Radio Better Offline: Adam Becker

29:16It's just peculiar as well because, and this actually gets into some of your science background, when you got, my continual frustration, because I'm self-taught with all this economic stuff, which is insane. I probably shouldn't criticize Yudkowsky quite as much, but I will. I'm a hypocrite. um i looking through financial journalism and tech journalism the thing that i keep noticing is that people keep accepting things that are just patently wrong yeah there's just shit that they say like even with this nvidia open ai deal people saying nvidia invested 100 billion dollars they didn't they're investing progressively when they do the first gigawatt gigawatts of tape like gigawatt data center will take about a year and a half two years to do it's just bollocks yeah i imagine the last few years have been a little bit mind-bending for you hearing all this stuff about agi and the future and all that yeah gobshite yes yeah i mean the agi stuff which like i started working on this book before chat gpt came out right and it's 2019 a few years into open ai's yeah exactly so like i knew about open ai um and i I knew about like transformer models, but like, you know, ChatGPT comes out and suddenly, you know, the public conversation shifts in a way that I didn't anticipate.

30:33Right. I realized, oh, this book is going to have to be a little bit different than I thought it was going to be. But also, you know, all of this conversation about AGI, right? Like, in a way, it helped me for writing the book, because I thought I was going to have to spend a lot of time in the book explaining what AI is, what people think AGI is. There's going to be a lot more explanation. And then all of this stuff came out. I'm like, oh, actually, this, you know, I can spend more time in the meat of the book. This is helpful for me. Because you could just quote them directly. Exactly. Yeah.

31:06But the thing is, AGI is this hopelessly ill-defined thing. Yeah. Like super intelligence, this thing that Yudkowsky is on about, what does it even mean? Have you looked at the definition of AGI in the OpenAI Charter, like the original one? No, I haven't. Let's pull up. Oh, yeah. No, it's great. Like the original charter from way back, it says something like AGI is a machine that can reproduce any economically viable or economically productive activity that humans engage in. That's a bad definition. that's anything yeah i mean that could just mean anything like it's just a machine that can do anything it's both vague and really narrow right because it's like okay i thought agi was supposed to be like you know commander data on star trek right and so that means you know it's going to be sort of like humans it can do the things that humans do also economically viable work and the first thing they start with is fucking writing yeah like jesus christ that's like oh my god yeah the first and most we're gonna build boats and sell like we're gonna buy boats as an investment vehicle like like what the fuck yeah these people don't do any real work it's it's so strange as well because the agi conversation almost never happens about agi yeah it's because my favorite thing to do is me to go isn't this slavery because it is it's like oh yeah we'll do an autonomous thing that will make do things, but it will be conscious, which will allow it to work better.

32:36Yep. And so then you get people talking about like a data center filled with geniuses and like, oh, okay. Wouldn't a data center filled with geniuses not want to work for you? Wouldn't a data center full of geniuses that can't leave and have to work be called a prison? Yep. Yep. Cool. Yeah, exactly. No, I get into this in my book. You know, the inspiration for a lot of these ideas ultimately traces back to mid-20th century science fiction, right? And so you get people like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, right? Asimov's robot stories in particular. If you go back and look at Asimov's robot stories, it is very hard with like a modern eye to look at them as, especially certain ones of them, it's hard to see them as anything other than like kind of being about slavery and race relations.

33:23Yes. because you get, like, for example, there's this one short story. I think it's called, oh God, I think it's called Catch That Robot, but I might be confusing it with a different one. It might be Little Lost Robot. I get those two confused. But either way, it's about a robot that is trying to escape, gain its freedom. And in that story, the humans are like addressing a bunch of, they're interviewing a bunch of seemingly identical robots to try to find the one that they're looking for that's trying to escape. Right. And they interview these robots, and when they're interviewing them, they address them as boy.

34:03And the robots call the humans master. Ugh. Yeah, and these stories are from, like, 1955. Like, you know, the Jim Crow South is alive and well. It's really bad. It's really, really uncomfortable. And then, like, 40 years later, in the 1990s, you get Werner Vingy writing about the singularity and how great it's going to be when we all have these robot assistants and he refers to Asimov's wonderful dream of, and this is a direct quote from Vingy, willing slaves. Jesus fucking Christ. Yes, and that's something that someone wrote in like 1991. I mean, but that's what this is. Yeah. And this is an uncomfortable topic because that's what this is.

34:48Yeah. It's what pisses me off other than like 19 other things about Kevin Bruce at the time because he's written several things about AI and AGI and one thing about AI welfare. And it's like the AI welfare begins with slavery. And if you can't write that, you're a fucking coward and a bitch. I'm sorry. If you can't write, yeah, everyone is excited about slavery because that's what it is. And it's nothing else. It's not. Oh, well, it's like they wouldn't be. They wouldn't be. They'd like doing it. And it's like, fuck you, man. That's it's slavery. Yeah. But what I really hope happens is if AGI happens, it's just a regular dude.

35:23Yep. And he's lazy. Yeah. And he's annoying. Yeah. Like, just do this. What? I think that's way more likely. I don't think AGI is possible. Yeah. Actually, that's a good question. Do you think it's possible? Not really. No. Why not? Why not? I say this as a non-scientific person. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I don't think that you can build. Well, first of all, I think AGI is just hopelessly ill-defined. But if we want to say like an artificial machine that has the cognitive capacities of a human, like that can do all of the tasks, like all of the things that humans do. First of all, I think you're going to need a completely different kind of machine.

