Don't Worry About AI Apocalypse - Cory Doctorow

0:00When Donald Trump gets into trouble passing a partially digested big Mac lubricated with nothing but elderly mucus and a diet coke and heals over like Elvis. The person who replaces him, J.D. Vance, is not going to be better at keeping the more maniacal elements of his coalition in line. He is going to be worse. He had died mountain dew yesterday and wanted to answer that race. But it's good. I love you guys. Zero race. Oh, that man. Yeah, that man is a charisma. Like that. He's got no buttons, so he'll just have to go full-fash. Yeah, no, he's not just full-fash, but incoherent full-fash. He won't even get Hugo Boss to make cool uniforms. The origin of antitrust law is the grain drop rising in the prairies from all the farmers who were furious that the rail companies were absorbing 100% minus one penny of the surplus associated with getting grain to market.

1:14They started fucking Luigi Mangione in railroad barons. This is how John Sherman got his law through the Sherman Act because the grainders were behind him and they were like, we're going to lose control of the political situation if we don't do something about railmen, please. But you're not as fascinated about that. Manjione is rarely ever spoken about as a political actor. He's kind of spoken about a lone mental kid. But what he did was terrorism. That's political violence, violence and service of a political ent. Sure. Right. And like, it's at the... I was having a conversation with somebody the other day. It was like, OK, let's say unplugging could happen. I know we've just kind of just gone straight in. But let's say unplugging happens in the future. And people are tearing down data centers because they're losing their jobs. And the economy is fucked because the bubbles burst. And the last three drops of water that aren't polluted by human feces in the United Kingdom have now been used to cool a data center. Sure. Sure. And it's happening in their neighborhood. And these people are going there and they're going, I'm going to fucking tear that thing down. And if the security guard stands in my way, I'm going to be violent to him too.

2:15And let's hope actually this is a visit with the local MP or whatever. That would be terrorism. That's political violence and service of a political end. And so is Manjione. So when Manjione kills a United health care... Yeah, of course. ...about relating to the use of AI in there. But this is what he says. I'm not saying this is all allegedly as well. They've been in the case. Has been concluded yet. No, no, no. He's... He played guilty. Okay. I can say it. So I mean, his argument was that they were using the AI to like fast track, basically rejections of people's rights. They were automating the awaited cheat on their own procedures to deny people care and kill people. That's not even reverse-centred though. Because they're not even checking the truth. No, no, no, no. That's accountability, thanks. Yeah. I guess one of the interesting things around that though after the kind of violent act of it all is... People then apply their own reading on the act anyway. So there's its own kind of political context that exists within, which is broadly applicable to almost any context you want it to be.

3:19And the accountability is such of the act, but not of the kind of precursory events that... Sure. ...and they would be acting on it. But also when your manifesto is three words written on shell casings, it leaves a lot of room for interpretation. Yeah, that's it. People have their own views about the unibomber, but it's not a mystery what motivated them. That guy was a wordy motherfucker. So, you know, like... In the time the full elements... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Background, he did it all by hand. So it's not like we... it's not like it's a mystery. Like those people really crisply articulated what they were out there for. So I mean... I mean, in my... I don't think that it's a wildly heterodox position to say that mangy on his political actor and then that was an act of terrorism. I actually think some of his critics say so too. Certainly, you know, in America, calling someone a terrorist just like here gives you access to fast track on justice and the justice system. Well, thanks a lot. Much, much longer sentences, much harsher treatment in prison, you know, gets you sent to a supermax, all that other stuff.

4:22So I don't think... I don't think is the people who are angry at him were shy about calling them a terrorist either. Well, I think if you could make a comparison to other forms of terrorism, right? Like if a far right terrorist does something, there is a significant amount of media time and space. It invested in investigating the ideology and talking about the ideological roots, the reasons that this person's profusely... I guess... Yeah, I mean, in the sense that everyone's looking for an excuse. But, you know, the mass thugs this week were not... Yeah, there was no... Where is that... There's not a lot of information to that. This came after the port of Dover had been brought to a standstill on Saturday, masked demonstrators blocked traffic in and out of the port. Yeah, they're just like... they're just like boys being lads, right? I mean... I was all mostly would not be impressed with Daddy Toppo. You're not going to think. I'm going to come on. How in short, bloody... I don't know. He's not going to the literacy levels for... No, he's not going to be impressed. He's not going to be the political sophistication. But, I mean, the ability to organise, you can never understate and that's what he's been under.

5:24100% which the power lights would never really succeed. And on that point, he's even got the... The gumption to gloat about getting wired 30k off an American somebody or other. Next thing is I get an American think tank contact me. And they say, we understand that you haven't... You haven't really got any funds for this. What's your plan? And I said, well, I got some scaffolding. I got the guys coming up with some scaffolding. They said, what if we can give you some money to make it, what it needs to be? Yeah, okay. What are you talking? 5, 10 or up, we can... 30,000 can be on the table. As soon as he'd organised, which I think is fascinating, right? Because like, we... People often talk about within left circles about like, what is the nature of the amplification here? Is it top down? Is it contrived? Do you have these foreign acts? Is it involved with how organic is it? It is organic, by the way. He organised those people. That's real, right? But the money just comes through. The money just appears like that.

6:24Yeah. I'm still waiting to be wired for EK for having Corey Dock's road of the ball got stuck. I'm a fully paid up member of the International Jewish Banking Conspiracy, and I've never gotten my check. So we're going to have to bleep all of that out. Let me do an intro, though. What's left back again in the shoe with the AI final boss critic, Corey Dock's road in the building? Surely that's a tron. I mean, Zitron's probably got the claim on that right now. I think Zitron does best at, let's say, following the money. You probably do best at making the kind of more philosophical argument about what is the purpose of this instrument. So we're here today, Corey, a day after the news dropped that one of the staff at Amphropic has left his role in AI safety because he is afraid that they are building the apocalypse. That you believe that AI could kill us all by the end of the decade. It sounds like something that's not real, but I think it is frighteningly real, and it's easiest to understand it if you think about real things that happened two months ago.

7:28So two months ago, open AI agents, AI's hacked into third-party infrastructure entirely at their own accord. And this was like a concentrated hacking spree that they carried out of their own volition. And I think that if you extrapolate into the future, the level of capabilities of these AI's, with the same independent volition they could cause extreme havoc, for example, hacking critical infrastructure, building extension level bio-weapons, there's a lot of ways that the AI could actuate us off in the world. He then got backed up by one of the, his name's Ed Harbinger or something like that. And I'm going to have to terminus it. So Jacob Cuxen was the guy who was working at Andphropic. Freddie Dyer warning. And he coaxed out some information telling us that we are racing straight to self-improving super intelligence and gambling with our lives.

8:28This is one of the most viral posts of this year, 143 million views on Twitter, 720,000 likes. And Evan Huberinger, I got Harbinger. You know, that was my nominated de-servanism going in there, basically back to my saying that there's more or less a 10% level risk. Jeffrey Hintz has gone on BBC to say something similar, but I feel like you have something different to say on the matter. Yeah, I mean, you know, I'm indebted here to the work of the STS scholar, Leibin Sol from Virginia Tech, who coined this very useful term, Critahype. So Critahype is repeating tech hype and then putting in parentheses at the end, and that's bad. And there are sincere critics who engage in Critahype. So, you know, you think of the a couple of years ago when we were all worried that somehow someone is as manifestly stupid as Mark Zuckerberg had created the Mind Control Way. And we were like, you know, my grandpa is a QAnon because Mark Zuckerberg used big data to make him into a Mind Control Way.

