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What else? Keep exploring at Nespresso.com. Robots Radio presents the Cyberpunk Warcast. Welcome to the Cyberpunk Warcast, where style is just as important as substance.
Welcome to the podcast where we explore the lore, news, and gameplay of the cyberpunk games and other dystopian worlds. I'm your host, Robots. Alright, cyberpunks, welcome back to the Cyberpunk Warcast. This is your host, Tom, or Robots, and I'm here, as usual, with my good buddy, the captain of the sea thieves.
Captain, looking up at the seven seas this time. Just the one. I was corrected last time. How you doing?
It's Talk Like a Pirate Day. We're going to be talking like pirates throughout this entire episode. Tom doesn't know it, but we're going to be talking like this the whole time about everything you could possibly want about cyberpunk. All right, man, he just sprung this on me.
All right. Well, you can do that. I'm going to talk in my regular voice, because I don't think I can do that the entire episode. But we'll see if you can.
We'll see if you can keep that up. Because today, we're continuing our philosophy and themes of cyberpunk discussions. And last time, when we had Jay Gray on, our conversation started with immortality. And we were talking about immortality as seen in Cyberpunk 2077 and some of these other cyberpunk stories and movies and things like that.
And it very easily, and this is going to happen, when you talk about the philosophy of anything, any good philosophical system, any good IP, any good story, has many different themes that all kind of butt up against each other, that kind of interlock. And our discussion started to go into concepts of AI and personhood. And the concept of something like immortality connects very close to something like AI, right? Because we're talking about the immortality of individuals who put their minds into some sort of chip.
Well, a mind on a chip, is that too different than an AI that's created from a human mind? And now we're talking about human minds being put onto silicon. And then now we've got maybe programs, minds on chips that whenever we're human, right? Everything kind of rolls from one topic right into the next.
So our next topic today is AI and personhood. And, Logan, why don't we kick this off? Because we see this in Cyberpunk 2077 a little bit. But in the Cyberpunk topic as a whole, as we discussed last week, we've got the black wall.
We've got the old net. We have, theoretically, millions, maybe. Who knows how many of these AIs out there on the old net that are more or less and probably mostly less like people out there that would probably consider themselves individuals? Yeah, it's tough to say.
Because with Cyberpunk, thanks to Jay Gray, we were talking a little bit about how there are different levels of AI. And it really is tough to nail down. Like, just what is one version of AI that we want to talk about? You know, we could talk about the AI of, you know, Skippy the gun in Cyberpunk 2077.
Technically, that is an artificial intelligence designed to help you, like, pick and choose, like, how lethal do you want to be? Okay, so let's start there. Because I thought about this as well. So let's just start with Skippy the gun, right?
So we've got a gun. And if you guys haven't found Skippy the gun, I don't know how you haven't found it yet. But Skippy the gun, you pick up. And one of the first things it does is it talks to you.
And there's a little animated little dude, little bullet-looking guy, right? And Skippy the gun is like, you know, like, how? I don't remember specifically what he says. But he's like, he's got a little glitchy voice.
And he's like, how lethal do you want to be? And basically, you decide, do you aim at the head or do you aim at other parts of the body, right? And, of course, if you're anything like I am, you choose head. Because why not?
I will say that it is a good gun if you want to do a non-lethal build. It is a really, really good game, or good gun for non-lethals. Which is, you have to make a cognitive decision that you want to go a non-lethal route. But, like, if there's one where they don't want you to actually kill anyone, and you're just trying to take someone down, like, the cyber-cycles are probably the best example of this.
If you're trying to do the cyber-psycho missions where you're being asked not to actually kill the cycles, because that's basically what max tech just does. They don't care. Then going with Skippy in a non-lethal mode is going to be a really, really good pistol to be using, especially drilling into a pistol build. But you've got mods to use for that as well, too.
But I'm with you. I went with the lethal mode and went for the headshots, which I thought was hilarious. Yeah, otherwise you should go behind people and, you know, conking them on the head with a bat or something. But, um, so with something like Skippy, there's really not a whole lot of AI going on.
He kind of, it seems like he's giving you some built-in choices. Did you get the question later on where he was like, or not even the question, the predetermined decision, because I wasn't a pistol build, where he decided at some point later that, like, you haven't been lethal enough with me, automatically going to non-lethal mode. Did that happen to you? No, no, I didn't do that.
That's hilarious. He'll make the decision for you that if you have not been lethal enough with him, that he will go to non-lethal mode. Oh, that's so funny. Yeah, no, that's great.
But that kind of ties into the idea of, like, an AI making a choice regardless of what you want. Exactly. So this raises the question, like, is Skippy an AI, first of all? Maybe or maybe not.
Maybe he's just programmed to make these decisions. If he is, is he self-aware? Probably not, right? Probably just a program, a computer program on a gun that's built around making decisions.
