00:10:18 · Jaron Lanier
[00:10:18] S7: that Let me qualify this a little bit because that, I am sort of saying that, but not quite. There's an important difference here. So to me, the the large language models are cool things. Like, I... I'm not anti the technology itself. In fact, I think it's cool. I love having new tools to extend human efforts and collaboration. But the thing is, just like with a library, a library by itself just sits there. It only has any meaning if somebody goes in and does something with it. Like a library without a culture of scholarship, without a culture of library science, without librarians, it's it's just inert. And the same thing is true of these models, these large language models and other recent frontier models. There has to be something done with them in order for them to have any impact. And so the thing we chose to do is reproduce this Eliza illusion from the sixties or the thing that drove social media, which is, oh, let's make it a fake person, and then, people become addicted to it. They treat it as their therapist or girlfriend or partner in some way. And then, of course, you start to own their lives because now you own this intimate part of them. Just like with social media, I think sometimes it works out well. Sometimes it doesn't.
00:11:33 · Danny Fortson, Jaron Lanier
[00:11:33] S10: So question. One of the things we've been talking a lot about and writing about recently on the pod and in the paper is this notion that we, the leaders of this company, have created a new species. And therefore, they're, quote, unquote, moral agents that they have some equivalents and that we must treat them or really think about them in a way that is not just [00:11:59] S7: Yeah. [00:12:02] S10: One, do you agree with that? And two, if you don't, is that problematic, that framing? [00:12:06] S7: It embarrasses me so deeply. [00:12:08] S10: Why? [00:12:08] S7: So so... Okay. So let's unpack this. First of all, if we're talking about absolute truth, any question about what's a being and what's not a being is ultimately a matter of faith. We have latitude to believe different things. We have to live, and we have to make decisions. And I think as a pragmatic concern, we just have to have assumptions that we make about things. So I I feel a similar argument for me has to apply to AI, which is, you know, if we make a machine and we declare it god, what's the consequence? And the consequence is we have to let it run rampant, and letting a machine run rampant is really stupid because they... [00:12:51] S10: You wouldn't Well, and that's kind of what we're... That is what we're doing right now.
00:12:55 · Jaron Lanier, Danny Fortson
[00:12:55] S7: Yeah. And so the thing is it's pragmatically absolutely absurd. Let me give you a couple of examples of that. Yeah. So what actual core benefits have we gotten from AI so far that have made a difference in things? Actually, you know, it's a little hard to nail them down, you know, honestly. But let's say one of them is... There have been some scientific projects that have been furthered by AI, like, ish... Proteins and whatnot. There's a Nobel Prize out. So one of the things that's interesting about that, if you look at that... The Nobel Prize work, it was before the popularity of trying to treat them as gods. And so, therefore, they didn't use the formulation of agents. They didn't have the thing going off on its own. It was rather an algorithm that searched the space. Now the whole idea of the agent is an... It's a ritual worship object. The idea is that we believe the AI is this living god thing. And so instead of just using it, we're gonna have it go off on its own. But the thing is that's actually not needed for doing anything productive. There are a few exceptions. If you wanna use an I... AI algorithm to control something in real time, you might wanna let it go and and do its thing. I have some friends who are trying to work with Frontier AI models to improve ICU's intensive care units at hospitals. You need an agent for that. The most prominent proposed application, which has actually seen the light of day in Ukraine, is using it to control, smart drones. [00:14:23] S10: Right.
00:14:23 · Danny Fortson, Jaron Lanier
[00:14:23] S10: Right. [00:14:23] S7: The thing is, in almost all cases, if it's something about your exercise or recipes, if it's something about your stock portfolio even, if it's something about productivity in your company, the use of agents doesn't actually help you. It's a ritual to support the adulation of this new golden calf that people made. So it's a ritual of adoration. But the problem with it is it creates dangers. So you have this repeated stream of things of, oh, we sent out all these agents, and the agents mess [00:14:54] S10: They broke out [00:14:55] S7: of their [00:14:55] S10: sandbox, and they created... They committed felonies or whatever. Yeah. [00:14:59] S7: They actually weren't needed in the first place. Like, the whole thing is stupid. This is like somebody saying, oh, I ate dirt, and it upset my stomach. [00:15:07] S10: Don't eat dirt. Don't [00:15:08] S7: eat dirt. If people do survive our stupidity during this generation... I mean, we could make people extinct. I mean, but we will be the ones doing it, not some AI god. But as presuming we survive, future historians will look back at this and will call this the era of the stupid engineers. You know? It's a shockingly dumb period. [00:15:29] S10: Do you have a sense of why? Like, why are we here? Why are we being so moronic and stupid [00:15:35] S7: Yeah. That's a great question.
00:15:35 · Jaron Lanier, Danny Fortson
[00:15:35] S7: Yeah. That's a great question. [00:15:36] S10: You know? Because it feels like stepping back and putting this through a Normie lens. Like, I'm just talking to people this week in Texas about data centers. One little town called Red Oak, Texas, seven data centers are being built, like, encircling this kind of rural town. Yeah. Everybody's angry, taking all the water, changing the landscape. And then you step back further and you're like, okay. For what? So we can all lose our white collar jobs, and we can all end up on universal basic income. But don't worry. Step back one layer further in the future, the distant future, there will be great abundance. We will solve all the problems.
00:16:22 · Jaron Lanier
[00:16:22] S7: Well, so there... There's a couple of things to say about this. The image I always get about the towns with data centers is like human sacrifice. It's like people being dragged to the top of the pyramid in Mesoamerica or something. It's sort of like, we've decided our god is so awesome. We must present it with humans or something. But then as far as getting to the future of abundance, the problem with it is there's this sort of magical thinking that you can make every little decision on the step towards something counter to that destination, and then somehow at the very, very last step, it'll turn around. And the thing is within Silicon Valley thought, you might have a startup that loses money and loses money and loses money. And then it hits its moment of strategic relevance, and it might be acquired by one of the big companies for a lot of money or something. So when employees at tech companies say, hey, we're being more productive now because we're using this model. And then they'll say, can we work less? Oh, no. You cannot work less. You must work more. And we've seen that interaction at Meta, for instance. Mhmm. So Meta for a while was just asking people to use as much AI as possible, but then would not allow them to reduce their work hours. And so the question is, well, like, if people even inside the industry aren't able to, what's the magic event where that turns around? Now the question of, like, why are we doing this? Why are we doing this? I've puzzled over it for many years. Part of it is that there were some people who really wanted us to do this, and it's been a pretty explicit agenda for decades and decades. Going back twenty or thirty years at least and really longer, there was this realization that the structure of code, because it has so much impact on people, because it it not only addicts people, but it also creates the the maze within which they can operate. It creates the the field of available actions to them. Like, you know, if you're using a software interface to to access products or government services or whatever, you can only work within the structure of that software, you know?