9:28Look at that evil dopamine hacking wizard. Our civilization is over. We no longer have a future tense because all of our thoughts are going to be beamed into our heads by Facebook's algorithm. And you know, there's a much more banal explanation, like maybe grandpa is a QAnon because he was always a bit racist and Mark Zuckerberg introduced him to a bunch of other racists. And so they like disinhibited each other. And then because their material circumstances decline precipitously, they were suckers for fascists who said the reason you can't go to the doctor anymore is because an undeserving other is getting the medical care you should be getting. And so that upregulated the salience of their racism and it just became like their big thing. And the reason you and your friends are still on Facebook is not because your dopamine loop has been hacked. It's because your friends are lovely, but they're a giant pain in the balls and you can't agree on where you're going to go for a drink. And how are you going to agree when it's time to leave Facebook? And so you're all stuck there because you're holding each other hostage and as long as you love each other more than you hate Mark Zuckerberg, you're going to stay there. So like those are much more parsimonious explanations, but also in terms of the damage you do to Mark Zuckerberg, if those are the explanations that you believe in and that you amplify, then you don't help Mark Zuckerberg sale staff go out on a call and say,

10:38why should you pay a 40% premium to advertise on Facebook? Well, don't take my word for it. My critics will tell you that I work for cyber, Rasputin, Mark Zuckerberg, who has perfected the Mind Control way that eluded Mesmer and MK Ultra and pickup artists and neuro linguistic programming weirdos. He can sell anything to anyone and that's why you should give me millions of dollars to advertise on Facebook. And in the same way, these guys are like these these manifestly unsuitable chapods that very obviously can't do your job. You should never the less be fired and replaced by them because someday they will be because someday we're going to teach the word guessing program too many words and it's going to wake up and maybe turn the human race into paper clips. But if it's going to be so powerful, then surely it will be able to do your job when that day comes. And so when we run around and we say, hey, A.I. is going to take my job because it can do my job. We help them raise investment capital. When we run around, we say, my boss is a credulous dole who's infinitely horny not to have ego shattering confrontations with people who know how to do things and tell them that all of his ideas are stupid or immoral or impossible or illegal or will kill people.

11:45And therefore he's an easy mark for a salesman who says, wouldn't you like to replace your workers with a pliable chap pot. And therefore my job is going to be given to a chap pot that can't do my job. We help make the case not to give the A.I. company's billions of dollars to feed into a money furnace. And then we hasten the day where the bubble burst. And then we can just go back to treating statistical inference tools as normal technology that have places where we use them and places where we don't. And not a thing where we incinerate the world to build the world's biggest statistical inference tool. You're slaying a few secret cows there. It's a lot of digest on a lot to chomp on to begin with. Yeah, I mean on the offset that sounds like a deeply cynical view, I would say, when you're considering the impact that A.I. actually has in very real terms for many human lives across the planet whose jobs may already be affected, whose jobs may soon be affected, how they interact with health services or educative services or things of that sort.

12:48How can you, when people have legitimate concerns about the future of this technology, because it affects their lives, have such a kind of blase view when they don't make the correlation between them scrolling on Facebook and the ads it's pumping out, have any effect for them outside of them just wanting to consume more and more and more. I'm not sure I understand the point you're making at the end there. Could you restate that the thing about ads? The kind of banality of going on Facebook, as you say, seeing a mate and doing right, but subliminally you're being fed. Oh, sure, subliminally you're being fed ads, but also when Proctor and Gamble zeroed at their surveillance advertising budget in 2017 and went from spending $200 million a year on those ads, $200 million a year on those ads to $0 million a million, $0 a year on those ads, they saw a 0% drop in sales. Because to a first approximation, all those ads were either being mistargeted or disappearing down the ad for out of whole. So yeah, sure ads have an effect, but the people that advertising firms are best at selling things to aren't the targets of the ads, they're the people who buy the ads.

13:52So, basically, John Wanamaker, the person who invented department stores, said 50% of my advertising spending is wasted. I just don't know which 50% and in the age of analytics, we know that John Wanamaker was a total sucker because 99% of his advertising budget was being wasted and he only thought it was 50%. So sure, ads have an effect, control of the narrative has an effect, but the idea that, for example, you mentioned subliminally. So there was a panic in the 50s about subliminal seduction and the idea that if you inserted like three frames in a film of someone enjoying Coca-Cola that sales would go up, the people who did that believed it was true, and all of the independent efforts to replicate that research found that it wasn't. And it's an unkillable fact that if you hide an eye-blink message or in the in-nice, the famous one was there was an ice cube and a drink and a drink said that had a naked lady in it and this would make you create these. These are not replicable under laboratory conditions.

14:53The fact that advertisers believe it and that advertising agencies sell it some and they may believe it to doesn't make it true. And you know, I think that when we want to look at kind of the ideological origins of the capital allocation to AI, which is is an ideological project in large part because you can't really call it a material project when someone spends a trillion dollars as they're doing this year to make 50 billion dollars. That is not materialism, that's ideology. And so, you know, when you look at the kind of ideological correlates of this, I think we can divide up the capital allocators into at least two groups. There's the billionaires who are just solipsists, right, who like don't deal with people as statistical artifacts, right, because they run a social media company or they have hundreds of thousands of warehouse workers or because they run a search engine and they just like deal with people as a stream of queries and clicks out. And so they are already thinking of people as statistical artifacts, they're kind of ghosts, they're not as real as the people in their lives.

15:55Certainly you couldn't inflict the kind of pain that you have to inflict to make billions of dollars if you thought other people were real. Like as a man in my mid 50s, I know what it's like to have to pee all the time. Jeff Bezos is 10 years older than me. That man has to pee all the time. And yet he is built an empire where no one's allowed to pee. Right. If like if you thought that when an Amazon driver had to pee and wasn't allowed to, it felt like when you had to pee and you weren't allowed to, you would make sure that they had pee breaks. So food. Food. Yes, you would be pissed. So clearly he doesn't think that those drivers are as real as he is. And in the same way that like no one could go to Epstein Island if those girls were as real as their own daughters and the women in their lives. So those people, they're like, yeah, of course the AI can do the job as well as you can because you're basically a bot already. Elon Musk literally calls the people who disagree with MN PCs. And in your book, you introduced this idea of as a reverse sento or the work that is the reverse sento.

16:56Person controlled by the machine. Yeah. Yeah. So you know in in in automation, we call someone who's controlling a machine, a centaur. You know, the metaphor here is you got the human torso and head on top of the horse's body and the human has the discernment of the judgment. But the body, the machine, that's got the strength and the endurance and the the dexterity and the speed, which is fine. So long as you're in charge, if you're deciding the rate at which the spell checker makes suggestions or if you're deciding where the bicycle goes, you're a centaur, the inverse of that is the reverse centaur. And that's where the machine is is riding you where you're inlisted to be the peripheral. And that's where you get the people who aren't allowed to pee because when you spend seven figures automating the warehouse, you're not going to run those machines slower than they need to be run. You want to you know, sweat your assets. And so you're running the people who are the bottleneck at the maximum speed and for the maximum amount of time that they can run. And as a person, when you work at the maximum speed of the maximum time you can run, you make mistakes, which is why Amazon warehouses at the highest rate of serious injuries of any warehouse in the American warehouse sector, three times the national average because when you make a mistake and where is full of automated forklifts, you get impaled by them.

