CZM Rewind: The Academics That Think ChatGPT Is BS

28:18We have to have some inbuilt grammatical structures that language is latching onto. And there's been some papers arguing that ChatGPT shows Chomsky was wrong because it doesn't have the inbuilt grammatical structure. But one interesting thing is it requires 10 to 100 times more data than a human child does when learning language, right? So Chomsky's argument was we don't get enough stimulus. And ChatGPT can kind of do it without the structure, but it's not quite doing it as well. And it gets like orders of magnitude more input than a human does before a human learns language, which is kind of interesting.

29:00And it still can't do something as basic as putting the word fuck into it. Right, it still can't do that. Yeah, it doesn't even see, and it doesn't have the knowledge to say request more context, because it doesn't perceive context. And that's kind of the interesting thing. So there was another paper out of Oxford, I think, that was talking about cognition and chat GPT and all this thing. And it's just, it doesn't, chat GPT features in no way any of the things that the human mind is really involved in, it seems. It's mostly just not even memorization because it doesn't memorize. It's just guessing based on a very large pile of stuff.

29:36But this actually does lead me to my other question, which is you don't like the term hallucination. Why is that? Hallucination makes it sound a bit like I'm usually doing something right. I'm looking around, seeing the world as something like what it really is. and then like one little bit of the feature for a visual hallucination one feature of my visual field actually isn't represented in the real world it's not actually there everything else might well might well be right imagine like i hallucinate there's a red balloon in front of me i still see mike i still see james i still see the laptop one bit is wrong everything else is right and i'm doing the same thing that i'm usually doing like my eyes are still working pretty much normally i think i and this is the way of i usually get knowledge about the world this is a pretty reliable process for me i'm learning from it right and representing the world in this way so when we talk about hallucinations this suggests that um chad gpt and other similar things they're going through this process that is usually quite good at representing the world and then oh it's made a mistake this one time but actually no it's bullshitting the whole time and like sometimes it gets things right right bullshitting just like a politician imagine a politician that bullshits all the time if you could possibly imagine it sometimes they might just get some things true um and we should still call them bullshitting yeah because that's what they're doing and this is what actually pt is doing every time it produces an output so this is why we think bullshit is a better way of thinking about this or one of the reasons why we think bullshit is better way i think i also kind of think that some of the ways we talk about chat gpt when even when it makes mistakes lend themselves to over hyping its ability or overestimating its abilities and talking about it as hallucinating is one of these because when you say that it's hallucinating as joe pointed out you're giving the idea that it's representing the world in some way and then telling you what the content and it It has perception.

31:48Yeah, exactly. Like it has perceived something and like, oh no, it's taken some computer acid and now it's hallucinating like imaginary things. And yeah, just as you say. And that's not what it's doing. And so when the kind of people who are trying to promote these things as products talk about the AI hallucination problem, they're kind of selling a product that is a product that's representing the world, usually checking things and occasionally makes mistakes. And if the mistakes were, like Joe said, were a misfiring of a normally reliable process or something that normally represents going wrong in some way, that would lend itself to certain solutions to them.

32:33And it would make you think there's an underlying reliable product here, which is exactly what somebody who's making a product to go on the market will want you to think. right but if that's not what it's doing in a certain sense they're misrepresenting what it's doing even when it gets things right and that's that's bad for all of us uh who are going to be using these systems especially since people you know most people don't know how this works they're just understanding the product as it's described to them using these kind of metaphors so the way the metaphor describes it is going to really influence how they think about it and how they use it yeah just to sort of cap that off if i can there's one of the responses to some corners has been to sort of say um of us look you whinge about people anthropomorphizing chat gpt but look if you call it bullshit you're doing exactly the same thing and i mean there might be some extent to which it's just really hard not to anthropomorphize it i don't know why i picked a word that i can barely say um like we've been doing it constantly throughout this discussion right when we were talking through the kind of through the paper we kept talking about chat gpt as if it had intention, as if it was thinking about anything.

