The AI Industry Must Stop Doom Trolling w/ Cal Newport

the last minute, and well, here we are. Subscribe to the newsletter ideally the premium support your local zitron and as ever, if you have anyone else's financials, you can catch me on ezitron Dot seventy six on signal. It's

going to be in the episode notes. Anyway, Today, now that I'm done drinking milkshakes, I'm joined by the wonderful computer science professor and writer Cal Newport to talk about AI, but specifically to talk about what he calls doom trolling in one of the best pieces I have read on AI ever.

that their products are going to cause. And if this was any of the industry, this would be completely mind boggling. The example I had in the in the New York Times op ed is like if the CEO of Ford, You'll put out a white paper and was like, we're really worried that our f one fifties are going to start catching on fire and burning people to death. But you know, automotive technology, we can't impede it, and we're just going to get back to making them.

your doorstep and walking away. They just every two to three weeks want to drop some sort of doom troll document to get people freaked out, and then they just back away and go back to what they're doing. And I kind of got fed up with this, so I said, let's do a moral analysis about this strategy. And I said, look,

there's only two options here. Option number one. They really do think that technology they're building has put them on a trajectory to and the best case, destroying the economy or in the worst case, wiping out humanity, in which case every ethical system of you know, any merit would say you have no other choice but to stop immediately what you're doing and use all of your time, energy and treasure to try to stop other people from doing

the same. The second case is you don't fully believe it, which means you are laundering the anxiety of hundreds of millions of people to try to make the bank balances of a vanishingly small number of original stockholders larger, which I think is equally as morally monstrous. There is no moral analysis that says trying to frequently terrify people about the things you're building while making no adjustments to the things you're building, there's no moral calculus that says that

makes sense. But because AI is new and people don't understand the technology, and it's shiny, and we saw James Cameron's movies, we somehow treat this different. And I say it's not different. This is a product that they are selling. They are not the stewards of an inevitable technology. They are building products according to business plans and trying to sell them. They need to act like consumer product companies. We need to demand that they act like consumer product companies.

building is so dangerous dot dot dot. But we can't do that unless everybody in the world does the same thing, including China essentially, and if that's not the case, we have to just keep going full speed. So what they said was we should do worldwide pause, but of course we're not going to. It's really what they were saying there. But the point is, all right. So the report we're

talking about here came out a few weeks ago. If you haven't read it, this is basically the report where they just out of nowhere wrote a white paper with a bunch of charts. They always have charts where they were saying, yeah, pictures and an animation of.

We think that it might be. Looks like it's getting closer to being able to improve itself. And if it does recursive self improvement, which by the way, is that it's at the core of philosophical superintelligence, right, the sort of a Silicon Valley cult, like thinking about computers replacing us. If it does, hey, maybe that'll be good for humanity. It'll cure all diseases. But also we could lose control of it. Thank you, have a nice day. And they

walked away. They just put out that report. That's the report.

that can build itself. Meta a year ago said in Personal Superintelligence, we're seeing the early signs. And they're doing this because, in my opinion, maybe disagreek how they've run out of ideas to the point that they're literally going back to what Sam Moltman said in twenty nineteen. Yeah, we'll just ask the AI what to do. Yeah, lo'st the AI out build. These guys have so few ideas that, just like Christ, can't we just make the AI.

it look like? How you architect it? Like, what what allows it to do it? And their answer is we don't have to figure that out. The AI will right now. This is perfect not the history problem. We could history lesson this this although this goes all the way back to the nineteen sixties. So there's a there's a statistician applied mathematician named I. J. Good and he wrote a paper. It's really like an information theory paper, but he wrote a paper where he said, we, if we think about it,

called it ultra intelligence. Really, all you have to do is build a machine smart enough to improve itself, and then that machine will improve itsself. That machin will improve itself, and then we'll get to ultra intelligence. So we don't have to figure out how to do it. The danger lies in just making a machine fast enough. So it's like a bit of a semi thought experiment that became the er document of what I call like the philosophical

superintelligence cultists. So this sort of where the philosophers took this idea away from the technologist and began turning it into a sort of digital erascholasticism, where they sort of abstracted away all technical details and just started building list of list of list of lists of all the different things that could happen. They just did a bunch of

thought experiments about super intelligence and recursive self improvement. They then merged with the utopian singularity people that were coming out of sort of Kurzweil's orbit, and you kind of created this group that was non technical. This is not engineers, this philosopher's ethicist and sort of gadflies and you know, you know, speculative fiction writers and fan fiction writers like Yukowski, and they kind of created this sort of dumorous utopian cult.

