podcast friday

[sabotabby]

 Today's featured episodes are from Behind the Bastards: "Tech Bros Have Built a Cult Around AI" (Part 1, Part 2).  You can also read a version of the episode here in Rolling Stone. And yes, I know that everyone is almost certainly sick of hearing my thoughts on AI or hearing me repeat Robert Evans' thoughts on AI, which are not dissimilar to my own. In this episode, we also get Ify Nwadiwe's thoughts on AI, which are also not dissimilar to my own.

Why it's particularly good:

1) Robert has a uniquely strange background, being a former tech journalist, comedy writer, novelist, anti-fascist activist, and researcher into Bad People (including cult leaders) to be the closest we have to an expert on this kind of thing.
2) In Part 2 they talk about Roko's Basilisk, which remains the funniest thing that has ever happened, and I will never get sick of hearing someone (in this case Ify, who's also a comedian) reacting to hearing about it for the first time.

I think the cult analysis is especially shrewd, because I've been saying LessWrong, the origin of a lot of this nonsense, is low-key a cult for years. And also there is such a similarity in terms of the patterns of a tech hype bubble that you need some kind of framework to analyze it, and the cultic milieu is a good framework for that.

It ends on a weirdly positive note for BtB, which is that this is a tech hype bubble that will collapse the way NFTs did (albeit probably not without killing a lot of jobs first) and technologies like Nightshade, which are very promising ways to poison LLMs. It's rare that an episode of BtB leaves me with a feeling that "oh, this might be okay if even a few of us fight back," but this one kind of does, so it's also worth listening to for that.

Comments

[greylock]

Realated:
https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-companies-lose-190-billion-dismal-google-report

[greylock]

Or "related" as we used to say.
Tech is so good at bubbles.

[sabotabby]

Hah I hope they all go bankrupt.

[greylock]

They won't.
Unlike the Metaverse, or NFTs, or VR, or even bitcoin, or whatever other vapourware ideas have burned VC capital in the valley over the decades, AI has at least proved popular among the plebs, which means it will inevitably be monetised.

But it's a nice dream.

[sabotabby]

I guess we must be the small vanguard that makes it unusable, then.

A year or two ago, Robert and Garrison were calling for people to make the metaverse unusable and it seems to have worked.

[greylock]

The Metaverse was always a version of "We have Second Life at home".
I never say anyone creditable think it was useful..

[frandroid]

That's a lot of tech content coming from CZM where they usually do in my Leftie or Random verticals... :)

[sabotabby]

In fairness Robert and Garrison just got back from CES and have a lot to say about it. And there's a lot of intersections—Garrison was talking about drones and AI in police surveillance today, which is pretty dystopic.

[moon_custafer]

Roko's Basilisk, which remains the funniest thing that has ever happened,

It’s like someone read ‘I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,’ and their takeaway was the strangest one possible.

It’s like someone took the not-totally-unreasonable* argument ‘how will future people judge your actions?’ and then added ‘ok, but what if the future that’s judging your actions is an evil dystopian one?’

*(it still rests on the premise that the person being asked cares enough about their reputation after their death to sway their actions in this life – but then, a lot of people do care about that)

[sabotabby]

Pascal's Wager for incredibly high men who have never read a book.

[rdi]

This isn't the first AI hype bubble I've seen, albeit the biggest. It's another Rapture of the Nerds, though once the bubble bursts and the pieces land there might be some useful bits of tech left lying around to make things with.

[sabotabby]

Let's hope it doesn't further drive down the value of labour like the dot com bubble did.

[rydra_wong]

In this episode, we also get Ify Nwadiwe's thoughts on AI

Here I went: no it can't be the same one.

(in this case Ify, who's also a comedian)

And here I went: oh shit it is???

My only knowledge of him is from Escape from the Bloodkeep, in which he is delightful.

[sabotabby]

I have never heard of that, or him, but based on his sense of humour in this episode I assume I'd really enjoy his comedy.

[rydra_wong]

I have never heard of that

He plays a swashbuckling airship pirate rogue in a very silly and charming short "All Evil" D&D campaign.

More low-key than some of the other players, but manages some spectacular balls-to-the-wall moves in the endgame. Also starts a romance with Matt Mercer's character (whose character concept is basically "what if the Witch-King of Angmar but anxious and gay").

But yeah, you see why I didn't immediately connect him with "person invited onto a podcast to talk about AI".

[sabotabby]

Normally the guests aren't experts but people who know enough about a subject that they can give funny reactions. There's a lengthy bit about the George Carlin thing, so I'm guessing that's why he was invited for this particular one.

[rydra_wong]

Yes, my brain regrouped and arrived at "ah, okay, invited to be funny and to have Roko's Basilisk explained to him, not because he is also an AI expert", but there was a lurch.

[sabotabby]

Valid. At any rate, he is very funny and as a Not Really Comedy person, I'd check out his other stuff for sure.

[smhwpf]

We were promised R Daneel Olivaw, the Three Laws of Robotics, Data and Emergency Medical Holograms, and instead we get Lethal Autonomous Weapons System, ChatGPT, and bad plagiarised art.

[sabotabby]

In fairness, we were also promised Minority Report and RoboCop.

[greylock]

We are part the way there with predictive AI, always on tracking and buyttplug shaped security robots. And drones.

[smhwpf]

True dat. And also The Matrix and Terminator, so I guess it could be worse.

[sabotabby]

I feel like the Matrix was better, maybe? The simulation was stuck in the 1990s so at least you could have a steady job that was boring and paid okay.

[altamira16]

This made me go back and try to remember when I had read "The AI Does Not Hate You." I found my entry on it from 2020. Chivers was less critical of all the cult of the singularity people than I was, but he had a whole chapter devoted to "Is it a sex cult?" I didn't cover that in my review, but I believe it was part of the book. I think that the whole "Universal Paperclips" game came out of the thought experiments that some of these folks were doing.

The interesting part about the book was how the LessWrong crowd overlapped with a lot of other groups of terrible people.

[sabotabby]

It's totally a sex cult. It's a bunch of other things but sex cult is part of what it is.

I have had to deal with LessWrong people in meatspace twice, and neither one was what I would call particularly hinged.

[misyachnakvitka]

I totally see where you are coming from with this Roku's Basilisk. AI is taking over people's jobs, bc as my friend Liz told me, they do so bc HOOMANS don't want to work. :o And the idea of AI punishing us is terrifying to me. I won't set a foot in our local Swiss Chalet bc they have AI robots. :o

[sabotabby]

Do they really?

I believe that it's actually a social good to steal from places with automated cashiers, and apparently so do a lot of other people, because apparently theft* has started to cost more money than they are saving on staff.

* Really more like compensation, if you expect me to do a cashier's job.

[lastofhisname]

I tried to listen to a BtB episode. I got 15 minutes in and it was all personal experiences that I didn't really care about. I want to hear what they have, not...superfluous bullshit.

I dunno. Maybe I'm just old and cranky.

[sabotabby]

Oh no. I adore the banter.