18:12And so that's the, so that's the, I think that's the kind of people as hallucinations, but there's another group of capital allocators and they may not in this back to your cynicism question. They may not think that other people are fantasms. They may not care. And you know, I put them in a class with people who are like, I don't know if peptides work, but I'm pretty sure Andrew take can sell a lot of them. So I will invest in Andrew Tates peptides. Yeah, yeah, or clavicular or you know, I don't think J. Dex are going to improve a woman's vaginal health, but I do think when it's Paltrow can get a lot of women to put J. Dex in their vaginas, I think she actually did and then had to pay a giant settlement over. So we can keep this on there because it's not livalous. And you might invest in that, right, even though you know it's nonsense. And so I think that it's actually quite an unholy alliance. I think when you have cynics and true believers together, allocating capital that there are that they egg each other on that where one expresses doubt the other has certainty and that anything that might act as a break on that enthusiasm is overridden because of this,

19:20this kind of vicious chimera that is the cynic and the true believer fused together in a single ideological project. What you're doing is you're kind of pacing a whole on the bubble of storytelling, right? Like and how everything that anyone sells ultimately is a story, right? First and foremost, and you know, ticket it an analogy to like political Sven Garles. More often than not, the media representation of some people who work in the shadows of politics is so much more nefarious and powerful than you actually, when you actually encounter these people of person, you realize what you're just a human being. Right, right. I mean Peter Mandelson is just has a howling void where his conscience should be and a good memory for Compromot. And so you know, you put those two things together and you've got a very effective political operator in the void. You can pump a lot of hot air into make people feel like, okay, this is this person is really the person pulling strings here. And like obviously there is evidence as well of those things that that then happened, which didn't get released in the Epstein files and validate that that worldview. So it's not it's not just that it's like it's just pure invention.

20:27There are there are bits of evidence that are being woven together to create a story, right? And I think what's fascinating about the way you you pose this around AI is that you recognize that something that maybe us who are receiving the story and are trying to make sense of it who are experts. Is this sense of like we're just like, wow, okay, well, this is the new thing. And as you point out, it's ideology in the same way that Biders inflation reduction acts and massive investment in green technologies was an ideological investment in the future that you were hoping that you would get returns. And you did see economic growth of a you know, four to five percent. So not matched actually by the level of growth that we've been seeing in the US since which is basically been driven by data center build out right in particular. So that's that is fascinating right because the level of scrutiny that was put on Biden's climate policies compared to the level of scrutiny that has been meted out by the mainstream media on tech is not commensurate at all. No, I think that's right. I think that's right. And the narrative here, you know, I think we have to understand it as a narrative that's not entirely directed at the public.

21:31But that is ultimately in service to convincing investors that firms that have saturated their markets can grow. So, you know, I wrote this book in shittification about what happens when firms that have saturated their markets. Continue revenue growth not through making things people like or by attracting new customers because they're out of all out of ideas and they've got all the customers. But by squeezing the customers they have because they have regulatory capture and other mechanisms they can use to stop customers from defecting to stop workers from defecting. So it's really just reallocating the capital distribution in their in their favor and that works, but only for a while right there's 10 ads in front of a YouTube video now, but there can't be 50. Sorry guys. Yeah, they're there can't be 50 right 50 ads in front of a YouTube video of YouTube ceases to be a going concern. And the reason that matters for YouTube is not because endless growth is the ideology of a tumor as many people undoubtedly have said to you and have said to me on many occasions. It's because as a material matter markets value growth stocks more than they value mature stocks because a share is a claim on a firm's future earnings and firms that are growing have more earnings next year than they have this year.

22:43So if you have two comparable firms with the same earnings this year, but one is growing the other one isn't growing firm will be worth more. And when you have a very valuable stock, it becomes highly liquid and third parties will accept it in lieu of cash, which means that if you want to grow your firm by buying arrival or by hiring key personnel rather than using sterling, which you can only get by getting a bank or an investor or a customer to to transfer to you, you can use shares and shares are things that you make by typing zeros into a spreadsheet at the corporate headquarters. And so this is a very good thing to have just as a purely material matter, right, not as an ideological matter. And the corollary of this is that the day you stop growing or even worse the day the market loses confidence that you will continue to grow. There will be a panic sell off of your shares because now you're a mature firm and your firm is grossly overvalued. You know, Mark Zuckerberg in the first quarter of 2022 did his normal quarterly report and he said, by the way, we projected so many new US signups and we got fewer.

23:46And there was a $240 billion one day sell off of Facebook shares. It was the largest corporate sell off in the history of markets. Mark Zuckerberg is personally extremely exposed to that. He's the person whose portfolio is most top heavy with Facebook shares. There isn't a person in the world who wants to be 90% poorer, richer poor. That is not ideology. It's not the ideology of endless growth in the tumor that makes Mark Zuckerberg not want investors to sell off his shares and tank his personal network. It's materialism. And so when you have run out of growth by signing up new customers, when you've run out of growth by squeezing the customers suppliers and workers you have, you need to convince investors that you will grow by doing something new. And we had this series about land of stories about blockchain, cryptocurrency, metaverse, web three. The downside of those is that no one knows what they're going to be worth. That they're going to be worth anything. But the upside is that since you just invented them they could be worth whatever you say they are.

24:46And so if you're a good storyteller, you can keep your share price high by convincing people that you're now called meta and your company is going to be the metaverse. And Morgan Stanley said, we'd always spending six hours a day in the metaverse by now. I don't know if you logged your hours yet. I haven't gotten to mine, but I'm hoping to catch up later today. And it didn't work. We're not in the metaverse. Mark Zuckerberg pissed away 61 billion dollars on that project, not counting whatever they spent on new letterhead for Facebook when they switched the name. But they did survive. No one sold off all of Mark Zuckerberg shares. So he was able to hire people. You remember when Mark Zuckerberg was hiring AI scientists for $100 million? Yes, it was poaching from an AI and stuff. He was just typing zeros into a spreadsheet. There wasn't a hundred million dollars involved. Right. This was just shares in Facebook that he was handing over, which are an endogenous substance he makes in his own at his own laptop keyboard. Right. He doesn't need to get anyone else to hand him anything.

25:46And so, you know, now we have AI. It is a much stronger narrative than the other narratives. It's bigger than any other bubble we've lived through. Partly, that's because the computer science is real in a way that, you know, blockchain is real too, but blockchain is just a way to do an untrusted database synchronization with parties who you don't hold to be faithful users of the technology who have adverse interest to you. It's just an interesting technical and security problem that turns out not to have very many applications. Set the drugs. I mean, it's not very good for drugs because the point of a public ledger is that you can find out who bought it. And so the day your wallet is exposed, we can go back and find all the other things you did with it, including all the drugs. So they got the Silk Road guy. Yeah, and it's how they're getting. Yes, indeed, it is very good for bribes because you don't really care about the bribes. And you know, arguably we found out with, but I mean, even then we've reformed. People, they've been. Yeah, I mean, I'm being more Trump. But you know, like it doesn't have the odd use, right? And one of the uses that people who are like on the crypto left have said is like, oh, well, it's a way to beat sanctions for sanctioned entities, right? And like, you know, if you want to get money to Cuba, certainly as someone with family in Russia, I know lots of people who are saying, well, normal people in Russia, who can't afford it.

27:11Who can't afford groceries are not the problem. And I feel just fine using crypto to remit to my family there, right? And there are lots of people who are doing that. So those are very peripheral uses. And certainly like if crypto is only valuable for so long as Putin is staging an imperialist expansion into Ukraine, then I wouldn't say as a leftist that I have a great belief in crypto's long term viability. So, you know, can I just bring back to your point with like if you look at an anthropic right compared to let's say the more mature companies that we've mentioned to a constantly trying to reinvent the wheel about what the new technology is that's going to get them growth. Like anthropic when they lose a data safety scientist like this in this very public way and you then get obviously the BBC having a conversation about AI apocalypse. All the rest like on your reading then that is just like this is the same wheel spinning of high. I think that's great for them hype to you. So pre IPO you've got three your three weeks out from IPO you've got your member of staff validating the view of the person that's left.

