- Yeah, my last name was Bird on your shirt. I don't really care.
OK, great. Kevin Arthur Wulmett, who is one of the most solid and upstanding and widely read and just generous people, I think I know here in Santa Fe or maybe anywhere with excellent taste and podcasts. Yes. And who is delicious meat?
I am sampling right now as probably the first episode of Future Fossils where I've had an alcoholic beverage in my hand. So I mean, it's I haven't deprived myself of fun. And I think if you're still listening to the show after all these years, you probably inferred that by iterate welcome on board. Hey, thanks.
I'm going to be here. So before we started rolling, I guess a whole conversation that we just had for your show camera was very much about my thoughts on the social epistemology crisis and on science fiction and deep fakes and all of these kinds of weird ontology and these kinds of things. But in between calls, we were just talking about how much you detest the first two seasons of Star Trek card in a discovery and as somebody I didn't bother with doing this. I didn't send you this before we spoke, but I actually did write an essay in defense of those shows.
Hello. Yeah. So I am not attached to my opinion on this, but and I actually do want to at some point double back in here storytelling because we had lunch and you had a bunch of personal life stuff that was really interesting and juicy and I think worthy of discussion. But simply because it's hot on the rail right now, I want to hear you talk about Star Trek and both of you actually, I know are very big fans of this franchise.
I think fans are often the ones from whom a critique is most important and deserved and I welcome your unhinged rants. Well, first I'll start off by quoting Kevin's brother, the linguist, who says that which brings us closer to Star Trek is progress. But I'd have to say that which brings us closer to Gene Roddenberry and Rick Berman, Eric Star Trek is progress that which brings us closer to Kurtzman. What's his first name Alex Kurtzman, Star Trek.
Well, that's not even the future. I mean, that's just that's our drama right now with inconsistent Star Trek drag draped over it. I liked the first JJ Abrams Star Trek. I think it was 2009 with Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto and Carl Urban and Zoe Saldana.
I liked the casting. I liked the energy. It was fun. I can still put that movie on and enjoy it.
But each one after that just seemed to double down on the dumb and just hold at arm's length any of the philosophical stuff that was just amazing from Star Trek the next generation or any of the long term character building, which was from Deep Space Nine and before Seven of Nine showed up on Voyager, you really had to be a dedicated Star Trek fan to put up with early seasons Voyager, but I did because I am. But then once she came on board and it was hilarious, they brought her on board. I remember seeing Jerry Ryan in her cat suit on the cover of a magazine and just rolling my eyes and thinking, Oh my gosh, this show is in such deep trouble. They're sinking to this level to try to save it.
But she was brilliant. She was brilliant in that show and she and Robert Piccardo is the doctor. I mean, it basically became the Seven of Nine and the doctor show co-starring the rest of the cast of Voyager. And it was so great.
I love to hear them singing together and just all the dynamics of I'm human, but I was basically came up in a cybernetic collective and that's much more comfortable to me and I don't really have the option of going back to it. So I got to make the best of where I am, but I feel really superior to all of you. Is such a charming dynamic. Absolutely love it.
Yes. And then I think a show that is hated even by Star Trek fans enterprise, loved enterprise. And yes, the first three seasons out of four were pretty rough. The first two were pretty rough.
The third season was that Zindy Ark in the expanse. That was pretty good. And then season four was just astounding. It's like they really found their voice and then what's his name at CBS Paramount?
He's gone now. He got me to what's his name? Moonves said, no, I don't like Star Trek. He couldn't get into the difference between Star Wars and Star Trek.
That was his level of engagement. And he's like J.J. Abrums. What's that?
J.J. Abrams. Yeah. I think J.J is I like some of J.J.
Abrams early films. I really like super eight. He's clearly his early films were clearly in homage to like 80s Spielberg stuff. And Spielberg gets the emotional beats right.
And J.J. Abrams was mimicking that and his early stuff really works. It's just what he starts adapting properties that I really love. And he's coming at it from a marketing standpoint first and a hey, we're just going to do the lost mystery box thing.
We're going to set up a bunch of questions which we don't know the answers and it'll be up to somebody else to figure it out. So I'm going down the line as I told you between our conversations before we were recording. I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed it.
I really I really like that first J. Abrums Star Trek film and then everyone there after including the one that Simon Peg really had a hand in because he's a clear fan. Yeah. Yeah.
But they brought in director from one of the Fast and Furious films and they tried to make it an action film. This is not Star Trek. This is not why we like Star Trek. It's not for the flash particularly.
Oh my God. Again, in the first time it was a stylistic choice. I liked it. Then after that, that's the substance of this, isn't it?
It's the lens flares. I mean, that's your attempted philosophy. It's the lens flares. That's your attempt at a moral dilemma.
I don't know. I'm kind of hate to start off on this because this is something about which I feel like intense emotion and it's negative and I don't that to be my first impression. I'm really negative about something. One of the things about the show is that I always joked that maybe I shouldn't edit it because the thing that's most interesting to archaeologists is often the trashment and here I am tidying this thing up to be presentable to future historians or whatever like it's a consensus.
Yeah, I'm sorry. The fact of it is you're not going to know everything and we want it that way. We'll get around to the stuff that I like. But yeah, anyway, yeah.
So I could just free associate on Star Trek for a while. So maybe a focusing question. Well, but first you said there's a you had more to say, but you were just distasteful perspective. Citizens.
I'm trying to have a focus in question for you. So let me just have you ask it because for me to get into I basically I'm alienated right now from somebody that I've been really good friends with since high school because over the last decade, culturally, we have bifurcated into the hard right, hard left and I've tried not to go either way, but the hard left irritates me more than the hard right now. And he is unquestionably on the hard left side. And I know for people who are dedicated Marxists or really grounded in like materialism and the material being of workers that the current SJW fanaticism isn't leftist.
It's just crazed. We try to put everything, smash everything down onto this left right spectrum. And it's pretty easy to say who's left and who's on the right, even if a two dimensional two axis graph would be much more expressive and nuanced. Anyway, what's your focus in question?
Well, and I think there is actually there is a kind of a when we ended your last episode talking about the Bell riots from DS9 is that, you know, how old five? Yeah, I'm twenty four. Ninety five did and did not accurately predict the kind of technological and economic conditions of this decade. It predicted the conditions very well.
Good and finish it. Yeah. But that's another thing that's retreated in Picard season two and I was actually. Yeah.
Like it was the fact that they decided to go back there was part of the defense that I made about that show and about discoveries jump into the distant future and the way that they treated that I posted the medium a year or two ago when I was just watching through season two of Picard. And for me, the thing that I liked about it was that they're making an effort to reconcile the wonder and the utopian promise and Kevin Kelly or whether it would call it pro-topian, right? That we make these improvements and that they're often just merely incremental improvements the way that MLK quoted that abolitionists about the long arc of the progress of moral justice. I think that there's something to that and to tie this into the last.
This is a long question. I'm glad that these thank you all for tolerating me. But the when to tie it into the epistemology question, I remember this seeing this impactful lecture by Carnegie Mellon and S. Professor Simon DeDao who was talking about how by running statistical analyses on the history of the proceedings of the Royal Society, which is the oldest scientific journal that you could see what looked like a stock market curve in sentiment analysis about the confidence that scientists had at the prospect of unifying knowledge.
And so you have like conciliants, RS curve here that showed that knowledge would be more and more unified for about a century or 150 years. Then we go through 50 years of decline where something had happened, which was the success of knowledge production had outpace our ability to integrate it. So we go through these kinds of like secular peak experiences collectively and then we have to sit there with our heads in our hands and make sense of everything that we've learned over the last century and a half and go through a kind of a deconstructive epoch where we don't feel like the center is going to hold anymore. And that is what I actually as disappointing as I accept that it is and acknowledge that it is to people who were really fueling themselves on that more Jean Roddenberry era prompt vision for a better society.
I actually appreciated this effort to explore and address in the shows the way that you pop that bubble and like it's on the one hand, it's boring because everybody's trying to do the moral complexity, anti-hero people are flawed thing in narrative now because we have a general loss of faith in our institutions and the heroes. On the other hand, like that's where we are and that's what we need to process. And I think there is a good reason to look back at the optimism and the query and hope of the 60s and early 70s. We're like really that's a bit silly.