And then what happened is that group was like, we should create a nonprofit to look at these ideas, and we'll take sam Altman and put them in charge. We'll call this Open Ai. And then suddenly they were like, oh my god, this jin Ai thing is working better than we thought, and we have now a one of the you know, someone coming out of this general kind of cultish let's eschatological you know, in times could come through computers, was suddenly and accidentally in charge of the

most important company in AI. And one of his you know, lieutenants left to start his own company. And his name is Dario Amaday. So these the two major players we have in AI right now, come out of philosophical superintelligence, which uses this idea of RSI, and it's like a it's like a parable, it's like an abstraction. This is not like a serious it wasn't like a technical concern.

It was a like a thought experiment, and they are completely influencing the like the daily lives and psychological well being of hundreds of millions, and like the economic health of the entire world. So it's it's a really an interesting world we've ended up in now. And all of which is to say, I don't think we're talking enough about how weird these people are. I think we keep

steering the conversation back to the technology itself. We keep steering the conversation back to like, well, could it take over or not? And we need to spend some more time saying, wait, who are these people and what are they doing? They're doom trolling. This makes no sense. No company ever in the history of companies was trying to troll their own customers to be afraid of their products.

They're treating their technology like a religious object. Like, we are underestimating the weirdness of these people, and when we put that into focus, it completely changes I think our own psychological relationship with what's going on right now.

that however you feel is however you feel. But I think that they correctly realize that they could very easily make people talk about something that doesn't exist just by mentioning it. How I saw a bunch of headlines that were like, Wow, anthropics seize the path to self building AI.

twenty seven. I want to be clear that and the reason I mentioned this is I just brought this up, is that in early twenty twenty six, in AI twenty twenty seven, they say that Agent one has already started doing its own research. That's not happening. None of that's happening. In fact, none of this is happening. These people are just weird fantasists. I think. While there's the poison of

the philosophers in them. I just think that Warrio Ama Day and Sam Altman both I think that they both realize that journalists series ly con the investors reasonly con that you can just say shit and anyone will print it and believe you because you're a CEO.

like one direct report. Yes, so I don't think you know, he's he's necessarily in the war room with a thousand engineers and like doing a lot of business strategy here too. So it's possible that these guys are more isolated than than we think. I don't know, but I mean, if he has.

think about what the benefits would would be. They've this has led to a sort of discourse environment essentially, where you have a normal technology that's that's advancing along a jagged frontier, which is what happens with like new technologies. There's like certain applications where they feel like they're making progress and a lot of other applications where they're stuck.

And so like they've been making progress with these these coding systems that that's kind of a scenario which there's a lot of room for play with these type of systems. A lot of other things like non coding agents, et Cetera's not going so well. In math, they're making progress, but that's such a narrow field that it's not like it's not economically relevant to them. So you could see

this as just like a normal technology. And in chat chat search which is basically you know, running Google search results through a language model, the natural language search basically, so like places they're making progress, other places they're stuck. That's like an interesting normal technology story. But if you layer on this other sort of eschological story about we are on our way to utopia or dystopia and we

keep trying to keep you like upset about that. Think about the way now when you're online, how people think and talk about AI. It's all about if something made, if there's some new feature that works, if there's some new chart that goes better, that's evidence for the prophecy is true. And then so then that that puts so much more power. Like if you otherwise just came to me and said like, hey, we have this like advance in our coding harnesses, I'd be like, I don't care.

