wx2026-0924 POSTSHOW Jacob-AI-dirty.mxf-podcast

0:00this is democracy now democracy now dot org the war and peace report i'm in the goodman with nermin shaykh as we continue our conversation with journalist jake of silverman his book is out this week in paperback it's called gilded rage elan musk on the radicalization of silicon valley interesting it's out this week with the a i summit uh... the tech billionaire a i leaders addressing the u.n. security council and now in washington d c president trump has received chinese president she and they're having a state dinner tonight among those attending that state dinner or mark zuckerberg of metta jensen whine of nvidia sam ultman open a i tim cook of apple uh... center pa chai of google uh... satin edela of microsoft leases who amd and elan musk uh... tesla and space x

1:00that's where we want to go jake of silverman because that he is in the title of your book gilded rage elan musk on the radicalization of silicon valley is you listen to that list of tech c e o's who be part of this a i summit with she and trump uh... if you can talk also uh... and especially about elan musk and what is happening right now you wrote this book a year ago well in the times that i finished the book it seems that musk has fallen out with trump and gone back together a couple times uh... what i think it shows even that uh... where a couple years now into the new trump regime almost uh... is that these tech leaders are able to stick by him they they find common cause and common interests and i think especially with a i uh... the authoritarian mindset i think comes very easily to the a i c e o's because they are thinking about changing the world at least according to their own vision which is often just

2:01communicated to abstract were to create a utopia or apocalypse but in order to do that they need vast amount of resources and they need sort of nation-state level capabilities they need unbelievable amounts of money land energy the chips that only and video and sometimes a couple other companies can provide uh... and that's why you see these guys like sam ultima who was very anti-trump i had a twenty sixteen election but is also very opportunity opportunistic person come around now and go to every dinner or public event that invite to a trump because the u.s. government can provide contracts and provide funding investment and might even take an equity role in open a i which is something that sam ultima has talked about so these aren't the tech companies of ten years ago these are ones that are much more like their own little nation states and need that kind of relationship with uh... authoritarian power like the trump regime and i think it's so interesting that you talk about these companies like nation states because these tech billionaires are now i mean they are dressing world leaders and

3:03uh... they will have more power than any head of country yeah in a way it does seem a a little ridiculous or discordant to me i mean i think their products and the power that they will yeah i mean it's not something that one want to see this i mean this is what we see here in the united states this fusion of corporate life and the white house including just trump's own business interests was as a stock trader and with his uh... world liberty financial another crypto interests and so it is disturbing i think to see these cios who don't seem to be great friends of democracy given so the sort of stage of the united nations and they speak in such general terms like if you think your your product might destroy the world will maybe you should stop making that product uh... but they are for to the kind of respect in even a kind of latitude that you don't see in other industries if there was a an energy company or chemicals company or some like that and their product started harming people uh... hopefully there would be a legal a regulatory response and right now they

4:06what the a i industry is doing is they say this stuff is going to get away from us and there's nothing we can do and i don't really buy that narrative in fact you've said uh... quote is a quote from you the catastrophic promise of a i has practically become part of the sales pitch in their ominous warnings of unchecked artificial intelligence escaping pandora's box industry luminaries can sound like robert j openheimer and the manhattan project scientists who wondered if a nuclear bomb test would ignite the earth's atmosphere could you elaborate on that analogy sure so uh... during war two in the manhattan project uh... robert openheimer and other scientists working on it with sort of joke or even bet with one another that the next test might ignite the oxygen the atmosphere and destroy the planet uh... of course those were much different stakes involving a massive global conflict conflagration like world war two but there's a similar kind of almost blight attitude among

5:09a lot of the a i leaders today and i what i think is very disturbing about this is that they see themselves of the inheritors of the manhattan project date and some of you talk about how a eyes of bigger risk than nuclear perliferation or the use of nuclear weapons and right now we see some definite negative externalities from a i and their ways i think in which actually jensen hangs right the laws on the books could be used to crack down on companies that harm consumers for example but uh... there also is this sort of technological determinism that they operate under which is that someone has to do this it's gonna advance on its own anyway and you should just believe our promises that uh... this sort of apocalyptic potential is matched by an even more utopian potential and that is you know that is not really good answer to a public that's actually worried about how a eyes harming people in the here and now whether through a i psychosis or being used in war zones i mean the bad effects of a i or something we're seeing right now and they don't necessarily have to involve the end of the world unelearned must i mean who you focused on and gilded rage