33:38That might be another reason to call it bullshit. We go, look, if we have to treat it as if it's doing something like what we do, it's not hallucinating, it's not lying, it's not confabulating, it's bullshitting. If we have to treat it as if it's behaving in some kind of human-like way, here's the appropriate human-like behavior to describe it. I also think the language in this case, and one of the reasons they probably really like the large language model concept, is language gives life to things. when we describe the processes through which we interact with the world and interact with living beings, even cats, dogs, even.

34:08We anthropomorphize living things, but also when we communicate with something, language is life. And so it probably works out really fucking well for them. Sam Altman was saying a couple of weeks back, maybe a month or two, he was saying, oh yeah, AI is not a creature. It was something he said. And it was just so obvious what he wanted people to do was say, but what if it was? Or are people saying this is a creature? and it almost feels like just part of the con. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It fully is. I hadn't thought about that as a reason for them to go for large language models as a way of kind of, I don't know, being the gateway into more investment in AI.

34:50Fake consciousness. Yeah, yeah. But I had thought about like how this might have been caused by just like deep misunderstandings of the Turing test. Right, go ahead. No, I want to hear this one. Yeah, yeah. So like the Turing test, I think this is closer to what Turing was thinking, but the Turing test is a way of getting evidence that something is conscious. Right. So, you know, I'm not in your head, so I can't feel your feelings or think your thoughts directly. Right. I have to judge whether you're conscious based on how you interact with me. And the way I do it is by listening to what you say, right, and talking to you.

35:30And Turing sort of was asked, you know, how would you know if a computer was conscious? So, you know, we think that our brains are doing something similar to what computers do. That's a reason to think that maybe computers eventually could have thoughts like ours. Right. And all of us think that. I think it's possible. Great. Yeah. I didn't know if they thought it was possible because not everybody thinks it's possible. It's possible. I just don't know how. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So Turing was kind of, you know, thinking like, how would we know? And one way we would know the obvious way is to do the same thing you do to humans, talk to it and see how it responds.

36:09and that's actually pretty good evidence if you don't have the ability to look deeper but it's not constitutive of being conscious it's not what makes something conscious or determines whether they're conscious or in any way like grounds their consciousness right their ability to talk to you is just evidence it's just one signal you can get and that's the way to think of the turing test So as a result of people thinking in a kind of behaviorist way, thinking, ah, passing the Turing test is just all it is to be a thinking thing. There have been, at least since the 90s, attempts to design chatbots that can beat the Turing test, right?

36:48And popularizations of these attempts and run-throughs of the Turing test that talk as if, oh, if a computer finally beats the Turing test, I should say what the Turing test is, right? Yeah. The way Turing suggests that the test works is you have a computer and a person both chatting in some way with a judge. And the judge is also a person. Right. And if the judge can't tell which of the people he's chatting with is a human, then the computer is one. Right. Because it's unapplicable from a human. Right. So people have taken this and it's been popularized as a way of determining sort of full stop whether something's conscious.

37:25But it's just a piece of evidence. And we have a lot more evidence. Like we know a lot more than Turing did about how the internal functioning of a mind works. Functionally, what it's doing, how representation works, how experience and belief works, how they are connected to action and how they're connected to speech and thought. And once you know all that stuff, you have a lot of other avenues to get more evidence about whether the thing is conscious. and whether it passes the Turing test is just like a drop in the bucket compared to these, especially if you know how it's internal functioning.

37:59The other notorious problem with the Turing test, and I think to be fair, Turing did mention this, if not in the original, then kind of later on. One problem with the Turing test is that it's like the Voigt-Kampf in Do Androids Do You Have Electric Sheep, right? Plenty of humans would fail the Turing test. Yeah, it is a piece of evidence, but it was never, as Mike says, it wasn't supposed to be constitutive. It wasn't like, if you can do this thing, you're conscious, kind of full stop. It was supposed to be, here is the thing that might indicate that being you're talking to is conscious. Happily, as Mike said, we've got loads and loads of other evidence.