28:19You know and account narrative that's also kind of build some credibility as well. So it doesn't just have to be a kind of determinable response as to what the say is. Yeah, you're fairs are. It's instead of people going hey this is foundationally unsuitable for the purposes of replacing high wage workers who do jobs whose outputs we care about. Which is the only way that you go from fifty billion dollars in revenue on a trillion dollars expenditure into a balance sheet that's right side up right it you have to be able to displace high wage labor. And one of the problems with high wage labor is we generally care about the fidelity of its outputs right you know we like AI is a great thing to use if you don't care if the job is done well right if you don't care. So you know about racist discrimination in lending or in child protective services taking away people's kids or sentencing or hiring. Then AI is a great thing to do to evaluate people's applications right but if you actually care about like radiology or if you care about whether you're lawyer amounts of good defense for you because you're rich or if you care whether your contracts are any good.

29:26You know then it's not clear that you can just I mean sure AI would might be useful by all the professionals who do that but it would be useful in the center configuration where they elect to use it in ways around the periphery that does not produce output at a very high speed because the problem with output being produced at a very high speed is that it precludes you actually carefully evaluating those outputs and the firms themselves will tell you that there is no way to get around the hallucinations which is what they call defects in their products. The products outputs just have to be carefully monitored so that the hallucinated outputs can be sorted from the valid ones but you can't do that at a high speed right people cannot remain vigilant for things that don't happen very often. You know this is why the American transportation and secure administration has created the world's water bottle spotting us mother fuckers who are nevertheless pathologically incapable of spotting the fake guns that red teams put through their checkpoints because they never see a gun. They see water bottles all day long and what you see as a radiologist is broadly correct AI diagnoses except for the ones that are ghastly and incorrect and kill people and you are asked to do the work of the 10 radiologist they fire because that's the way we're going to make the balance sheet right side up and so you're doing hundreds and hundreds of these a day a pace that you would have never had prior to AI as opposed to like you just do your job and twice a day the AI says take another look at that one which would be a great configuration for AI and rate.

30:52And would not induce automation blindness right that that means that there's no way to actually put the balance sheet right side up but if AI is so powerful that there is a 10% chance that it's going to destroy the human race turn us all into paper clips then surely on the way to acquiring that much power it will be able to avoid hallucinating and we can fire the last radiologist right and and we can put them all in the woodchipper and so if you want an IPO. That doesn't cheat the way mosques IPO did right where you just sneak into the index and force index managers to buy your shares at any price which is how he unloaded the the Grock AI money furnace on everyday savers who didn't want to become homeless and starving in their retirement. If you want to do an IPO that actually like sells out to to institutions and smart money and and even mean stalkers and whatever then. You need to be able to tell a story that your AI is going to be able to make up change in kind that there's no evidence for there's no evidence that teaching more words to the word guessing program makes it stop hallucinating because the word guessing program does know what it's doing and so it can't know when it's hallucinating.

32:04That is the entire argument that Samaltman is putting out that this is a technology that is going to bring about greater benefit make you more human be the central where you have domination over this technology. What do you say that's not the argument makes to investors right the argument is making to investors is not like oh every worker will have more autonomy. Yeah, how does that how does that but his balance you right side up right the other investment that it's this about disciplining labor right we did an event last night down at St James's church me and Riley Quinn from trash future and Riley had a really good analogy here to the industrial revolution between weavers and carpenters so the thing about a weaver is that their output. Can be automated if you don't really care about the quality right you can produce a low quality fabric at high speed and you can take a weaver who works at one machine and produces so much cloth a day and put them in charge of four machines that produces far more cloth a day that's of inferior quality you don't really eliminate weavers what you do is you eliminate high quality cloth that was the that was the industrial revolution.

33:14The Lodots right yeah this was the this was the question what the lot of it's were the weavers who are displaced carpenters were in displays for centuries right they were they we didn't have machines that could do carpentry now obviously carpentry is a machine heavy discipline right but we couldn't put carpenters in relation to the machine in the way that that we could put weavers into the machine and never the last the story about the machines did put pressures on carpenters to make concessions that they. We might not have made or earlier on in the under the guild system and you know a back to Luigi Mangione. At the time we actually had pretty good laws that gave the guilds a right of co determination as to the rollout of these machines and those laws were ignored by the by the you know the Sam Altman's of the day and the cause of the Lodots before they started burning down mills was just obey the law. Byron's maiden speech in the lords was like we should obey the law Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein was a novel about about Luddism it was a novel about what happens when entrepreneurs are allowed to unshackle themselves from the state and make technology without asking the people who will be affected by what they should do she was a she was a public and ardent supporter of Luddites you know the Frankenstein's a Luddite fanfic novel and so we can't say that.

34:42And so you know this is an arrangement we face before and we've seen back to whether this is cynical we've seen the machine has doesn't have to be able to do your job for the machine to be able to discipline labor and boy were they interested in disciplining labor you know that not only do they ignore the laws about co determination they brought back cavalry from the Napoleonic wars to put down labor rebellions in the north. At the expense of military victories in France right like like they were like this is fighting on the home front to stop workers from insisting that the law of co determination in automation be followed is more important than winning wars in France this it's it was amazing. We are on the Napoleonic wars I mean the big difference between the UK and France is that the UK could raise double the taxes with half the population right and if you're talking about break down in the relation between capital and labor and we're also talking again about okay let's say the job replacements are happening to an extent here not so much in the US right like the economy this week saying that so far they're above replacement in terms of the jobs that they're generating but that that does draw an interest in

35:58industrial revolution which is to say like if you live in the imperial court you guys will be fine you know like you know the likelihood is that like there will be jobs created here but there will be automation happening elsewhere because like I'm not saying about chat box let's talk about robotics instead right like you look at somewhere like South Korea worst gender polarization but the highest uptake in robotics and manufacturing happening simultaneously as well as getting a collapse in the birth rate so for whatever is happening in their political economy the elite there are hedging that like okay well we can't we can't trust that we're going to have labor power here right so we're just going to end the people basically right like we're good and then what happens to the taxation system in that in that country how do you make sure that you have enough broad based taxation to ensure that democracy can exist like my concern then is about like I get what you're saying in terms of like the we're overhyping this stuff and there is like a flywheel here that's inflating inflating the money but there is something real happening in industrial capacity that can't be ignored either and I feel like your argument is to be good AI critics is to focus in on where the actual changes are happening but if we want capital to be mobilized in the service to improve goods the story has always been in the history of automation that only when labor determines the rollout of automation do you get do you get a higher quality output you get higher throughput of same or lower in quality when capital is in charge of the machine

37:27because it wants to maximize the wants to sweat the asset you get worse fabric and you know particularly where you have market power you see a decline in in quality because you can voice in inferior good so this is you know the fact that AI is being widely deployed for customer service really tells the story because they never wanted to provide customer service anyways right the whole idea of saying well we used to have customer service on shore and then we found people who are quite bright and you know it graduated with first from their universities and speak excellent English and the Philippines in India and we are going to give them a script that never ends with them solving anyone's problem right so your job is to speak fluent English and get shouted at and AI is going to be better at speaking fluent English and getting shouted at than anyone in the Philippines or India will be and so now we're replacing the human beings with with chatbots there so this thing I'm quite interested in the kind of corresponding culture and labor so I guess you talk about people from India and the Philippines but domestically if we take the analogy of a kind of imperial call it's hard

