I'll get a team. It's Harps, It's it's Jumbo, It's Tiffany and Cook, It's David, Bryan, Kevin, Patrick, Gillespie, it's the project that's us. We should call it the US projective.
Do you always say the same seventy eight middle names for Gillespow or they did?
I think they're mostly the same, you know, even always makes it Patrick, always a Patrick.
Yeah, you know, Well, I don't know. I don't know what it actually is, but I feel like Tiffany and Cook, Craig, Anthony, Harpa. We have you actually told me? You probably told me once before you have one?
Oh? No, I do you do have a middle name. It's very embarrassing.
It's Andrew, I say Andrew. It starts with a vowel.
Was that embarrassing because of the word it spells.
Dang Wow, that's a nice acronym and can I it's what appropriate? I mean, you are a bit of a dag.
Yeah, that's true, that's true.
That's okay. My mum uses that term, and usually dag. It's quite a it's quite a warm term. It's like someone's a bit funny or a bit.
It wasn't so warm when I was growing up though, you know, but so I didn't make a big thing of it.
At least you didn't get called jumbo for hey. I was speaking of school, speaking of those tender years that molded and shaped and informed the fucking amazing grown ups that the three of us have become. So they've been talking about putting a limit on kids accessing social media, which I think you wrote somewhere is like pretty much you didn't say this, but this is kind of what you said. This is how I interpret it. You're like, yeah,
a great idea. How do you enforce that? So the idea they've been talking about it on the news down here a little bit recently. I don't know about it, QLD, but the idea of limiting teenagers or stopping teenagers from accessing certain programs or apps or whatever until they're sixteen. What are your thoughts on that? Is it possible? Is it a ridict? Like? It sounds like a good idea maybe, but impossible to as you said, enforce.
Well, I mean, they're doing such a good job of stopping teenagers accessing porn that I'm sure it'll be really really easy for them to get them to stop accessing social media. You know, the reality is this difficult, if not impossible, to do any kind of enforcement. And I know it sounds good to a politician to stand up and bang on about doing it and people say, oh, yes, that's a good idea. I think it's more informative that they feel the need to do it than whether or
not it's actually doable. The fact that we are now having a public conversation about social media like we are talking of cigarettes, to me is a positive step forward because there's not a lot of difference between the two in the senses that matter, meaning the problem with social media and not just social media by the way. I mean.
That's a problem I have with this chat about social media is it seems like that's the only thing we've got to worry about, and don't worry too much about the online gambling, the pawn the online gaming, all those things. Let's not make a fuss about that. Let's criticize Facebook and Instagram. But it's a start. It's at least recognizing that there's something that we have to be concerned about, and if nothing else, people might ask themselves, why do
they want to ban something like that? And then they might ask the next question and find out, well, because this stuff is designed to addict your children, and once they are addicted to that, then they are much more
easily addicted to everything else. And we can already see that transition happening in schools where kids get hooked, get the dopamine circuitry fired up by software in the form of social media or gaming or gambling, and then easily transitioned to a substance addiction through vaping, which is then easily transferred to an even harder substance addiction, ultimately to something like cocaine.
I don't understand technology the way that you do. And you're I think designed apps, and you're a programmer and you can write code and you can do those things that to me are just concepts, right. But lately I've been hearing some of the shows that I listened to where they've had what seemed to be like people who are at the cold face of AI, some of them who have jumped out of AI with great concern, like literally.
Saying that that artificial intelligence could pretty much bring about the destruction of mankind if it evolves to a certain point where it is so intelligent, like he was telling the guy that I was listening to was telling a story about how this machine was trying to or AI was trying to get through this into this program or into this I don't know whatever it was, but you know how they give you like a blurred image with letters and you need to need to go, oh that's a G and a six and a one for S,
but it's not written clearly, but you can read it and then type in that code and that opens that up. So this, this computer or this AI was communicating with a person.
