[SPEAKER_00]: You're on team human, conscious intervention in the machine. [SPEAKER_00]: A chance to reclaim our agency and choose if and how we want to participate in the digital landscape. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Douglas Rushkoff, and I'm on team human. [SPEAKER_00]: Well, I finally used AI for the first time, when I have the first time, we're all using AI all the time where AI is using us through our social media feeds, web searches, email solicitations, streaming media recommendations.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're touching a smartphone, you're interacting with AI. [SPEAKER_00]: But I did my first real AI project this week, both as a way to get something done, it's just been too big a lift for too long and as a way of engaging with the technology I've been avoiding for a way too long. [SPEAKER_00]: I think I was motivated in part by a bunch of campaigns saying not to use AI that AI is the enemy. [SPEAKER_00]: It's unethical to make a single prompt.
[SPEAKER_00]: AI will destroy the environment. [SPEAKER_00]: You're taking away someone's job. [SPEAKER_00]: You're feeding the thing that will one day become conscious and kill us all. [SPEAKER_00]: And as the original spokesperson for team human against transhumanists like Ray Kurzweil, who argue we should just pass the evolutionary torch to our robot successors, I felt it was my responsibility to really learn this thing rather than just a pine on its impact.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I admit as an older GenXer. [SPEAKER_00]: I was kind of just hoping I could sit this one out. [SPEAKER_00]: I've learned every new tech since assembly languages and programming memory addresses for hardware control of eight bit systems. [SPEAKER_00]: through basic and foretrend to C++ and HTML and CSS style sheets.
[SPEAKER_00]: I learned databases, social media platform architectures, algorithms, tour networks, and even blockchain from the insight out just in case people came to their senses and chose to use crypto for something better than extraction. [SPEAKER_00]: I learned MIDI, linear editing, nonlinear editing, macromedia director, Maya, Adobe, blah, blah, and every time I learned something new, my wealth of knowledge was obsolesced by the next technology.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like who can keep up with everything? [SPEAKER_00]: I was thankful when they got rid of flash because I never had time to learn it. [SPEAKER_00]: It's not that I'm a programmer, but if I'm gonna speak about these landscapes, their biases and what they may or may not do to humanity, I should know how they work. [SPEAKER_00]: Program or be programmed, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So, I was hanging out with my friend Benjamin Wong, who runs a terrific meta-crisis salon in Brooklyn that I've been attending, and he's just taken a course in vibe coding. [SPEAKER_00]: All right, vibe coding is when people build a whole app or platform or something without any coding knowledge, just an AI partner.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he was jazzed, showing us all these dashboards he's creating to find trends in his communications and passes to scour the web for events he'd be interested in, to monitor climate change and model social networks you name it. [SPEAKER_00]: It was like he caught a bug. [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm thinking, yeah, well, this stuff's cool, but at what cost I've got friends who are now making animated movies about really deep stuff and highly crafted detail.
[SPEAKER_00]: thought and hours going into these creative expressions. [SPEAKER_00]: So we got into the question of whether these cool, potentially useful and socially beneficial programs could be worth the unseen costs of AI, the environmental damage and resource depletion and labor displacement. [SPEAKER_00]: And it was hard to know. [SPEAKER_00]: So we decided to convene a hackathon the next weekend, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: To ask just that question in the back room of a vegan restaurant in the East Village that we're trying to rescue, right? [SPEAKER_00]: Bring a bunch of new customers into the space, while also seeing what a group of mutual aid and social good pioneers, the medic crisis people and our friends [SPEAKER_00]: So, that thing is going to happen like in a week and I'm supposed to be one of the conveners. [SPEAKER_00]: So I figured I should find out something about AI myself.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I have this website of my own sitting on WordPress with a bunch of custom code for its little features, it's little search box and calendar entries and little carousel of latest works of feed for my blog. [SPEAKER_00]: Every time WordPress does a security update, one of those things breaks, and I'm stuck thinking, is it worth the time to fix this one? [SPEAKER_00]: Or do I just make a new site?
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'd hire someone to build a site for me, but I'm spending every spare dollar on producing this show right now. [SPEAKER_00]: So, I could go on one of the four pay-platforms like Wix or whatever, where they actually have AI's assisting you in the building of your website, or I can build it from scratch with the coding module of an LLM-like cloud.