38:33you're going to have I mean in the book you make the analogy between students who want to go to grad school and they need their tutor to go and write a reference or whatever for them there is increasingly a cultural expectation that you have to engage with this technology to do your work anyway so irrespective of its inflation it's having a very material consequence which is changing how we interact as working people as laborers as qualified people how does that fit within the broad narrative because as you're saying there is the notion of this being a story which I would agree to be true but within that story there are individuals of agency who are going to work but having that technology determined for them and that increasingly is a generational conversation as much as it is a very tangible one because for most of us we're going to have to integrate this technology within our lives at some point anyway like clients will say to me you're using AI aren't you? as well right like like so like people who I consult with about like digital media that like you're using AI in your process and I do use it sometimes with research

39:36in you know sometimes a stress test but I mean I don't I have to validate everything I'm trying to be a central reverse right so so that that is a real thing that's happening especially to our generation who are entering the workforce I mean to a certain degree this is a bit of a mania though as well right like are it if if if they have already agreed to a price they've already agreed to a schedule and they are confident that you will produce material of a certain quality asking whether you're using AI to do it is like asking whether you mouse over to the menu or use the keyboard shortcut who cares right like if it's like write me a report about x y and z and and did you use did you every time you you need an italic did you mouse over to the little italic thing in the in the ribbon at the top of word or did you hit control I that is not a thing that normally clients care about right so this is a mania and there's a great commentator on this he runs a management consultancy that do does database integration in Australia called no medworks his name is

40:38Nikhil Siresh Nick Siresh you got famous briefly for writing an essay called if you mentioned AI one more time I will fucking pile driver you and he's got a new one called AI is destroying corporate decision making and it's about the fact that his consultancy goes into shops where they do business where they've done business for many years billion dollar companies and they say you're currently using oracle we can move your date over to snowflake you'll save twenty million dollars a year and they're like yeah but is it AI I'm like well there is an AI thing it's very expensive and buy snowflakes own account if you were to use it then if it were perfectly configured the best that you would get is 92% accuracy accuracy so 8% of the time when you give it a natural language query like help me do a payroll projection for the next quarter it's just going to give you a wrong answer and they're like you know we want that right and and he points out that as a management consultant he doesn't there is no advantage to picking a fight with your client about whether or not that's stupid

41:45they've turned down those contracts now but like having the argument with them where you're like are you stupid that doesn't help you run your business and as an executive there's a kind of prisoner's dilemma here where if you show up and you go oh yeah everyone in my division I've made them use a i and we're not getting any benefit out of it you're basically calling all your colleagues a liar and so within the corporate culture there's a kind of deadlock here now that doesn't help the workers who are being forced to use a i it doesn't help the workers who being asked to produce more output with fewer colleagues and resources all of that stuff is is is alongside of it but I don't think you can understand the forces that are driving it without understanding these these other things that are going on within the decision making apparatus and in particular I think the only answer to this is labor power and I think that if your trade union wants to make sense of this then you have to have a grounded technical and material understanding of the technology before you can have that and you know

42:47all power to the screenwriters who went in with a grounded technical understanding who did not say the AI can do my job who did say this is a way to produce some fear outputs and who won with their strike the right to use AI whenever they wanted but not with wage concessions or headcount concessions so they get to produce the same outputs they're producing no one asks them whether they're mousing over to the italic button no one asks them whether they've asked a chap bought to build a continuity database of all the episodes in the series there in the show the writers room for so that they can say oh you know was this character ever emotionally vulnerable and if so in which episode find me the time code for it so I can review it right like that if writers want to do that that's their own goddamn business asking whether they're using AI in the writers room is like asking you know which kind of pencil they use who gives a shit if we go back to to this problem about the apocalypse though this like surely surely the flywheel of hype to cynicism driving up you know economic growth behind it

43:51there's a risk that if people really do believe on mass that this is going to destroy everything that then you would get concerted slowdown right like people you could have you could see that the sure the political democratic will emerging where people say let's actually slow down and then surely that is really bad for you know as you often talk about another shows right like the mag seven keeping the stock market flow and whatever yeah and there's a risk I guess the so you can see the kind of master storytellers the dungeon masters in this extremely bad tabletop RPG uh changing the changing the narrative right a couple of months ago sam alton was like actually it's not going to take everyone's job it's just an extremely normal technology please stop being angry at me right after years of being like no this is totally going to take everyone's job which is why I invented the orbuse stick your face and so I can scan your retinas so that when we have universal basic income I can make sure you're not cheating which is like just the weirdest goddamn thing that man has ever done this is the orb it looks very cool but it's basically just a fancy

44:52camera that's able to look at you and tell whether you're real human or not like he has a very weird man objectively but I don't think we've had enough discourse about sticking your face in the orb for UBI for when the robots take everyone's jobs as a very important adjunct to his project but the whole thing is irrational and it feels like to me uh I mean going back to your story point and you obviously come from a science fiction background all of this stuff is just gloated science fiction that isn't really based on any rational yeah no science fiction we have a we have a move which you might generously call hand waving where we need to stick an AI in and so we it's it's kind of the magic underpants known method where we're like computers get big and more powerful question mark question mark question mark AI because that's the thing I wanted to make a futuristic parable about without having to spend a lot of time wrestling with how computers getting more powerful and then AI emerging at the other side

45:53happened and so we do that because that gives us a narrative convention and a convenience and the readers come along with us in the same way that like you know uh uh man with long beard and questionable personal hygiene sketches a very complex ruin and all of a sudden the demon appears uh is a thing that you might go along with in the fantasy novel without having to know all the niceties of how the ruin is being scratched but you know it's the the point isn't to predict that ruins will Sunday make demons appear and on like the way in which current AI testing you know you you have question marks around like Waymo for instance like or we've got in the UK way V which we're starting to see out on a batten town way V had their launch uh followed by a sky uh AI journalist Roland Manstorp and it basically crashes on the on the test I don't know if you've seen that you've seen the clip but like this is an interesting almost counter example to the thesis that somewhere there is

46:54you know uh reverse central checking the checking to intervene when things go wrong they fucked up literally live on or if you don't but if you don't care how how bad the outputs are then you might have a river center but not enough river centers to actually monitor it you know I I uh the reason I'm skeptical about about self-driving cars is a couple of reasons so one is that um the companies that do it have just been caught lying so much and it's easy to lie right it's it the the um difference between a self-driving car and a remotely piloted cars uh impossible to detect without kind of a colonoscopy on the on the on the computers inside the car and no one is able to do that and we know that they have sometimes claimed that they had autonomous things that were remotely piloted uh and even by their own admission they're like sometimes it's remotely piloted when it gets into trouble it's remotely piloted and and so how much remote piloting is going on is a is a mystery and what I think is if that number was small and flattering to their technology

48:01they would have released it now again uh maybe maybe they just want us all to be pleasantly surprised and they don't want to ruin it and that's why they're not telling us how often the human takes over the machine but um I I just think that like we should be skeptical of that claim but there's another reason to be skeptical of that claim which is that no language on earth contains the phrase as well paid as a taxi driver right this story that like somehow you turn $50 billion of revenue into a trillion on to a trillion dollars expenditure into a a net positive is by replacing cab drivers who today provide the cars for free to the company and pay the insurance and the petrol and the wear and tear that somehow the I mean that's real magic underpants gnome stuff right and so like stipulate that they will someday stop replacing as as cruise general motors AI David self driving car division was in San Francisco they will stop replacing one low-waged cab driver with one and a half high-waged engineers uh and that they will if these