38:32So these guys have made a machine that's just designed to do one thing, and that's pass the Turing test. I can give you one more annoying example. Are you familiar with Francois Cholet, the abstraction and reasoning corpus? So this is going to make you laugh. So he's a Google engineer and he created this thing called the ARC, the abstraction reasoning corpus, to test whether a machine was intelligent. And someone created a model that could beat it. And then he immediately went, okay, you can't just train the model on the answers to the test. This is why people, well, I say people, a fairly small subset of weird nerds.

39:08But this is why a small subset of weird nerds have been for the last 20 years emphasizing artificial general intelligence right and the kind of what we'll call it when something really is a thinking being is when it's not specialized to do one and only one task and but rather when it's you know capable of applying reasoning to multiple kinds of different and disanalogous cases on the one hand it does seem a little bit like the guy flipping the table and go oh for fuck's sake now you've won i'm changing the rules but on the other i think he's got a point right yeah if you're if you're training a thing to do very specific like you know like activate certain shibboleths then And unless you're some kind of mad, hard behaviorist, then yeah, like it's not, that doesn't demonstrate intelligence.

39:47It is one thing that might indicate intelligence. It's the same problem with chat GPT. It's built to resemble intelligence and resemble consciousness and resemble these things, but it isn't. It's almost like it's meaningless on a very high-end philosophical level. I find the whole generative AI, I think, deeply nihilistic. I do too. I mean, one thing that connects to this is how bad it is at reasoning. And this is kind of good for us, especially in philosophy, because our students, when they use it to write papers, the papers have to have arguments. And ChatGPT is very bad at doing reasoning if it has to be sort of an extended argument or a proof or something like that.

40:27It's very bad at it. I think also that if there's one thing kind of we learned from chat GPT, it's that this is not the way to get to artificial general intelligence. I was going to ask, do you think that this is getting to that? No, partially because it's so subject specific, right? It's one, it's trained to do one task and it takes quite a lot of training to get it to do that task well. It's bad at many of the other tasks that we think are connected with intelligence. It's bad at logical and mathematical reasoning. I understand that OpenAI is trying to fix that. Sometimes it sounds like they want to fix it by just connecting it to a database or a program that can do that for it.

41:11But either way, what you have with these kind of big Bayes Nets models is something that is really good at whatever you train it to do, but not going to be good at anything else. You know, it's got a lot of data on one thing. it finds patterns in that it finds regularities in that it represents those the more data you feed it the better it'll be at that but it's not going to have this kind of general ability and it's not going to grow it out of learning how to speak English have you heard the Terry Pratchett quote about it's quite early on he's talking about hex the kind of steampunk computer they make at Unseen University and it just has this offhand line a computer program is exactly like a philosophy professor unless you ask it the question in exactly the right way it will delight in giving you a perfectly accurate completely unhelpful answer right so if you abstract the justified shot of philosophy lectures there basically what intelligent things do is go you can't have meant that you must have meant this right chat gpt goes uh i will take a question as read i mean of course it doesn't have an i there is nothing like i've just answered formalized it again, but it's the same thing.

42:21And it's trained to do incredibly specific things, and you get the same problem as any program like Garbage In, Garbage Out.