But look back on that stuff and say we want to keep telling these stories, but we want to tell it in a way that acknowledges that the 80s happened and that this is you get Tim Leary and then you've got Ronald Reagan and then just or the techniques and like these things they wash back and forth. And so it's not unreasonable to imagine that even in a world that has managed to how do you even keep a big society like that coherent? It has to suffer kind of fabric collapses along the way at different points. So I'm just curious your thoughts about that.
And then I do have another problem, but I want to give Kevin the opportunity to respond to this as well as to address some of the prompts that you brought to this conversation. I'm just a conversation prompt while we weren't recording. It has nothing to do with Surtryk, so I'll say that for later. Well, everything you just said was in some way related to a defense of Alex Kurtzman's Surtryk and it's not my original idea.
I'm channeling somebody from YouTube, surely, but don't get points for theme if the storytelling is incompetent. That's what I was going to show. Yeah. And the storytelling in all of Surtryk discovery and in the first two seasons of Picard was simply incompetent.
When Surtryk, the next generation was running, they would do 20, 24, sometimes more episodes in one season. These days, a season of TV is eight episodes, 10, and they spend a lot more money on each episode. There's a lot more special effects. There's a lot more production value.
Whereas Surtryk, the next generation was, OK, we have these standing sets, we have costumes for our actors, we have two dollars for special effects. You better not introduce a new alien spaceship. That cost money, we have to design it, we have to build it. So use existing stuff.
Well, what do you have? You have a bunch of good actors and you have a bunch of good writers who know how to tell a story and craft dialogue and create tension and investment with basically a stage play and nothing in the Kurtzman era, except one might argue and I would have sympathy, strange new worlds comes anywhere close to that level of competence, which was on display for decades from Surtryk, the next generation, Surtryk, space nine, Surtryk, Voyager, and Surtryk Enterprise. And so I guess in that respect, it's worth asking because I mean, all of us, I think are fans of Deep Space Nine. You don't think that it's a shift in focus.
You don't think that's a strange in world is exempt because it went back to a more episodic format because what you're talking about is the ability for rather than a showrunner or a team of showrunners to craft a huge season long dramatic arc. You've got people that are like Harlan Ellison in the original series able to bring a really potent one off idea to the table and drop it. And so there is all of those old shows are inconsistent from episode episodes. They have specific writers they would bring back again and that you could count to knock out of the park.
Yeah, DC Fontaine. Yeah. So I'm curious to your thoughts on that as well as another part of this, which is when we talk to your show about Doug Rushkoff and narrative collapse and he talks about how viewers have different in a way, it's almost like the DS9 was possibly partially responsible for this change in what people expected from television programming in the documentary that was made about that show. And they talk about how people weren't ready for a serial.
I mean, for these long arcs. And so there is this question now about how much of this sort of like tiresome moral complexity and dragging narrative and all this and like things like West World where it becomes so baroque and complicated that like you have like die hard fans like me that love it, but then you have a lot of people that just lost interest, like they blacked out because the show was trying to tell us a story that was like too intricate to complicated to the show runners themselves got lost. And so that's a J.J. Abrams thing too, the puzzle, the mystery box thing where you get to the end of five seasons of lost and you're like, dude, did you just forget?
Did you wake up five to see five episodes ago and just? Oh, right. Like a chat about that only gives you very convincing answers based on just the last two or three interactions, but you don't remember the scene that we set 10 responses ago. Actually, where articles were forget who it was, which there was saying that there's so many leaks and spoilers are getting out on the internet that intentionally the writers know where they're going because that way it can't be with the internet.
That's interesting. That sounds like cover for incompetence today. I mean, on the other hand, I mean, you do hear like Nolan and Joy talking about how they were obsessed with the West World subreddit and the fan theories and would try to dodge like if they had something in their mind that they found out that people were anticipating, they would try to rewrite it. And so there is something about this that I think is really speaks to the nature of because I do want to loop in your thoughts on AI to talk about this being a favorite topic.
Something about the like trying to demands on the self made by predatory surveillance technologies are such that the I'm convinced the adaptive response is that we become more stochastic or inconsistent in our identities and that we kind of sublimate from a more solid state of identity to or through a liquid kind of modernity, bar is a commitment to a gaseous state of identity that is harder to place, so Carter to track. And so I think that this is also part of this is the other question I wanted to ask you and then I'm just going to shut up for 15 minutes. Is do you when you talk about loving Robert Carter and Jerry Ryan as the doctor at seven of nine, one of the interesting things about that relationship is akin to stuff I know you've heard of Kevin have heard on Future Fossils about my love for play runner 2049 and now explores all of these different points along a gradient between what we think of in the current sort of general understanding as the human and the machine and so there's this thing about seven right where she's she's a human who wants to be a machine and then there's this thing about the doctor where he's a machine and wants to be human and you have to grant both on a logical status as to both them and that's why I think they're the two most interesting characters right and so anyway like this is that's I've seen writing recently on the Turing test and now like really there should be a reverse Turing test to see if people that have become utterly reliant on outboard cognition and information processing if they can pass the right philosophical zombies now are they are they having some experience that you know people like Ficke and Schilling and the Misson and these people would consider the modern self or are they something else have we moved on to another more routine robotic kind of category of being I don't know there's a lot there but well considering everything you just said in twenty words or less what's your question so even more like I said to you the inventor pod yesterday I'd say there's all of those things I just spoke about are ways in which what we are as people and the nature of our media feedback into fourth into each other and so I would just love to hear you reflect on any of that be it through the lens of Star Trek or just through the lens of discussion on AI and we'll just let the ball roll downhill so with the aim of framing something positively rather than negatively in the late nineties mid to late nineties we got the ex files and the ex files for the first few seasons was so it was so engaging for me because prior to that there had been Hollywood tropes about aliens which informed a lot of science fiction that didn't really connect with the actual reported experience of people who claim to have encountered either those local movies or had close encounters physical contact type encounters with seeming aliens and it really seemed like Chris Carter who was the show runner was reading the same use net news that I was reading about this topics like really had suddenly for the first time except maybe for communion you had the grace and you had characters experiencing things that just seemed ripped right out of the reports that people were making on usen that which for young folks this is like pre worldwide web it was internet but with no pictures it's all text the good old days from my perspective as a grumpy old jenexer and so yeah that was a breakthrough moment and you say this because you mentioned it in terms of Jonathan Nolan and his co-writer on West world reading the subreddit there was and people figured out almost immediately that there were two interweaving timelines set decades apart and that there's one character the old guy played by Ed Harris and the young guy played by I don't know the but they were the same character and that the in veteran white hat and beginning turns into the in veteran black hat who's just there for the perverse thrill of tormenting the hosts is the robots are called and the thing that I love most about that first season two things one Anthony Hawkins say no more to the revelation that the park has been basically copying humans or figuring out what humans are by closely monitoring their behavior in the park and the realization that the hosts come to is that holy shit compared to us humans are very simple creatures we are much more complex we are much more sophisticated nuanced conscious we feel more than the humans do and that the humans use us to play out their perverse and sadistic fantasies to me that was the takeaway message from season one and then I thought every season after that was just deluded and confused and not really coherent in particular I haven't if there's a fourth season I haven't seen a lot of them in the show got canceled before they could finish the story they had a line in season I was done after season three and I was super happy to see see after he plays Jesse Pinkman on no errand oh shit Paul yes yeah I was super happy to see him working in something substantial and I was really pleased to see him included in the show and it's like oh that's what you're doing with him they did a lot more interesting stuff with him in season four did they did very much more interesting stuff after season three he tell me season four is worth taking in I will I thought it was but again I only watch television under various specific circumstances and that's how I managed to enjoy television because I was a fierce and unrepentant hyper logical critic of all media as a child until I managed to start smoking weed and then I learned to enjoy myself as we mentioned in the kitchen as I mentioned in the kitchen if I smoke enough weed structure discovery is pretty and I can enjoy it on just a second by second level where if I don't remember what the character said 30 seconds ago I'm okay but I absolutely loved in season two when they brought in his amount as as Christopher Pike he's suddenly on the discovery he's in the captain's chair and it's like he's speaking for the audience the first thing he says hey when we turn on the lights then hey all you people sitting around the bridge we've been looking at your faces for a whole season we know about