The person didn't know what's it called the Turing testy tries to identify whether or not if a computer can trick a human, but it was. It was communicating with this person and said, can you I can't read this clearly? Could you you know? Help? And the human said as long as you're not as long as you're not a bot, L O L. And the AI said, oh, no, definitely not lol. I have I'm vision impaired, right, So it
hadn't been trained to do this. It figured this out and it told this real person that it was vision impaired. Then the person apologized and gave them the code, and it did that all by itself and I'm like, is this and they reckon its potential now is absolutely nothing compared to what it will be in as little as one or two years.
Do we need to worry, Yes, and yes we do need to worry. No, it won't matter because as soon as it hits on what's called artificial general intelligence, which is essentially human intelligence or more, the rate of growth in itself will be so exponential that it will all be over before we even realize it started. So whatever they will do to us or will be over before we even know it started. So it's a disturbing projection.
And the really disturbing part about it is that not only is no one trying to stop it, but there are people desperately spending billions trying to make it happen so that they are the first to have it happen because they're suffering under the delusion that they can control it. And I think think that's a really difficult prediction to make. It's like predicting how will an alien look or think,
presuming there is such a thing. And yes, you can wheel out all the things from the nineteen fifties of funny little men with very big eyes and all that sort of thing. But the chances that an alien actually looks anything like that are so remote as to be unbelievable, you know. And the chances that we will have any understanding of what an AI would consider valuable or an
AGI would consider valuable even more remote. So the difficulty with this is that we are in an arms race to create this thing, and there are people in China working just as hard as the people in the States and in Russia and everywhere else to create this thing, and the technology is getting better by the second, and at some point they just might crack it. And I think there's a very good chance that the second after that there'll be no one left to know.
I feel like we're sprinting towards the edge of a cliff.
Yeah, And that's the feeling I have too. It's and I'm sorry to be such a down of for your listeners, but but that's the reality of what of the path we're on. Once an AI is sentient, it can create itself, and it can create itself at unbelievable speed, So there's no limits, you know. The speed of light is the limit, I guess. So it's it's naive to believe that all that's going to result in something good for us. You know, the chances of that are very remote.
Do you think that, Like when you say sentient, let me just clarify, I might get this wrong, but you mean that it will be able to think for itself essentially, right, Yeah, so the ays that we ranson consciousness. Yeah, so the ais that we're used to interacting with day to day, now, even the really really good ones are just really good simulations of humans. And yes, and yes they're they're they're the kind of simulation that could easily fool you easily.
I mean, one of my sons was is a CODA and I was mucking around with some of the toolkits with it, and he built a thing that he called me, And I wasn't certain it was a human I was speaking to. So I asked it, are you and AI? And it said no, I'm.
Not, And and then I still wasn't certain, so I asked it its name, a little bit of its backstory, its history, how did it know my son? All that sort of thing, And I still couldn't be absolutely certain that I wasn't talking to You know that I was. I wouldn't have been able to put money on am I talking to a human or am I talking to
something else? And that was just messing around with publicly available API kits, the stuff that you know, defense forces and governments have access to many times more powerful than that. And yeah, the the implications for us. I don't think there's such a thing as a sentient AI at the moment, because I, as I said, I think it would be over if there was. But I think there's a lot of people trying very hard to make it.
So do you think that like what is them and this is you and me just velosiphizing and waxing lyrical in the middle of a potential existential crisis? What do you look? It's hey, everyone, just have a couple mile o. It's just the end of the humanity. Look, we've had a good crack for three hundred thousand years or maybe millions, depending on which.
Three hundred thousands probably a reasonable approximication approximation of our species age, which is nothing, yeah, zero in terms of the universe.
In terms of the age of the Earth. We've been around since Tuesday, Yeah, not.
Even that, we've been around since about a minute ago.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So obviously these people who are you know, working exponentially to you know, expedite this reality, to create this level of consciousness, this artificial general intelligence, that what is their motive? Their motive is just money and power. I suppose winning is their motive. Yeah, be the one that controls it. They everyone doing this is firmly of the belief that if they create it, they will control it,
and then they will own the world. How ironic, how ironic that they are creating something that is destructive potentially like irony.