I'm not a software developer. But if you say, oh, that means that the prophecy of the RSI gods is true, Now suddenly that is really eventful, and I'm really excited or scared. But I'm giving a lot of import to your company. So I do think it generates way more sense of import on these otherwise, like I think very often very minor and jagged improvements. I mean, I think with other companies, if you kept putting out graphs that you created on measures you created, I was like, I

don't know what that means. Tell me when like, my business is going to be doing better? Right, So there is a huge advantage regardless of intention. There is a huge advantage to have a doom troll because as long as people are are terrified or extremely excited about this future, and then there's a secondary advantage. This is cynical, but I just want to throw it out here ed because

I'm sensing this more. I think there's a whole other substrata of sort of like tech adjacent people who are who are you know, online or not, who got caught up a little bit in that type of hype type vision and now their pride is engaged, and so now they will interpret I encountered this all the time, not even skepticism, just literally saying oh, I don't think that tool. People are struggling to use that tool well, or this might this is not a very profitable model here, They'll

have to find another model. They interpret it as like, well, this is embarrassing because I was just telling my siblings and everyone at dinner last night about because I used cloud code, and I think it's how nine thousand and I was just so excited about it. It's cognitive dissidents, and I'm embarrassed. And so now I am a warrior for the prophecy. So I think you also have that substrate who are like, yeah, but what about and then you know some metric that went up or something like that,

and that's way and their benefit as well. You have a soldiers of marketers that are trying to basically protect their pride.

software good? Does it make money? But something about this is really entered into the realm of religiosity, not even faith, because faith is a much stronger and more fundamentally sound thing. This is religious cultism. But the God is capital Like you can say it's Ai, but the God is capitalism. It is this idea that the big money people who are constantly threatening you, like they just they're like, yeah, it's gonna kill you or it's gonna take everything. I

guess it's Pascal's wager as well. It's well, if I don't know if this is the case, but if they're all saying it, and if I'm wrong, the Roco's bassilisk will drop an anvil on me. I guess it's it's frustrating. But also I don't know what these people will do

if the bubble, when the bubble burst. I don't know why I'm saying if when it bursts, I don't know what these people do because their worldview is built around existing outside of reality, almost like that just this chatbot will become God will become autonomous, and because I was there saying it will become autonomous, I will be given something. It's unclear what the reward is other than simpering, and there's something in it for them, that's the thing. It's like,

I guess maybe it's community. They're finding. It's replace AI with God, just like with church, and they would mock whoever was talking about it. It would mark anyone who took a sign of well, this is proof that God exists. But they would look at a meter study and they go, well that's proof that AGI is coming. Yeah, and it's so strange.

ideas and then added this layer of fearmongering plus childish philosophy. Ye, very like, very much like this shit must have hit so this would hit so hard if I was twelve. Yeah, it goes to it like holy shit. Yeah, Oh I'm using this computer today and tomorrow it will be ultra intelligent. I'm so smart for finding this first. It's deeply sad. I didn't think I could be more embarrassed by Silicon Valley, but the fact that these people are being this weird.

Is that I like, we need to call them weird. It's actually kind of unsettling as well. It's unsettling the also that you are one of the few people just saying it that everyone else is acting like this is normal or rational or in any way logical.

I'm the trend I'm seeing which I don't like. Is this idea of the people who instinctually do not like what's going on with these AI companies are trying to match the intensity and high of what they're saying, but going the other direction, right, And so they're like they're destroying everything, right, Like the environment will all be destroyed by the data centers, and all education is going to end.

And the idea being is like, I need to be as like as intense about all of the terribleness that your technology will cause as you are about like the good it will cause. Where I don't think that's playing into their hands. I think the right reaction is ridicule

and embarrassment. This is where things need be if you read anthropic white paper, you read these things, it's we're now going to go through we envision four possible futures for where this technology could come, and then they just make up like four or twelve year old sci fi. Maybe the technology will take over, but it will be in more of a sort of a church Hillian mold, and we'll wear top hats and that we could imagine a council of humans, but they would probably be like

one third humans and two third robots. And you know, like just like work, it's just it's just nonsense, right, Like this's goofy. It's not it's not philosophy, it's not it's not technology, it's not political science. It's just goofy. Right, And I think that, and I said this in the op ed. I said, the zeitgeist on this should could change really quickly, right where it's like, all right, Dario, is the agi in the room with you right now? Can you see the agi in the room with your right?