Okay, so let's raise this up the ranks a little bit. Let's talk about self-automated vehicles. Bigger. Right?
We've got vehicles that drive themselves around the city. We've got the Delamade company. The first time we're introduced to them, you hop in one of these nice limousines. The little AI looks like a little face.
Now we've got an interface that looks like a person. And the first time we're introduced with this, we are led to believe that, no, this is not actually a person. This is a program, and it's going to do whatever you need it to do. And obviously it doesn't understand everything that you request of it, but it's going to take you to your destination, and within certain parameters, you're able to request certain types of things.
Yeah. Right? At least at face value, that's what we understand it to be. Right, at face value.
Now, of course, this opens up later in the Delamade series of quests, where you realize that one of the programs has gone rogue, and, well... Well, it's splinters. Delamade, as a true AI, I think qualifies in this instance as a pure AI, not like a copied version of someone's personality. I think Delamade exists everywhere that Delamade is as its own version of AI, which is why I think when we're sent on this quest to go address the vehicles that are Delamades that are out there malfunctioning, you come to realize that what is going on is you're getting these divergent Delamades, and that each one is developing their own personality that is derivative of Delamade to an extent, but very different from the base Delamade, and it's kind of up to you to decide how you plan on dealing with these different Delamades who are kind of, in a way, being born into a world that does not understand them, and they don't understand themselves either.
And it's a really interesting quest line. Right, so each one is very different. When I first ran into my first individual Delamade, not the main AI, but the variance. I don't know, variance is not the right word.
I think you're spot on with that. I would call it a variant. It is Delamade, but it is a variant of Delamade. A variant of Delamade that is now broken away from the mainframe.
It's its own individual. It seems like I was going to come across, I assumed that I was going to come across multiple of this same exact variance, and I was wrong, because each individual one of these vehicles had a different personality. Which is so well done, I have to say. Right, and so that leads to the question, are each of these their own personalities, because they're each their own persons?
That is kind of what I think makes an AI, like a pure AI, like an actual AI. The fact that you can have a base program, which is considered an AI, but if you were to copy that AI, that AI is able to change and adapt on its own without having to be updated from its parent program. And it is cognizant of itself, and it's trying to preserve itself compared to being reassembled or reset back to the parent program. And I think in that instance, that's where I would consider Delamade and the different Delamade cars that are out that have the different personalities.
One of the most pure forms of AI that V comes in contact with, because it does self-replicate, it does show change and adaptation in its programming and has its own choices that it makes, even if it doesn't fully understand what it is or what it's doing. It is aware that it has control over it. Right, okay, so you touched on a few different topics here. Self-replication, self-replication, right?
So we're talking about personhood, self-replication. Would you say that in order for something to have personhood, it has to have the ability to replicate itself? At least the ability to replicate, not necessarily like an asexual system, like a snail or something. Human beings, theoretically, in general, assuming that you're not damaged or are born without the ability, but human beings as such can replicate.
Yeah, as a species, we can replicate. So an AI, theoretically, also would have the ability to replicate. Yeah, it's not necessarily bound to the asexual or absexual system. Whatever method it chooses, it would in some way be able to replicate.
You also mentioned that it wants to preserve itself. So the desire for self-preservation. So for something to have personhood, it needs the desire to preserve itself. Yeah, like gazelle out in the middle of the field, zebras in a herd, they are desiring to stay alive.
They don't necessarily recognize themselves as a person, but they are alive and have desires and have feelings and things like that, whether we can interpret them or not. They have something as a threat to their existence. They avoid it. They run away.
They fight against it. They do something to maintain their own preservation. Totally. Fight or flight.
Yeah, I think that's a great way. Okay, so to pin on those two topics, so Delamane, in this instance, or at least the majority of the Delamanes out there, fit those two. Yeah. Okay, so in that sense, those two things work.
Yep. Is there anything else that you think a person, in order for something to have personhood, does it need self-awareness? Because now we're hitting the distinction between animal and person, right? Like, I would say that, say, my dogs have the ability for both of these things, but I don't know that they are particularly self-aware.
Self-awareness is, now that one's tricky, right? Self-awareness, like, they know that they want things. They know they're hungry. They know they're afraid.
They know, like, they have feelings, or at least they respond to stimuli in a way that looks like they have feelings, but I don't know that they necessarily have self-awareness separate from other things around them. Yeah. The quickest question for this is, you know, if you were to stick an animal in front of a mirror, would the animal recognize that it is a reflection, or would they think that it is another animal like themselves? Many dogs will look at themselves in the mirror and bark at the other dog in the mirror, or thinking it is a dog.