They would say, oh no, no, we're smart enough to make sure that it's not. I think that's a really big call. And to what end in the in the sense that once you can create something that thinks like a human, is sentient, but can do it ten biginion times faster, what do you need humans for?
Yes? Yes, And like when you think, okay without without computers for the most part, like money is almost a done deal. Like cash is almost a done deal. Like having a car that isn't essentially a computer on wheels, well that's pretty much a foregone conclusion. Now without computers, we're not having this conversation without you know, all of like pretty much unless you're living in the middle of nowhere, and you can hunt and feed yourself, and you know,
medicines depend on technology media, so everything. It's like we've actually built a prison, a technological prison for ourselves that we can't really get out of.
Yeah, but I think this is on a whole different plane. This is if you think about, say, the replacement of human labor by robotics. So the average auto worker from the nineteen fifties would not recognize a modern car factory, would not recognize what goes on in a Tesla factory. You know, there's almost all the labors performed by robots, and there's a couple of humans there to sort of make sure the robots keep running, you know, and to clean them. So their job, the job of the humans
is to clean the robots. And what they done is replace, you know, in a given factory, tens or even hundreds of thousands of human humans performing labor with robots. And we've accepted that because it's largely hidden from view. And what's happened is that humans have transitioned more towards service and knowledge based jobs, you know, so you know, caring for other humans and healthcare and all that sort of thing,
and knowledge based jobs. The trouble is that even with AIS it currently stands so just the relatively primitive tools that are now. They're the ones that you're talking about at the start, which do a pretty good job of imitating human interaction to the point where most humans couldn't tell the difference. That kind of AI is going to be the robotics of the modern knowledge worker. So it's the kind of thing that replaces anyone who is producing
any kind of content. It'll start with the lowest level of content, you know, things like journalists, but it'll move its way upty pretty quickly through the ranks of anyone producing knowledge work. And what will happen is the same thing that happened in auto factories, is that thousands of humans will be replaced by one or two humans using those tools to produce more than those thousands of humans did before. And the big question is what happens to
the thousands of humans? You know, do they become unemployed? What happens to them? What happens to a society where everybody is suddenly unemployed? And we are going to have to face those questions pretty a lot sooner than we might think. We're going to have to and I suspect we're going to have to come up with a new economic model to cope with that, even without an artificial
general and intelligence. So the model we've got has only really been around since the Industrial Revolution, when factories first started coming on the scenes. We're going to have to think about more of a rather than a labor based model where you put in the hours and you get paid, more of a dividend based model, which is, you're a citizen of this country, this country produces x amount of GDP, you're entitled to a dividend.
Mm hmmm, yes, what is that called? What is that called? Where everyone gets what's that you know, where everyone gets just paid?
Yes? Yeah, so, uh yeah, you've done it to me, You've infected me. I've forgotten it too.
Don't blame right, But what is it called tips?
What dominald It's.
Called UBI UBI so, which means universal university income, Universal basics basic income. Yeah, so where every man, woman and child has just given an amount which is sufficient for them to live and if they choose to work they can doesn't affect whether they get that, and if they don't, they don't then.
And to me, that sounds like a pretty sensible solution in that. Then people say, oh, it'll kill entrepreneurialism. Well not one really. If you're the kind of person that wants to invent something and run with an idea, all it means is that your rent and your food are going to be paid for and you can go out
and see if you can make some more money. If you're the kind of person who'd rather just go down and help with the touch shop, knowing that everything's taken care of, then great, because we've lost all those volunteers and that would bring them back into the economy. Now, you know, old world economists pooh pooh that and say no, people should be laboring, you know, eight hours a day
or else. You know, what's the point. But really we're getting to a point were robotics and AI where very very soon there'll be such massive unemployment that we have to come up with a different model.
Yes, yes, universal basic income, that's it.
Yeah.
