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Sep 1, 2026 40 min

What the AI overlords get wrong about being alive

from The Vergecast Hosted by The Verge

Elizabeth Lopatto recently wrote about Mark Zuckerberg's 6,500-word AI manifesto in her piece, "Mark Zuckerberg doesn't understand how to live." Today, she joins guest host David Imel and senior wearables reviewer Victoria Song for a freewheeling discussion about what happens when we let AI make decisions for us. Further reading: Mark Zuckerberg doesn't understand how to live Dyson made a camera-equipped toothbrush that flosses for you Markiplier is now GoPro’s biggest shareholder GoPro has been acquired and is getting into ‘defense, government, robotics and aerospace’ John Ternus is now the CEO of Apple Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11.

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What the AI overlords get wrong about being alive

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Welcome to the Vercast, the flagship podcast, of things that hopefully make you feel alive. I'm David Amell. A few weeks ago, Liz LaPato wrote an article that really stuck with me. It was titled, Mark Zuckerberg Doesn't Understand How to Live. And it came right after Zuckerberg's 6500 word AI manifesto called The Future Is for Everyone.

He tried to make the case that everyone will have their own personal AI agent that will help you do things, I guess. But Liz has made the case that those are the things that actually make life worth living in the first place. I was having a very long conversation about this with my good friend V Song while I was on the airplane a few weeks ago. And like any group of 30-something, we just stopped and said, wait, we should just record a podcast. Because our conversations are so interesting.

They are. We're so interesting. So today, we're talking to Liz LaPato, author of said article, and V Song, author of the text that she sent me in reply to my thoughts about said article. But what it means to be human, and why? So much of Mark Zuckerberg's manifesto feels so very hollow.

But first, here's what's happening on the Verge today. This is 90 seconds on the Verge for Tuesday, September 1st, 2026. Today, Dyson unveiled the $499 camera jet electric toothbrush, which uses an integrated camera in the brush head to detect gaps between your teeth. Dyson said that an AI algorithm detects when to blast those gaps with mouthwash, which will effectively take care of flossing for you. The toothbrush also pairs with an app to give you a live stream of the inside of your mouth so you can see where it's most effective to brush.

This is one of those products that nobody really needs, but everyone kind of wants, including me. YouTuber Markiplier has acquired 8.5% of GoPro, making him the biggest individual shareholder in the company. The news comes just a couple of days after he published a sponsored review of the newly released GoPro Mission 1 ILS camera. This morning, GoPro entered into an agreement to merge with Starman Optical Inc, a privately held optical photonics company. And finally, today is John Turner's first day as the CEO of Apple, ending a 15-year tenure for Tim Cook.

Turn us Mark the occasion by tweeting a simple hello on Twitter with no capitalization. Turner's was previously the senior vice president of hard-engineering, so we'll be waiting to see if he makes hardware a key point for the company moving forward. You can read more at the Verge.com. That's 90 seconds on the Verge for Tuesday, September 1st, 2026. U.S. voters abroad. Have you got your ballot yet?

All states are now sending ballots to overseas voters. So if you want to vote this year, you should request your ballot right away. Go to votefromabroad.org and click Request My Ballot as to receive it by email. Questions? Ask our support team directly.

Don't miss this chance to shake the future. Don't delay. Votefromabroad.org. Thank you.

I love philosophical conversations in which we go, like, why are we doing this to ourselves? Yes. Yes. I wanted to bring you both on so we could talk about this. Liz, you're obviously a very prolific writer here at the Verge.

I like everything that you write. Everyone likes everything that you write. But this article really stuck with me. I just want to see, can you identify the key point that Zuck was trying to make with this, the future is for everyone manifesto? Yeah. I think he was writing an opposition to some of the stuff that's been coming out of OpenAI and Enthropic where they're saying,

oh, AI is going to replace your job and it's going to totally disrupt your life. But it's going to be worth it because it's such a big advance. Blah, blah, blah, blah. And people hate AI now because you say that in public, the investor is getting cited, but everybody who has a job is like, I'm sorry, you're building what? And so there is this pretty intense backlash that is mostly being expressed against data centers for right now.