Cause it's that's like, that's the reaction I think we need plus forget that justify why I'm spending a thousand dollars a month on tokens, Like I don't want to hear your report about you know, hey Ford, I don't need your report about the future in which we'll have transformers that will help us police our streets. I am spending this much money on gas for my f one fifty, Like, tell me, like why that's worth it?

understand this argument. It was in the latest anthropic paper. We're building this technology, it might come alive and we might lose control of it. But how can we stop because China is also building the technology? And what if they build it and it comes alive and comes control. Why don't we get to do it too? What's the moral argument there? This is not like a nuclear deterrence argument that if you somehow destroy humanity first, that like what's the advantage there?

the wrong coast. We're not on the West coast. We don't we haven't gone to those cult meetings who are like, there's interesting technology here, and I want to hear about the products. And this is actually you and I maybe even differ a little bit. I en that piece by saying I'm pissed off because this should have been for a nerd like me, an exciting time. This is a cool technology. It's hard to make products out of it, but we should have been like it, kind of excited about.

Oh I never thought about doing that with this. Oh isn't that cool? What's going on? Instead? Everyone is terrified, like you ruin this moment because of God knows why. We don't even have to get into it. So I think the right response from like actual engineers who are not part of that cult. And you know, you got to swallow your pride. I get it. You were really excited to your cousin after you use claude code like that's okay, swallow your pride a little bit and say

this is doom trolling and it's embarrassing. Can we talk about the real technology, like a normal product. There's cool things you can build. Some stuff isn't working. I want to know if my stock market portfolio is going to crash, Like, let's just be normal. Stop the weird stuff. Just stop it, like you're a real company trying to sell real things. Let's talk about products like why I want to spark a revolution to bring things back to normal.

you're doing? No? Is the code overlea for Bose, Yes, Like, it's like there are tons of problems with it, but one sentence allows the generalities to grow. And also, I think there's a very obvious reason they don't talk about the present because it's kind of boring. It is like, it's just in comparison to a big, sexy autonomous robot. It's incredibly boring to say. But also the business doesn't work.

The business is like, the business doesn't function if they have to talk about why it costs one thousand dollars of API tokens to do something. They have to talk about their business and they have to talk about what it does today, and the problem is with that is so my position on this is I don't mind on device models. I actually think that's all that's going to remain of LM's I think maybe we'll get some rag search stuff here and there. But I don't have an

animous with the non data center ones. But I do agree that there needs to be that people do need to stop fighting fire with fire. As far as being like if they're gonna dooma, we're gonna say that all data centers are the worst, which they are. The water story is murky, but the environmental story is very real, especially with the behind the meat of gas turbines.

sound like a crazy person. This is an insane Sundhar Peshai. Yeah, Google Search is oh any in any week now? You just laugh at it. You would laugh at him.

maybe in six months. And it's just the Yeah, they're using the Dario playbook with everything because they're just making the same things and they don't work particularly well. It's just so these people are so weird. Now you've said it. Now that's all I can think about.

a psychological perspective in a second. But there's this logic of if there's something I can point to where AI did something that I thought was like impressive or interesting or better than I thought, every prophecy is true, yes, and I think I think it's I don't know psychological self preservation or I don't know what it is. But I don't under this. This is again from like a logic point of view. I teach logic to undergraduates, like propositional logic. I don't understand. This is a it's an

argument that's missing premises. Right, So they're going from the premise of hey, it's and it's almost always the same thing. It's almost always a non engineer using cloud code because it's really fun. It's like a slot machine. It especially your you know, it just like creates code. It works for simple things, and you're like this, it's really fun. Like I've talked I know people who are like they're they're like, this is my new hobby. Like it's it's