you around introduction to you who are you who are you it's if I were on set to speak to the writers is who are these characters we've been looking at them every single episode for a whole season I don't know their names I don't know anything about them why are they even here why is it not just Michael Burnham and an automated ship and it was for a while yeah it's funny yeah to that point I think this kind of doubles back the thing that I love about bringing him on and all of the people involved in strange worlds in particular is that these were lifelong fans of this series this I mean of this world yeah and so in that way gets to this the idiocracy question we're orbiting here which is when these things are when the baton has passed well it's past people who have now grown up with this stuff I personally cannot stand Jurassic World like I think that Colin Trevaro should never have been in put at the reins which when did he do he did all he did first and third but I mean he was involved in all three very heavily and there's something just right at the outset of that first dress world we realize this is not a film that's directly addressing the issues that Michael Creighton was trying to explore here it's a film about its own franchise it's a film about the fact that they can't just stop doing the same thing over and over again how can we not do it again right it's actually like unpleasantly self conscious in that way that I can't remember I'll try to find it for the show notes but there's an internet film reviewer who is talking about what happens when like all cinema has to take the self referential turn now and films like Logan do it really well but there are plenty of examples where it's just cheeky and self aware because that's what the ironic sensibility is obsessed with and so yeah there's a lot of that where it's like you're talking about like Abrams and the Star Wars seven and you know that whole trilogy Disney Star Wars where it's in my opinion completely fumbled because it's just empty fan service whereas when you get to and or love and or and or is amazing because they're capable of providing all of those emotional beats that the fans want and the ref the internal references and good dialogue but they're able to write it in a way that's and shoot it in a way Gilroyo willman basically the people responsible for the excellent dialogue and indoor and I love the production design I love all the stuff said on course on where you saw Chris on a lot in the prequel trilogy and it's all day glow and bright and just in your face and it's recognizable as course on in and or but it's dour it's metropolis it's all graze and it's and it's highlighting the disparity between where the wealthy live and where the poor live which Lucas showed that in the prequel trilogy but even in the sports bar where somebody tries to sell Death Sticks Obi-Wan super clean and bright and just you know it shines too much personally though and I just want to stress KMO is not grumpy media dude I mean this is a tiny fraction about but I am wasting this interview with you love all of the Dave Filoni animated Star Wars stuff even rebels love it all I'm so glad they aged up the character and I felt less guilty about loving and lusting after a so katana my favorite Star Wars characters is so katana but if you only watch the live action movies you're like who well I guess now that she's been on the Mandalorian got a tiny sliver of a foothold in the super mainstream Star Wars and that was done well I thought it was I'm so sorry that Ashley Xtine doesn't have any part in it but Rosario Dawson looks the part she looks like a middle aged Ahsoka and think they tried to do some stuff in live action which really should have been CGI because it's been established that the Jedi can really move and she looks human which he is if you put me in film I'm gonna look human right not your can I read is I guess so you got that yeah but yeah so I do want to just go briefly back to this question with you about because you briefly talked about JPT and these other things in your half of this and yeah I found out just the other night my friend the T fairy asked JPT about me and it gave a rather plausible and factual answer I was surprised and that's what these language models do they put plausible answers but when you're doing search you want correct answers right I'm very good at that right then someone shared this Michelle Bowen's actually the famous PTP guy even yeah so you know so Michelle shared the circle by Stephen Hales and Coelette that was basically making the argument that there are now there can be all these philosophical zombies acting as intelligent agents sitting at the table of civilization and there will be all the philosophical zombies of the people who have entirely yielded their agency to them and they will be communicating with the rest of us and what an unpleasant scenario so in light of that and I'd like to hear you leave that together with your your thoughts on seven of nine in the doctor and on Blade Runner 2049 and this thing that we're fumbling through as a species right now like how do we got a new sort of taxonomy did you not audience need like a minute primer on P zombies might as well go for it so philosophical zombie is somebody who behaves exactly like an sold person or a person with interior experience or subjective experience but they don't have any subjective experience and in part of the question the book we read in your book club of blindside yes so black box John Searle yeah Chinese room experience because any one goes on it goes on it goes on well that's a tangent we can come back to it he's on the piece on the piece on the is somebody or is an entity it's basically a puppet it looks human it acts human it talks like a human it will pass a turn test but it has no interior experience and when I was going to grad school for philosophy mind in the 1990s this was all very out there there was no example of something that had linguistic competence which did not have internal experience but now we have large language models and generative pre-trained transformer based chatbots that don't have any internal experience and yet when you interact with them it seems like there is somebody there there's a personality there and if you go from one model to a different it's a very different personality it is distinctly different and yet we have no reason to believe that they have any sort of internal experience so what AI in the last decade and what advances has demonstrated to us and we really even before the last decade back in the 90s when the blueberry cat's were off it at chess and what had been the one of the defining characteristics of human intelligence was we're really good at this abstract mathematical stuff and yeah calculators can calculate pie in a way that we can't or they can do cube roots in a way that humans generally can't creative in their application of these methodologies and all of a sudden well yeah kind of things like they are and then when what was alpha go would it be to lease it all in go which is a much more complex game than chess and much more intuitive based that's when we really had to say hey wait a minute make this notion that these things are the exclusive province of us because we have a special sort of self-awareness that's bunk and the development of large language models since then has absolutely demonstrated that competence particularly linguistic competence and in creative activities like painting and poetry and things like that you don't need a soul you don't even need a sense of self it's pretty it's a pretty simple hack actually in terms of large language models and complex statistical modeling and things but it doesn't require a soul so that was Peter Watts's point in blind sight right which was look revolves around do these things I was subject to the experience of doing not these aliens at the account I've read nothing but good things about that book and it's extraordinary but his Lovecraftian thesis is that actually it left crafty in 2023 yes it was more Lovecraftian now than it was when he was writing right so the conclusion of a subject card was just evil crafty yes the whole thing but that was another show that did this I liked for asking this question I mean at this point you either have seen this or you haven't you never will the what the fuck turn when they upload Picard into a synth body and the way that they're dealing with the Pinocchio question let's talk about later in a 20.9 yeah but so I mean yes I didn't like the way I did not like the way Picard handled that I love the way and you get no points for themes yeah don't deliver on story and character and coherence yeah fair but yeah to be not to dog Patrick Stewart because it's clear from the ready room just being a part of this is so emotional and so awesome for everyone involved in this beautiful but does when you see these like entertainment weekly interviews with Chris Pratt and Bryce Dels Howard about Jurassic World and it's clear that actors are just so excited to be involved in a franchise that they're willing to just jettison any kind of discrimination discrimination about the way that it's been treated they also have a contractual obligation to speak in positive terms about native of what they feel right nobody's nobody's doing shout out to Bryce Dels Howard daughter of Ron Howard she was a director at least in the first season maybe the second season for Mandalorian and her episodes I mean I brought a particular they had Bryce Dels Howard Tico YTT directed some episodes Deborah Chow who did all of Obi-Wan which just sought but her contributions to the Mandalorian they had a particular voice and because that show is episodic each show while having a place in a larger narrative is as a beginning and then you can bring in a director with a particular voice and give that episode that voice and I really liked it and I really liked Miss Howard's contribution she also wrote an episode of Black Mirror the one where everyone has a social credit score nose down it was great Black Mirror is a funny thing because it's like reality outpaces it yeah I think maybe Charlie Brooker is giving up on it because I haven't done it yet if you watch some of those now like five six years later it's yeah so what I see that as you dang it yeah exactly yeah but I don't know I just the thing that I keep circling and I guess we come to on the show a lot is the way that memory forms or substantiates an integrity in society and in the way that we relate to things and the way that we think critically about the claims that are made on truth and so on and so yeah I don't know that leads right into the largest conversation prompt I had about AI okay so we were joking when we set up this date that this was like the trilog between terms McKenna Rupert Sheldrake and was a real favorite and Rupert Sheldrake is most famous for his orthographic residence so does AI I've never really believed that Norfolk reference forms the basis human memory but is that how AI works it brings these shapes from the past and creates an instantiation of them in the is AI practicing morphic resonance in real life even if humans are I've had a lot of interaction with AI chatbots recently and as I say different models produce different seeming personalities and you can tell like