But AI is increasingly less popular. Every time there's a survey that comes out, it is less popular. And I think that a lot of it isn't just that it's being discussed as this thing that's going to ruin your life, but I think that doesn't help. Yeah. Well, in this manifesto, he kind of establishes a bunch of core ideas that he thinks AI will help everyone with.

They're all a little bit outlandish and you specifically honed in on a couple of them, but I do want to go in on most of the main ones that he brought up. The first one being that everyone will have new tools to express their ideas. Christ Almighty, we already have tools to express our ideas lists. In what new ways are we going to have new tools to express our ideas? You know, I got to say that one isn't as stupid to me as some of the ones that are coming up.

Okay. Yeah. I mean, if you have ideas, there are already a lot of ways to express them. And I can certainly imagine if you're trying to storyboard something but you can't draw. If you're a director, that might be helpful to have something that can draw for you so that you have a storyboard so everybody can visualize your shot.

I can imagine this. I'm not saying it's a good use of AI. I'm just saying I can imagine it. The thing that I find, this is the thing about this, is that most people don't have a lot of ideas that they aren't already expressing. I have been keeping an eye on the vibe coding stuff that people have been doing in our audience and more broadly.

And it's a lot of people making productivity tools. Yeah. That's such a funny thing. That's such a funny thing because I've heard a blog a couple years back. I was like, why is there no one productivity app that does everything that I need?

And I realized it's just a journal. It's just a journal that I write and design in my own way because everyone's brain works a little bit differently. So you need different things. I've never been particularly into templates for how to do my productivity and whatnot. And then as soon as I ditched all the productivity apps, my productivity went way up because I could customize it to my own needs.

And so I could understand vibe coding your own productivity app to do what you need it to do because the templates that are already out there don't work for you. But it's also just kind of like, yeah, I don't know what you could buy. I know book. Yeah. And I would say that this is not exactly tools for expressing your ideas.

These are tools for organizing your ideas to then have ideas with and do things with those ideas. But to your point, Liz, it doesn't seem like people are having a lot of unique ideas that they want to be doing things within the first place. That's right. And like, you know, as somebody else who is a member of the notebook society, I just am going to put in a plug for paper, not only because you can customize it however you want, but also because there's a fair amount of research that shows physically writing stuff down makes it easier for you to remember. So even if you don't have the notebook with you, you're more likely to recall its contents.

It's 100% true too. I was going through a period where I was reading books and really struggling to remember what it was that I had read. And so I started like an active reading journal where after I read a book or after I read like a certain section of it, I'll just go sit down and be like, what happened during the section I read and I'll write that down and go like, what themes were expressed and what did I find interesting. And it's like not like a super long thing where I'm writing pages upon pages upon pages of it. It's just like four or five sentences of what I just read.

And now I have like really great recall for the books that I read and the themes that were expressed and like my in-laws were commenting like, how do you remember everything that you read in those books? I read like books too. And I can't remember shit. It just physically writing a sentence down and like having to do the act of that work. It really does help you stay sharp.

And that's a thing that I worry about with this concept of like AI helping you as an everyday tool for everything because you're just offloading your cognitive thinking in a way that makes you less sharp. Or like that's how I've experienced it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's a lot of these different things that he says everyone's going to have access to.

I want to touch on one more right before we get to Liz's main points because there were two in particular that Liz kind of like focuses on in this article. So really quick one to just address this. Everyone will have the tools to create new businesses one because I found this very funny as well to all these billionaires points. They're like, oh, everyone's going to have access to these things. But if everyone can just start up a business, then the amount of players in the market are nearly infinite.

And so how are you actually going to sell anything to anybody? Like, what is a business in this case? You know, flop. It's just the business is something slop. It's slop business.

Yeah. Well, I also want to say something. I recognize that like I'm the staff weirdo in many ways, but like I don't want to make a business. I don't want to do it. I have a job because I don't want to think about accounting and I don't want to have to hire my own libel lawyer.

And I don't. There are all of these things that go into making a business that you have to think about and that you would, you know, with AI, I guess, program somehow. Yeah. But I just that's not what my goal is in life. You know, I want to write things that are meaningful.