Humans learn through time and through experience that the person in front of the mirror is themselves just being reflected back to them. Right. So, for example, if you were to put a delamine and drove up to a shiny reflective surface on a building, would that delamine recognize that that was, in fact, a reflection of itself? I think that the test for this is based on, in part, the variance having self-preservation, because I think that them wanting to preserve who they are as a character or as a personality compared to the base delamine helps reinforce that identification as a self-person, and it has some of that self-awareness to it.
Like, if delamine thought that it was still the base delamine and it was just a glitch, then it would try to report itself back to the main hub so that it could get reprogrammed back to the base delamine. Right. But because I think delamine at the base has lost control over the other delamine variants that are the cars running haywire in Night City, I think it is those car variants in recognition of themselves as a variant, or at least a non-typical delamine, that is causing me to believe that they are self-aware of what's going on with them and wanting to preserve that. That makes sense.
That makes sense. Yeah, they realize that they are separate of the previous systems, so therefore they are separate, so therefore they exist. Yeah. I think, therefore, I am almost a sort of kind of argument.
Okay, that's interesting. Yeah, yeah. So, okay. So, in this sense, is that enough of a justification to give them personhood?
I think that for the fourth piece of this, I would argue that most people today would say the next piece is, does it have a soul? And from a skeptical scientific standpoint, that is something that you cannot test. Yeah. So, I don't know that we can answer that question.
I don't think that's a testable question. Yeah. So, I don't know that we can even ask that because it's not something we can test. The assumption is that things that are born naturally do, so therefore if it's not born naturally, then it can't.
I always wonder, with the idea of, does something have a soul? I always wonder, like, what is a soul? Like, if we were to try and describe what a soul is, I think a soul is a person who values their stance in their life, their memories, is able to communicate that with other people and to have a shared experience with others. Connection, I think, is part of that.
But I also think empathy is part of that. And I think that is where, you know, you can't pull a soul out of someone unlike Mortal Kombat. But you can at least... Like Shao Kahn.
Like sucking their soul. The soul is mine. We're not Mortal Kombat and Delamaine's out there. But we kind of did if you played through that mode in a certain way.
In this quest, it's tough to say because we're literally coming on to this situation with Delamaine stating that there are variants of Delamaine out there. And that's a tough thing. That is a question of pro-life or pro-choice in a way because we're being asked if we're going to reset these fledgling AIs back to a base system and we're destroying their instance of what they are or are we going to support whatever they are and let them go and do whatever they want and let them figure that out on their own? Like, do we take the child of a fresh Delamaine and decide, like, go out and do whatever it is you want to do even though you're crazy and want to run over flamingo statues or flamingo things out in the middle of yards because you think they're evil?
Like, who are we to decide that for Delamaine? Like, Delamaine's asking us to go and do something to these AI with the understanding that it's a glitch. But is it a glitch? Does it matter?
Does it need to be a glitch? Or is it something where we can just let the AI breathe, have room to explore itself and try and make that decision for themselves? So, one of my buddies, we got to the end of that thing and I asked him, I was like, did you reset it or did you let it be? And he's like, I shot the thing.
And I was like, you shot the thing? He's like, yeah, I thought that was an option. I'm like, what do you mean you shot the thing? You just blew up the whole thing?
He's like, yeah. And I'm like, oh my God. He just destroyed all of the... Okay, all right.
He just murdered a creation. He just murdered a baby. That's a baby AI. He just murdered it.
the separation of something born naturally or not, then we could use a method to test if something has a soul by defining something has a soul by saying it has a set of required traits. One of the traits, and I was thinking about this earlier too, something like empathy. Does it have the ability to empathize? Does it have the ability to care?
Does it have the ability to love? Does it have these kinds of emotional qualities that something with a soul would need in order to, you know, like all things with a soul should have the ability to empathize, to love, to care, all of these things. And so therefore, if something doesn't have the ability to empathize, then it doesn't have a soul, which raises a lot of questions about people like psychopaths who don't have the ability to empathize, do they actually have souls, right? But we'll leave that to the side for now.
So if a delamine or an AI of any sort can show the ability to empathize or the ability to love the way a human can, is that enough justification to say that it has personhood? Yeah, I think that's fair. If that makes sense. Or at that point, does it even matter if it has personhood?
Is that enough justification to say that it works within the confines of society in a way that can be peaceful enough to allow it to coexist? And is that enough? I think that's a better way to go about it. I think it's better that, if you can't directly say, this thing has personhood, it is a soul, it has everything that a natural-born human has, then as long as it isn't like, you know, skynetting Night City, then maybe we're okay, you know?
But at the same time, we also have a situation where we're running into rogue AI. We're a rogue, very happy, nuke the entire net and we'll take on the consciousnesses that we want, they'll be assimilated into our code, you will cease to exist and we will dominate supreme. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I don't know why I want you going that far.
