Going Direct Conversations
00:19:47 · Ben O’Hanlon
But I don't think that it necessarily would be if these tools are used in the same way the monetary system is being used as a tool for like civilizational control and management.
00:19:57 · Jordan Wolfe
[00:19:57] S1: So I think... To wrap it back to this, at the beginning of the conversation, or when we started talking about money as a coordination technology has been captured, and I think your world, your interests, and how you see things in helping other people see things, we're at a very important point in time. As you were saying, I find a similar thing where most people don't pay attention to this, they just want to live their lives and do their thing, and they're not thinking too much about much. And, you know, we're seeing it all around us, obviously, but understanding money and then actually how debt works and then the problem that most Western governments, that problem that they have and then now they have an interest problem and as they're printing more and more money for everyone out there that doesn't pay attention to stuff or don't really care that much. As you print porn more money, your money gets inflated away. And so you're kind of sleeping at the wheel. And part of my hope, kind of similar to what you're saying, is we can help more people wake up and say, hey, no, like, you need to pay attention to this. And I think it's important, especially as AI starts to diffuse through our lives and the economy, that we need to fight for much more decentralized, distributed intelligence for all the reasons that you just said. So I want to go over to the kind of the transition into the next essay. Okay. As we're kind of moving from money to cognition, I pulled a quote from like the end of the first, the first piece. Okay. It's a little bit long, but folks can hang with us. AI, like money before it, is a coordination technology that reorganizes society. But it sits a layer deeper. Money captured exchange and through it, governance. AI reaches the layer beneath both. Cognition where belief itself is made. Capture that and everything built on belief comes with it, money included. It is being rapidly deployed by a handful of private companies to capture the 21st century. Okay, that's a deep, deep excerpt. So you say that AI sits a layer deeper than money. So why is cognition deeper than exchange?
00:22:13 · Ben O’Hanlon
[00:22:13] S2: I'm going to answer it. One thing about the monetary, the reason that we had to establish the monetary system is that if you just come in at this conversation right now, People won't necessarily know that it's real. It can sound that you're being a conspiracy theorist. I wanted to establish this has happened before. And this has happened, and this does answer your question to some extent, this has happened where you're not even conscious or necessarily realizing it, right? Like a fish in water. Because it's so normalized, how the monetary system works in the past, however many years it is. You're not even aware of it. It's happened all around you. All of your children and yourself and your parents and your children's children, all of their economic output now is kind of owned by this system, right, with its owners. And this is what's happening with AI, you know? And the reason it is is there's going to be people navigate the world based on stories, right? And they tell themselves a story about who they are and why they're doing what they're doing. And one of the most important things you can do is validate someone's idea of sense of self. That actually drives more behavior than money would, right? If you really want to understand how you're going to kind of mobilize people, you need to understand How it is they're talking to themselves. What is their internalities as opposed to the externalities, right? Kind of like the superposition we're talking about. But now we're thinking about instead of this multinodal network of minds, we're thinking about the individual and how it operates in the world, right? And I talked to you before the call started briefly about John Boyd and OODA loops, which is observation, orientation, decision, and action. And that on every LinkedIn post ever, it's just reduced to this one cycle where you have to spin it. But it's not. John Boyd was an American... I think Air Force General, or I'll get the terminology wrong, but it's very interesting because he's talking about operating in other people's decision cycles. So an adversary, partners, coalitions, groups, right? How are those people thinking? And something my wife taught me much later in life was like theory of mind, you know?