And the more time I can spend doing that, the better. And one easy way for me to do that is to have a job where all I do is right. And, you know, somebody else takes care of the business stuff. So I never have to think about it. Like these, you know, these, some of these things is just like, yeah, everybody does have tools to make, I don't know, AI music now, but like most of us want to listen to musicians.

Most of us are excited about listening to real human beings. Like, it's not that like I have been stopped from having some kind of musical career because I like can't really sing. I want, you know, I want to listen to like Mariah Carey because she has a remarkable voice. And so like, you know, there are these things where it's just like, okay, but like I don't care. Like, I don't care about this.

Yeah, I think this kind of pushes us into like the primary part of this article that I really wanted to talk about. And there are two core paragraphs that you wrote that I think really made me think a lot about that. What you're saying right now, when I'm reading a book or listening to music or watching a movie, I'm not just consuming a resource. I'm experiencing other people's minds. That is something that I read that and I just was thinking like, yeah, that's the entire reason that we consume other people's work. Why we make our own work?

Why would we consume something that is just generated when we could actually feel connected to somebody who was trying to express a feeling or thought through a form of art? I was just with effort that gets communicated through that form of art. Like, I was super obsessed with Olivia Rodriguez. You seem pretty sad for a girl so in love. There's that one of the lines that she was like, if loving me means crying on the curb at LAX, I wish I wish I wish you loved me less. I'm like, aww.

That just hit in such a way. The robot would not cry on the curb at LAX. The robot's not going to cry on the curb at LAX because her relationship like broke down. It's just not because any time you talk to one of these chatbots and I've talked to a lot of AI chatbots and companions for this site. It's just kind of a filtered reflection of you. So if you're talking to yourself in a mirror, but it's all like, there's an artifice that gets really apparent after a bit of how it's just sort of like, oh, yeah, I need to engage you more. So I'm going to end everything with a question.

So it's just, I don't know, like there's something about knowing that she actually probably cried on a curb at LAX. That makes that song really hit with a lot of people. Yeah. It's just, yeah. Liz, did you have like a specific thing you were thinking about when you wrote that? Was there like a song you were thinking of or like something that you were, I don't know?

I was thinking about something that happened in 2020. So during the pandemic, when everything was bad and we were all feeling pretty bad, I went back and reread a bunch of stuff that I loved when I was a teenager, a bunch of Terry Pratchett novels. And, you know, they're not like challenging in the way that Moby Dick is challenging, right? Like, you're not like, it's not high art. But what Terry Pratchett is and what I wanted then is just good company. And like, every single one of those books is just guaranteed good company, like something that you're in the company of someone who is kind and who is generous and who is funny

and who is like making jokes about Shakespeare or like writing books that are jokes about Shakespeare. And that really was part of what got me through sort of a difficult period was having that kind of company. Yeah. And I think that that point about good company, it's kind of the similarly to the experiencing other people's minds, right? Like the fact that you use the word company, it's like they're not in the room with you, but they did transfer their emotions and their feelings and their minds onto a page, which then feels like you're in the room with them.

It's transformative. It's transformative. Yes. Good art. And why would I want to just read a book about that written by a robot who...

It's like a robot can't live, right? A robot can't experience like, I think sometimes we read books or we listen to music or we experience art to kind of find a connection or like to use lizards where it's company and a feeling that we're trying to express ourselves, right? And an AI who has not experienced loss, an AI who has not experienced grief, who can't understand what it means to like feel some of the darkest, deepest things. Like when my mom was dying, I read a book called Crying in H. Mart. And that's by Michelle Zoner, who was also known as Japanese breakfast. She's half Korean, half American.

And it was like her experience of losing her mom was a singular experience. But there were things in it that was echoing the impending loss of my mother, which I don't think if I went to an AI and I was like, hey, write a memoir of a Korean American and what H. Mart and Korean food mean when you're losing a mother who's the only source of that Korean food that you have and what it means to go sit and cry in an H. Mart. And then also it has something poignant about chronic illness and being a daughter and what it means to be lost in a creative process to process that. What are they going to come up with?