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45:28So have you found a lot of students using ChatGPT? Because this is a hard problem to quantify. Is it all the time? I mean, it's a lot. I wouldn't say all the time. let's um you said you thought that there were more season needs this semester yeah so i think there are quite a few and sometimes it is difficult for us to prove and if we can't prove it then at our university then well shucks they kind of get away with it uh we can interview them but unless we're like unless we have like proof that you could take before like a court then we are we're not able to really nail them for it which is a bit of a shame so it's suspicion yes we suspect that a lot of them are i'm very i'm 100 on some of them i just know what are the clues i want to hear from all of you on this one like what are the signs it's the uncanny valley like i will not shut up about this right you know that um like you of course will be i imagine a lot of your kind of this really will be as well but the the uncanny valley thing in respect of humans is that there's a kind of a point up to which humans seem to trust artificial things more the more they look like a human so like we'll trust a robot if it's kind of bipedal or if it looks like a dog but after a point we really rapidly start to trust it so like if it basically when it starts looking like data uh some deep buried lizard brain goes danger danger this thing's trying to fuck with you somehow and yeah right and chat gpt writes exactly like that it writes almost but not entirely like a thing that is trying to convince you that it's human.

46:59I mean, the dead giveaway for me is that it never makes any spelling mistakes, but it can format a paragraph to save its life. Normally, you would expect someone who didn't know how to kind of order their sentences to misspell the occasional word. ChatGPT spells everything correctly and doesn't know what, like, subject-object agreement is. It's, like, it's bad. So can you just define that, please? Subject-object. The beer that I drink, right? Not the drink that I beer. Right. Right. Because it's interesting. It almost feels like there is just an entire way of processing and delivering information as a human being that we do not understand.

47:35There is something missing. I mean, for me, like it's very good at summarizing. But when it responds, it responds in really trite and repetitive ways. So like you'll get a paper that summarizes a bunch of literature at length very effectively and then responds by saying, well you know this person said this that is doubtful they should say more to support that you know which is basically saying nothing right yeah and that's pretty common it also does lists it formats things in kind of like a list and even if the students like make it look less like a list the paper still reads like a list oh because someone has asked give me a few thoughts on x yeah yeah yeah that's very depressing what about you things like the introductions you get um you'll get this is a interesting and complex question that philosophers have asked you the ages and this is one of the things we shout at students not to write from first year and then you'll get this garbage right back at you and then at the end it'll be oh overall this is a complicated and difficult question um with many nuances it's a world of contrasts one of the things we tell them don't ever fucking do this this is terrible and right back at you in perfect english uh the sort of english that you'd expect a really good student might have written but clearly they can't be a good student because otherwise they've listened to our fucking instruction i also i had some papers that i suspected were chat gpt this year but they were already failing.

49:13So I didn't think it was worth it to pursue them as a plagiarism or chat GPT case. So it's never good papers then? It's never like a first? Oh no, absolutely not. So I think that part of what goes on is you can get a passing grade with a chat GPT paper sometimes in the first couple of years when the papers are shorter and we're not expecting as much. But then when you move into the, what we call honors level here, which is like upper level classes in the U S like third and fourth year, I've got a first to have a wrist with. Oh no. Yeah, exactly. Great. Well done. Well done. You would not have gotten it with chat GPT because you get dropped in these classes where we expect you to have gained writing skills, minimal ones in your first two years.

50:04And then we're going to build on that and have you do more complicated stuff. and chat gpt doesn't build on that right it just stays where it was so you go from writing a kind of c grade passing paper yeah your f grade paper and it's also more obvious because the papers are longer and chat gpt can write long text but it gets very repetitive and noticeably repetitive right and so you're kind of lost like you haven't done the work of figuring out how to write on your own and the tool that you've been using is not up to the task that you're now presented with and so i think i have seen a few papers that i was suspicious of but the papers that i was certain of were ones that were like senior theses and very clearly the person just had no way of writing that's insane at that stage yeah i mean it's bonkers i mean one of the things that we get told about is like oh students have got to learn how to use you know ai right and large language models, plagiarism machines responsibly and in a kind of positive way.

51:09Well, if they're using them in a way that means they don't learn how to write, then it's not positive, is it? Like, yeah, it's fucking hard to write a good essay. Yes, it is fucking hard to write. That's why we practice. That's why we have editors. That's why we do this collaboratively. If you're using this as a sort of, oh, I don't know how to write, well, tough shit. You're never going to know how to write. That doesn't seem to need to be a positive use of any of this. Well, that's the thing. Writing is also reading. The consumption of information and then bouncing the ideas off of your brain, allegedly.