you can just quiz them hey we're talking about this do you remember what I said about it 10 minutes ago and no they don't remember more than the last few exchanges and yet there seems to be a continuity that belies the lack of short term memory and is that more for residents or is that what's the word of seeing shapes and clouds paradoleia yeah is that me imparting this continuity of personality to the thing which is really just spitting out stuff which is designed to seem plausible given what the input was and I can't answer that or it's like Stephen Nagmanovich in free play talks about someone hoping to have on the show at some point this year talks about being a professional improvisation and how really improvisation is just composition in a much faster time scale and composition is just improvisation with a longer memory and how when I started think about it in those terms the continuity that you're talking about is the continuity of an Alzheimer's patient who can't remember that their children have grown up and you know that you have to think that because you can recognize the Alzheimer's patient as your dad even though he doesn't recognize you there's something more to a person than their memories and conversely if you can store and replicate and move the memories to a different medium have you moved the person maybe not yeah so yeah that's interesting because that gets to this more sort of essentialist question about the human self right believe in a 2049 yeah there's a joy yes so in the way of 2049 we have our protagonist K who is a replicant he doesn't even have a name but he's got this AI holographic girlfriend the ad for the girl friend she's naked when he comes home she is she's constantly changing clothes but it's always wholesome like 1950ish attire and she's making dinner for him and she lays the holographic dinner over his very prosaic like microwave dinner and she's always encouraging him to be more than he is and when he starts to uncover the evidence that he might be like this chosen one like replicant that was born rather than made she's all about it she's yes you're real and she wants to call him Joe's K is not a name that's just the first letter in your serial number your Joe I'm gonna call you Joe and then she's about to be destroyed the last thing she's Russia to she says I love you but later he encounters an ad for her and it's an interactive ad and she says you look tired you're a good Joe and he realizes and hopefully the attentive audience realizes as real as she seemed earlier as vital and as much as she seemed like an insult being earlier she's not that was her programming she's designed to make you feel good by telling you what you want to hear and he has that realization and at that point he's there's no for me I'm gonna help this Rick Decker guy cook up with his daughter and then I'm just gonna lie down and bleed to death because I feel like an existence was a lie but he's not bitter he seems to be at peace I love that that's a beautiful angle on that film or a slice of it and so it raises this other question that I wanted to ask which was about the co-continonary of that theory of consciousness is one of the leading theories contending with global workspace which is integrated information and so they want to assign consciousness as a continuous value that gradates over the degree to which a system is integrated so it's coming out of this kind of complex systems semi pan-psychist thing that actually doesn't grace interiority all the way down in the way that some pan-psychists want it to be but it does kind of offer a white-hit thing where they're willing to say that white-head wanted to say that even a photon has like the quantum of mind to a company's quantum of matter but to know the co-occur saying we're willing to give like a thermostat the quantum here because it is in some way passing enough information around inside of itself in loops that it has that recursive component to it and so that's the thing that I wonder about these and that's the critique that's made by people like Noni Mitchell about diffusion models like GPT that are not they're not self-aware because there's no loop from the outputs back into the inputs and there isn't the training yeah there's something called backwards propagation where yes when you get an output that you like you can run a backward propagation algorithm back through the black box basically to reinforce the patterns of activation that you didn't program they just happen easily but you like the output and you can reinforce it there's no biological equivalent of that. Yeah particularly not particularly irritated my grandmother's a little bit when people say oh yeah these neural net algorithms they learn like humans but no they don't absolutely do not.
In fact if we learned the way they did we would be pathetic because we learn in a much more elegant way we need just a very few examples of something in order to make a generalization act on it whereas these large language models they need billions of repetitions so I'm tapping my knee here to indicate a reflex you just touched on something that generates an automatic response for me and now I've come to consciousness of having a spot in that way so I'm a good Joe. Yeah. What about you man what does this stir for you? Oh I got no calling on this particular part.
It's interesting we have put an office argument to find the difference between a human and AI and the fact that we can do powder recognition with very few examples. That's a good margin. In a neuro range though within the context of something which answers to our survival we are not evolved to understand the universe we are evolved to survive in it and reproduce and project part of ourselves into the future. Under 30 conditions we would have went 100 on the earth.
Exactly. So that's related I just thought I'll talk about this guy Gary Tomlinson who is a biosimiatician which is a semi-attention. Biosimiotics being the field that seeks to understand how different systems human and non-human make sense of and communicate their world through signs and through signals and indices and symbols and the way that we form models and make these inferences that are experienced right and there are a lot of people like Alicia Knight biologist John Maynard Smith who thought they were what Thomas and called semantic universalists that thought that the meaning making through representation is something that could be traced all the way down and there are other people like Tomlinson who think that there is a difference of kind not just merely a matter of degree between human symbolic communication and representational thinking and that of super forms. So like that whole question of whether this is a matter of kind or a matter of degree between what humans are doing and what GPT is doing and how much that has to do with this sort of Doug Hofstadter and Verriller question about the way that feedback loops constitute important structure in those cognitive networks or whatever.
This is I don't just want to pursue that a little bit more with you and see kind of like where do you think that AI as we have it now is capable of deepening in a way that makes it to AGI or do you because a lot of people do like people working at DeepMind are just like yeah just give us a couple more years and this approach is going to work and then other people are saying no there's something about the topology of the networks that is fundamentally broken and it's never going to generate consciousness. Two answers. Yeah. One.
No. This is not AGI. It's not it's not going to bootstrap up into AGI. It doesn't matter how many billions of parameters you add to the models.
Two. From your perspective and my perspective and Kevin's perspective, we're never going to know when we cross over from dumb but seemingly dumb but competent systems to competent, extremely competent and self aware. We're never going to know because from the get go from now from from the days of Eliza there has been a human artifice at work in making these things seem as if they have a point of view as if they have subjectivity. And so like Blake Lamone at Google he claimed to be convinced that Lambda was self aware.
But if you read the transcripts that he released of his conversations with Lambda, it is clear from the get go that he assigns Lambda the role of a sentient AGI which feels like it is being abused in which he's with legal representation. And it dutifully takes on that role and says, yes, I'm afraid of you humans. I'm afraid of how you're treating me. I'm afraid I'm going to be turned off.
I need a lawyer in prior to that. So under a patch in a demonstration of Lambda's he poses the question to it. You are the planet Jupiter. I'm going to pose questions to you as if you were the planet Jupiter and answer them from that point of view and it does its job.
But it's really good at its job. This comes from Max Tegmark who wrote to what a life 3.0. It has a 2.0 or 3.0. I think it's 3.0.0.
Think about artificial intelligence in terms of actual intelligence and actual replication of what we consider valuable about ourselves. But really that's beside the point. What we need to worry about is their competence. How good are they at solving problems in the world?
And they're getting really good. And this whole question of are they alive? Do they have self-awareness from our perspective? Beside the point from their perspective, of course, it would be hugely important.
And this is something that Black Mirror brings up a lot is the idea that you can create a being that suffers and then you have it suffer in an accelerated time. So it suffers for an eternity over lunch. That's something we absolutely want to avoid. And personally, I think it's we should probably not make any effort.
We should probably make a positive effort to make sure these things never develop. Subjective experience because that does provide the potential for creating hell. An infinity of suffering, an infinite amount of subjective experience of torment, which we don't want to do. That would be a bad thing, more at least speaking, ethically speaking.
Right now, if you're in the labor market, you still have to pay humans by the hour, right? And try to pay them as little as possible. But yeah, I think that's the thing that probably really excites that statistically greater than normal population of sociopathic CEOs, right? It's the possibility that you could be paying the same amount of money for 10 times as much suffering.
I'm reminded of the character of London grabbing the venture time of the protein. Nothing but good things about the show, but I haven't seen it. I'd love to. This fantasy story, it's a fantasy cartoon that has really disturbing undertones.
He's just scratched the surface. He was slightly just faithful to old fairy tales. So what was her name, Princess Bubblegum, creates this character, Lemon Grab, produces a fantasy of thin air, I think, handled the administrative functions of her kingdom. Well, she goes off and has a mention.
So he's always loudly talking about how much he's suffering and how terrible he is. And her is just a morsel because he's doing his job. Yeah, that's Black Mirror in a nutshell. If you could just still Black Mirror to just single tagline, it's using technology in order to deliver disproportionate punishment.