And the thing is, it's like it's nice to I don't know, romanticize the past and all of that and to be to you know, and I do worry about the idea of people who are disincentivized from working and all of that. I worry about that. But as you said, I think the people who want to go and create and be entrepreneurial and build a business, they can still
do that. And I wonder I guess the people who would have done it done that anyway in our current operating system will probably do that if something new comes into place. But the very yeah, the practical reality is that there are going to be so many jobs that are made redundant with the ever advancing and evolving.
We kind of did a test case on this in Australia, at least during COVID, because in COVID, essentially that happened all of a sudden. Yes, a lot of people were out of work, very very suddenly, and the government solved that by essentially doubling all of the unemployment and social
security benefits. And the interesting thing, and this will be studied for a while, I'm sure, the interesting thing about is what that did to things like crime rates and anxiety and depression and things like that that we accept as just a natural part of society. But they all took a massive dive, massive dive during that time. So when you remove stress from people's lives, which is what you introduce when you ask them to live on less
than they can on. Then suddenly they get to not be anxious, not be depressed, and not be in a state where their brain loses impulse control and crime becomes either necessary or involuntary.
M hm.
Did you say that anxiety and depression dropped.
Yes, during during COVID, anxiety and depression dropped, so during the but after it it's gone through the roof.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm taking a little bit of a left turn. But interestingly, we did an episode a week or so ago with Patrick, who's our other regular who does kind of tech stuff as well. He's not as far down the AI rabbit hole and as you are, but he got a bit of my voice and this is like a a simpler version of what your son did to you. But anyway, he said to me. We started the show and he said, how come you
never let me intro? And I went, all right, well, off you go, and then he played this thing of me which he deep faked me or whatever, and it's basically me telling the world I'm a fuck with and he's brilliant, and you know, it was just it was about one minute of me shirting myself in the foot in him. But honestly, it.
Was wait till he does it with video and you're in a porno without realizing it.
Ock hell, I mean yeah, yeah, And it was pretty much indistinguishable except we knew, you know that. I had to interrupt. I'm like, hey, everyone, this isn't me because it sounded so real. And I said, how much, like, I don't know how much of my voice did you need to get to create that? He said, like about a thirty second grab of your voice, And he said it took me like five minutes, three minutes to make
the whole kind of minute of Yeah. I'm like, that's and it's still pretty rudimentary at the moment for what it's going to be.
Yeah, although they're getting very good now, some of the voice models, you know, when you're talking to them, they really make you doubt it because they do things like pause like that they you know, and they are and they have an intake of breath, so even though they're not breathing, so it starts to sound the way human
would sound. And because of all those little signs, if you're listening to them, you're losing a lot of the cues that would normally lead you to suspect I'm talking to a robot here, you know, because and they're getting close to that with video. To me, video is still detectable if you look very very closely and just watch for little tells. But it is close. It is really close.
And it is almost to the point where if you see video of a politician on the television saying something, are you absolutely certain that that is a real person doing that? At the moment, you'd say, I am absolutely certain. I'm sure no one is getting inside the machine here and doing that. But we are very close to the point where where you won't be able to tell. And I noticed that there was talk yesterday on the news. I can't remember I heard it talking the our government
is talking about outlawing deep fake videos. So, rather like where we started this, where they're talking about outlawing access to social media for under sixteen year olds, if they're getting to the point where they have to talk about outlawing deep fake videos, then there's some stuff going on out there that probably you are not encounter. I see TIFFs nodding. She's probably continuously deleting all the deep fake videos of her.
I think it's terrifying.
Yeah, well, it's especially terrifying for a woman because they you know, these things are often used for explicit, violent sexual content, and that's the kind that's why they're worried about them. So, you know, because because you can train one of these models with someone's photo, So all you need is a photo of someone fully clothed and and show it to one of these models and create whatever you like from it.