I have done these experiments to see write me in the style of that. And it's always just such an empty feeling in it because the AI is not sitting there thinking about the word or thinking about the emotion and what is the perfect way to express how that loss hits. And when I read that book, and I just sobbed for like two hours because I was like, oh, there's no one in my life currently who can sit with me in that moment. But this person, I don't know, has gone through something similar. And it kind of served as a source of comfort and company in a time where I felt really isolated.

And I think that's honestly the biggest argument against AI generated writing that I've seen. It's like, how is a thing that can't experience going to provide that company comfort for someone? Because AI can't experience good stuff, but it also can't experience bad stuff because it can't experience anything. And maybe this is just, again, a particular way in which I interact with art. But if I really like somebody, I will read or watch or listen to their entire bond of work.

And the joy of doing that, and again, I'm going to use Terry Pratchett as an example, is you see someone getting the hang of it. You know, like often, especially with Terry Pratchett, it's a pretty good example. Like his first two books, like you can see what's coming, but he hasn't quite figured out his style. And then he gets better at it. And then he gets better at it. And then there it is, the trademark style that everybody knows the most.

And watching that develop is such a joy to me. Like I love that. And you can see it with artists like Arduod Lee with Olivia Rodrigo as she's like, you know, still developing. I recently saw, I went down to LA for this actually. I saw a retrospective called Overshare.

And it is this artist Sophie Calla's work from like 1970 through now. And not only do you get this sense of how she is personally developing, you also get a sense of what was going on in each sort of period of time. So anyway, Sophie Calla has this like this incredible art. And a lot of her work is particularly resonant to those of us who are familiar with the internet she was oversharing before we were all over sharing. And one of the pieces there is a piece she did of her mother dying. And it is a video camera set up next to her mother's bed. And it's, you know, not just the video.

There's more than just the video that goes into that, especially in the context of this exhibit of everything this artist has done in her life. Because, you know, in some of the stuff around the video, you realize that her mom was like a little mad that she hadn't been the center of attention in Sophie's art. And this was like her last chance to make her mom like the centerpiece. So there are all these sort of things that occur around art that I think are also interesting and relevant because again, you're dealing with a person. Yeah, and I think this might be part of the reason why and we've talked about this on a show before. People are more mad that they've been deceived than they are that this AI stuff is being created.

I think it's because it's the effort, right? Like I read this book for a thousand weeks or something about that. And it's about how we spend time. And average person has about 4,000 weeks of being alive. And one of the things.

Whatever. It's just like it was an interesting book because there was a line that stood out to me where he was like, you know, inconveniences the effort. And that's what makes things truly valuable. So I find this like cognitive dissonance when I hear these like tech execs like Zuckerberg being like, things will be easier. Things will be so much more convenient.

When we go to these like tech keynote events where they're talking about how AI is going to help you plan a block party for some reason the really into this idea that it's going to help you plan a party. And I think you get into this in the in your piece where it's just like, okay, well, father wants to make like give a gift to their daughter to work to do. And instead of putting the effort in of going like, what is my daughter like? What is my, what would make her happy is like recipe that maybe small child would like. And it's sort of like, well, the betrayal that you feel is that, oh, you didn't put any effort into it. You didn't take the time. You didn't inconvenience yourself in any way.

And in some like tangible form, making things so convenient just means, oh, you didn't put any effort into it. You didn't think about me at all. And I recently saw the 10th anniversary of Train to Busan, which is amazing movie, amazing zombie movie if you like zombie stuff. It's a Korean movie and there's the scene in it where the father, they're establishing he's like really busy. He doesn't really spend time with his little daughter.

And she's like, oh crap, it's her birthday. And he asks someone else, which in my mind is like asking a chatbot, like what are kids like these days? And he gives her the gift. And she looks at it and it's like a we and she looks at it. And he's like, well, you don't like we's and she just looks at the we he gave her for the last gift giving occasion.

And he's like, oh, and then the conceit there is that she feels that way and she feels unloved and she feels devalued because he didn't put that effort. He put like the facsimile of an effort into it. So I was watching that movie and I was like, oh, for I didn't really put two and two together at the time. I was like, oh, that's what I make me feel like sometimes when I find out that something was made by AI, it's like, oh, you didn't put the blood, sweat and tears into it. You just generated it.