[SPEAKER_00]: Use it as an opportunity to get my hands or even my soul a little dirty, see what the fuss is about before the vibe-coded mutual aid hackathon. [SPEAKER_00]: And to be honest, the first thing I thought was what will people think if they find out my website was coded by AI. [SPEAKER_00]: Will they think I'm a turned coat? [SPEAKER_00]: What about the web design job he just destroyed and so on?
[SPEAKER_00]: To be honest, part of the reason I needed to turn to AI is that I am dealing with a lot of data here. [SPEAKER_00]: A few thousand articles, reviews, interviews, book chapters, videos, podcasts, all in different file types disorganized. [SPEAKER_00]: Archives from previous websites and proprietary formats, it's a curatorial nightmare. [SPEAKER_00]: I would not wish on any of the students that I regularly hired for help. [SPEAKER_00]: as for the environmental destruction?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that's part of what I want to test here. [SPEAKER_00]: I wanted to see just how much money and correspondingly energy it cost to get a job like this done. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm fully aware of the oil, rare earth metals, cobalt, and unseen labor we're leveraging to prompt an AI system. [SPEAKER_00]: but how much are we really taking and what can we create in the process? [SPEAKER_00]: Could the destructive impact of using AI ever be outweighed by the creative output?
[SPEAKER_00]: And how much better or worse is it? [SPEAKER_00]: Then all the other ends justifies the means compromises we make in our choice of a meal, clothes, [SPEAKER_00]: So basically, I'm oversimplified. [SPEAKER_00]: Instead of using a website and asking questions, I installed an AI called Claude into the terminal of my Mac computer.
[SPEAKER_00]: This way, I could have Claude due tasks for me with my files on my own machine and then publish those files to my website on GitHub, which is just a place on the internet where it's really easy to upload files and test things.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, I put a folder on my desktop with all the stuff I wanted on my website, all the articles, all the clips, all the stuff, and I told Claude the basic architecture, what I want on the home page, my books page, the archive of my articles, right, I want the latest team human monologue as an embedded video and so on. [SPEAKER_00]: Cod kept the websites, local files on my computer until I was ready to publish them on the net.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's right there right now at rushcoff.com. [SPEAKER_00]: Responding to my desire for transparency, Cod wanted some of the themes we tried earlier to remain accessible to visitors. [SPEAKER_00]: So there's even a little theme menu where you can see the [SPEAKER_00]: It took about five hours instead of maybe month or two. [SPEAKER_00]: The real achievements are a searchable archive of articles. [SPEAKER_00]: And now it's a totally changeable website.
[SPEAKER_00]: I can go to the website editor on my laptop, paste the link of a talk I'm going to do, and it will create an upcoming event with all the information. [SPEAKER_00]: I could even just say add a new page for team human with an embedded YouTube or let's create a prompt for people to query my entire body of work that includes a meter showing how many kilowatt hours of electricity it took to generate the response.
[SPEAKER_00]: Speaking of which, when I was done, I held my breath and took a look at how much energy it cost to do all that work, how much water, not just building the website, but organizing and categorizing all those thousands of files, giving all I've read and been told about AI's massive energy costs, I figured, [SPEAKER_00]: It would be the equivalent of like a round trip business class flight to Istanbul.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I checked the tokens I've used so far for my entire cloud experience and it's just under $5 worth. [SPEAKER_00]: So, even if endropic is effectively subsidized and getting energy cheaper and hiding certain externalities, right? [SPEAKER_00]: Even if they're only charging me some teeny bit, even if we want to be super pessimistic and say that the company is somehow using four times as much energy as they're paying for. [SPEAKER_00]: We're looking at maybe what?
[SPEAKER_00]: 20 bucks of energy? [SPEAKER_00]: As far as intellectual property, my AI web designer partner was benefiting off the design and user interface strategies of a myriad of human designers as was I and Wakes and Squarespace and everything else. [SPEAKER_00]: It was starting to get hard to take an absolute stance against this tech. [SPEAKER_00]: And there, I'll tell you, people came up with some really good ideas.
[SPEAKER_00]: One person was using AI to do a meta-analysis of intentional communities, to see what the few successful ones had in common, and what were the biggest reasons the great majority of them failed. [SPEAKER_00]: A research project that could take a dozen grad students, years of analysis, and they still may miss the truly relevant variables. [SPEAKER_00]: All right, my favorite project was the simplest.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's an I have I need bulletin board basically like the original Craigslist on digital steroids, right, an Amazon killer where people list what they're really going to give away or provide in service as well as what they need. [SPEAKER_00]: So a kid who needs a bike gets one from the kid who outgrew hers.