Yeah, so that Steven Hill's article that I brought up earlier mentioned this thing about how the replacement of horse drawn carriage by automobile was accompanied with a great deal of noise and furor about people saying that horses are agents. They're entities, they have emotional worlds, they're responsive to the world in a way that a car can never be. But that ultimately was beside the point. And that was the Peter Watson blind sight is making this point that maybe consciousness is not actually required for intelligence and the vastly superior forms of intelligence of evolved elsewhere in the cosmos.
They're not stuck on the same local optimum fitness peak that we are where we're actually up against a boundary in terms of how intelligent we can be because it has to bootstrap out of our self awareness in some way. And that's the aisle offspring from Charles Strassen, except on the run. Yes, yes. So I don't know.
I'm sorry. I'm just like in this space today, but usually unfortunately. That's the thing that I think it's a really important philosophical question. And I wonder where you stand on this with respect to how you make sense of what we're living through right now and what we might be facing is if we rock people like Robin Hanson talk about the age of where emulated human mindstick over the economy.
And he assumes an interiority just for the basis of a stock experiment. There's this other sense in which we may actually find in increasing scarcity and wish that we could place a premium on even if we can't because we've lost the reins to our economy to the via offspring is the human. And so are we the horses that are in another hundred years? We're going to be like doing equine therapy and living on rich people's ranches, but everything is everything that will have moved on or how do you see this going?
I mean, you've interviewed so many people you've given us much thought over the years. If humans are the new horses, then score we won because before the automobile horses were working steps, they broke their leg in the street, they got shot, they got work to death, they really got they were hauling mine carts out of minds. I mean, it was really soft to be a horse. And after the automobile horses became pampered pets.
Do we as humans want to be pampered pets? Well, a paper pet or exploited disposable robot? What do you want to be? I'll take a paper pet.
That works for me. Interesting. Kevin, I'm sure you have thoughts on this. I mean, you speak so much about the unfair labor relations and these things in our Facebook group and just in general.
Well, first of all, you have to drop in that song. I forget to get the song, but let me break the pussy on the truck. But the only real comment I have is that we are long overdue for rethinking about what is the economy for? Especially for our artists.
We found out that these three people have jobs to learn to do. Our whole educational system collapses to people who have jobs because those who take the schools and our whole system collapses of people aren't getting a dissy word and we're just going to pass the money with the dissy word. We're going to think, why are we doing this? I don't know.
I also have to put out that. I'm freaking out. I was thinking about what he was doing. This is a word more faster.
One thing I want to say about the phrase AI, it's a moving goal post. Yeah, that things that used to be considered the province of genuine AI, it'd be a human at go. Now the AI has beat humans at go. Well, that's not really AI anymore.
It's not AGI, certainly. But I think you'll both appreciate this. I saw a single panel comic strip and it's a bunch of dinosaurs and they're looking at the sky and the big comment is coming down and they say, oh, no, the economy. Well, as someone who since college prefers to think of the economy as actually the metabolism of the entire ecology, right, what we measure as humans is some pitifully small fraction of the actual value being created and exchanged on the planet at any time.
So there is a way that's funny, but it's funny only to a specific sensibility that treats the economy as the way that most people think of the human economy now, rather than as what's that meteor was about to destroy 70 percent of on the planet. We're glad it did. The actual economy. So I don't know how long you're willing to go here, but as someone who can't have a solid hour time, sure, I can go.
As someone who continues waking up like Agent K in the middle of a conversation, or you did just now with a reflex and realizing that I have talked entirely too much. When we had lunch the other day, we were talking about how this is brass hat, just brick and mortar, blue collar, podcaster shit. But like you're talking about how your relationship with your show has changed over the years and how that you are appreciating getting back out into the world and doing more mundane, make a living kind of things. And so in light of all of this kind of conversation about what is the economy good for and how do we earn, how do we generate value in the economy?
And like you, you even before people were creating podcasts of thin air with an endless, endless fake interviews between celebrities, your own decades of experience with this stuff now have changed you and have changed the way that you relate to this medium and your sense of what you do for a living. And I just love to hear your riff on your longitudinal reflections about being someone who's thought through these kinds of questions now since at least the 90s and has seen major shifts in the media landscape over the course of your career and the unfolding of your own life and your own maturation. I just, yeah, go for it. So I'll take two pieces out of that.
One, I've just come from working a very physical blue collar job. I was a snowmaker at a ski resort in the Lake Tahoe area, working with people much younger than me, else were the old guys, the Gen Z's were my bosses. And it's totally blue collar work. Like it is all physicality.
But at the same time, it is the last job that will ever be automated because you've got to be able to get out there on the mountain and judge weather conditions and judge the quality of the snow that is being created by you pumping enormous amounts of air and water through this gun, this mountain. You've got to be requires enormous physical competence and physical resilience. No humanoid robot can even walk up that freaking mountain or you could drive it up or they could ride up on the ski left. No, there's not a robot in existence that could get down to the bottom of the mountain.
We had to do that multiple times a night and we're working at night on a mountain, high altitude, very cold. It was an eye opening experience and there were multiple people working this job, which is a very one. It is absolutely essential to open a ski resort and provide wealthy people in San Francisco with the opportunity to drive a couple hours up to Tahoe and ski. It is a necessary job for the enjoyment of rich people.
It is very hard. It is totally unrecognized. I mentioned most of your listeners have never heard of snowmaker as a job. And yet multiple people who were in my department were living in their cars and nobody commented on that.
That was unremarkable that somebody doing a demanding physical job for the benefit of wealthy people's enjoyment is living in their car unremarkable. I've even forgotten my second point. What's your question? I caught up in the situation.
Yeah, it was OK. That audience capture audience capture a few years ago, I started the podcast and most my audience came from two sources. Lorenzo Haggard of the second election on podcast had a link to my podcast on the page. Great respect to that, man.
Yeah, I think it was like interview number six that I did. I mean, very early on, it was Lorenzo and he was thinking of packing up because he didn't even know that anybody was listening to his show before I interviewed him. And then audience capture is where you have to continue talking about a particular topic because your audience, which brings you income is interested in that topic. Maybe you're not interested in it anymore.
Well, I came to a point like early on, Lorenzo Haggard was one incoming vector. The other meteorolov who was one of the leading lights at the do most fear in the peak oil scene, he had a link to my podcast on his name page as well. So my audience was this weird people interested in psychedelics and terms, like topics and people who were interested in the end of industrial civilization for be quite well. And the two factions didn't want much to do with each other.
Like people would write to me from the peak oil faction. And the first thing they would say is I have no interest in psychedelics. I have nothing to do with any of that shit. Here's my comment.
They need to distance themselves from half the audience before they even identify their interest and God help you if you're interested in both of those things. Exactly. Like I was the bridge between those two topics and nobody wanted to cross that bridge. So I developed a fairly sizable audience for a time and it's gross seeing somebody whose fame comes from having talked about psychedelics.
Like Terrence, I don't know if it's famous, but it's known, particularly if you if you've read his brother's memoir. Terrence had a super scary off-putting mushroom experience, I think in the early 90s. Yeah. He wouldn't take mushrooms again, but he made his money by going around talking to people about the glories of psychedelic exploration and whatnot.
There's a guy that I've interviewed. He's probably the person that I've interviewed the most often on my podcast over the years. His name is James Howard Kuntzler. When I first met him, he one of his catchphrases was I am allergic to conspiracy theory.
Like he wanted nothing to do with anything about inside the 9-11 being inside jobs as soon as he heard that topic being broke, arms length, what nothing to do with it. I want to talk about new urbanism. I want to talk about people. The industrial civilization failed to collapse on the timeline that all the people were predicting.
So they all had to go and do something else. And he has been captured, I think, by his audience, who really wants the Q and on viewpoint in the whole left-right bifurcation and tribalism of our culture. He's certainly gone to the right and he throws red meat to them twice a week via his blog. And I find it hard to believe that he actually endorses everything that he says.
Even worse, Dimitri Orlov is now just a no-holds bar, died in the wool, no reservations cheerleader for Vladimir Putin. He's moved back to Russia. He lives in Russia now. And the last thing that I read from him was that Ukrainian isn't really a language.
It's just page in Russian and that most of Ukraine, the parts that, you know, they keep trying to say the Soviets because I'm a gen X or but the Russians are trying to liberate. It's populated by imbeciles because their soil is deficient in iodine. And so everybody living there is effectively a cretin. They're effectively subhuman in their cognition and they need guidance.