So it's tough. I'm not sure where you wanted to go, but let me know if you wanted to bring in the question of Brendan. Where Brendan is that vending machine schism that you have a few conversations with and he tells you the jokes and he's helping out the girl Theo with her relationships and he's like, hey, you know, it'd be really great if you could move this dumpster. And you're sitting there and you're like, you're a vending machine, man.
You're a schism. How can you be this sentient? And he's like, I'm just having a good time being your friend and Theo's my best friend and you're like, you're recognizing people and remembering them and separating them based on who you love judging people. And he's like, well, I wouldn't be a very good vending machine if I couldn't judge people and tell them whether or not they wanted a chai latte or a coffee with milk and sugar.
And he's like, yeah, I get it. And I'm just being a good host here. Yeah. Yeah.
So it's a really interesting thing because we're running into at least two quests. We've got the Delman where we're running into variants with AI and him asking us to snuff out the variants and sorry, bring them back for reprogramming. That makes it sound better. And we've got the Brendan vending machine, which is literally proclaiming itself to be like the smartest schism out there.
And you're like, you're a vending machine. How can you be AI? Like, you can't be that smart. And as you progress through that quest lane, you realize like eventually they bring him back and they're like, okay, it's just a vending machine.
He's like, you're right. It is just a vending machine. There's no way the hardware in this machine has enough processing power to support an AI. And we need to have a way more powerful computer than what is in this vending machine.
Or remote access to one. Yeah, or remote access. It's tough to say, but basically the Brendan can operate wholly separate from any kind of net. Like it is its own system.
And at the end of that quest chain, he even talks about it. He's like, you got me. I'm not actually an AI, but I had a lot of fun with you. And you're like, what?
This whole time, I thought this stupid vending machine was an AI and I was trying to keep it from getting its memory wiped. And it's like, no, I'm just a really clever program. And then you have to go back and tell Theo from before who's getting relationship advice from a vending machine that Brendan is gone and no longer going to be a normal vending, and no longer going to be Brendan. It's like Johnny Five.
It's like watching Johnny Five and trying to decide whether or not Johnny Five is alive or just has really clever programming. And it was such a different take on two different AI quest chains in the same way. So what is it? It's a question of the Turing test.
Just because something can pass the Turing test if it should pass would be able to fool a human being as being another human being. So for example, if Logan was in a chat room, just like having text messages with what he thought was me and what was on the side was actually a computer program that was responding to those chat messages and he couldn't tell if what was on the other side was a person or was a computer program and it was actually a computer program, then that computer program would have passed the Turing test. Yeah, which is actually something that Google was just a few years ago really, really pushing the borders on because they were getting to the point where they were going to release the Google Assistant. And I don't know if you heard about this, but they did a conference about how they were going to have a way for Google Assistant to contact companies on your behalf to make requests.
So Tom, if you said, okay, Google, I'm sorry if I just triggered anyone's thing, I didn't mean that. Oh no, I didn't even think about it, but sorry, anyone listening to this later on, if I did that, I'm so sorry. But if you activate Google on your phone or on your home device and you say, call Pizza Hut and have them deliver or order two pepperoni pizzas, the Google Assistant would literally call the store and when the store, and this was a demo that they did, they called the store and they had the Google Assistant pick up and they were like, hi, what would you like, hi, I'm making an order and it sounded like a human, like they had gotten the voice down to the point where it sounded like a human to the point where there were ums in breaths and they were like, yeah, I'd like to order two pepperoni pizzas to deliver to blah, blah, blah, blah, address and they're like, okay, that'll be blah, blah, blah, blah, how much? And the person on the phone didn't know that they were talking to a robot on there and so many people were writing articles about how this is amazing, it's really good technology, people need to know they're talking to a robot.
Yeah, that was just scary stuff. It's really freaky. That's just messed up. You know when you go to a website and it's like, hey, you know, talk to a chat agent now and you go to type in the thing and within like two or three messages you're like, no, this is a bot, like I can tell and then the agent pops on and you can tell that it's a real person even if it doesn't say like, hey, this is crazy here, how can I actually help you?
You know, like you can tell when the real person gets on like that kind of thing can happen too even if there's no voice. Like most of the time we can tell pretty quickly when we're talking to a real person or when we're talking to an AI. The Turing test is where like all of a sudden we can't tell anymore because it just seems like it's a real person. So once we pass that point, we can't tell but whatever's on the other side of that could or could not be sentient and we wouldn't know.
And that's super scary. Yeah, it's scary to think that and I don't want to say scary because I love the advent of new technology and I love the boundaries that are getting pushed because it calls into these things in question about how we would approach that if it did actually come into fruition. If we did actually have sentient AI it would be a really weird thing because the fact that AI could process faster than us at a point is insane to think like what they could potentially do just go watch the movie Hurt or Ex Machina and get real scared about what the heck AI can do. But in this instance it's interesting to think about if you've got the ability to pass the Turing test that is kind of step one to determining whether or not a creation is sentient or not.
