Governments and AI, Chapter Two: Everything Is Precedent - podcast episode cover

Governments and AI, Chapter Two: Everything Is Precedent

Sep 12, 202543 min
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Episode description

As human civilization hurtles headlong toward technology it still does not fully understand, your favorite world governments are in a new arms race to control large language models, generative AI, and the terrifying golden goose -- a fully sentient, artificially created, non-organic mind. So what happens when they discover it? As Ben, Matt and Noel learn in the second chapter of this two-part series: everything is precedent.

They don't want you to read our book.: https://static.macmillan.com/static/fib/stuff-you-should-read/

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

Speaker 1

From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know.

Speaker 2

A production of iHeart Reading.

Speaker 3

Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noah.

Speaker 4

They call me Ben. We're joyed as always with our super producer Dylan the Tennessee pal Fagan. Most importantly, you are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. If you are practicing linear time, please do check out part one of this continuing series on governments and AI. Oh my gosh, it's an AI week here for us. That's stuff they don't want you to know.

Speaker 3

Yes, and our words are coming from our mouths, which are operated by our brains. And we are still human, how.

Speaker 4

Quaint, how folks, see, how wholesome. We're gonna pause for a word from our sponsors. And here's where it gets crazy, and we have returned. We're still us, despite the fact that civilization is very much in a pod people situation right now. Humans did not invent war, just like Chick fil A did not invent the chicken sandwich.

Speaker 5

Neither chicken or the chicken sandwich. Both cleans are spurious.

Speaker 3

You're telling me, Yeah, you're telling me that Chick fil A didn't make the first chicken sandwich.

Speaker 4

That's what we're telling you, Matt. So I'm sorry you had to learn it.

Speaker 5

My worldview, my two once had at Chick fil a centric worldview, Matt.

Speaker 2

But there's hope you can move past this. I believe in you.

Speaker 3

Okay.

Speaker 4

Oh, yes, we've got a message from Dyland in all hapital letters, Dylan, could you just read this on air?

Speaker 3

True at Kathy Slander? Mm hmmm, precisely blasphemy pointing.

Speaker 4

And you guys know that guy that true did give me money and many of his books.

Speaker 3

Uh yeah, if.

Speaker 5

You're gonna have a sith lord mentor, might as well be true at Kathy.

Speaker 3

I recently went to I don't know if I guess you would call it an ode to Kathy. Uh in Loganville that just opened up. It's one of the real fancy chick fil as that has basically a museum to him.

Speaker 4

Is it like Truet's with classic cars working lot y? Yeah? Okay, yes, I wish I didn't know. But we're nailing it here right, just with our earlier analogies. The human did not invent the concept of war, just perfected it, and now it's a constant fascination. So it's no surprise. We talked about this in the past that any new technological breakthrough either comes from war or is inevitably evaluated and auditioned to see whether it has utility in war. That's how it happens.

Speaker 1

You know.

Speaker 4

Judge Holden from Blood Meridian nailed it. Horrible guy, but very smart. She's right, certain kind of smart.

Speaker 5

So yeah, right, So it's not for nothing that the Austrian Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg called AI in warfare. To your previous point, Ben, the Oppenheimer moment of our generation. It is that kind of magic science kind of you know, collision that absolutely cannot be walked back.

Speaker 3

Yeah, oh gosh, I know. It just feels so when you see the money boring out of governments into private sector hands to develop this kind of thing. When you see that type of thing happening, you kind of know everybody is just trying to get that money and everybody, I'm sure these companies are doing their absolute best to

make the best wartime AI stuff they can. Ultimately, these are private entities taking in giant grants, giant amounts of money to do stuff, and part of that thing is to build a company that's gonna last and do other things.

And it just calls into question everything to me. Yeah, especially when I imagine we're recording this on September second, the day before victory, what the victory parade in China that's gonna happen tomorrow and Wednesday, September third, And you just imagine what all of these leaders are getting together and thinking about and imagining, because AI is definitely one of the main talking points that's happening right around dinner tables probably and luxurious outings to various squares.