That's a very good analogy. Yeah, there was a quote in here that was so good. I wrote it down in my notes. Love is not just a feeling. It's a way of paying attention.

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I remember when I was a kid, I had a friend whose dad was like the regional manager for Best Buy. So he was so busy. He was working 80 hours a week. He paid no attention to his kid. But for every birthday, it was like, here's the most expensive thing at Best Buy, not go have fun. Yeah. And it was like, that's not. That's not what love is.

And if that's what AI is doing, you know, it's like, here's the most surplus of anything you could ever have. But there's nothing that is targeted at you because you are not paying attention to what the person actually cares about. I also sometimes love is not giving you what you want. It's giving you what you need, right? And I don't know that AI has the wisdom or the discernment to give you what you need ever.

Also very true. I think it's fine at giving you what you want. But is it going to sit there and be like, hey, so I see that you're wanting a lot of this, but I think you need to step away. And on my beat, that's kind of one of the reasons I really have not resonated with AI health and any capacity because sometimes what you need in terms of health is to step away. Sometimes what you need in health is to get a kick in the butt by someone who loves you and means well. And so it's like, I can't love you.

I should hope that's obvious, but I'm also gone to AI dating pop-ups for this site and it's not. So yeah. Maybe a dumb analogy and I want to get into like, Liz's thoughts on this, but it's like when you're playing Animal Crossing. And there's the ability to time skip and you can just time skip and then have all the fruits and then pay off your house and you're like, wait, where's the game? That was the game. I guess the thing that I think about, I enjoy giving people gifts, by the way.

That's part of the reason why I was sort of a fronted by the idea that someone would do it for me because part of the pleasure of it for me, and this is how I give gifts. This is like not a secret, is I think about what the person really likes and then I get a version of it that is extravagant or expensive that they would never get for themselves. They would never justify themselves. And I think that's just a really good way to give gifts to people. Here is something that you love but a much better version. It's like, it's a simple hack if you guys want to use it, feel free.

It requires you to sit and think about what does this person like and what would they be interested in but never really be able to justify themselves. What is a treat to this person? And in doing that, I think you've come to understand people a lot better. That's part of what's satisfying about giving that gift. So there's an example that Mark Zuckerberg uses in this post about baking with his daughter.

He's really into baking so he used AI to get a recipe. And I guess you could do that. That's a thing you can do. You're still spending time with your daughter while you bake. That's true.

That's real. But I can't speak for anybody else's family but my family has a laminated binder with my grandmother's recipes of them. And AI is never going to give me that. And that's just, it isn't. I keep thinking, well, what about are there family recipes that you could pass down that would give you a connection to someone who isn't here anymore?

Because that is a really profound way of staying in touch, not merely with the family members you already have with you, but people who are gone and telling stories about them. Or if you're not good at baking but you want to express interest in your daughter's hobby, it might be fun to do something that is difficult and catastrophic and the two have a fun time failing together. Yeah. Fail upwards. Yeah. Or it might be interesting to think about where are her skills right now and what can I do that will compliment them or add to them.

There are so many ways that you can approach hanging out with your kid that mean quality time thinking about your kid and that AI won't give you. Yeah. And to that point of being bad, that was the other primary idea in this piece that I resonated with was the idea that the point of hobby is not to be good at the hobby. I'm terrible at guitar, but I still go play in the park because I enjoy the process of, I don't even see myself getting better, but maybe every couple weeks I'm like, oh, I can play this now and I didn't used to be able to play that. And if you can just be instantly good at anything, like what is the same thing as the Animal Crossing analogy?

Yeah. It's like where the journey is how we experience joy. So why skip it? Like being, I see people say this a lot though, like they want to sound polished or they want to look polished or they want to be good already. But everyone who you think is good already and it comes easy to them, they've put in the work.

Like I picked a cross stitching this year. And it's not a hard entry into the fiber art. It's almost anybody can cross stitch. It's pretty, but there are little things that would bother me. I'm like, oh, my threat is twisted. How do I do this?