really fun if you're into that type of thing. Right, we talked about this earlier. It's like model trains for engineers. You do that like that was really cool, and then you translate that experience of like I really enjoyed that to you know, I wonder what salt mind the AI overlords are going to assign me to. And it's a weird that that leap of logic. How can we just keep it as like, Okay, this was really cool that

you built this dashboard. We don't have to leap from that to therefore everything Dario Amadae said must be true. It's not this binary balance on a folk rum where we're just looking for like one one little piece of evidence will tip it one way or the other. So I think we need to be careful about these elaborations. It's ad jagged technology. Some things make more progress than others. Some things are cool, some things are more narrow than

you would think. But like, you know, does see I built a really cool web based game in Fable five, which actually is probably just copying the source code of a similar game. Yeah, does that mean like recursive self

improvement is coming? So what I'm hoping we can do is stop making these leaps of logic where if you encounter any sort of feature or have any sort of positive experience with an AI product, that you then leap immediately to the conclusion that everything involved in the prophecy about the future of AI must be true, or to put someone like you and me now it has to be put on the defense of of I did something positive with AI, all right?

keep adding new features or finding things to improve? That is a given a course? What technology in the history of world would you have no improvements on? If you're spending you know, ten to twenty billion dollars a year in R and D, of course it's going to have improvements. Why are we leaping from that?

don't see anything about what it says. If it tells me I have a good idea, I'm like, I don't care. I feel nothing. I think that a lot of people do feel something. I think when they see these things compliment them and do an impression of brainstorming with them, which is really just talking to yourself in the mirror, which can help. That can help. I've done it. I think that it makes them feel good and also your

claud code example. I think that people feel very good about that, and they feel very proficient, and it makes them feel capable at something perhaps they were incapable of before. And thus if you say to them, well, okay, that's just that's fine, they go, no, no, I'm a big boy. I think there's something kind of almost childish about it, like no, I'm special, I'm special. Why aren't you impressed with? And it's something that models are built to do. The ingratiation,

I think is important. But also I think that the tech industry has done a really good job over the years of convincing us that everything gets better and better and better, even though it doesn't. Even though a lot of Google Search has got worse, Facebook's got worse, Twitter's got worse. Honestly, argue, many parts of Blue Sky have got worse. It's less reliable. At least, the experience of using the computer has got worse. We've hit a wall

with innovation in general. But this thing, because it can kind of resemble anything if you want it to, I think touches something dark in some people, not evil, but just like something very vulnerable and kind of weak, kind of gullible, where they say well, if I'm getting this out of this, then I'm part of the future and I need someone to be impressed. But it's this is now a part of my identity, and that's I think that that might also be the differentiator here as well.

I don't remember. Take sure you had four or wars about gaming consoles. I'm sure you had, you have Android versus iOS whatever, not like this, nothing like this, And I think that it touches something in people.

in Italy or whatever. It's like one of the ways to deal with it psychologically was to get out in front of it and be like, this is going to be really bad, Like I you know, I'm on it, and you know, you feel more prepared, like I'm not. I'm not going to be caught off guard. I'll be the one telling people how bad this is. And like somehow that does help you a little bit deal with

like the anxiety of like impending dread. And I think there's a lot of that going on with this as well, is like I'm anxious about this doomtroll lamp and doomtrolled so many times, I'm going to kind of get out in front of it. Now if I'm the one saying, well wait a second, I get so many I am for a lot of people now, they're like stress pacifier of like well what about this go right? Like I saw this thing that upset me, Like doesn't that mean that means? I think that means it is going to

take it over? And then they're kind of hoping that me or someone else will come in and be like you don't really it's okay, Like that's not as big of a deal as it seems, where so I think

both are going on. It's either like this gives me meaning like I'm a part of the future if you're like using cloud code, and if you're just using like chat GPT for natural language search, you might just be really anxious because you know, you hear these earnest podcasts where people are interviewing people about you know, we'll have to eat our dogs when the jobs are gone, and you're like, well, if I get out in front of it, at least I feel like I have some autonomy in

this dark thing that's happening. And so it's like common psychology. Both of the psychologies equal dollar and cents for a Again, I keep coming back to remember is a vanishingly small number of early investors who have large equity positions in these companies. That is, who benefits from all of that.