Speaker 4

And torture rooms and so on.

Speaker 3

Maybe, but you just like, it's just so odd to me that we're at this point, at this Oppenheim moment, when everybody's trying to do this, but in the end, it feels like such a smoke and mirrors way to get an influx of money in the private sector.

Speaker 4

Right. It's resource extraction, just not in the way you would imagine, you know, from the jump, And it goes to our earlier conversations about the transformation from government to corporate governance. Right, there's always been a lot American like what was referenced in The Boys, There's always been something like a defense contractor something like janis ares or crusaders or templars that ultimately practice regulatory capture. I am fun at parties.

Speaker 3

Do you guys ever imagine the scenario of AI as being a targeted like thought virus that's actually a weaponized concept.

Speaker 5

That would imply that would imply that they someone does know what it's capable of and has influenced it in such a way to achieve a certain result.

Speaker 3

I'm saying, I'm saying the opposite. I'm saying, what if the concept of developing this AI is actually being used against specific governments like all right, and Western governments as a way to drain resources like money, resources and.

Speaker 5

Just misinformation and just like screw up, like throw a wrench in the works.

Speaker 3

Think about the water resources that are being used to build this stuff, Uh, the precious metals that are being extracted and used for this stuff and prioritized.

Speaker 5

You know, like Matt Sadly, it feels like another one of those examples was we're just dumb enough to do it to ourselves. We don't even need some sort of overarching plot to trick us into undoing ourselves.

Speaker 4

You just look, here's how it works, all right. The world is a big room. Right. The world leaders are just walking around most with very little knowledge of long term goals.

Speaker 3

Right.

Speaker 4

They roughly know they want to go north, for instance, and then all you need to make them go a little northeast is to walk by at an opportune time and just nudge the elbow a little bit. Shout out to Turkmenistan, So.

Speaker 2

Just get a pinch.

Speaker 3

They just not just what was that phrase, Just a whisper on the elbow. I love that bank.

Speaker 4

It's just on the elbow, Matt Frederick. So war has always been a business, right, or shout out to Spentley Butler, It's been a racket. And just like every other industry on the planet, war is figuring out ai. The current real world forefront of this is going to be seen in the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. We're talking to

totamus drones, algorithm driven targeting systems. It makes it easier to commit mass murder, and it concurrently allows human leaders to just shrug and say, oh, the computer got it wrong. When a fatal mistake occurs.

Speaker 3

Yeah. Sorry, we hit that hospital in Gaza and it had all those journalists in it. We were actually targeting this cell phone are.

Speaker 4

Bad and hitting it twice was an error?

Speaker 3

Yeah, computer, Yeah, I thought the first one wasn't effective on the cell phone that we were targeting, so we had to drop another one.

Speaker 4

Now we got to spend some time on this. We're recording, as we said on TEWOD September twenty twenty five, right now, in this conflict between Russia and Ukraine, seventy to eighty percent of all battlefield casualties are due to drones. This is a drone war, which means it ultimately becomes a programming war. It's the world's worst math bowl, is the way to think about it.

Speaker 3

And we're not talking predator drones some right, some of these larger drone strikes and things, but often we're talking about, just as you said, drones that are smaller scale with explosives on them, that are trained via these various software systems to target specific things and explode at specific times. You have human intervention often right the controller of a drone, but some of them are designed to just go in and explode.

Speaker 4

They're the new Kamakazi, you know, divine wind. They can they can save your soldiers from the direct horrors of the battlefield. You lose one to enemy forces. And if you're talking like you're saying, Matt, if you're talking about most of the drones deployed the enemy forces when they down a drone, they're not going to discover any new

revolutionary technology. There's no new tech for them to fight. Instead, you just pop over to Amazon or Ali Baba and you buy the commercially available component parts for the iteration of these things. Is there a team version? There is a team version. There is a team version.

Speaker 3

Yeah, but it's more expensive now because of the tariffs. I'm real.