51:39Yeah, I worry about like, because ChatGPT is good at summarizing. So I worry that one of the uses people will think, ah, this is a pretty good use for it is summarizing the paper that they're supposed to read. And it will do that effectively enough for them to discuss it in class if they're willing to be. Yeah. Right. but they're not going to pick up a lot of the nuances and a lot of the kind of like stylistic ways of presenting ideas that you get when you actually do the reading and it's it's so frustrating as well because like for this for example i've just got to printing off things i don't read pdfs anymore because i feel like you do need to focus yeah there's some evidence that reading physical copies makes you engage more sorry i'm very old-fashioned i guess but no it's true though but also reading that, I wouldn't have really, on a PDF, I wouldn't have given it as much attention, but also going through this paper, you could see what you were doing.

52:36Like you could see that you were lining up. Here are the qualities that we use to judge bullshit, but also summarizing a paper does not actually give you the argument. It gives you an answer. So what do you actually want students to do instead? Because I don't think there's any reason to use chat GPT for these reasons like it doesn't seem to do anything that's useful for them i don't have no i don't actually have any use for chat gbt that i can put to my students and say here's what i think we are like kind of developing strategies for keeping them from using it so like building directly on what you're saying like in my class next year i'm going to have the students do regular assignments which are argument summaries and not paper summaries so the idea is they have to read the paper, find an argument, and tell me what are the premises, what's the conclusion.

53:27And that's something that ChatGPT is not good at, right? But it's also something that will give them critical reading skills, which is what I want to do, right? So, yeah, I think that I've mostly been thinking about ways to keep them from relying on it, because I think that often if they rely on it, they'll put themselves in a worse position when it comes to future work. They won't develop the skills that they're going to need. And the skills that we tell them and their parents, they're going to get with their college degree, right? He almost feels like we need more deliberacy in university education because I was not taught to write.

54:05I just did a lot of it until I got good enough grades. And Daniel Chandler, great mentor, but I've had tons of them. And it almost feels like we need classes where it's like, okay, no computer for this one. I'm going to print this paper out and you're going to underline the things that are important and talk to me about. Almost feels like we need to rebuild this because yes, we shouldn't be using ChatGPT to half-ass our essays, but at the same time, human beings are lazy. Yeah, I mean, for me, I also prefer to read off the computer, but I often read PDFs because I'm terrible at keeping files, right?

54:42Physical, like, you know, I'm not going to keep a giant file drawer with all the papers that I've read and then written my liner notes in. You guys can see in my office, they're just piled around. Like you can't see this end. That's academia. Yeah, but I just have piles of paper with empty coffee bugs everywhere that the camera is not facing. But it's the terrible system. So at least on my computer, if I'm like, oh, I read that paper like a year ago, what did I think? I can click on it and see my own notes. And I do think that there's something to keeping those records and kind of actively reading in that way.

55:16I don't know how I ended this without telling you how to make students do that. No, you started with the correct answer, which is don't use chat GPT. Yeah. I actually I've got a certain amount of sympathy with like just keep writing until you get good at it. But I realize as a lecturer, that can't be my official position. and I certainly think that it's the case that certainly Glasgow has got better over the last few years about going oh actually you do like we do need to give you some kind of structuring and some buttressing on here's how to write academically here's how to come to research and I think that's all to the good it's worth saying this started happening well before chat GPT started pissing all over our doorstep so they don't get to claim that as being a benefit there was the whole Wikipedia panic when I was in school yeah yeah the thing about Wikipedia right it's like I used to say this to my students which is truly one of the best resources it's absolutely it's absolutely fine as a starting point for research yeah absolutely no problem with it whatsoever but if you're turning in an honest level essay i want you to go and read the fucking things it's referencing yeah that's right and um yeah i think these things are often great as sources my worry about chat gpt is that it's not great as a source it's just yeah we've been saying it often gets things wrong and it often it'll make up sources whereas wikipedia will never do that there are some famous hoaxes but they get caught Joe have you got any positive things to say about chat GPT?