[SPEAKER_00]: And because it's built on AI, [SPEAKER_00]: It could be a dynamic database that matches people geographically when it's a thing like a bike, linguistically when it's verbal, or stylistically when it's closed. [SPEAKER_00]: Moreover, because it's being conceived by social activists and instead of a team of hired engineers, it's valuing horizontalism, mutual aid, and trust. [SPEAKER_00]: Instead of expedience, profitability or scale.
[SPEAKER_00]: At worst, they get a working prototype for something they can bring to a nonprofit who can bring on real engineers to build the more durable version. [SPEAKER_00]: They're working prototype didn't even cost five bucks at tokens. [SPEAKER_00]: If their vision holds, more and more people start doing the peer-to-peer economy we imagine in the 1990s, before Airbnb and Uber replaced what we used to call couch surfing and ride-sharing.
[SPEAKER_00]: The excitement in that room, the back room of my favorite vegan restaurant, which deserves a plug, Caravan of Dreams on East Sixth Street in New York City, the excitement in that room, [SPEAKER_00]: Remind it me of the early cyberpunk infused internet era. [SPEAKER_00]: Are we in that same place? [SPEAKER_00]: And can we learn from our earlier mistakes? [SPEAKER_00]: Is it foolish to think we can use the master's tools to take down the master's house?
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to believe. [SPEAKER_00]: Are we in another moment of great potential? [SPEAKER_00]: Or is this another momentary mirage in the endless march of capital through the incarnations of exploitative technology? [SPEAKER_00]: Is it already too late? [SPEAKER_00]: Is this just another end's justifies the means rationalization? [SPEAKER_00]: Can we beat them at their own game by bringing our best and brightest to the four?
[SPEAKER_00]: Or is this technology already been monopolized by those who mean to colonize our last bits of attention and coherence? [SPEAKER_00]: Can we decolonize the eschaton? [SPEAKER_00]: because we're working against some powerful countervailing forces using the same technologies. [SPEAKER_00]: I don't just mean the obvious players like Elon Musk or Sam Altman, but tick billionaires who've been working behind the scenes for decades.
[SPEAKER_00]: The scariest one to me is Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle. [SPEAKER_00]: Oracle's first customer was the CIA. [SPEAKER_00]: The company is named after a CIA database project from 1977. [SPEAKER_00]: Between 2014 and 2024, Oracle acquired companies like BlueKy, which does browsing tracking, [SPEAKER_00]: data logic, which links online behavior to real world purchases, and add this, which does device fingerprinting, and emerge them all into the Oracle data cloud.
[SPEAKER_00]: So by 2016, Larry Ellison said that Oracle had data on 5 billion consumers. [SPEAKER_00]: What's he doing? [SPEAKER_00]: Right? [SPEAKER_00]: Because there's more.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the U.S. [SPEAKER_00]: Projects Stargate, Larry Ellison's joint venture with Open AI and Softbank, funded by all sorts of sovereign wealth funds and announced by President Trump in 2025 at the White House, it was billed as a $500 billion A.I. [SPEAKER_00]: infrastructure project, essentially a massive build out of data centers to power next generation AI. [SPEAKER_00]: and Ellison mostly says it's a health care database to prevent or cure cancer.
[SPEAKER_00]: But Ellison's also publicly spoken about AI powered surveillance. [SPEAKER_00]: He told investors in 2024 that citizens would be on their best behavior because of constant recording and reporting. [SPEAKER_00]: Ellison's AI would act as, and this is another quote, it would act as an ever-present supervisor. [SPEAKER_00]: analyzing every police, body cam, and doorbell camera, nations would unify all citizen data, including genomic data into a single AI accessible database.
[SPEAKER_00]: just a couple of weeks ago, Oracle published a blog post, announcing that the US government authorized it to run generative AI on federal government data, including Medicare records and military systems at the highest civilian and DOD security clearance levels. [SPEAKER_00]: Are we contributing to these efforts when we work or play with AI, pay for pro accounts or just even watch Ellison's Paramount Media channels or Oracle own TikTok?