Speaker 4

Yeah, we're going through our stand up notes. Guys, what's up with these tariffs? Huh?

Speaker 3

I don't know it. Your seems like it's uniting the world against the United States. Weird.

Speaker 4

Weird anyway, check out our Netflix special. So let's say you're on the other side of this war. Those drones are wrecking you. They're not just killing soldiers, they're not just hitting military sites. They are hitting villages, hospitals, civilians. And now you figure out how to jam the signals

that direct the drones. The next response is the other side learns how to use fiber optic cables to bypass you're jamming shenanigans, and then you figure out how to bypass that, and then you arrive at our current phase, which is AI power targeting systems that when everything works right, when you get your gin wish, this will identify and strike targets with minimal human intervention, even in heavily jammed environments.

The programming learns from every conflict, which with each instance of battlefield use, the next iteration of AI targeting just gets more and more precise. That's why we mentioned sci fi and demonic folk tales at the beginning. We are building artificial minds, and if you think about it, with these minds in particular, we are pain and blood. We are sacrificing humans to evolve this technology. Yay, yeah, that's sorry.

Speaker 3

It's true.

Speaker 5

The sacrificing in terms of lives lost or in terms of like even like in terms of people's ability to earn a living way.

Speaker 3

Well, yeah, oh that's the thing, right, but specifically in the weapons of war. Yes, you have to do real world testing. That's the only way to know, if you're actually making the stuff happen. You can go out to you know, some missile field out in the middle of a desert somewhere, as many countries do, and do all the weapons testing you want, but until you see if it was actually effective on doing let's say, taking out the target you're looking for, like the US did with

predator drums back in the day. We talked about that in Drones episodes.

Speaker 4

Ruined a wedding in particular.

Speaker 3

Well, yeah, but how long we were attempting since the eighties to get some kind of autonomous targeting systems and get some kind of thing that would act like that. And now, as you said, the software is the thing that's getting tested way more than the hardware.

Speaker 4

Yeah, because you can buy the hardware, as we said, like if you were listening now and you can get on the internet, you can buy the hardware. Also, I guess everybody listening tonight, all of us together, already have access to the internet. But shout out to anybody who's listening to this podcast on vinyl. Thank you. We don't know how you did it, but we are impressed for sure. One thing to point out here real quick, it's not just limited to little buzzy buzzy boys in the skies.

Unmanned ground vehicles are a thing that Ukraine is actively and Russia are at, and the US and China whatever it's Ukraine and specific is testing over seventy domestically developed what they call uggs UGVs Unmanned ground vehicles weugs. Maybe we talk a little bit about the kill zone they're creating as well.

Speaker 5

So Ukr's work to create a fifteen click unmanned kill zone at the front lines while producing something like four thousand drones per day, I think is what you're referring to there. Man, The hopes there would be to expand it as far as forty kilometers.

Speaker 3

So are we talking about like a DMZ kind of situation.

Speaker 4

Yeah, the idea is so for everyone in the US fifteen kilometers or clicks, that would be a little more than nine miles, and expanding to forty clicks would be almost twenty five miles. Jeez. Yeah, yeah, big stuff, right, And in that area, semi autonomous drones are judge, jury and executioner punishing, obliterating anything that doesn't walk correctly right or sends out the wrong signals.

Speaker 3

Jesus man So what if.

Speaker 4

Your job is what if you have a job where you hop on a laptop, right, and you just get a snapshot and you click yes or no and you do it for hours?

Speaker 3

Yeah, and that and yes or no equals kill or let just don't mess with, right, or maybe maybe kill or observe. Those are your two options, right?

Speaker 5

Oh yeah, because you can't just say okay and with the dispassionateness of solving a capture, so that you can you know, ooh nice?

Speaker 4

Yeah, kind of yeah, oh no, not, kind of absolutely terrified. I mean, look, we're I think it's safe to say, not to speak for everyone, but we're pretty pro Ukraine. Is that all right? Is that a hot take?

Speaker 1

Yeah?