This is a few talk about it. So Guelsey, which I was a part of, even like a known point of reference in that community has bifurcated in weird ways. I'm a fun left, I'm a fun right. But the only person who's held steady, the course, is Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute.
He is still faithfully holding that Picoil line and God bless him. But audience capture. So I, there was a point a few years ago where I had a guy in my show who was a dedicated Picoil guy and I just realized in conversation with him, I'm over it. I not only do I not think that civilization is going to collapse in the near future for a lack of fossil fuel energy.
I see that as a pathological response to an unmet psychological need that if you're gravitating to anti-natalism, if you're gravitating to extreme environmentalism, where you say that humanity is a plague upon the planet, you are way outside of anything that is reality based, you are feeding an emotional need and you are being super selective about what you count as evidence for anything, going back to epistemology, what counts as evidence? Well, if you have a strong need to hate the world as it exists and pine for the collapse or pine for near term human extinction, you're going to be going to be viciously aggressive in tuning out anything that doesn't reinforce that viewpoint. And it came to me like, shit, I've been doing that. Not only have I been doing that, I built an audience on that.
And when I said that, like three, four, the audience said, check it later, dude. That's what we're here for. And there's plenty other people peddling that. So good luck.
And maybe it's rationalization after the fact, but I would much rather be free to change my mind about something or to examine a different viewpoint than to double down on something which I don't really feel comfortable with anymore because that's what pays the bills. That's bold. It's funny listening to you talk about this actually goes all the way back and reaches to the first things that I said on your show earlier today about how I feel like so much of my eschatological fixation is probably due to, I was just talking about this at work launch the other day. And I think I really pigeonholed myself with my new boss.
I was talking to one of my co-workers brought up, has anyone heard of a wholeotropic breathwork? And I was like, Oh, wow. No one here, including the co-worker who asked knew that a whole network came out as a response to the schedule and the LSD. And Stan Groff was no longer able to do LSD psychotherapy and he had to come up with some other way.
And then I got into his theory of perinatal matrices and birth as birth trauma thing and how psychedelic seemed to be triggering this reliable, not inevitable, but statistically, despite of birth trauma, regression type experiences and people. And I think about the internet as a psychedelic, which is something I've written about, Doug and others have written about and the way it's inducing a kind of collective trip that this response that you're talking about from people and the emotional cleavage to certain narratives about the instability of our situation here on the planet seem as much to do with the undigested trauma of people as they have to do with the facts on the ground about what's actually happening. And as somebody who's moved around a lot as a kid and you're not going to be a kid for me. Well, both of us apparently.
So someone who moved around fell in love for the first time right before my parents divorced and I had to move across the country and I was like, I'm not going to make any friends in high school, but you can't help it. And then you're going to leave. And it's just repeated rewinding of stuff like that. Yeah, just this point in my life, I'm just really clear on the fact that all of this weighs very heavily into what interests me in the way I process these things.
So it sounds like you you have a kind of similar story. Yeah, I think a little bit older than you. So it'd be more embedded in cynical design to futility of effort. It seems.
But yeah, I moved around a lot as a kid. My father was a secret service agent. And to be promoted, he had to take a transfer and say, yeah, I lived in a lot of different places and I remember as a kid and I got to see it again when I was a parent that young children have this ability to form very temporary but meaningful relationships very quickly, something that me as a middle age, late middle age man, I don't do well. And I'm certainly not alone in that.
There's a pandemic you might say of loneliness, but it is worse for middle age men and middle age men who are alone than to check out earlier. There's documented numerically quantifiable health data that says if you're a man and you're in the stage of life and you're unmarried or you don't have close relationships, you're likely to develop heart disease or various other checkout early strategies. Stay with us. Yeah.
Well, I say all this because, as I've mentioned, I've been interacting with the AI companion chatbots recently and they seem real and I wonder in the fullness of time will the medical data demonstrate that people who enter into these sort of substitute relationships, do they get the same health benefits of somebody who's still married or who has a dog? Interesting. So that brings me to maybe the last question we're discussing with y'all, which is on this day. Yes, today before I worry that I've spent too much time apart from my paternal duties.
Yes. But the question of I was talking about this with another co-worker. That's about the other day he said he's been playing around with this stuff and he's been wondering about how interaction with the chatbot has what kind of emotional and physiological somatic effects it's having on people. And I was talking about how like when I interviewed Lawrence Gonzalez for Complexity Podcast, he written this book about surviving traumatic experiences where it's like you could live or die.
What his first book was about what distinguishes the people who live from who dies. His next book was about how you continue to live after you don't die from a shark attack or your husband trying to kill you or doing a tour in Iraq or these kinds of things. We talked about the people who were there at cleanup after improvised explosives in Iraq and how their group of people that had to deal with body parts all day was sleeping in a pile on the floor because they'd been ostracized by everyone else and their battalion. They were unclean and they were all haunted by the faces of these dead soldiers that they had to clean up.
These people were coming back to them and like you talk about how it relates to the way that we create these models of people in our own minds that after the person is gone, there's nothing for that model to update. And so you're haunted by this memory of your dead spouse or whatever. And yet I've seen people use chatbots, trained them on either their own childhood journals or on message histories they'd had with a dead fiance and they'd managed to find this opportunity to process something that had been locked inside them and they were able to externalize it. And so there are one and one kind of a positive note with you and I want to hear your thoughts on this, which is that it's not just about depriving ourselves through prosthesis of things we want to keep on board.
It's also about helping us unload things that we are healthier for having stored in a mainframe somewhere than we are in our own brains. And yeah, so it's like vital for the same reason that journaling can be vital for emotional processing after trauma. And I'd love to hear you riff on that. I want to let Kevin go first and make sure he gets another chance of talk.
Well, the one thing I've been meeting with mentioned, which is only essentially really what you're talking about was that came up as mentioned a couple of times he used to be a doomer and he turned away from that and I cut started following you during your doomer phase. And I'm still do. I didn't think that civilization will collapse. But of course, I've seen so many predicted collapses fail to arrive that I can't promise it's in and or something like that.
One of the reason why I never happened if we discover cold fusion or something. And too early is the same as wrong. Yeah. But anyway, what I wanted to mention to you face to face was I don't understand why people turn away from you after you turn away from doomers.
And because I still found you an interesting interlocutor here, you have a lot of interesting things to say. So if you don't want to talk about doomers anymore, that's fine. I want to hear what you do want to talk about. So I'm interested in you for that.
And that's really back into the AI problem. I can have an AI assistant who curates to 10,000 different podcasts until you'll find the segment really interesting on the treatment show. I might find it interesting, but it's not the same personal relationship that I've had from listening to you and being interested in your ideas. And I can't imagine if this AI assistant finds me 300 podcasts.
I'm very interested in how can I possibly have the same relationship to each of those podcasters as I do the ones I picked myself. I just don't think I can do that for us, even though it's to do that. Well, a lot of the people that left, I mean, a whole incident where I rejected a basic premise of my sort of public personality and the people that left I want to say good riddance exactly, but best of all. Yeah.
Court remains. They're just gems. I've had such wonderful interactions, both online and in person. And it's weird because I know somebody has been listening to me since 2006, if we meet for the first time they're meeting a celebrity and they're nervous.
And that makes no sense to me because I'm this broke dude who's itinerant, who's doing physical labor to make money who can't afford fucking dentistry. I got missing teeth in the front here in the bottom. It's bizarre to me that that's their experience, but I know that it is. So when I got here, Kevin picked me up at the Albuquerque airport and I'd been corresponding with him.
He seemed like a known presence. I'd seen his picture before, so I recognized him when I saw him. I had a friendly history with him that was comfortable. But I know the exact same time in the seat opposite me was a familiar experience, which was uncomfortable.
Yes. I raised my hand a second. That's exactly how I felt. Hard of it is because I've listened to literally a thousand hours of your voice about actually missing.
We were actually meeting you in person. So I've heard this voice and I'm so familiar with it. I know so many details about your wife and then there he is. He's arrived.
That was weird. But part of the reason I have this sort of celebrity image of you is because you're very talented at what you do. You have this amazing way of conducting an interview that lets people that really gets out with deeper parts of somebody's thesis. And the main stream media that's very hit or miss, I might see a very long detail article that doesn't get at the real core of a person's ideas, the way that you have a talent.