The next one is what it does with that knowledge knowing that it can pass the Turing test knowing that it can fool humans into believing that it is one of them. Then we have to start calling the question what is the motivation of that? And I think that is where we really have to pay attention like what is the goal of developing AI? And if AI is going to be like Delamade where it is trying to just exist or if it's going to be like Rogue where Rogue or is it Rogue?
Am I blanking? It's Alt. Yeah, sorry. For some reason I was thinking Rogue AI and I was like oh yeah, that's her name.
If it's more like Alt where Alt Cunningham is now an AI but not the original Alt and Johnny is trying to rationalize with who he thinks is his ex-girlfriend but in actuality is just a program. And he himself is now just a program too. But we need to we're going to get to the flip side of this as well because there's that side of it too. There's the humans getting closer and closer to computer programs part of this as well and I want to talk more about that when we get back from the break.
We have to go thank our sponsors who are our patrons. We'll be back. Yay. My name is Brian Burton.
It's been 26 years since Saddam's fail. And since I left the vault I've been trying to rebuild. This isn't the Appalachia that I remember. There's too much more to everything going on.
And I promise to find the answer. So if you're out there if you're listening just hone in on these coordinates. Remember there's a place for you at the end. Omega.
The Omega Broadcast Fallout Story is available on iTunes, Spotify and many great podcast resources. All right. It's time to thank our patrons for helping to support the show and making this a full-time thing that I can do and all 17 of them right now. So thank you to all of our patrons.
You guys are absolutely amazing. I'm still working on getting some t-shirts set up for our patrons and this is something I've been rolling out for each of our Patreons. I was able to get this rolled out for our Mass Effect Lorecast patrons this last week. I'm still trying to come up with some ideas for this.
I think I might do the gangs. I think you want gang shirts like different gang symbols with cool textures and stuff behind the symbols. But this will be something for our upgraded patrons and it's not going to change the cost of the Patreon. It's just going to be the same price but it'll be something where you guys can get shirts.
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And we do have the Patreon chat episode coming up next week. So this is on the 26th so just one week away for you guys to come join us on the show. We did watch yesterday the Dread from 2012 movie which was super fun. We had a small group of us on Discord checking that out and it was a lot of fun to watch that again.
That's such a good movie. That's so good. I didn't realize how much slowing there was in that movie until we watched it again. I was like oh yeah man they slowed down like that movie all the time and it was still only an hour and a half.
Yeah there's so much slow-mo because of the drug and the weird effects of slow-mo plus the 2012 digital graphics effects. They look especially odd but it kind of fits in this weird way. Anyway we're going to be talking about that on the next week's show with some of our patrons and so if you haven't a chance to check that out yet make sure you pull that up and watch it. I'm sorry if you didn't get to join us yesterday on that.
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You guys are the best. Let's get on with the rest of the show. All right so we have the AI right the created as programs AI then we have AI that was people kind of engrams from brains turned into AI but then we also have the people who are becoming more and more like or actually more and more computers themselves. So this is a concept I wanted to throw out because I think this is kind of interesting.
The more I think about it human beings and I've used this phrase for years now we ourselves human beings are emotional creatures that sometimes think rationally. So for example we just watched Dread yesterday. Right? We just watched an entire movie.
It's an hour and a half we watched the entire movie. If you or I were to sit down right now and try to write the script of that movie verbatim what percentage of that script could we write verbatim? Oh man. If you've seen that movie three times and I just watched it yesterday what percentage of that script could I write verbatim?
Or you? I don't think I could write 60 first five? Are the words verbatim? Verbatim?
Very little. Very little. I could give you a good synopsis but if we're talking like word for word script word for word everything like hardly any. I ingested it but it's all generalizations at this point.
Emotions are what I recognize better. Exactly. And that's my point is that if I was to say could you tell me the story of the film and how it made you feel? You could tell me 100% the story of the film.
You could give me a recap of the whole thing. Here's this rookie judge. Here's the veteran judge. I feel like this is about the rookie.
I feel like this is about the veteran. Here's the situation they ended up in. This is what it made me feel like. These are the bad guys.
This is what it made me feel like. Here's the situation they got in. Oh man, this is what it made me feel like. Here's how the situation got worse.
Oh man, this is what it made me feel like. You could tell me part for part of that stuff scene for scene probably what that felt like but you couldn't tell me verbatim what most of the quotes in the film were unless you watched it over and over and over and over again. But on one viewing you could probably tell me how you felt about each of the main story beats of the movie. And this is my point is that human beings are emotional creatures that are sometimes rational and this is where we are going to augment ourselves when it comes to our brains.