49:01will be fully autonomous and it'll be fine I tell me again exactly how that's better than the deal Uber has today you know over's theory is oh you're gonna buy a hundred thousand dollar EV that's fully autonomous and rather than leaving it parked in front of your house you will let them put strangers in it uh and be responsible for it driving all day every day yeah yeah keep shagging in them as well yeah shitting in them shacking in them uh you know like you feel for animals yeah that's why you want to self drive a car isn't it yeah yeah you know and so like drooling on them after they fall asleep whatever right like like it's just I do do that do you miss that as well yeah right I mean it is a uh uh making porn in them you know uh it it it is like a a really incoherent thesis and again like I think the AI bubble is really dangerous I think

50:02partly because as you've been saying young people are finding it very hard to find work and also the work they're finding is worse uh and there's a lot of credential young people yeah like as opposed to those you still outtrades or I've uh and don't use the AI I think I think sparks are doing pretty well because the data centers need them right yeah sure um but uh and some day people who've trained to run laser tag arenas will do really well when we figure out that we've got all these data centers and we don't know what to do with them and and they become laser tag arenas uh but um and so I think you know popping the AI bubble is really important uh and the sooner we do it the better because the bigger it is the more savings of everyday savers it will absorb because like that that's the point right it's not that amour auties are going to pay for this or billionaires it's good it's you and me and is being a central being in control of the technology a sure way of popping the AI bubble or is engaging with it anyway just going to enable it to no I think it's

51:02orthogonal to it I think engaging with the bubble is like saying things like if you care about digital sovereignty stop talking about AI because like you know if if if if problem plus solution equals problem and problem minus solution equals problem then solution equals zero right if like if we turn off all the chatbots in the united kingdom tomorrow nothing changes right every company continues to produce the same outputs it's producing every ministry continues to function as per you know kids have to do their own homework like that's the only change whereas if we turn off office 365 the united kingdom ceases to exist and Donald Trump has already told Microsoft and Microsoft has obliged him to turn off the office 365 access for government officials elsewhere in the world who upset his geopolitical goals so like the chief prosecutor the international criminal court who's investigation into Benjamin Netanyahu's genocide collapsed when his office 365 account was switched off after he swore out the arrest warrant and he lost all of his documents his emails has access

52:03to all of his accounts as calendars as dress books everything and the same thing happened to the judge who sent his yearables and arrow right and so like that is an actual existential risk you know the the big tech companies used to act like they were playing an iterated game and they could not terrify the foreign governments and firms that used them abroad because they would risk the long term stability of the of their operation if you remember after the stodon leaks one of the things the tech firms were really angry about was that there were two parallel systems for spying on people on behalf of the NSA the NSA issued them secret warrants which they fulfilled and they were promised that it would be a secret and then there was another system whereby the NSA was wiretapping the fiber lines between their data centers because they weren't encrypting the data between their own data centers and it turned out that the warrant was parallel construction that they would look at all of the data of all of their users and then they would find the users they cared

53:05about an issue a warrant for that user's data and so that way when they went ahead and arrested that person or wrong footed them or rat fucked them or assassinated them or whatever no one Yahoo would go like I wonder how they knew that about our user because they'd answered the warrant and after stodon everyone got in the world got really angry and they were like maybe we can't use American technology anymore and these guys were like why did you fuck up our good thing like we were partners in this and Trump has been like actually you know what I will do is if the europe if the Europeans pass the digital services act I will find the bureaucrats who worked on it and I will sanction them and permanently bar them from entering the United Kingdom and also we now have a directive that you are to be reading the private messages of European officials to figure out who we can sanction for being too mean to you right like that is the thing Trump is doing now and Microsoft is like okay well if that's the situation sure we'll turn off we'll turn off all of Denmark and you can just walk into Greenland so it's a red herring to worry about you know him turning off

54:05fable five or meath or so whatever because what the real turn off is the debanking and the yeah reading encrypted messages that they're not just debanking you remember when Russian soldiers stole all those tractors from Ukraine and they were traced through John Deere's cloud to Chachnaya and John Deere switched them off he can switch off all the tractors too right and and like given that there is no rule of law to speak of in the United States anymore is total impunity and the John Deere company is entirely dependent on Donald Trump's largest and it's a personalist regime and it's an oligarchy and they are the only country in the world except maybe China that has access to this geopolitical lever and the people in Donald Trump's orbit are not the ones who are holding him back they're the ones who are egging him on you know when John when when when when when Donald Trump gets into trouble passing a partially digested big Mac lubricated with nothing but elderly mucus and a diacote and pops his clogs on the toilet and pops his clogs on the toilet and kills over like Elvis

55:08the person who replaces him John and JD Vance is not going to be better at keeping the more maniacal elements of his coalition in line he is going to be worse because he's got zero rates oh that man yeah that man is a charisma like that he's got no bounce so like he'll just have to go full-fash yeah no he's not just full-fash but incoherent full-fash right like it's just going to be like he won't even get Hugo boss to make cool uniforms yeah yeah yeah yeah he is going to he's going to suck right and you will have people showing up at Microsoft with a bunch of guys in black balaclava saying turn off grid denmark today today or or you know the the puppy gets it right so like this is an actual like geopolitical risk it's been a geopolitical risk we've known about since since Snowden at least but we've pretended like they wouldn't fuck with it in a way that might mess up the good thing and certainly like in other domains like dollarization and fiber optic lines it's going to be hard to respond right like the dollarization fiber optic lines

56:12they suffer from a thing that mathematicians call the order and squared problem which is just like every time you add a new country that has to have a direct fiber linked to everyone else or a pair wise currency trading market with everyone else you square the number of connections you have right because everyone has to have a new fiber line everyone has to have a new currency market with a reserve but like that's not true digital international public goods right if we're like just writing alternative firmware for john deertractors and reliable jail breaks that bypass their bootloader so we can install it that's just a thing everyone works on together every country that joins that makes it more effective and easier to install and easier to troubleshoot and adds new features right so this is like the only part of trumpism we know how to solve and it also solves the china problem because if you're worried that you know you're going to put balcony solar and now that it's legal but the inverter is tethered to a chinese cloud and if china ever gets angry enough that you know prime minister for rosh that they shut off all the inverters well we need to jailbreak those

57:14inverters and install open reliable auditable firmware on those two this is the thing we should have been doing all along like it's just really dumb and suicidal to like have critical infrastructure that is secret and proprietary and also remotely controlled because like it doesn't have to be trump ordering microsoft to shut off your your infrastructure it could just be like someone at microsoft who's angry who shuts off your infrastructure or someone who hacks microsoft who shuts off your infrastructure there should just not be kill switches in our infrastructure that's just bad right and so we should not have field kill structures to switch as an infrastructure the americans shouldn't have kill switches in their infrastructure either and like the cool part of all of this is the only reason we haven't done it until now is that article six of the copyright directive a law we assuredly do not have to pay attention to anymore because i'm told Brexit means Brexit says that we will never reverse engineer and modify america's technology and the reason we adopted that law is because the americans said if we did we wouldn't have tariffs on our exports so here we have the tariffs right we we were told do as you're told or or we'll burn your

58:20house down we did it they burn the house down anyway we don't have to keep doing it we could make billions of dollars turning america's defective tax tech exports into things that we remediate and export the the corrections to all around the world and we could solve our geopolitical problem while finally having effective privacy and not having our money picked out out of our pockets when we use digital technology we solve all the problems with this we enlist not just digital rights hippies like me but also like people who just want to make money and also national security typically not all on the same side typically we're all enemies this is the thing we all agree on is the currency is is a post-american internet you know and so like this is the this is a thing to be actually excited about and it has nothing to do with AI so so so your positive vision then right like and i'm not saying that this is going to be perfect this is what could happen or it all might happen but like you would have the bubble burst you'd have the economy then be pointed that whatever happens you know whatever massive contractions fiscal contractions happened