They will benefit immensely because no matter what that psychology is, this company is at the full crumb of the future, and that's worthy of investing in, even if their revenue story is murky, even if their product story is there's no moat and it is I mean, I don't want to get into the economic weeds. But this is like a Clayton Christiansen fever dream what is happening with these

companies and their products. So he had this idea of, you know, talking about disruption from below that the problem is is you're working on high end version of a product and you don't want to undermine your market, so you try to keep it expensive and high end, and then someone comes in from below with a different way of doing it this much cheaper, and you're screwed because you ignored that market. All of these use the use cases that are useful now that people are spending money on,

like software development tools and natural language search. Here's the problem. You don't need a ten trillion parameter language model to do this, and this is why they're so these companies are so screwed, and I think are trying to IPO as fast as they can. Is that like someone's going to come along and say, we're using a twenty billion parameter open source model with a really smart coding harness that we just coded ourselves on top of it and tweaked for the last two years, and you know what,

people like it better than claud code. And it's a hundredth of the price right or natural language search. You don't need claud fable five to summarize Google search results right. And the economics make no sense. But a small model could, a non chip model could. That is why they're in trouble economically.

and the current products do not provide that rationalization. Nothing about chat, GBT or Claude or clock code or fable or whatever actually rationalizes this. Doesn't make it. A trillion dollars is too much money for anything outside of like healthcare and housing. In fact, probably could have taken care

of that really easily. But nevertheless, people see that and they don't want to deal with the natural kind of dissonance they get, which is wow, are all the companies run by people who don't know what's going on, and the answer is yes, Like, I don't think that there's actually a grand conspiracy. Oh my god. The emails are get every week, people being like, it's surveillance. It's a secret surveillance state. It's secret. It's yeah, it's so secret.

It's on CNBC every day. Oh oh, they're all they're doing secret data centers. Yeah, it's called Oracle, it's being it's called Oracle. That's what Oracle does. Oracle has a huge class. Like, that's very well known. What do you like? I think people need there to be a conspiracy because otherwise the answer is which is what I believe, which is none of these companies had a plan. I think Sam Mortman and Daria Amedy thought we're gonna throw a

bunch of money at this and then God will come out. Yeah, money, money, so much money, and then they will have asi agi whatever they call it. And then it happened, and then ye didn't. They hit the diminishing returns at the end twenty twenty four, and since then they've been kind of harnessing non LLM stuff on top of LLMS in an attempt to make them do stuff.

the doom trolling. This is another advantage of it. They've completely offfuscated exactly that point that you just made, which is that pre training scaling again had We've talked about this on the show, but has had diminishing returns, you know, starting after twenty twenty four, and so all of the improvements that have come since then has been post training pre train models and building hand coding harnesses with more and more special cases plugged into it to find more

places for them to be useful, which is a completely different trajectory than twenty twenty three where they were like, no, we'll just keep pre trained scaling these things till we have AGI. And they've created a sense of like, well AI has been drastically improving, hasn't it. And you said, well, wait a second, Like if you told me in twenty twenty two, you know when you're like, we're going to scale our way to AGI, and our vision of AGI is software development tools.

that happens every time. But then I'll find one weird PDF and It'll be like, oh cool, But isn't that if you didn't if elms didn't exist, I would expect Google Search to do that by now, like that would that feels like a natural progression, But it's just normal kind of boring. So I always say it's like, oh, if they called it library models, it wouldn't be that big deal, but it would be a more accurate, like you just choose a regular name.

and then they saw how well it worked. I think I genuinely think on an ethical level, it's one of the most disgraceful things anyone's ever done technology Technologically. I think it's just on top of the obfuscation of what these things actually do, it's horrible. It's a it's a cruel thing to do. I hear from people all the times being like, am I going to lose my job to this? I'm like, why is my boss telling me I'm going to lose my job to this?