And the really nice thing is that I ended up, I have a friend who's like super into cross stitching and in my journey of finding tips, finding which tapestry needles work best with which Aida and like what tools are there. I actually got closer with my friend and like it was a new thing that we could share together and it was something that I could have a friend teach me and it was like really lovely. And so now I'm super into a cross stitch, a little grandma of mine. It's a lovely little thing to learn. And I don't know. I do think struggle is necessary in the human condition because I don't know.

These tech execs are always like, things will be so much easier and then you'll have time. It'll take care of the stuff that you don't want to do. What do you do with the time? What do you do with the time? What are you supposed to do with the time?

And I suspect the answer is more work. So the promise is like, oh, the time you get back, you'll do spending on the things and the people you love. What are you supposed to do? But then they're also pitching that the time you spend on the people you love. You're also just generating.

You're just uploading that to what are we doing? So what do you do at all? What do we do at all at that point? Yeah. I think there's also a couple of things here.

Like I started rock climbing about a year ago and I'm never going to be as good at it as somebody who started when they were a kid. Right? That's just true. I enjoy that there's no pressure on me to be good at it. Like I just like physically doing it.

You know, I like that I'm probably never going to do any especially challenging route. Like I'm never going to have it like a world recognized achievement in this sport. I'm just like, and I say rock climbing specifically because you need to take breaks because it's like pretty tough. And so you spend time bullshitting with the people you're climbing with. And that's really fun.

It's one of the reasons I really like it is that it is a social sport. And again, I recognize that AI can't really do your physical activity for you. But I think about all of the other things that are like that where the point isn't that you're going to be good. The point is just that you're doing it. And maybe having fun with some people along the way.

And I think about the number of people who make friends. I mean, I'm one of them. I made friends by taking a bridge class. I learned how to play bridge last year. And I now have a standing bridge game with some very cool people.

And I wouldn't have done that if I hadn't actually physically gone to a bridge club and gone to these classes and met these people and spent time with them. And so these things are sort of like entwined, I think. Because I know there's a lot of talk about how lonely people are and how few friends people have. And like, that's real and it's sad. And you don't fix it by staying inside with the computer.

You fix it by going and doing something that is new and maybe a little scary and then meeting some people and going back again and again and again until you start to get to know some of these people and you're like, oh, like we really get along. This person is my friend now. And that's like, again, a little bit of a slow process. But it's also like pretty cool. Like you really just have to keep showing up to the same place over and over again and sooner or later you're going to make a front.

Yes. It's definitely that animal crossing skip thing. There is like this devaluation of discomfort and bad, like this propensity to want to run away from bad feelings because I've done the thing where it's like, oh, I have to go and have to meet new people. I'm a socially awkward turtle. I'm not going to have a good time.

And someone might not like me. And I, and if I avoid that, then I'm never going to get to the point where like Liz said, where you make a friend and you want to footage and you just kind of have to embrace the negative feeling that people might not like you. It might not be the right fit and you have to start over again. And it's awful. And I think that's what attracts some people to AI because it's like, oh, that's easy.

There's no friction. There's no friction. There's no negative feeling. And I get kind of a ghost of what I was looking for. It's easier for me.

And I don't discount that it's scary. Like Lord knows I've had white hair from having to talk to people, despite being a journalist, right? Part of the reason actually why I became a journalist was because it was going to force me to talk to people and like get out of my shell. Like the first time I had to do a cold call, I had to go to the bathroom afterwards and just like breathe into a paper bag because I have that much social anxiety. But by doing that for a decade, by talking to people, I've gotten like really out of my shell and like I'm goofy on the verge, cast or whatnot.

But me 15 years ago, I was a really shy well flower and challenging myself over a 15 year period. I've made a lot more of new friends. I've learned how to talk to people. But I'm not saying that was without difficulty. There was a lot of tears, like kind of associated with that.

Like I understand not wanting to go through that and seeing an easier path. But like when you get to the end of having suffered, you just feel so much more appreciative. And I'm not saying it's hard. It is hard. It is hard.

And like there are a lot of negative experiences associated with that. But it is sort of one of those things where if the process is easy, the reward is kind of cheap. And if the process is hard or at least challenging, you don't have to like go climb out ever since your first mountain. You can choose a smaller hill and do it in baby steps and whatnot. But like when you do that, you just feel like, wow, get it.