59:22to i guess pointing all sorts of investment into creating a european stack or stack with allies who aren't america aren't china but using the chinese means right using the re the reverse engineering yeah yeah you don't need to make the hardware right you use the hardware that they're subsidizing and then you write your own software for it so you can rely on it right and do you think um kind of collective action from middling countries like the uk european countries could have an outsized impact in determining our own events against america rule totally i think this is like this is so once again the only thing the only of the the only one of the trump crises that we have any hope of solving without a lot of ballake because of the order and squared problem is this it's the digital international public goods we don't have to wait for the bubble burst to burst to do it by the way like we can just do it and in fact you know when we when we say oh well where were the capital for this come from uh there are a lot of people who are like i don't want to put my money in

1:00:22a i and i don't want my money exposed to a i so the most profitable things each of these tech companies does is rant extraction like literally not like figuratively like the line item on apples balance sheet that represents their largest profit is the one hundred billion dollars a year they make from payment processing because thirty p and every pound you spend in an app goes into apples pocket and same with google apps too and it's against the law to reverse engineer an iphone and put a new app store on it that charges three percent and so all of the business customers for that platform right uh whether it's spotify who are really angry about this and suit over it or whether it's uh epic games we make fortnight or really angry and suit about it but also like all those patreon people were suddenly like saying oh please don't sign up through the app store because i get 30% less those are all paying the aptacks so apples making a hundred billion dollars a year on this Jeff Bezos his maximum is your margin is my opportunity the cost of processing the payment is below one percent you could offer three percent payment processing a ninety seven percent discount

1:01:23on the uh on the on the payments that they're that they're currently processing you could uh take a hundred billion dollars off of apples balance sheet and turn into ten billion dollars on your balance sheet um you would make everyone better off in the world and you could export that to everyone in the world including all the americans who are fucked off with this too right like every business looks like this amazon's single largest line of profit is the eighty billion dollars they make every year from uh uh selling search placement so the first link on the first link on amazon search result page is twenty nine percent more expensive than the best match top row is twenty five percent more expensive best match is about seventeen places down on the second screen right it is the most economically useless conduct any firm engages in it makes goods more expensive it makes it harder to find high quality goods and it is the embodiment of Gresham's law that bad drives up good because the top search result and the maximum number of sales goes to the company that spends the least on quality and the most on private amazon to put their search result first which is how you

1:02:24end up doing things like buying a thing where you've entered a part number and then you buy from amazon and it's a different part because they've bought the ad against that part number and they're they're just like whatever we'll just sell as much of this crap as we can so like you can just read those margins starting tomorrow and who will program the software well here again comrade trump is doing praxis because he sent every ambitious technologist in the world who drumped for generations of moving to silicon valley back home to their home countries in the most like shooting yourself in the dick move imaginable of reverse brain drain you know one step ahead of a chud and like oakles and a gator with like a totten cove tattoo under his plate carrier who wants to shoot you in the face or send you to salvador and death camp right they're all here going like when do I get to do the Steve jobs plan to make a dent in the universe well it's not like finding ways to increase click through by one millionth of one percent it's disrupting tech companies who you don't work for

1:03:24anymore whose internal operations you're intimately familiar with and like moving fast and breaking their things which are like great things to break we should break all of their things so so the anti trust move would be to take all of the x engineers and say like you understand how the rent extraction takes place reverse and they know that shit and let's find some new businesses out of that margin is your opportunity and unlike say the digital market sack which was a great idea when it looked like the americans would collaborate on it but which has been a dead letter now because apple has come up with the absolutely unbeatable legal defense which is we pretend we're Irish fuck off right and so we're just not going to obey the law right you don't have to make apple right new code right like if you want to like have every big test go in the country have a pin board of the checkout with 99 p dongles that jailbreak your phone and install new apps on it you get someone in the united kingdom to write that software who doesn't work for apple who's in fact trying to drink apple's milkshake right and and that person does it maybe not because they care about

1:04:28digital rights or geopolitics just because they would like to be a billionaire right and uh and then weirdly enough that aligns with people who care about digital rights in geopolitics but I guess the problem with the UK is that we have become a vassal state for the United States and so if we were to ever act independently of what's already been arranged the terrorists are kind of the first challenge but we would experience so much more heavy tariffs or political consequences for doing that to a point I can see why as a small country that isn't connected to Europe in the same way that we are we are carrying in the face of all of this what I mean how could you say it's so easy but I mean this is what my so like all the best Americans I'm Canadian and this is where my fellow Canadians say all the time like oh we can't make Trump angry and I'm like guys do you remember we had those wildfires and Trump raised our tariffs because we were polluting America like the idea that if you just do as you're told Trump will let will leave you alone you know first of all

1:05:31leaving aside the kind of obvious advanced white matter disease that guy has that is causing him to do things like saying you know you've invaded America with your wildfire smoke so I'm increasing your tariffs um he also treats all capitulation as a sign of weakness and an invitation to double down right it's not like we we get a stable outcome I mean this is like you go up believe the bully well or you just can't rely on the bully like the bully is not playing good game theory right like you know he is he is the guy in the game theory who's like I'm gonna I'm gonna throw away the steering wheel so I can't turn the car but then he's also like I'm drunk right like it's just that like there is no kind of stable configuration you end up with Trump because he's he's um he's a chance her he is a guy whose entire life is a protracted exercise and running across a river over the backs of alligators without losing a leg he does not have a plan he he will tell you he doesn't have a plan the the people who brief him will tell you that you can't brief him with something

1:06:36longer than text message right like he he literally does whatever the last person on Fox News tells him to do like he is not a reliable person with whom you can have geopolitics he's not Putin right like Putin actually has like a plan he we can say what we want about him but he like knows what he's doing he's not she's in ping he's not even Victor Orban right he's he's an unhinged maniac and so whatever arrangement we come to is not going to involve keeping Trump from getting angry at you it just can't I mean it'd be great if it was I mean it would be miserable but it'd be great like we could just say okay well we'll accept you know chicken with bleach on it right from from America's E. coli factories but like that's not like the chicken with bleach will poison us we will shed ourselves to death and then Trump will get angry at us again and insist that we also take the defective let us so so so what do you think that we you know how do we be good AI critics in

1:07:39understanding what is good what is new about the the computer science technology innovations right like yes the brute forcing is incredible like yeah as a matter of scale right like solving these millennial problems in mathematics sometimes maybe even ripping off you know allegedly ripping off training data of mathematicians who are solving this using using their programs yet it's still impressive right like these are the insurmable problems but we want to be centaurs we want to have the wind you know going through our hair whilst we're galloping into the future we don't want to be reverse centaurs we don't want to be you know horse heads with kettie human legs in the middle of boot down festival I mean not sure which would dissociating from from reality like we want to know what the country should be pointed at do you think that the way you do that is by some form of middle powers alliance do you have to say that states who believe in liberal democracy and don't want to see the the financial infrastructure be abused and by interest in America such that like you know you can't compete and everyone else is a corner

1:08:42must be extracted from what do we do I would I would those things like a middle powers alliance sound great but the question is how do you get though how do you get one how do you get a middle powers alliance that's oriented around not making AI but making important digital public goods that reduce extraction and produce prosperity and actually solve real problems and give us the new good internet that we need if we're going to coordinate our works so that we can resist fascism and deal with the impending climate emergency and so on and and also the austerity emergency we're going to have when a third of the stock market is vaporized when the magnificent seven-go tits up right which is going to provoke austerity and drive more people into the arms and more fascists right so like how do we how do we build the how do we get to the point where our decision makers are making the decisions that give us those digital public goods well there's sort of three levers we can pull on one is civil society I work for the electronic frontier foundation it's the most important most effective digital rights group in the world I've been there for 25 years where the ff.org you can join we work extensively in the in the UK and the EU we have staff