Yeah. Yeah, well I noticed more and more, Like I watch on instag I follow like lots of bike stuff and car stuff, and health and fitness stuff and more and more of the you know, it's not like fifty percent, but I would say ten percent of the images or videos that come onto my thing. Now I'm like, like this thing. I don't know why this thing came up this morning of and it said something like the most beautiful birds in the world, right, because I think I have lots of dog videos come up and a few
other animal videos. I'm like, these are the most I'm like looking at these birds and they it did not at all look like computer generated or it just looked like these incredible birds in nature. And then I'm like, where the what kind of birds are these? And I went into the thing, and then someone said this is this is AI, and then a whole bunch of people who were younger and smarter than me went, yeah, these are not photos. This is AI. I absolutely could not
tell at all that they weren't photos. And then I saw this thing the other day of a guy, a motorcyclist that I you know, a GP rider, moto GP rider, and he's doing this thing and it was this incredible thing. I don't know if you saw this tip because you follow motorbikes uff as well, but he had his knee and his elbow on the ground and he just missed this.
It was like the most unbelievable writing ever and nothing about it looked like it was CGI or computer generated or whatever, and it was I'm like, I don't know now. I like, already I don't know with some of the videos what is real. And when I see something that's mind blowing, I have to go into the comments because somebody else will say, no, this is not real.
You know, yeah, but you can't be certain. I mean I see that. I think Google and released their video creation tool today or yesterday, where you just give it a prompt, you say what you want a video of and you know. So this is the cleaner side of deep fakes. But you can handle a photograph and you can say, give, make this photograph move. So one of the examples that god is that there's a girl holding
a puppy or something. It's just a photograph, and make a move and she turns and looks away, and the puppy starts moving and it all looks absolutely cinemagraphically real.
What what's that called?
Oh, it's it's the Google Google competitor for Sora, which is the chat ept open ai one. So Sora is its name, So Ora, but what was the Google one called? I can't remember. Tiff will find it in an instant.
So Tiff, you find that if you couldn't get back to us, so could you just like, I just want to come full circle and we'll finish soon. But so, we have a lot of listeners who are not your typical podcast listeners. So of course we have people in their twenties and all of that, but we probably have a disproportionate number of listeners who are somewhere in the forty to sixty range, which is a little bit atypical for podcasts. Just remind I'm really asking this for myself.
Everyone just remind our listeners what artificial jar?
Sorry, I just found the name by the way beat you Tiff only just vo rio Yeah, totally be the EO.
Deep mind.
See while you were talking, Craig, neither Tiff or I were listening to your word you was.
I was telling everybody what to fuck?
What you are?
Oh?
Good, good cook?
Cood so so vo is that? I'll come back to my question. But is that an app that we buy or is that a program that we can just?
What is it? It's just a website. You can go to Google. I think it's Google Labs. Tift's probably got the detail there, so you can go and try it out.
I'm signing up as we speak.
There we go Tifts producing videos of you.
Craig.
Watch I want to put a photo of Harps in there, and I'm going to say, put this person in a red dress and make them dance like an exotic belly dancer.
So now if I did that to you, I'd get a thousand hate emails. You're not allowed to do that. You're not allow to sexualize me.
It's top sexualizing blue dress.
Just tell everyone what AGI is again, that's.
My artificial general intelligence.
And what does that mean though?
That means well, human intelligence, basically human like intelligence, where it's it's making its own adventure. It's not reacting to what you tell it to do. It's figuring out what to do on its own and deciding, oh, this is the way I want to go with this, or this is the way I want to go with this. I don't know if you've played with some of the more advanced day eyes, but say something like Google Gemini, which
is their latest, really really good one. You can say to it, oh, look, I want to write a science fiction book. Give me a narrative arc that matches the greatest narrative arcs in history, and it'll generate the plot outline for you in about a second. And then you can say to it, oh yeah, now, general, now give me the first chapter and it'll just start writing. And then you just keep going. And while you've got a book and it's beautifully written. The plot structure is perfect,
the narrative structure is perfect. You know, you can tell it to be politically correct with its characterizations, etc. Depending what audience you want. But all of that is doing it. I'm having to do the thinking. I'm having to do the driving. I'm having to think about what I want it to do, and now it does it almost magically and very very quickly, But it's still me doing the thinking.