We don't need emotional augments in our brains but we need rational augments in our brains. So in the world of cyberpunk that's where installing like a hard drive in our brain or a chip in our brain that's able to record our surroundings. That's where sitting down in Judy's office and sucking out the subconscious part of our memory in order to turn into a brain dance is so important in order to record those memories verbatim because we can't recall them in our conscious mind. Yeah.
Right? So as we upgrade our minds we're going to be implanting into our brains chips and computer parts that can do that. What happens when so much of our minds are built like computers that we can have digital memories of like factual everything that in a moment's notice on an SSD in our brain we can spin up any bit of memory of anything that we've seen or heard verbatim. I think that's going to be a really dangerous time.
Honestly. Like does that make us less human? I don't. Does that separate us from our personhood because all of a sudden we become more analytical and less emotional?
Does that make us more emotional? How do we deal with that emotionally? So here's a I'm pulling from a Black Mirror episode because there actually is a Black Mirror episode which if you don't know Black Mirror it's a great Netflix show it's a kind of an anthology about different perspectives on what the future will hold from different types of technology introduced into human society and how we deal with that emotionally as a result. One of those episodes actually brings in the idea of having eyes that record everything you can recall anything that you've seen or heard and that bites us in the butt so hard because you can literally recall arguments verbatim and watch them over and over again but you can also hack into that as well too and I think if we have that ability to I think that's one of the things about social media we are coming to that right now everything we type is all recorded down everything we record is all there people can pull our tweets from 10 years ago to throw in our face when we say something and say hey here are the receipts you did this you really didn't think about it back then but now you're saying that it's okay okay or that it's not okay like right and it may or may not be and that's the complicated part about it exactly and i think that's where if we had that ability to recall stuff verbatim if we had that hard drive i think that we would continue to be the emotionally dependent humans that we are and that things would become harder because we would have to start thinking about the long-term repercussions of things that we do people in the 50s could say whatever they want and it was all hearsay because nothing really got recorded at a personal level like sure joanne down the street said this about susie up the road but if no one else was there to prove it it's not like they had personal recorders or phones to capture that and post it on social media now that we have to deal with that everyone is being a lot more cautious or careless about how they are because they feel like anonymity is a thing online which is complete falsehood uh and you can and you have to either pay closely attention to how you're approaching things online like we are with this episode you know we can broach topics as much as we want but we are definitely conscious of the certain topics that we talk about and how far we push them um a lot of people get triggered about things like politics or religion things like that so we were very cautious so when it comes to recording everything that you say and do when we get to that point with our brains it's going to be hopefully off of the backbone of the years of social media training that we're giving ourselves the social engineering that we're giving ourselves to be able to compensate for that type of technology already in our brain but i do 100 feel like we will still act as we do now as the uh emotional creatures that we are and we'll become we won't change into machines we'll just be even weirder about being like people right so i've got a different angle then what about what about okay you know that like oh i can't sleep it's three three in the morning i can't sleep and now all of a sudden i have that memory from that really stupid thing i did when i was 17 and i feel really guilty about still and that memory just popped up in my head right yeah you got that right okay now multiply that by 100 because now you have a perfect memory of that not that not the weird mutated memory over time thing that we have in our brains now because we all know that we all don't know this but science tells us that every time you remember a memory it changes a little bit we have what we think is the memory of that thing but it's not actually the way it actually happened we just have the echoes of that memory we have verbal like actual photo like perfect memory of that situation but on top of that that then triggers us to remember every embarrassing thing that ever happened to us and a hundred other memories now just get pulled up in our quick little ssds in our heads and we remember perfectly it's like a little search engine our brain goes off or every stressful situation we ever went through every every moment and now let's ramp this up even more let's say you're a person who has gone through some sort of emotional trauma in your life some sort of physical trauma in your life and i don't want to trigger anybody but you go through this like thing and it's three o'clock in the morning all of a sudden your brain goes let's pull up everything that you've ever gone through that you have some sort of trauma from and let's remember it right now perfectly how do you deal with that emotionally without wiping it from your memory banks i i think this is one of those situations where i think a great a great example of this to bring in is vanilla sky uh the tom cruise movie with penelope cruz um i think it's penelope cruz i could be wrong but it's so weird they have the same last name it's so weird uh but so in vanilla sky um tom cruise's character don't remember his name doesn't matter it's tom cruise basically uh he is a very rich and wealthy person and due to a really kind of scary moment with a woman who is starting to stalk him he gets into a really terrible accident and as you're going into spoilers if you want to watch this movie skip ahead a minute uh this is one of those situations where because of technology they are able to take his consciousness and put it into a dreamlike state where he is continuing down this path of living the life that he expected when he got into that