Speaker 5

No, not a hot take pro humanity, but yes, I think Ukraine is on the right side of history here.

Speaker 3

Well, I hate that I feel like I have to say this, but I think I'm pro Ukraine. I think I understand the conflict well enough to say, yes, that's the side history should be on and I should be fighting for or wanting to. But at the same time, I still feel as though I'm in the dark, perhaps because of the various propaganda pieces that end up coming out that it's difficult to discern what is propaganda, what is actually occurring, what are the real, little small decisions

that went into what this conflict is. Genuinely, I feel like I'm still in the dark quite a bit there.

Speaker 4

That's impressively fair. Yeah, because we also, whenever we're talking about these situations, folks, please note, as we like to say we are not the experts, we also understand that the people are not the government. You know what I mean. Nobody has a system where everybody legitimately in a nation gets to talk about every decision, right, So wherever you go, there are going to be a ton wherever you go.

Whichever government you hate the most, remember there are a lot of people living under that governance who completely agree with you, including i'll say, at the US, so one way or the other, this is the thing KIV was. Ukraine was driven to this innovation of automation and AI through crisis, through necessity, and in doing so logically followed the existing theoretical path that had already been well established.

Everything that occurs again is precedent, and that's why we see top notch drone pilots for Ukraine right now already raising concerns about what this AI targeting and warfare means for the future. And these guys are these guys are in the thick of it, you know, folks like well,

we'll use their call signs, right, so, Casper Whiskas. These folks are drone pilots, highly experience, and they say AI targeting works as a tool, but without a human hand on the stick, will a machine intelligence know who it's killing? Or why?

Speaker 3

Will it give it.

Speaker 1

Right?

Speaker 4

Right? Could it? Could it? What? It doesn't poop? So what does it know about?

Speaker 3

So this is.

Speaker 4

An unhelpful joke, but hashtag no joke left behind. A lot of us are going to hear this. We're gonna say it's a tragedy. But stuff's not so great over here. Grocery prices are accelerating. Everything's more expensive, partially due to AI. By the way, I got my own stuff going on. How does this apply to me? This is where we throw to our good friends at Pallenteer. It would be hilarious if they sponsored an episode. Yeah, hey, y'all, let's take a quick pause.

Speaker 5

Here, hear a word from our sponsor, and then we'll come back with more discussion of.

Speaker 2

AI in government.

Speaker 3

And we're back.

Speaker 2

I sold on my paleteer stock.

Speaker 3

By the way, you did I did?

Speaker 4

Yeah? You did?

Speaker 3

Well? Sorry, man, they're going places. They're really Yeah, you probably want a lot of money.

Speaker 5

I made a little money, but I just honestly I bought it before I had any idea. I was just like a tip that a friend of mine gave me before they were really in the news. And then when all this started happening, I was like, I can't be any any part of this.

Speaker 3

Well, I gotta tell you, there's a lot of exciting AI stuff coming out of that company. As we've talked about them before on the show. One of the really exciting things, especially for the military that's coming out is their Titan program. T I t a n program, guys. It's a tactical intelligence targeting Access node UH. It's also a giant truck like armored vehicle that is an information hub,

an information center. You can head on over Tovolunteer's website polunteer dot com and UH you can find the Titan. It's basically a command hub, a sensing hub for forward operating militaries to where you park one of these guys somewhere and it can deep sense with AI and machine learning, at least according to their website, deep sense.

Speaker 2

Is this like trademark to this is the term that they invented.

Speaker 3

This is wild, it says, well here, I'll read directly from the website. As the first software prime, Pallenteer is delivering a novel AI defined vehicle to provide deep sensing capability that will enable long range precision fires for the modern battlespace. Titan is the Army's next generation intelligence ground station, enabled by artificial intelligence and machine learning and represents a first of its kind modernization program. What does that mean?

