The Last Good Day On Earth

0:00This podcast is supported by GoFundMe. My name is Veronica. We started our fundraiser for Mariah. She was a close friend in my heart, but she was also family. She was my sister-in-law. She unfortunately passed from a car accident, so it wasn't something that we were prepared for. Shortly after we got the news, I was put in charge of helping with the funeral arrangements and everything, and just looking at the overall cost, it didn't feel right for me to ask the family that's grieving for money. That's what made me go to GoFundMe, and it just became a network of people that were willing to come together to help. GoFundMe is the world's number one fundraising platform trusted by over 200 million people. You really do miss out on the opportunity to help people if you don't ask. When you actually put your heart, your soul into it, and you're like, this is the reason I'm doing it, it helps a lot. Start your GoFundMe today at GoFundMe.com. GoFundMe.com. The last word.

1:01With life pharmacy, over 100 local pharmacies nationwide that are always here to help life pharmacy, live better together. Now it's great timing to have Mark Little, which was today he has a new book called The Last Good Day on the Internet, and I suppose the timing is good because of what's been happening in the last couple of days with Donald Trump, and with all of those who are in the next phase, I suppose, of how the Internet has developed artificial intelligence. Mark, thank you very much for being with us. Great pleasure to be here. And Donald Trump is talking about artificial intelligence, or he, as he now calls it, super intelligence, self-regulating. Yeah. Maybe you should give him a copy of this book. Now, not that I'm sure he'd read it, as he strikes me as a one-page ban if anything, but are there lessons from the way the Internet develops that should be taken into how artificial intelligence has the next step develops? I think the one thing, and again, this is one thing in the book

2:02that I'm very clear about. I was one of those people who thought that social media, the last great warning a humanity had, was morally good, that it was, by definition, how to compass the Arab uprisings were happening at the time. It was democratizing everywhere it seemed, and I thought that would always be the way. I think, actually, Mark, you were a bit of an evangelist at the start with social media. The parts that were good were great. It made me a better journalist before I decided to go off and found my own company. I was definitely seeing practical impacts of it, but this idea that it will always be positive. When I listening yesterday to Donald Trump, first of all, taking this phrase, super intelligence, which has a very specific meaning for people who know their stuff, which is the point at which the artificial intelligence gets so good that it's better at us than every cognitive task. That's him looking at that and saying, that's a good thing. It's not a good thing. I think this idea that Donald Trump now has almost seen his moral mission, potentially given that he's under such pressure politically, in promoting the acceleration of a technology

3:05that he's even forecasting would be outside of human control. That's whatever naivete we had about social media, him taking it to that degree, assembling all these big companies around on the handful of men who have all the power in the world today, almost like hostages. That for me is whatever mistakes we made about social media, our naivete about it, this is on steroids. In fairness to you, I think you also haven't been an evangelist at the start, copped down very quickly for the potential for the internet to be used by malign forces, which is why you set up storyfall in then Kinzen was this realization that there were bad actors who were going to manipulate us. And it was also the concentration of power. Remember, I mean, these were the big tech platforms that had funny names when they started. They looked like there were minor irritants for the big companies, became the biggest companies on earth and still are today. And what happened, the algorithm was put in play. This essentially was subconsciously hijacking our worst instincts. There wasn't so much the social media, which in itself created democratic conversations.

4:06It was the power structure. It was the concentration of power and a small number of corporations which relied on the exploitation of our worst instincts. That this is happening again. But by definition, it's also even worse because the AI itself conferred their concentrate that power. So I suppose, you know, man, I'm thinking back to 2007-2008 where we knew that the financial crisis was coming but we didn't know how it was going to manifest itself. There's that same sense of bankruptcy because the banking system back then had their credit default swaps and all their fishy products. Now we kind of seen the same thing. So I think the analogy is better with the financial class of 2007. Yeah, is there artificial intelligence, I suppose, is here to stay? There's no going back in some respects. But will it be limited, either, if not in the United States, but by regulation elsewhere? I could have actually be regulated by the fact that they simply is not enough money there to under-as-not-the-ability to build all the data centers and provide the computing and do all the chips,

5:08which it seems that an awful lot of the proponents seem to think is guaranteed to be there in the next few years. It's a great point because it makes us feel there's no alternative, right? That the only real path to AI reaching fruition is to go behind the likes of the open AI's, the anthropics. We have a very narrow pathway at the LLM's and what we've done is we've forgotten. And I think this is an island is going to become increasingly critical in the months ahead that there are alternatives, that there are ways of developing AI that don't need to be in the control of these huge corporate powers. That concentration of power is unprecedented in the history of capitalism. We've never moved this fast, with so few people in charge ever before. There are alternatives. For example, the open source models coming out of China could get so good that they would essentially undermine the business model, which is already very shaky for those dominant powers, creating then another pathway for us to actually have technology that we can control. Explain to me, until this is open source, what the difference is, what that means.