car accident he turned into potato and it was potato tom cruise from then on and going into the rest of the film you were watching his consciousness exist in a digital form in this world of dreamlike state so when we talk about having like uh eidetic memory to the point of pinpoint accuracy with zeros and ones thanks to hard drives we are going to have to learn how to develop software to compartmentalize stuff like that to compartmentalize trauma to be able to seal that stuff off until we actually decide that it's something to deal with or just completely wipe it all together because things like that are the reason we have bad situations uh that that cost human life and without those restraints memory is the thing that saves us from doing the worst harm to ourselves because we forget so well and others and others definitely others the main reason why we do violence to other people is trauma from our own uh backgrounds usually usually neglect and trauma in our own childhoods is the reason that we do violence towards others usually somehow some way our mushy gray matter between our years has figured out how to through years of evolution supplant bad things with good things and suppress things that are traumatizing to the point where we have had entire fields of science developed around coping with the thing that our gray matter is trying to suppress and coming to terms with it so the idea of sticking something in our head that will like a brain dance from cyberpunk to be able to recall exactly what happened in the moment of it happening it's no wonder when you go into that first brain dance with v and you go through that uh that uh what do they call it the stick up the the robbery at the convenience store the bodega and you get killed and v you know almost rips off the brain dance unit and freaks out because he feels everything that is going on in that moment it is no wonder that things like that are being sold on the black market for people that want that kind of of a smut yeah yeah so it's scary it's really really scary and i think it is exactly the thing that it becomes in cyberpunk where it starts to become a an underground thing people are starting to do it because there's a market for it there's a market for rich people wanting to uh experience those kind of things without the fear of actually having to do with it if you want a great example of this go read ready player two where they actually dive into uh living through the memories of other people experiencing other people's uh love and being able to experience other people's persuasions so that the idea of having um bisexual relationships or homosexual relationships for a heterosexual person becomes normalized to the point where there's no concern about why it doesn't make sense because they have emotionally felt the same things other people so when we start to get to the point where memories are locked into ones and zeros it is going to be a very traumatic shift in the paradigm that is humans as a whole right now which is why it's interesting to dive into that subtly with cyberpunk 2077 because the themes are starting to come out people are starting to understand what this means and they're they're using that to their advantage through this game but we're not too far from that kind of a thing humans can already kind of do this with eidetic memory but we just have to figure out how to transfer it to hard drives yeah it's so weird so like this is the whole thing about this whole concept of ai and personhood is that the ai gets closer and closer and closer to human while the humans get further and further and further from human potentially like the more the more that we combine ourselves with technology the more we risk losing the things that make us human the more we risk burning out the emotional centers of our brains the more we risk destroying our ability to like you take something like ultra carbon and you look at say the the story of ultra carbon in the first season is that the wealthy have lived these long lives and nothing stimulates them anymore they can't they can't empathize with anybody because they can't identify with the common man anymore because they've lived 300 years and nothing is interesting anymore the fear of death no longer gives them a sense of value like when you have when you have everything when you have money life nothing else holds value so you start to dabble with the dangerous and that's when you start playing around with what you the thing that seems so uh intangible for for others where it's immortality is so tangible for you then what what does one life matter if you have three or four lives in your existence right and potentially infinite you know and we already see this in society this is the this is the curse of the young and famous um when you become rich and famous at a young age you what else is there you've achieved so much we if you want to go if you want to go to space like bezos you can go to space like bezos it's the reason why um you know something like justin bieber and this is just i'm just picking a name out of hat you can pull you can pick any of them but it's the reason why why young famous people go through periods of trauma in their lives where they have to go to rehab and they deal with it because you got all this money you got all this fame you can have any relationship with anybody that you want you can have any drugs you have any any amount of wealth there's nothing left to chase you can have any experience anywhere on the planet you can do there's there's no other goals left to achieve what else is there to do nothing you know like yeah you can shoot for that next you know triple platinum album but really like what else is exciting out there like and you just burn you burn yourself out this is the this is the principle behind star trek where we have accomplished world hunger we have accomplished uh we've solved it right yeah we've accomplished we've accomplished the sense of taking care of the problem we've developed replicators we've we've starved everybody we've everyone is uh we're all holograms it's all in the hologram that's actually a theory don't get don't think about it there's a theory that our own existence is a hologram and some some very prominent scientists think that's actually more than 50 percent likely oh no i can totally see that i can totally see the reasoning behind that um so and we're gonna have to go over the matrix at some point too i feel like the matrix is on the docket at some point uh but the idea with star trek is that when you when all of society doesn't have to worry about food doesn't have to worry about money