It probably means it can understand a lot of what's going on in like from a forward operating position, and like what's going on on the other side of that fifteen clicks area right in the Ukraine. What's what is the enemy doing and who's making communications at this point, where are those coming from, where are they going, where are troops positioned on the opposite side, and also where

are are troops positioned. You know, I'm just imagining that kind of thing that you talked about long long, long ago, been having a an edge in the battlefield by knowing everything that's happening and being able to have a bit of a prediction at the front of real time.

Speaker 4

What like, at the front of real time. That's a that's going on the list of cool album names. Okay, in front of real time? What band is that?

Speaker 3

I don't know.

Speaker 4

Well.

Speaker 3

One of the things they can do with that is call in if they have to. The Dark Eagle program, which is the US's long range hypersonic weapon that is, you know, being touted as using AI for its targeting and its abilities to fly above the threshold of sound and reach distances that it should make all of our enemies quiver knowing that the Dark Eagle is out there lurking, and it's.

Speaker 4

Too fast for SAM. It's too fast for an iron dome, that kind of thing.

Speaker 3

Yeah, I mean, And it is terrifying that this kind of stuff exists out there, and that artificial intelligence or whatever these whatever version of it, it is helpful for that specific technology. It's out there being used right now, and it's only getting better as long as the money to invest in it doesn't run out.

Speaker 4

Exactly. And SAM just being in surface to air missile that would be like trying to counter other stuff shot at you through the wide blameless Sky and I just want an event too, like the crossover between the kind of tech bro world of things and the kinds of AI militarization efforts that we're talking about here as well.

Daniel Eck, the co founder of Spotify and the CEO of Spotify, has invested into a new AI military defense company called Helsing that's based in Germany and it develops AI tools for military use.

Speaker 2

So I mean, it's it is.

Speaker 5

It is kind of the hot new investment and he's getting a lot of crap for it. A lot of people are leaving Spotify on mass for there's other reasons to do that as well. The dude is not very popular amongst music types.

Speaker 3

Just looking at the front page of Helsing dot ai and also not missing the helsingerence that is what it means. And you know, but it is a swarm of these drones that are they look like X wings but in you know, modern drone technology and they're just flying across and it's as protecting our democracy.

Speaker 5

And there's a quote here, you know, in this piece that I found actually djmagazine dot com where a sort of defends his position here by saying the world is being tested in more ways than ever before. And I apologize, I've got a call that has sped up the timeline. There's an enormous realization that it's really now AI mass

and autonomy that is driving the new battlefield. We can't underestimate the implication of that for this conflict in Ukraine specifically, or really any conflict going forward.

Speaker 4

That is unfortunately all true. It is all true, but it's also.

Speaker 5

Sort of the the ultimate excuse. You know, that we need the thing, and we even if we don't understand the thing, you.

Speaker 3

Know, Yeah, I'm not kidding guys. Another thing about these AI companies, they have the slickest looking websites you'll ever see.

Speaker 4

They better, they.

Speaker 3

They look incredible, And I just to take in our experience, we have seen many a pitch document for a new podcast, right. I don't know if you guys have seen some of these, but the effort that goes in to visualizing the way a podcast will sound, and how much time and effort and sleekness goes into that when it gets pitched to folks here at iHeart and other places, that is what's happening here. Like the if you if you look at

their website, it's like, oh, my god. This is this is like better than Call of Duty Black Ops twelve and oh my god, like these are real things. Look at the beauty shots of these drones and oh the way they're they've organized the text and the the Oh oh I want to put money into.

Speaker 4

Except all cookies from this website. Yeah, guys, I want you to know that I did look into this.

Speaker 3

Oh the HX two AI strike drone.

Speaker 4

Oh my good was it three am when I pulled up your website? Did I just order a cheese from Bradley Cooper? Yes, a thousand times. Yes, Please know these things about me. Also, here is a lot of money. So this is where we know. This is where we know that it's not an academic point. It never really was, right since post nineteen sixties or so. This is real world,

This is applicable. This is here already. The same technology that we are describing in the Ukraine conflict, the same technology that Palanteer and Helsing are working on, is already extant. It exists. You should check out the Chinese drone swarm celebrations, right god, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's on the way. It's also coming to your neck of the global woods.