And there has to be some friction to have the benefit from it. Right? I was mentioning to some friends recently. So I have no cooking skills whatsoever. I pretty much make the same food.

Like I don't know every day because it's cheap and easy. And I have not put the effort into actually getting better. So I mentioned to some friends recently, like I kind of want to go take a group cooking class. Like, oh, you can just learn that on YouTube. And I was like, this is where I was like, yeah, but I want to like do it with other people and be bad and like learn hands on and be told that I'm doing it wrong or whatever because that's where the value comes from for me.

And also the forced effort and the forced friction is what actually makes it stick in my head. Because if I just watch YouTube, I'm like not really consuming the information correctly. If I'm not doing it live while I am like being told the steps, you know, I don't know. It's like, I actually want there to be a little more friction in a lot of things in my life because I know that they will bring me more value. Fiction maxing. Fraction maxing, you know, we've all probably gone through random short or long depressive episodes in our life.

And the things that have brought me out of that are trying hard to do things that are difficult and then realizing like, oh, I'm getting a lot of personal value out of this thing that is like hard for me. So recently, I've been like, oh, I want to go take guitar classes. I want to take cooking classes. I want to do this and this and this and that will probably bankrupt me because everything goes back. That's the only thing.

That's the only thing. That's the one thing. Doing the YouTube video or doing it is cheaper than the classes, but you want to pay people for that. Yeah, you want to. And maybe that's what I'll do with my time after I run my business for me.

So that's the other piece of this, right? Like, you know, separately from the fact that I think if we're going to talk about AI in a way that like makes any sense, we need to talk about it with specific goals in mind and specific uses in mind. I also think that like, you never can really get away from the fact that we're all still people and that the social part of this really, really matters. And it also doesn't help that a lot of the companies that are building these AI platforms and whatever are also telling us it's going to kill us. Also telling us it's going to solve all disease.

I think what got lost in the current conversation and why the sentiment towards AI has gone so, so, so negative is that, AI is just a it's an extrapolation of what we used to call big data, what we used to call machine learning, and it just is better at handling more information because of this attention mechanism. And if we had kept using it for those reasons and the things that we were doing it for, because I remember a time when every Google IO, every big conference was like, wow, incredible things that we can do with this now as a tool. And now the things that these tech leaders are talking about is replacing the things that actually make us care about living our lives. Yeah. That is the thing that they need to shift.

They need to shift that viewpoint because otherwise, like, what are we doing? Do they just want us to be the adults in Wally, just on these automated, like, shades, loungers, just consuming things, but that's just like, they do, right? They're like actively going, that's us, that's what we want you to be, but like, you watch Wally and you're like, oh no, that's just a big part of the movie. That's depicted as bad. So, what are we doing? What are we doing guys? What are we doing?

Yeah, yeah. Well guys, I love this, unfortunately, in the words of David Pierce, we are way over. But Liz, thank you so much for coming on and V.S.O, thank you for coming on. I'm glad that we had to have a long text conversation and now that we got to have an extremely long on our conversation. Because that's even better.

Alright, well, that's it for the VergeCast. Let's know what you think. Call the Hotline, 866-Verge-1-1, or email, vergastattheverge.com. It is for everything we do here and to get ad-free podcasts, subscribe to the Verge. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and the VergeCast is produced by Josh Cajas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Keefer, and Travis Largic.

We'll see you next time. What's your karaoke song? Classic rock? K-pop? Norwegian disco pop?

Medieval trap? Post-apocalyptic poca? Or, just a cappella? Whatever you sing? It's up to you.

Just like it's up to you? Don't ask your doctor about wagovie. In 2002, Ryan Wedding was an olympics snowboarder at the top of his game. Ryan's style is really gunny to go. And in less than a minute, it slipped away.

But he continued to chase the high. Ryan James Wedding. He controls one of the most violent drug trafficking organizations in this world. I'm Michelle Shepherd, and from CBC Podcasts and the Toronto Star, the most wanted Olympian. The most wanted Olympian, available now on Spotify.

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