[SPEAKER_00]: Does building on AI platforms work against even the best intentions of the projects we build? [SPEAKER_00]: Not to mention the untold amounts of human labor and energy and water being extracted under [SPEAKER_00]: I really, I honestly don't know. [SPEAKER_00]: And Thropek, the company behind Claude, they're supposed to be the good guys. [SPEAKER_00]: Dedicated to human-centered AI and strict guardrails against all this nastiness.
[SPEAKER_00]: And while they're putting up a pretty good fight against Trump's efforts to commandier all AI technology for his crackdown on dissent and autonomous weapons, [SPEAKER_00]: they themselves admitted they've had to rescind their initial promise not to release AI models if they can't guarantee proper risk mitigations in advance. [SPEAKER_00]: Now on the one hand, I think it's a bit more honest.
[SPEAKER_00]: I ain't [SPEAKER_00]: who can guarantee anything about a technology like AI, which has emerging properties and behaviors, no one can really predict. [SPEAKER_00]: If they spend time and energy on guardrails that may not even work, they'll be outpaste by all the companies that don't even give a shit about such things.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if they don't, then is it a safe place to build the pro-human, pro-social applications, my friends and I are conjuring together [SPEAKER_00]: I like to think there was a refusal to become part of the U.S. government's militarization and surveillance apparatus is more important and a better place to draw their red line. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm personally less afraid of a rogue AI than I am a rogue president or a dozen rogue tech billionaires.
[SPEAKER_00]: As I see it, the object of the game is to weigh the positive potentials of these technologies against their extractive and sociopathic ones. [SPEAKER_00]: To treat them like any other technology with dangerous downsides. [SPEAKER_00]: Is this car trip worth the gas, the pollution, the oil wars? [SPEAKER_00]: Is this YouTube worth [SPEAKER_00]: Can we lean into the liberating pro-human capabilities of these technologies before they become unrecognisably incapacitating?
[SPEAKER_00]: In a lot of ways, this feels like the internet in 1994, before it became AOL and then Facebook, when it was driven by a counterculture, looking to expand the collective human imagination, or the blockchain, when it was characterized more by occupied Wall Street's drive toward mutual aid than the investor's fixation with token speculation. [SPEAKER_00]: Could this moment be different? [SPEAKER_00]: Did we learn our lessons?
[SPEAKER_00]: Instead of using AI to make cheap, soulless, replicas of Hollywood movies and putting creatives out of work, might the real opportunity here be to build platform cooperatives and community created worker-owned alternatives to Uber and Amazon? [SPEAKER_00]: You tell me. [SPEAKER_00]: Let's decide this together. [SPEAKER_00]: Use the comments to let me know. [SPEAKER_00]: Have you used AI? [SPEAKER_00]: Was it worth it?
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you think we can use these technologies to beat those who would control us at their own game? [SPEAKER_00]: Can we use them to help build widespread networks of sharing and mutual aid? [SPEAKER_00]: Is the true light-eyed position still okay? [SPEAKER_00]: That we're not against [SPEAKER_00]: Could we use AI to move toward an increasingly jobless society with universal basic income and optimized for leisure? [SPEAKER_00]: Or should we turn the other way?
[SPEAKER_00]: Refuse its shortcuts and its ability to do pattern recognition on a scale beyond anything we've known before. [SPEAKER_00]: the negativity surrounding AI today is justified. [SPEAKER_00]: But it may be too early to write AI's epitaph. [SPEAKER_00]: Can we use it to reinvent the virtual infrastructure for good? [SPEAKER_00]: Even if it starts out small, anything that actually works can be modeled, template and shared, is this our moment? [SPEAKER_00]: Or is it another mirage?
[SPEAKER_00]: Am I seeing something here? [SPEAKER_00]: Or am I just high on my own supply? [SPEAKER_00]: You tell me. [SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for being on team human. [SPEAKER_00]: This is a listener supported project. [SPEAKER_00]: You can participate, get ad free versions of the show, access to the community and a lot more by going to patreon.com slash team human.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're not in a position or inclined to do that, please support us by subscribing, liking, posting a review, sharing with friends or clicking on like or thumbs up or heart or whatever it is down there that this platform offers. [SPEAKER_00]: I'm glad you're here. [SPEAKER_00]: I appreciate your attention and no deep down we can do this if we do it together. [SPEAKER_00]: The team human is produced by Joshua Chaplin, and edited by Luke Robert Mason.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Douglas Rushcoff, and you've been on team human, our last best hope for Peeps.