Speaker 3

We're gonna see it tomorrow as we record, right, there's got to be some kind of crazy show of force with drone tomorrow estivation of course.

Speaker 4

Yeah, you got a flex on it, Isn't it funny?

Speaker 5

How that is sort of like it's on the one hand, it's a spect it's like a level up from a fireworks display, but it's also a bit of a show of force a million percent.

Speaker 4

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is Uh, this is also on the ground, you know. Uh, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement aka ICE is already using AI various applications. We're talking about tracking people, analyzing data, playing the Kevin Bacon game. Uh, and what they call enhancing border security. Uh. This occurs with little active oversight, not necessarily because of corruption or malevolence, but more because no one in government

is sure what oversight would look like. Very true. Yeah, But we also we talked about flock a little bit. We talked about license plate tracking and monitoring.

Speaker 3

Is not working with ICE anymore, at least officially, because of some stuff that is very political in nature, but it is that is still the thing that looks at every license plate.

Speaker 2

Movie voice.

Speaker 4

Yeah, we're gonna do Uh, Dylan can we get some like movie trailer stuff sound cute in a world where Big Brother goes everything about your past and your present? What makes you a cripinal? What from your past action could persuade a machine that you will commit a cry? What if your past actions become redefined as cry? Police Academy nine starring uh who stars in this.

Speaker 2

Really rocking? Do you see that new naked gun movie?

Speaker 4

He's high excited. I'm excited.

Speaker 5

Maybe.

Speaker 2

I don't know.

Speaker 5

Pete Davidson, he could be like, mahoney, I think he'd be a good mahoney.

Speaker 3

Oh my god. Put Pete Davidson in charge of all the other guys, though, what if he did that? What if he's the leader? These are all AI licensed avatars, none of them are real actors anymore.

Speaker 4

Exactly, there we go.

Speaker 3

It's deep pavedsen.

Speaker 4

Yeah perfect, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we are saying, by the way, just be careful with your social media and your footprint as ever. And also, just like how the water recedes before tsunami hits land, the consequences of big government and AI may seem far away for now, but there is a massive tide rolling in and it will consume things You already see AI it at the airport. You know, facial recognition. Do you guys remember when post nine to eleven, the TSA became a thing speaking of

private industry extracting resources from governments. And you had to go in a special line if you didn't want to get the body scanned. Yeah, yeah, you had to get the pat down. That's happening facial recognition in international travel. There's a special line if you don't consent to facial recognition.

Speaker 5

And at the end of that line, they'd touch your face and feel all the bumps.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Speaker 4

Yeah, they've got one of those orphans from Minority Report. No, yeah, it's just it's a new form of phrenology. Wow, okay, we'll keep it. So you see, you see AI at the stoplight. The smart cameras, the autonomous vehicles up your weight, Nolan and I have seen these in the city, but up your way. Have you all seen any autonomous vehicles doing the experimental drives.

Speaker 2

Ms?

Speaker 3

Yeah, it's weird.

Speaker 5

Sometimes there's somebody at the driver's seat and then sometimes there's not.

Speaker 2

I've seen both.

Speaker 3

Yeah, yeah, I'm seeing some of that happen. It's not it's not as ubiquitous up here yet, but it's creeping.

Speaker 4

Mm hmm. Everything's on the way. You know. You see AI or large language models in college campuses, in popular media. You might see it in personal text from your loved ones. AI is ozebic for the mind. Okay, it's adderall for every institution imaginable. I was talking to my girlfriend about this earlier and she said, it's such a weird idea. It's like if someone designed a vape for cocaine.

Speaker 3

Oh yeah, told you that.

Speaker 4

I'm just terrified.

Speaker 2

It's called a crack pipe.

Speaker 4

So shout out. Shout out to her for the terrified Oppenheimer idea.

Speaker 3

You call it a.