6:10can you talk about you know you started part two of this conversation by saying you know you wrote this when he was in with trump out with trump now back in with trump talk about that journey and also his companies and where he stands today from space x to x to tesla and his power amongst all these tech billionaires of course he's the first trillion there uh... well i think musk is very impulsive as a lot of us have probably seen and he doesn't he has his political beliefs which are very right wing anti-migrant anti-trans uh... but he doesn't i think have a lot of focus as a political actor because he's so rich he can afford to delegate or just say i'm gonna donate two hundred million dollars various republican causes but i think that's why we see that i mean he's a volatile person he's there been reports that he's a he's a he's a drug user and so i don't think it's a per-surprise when you see a late at night we'd have him saying that trump is in the abstinence files but then

7:13a month or two later he's making up with trump in public but what he is also is very transactional which is just what trump is he's the most transactional politicians so i think that's why you see these sort of combustive break ups and then they get back together because these are two types of people who can kind of operate in that same way i think trump appeals to to uh... musk because he's someone he feel like it feels like he can act through or at least uh... used to his own ends and i think that's why you're gonna see hundreds of millions of dollars from musk flow into the twenty twenty eight election and we're gonna end of the twenty twenty six midterms i should say and talk about what that means that you're gonna see a lot of sure i think it means that you can see a lot of traditional maga can it's with that kind of right wing tech backing led by musk and and you're gonna see these super packs that are supporting right wing candidates that are doing it with tech money and what we had in the twenty twenty four election was musk and the crypto industry which is the biggest donor by industry uh... supporting maga and putting a lot of money behind the trump and associate

8:16republican campaigns the only difference in the midterms is good it's gonna be a lot of the same people but now you have a i super packs and i think that's the main difference but we're gonna kind of see a reboot or or or another run around of the twenty twenty four financing of the republican and maga cause and illan musk's background and then continually you see uh... throughout the media that picture of what looks like the nazi salute of illan musk uh... at one trump rally when he was running give us a little more though it's uh... you know something you understand very well i don't think people really do about his background where he came from uh... i did a podcast for cbc can aim broadcasting about illan musk and we focus a lot on his childhood his political development me he grew up in a part-time south africa uh... he was sometimes political school he certainly had a a very uh... abusive father who who some of us have seen in the media

9:19who's now become a very strange figure uh... but he was part of the racial elite and in this in this society and i think he's carried this idea of his own sort of pre destination his own inherent elitism including of course his genetic elitism because he wants to reproduce as much as possible and that has been uh... uh... uh... something that he's carried with them through his whole career in silicon valley and as he's become more obviously right when yeah i mean he grew up in south africa under a part-time and he left right before college basically or he started a little bit there and they went to canada where his mom has citizenship and eventually came to the u.s. possibly through via immigration fraud uh... but i think that south african upbringing uh... is always going to be there that's that i mean must clearly displays the sense of uh... racial and genetic superiority you also see it now with how he talks about migrants in the u.k.s warning people in the u.k. that migrants are going to come kill them and they have to be violent in return i mean i don't know what to call that by

10:22kind of but the anti-blackness of a guy who grew up in a part-time south africa jake of in april you wrote a piece for the nation titled the death of an a i whistleblower can you tell us about such here balaji and what he sought to expose about uh... open a i data abuses a month after his interview with the new york times he was found dead with a gunshot wound to his head yes it's a very sad story uh... he was in his his mid-twenties he was an idealistic uh... ayy researcher and had jobs in ayy safety in what they call alignment which is sort of a branch of ayy safety making sure that these these systems work in in line with human goals and human values and you know there has been a lot of skepticism or kind of conspiratorizing the conspiratorizing around his story i did not look that much into the physical evidence but really tried to look at the at the case as well one it's very tragic i mean this