any other way for that calculus to work out. You know, I was just reading one of the mini papers that are actually now you know, surveying and studying AI in the workforce, and they they looked at this paper and they asked people that these software developers, like, estimate how much time you've saved or whatever, and it was, you know, eleven hours a week we're saving. And then they asked them, is your company performing better at all? Because this made

any impact on your bottom line? And it was like a vanishingly small percent that was like, yeah, there's anything different on the performance was that worth or making like software developers maybe by some measures one point two times more efficient, Yeah, worth causing. I think the negative toll of this psychologically is like getting close to like COVID territory. It's like population wide, you are stressing out everybody day after day. They've made the last two years for anyone

who's following the news psychologically miserable. That is a real harm. That is a real measurable harm. Like I really hate that I have to deal with this like time and again. It reminds me of having to deal with the pandemic, which was like a like a psychologically fraught time because every day you were being bombarded. But at this time, you know, a, there's not a virus that's infecting a lot of people, and be the people who are like

warning about all the doom. In this analogy, it would be as if like they were the ones in the lab doing the research that was producing the virus. Like that's the craziest thing about it, right, I mean imagine if in like twenty nineteen someone was like these viruses, coronaviruses doing gaina function research could really really like infect the whole world Like a course, they're going to get out.

We can't contain them. Oh, by the way, we're curiously doing this gain of function research on these viruses, and we're not going to stop because you know the Chinese well in this case, but whatever, yeah, someone else is direction, someone else might do it. So like what can we do,

like stop building the viruses then? Anyways, So I think we have to account for the net psychological harm, and I think, I mean, I don't think our current government can do this, but I think that that's something where the government should, in an abstract world be involved, Like, oh, there's a small number of people who are causing a huge amount of distress and anxiety around our entire country.

Of course we're going to get in the game and we're going to pause all your model deployments and tell like you either convince us that that's not the case and you admit like, yeah, we were kind of making that up, or if you don't want to say thathing like no, you don't get a release's product. You're causing mass pro mass unhappiness and damage right to our entire country. You have to account for that. You don't get to

just do that. So does I think the harms? So far have exponentially outweighed the tangible benefits.

make Richard. That's it, Like, that's the whole underlying goal, right, And the their whole model is we have to find new areas where there's something to be monetized, in which there's possibilities for unicorns. So we have to find new territories where you have the possibility of getting in early and having an investment turn out to be a multi billion dollar company.

social media companies. Right then they're like, we need another because you have to keep finding every time you raise a new fund, you need a giant new resource that you can monetize to get to early. So the next thing they tried was Crypto. Crypto was just you know, Andreessen Horowitz saying, there's no more unicorns left in social We're going to try to create a new field in which we can create unicorns. And they really flogged crypto. This is the future, This is the future. Yeah, yeah,

and it wasn't, especially for software. And I got yelled at for saying this, but I'm literally an expert on this. My doctorate's in the theory of distributed systems. It's a stupid way to build a distributed system, and I was right. And then no one built the systems that way, so that kind of failed. This was the next territory. And it doesn't say this technology is not interesting or potentially useful, but as you said, it's not trillion dollar useful, not yet.

So why did all that money come in is because we're talking about one street in one city. We're talking like sand Hill Road in Palo Alto. Like the people on that one street are like, we need to find a new territory that can produce, you know, one hundred billion dollar companies so that we can get the returns that we expect to keep our lifestyle up it And.

software to take off consumer software. It was meant to be the solution because they're doing exactly the same thing is that AI companies are doing, saying yeah, the AI will just fix this, what are we going to build with this? Or the AI will work out what's the product? AI will work it out. It's honestly a kind of a pathetic culture.

realized that's politics. But they put on YouTube for a reason. How many different outlets have talked about the job apocalypse that does not exist or the saspocalypse claiming that software companies are being sold off because of AI disruption that doesn't exist. The media bought and sold this. In twenty twenty three, there was Guardian headline that said Samuel was a little bit scared. It's just without that, none of this was possible. And perhaps they were just being a

megaphone for real anxieties from these companies. Well, perhaps they were just looking for a narrative that would get clicks.

