Second Orders

ABOUT THE EPISODEBrant Entrekin is a philosopher, currently pursuing his PHD in philosophy at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where he also teaches. His work spans social-political philosophy with a focus on epistemology, philosophy of social justice and religious studies. His paper, "AI-mediated mystical experiences" is a deeply interesting and provocative meditation on meditation, in which he examines the nature of mystical experiences, surveys our relationship with chatbots and asks us to consider a future in which AI can give us, to borrow from French writer Romain Rolland, "that oceanic feeling" which was once the preserve of the more saintly among us. I'll be discussing these ideas with Brant and look forward to giving the AI skeptics one more thing to be skeptical aboutABOUT SECOND ORDERSSecond Orders is a series of conversations with thinkers, tinkerers and theorists about pivotal changes in science, technology, law and culture, their unintended consequences and what they reveal about how we live and cooperate at every scale.Website: http://secondorders.coBecome a guest or suggest a topic: http://secondorders.co/hello

ABOUT THE EPISODELeif Weatherby is an associate professor of German at New York University, founding director of the Digital Theory Lab and Director of Digital Humanities. His research spans dialectics, semiotics, the nature of data and computing, and problems of political economy after the Industrial Revolution. He's also written several books, the latest of which is Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism, and is currently working on two other book projects: Artificial Concepts: How Cybernetics Encountered German Idealism and The Mismeasure of Mind: Against the Prediction of Everything. ABOUT SECOND ORDERSSecond Orders is a series of conversations with thinkers, tinkerers and theorists about pivotal changes in science, technology, law and culture, their unintended consequences and what they reveal about how we live and cooperate at every scale.Website: secondorders.coBecome a guest or suggest a topic: secondorders.co/helloChapters:00:00 Why LLMs got language before they got reasoning07:40 Saussure and the poetic function inside attention13:13 The four-horned unicorn: meaning from the top down15:42 What if grammar is easier than meaning?23:05 Steelmanning the AI skeptic32:58 Chess, Go and the boards we play language on36:47 Why language feels like the special human thing44:48 Do we need a new humanities to study AI language?58:16 How will AI change the way we use language?01:01:15 Language-as-a-service01:02:23 Can AI free us to interact more authentically again?01:10:06 LLMs as ideology machines01:23:14 Schismogenesis and the refusal of AI vocabulary01:29:10 Remainder humanism & taste01:37:51 What about the future excites you?

Michael Todasco led PayPal's Innovation Labs and now researches AI at San Diego State University. We explore what the one-person billion-dollar company actually means for incumbents, moats, and consumer trust, why the hollowing out of middle management might not play out the way people expect, and what happens when agents can spin up and run businesses with almost no human involvement.