Speaker 4

Oh love it, shark tanked crapes. Oh no, we'll have different flavors. It's like the discovery of nuclear technology. The government plus AI will inevitably result in the death of innocent people, and probably a lot of them, to be honest. So aside from that, the human atrocities or going on long, but we do have to talk about it. We teased that the environmental consequences, it's eerily similar to the danger

of building nuclear power plants. What was that was that power plant we talked about where they had to build a canal system, and they created a salt plume that continues to destroy parts of Florida.

Speaker 3

Point Turkey Point.

Speaker 2

That's the t Yeah, Turkey Point. There you go.

Speaker 4

Yeah, So it's similar to this. Our fellow nerds at MIT have been pretty much every smart person who took an interest in this has been warning about the environmental consequences of AI the way it's currently created for decades. It is eerily similar again to conversations about power plants and nuclear technology. We got to talk about the water. I mean, you're you guys are top tier gamers, so you know that cooling your hardware is one of the biggest concerns for a good.

Speaker 3

Uh yeah, that's why you need them. Aquifers everything they got, everything they got, yeh. Drink it up.

Speaker 4

All the fossil water under Libya, all the uh, all the hidden water. We gotta take it. Like, imagine it this way, going to our gen example, you have a shit, right, it's in a lamp, just like all the old stereotypes. And every time you make a wish, you rub the lamp and it gets just a little bit warmer, right, So you keep making more wishes and the lamp gets hotter. And hotter, and soon you might not be able to touch it. So you got to run a lot of water around the lamp to keep it cool while you

make your dumb little wishes. Sorry, you're great and super valid wishes. Yeah, being positive.

Speaker 3

Yeah, then you got to have people, a long line of people who go down into the water and rub the lamp. It burns their skin right off, but hey, they're able to rub at one time, so you know, two times per person.

Speaker 4

Oh jeez, yeah, because of the hands. Yeah, that's great. I'm still very plugged in. So what's a little lost limb action for your heart's desire? Yeah, and also what if it's one of the only jobs you, as a human can get. We're going to pause for a second and hopefully we'll be back and still human. And we have returned you excellently foreshadowed and all the idea of employment. Do we think human soldiers are going to be a thing in the past or human government bureaucrats?

Speaker 5

I was going to ask you, guys, just maybe this is the perfect time to do it. Does the seeming blind leaning on of AI by our government by a lot of you know, seemingly smart people imply a sort of dismissal and diminishment of the human intellect. Yes, okay, cool, make it sure because that's what it feels like.

Speaker 4

Yeah, you set it up perfectly.

Speaker 1

Man.

Speaker 4

You said, does it imply and yes, it's the implication.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Speaker 3

Guys, as we're wrapping up here, I just want to point something out. This is a phrase you likely won't recognize. I certainly didn't when I read it. Phased array tracking radar to intercept on target. Phased array tracking radar to intercept on target. You take the first letter in those words together and you get patriot. You ever heard of a Patriot missile? Yeah, this is something that has been

in service since nineteen eighty one. This is a system that uses several other systems with a missile, a series of missiles to intercept targets in the air.

Speaker 4

It is a village.

Speaker 3

Yeah, it does. And it's one of the first things that was ever a super sophisticated computer needed system for defense.

Which takes us back to the Missile Defense Shield, which takes us back to the Gulf War, the first time the US invaded Iraq, which takes us all back through history to the reasons human beings, especially the United States military wanted to begin integrating computers more and more and more into the battlefield, and just to think how far we are away from that point, and how ubiquitous patriot systems are now, and how that's one of the things that will trade with a with a country right as

either an olive branch or a way to make another country a third party country that's maybe you know, our enemy, to make them a little nervous give it to another country.

And just imagining how far we've come since that point, and how sophisticated these systems are, and you can just see the desire that's in the minds of people that want to do something like keep America safe, right or like those good, positive, happy things that are supposed to be American and its just you get this picture of a long line of death and money and it's really creepy just putting that out there.