they don't know about the rationalists. They don't know about the excescummuit that came out of the rationalists and then merged with the technological singularities, and that they also think they're going to live forever by harvesting the blood of children and all. They were just like, these are engineers. I don't know about technology.

the virologists know what they talk about. Why would they lie? And I don't want to miss that story. I think there was a lot of that going on. Of these are the people building the technic because I heard this phrase from so many people. These are the people building the technology. They know about it best. I'm not a

computer scientist. I mean I am, but if I'm being the journalist, and this is why, like the people who were not, where is the resistance is coming from is computer scientists like me who don't live near Silicon Valley, And well, I do understand this technology and what the hell are you talking about? But I think for the journalist it was and now they're just and this is why I wrote that off ed. I'm trying to spread

the word more. These guys are weird. They're weird, and by the way, they're mainly guys too, because I think women were gonna put up with this weird You know, I'm gonna go in my room and put with my Star Wars toys nonsense, right, I don't want to Who knows what that tells us about our our gender. But it's not great that it's all men doing this craziness.

that everything they build is amazing. I don't know, perhaps there's something going on that too, It's just.

they're too weird. They've they've proven time and again. But the key message I would also want like, if you're listening to this pod, if you're listening to this podcast, now, do not interpret this conversation as I'm going to categorize this in a claim that AI doesn't work. And therefore, if I see something cool that AI does, Uh, this conversation isn't relevant. You know, cal was wrong. This is it's really not about that is about what I'm talking

about right now. I am talking about the way that we actually talk about AI, how we treat it as a business, what is morally appropriate and what is morally not And these are normal products and I don't I don't to me, this isn't this not vaporware. I mean, I think the ability to parse natural language like a language model can do is like it's fascinating, and I'm also surprised by how hard it's been to come up with a lot of good, useful, economically viable products off

of that ability. Like we were still with software development tools and and uh, you know, rewriting Google search results. I actually thought we would have a lot more interesting tools that we were using in our everyday life right now. And because there's been some problems that we didn't think about. So this whole conversation is about stop treating this like a demon that's been summoned. Make fun of doom trolling

because it's kind of embarrassing. This is the you know, this is the magic the gathering club at the high school table, and just treat this like a normal product. And like I don't want to hear. Let's just what are the products you're selling, what are the benefits, how much do they cost? Is it worth the money? And uh, what are the products are you working on? Like, let's

just have normal conversation. So so do not as a listener categorize this in this in this, in this sort of light vers dark is like, okay, this means AI doesn't work. And this team says it does work, and if if and then I'm going to try to assess in my mind is AI useful or not? And if it is, then I have to be ready to mate with machines. And if it doesn't, then, you know, stop

all that sort of extreme thinking. I just want us to talk about this like a normal, interesting but normal technology, and normal people should look at the way that these companies are doom trolling us and say that's strange. Please stop. And in the meantime, I am going to have to really make fun of you, like I think that's where we need to be.

about Kubernetes. You wouldn't Microsoft word doing autocomplete, shouldn't scare you, grammarly, shouldn't scare you. This is the actual technology itself is not scaring you. It's the people around it and the

people's extrapolations. And also, like you said, the willingness. We have to believe people who are working on something, who have supposed expertise, as if expertise guarantees that you're correct, or indeed guarantees that you know what you're talking about, or indeed that you can see the future.

this written by AI? These comments like this synth this all the time, these these comments that are like I work for a such and such company and what used to take me three weeks I now do in like

six seconds. And you know, it's just like falling to People are just falling in their camps about like either you're one of the priests of the new religion or you know you're the you're the the the the Canaanites who are who were kicked out of the land or something right like, it's like you got to be in like one of these two like extremes, and don't do that. Just say, like, treat it like a normal technology. Stop doom trolling is stupid. Stop it like, treat it like

a normal technology. Either stop if you really think you're destroying the world, or start talking about it like pickup trucks. Right, we don't need this in between, So hopefully, hopefully we can convince a few more people about that.