Whereas if you imagine an Agi would just decide, oh, I think I will write the greatest science fiction novel ever and just start doing it, and then you know, within one second, it's probably published it on Amazon, it's probably got fifty thousand reviews, it's probably pushing it out through the distribution networks and all of that because it felt like doing it, because it decided to do it, not because anyone told it to do it.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I was sitting in the cafe this morning bucking around with chat GPT or GTB four or whatever it's called. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and I write this. I wrote right near piece exploring this question, is the
mind a real thing? Or is it just a construct created by humans to explain cognition, consciousness and awareness that arises from the brain, or maybe you have another theory and literally twenty sex I won't read the thing if you want to see everyone on my Facebook, but it wrote this fucking pretty amazing kind of exploratory on that question. In it was probably finished in fifteen seconds twenty seconds. Yep,
I'm like this shit. If I had written what it cranked out, probably I couldn't have written it, to be honest, Maybe I'm not sure, but it would have taken me half a day.
I would have taken it probably more than that. It's yeah, the thing that's incredible to me. I mean, I use it in a way that I suspect few people do. I feel like starting a club called the Dead Authors Society, because I have authors that I like to read, but they're not producing anything more because they're dead. And you can say to an AI, give it a sample piece of writing about anything, and say, rewrite this in the style of whatever author it is that you like, and
off it'll go. And then, as you say a few seconds later, there you've got the piece rewritten in the style you like. But it can do more than that. You can say, you know so. For example, one of my favorite authors is AA Gil, who writes blistering, sarcastic critiques of restaurants when he was alive. He's now dead, but I really enjoyed reading them because they're so hilarious.
The metaphors he will come up with just incredible, And because I still like reading him, I'll often pick a restaurant or a film or something and just ask it to write a review in the style of AA Gill, and three or four seconds later, there it is, and I get to read it as if he's still alive writing reviews.
So no Hunter s Thompson request in there.
For you, No, no, no, But anyone could do it for any style like there was. I was interesting. My daughters were watching Bridgeton the latest something or others come out about it. I can't stand the stuff myself, but there's a very there's a certain style to the way the narration is done in that. And I was working on a piece and I just dropped the piece into an AI and said, rewrite in the style of the Bridgeton narrator. And it did it perfectly, like just mind
blowingly perfectly. You know it could it could have been part of the script.
What did you use for that?
Just Gemini? The Google Gemini, the the Google competitor. I find it a little bit more precise than the Chat one. So it so I pay.
I think I paid twenty bucks a month or something. So if I want Google Gemini, I need to buy that as well.
It has a it is it does cost. But if you use Google Storage, which I do, I think it's included in in like, because I pay a fair bit for Google Storage because I like to have the automatic backups, so it's included in whatever I'm paying there for that.
Yeah. Yeah, So as we wind up, so a g I is not, it's not. It's not a matter of if it will eventuate, but when am I right?
Yeah? And you know, for for readers who are curious to read more, and I'll send you a link to this so Tiff doesn't have to look too hard, although you'll find it before I even finish. There's a blog called there's a blog called weight but Why, And it's written by a really interesting bloke who has He just does these extremely long form thought pieces on you know, how things work, essentially, and one of the ones he's
done is on artificial general intelligence. And he did it years and years ago, before we had all this AI stuff. I think he wrote it maybe ten years ago. But he takes it to the logical conclusion about what that would look like and what it would do, and it's it's a riveting piece to read. If you've got the patience because it's lengthy, but it's worth a read.
Wait, but why I've googled it and it's a store women's needs plus.
No, I feel you may have done something wrong, mare Craig. Let me just see you.
Scroll down because yeah, well it's the same website. I think there's two lists.
It's actually the first here. I'll drop it in the chat for you, the exact piece here it is. I'll put the link in the chat.
Wow, everyone, you're hearing the bloody inside here. There you go, all right, thank you? Oh hang on, I'm going to click on that. Oh there it.
Is twenty fifteen. He wrote it, so nine years ago.
He was a vision. Sorry ahead of his time. We appreciate you. Will say goodbye Affair, but for the mini thanks
Gillespo absolute pleasure as always, Thanks Tiff, Thanks kids,