56:40Positive things to say about it? Big fan. So I know some people who have used these kinds of things productively not in ways that our students would but I know some mathematicians who have been using it to do sort of informal proofs and things like that and it does still bullshit and it bullshits very convincingly which makes it very difficult to use for this kind of purpose. But it can do some interesting and cool things. I think some people in that sort of field have found useful. And also, we've mentioned this before, if you want ChattoBT to write you a bibliography, if you've got a bibliography in one style, tell it to put something into a different one, then it's good for that, and it's good for coding, doing certain things.

57:25I also think, I don't know, I'm not sure how I feel about what I'm about to say, but perfect yeah i'm going for it it is a somewhat positive thing maybe for chat gpt which is that we often have students who have like really interesting ideas and well thought out arguments but for whom english isn't their first language and the actual writing is kind of rough and you have to like push through reading it to get the good idea which is often really there and quite you know creative and insightful and so i do wonder if there's a way to use it so it just moves off the edges of this kind of thing but i worry that if you tell students to do that they'll just first if they can develop the language skills they often get really good by the end yeah what are you going to say james i want to say like yeah you can see me getting agitated yeah i think mike's correct about like that this is a kind of possible use but i think this and this is why i'm getting visibly agitated here that that's students either need to or feel they need to use this speaks to a deeper issue right to a social issue to a political issue to an issue about how universities work.

58:30If a student is having problems with English, then there's a number of like explanations or a number of kind of responses, right? One response is that like Glasgow isn't English teaching university. If someone's English isn't good enough to be taking a degree, then plausibly shouldn't have been let in and why have they been let in? Well, because of money. Or alternatively, if someone's having problems with English for like whatever reason at all, there should be support here. There should be kind of tutors. There should be people who can help with English. But again, that will cost university money.

58:56So of course that doesn't happen, right? It doesn't happen anywhere. It doesn't have anywhere to the extent it would have to happen in order for this to be general policy. Yeah, I think it could be better. But I do think that universities often have like a writing center or a tutoring center that you can send students to. But they don't have the sort of spread that would be needed or the staff that would be needed for this to be, instead of using ChatGPT to sound the edges off. Yeah, I think my... To, for example, tour through with your supervisor. My worry especially would be that this is my first year here at Glasgow, but I think they probably have a good writing center.

59:37Universities I've been in the past, I felt very confident sending students to the writing center when they have these problems. But I think James is completely right that we don't want the universities to see this as a way to get rid of the writing center. And that's 100 % a risk given the financial problems that universities are facing. And maybe they're already not. Yeah. Like given the quality of papers, they're often good. I think another thing as far as this is like a social problem is that when grading, I myself try to grade in terms of like the ideas and argument. This is philosophy and not the quality of data.

1:00:17Right. But not everybody does that. So I kind of think that another part of this is figuring out how we want to evaluate the students and what we want to appreciate. in that evaluation yeah sure so then again the kind of that that becomes a problem about what people are checking for not let's take this arse backwards approach to marking which is like how fancy is your english ah fancy english is good english have an a but rather we should be kind of checking for different things right so again the blame lies differently in that case but it still becomes a question that's not solved technologically yeah almost feels like large language models are taking advantage of a certain kind of organizational failure what an idea crazy that the tech industry manipulating a part of society that was weak i have a kind of related tangent here which is like what are the use cases that open ai was expecting but didn't want to emphasize because for everybody in university as soon as this came out the first thought was students are going to use this to cheat and certainly like the people in open ai went to college right and that's what i hear about them so they must well sam altman dropped down yeah i'm sure he really understands the value of a secondary he's like i gotta write these fucking essays anyway maybe he was thinking i would have loved to have a computer write my essays i'll devote my life but i mean i'm sure that they like recognize these bad use cases right but they're doing nothing to mitigate them as far as i can see and like another one that's very related is like, you know, I'm sure you've heard of this, Ed, phishing, right?