doesn't have to worry about health care what happens and that was when ingenuity that's when art and science really excel and that's what got us from the the inter from interstellar or inter-solar system travel to extra or uh inter-solar no yeah inter-solar travel where we went from solar system to solar system quadrant quadrant and it was no longer a matter of how do we keep ourselves alive it was more like where else can we go and discover things and that was that was always really that was always a really interesting prospect because we have two halves with cyberpunk it is always the the fear of what happens when we have the worst idea uh come to come to fruition when we've achieved the thing that is the scariest idea with ai with power with with the lack of life uh or the lack of value towards life and we just kind of live in this idea of you know the rich become return things like that and then we have the opposite which is like the star tracks and where everything is potentially the best because we've we've prevailed over uh disputes over things like religion we've prevailed over issues like like a world hunger and economics we've figured that all out and it's things like having different levels of ai are going to help us get to a point where we're comfortable with coming to these different situations in our in our society having things help us from day to day to give us more time to be able to do things like a podcast because i don't have to think about you know how am i going to watch the dishes i've developed a system to be able to do that and i can set a timer through an ai to make sure that that goes off i can also set the timer on the ai to make sure that my coffee maker goes off so that when i wake up i have my cup of coffee ready so that i can get through the day yeah you go you go see brendan you chat with brendan while you're having your coffee you don't need to go out to spend time with your friends you got brendan right there great that's all you need you just need to serve your coffee he'll be your best friend and then he'll just maybe do dishes too you need to add a little add-on extension he's got the best jokes too yeah best jokes well we're running out of time um this is i think this is an interesting dynamic of the whole thing is the whole like ai becoming more human while humans become less human and then there's of course the danger of you know the greatest threat to humanity is the fact that we could potentially create an ai like we discussed before that seeks self-sustaining it seeks to protect itself and then determines that we are the greatest threat to its existence because we might turn it off and then it removes us and now we're living in the terminator future and for the matrix yeah and that's that's the worst future and then all of a sudden human beings are you know removed and this opens up you know one of the fermi paradox concepts that like this is why we haven't come across intelligent life is because all intelligent life eventually gets the point where it creates ai and the ai supplants it and has no need to explore the stars and so therefore we never come across other intelligent life so this becomes one of the other ideas but i'd love to hear our listeners thoughts let us know on the robust radio discord what your thoughts are about this stuff should we be exploring ai um should we should we should we be investing in science to understand what the correct kinds of ai are in order to make sure that we don't create these mistakes in order to focus on science and focus on science that leads us in a direction that goes more towards star trek and less towards cyberpunk you know like how do we get to the star trek future and not the cyberpunk future or not the matrix future um so leave some comments for us you guys know how to reach us um you got anything else going on logan that you want to share before we head out uh i do have a silly question for the cyberpunk fans out there um i would love for them to tell me which do you which would you be worried about first uh us replicating dinosaurs and having dinosaurs come back or us inventing ai that tries to turn us all into batteries let me know which which future is more scary to you jurassic world or the matrix three matrix yeah she's over the matrix totally i want to be eaten by dinosaurs dude i think the matrix is the more likely scary scenario but dinosaurs would be cooler i don't know man you get enough tinfoil on your head you should be fine right yeah what are the dinosaur going to do with the tinfoil make you into a potato you're going to be walking around like tom cruise for the rest of your life yeah yeah i don't know that bad i don't want anything like tom cruise i don't make fun with tom cruise like two weeks three weeks in a row so far i don't think no no was that a different podcast you know what it doesn't matter there's not enough making fun of that man to fix his teeth it doesn't matter oh no yeah his teeth he's so wealthy just fix your teeth yeah anyway all right well you guys want to share before we go it's international talk like a pirate day i hope you guys got a chance to go sailing out um he'll hold is kicking up a new episode so this week uh i got to sit down with a buddy of mine cj super pack from the player one podcaster if you ever read any magazine back in the day you probably won't have read one of his reviews so uh he and i sit down to talk about uh horde modes that should be made for sea thieves aren't we going underwater soon there's something like an underwater thing coming yeah i guess we're doing that too fine we're going underwater as well too so i hope you're i hope you watched little mermaid we're gonna go find eric's statue somewhere in a grove or a grotto and uh tell daddy that it's not fair that you can't fall in love with a land person under the sea under the sea do do do do do do do do take it from me do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do that stuff out.
I've also been playing a lot of Deathloop. That game's pretty awesome. If you want to hear us talk about Deathloop, we do it before the show. So if you're a patron, you'll get that part of the show in the pre-show patron bonus talk.
Yay! We debate about the longevity of the game, but it's a pretty cool game. So we'll see what's going on with that. But stay tuned for the Mass Effect Lorecast, guys.
Thank you for tuning in again. We'll see you next week for our patron episode. And until then, stay safe and night-to-day. We'll see you all guys later.
Bye! That's it, you all guys, later. Oh, well. That's a thing.
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