00:24:42 · Ben O’Hanlon
So, and that's probably worth, because me and my wife would come back from social trips and, you know, places, she'd say, Then the reason they're saying this and that of this is because ABCD. And I'll be like, no, fuck off. No, no, that's outrageous. She's always correct. And I kind of realized, okay, there's something going on here that I wasn't really cognizant of because I, by nature, be quite direct, which can come across as naive maybe to some because you're just telling how it is, right? You're communicating directly, you know? But as I got to know over 15 years, this theory of mind is really interesting. So all kinds of things are happening in why somebody is orientating around the world. But it's like the monetary system and the inputs and the outputs. If you can control the inputs and the standards that are coming into somebody's observation and how they orientate themselves, you can determine all these actions. And I think that's what AI does. It will tell you the stories about yourself, your history. It's like the censorship we've seen. In social media. And by the way, like if we're going to contest this, let's not talk about like, I don't know, Gamergate. Let's talk about COVID where academics, doctors that had been to prestigious universities were censored. We're not talking about some fringe incel. We're talking about like Harvard graduates. We're talking about people that weren't telling the narrative. But that propaganda or, you know, that kind of It has to be fought in the externalities. It has to be fought in the media and out in the real world. But with AI, it's somebody having a conversation with what feels like they're talking to themselves. I'm not all doom and gloom, by the way. I feel that there's great hope with AI. I feel like it's extended capabilities beyond I massively feel that my ability to express my values and intention and ideas in the world is exponentially greater the more I'm developing it. So I think it can be an amazing tool. And I also like, you know, if you're as old as me, do you ever like Back in the 80s, 90s. Oh, humanity, man. Consciousness is going to change. There's a great awakening coming. Do you know, like tie dye t-shirt? Yeah, of course. So like in some ways, like my hope is AI is that.
00:27:13 · Ben O’Hanlon
Is that because it is a way of people to kind of, I found in myself becoming more aware of my own thought process and how I think because I'm having to abstract it To a model and explain it like a harness we can talk about if we ever have time, but, but my point is like, so I think it can be a really, a really interesting tool, but if it's controlled by, you know, a centralized entity, if it's controlled by people that have interests of their own at the expense of others. Then I feel, and this is all technology, by the way, there's like a tension between tyranny and freedom, freedom of association, freedom of commerce, freedom of expression. And what we're talking about here by expressing our ideas, intent and values in the world, you know, maximizing our freedom of action. You know, these are the things that are so exciting that makes you want to be part of the human race, right? Whereas like the idea of my kids and your kids and everybody that comes after us having to pay rent because Some guys happen to have discovered an algorithm a little bit sooner than some other guys is insane. It's completely insane. And you can only imagine that the people that are the figureheads of these frontier labs are completely captured, you know, otherwise they wouldn't be there, you know? So, yeah, probably exposing myself now is a bit of a... This is why I was like, who built the moon, right? This is why I was...
00:28:49 · Jordan Wolfe
[00:28:49] S1: No, I mean, listen, you're just reinforcing, no, you answered the question in the comment from your, or the excerpt from your essay, but you're getting at the core of this, right? Which is, I think, the line that hits the most with me, which is, and you made the example with the monetary system as well, it's whoever controls the inputs, right? Yes. Like, you just see it, even with AI, obviously you see it in a very, We're going to see it in a very direct way as you see like the insane concentration of wealth in a small number of companies. And with this whole anthropic IPO and everything like that, like we're seeing how much influence they have directly in front of us. And What I would say is, you know, I'm very bullish on the positive aspects of AI, but I'm very clear, even in my own world, it's very interesting, even in my own world, it's like, I think one of the most interesting things AI can do when it comes to like ownership and company formation, it's actually going to create completely new ways to form companies. It's going to bring back different types of co-op models and employee ownership models. And because of the coordinated effects of it and how you can share that infrastructure, I think is really interesting. But I oftentimes, and that's what I'm interested in, that's really where this kind of everything with Going Direct is going to go. But I even myself feel myself getting pulled naturally by like market forces. I'll give you an example. So about a year ago, I almost started a company all around collecting data to help train for physical AI companies, right? Human level data. And that's like have completely exploded that whole space. And as I was digging into it, it was like, no, but that's just like a market opportunity that is going to explode. But it's like just not aligned with who I am. And I think going back to your point, I think one of the challenges, and this is the reality, which is I think one of the parts of the conversation I wanted to have with you, which is the reality of is most humans, like you said, just want to go through their day. They're not going to go through the hard work. They're going to take the fat shot. They're going to send AI slop out the door because they don't want to do the work, right? Right. And so I just think that's part of human nature.