11:24is someone who uh... well basically blew the whistle on open a i appeared on this front page new york timesore because what he found which is what's happening at a lot of a i companies are pretty much all of them is that open a i was stealing data wherever it could find it and and using copyright information in order to train its models you know when i hear about open a i or one of these rogue open a i agents supposedly hacking into another company i mean i think that's relevant but it's also this is something control by humans and it's probably part of that search for as much data as possible so so so she or the logic lived in san francisco he appeared in this uh... neared times profile but very sort of innocent looking face young guy and about a month later he was found out of a gunshot wound i mean personally i i think it was a suicide uh... one thing i tried to talk about the articles i mean is the stress that faces whistleblowers uh... they're not enough protections for whistleblowers and they're not enough actually for a i whistleblowers who uh... chuck grass leave all people who actually is fairly pro whistleblower in some context that's trying to

12:27introduce a bill to protect more whistleblowers but you know this is someone i think had this big splashy front page article and then spent the next month kind of alone being under a lot of stress you still talking to friends and and family but uh... what i've learned sort of researching and studying whistleblowers and talking to people work with them it is an incredible kind of stress and fear and it's incredible it's not enough to just testifying a case or appear in an article it's a long trying potentially damaging process and i think based on what the physical evidence that that we've seen he probably did commit suicide but one thing i do also write about his parents who are very sympathetic people obviously went through one of the most horrific tragedies one can and they because the democrats don't seem that interested in this guy and so she or the logic story uh... they the parents have actually been involved in a lot of this conspiracy isn't and been been interviewed by a lot of right wing media talk from tucker-crossing on down and part of that is because this story kind of plays into the elan must sam

13:29altman rivalry so she or the logic obviously work for sam altman at open a i but it's i think a more complicated story about uh... the idealism behind some people working a i what happens when they see that these companies are just as ruthless or cut throat as any other american corporation and then how you deal with that when someone tries to blow the whistle and you know this guy's to share the logic this young man was definitely failed by the systems around him well uh... we'd like to go uh... to another person who uh... quit from a major uh... a i company that is to say and thropic earlier this month jay jay kirk conkson publicly resigned warning that the race to produce super intelligent machines poses an existential threat to humans this is jay kup speaking to pbs news hour last week rs i or a cause of self improvement is the idea that we could take the discipline of a i research as currently practiced

14:30and automated with the a i's were building so we could let the a i's make themselves smarter and we've already made strides towards doing that so right now a lot of the research that researchers at these labs do is via a i's that carry out certain tasks or experiments currently we still need the human to provide taste or judgment plausibly within a year certainly within within two years we're on track to also automating away this nebulous human quality of judgment so that the a i's can rapidly make themselves smarter and at that point things could go very very fast so we get new generations of the a's very quickly without necessarily having the the corresponding text uh... to understand what they're doing in control what they're doing so your response to jay kup conkson story and what his position is well i think we've seen a lot of this in recent years of researchers quitting a i company sometimes going to another one right afterwards uh... i think what we need to hear more c is really

15:32transparency to these companies i mean if they are speaking to us about these dangers we need to have responsible outside figures who and especially technically competent people who can kind of audit these claims and then we can figure out what to do from there but just this promise that they're building something terrible and that they can't seem to stop i think more alarms the public than anything else in in some ways attracts good attention to these companies yes so let's go back to twenty fourteen when the world ran out ground-based breaking physicist even hawking issued a warning about the development of artificial intelligence hawking had a neuromuscular disorder known as lu garrick's disease and used a computer-based communication system to speak he was interviewed by the bbc again this is twenty fourteen the primitive forms of artificial intelligence we already have have proved very useful but i think the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race

16:37once humans develop artificial intelligence it would take off on its own and redesign itself had an ever increasing rate humans who are limited by slow biological evolution couldn't compete and would be superseded so that was steven hawking world renowned physicist speaking through a computer he had lu garrick's disease so these warnings then about the risks of artificial intelligence are minimally eleven years old your final words i think actually their decades old because a lot of the stuff goes back to the science fiction that people like elan masquer other people involved in this debate grew up reading and what i think we have to understand is that these are technologies made by humans and hopefully control by humans we don't need to bring humans out of the loop and this idea of recursive self-improvement is certainly something to watch out for but you know these are systems and companies massive ones require huge amount of

17:39resources and which humans are still involved and human should be legally liable and responsible for doing this kind of element and this idea that might just suddenly escape all of us i think is a kind of an abdication of human responsibility and perhaps legal responsibility Jacob Silverman his latest book gilded rage elan musk and the radicalization of silicon valley is just out in paperback to see part one of our discussion go to democracy now dot org i mean a good man with their means she thanks so much for joining us