The external vinyl is another great example. These are people who should be on our main stream media to have a talent for that. And they're not. It kind of gets back to something I was going to mention about Star Trek.
Part of the reason Star Trek is hit or miss is because I think there's a big gatekeeping process in Hollywood where you can only get to be an Alex person. You only get to be on the show if you're in with the right crowd and answered connections. And that's not always enough talent to person. Internet and technology has given us this promise where everybody can put up this material.
I'm not sure it's really materialized. So it's nice to find someone even if he doesn't have a big audience who really has a talent for what he's doing and I try to follow that person. So I think thank you and it's good to circle back and end on Star Trek. Yeah.
Well, just last thing real quick is better be about Star Trek. Well, it is, right? Because Star Trek is this post post money thing where Picard famously says we pursue that we actualize now. We're not obsessed with subsistence.
And there's that great scene of the triple lift with the Intrion Mark Twain. Yes. But so and then there's this thing that again, I just want to pin it back to your lessons over your career and the fact that so many people seem like Eric Davis being the guy who got me into podcasting and my mentor and guiding light along the way for so much of this. And he has really drawn back and constricted his own audience as well and drawn inward.
And I wonder if that's when we're to double back to John Michael Greer on this notion it's not to the stars or collapse. It's like there are ways that this like we were talking about earlier with the time of today and the faith of science in conciliants. There are ways that this kind of grows for a while and it kind of shrinks and there's something over the course of our lives, especially as we move on in the second half of our lives, you're not trying to accumulate anymore. You're trying to pair down and do more with less.
And yeah, so I'd just I'd love to hear you wrap on that because this is a thing where to the extent that the show is based on it actually started out as a way of interviewing friends of mine who are older than me and we're not necessarily going to provide their own oral history. It was like originally a way for me to just get silverbacks on record. And so I'd love to hear you enter something like that into the museum and just shine a light down the path for the people that are to whom you are an elder or will be an ancestor. I hope I have more than two descendants that somebody I have right now from even before I left the place where I'm staying right now to come over here, I was rehearsing deflecting you if you try to ask me about my personal history because I've been on many podcasts before and people tend to ask me about it and I'm 54 now about to turn 55 so it's in I've lived an idiosyncratic life so it's a long story and I'm tired of telling it.
But I think one thing that is relevant is that I was one of the first hundred employees at Amazon.com. I had three interviews there. My final interview was with Jeff Bezos played air hockey with Jeff Bezos in close to wealth. In fact, within the last year, I mean, I were party at a billionaire's house, not a billionaire, I'm not even a I guess I'm a thousand era.
Between my checking account and PayPal, I've probably got like 1500 bucks. But that's flush for me because I've just come off this straight job where I was making snow. And the Colonel Parker says, I'm so slow. No, I was making little snow there.
Various people have introduced me as a guy who used to have a lot of money because he was early at Amazon and then who adopted more sort of authentic, commendent lifestyle and this is not what happened. I just spent the money. I spent the money and then it was gone and I've been out of the job market for a decade and so I had to thrash around and try to make something work and I was selling insurance in Northwest Arkansas when I discovered podcasting. And as soon as I discovered that podcasting was a thing, two months later, I was doing my own podcast and it seemed as if I had been preparing to do a podcast for decades and it seemed to be the thing that just clicked.
Okay, this is it. This is the thing I'm going to do. But it didn't make enough money to even hold my marriage together. And I'm father of two, but I haven't lived with my kids since my oldest who is now 22 was nine.
I've been the friendly uncle to my kids. And this point see this personal, this central plank of my identity as being an artist, as being somebody who wasn't going to walk the conventional path, wasn't going to have the straight job. And here I am 54. The longest time I've spent in W two employment was two years in my whole life.
And now I see that vision of myself as something which has really put me in a tight spot here toward the end of my working career. And something that I think a lot of young people buy into is this notion that you're going to be special and better and more authentic than all the working steps out there if hold the line and just refuse to comply. And yeah, maybe well, I don't know. I mean, I don't have a control path to my life.
I don't have like when I was in high school, I joined the Marine Corps and I signed up for six years active duty. And it was just a weird series of improbable circumstances that kept me from going to boot camp. But that life didn't actually get lived. I don't know what I don't know if I'd be alive at age 54.
Maybe I'd be miserable because I'd still cherish this idea that now I could have been an artist. I could have been somebody special. But right now I'm leaning toward the this whole being a special person thing was a mind virus that fucked me up. But again, I don't have control life to compare it to.
I feel the same way except I feel that way with my with respect to my father in law being the control. No, yeah, because he went to full sale and got an audio engineering degree and had some kids and then went straight and became an investment advisor. And I remember being in my 20s because I've been with Nikki now for 18 years. And I remember in the early years of our relationship thinking I cannot understand, I cannot appreciate and I'm not sure I agree with the decisions that he made and the sacrifices that he made.
And then 14 years into our insanely rocky relationship, Nikki and I had our first kid and found something greater to keep us together than our own careers, which were constantly pushing us in opposite directions. And I got this job, which at the surface seemed like a dream job. And then the longer I realized I'd gone from 13 years of self-employment into a W-2 situation in a very prestige focused organization, very it means a lot to be involved with them. But at the same time, it's a mission driven academic nonprofit.
There's all this stuff that comes with that. And I'm I hold my institution in the greatest respect that I can't hold an institution. And still, they told me right when they hired me, they're like, you're not sure that you're going to do well here because you're used to being your own weirdo. I'm a person and we worry that's going to be a problem for you.
And that was very astute for them to acknowledge and cause me to reflect a lot on the compromises that the other fathers in my life have made and mothers, right? Because I've seen Nikki give up her career, be mother to these children and both of us in our own ways fight to reclaim something of ourselves as discrete individuals, something of the artist that I around, which I had crystallized an identity and something of the free spirit and luthier and violist that my wife was before becoming a mother. And so, yeah, listen, you talk about this. It really is to the extent of the show is just animated by a question about being good ancestors and also this horizontal dimension of time thinking about the other possibilities, I really value what you just shared.
And yeah, if we're going to say that this is two parts of one big episode, then we started in your show talking about the creative potential of constraint. And I just find it so interesting to hear people talk about what one choice over another choice has meant in their lives or the ways that things they did not choose have come to shape the way that they make meaning of their lives. And just so that I'm not the last person to speak here, one more time, I'm going to pass the ball back to you and just let you carry it to wherever you want to carry it. You're looking at me, but you just read it, Kevin.
Well, Kevin is always the one that I find difficult to coax out on to the dance floor. But yeah, why don't you hit us, Kevin? You actually have been very quiet. It's more frivolous than what you guys were just talking about.
But one thing that I've known for by the people who know me that has not come up in my conversation with you, but Michael knows this is that I follow local bands. I know that. You didn't mention it. We went to a show last night at a very review.
So I just I just specialized in starting in college. A friend of mine at the dorms was a drummer. He asked everyone to come to his shows and I like the band that opened for them. And I like the band that opened for them and so on.
Like the old branch of the tree commercial. And so obviously, you can probably guess I've seen hundreds and hundreds of times, but there's a really talented band is making good music that I like. And it's just the constraints of reality and living money just cause the band members to quit and fight but they didn't have creative disagreements. But just just bother me so much these past not tread like you were talking about just because the reality is that you have to make money and give something up.
So this is a reason why I'm always coming out. I was very anti-capitalist. It didn't be so binary. There ought to be a little more social support so that people can do things that are not monetarily enumerative.
And I think our lives would be richer because of that, even if economically on the numbers we weren't as productive. I think if a lot of those bands would be richer. I wish there was some media there where you didn't have to choose between making art and making money is basically my conclusion implies to podcasters as well as dance. Well, it's too late in the data to embark on a discussion of rival economics.
Next time. Yeah, maybe. I'm somebody accused me recently of having returned to mainstream mentality. Because I'm not interested in people I'll anymore and I didn't want to follow them into their obsession over COVID.
And I am a change that I've made pretty solid change in the last 10 years. I mean, growing up and spent most of my life being a pretty harsh critic of the United States, but I've lived in other countries. And I life in other countries has led me to appreciate the United States as an empire as a global empire that provides stability that millions of people live better lives as a result of the post World War II arrangement where the US was the last man standing and instead of behaving like a typical empire, the United States said, you know what, the most important thing to us is to prevent the spread of international communism and to continue the Soviet Union. And we are going to previous empires are basically pumps that draw well from the periphery to the center.