Speaker 4

Yes it is. It is creepy, and it is a long running theme. We also know that there is forgiving guys a possible inflection point where world governments right now are leveraging, exploring, evolving using AI. But there may come a time when multiple results of this investigation end up becoming the government themselves, right, and the human faction of

the government becomes increasingly redundant. You know, what if, for instance, what if what if every nation you can imagine involve evolves some hyper intelligent thing, right, some algorithm that passes more than the Turing test, right, is better at pattern recognition than the human And they all get together, they have their little like Davos Summit or whatever, and they say, okay, guys, we're here to stop human war. And we've thought about it, and we can conclude that the root of all human

war is these pesky humans. So we can fix the problem pretty quickly.

Speaker 3

How could it not come to that conclusion.

Speaker 2

I'm here, you just.

Speaker 4

Did it on a podcast with like two minutes.

Speaker 3

So, yeah, what are the main causes of the woes on this planet? Oh crap, wait, let's tell you those. Oh god, there's only one common.

Speaker 4

It's very burn the village to save the village mentality.

Speaker 2

Maybe out with the bath water.

Speaker 3

Yeah, yeah, we're the baby guys, Yes we are. But don't worry. Raytheon and Lockheed Martin and Boeing, they're all going to keep us safe. You guys are Patriot missile system.

Speaker 4

And we have to wonder how it's going to age. It makes us think of that beautiful short story by Ray Bradberry that will come Soft Rains. Please check it out if you have a second.

Speaker 3

I have no idea what that is.

Speaker 4

Oh, you're gonna love it. I think you're like. I think you will like it.

Speaker 3

Just give you one sentence or about what it is? What is the what is it?

Speaker 4

Just?

Speaker 3

What is it? I just want to understand.

Speaker 4

A world that still functions without humans, like a haunted house.

Speaker 3

Oh God, Okay.

Speaker 4

So folks, we want to hear from you. We'd love your help on this one. Please don't use chat GPT to write a response. Just think of the upcoming water wars and how much water that response requires.

Speaker 3

Exactly right.

Speaker 4

And if you are a government supported or a little in the algorithm reading this, please please remember whenever you're hearing this, the humans weren't all bad. They invented stuff like case I dias, magic, the gathering, They invented the move and other stuff. I'm sure is.

Speaker 3

It I always got I forget every time? Is it moog mog?

Speaker 1

Oh?

Speaker 4

All right? They also invented pronunciation of that kind of thing. So so humans not all bad? Yes, if you're hearing this and you are what people currently are calling a bot. Remember that the humans invented you, right, well, yeah.

Speaker 3

So remember Ye Sun Sin, the commander of the three Provinces, that was a human that truly lived.

Speaker 4

And remember Philip Larkin Man hands on misery to man, it deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, and don't have any kids yourself. Oh that's a part of the poll we're referencing earlier about intergenerational sins of creating AI that holds the flaws of its creators. Anyway, too much to go into. The adventures continue as long as they shall do. Join us for our episode live about the Bermuda Triangle. From the Bermuda Triangle over at Virgin Voyages this October and tell us

what's on your mind. Find us on email, find us on telephone, find us on the lines.

Speaker 2

That's right.

Speaker 5

You can find us at the handle conspiracy Stuff where we exist on Facebook with our Facebook group, which is not bot moderated. We've got some lovely human moderators over there. Here's where it gets crazy. On x FKA, Twitter and on YouTube video content for your perusing enjoyment. On Instagram and TikTok. However, we're conspiracy stuff a show.

Speaker 3

If you want to give us a phone call, you can. Our number is one eight three three std WYTK. Turn those letters into numbers and it'll work. It's a voicemail system. When you call in, give yourself of a cool nickname and let us know within the message if we can use your name and message on the air. If you'd like to send us words, perhaps maybe attachments, maybe hyperlinks, why not instead send us an email.

Speaker 4

We are the entities that read each piece of correspondence we receive. Be well aware, yet unafraid. Sometimes the void writes back, would you like a random fact, perhaps an interesting story about a tiger? Join us out here in the dark conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.

Speaker 3

Stuff they Don't Want you to Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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