1:09:48here there's also groups like the open rights group here in the United Kingdom which I helped found more than two decades ago there are other digital rights groups too and other rights groups broadly that that are here unfortunately we've lost amnesty UK they've decided that keeping the transphobes happy is more important than doing the right thing and and then there is politics big pee and small pee politics you you have been party activists and you you know where that's at party politics suck right now there I I think that those parties have let us down significantly and kind of maneuvered us into this horrible cul-de-sac and he even even understand what is going on no but that's why we have to do entryism and take them over and make sure that people who understand what's going on is running I mean it's polisky did that last year whether or not he succeeds electorally that was his plan right he took a party that's quite symbolic and still had a bunch of people who thought homie opathy was real in it and he turned them into a left party and and so

1:10:49you know there's there's we need to we need to occupy our parties and you know if there's one thing that moms for liberty and reform and so on have shown us it's that the stupidest people you can imagine going out for the most obscure seemingly irrelevant local offices you've ever heard of or more to the point never heard of can make gigantic material differences for the worse which means that there is power in those local offices and you know one of the things that the party suck at is they suck at wielding power like they just really have been genuinely very bad there they're really bad at you know you just look at how little legislation they pass you look at how meaningless that legislation and unambitious that legislation is or misguided when it when it is remotely ambitious but you know that that requires that we develop a theory of power that and you can start at the local level even if you think the national politics are a mess and the local level it's going to determine things like data centers and flock cameras and you know if Prime Minister

1:11:50Farage gets to send British ice goons into your neighborhood to kidnap your neighbors that's all going to be a local politic matter and then the third thing is unions and unions are as imperfect as everything else and the way that you make your union work is you occupy your union you take over the leadership and you make them do the right thing we saw Sean Fain do that in the in the in the U.S. where they they won the historic leadership election in the United Auto Workers and then they won three historic strikes against all three of the auto big automakers and then they synchronize those contracts to run out in the run up to 2028 so that they can call a general strike because all those contracts will be up for for grabs and they asked every other union to synchronize their contract expiry dates with the electoral season in 2028 so that's that's labor power and there's no substitute for it and it's hard in its sucks and Sartre was an optimist how does other people meetings are hard people who can quote Roberts rules of order or tedious fighting about who's

1:12:51going to do the washing up is a pain in the ass and yet there is no alternative to it it is the it's the hard yards that we have to put in and that's how we get there you sound like a mentor in your political methodology my trotchiest father would be very disappointed. Well yeah I thought you sounded a bit like a trot and your writing is very binary workers bosses and it still has like a very kind of almost traditional Marxist reading of society do you think that is still a useful way of understanding the dynamics between the technology we have today and the dynamics of technology that dominated society during the industry evolution. What I would say is that there are unresolvable conflicts not just between wage labor and capital there are unresolvable conflicts between rents profits and wages that they are they are in in a zero-summer arrangement and there is a massive division in the ruling class between rents and and and profits right now that is an exploitable fracture line that we should be talking about and you see it in things like the

1:13:57arguments in an AI circles about open source AI and and proprietary AI that is a fight over rents versus profits because the open source people are like what we would like to do is have the lowest cost productive goods on top of which we provide services and what the proprietary I people are saying is we would like to own some important factor production that anyone who wants to make a profit needs to pay us rent on and so that is a really important fracture line but as a worker you probably don't care whether your wages are being alienated and serviced to profits or rents however if you want to fight a divided ruling class you should understand that that distinction matters because it is by exploiting that distinction that you can build your power and is the voting class divided today you'd say yeah yeah between rents and profits right absolutely you know that is why there that is why all the AI weirdos are are going bananas about open source AI it's why like it's their big internal fight is open source AI they're like because how do you

1:14:59have an effective mode around open source AI if it runs on commodity hardware if it's a digital public good how do you enclose it and then extract rent from users of it and you know if that like basically the promise of open source AI is the promise of people who scoop up distressed assets after any other bubble right it's like you know you built the railroads and went broke I operate the railcars that run on top of them because I bought them for 10p in the pound from you yeah all of this stuff I mean it just sounds like the precursor to the first world war when you have disparate elites who have naked self-interest and aren't willing to cooperate but that's our mark success for caddy yeah but history has shown us at least for now that the workers haven't always come out on top and is it because there isn't almost ideological rigidity within the labor movement or is it more they're just they will unite and they'll come together again after I mean it doesn't happen I'm not a teleologist random an activist so what I what I do is I say like what is the move that

1:16:03gets us the further us the furthest up the gradient that we want to ascend that is available to us that we can see from here like which paths can we see and which and of those which goes most most deeply up the gradient and so I don't I'm not making predictions about whether workers will do x-wire said I'm saying we should try we should try and get workers to do x-wine said and and I I do think that because so much gets easier I mean think about the coalition government the 2010 election right and then run up to that election I supported the Lib Dems and I supported the Lib Dems because at the time I wasn't yet a British citizen and they were the only party that didn't want me to carry a biometric identity card and you know in retrospect not a great single issue vote but I thought I saw it as a proxy for a whole suite of issues around authoritarianism and particularly digital authoritarianism and my dad the Marxist got on the phone with me and said the thing you need to understand is that all of the forces that have dragged Tony Blair into this

1:17:07disgusting posture that he's landed in and made him and his party so disqualified for rule are capable of influencing the labor of the Lib Dems as well the difference is that there isn't a unified block to resist them and so they will compromise the Lib Dems as thoroughly and more thoroughly than they ever compromised labor and he was completely right and so there is no substitute in a world of class solidarity among billionaires for class solidarity among the people billionaires extract their wealth from there isn't and the fact that it would be nice if there was right if the billionaires were right and we could vote with our wallets a thing they only want us to do because they will win that vote because their wallets are thicker than ours then we wouldn't have to have tedious meetings and quote Robert Roles of orders and have that one guy he keeps shutting stack stack right we could just like solve problems the way we you know with the by agonizing the grocery all about whether we're going to spend 10p extra for fair trade eggs right but that's just not how any problems get solved and so in eastern Canada there's a joke whose punchline is if you wanted to get there I wouldn't start from here it would have been nice if labor hadn't

1:18:11lost its power if we hadn't you know had the same problem we're having with vaccines now which is like everything sort of works so we decided we didn't need it anymore and then we woke up one day and realized oh no that this was this was something that was making it work yeah yeah you know it would have been nice if the squishy lips of the Thatcher era didn't side with capital over labor uh as and and and if we didn't deliver to Margaret thatcher uh a majority that would have made you know Saddam Hussein blush and if we didn't then solve that by producing Tony Blair who Margaret thatcher quite reasonably called her proudest creation uh and you know if you wanted to get there I wouldn't start from here but here we are and you know this is why I'm excited about the post-American internet I think it's a thing we can do uh and I think that it gets us very steeply up the gradient towards things like labor power because if you can jailbreak the apps in your phone then you can organize all the uber uh drivers into a de facto sectoral bargaining unit

1:19:16against all of the the um bosses that provide you with apps to work uh and you can organize strikes that you couldn't organize in any other way with those workers and that you need jail broken apps to do because you can do things like everyone turns off their apps and synchronize times or they refuse all wages below a certain floor or what have you right like that's that is a very powerful uh change in the layout of the game board does mean we're gonna win but right now the game board is very disadvantages to us and so when we have an opportunity to reconfigure that game board we should Corey Doctorow thank you very very very much thank you sure as guys

1:20:23you