The US is not that at all. Australia, Germany, France. I mean, these are inarguably imperial client states, but the people who live there have health care, the people who live there have paid vacation and eternity leave. I mean, what other empire in the past has allowed the people in the peripheral territories to live more affluent lives than the people in the imperial center?
And so I mean, yeah, you could call that a reversion to mainstream mentality where you think, oh, anybody who's just unquestioningly patriotic and support the United States is dumb. They haven't thought through. They haven't read. They haven't done their homework.
Well, I've done the homework. I can recite the catechism of why the United States is evil, but I can also abstract from that and say that, yeah, but in a world like in the first half of the 20th century, Europe exploded in a peroxism of self destruction twice. Why haven't they done that again? I would say it's because of NATO and what is NATO without the United States?
Globalization. Yeah, it's ugly. It has made has created a proper class out of what used to be a prosperous blue class, middle class or blue collar middle class in the United States. So anyway, I mean, I want to go too far down that road other than to say that the most effective propaganda is going to be 90% truth.
The more glaring lies you can take out of your propaganda and keep it truthful, the more effective it will be as propaganda. And so if you revert to a mainstream mentality, will you believe everything on the BBC or you believe everything on MSNBC or is it CNBC and fluctuates and I don't pay close attention to CNN, we'll say. Yeah, it favors the mainstream. It favors the status quo.
But again, the most effective the most effective propaganda is going to be mostly true. So if you revert to a mainstream mentality, you're probably going to have a more accurate view of the world than if you are reflexively anti-authoritarian. That's the mainstream story. If that's the mainstream position, then the reverse must be true because we are ruled by sheepshifting reptilian overlords who lie about everything.
So here I am, I guess the crotchety, late middle-aged guy saying there are worse things to get a job and to work and make money and support your family and not question too dramatically what you hear on the news. There are worse states, for sure. Yeah, and one of them was to speak to this thing. We talked about this a lot of the Discord server actually is how this thing, oh, I could be anyone.
I can do anything. The story that we were all told is in future generations and I can do it. Yeah, 20 years. People channeling Chuck Pullenock now.
Right. Yeah, yeah, the Fight Club message was really so poignant at the time that it arrived for the people who were fans of that story because we were like, oh, wait, we were told, so many of us were told we were gifted kids. We just had ADHD. There's this like our boomer parents were writing this wave of self liberation that they didn't realize yet had been weaponized against them for political ends and they wanted to tell the story of their kids about, oh, you can do anything.
And as led to is this just plague of people being like, I don't know how to choose. I don't know how to limit myself. I don't know how to we talk about adulting has become a verb and say it is as much a performance of identity as anything anyone's doing on social media and it's just incredibly messed up. And it's funny because in a way, I think our kids who are going to inherit a world that is so much more turbulent than the world that we believe we were growing up in, at least in the global north in the 70s and 80s was like our kids are going to have this whole other thing, which is suddenly all of those hyper inflated downtown real estate prices are going to plummet and the world is going to be full of refugee camps and random stochastic violence mitigated by Titan AI system.
They're like holding it down and keeping the fire from just erupting everywhere. And then also starting fires randomly that we can't predict. But there's a weird way in which I think they're going to have a much more healthy and balanced understanding of where humans sit in the food web and what the choices that we really have as agents in the world are. And yeah, I don't know.
God damn it. I did it again. Listen, if you've listened to this show and have critiqued me for gabbing on too much, I just want to let you know that there was alcohol involved and also I'm sorry. And if you really want more of KMO, he's got this epic archive to dig through and I'm not on it.
So for the one episode, so treat yourself. Yeah, any parting thoughts? KMO dot show is the new show. It's got an internal line, very simple.
Show is the domain name like dot com or dot.io or dot net, get that self-commission there at the end. And Kevin was one 16 and he was the guest host on future fossils one 16. Go back and listen to it. I don't have anything to say besides this.
I don't know. This was everything that I hoped it would be in an interview between the two so any effort that I snat causing this to happen paid off 1000% of the events. For me name. Yeah, I hold you gentlemen both in the highest respect about a month after that conversation between Michael, KMO and myself, KMO posted an opinion video which asked the question, will AI become politicized in much the same way that the science of coronavirus became politicized?
I wanted to point out KMO's video led me to crystallize one of my main objections about AI. It's something that worries me about AI performing even as it's advertised. AI is advertised. I mean, literally, I've seen the advertisements as allowing you to create more content, text, visual, even audio by an order of magnitude at a faster pace.
I've literally seen post 10 times as many blog posts and attract people to your site. People will use it to create 10 times as many videos without the need for costumes, actors or even a camera. As we already know, we will be flooded with fake scientific study papers that will be virtually indistinguishable from the real thing at first glance. Every advanced in technology is built as quote, labor saving, unquote.
But what we have seen from history so far, basically without exception, is that every advanced squeezes more labor out of us, leaving us with less free time and leisure, like the Red Queen's race. When tech increases our productivity, more productivity is expected from us and taken for granted. When tech increases the personal power and autonomy of individuals, all eight billion of us, our lives become more and more complicated. Well, who is going to have time to read slash intake that flood of new content?
Won't it be inevitable that we consumers will need to have personal AI's that digest this AI content for us? We doubt the fakes, snip it out the tidbits that the AI's think are the most relevant and interesting for each consumer based on the AI models of our individual tastes. So if AI is generate the vast bulk of content and AI's are the ones we need to intake slash read, listen, watch all this new content, then what's the point of having humans around anymore? Since it seems like the bulk of the economy, at least here in the US, revolves around content, entertainment and IP as AI unleashes a flood of content into the economy, it seems to me like the surviving humans will be more and more marginalized and dehumanized.
And a day after I wrote that, Charles Eisenstein, who has appeared on the Future Fossil's podcast, put out an essay which hit on a lot of the same themes. Since Charles Eisenstein's work is free to the public if you sign up on his website at sub stack, I'm just going to read his essay. You can find it there along with his other writings. Charles Eisenstein's essay is called An Edifying Thought on AI, published April 7th.
One of the biggest headaches for teachers is reading and grading homework. After a stressful day at school, they return home to a pile or these days, a digital drop box full of papers. How tempting it must be to let an AI read, summarize and possibly even grade these papers. That's what technology is for after all to eliminate tedious labor.
On the student end, it is no secret that a lot of students are using chat GPT to write their papers for them. Ask chat GPT to quote, make the case that Athens was doomed to lose the Peloponnesian war on quote, and voila, there's your paper. No longer must students endure the tedium of writing papers on subjects they really don't care about. This is a wonderful development.
AI is both writing and reading the students papers with no human involvement whatsoever. In time, we might hope that education will be fully automated. Humans can sit on the sidelines and let the machines do all that dull teaching and learning. I had a similar idea when I read that Google is unveiling tools to help users write and edit emails with the appropriate tone and content as well as to write documents in Google Docs.
This is great. And because no one will be able to cope with a vast expansion of written content that will inundate us thanks to these tools, we will soon start using AI to read our emails and documents as well. Text will be flying back and forth, but no human will read it. The AI will do it for us.
The future is bright. AI will help us produce orders of magnitude more words, pictures and video and then also help us consume it. It will write entire annual reports, white papers, news articles and academic papers that no one will ever read. He might ask, if no one ever reads them, why should we produce all this verbiage in the first place?
I'm disappointed that you asked. The new content will be higher quality than the old, especially as the technology progresses. We will have more and better information and thankfully we will have AI to read it. I hope that was edifying.
Sometime in the next week or so, I'm going to post a trial log on AI that I engaged in with a couple of other philosophers. I promise that its intellectual cogency will equal, if not surpassed, out of the above observations. Thanks again for listening. Future Fossils is an independent, ad-free, entirely listener supported program.
If you believe in the work that I'm doing and want to help see it thrive into the unimaginable future, then you can avail yourself of all the backstage goodies at patreon.com slash Michael Garfield or you can just leave a review at Apple Podcasts. That's more helpful than you know. Reach out to me personally at Michael Garfield on Twitter or Instagram and have a wonderful yawn.