1:01:53A lot of, you know, corporations get attacked and get hacked, not by someone cleverly figuring out a backdoor to their system, but by somebody sending in - Social engineering. Yeah. Asking for the password to somebody else. And one of the biggest barriers to that is that a lot of the people who are engaging in phishing aren't from the same country as the company they're targeting, right? So they're not able to write a convincing email or make a phone call that sounds like that person's supervisor. But with a tool like this, you could 100 % write that email, right? It's going to make it a lot easier for these kinds of illicit schemes to work.

1:02:33There has been a marked increase according to CNBC, which we just brought up. So 1 ,265 % increase in malicious phishing email since the launch of ChatGPT. Great stuff. I mean, if I could have thought of that, imagine what a criminal could do right but also weren't the people at open ai thinking about that like they don't care yeah yeah we've all seen jurassic park right yeah yeah they were so busy thinking about what they could do they never thought about whether they should yeah this is the kind of problem with the move fast and break things mentality like they're obvious i mean i might be the only person who was raised in the u.s but we had future problem solvers where you You know, you think about a future problem and what bad consequences there could be of some technology and how to solve them, usually through social cues.

1:03:18If I could do that in fifth grade, I would expect these people to have thought through some of the bad consequences of the technology they're putting out. And, you know, some of those are cheating on tests, and they don't seem to have worried about that. And another one is phishing. They don't seem to have worried about that, you know. And biases and algorithms, right? Yeah. This again is a, you know, it comes as no surprise to you, Edward, it turns out. So with a lot of the facial recognition systems, they were incredibly racist. They were going back to Microsoft's Kinect. They could not see black people.

1:03:50Yeah, yeah, yeah. And kind of CCTV stuff that basically just sort of, unless it was presented with a blindingly white Caucasian, went, I don't know. Right.

1:04:02The sort of stuff where these like language models are trained on certain sets of data and they're trained on certain assumptions. and like shitting shit out. And particularly if people think that it's actually doing any kind of thinking and if they kind of cargo cult it, we again get a kind of social problem multiplied by technology feeding back into a social problem. And it's the, sorry, these guys have heard me whinge about it so much. I love it. But I'm profoundly skeptical of technology's ability to solve anything unless we know exactly the respect in which we want to solve it. and how that technology is going to be applied.

1:04:41You know, like, sure, experiment with bringing back dinosaurs, but, like, don't tell me that it's going to save the healthcare system unless you can demonstrate it to me step by step how that big old T-Rex running around on Isla Nubla is going to save anything. And they just try to blind people. Actually, bringing back dinosaurs would be just good in itself. That would be great. Yeah, all right, this isn't the best example, but I already had Jeff Goblin in my head. I had to go to Jurassic Park, for example. Fellas, this has been such a pleasure Oh right, are we out of time? Don't put that in the recording Nah, it's fine We won't edit it in post And you will give us your names I'm Mike Hicks, but my papers are written by Michael Townsend Hicks And I'm a lecturer at the University of Glasgow My website is TownsendHicks It'll be in the podcast profile, don't you worry You'll get that?

1:05:32Right, just plug in my Plug your stuff My name is Joe Slater. I'm a university lecturer in moral and political philosophy at Glasgow. I'm James Humphries. I'm a lecturer in political theory at the University of Glasgow. And even if I wanted to, I couldn't give you my website because I don't have one. Fuck you. Everyone, you've been listening to Better Offline. Thank you so much for listening, everyone. Guys, thank you for joining me. Thanks, Amonis. Cheers.

1:06:06Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Ossowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at matosowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I.com. You can email me at ez at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat.wheresyoured.at to visit the Discord and go to r slash betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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