6:09So that means that it's been happening since the beginning of the internet, the early software is where people came along. They made it better. They handed it on to somebody else. So everybody, no one owns the source code itself. They can improve it. They can apply it to any use they want. So it could be a small model in the hands of a medical researcher without control by the big corporation. So that's the difference. Now, obviously, the dominant models are Chinese. And there's a huge question mark there over that control. But open source allows people to put a model to a practical project, which might be researching some medical breakthrough. That allows for that kind of innovation from the grassroots up instead of domination from the top down, not perfect, but that there's definitely an alternative there. This podcast is supported by GoFundMe. My name is Veronica. We started our fundraiser for Mariah. She was a close friend in my heart, but she was also family. She was my sister-in-law. She unfortunately passed from a car accident. So it wasn't something that we were prepared for. Shortly after we got the news, I was put in charge

7:10of helping with the funeral arrangements and everything. And just looking at the overall cost, it didn't feel right for me to ask the family that's grieving for money. That's what made me go to GoFundMe. And it just became a network of people that were willing to come together to help. GoFundMe is the world's number one fundraising platform trusted by over 200 million people. You really do miss out on the opportunity to help people if you don't ask. When you actually put your heart, your soul into it, and you're like, this is the reason I'm doing it, it helps a lot. Start your GoFundMe today at GoFundMe.com. That's GoFundMe.com. GoFundMe.com. Indeed, you've mentioned medical twice. And is this one of the areas where we actually should be trying to embrace artificial intelligence as the next step that there is enormous good that could be done? And not necessarily just for people who are prepared to pay for it. Yeah, and in the end, you can't see, turn out at the moment and you hear these big titans of industry telling us,

8:11first of all, that this AI will kill us and wipe us out. The second moment, they'll say, it'll cure cancer. Like, we have to keep both of those claims at a bit of skepticism. But you could see rapid acceleration of the kind of research, for example, that could lead to a solution to antibiotic resistant drugs. It could lead us to better medical research on something like dementia Alzheimer's early diagnosis of a disease like pancreatic cancer, which right now is a death sentence. So I'm haunted by the fact that my lifetime, when I was born, the average life expectancy of an Irish mom was 69 years old. Today, the average life expectancy is about 83. So if we could do that in my lifetime with the technology we've had already, what could we do if we could accelerate research? Now, it'll come up against human barriers in terms of trialing and other limitations. But again, it's about the idea of imagining an alternative when we put research money into research institutions not into big private corporations. That's where this becomes more feasible. Let's go back a little bit step again

9:12and probably more relevant to your book. I think a lot of people had great hopes for the internet as a tool of democratization to give everybody a voice, to give everybody an opportunity to find out how disappointing is the two you that had essentially fell into the control of a small number of corporates and within the corporates to particularly strong individuals who have become almost as powerful as elected leaders. That's a great distinction, Matt, because I think the old internet didn't go away. Like the vast majority of systems we operate in the world today still operate on these open elaborate principles set up by people like Tim Berners-Lee. What happened was big corporations came down and put big shopping centers on top of that land. So in many ways, the old internet hasn't gone away. It's just been dominated by corporations. And I think right now part of we in Ireland have to be thinking about is almost having two contradictory ideas in our head. Like we are very dependent on these big companies. We play nice with them. We want them to come here and invest.

10:13We're building data centers. But if we're not thinking at the very same moment of taking some of this money we get from the likes of Apple and investing it in some sovereign economic strategy, that's all about this more open source approach, rediscovering that kind of promise of grassroots innovation. If we're not doing the same thing, this is at the same time. We have serious, I think, peril for our own economic sovereignty going for the let alone whether or not we're using the right internet or the wrong internet. So Ireland is faced with a choice, I think, more than most other nations right now. Yeah, you think your company's like meta and Google which are significant employers, Ireland and possibly more importantly significant taxpayers. But because of that, do we go and conflict it? If we have meta, for example, has its new app, which has been extraordinarily successful in its first few weeks in the United States offering a sort of an AI service. Do we really want to be in a situation where everybody has a meta app on their phone that they're relying on to recommend to them

11:15where they shop, where they eat? All of the things that they do in their lives. Well, imagine the political prices to be paid when suddenly one of these apps goes crazy and closes down the banking system. And we ask our politicians, where was the safety, the inspector that we should have set up on a national level, for example, bringing on the technical expertise in this country to sit down and have what they call and technical terms as sandbox for any AI application that goes on the market in Ireland and having that capacity to have some sort of safety compliance body to investigate and inspect these products. So I mean, we can do that and should be doing that without having some sort of European wide agreement. And the price to be paid, I think, politically that if we look back in a couple of years and say, why didn't we do it now? If we in any way are compromising that kind of safety initiative right now because we don't want to offend the big companies that are here, we will pay a price. And I think the political system will pay a price in terms of its lost credibility. We only have to look back to politicians telling us in 2007, don't be cribbing a moaning

12:17to see the kind of alienation that crept in when everything fell apart. So I do think if I was a politician right now, I'd have a little war room, somewhere in government buildings looking at that alternative strategy with safety first. Mark, I've known you for about 35 years and when you were a journalist initially then before you became a businessman. And I've always regarded you as somebody as well as being highly inquisitive and wanting to find out, but I've always been optimistic and tone. Do I get the impression that the last good day on the internet is making you a bit more wary, a little bit less optimistic than would be your natural? Well, since we sat in that office in the Sunday business post of both of us merchant key long, long, long time ago, I realized the difference between optimism and hope. And this is what the book is about. The last good day on the internet is realizing that empty optimism like having a lottery take in your hand is if I can use that phrase bullshit. Like that is a terrible way to conduct yourself. But the idea of hope, which I found in startup life, which is I believe in the course of action

13:18I'm taking to be right. I believe that what I'm doing every day to achieve that is good. And I have hope on that basis. So there's a great writer Rebecca Salon who talks about hope being the axiom of the door. You take down an emergency. We need a lot of hope right now, but we don't need blind optimism. And I think that's the journey I've taken probably since we were writing stories about a different economic system of different Ireland way back when. Mark, little great having you with us. The last good day on the internet. The last word with life pharmacy over 100 local pharmacies nationwide that are always here to help life pharmacy live better together.