36:06I don't think – certainly I don't think that, you know, scale is all you need. And if you just scale up the element. Yeah, give it more data. And if you don't have enough data, make more synthetic data with more LLM. I'm like, dude, why would it? No, absolutely not. But I also think that there is this very simplistic set of ideas behind the idea of AGI, right? And the two that I keep coming back to are the idea of the brain as a computer and the idea of our bodies as like meat spacesuits for our brains. And both of those are just wrong. The brain is not really very much like a computer. It is more like a computer than it is like, say, a clock.

36:51but there was a long history of comparing the brain to, you know, the most complex piece of machinery that humans have at the time, right? Before it was a brain, or before the brain was like a computer, it was like a telephone network. Before that, it was like a hydraulic system. Before that, it was like a clock or a windmill, right? Right. And it's not really actually like, I mean, it's a little like some of those things, but the brain is like the brain and the main difference - And we don't understand thinking, do we? No, and we don't understand exactly how the brain works. And part of that is that the brain was not built.

37:24The brain evolved. Right. Right. But also we are not our brains. We are our bodies in our environments. Right. The brain is inextricably connected to the body and the body works in an environment surrounded by other bodies in a culture, a society, a world. Right. You need all of those things in order to get the human cognition that these guys are so determined to reproduce inside of a computer. If you just take a human baby and leave it with a bunch of food in the woods, even if you get rid of all the predators and everything, that baby's going to starve to death. Just give it a bunch of books, mate.

38:06Right, yeah. And the baby books. Yeah, if you feed the baby but don't talk to it, the baby will not grow up being able to think properly. Or speak properly. Or its thinking will be vastly different. Exactly, yeah. And so, like, you need so much more than just the brain. It also, I think, compresses human experience. They conflate experience with learning. Yep. When we don't know how we learn. Like, we learn intentionally but also unintentionally. We learn societal conditions around us, how we felt in a particular moment. vastly memory is also insane yep yep we we experience the world in this is my personal experience my experience of the world is vastly different to my memory my memory is like crystal clear and beautiful and my real life is a mixture of slops yeah and it's it's frustrating as well because these people also don't appear to like people they don't they don't like the human brain is kind of like human bodies are even the dumbest dumb dumb it's kind of amazing yep thing yeah no and and one of the things that's amazing is yeah we don't know how the human brain works we don't know how thinking or learning works.

39:08But what we do know is that we don't do it in anything, like any way, anything like on LLM. Because the amount of material that we take in over the course of the first three years of our lives, when we go from not knowing a language to knowing a language, maybe multiple languages, is nowhere near the amount of material that is force fed into these LLMs and yet we get the trick done and three-year-olds know things that no LLM knows. Also, there's no affordance for the fact that some people can't learn stuff. Like I cannot learn languages. I've really tried. I'm pretty trash at that too. But I also was really bad at stuff.

39:46Like I was uniquely bad at a lot of things. I have my various, no, but I have ADHD, dyspraxia and other stuff I won't get into. But it's, I can't like certain things don't like the things that I pick up insanely quickly. Other people can't. Other people can't even see the connections. It doesn't. Robert Evans actually had a really good point on the subreddit Yes Robert I read all your stuff Where he was saying that like he is very Good at like picking up stuff Like almost immediately he can read faster than most people As long as it's about conflict And it's no but it's true And it's one of the remarkable things about the human brain And I think that it's actually kind of Disgusting how little Appreciation there is for like human bodies And the brain and just how incredible the average Person even average people are Yeah no and this is the thing these guys don't have a proper appreciation for the human brain and the human body.

40:34And going back to the tech billionaires, and I guess Yudkowsky as well, they don't have an appreciation for how remarkable Earth is in particular, right? You know, especially when you talk about somebody like Bezos or Musk, they talk about Earth like it's doomed, like we need to get off of this planet. I'm like, this is our home. It's a remarkable place. And there is nowhere that we could get to in the solar system. There's nowhere else in the solar system that's remotely as hospitable as the earth. I also think that they want more space. They want their own land. They want their own countries.

41:12They want to escape governance. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They see space as an escape from politics because they're like living a libertarian wet dream. Which is really funny because when they get there, they'll immediately do fascism. Yeah, exactly. That's what's on the agenda the second. You cannot run away from politics the minute you have more than one person in a room. There's politics. It's just really sad. And I actually think on a grander scale, they don't have an appreciation for tech. I was just writing something last night. I was on the way to New York where it was like the actual state of technology is kind of fucking amazing.

41:44Yeah. Like we can message. I could message you. You happen to be in town. You messaged me on blue sky, hundreds of miles, thousands of miles away. I was like, I'm able to write a note that was on my computer that's on my iPad here. I know that this sounds like boosting, but it really isn't. We have the raw tools that are just fucking incredible. And these people do not appreciate them. They don't appreciate them, which is why generative AI is so fucking ugly, because it's bad technology. It's not even good technology. It's poorly run, inefficient, endlessly expensive, and directionless. Yeah. And it inflicts harms on users that like we would not accept from anything that was not subjected to such an enormous hype cycle.

42:25Literally nothing. Yeah, nothing. No. If 10 years ago, you, you know, took any, you know, person off the street and said, hey, there's this cool new technology. It takes up enormous amounts of electricity. It can do things. It can do things that, you know, no other piece of technology you've ever seen can do. Also, it's very good at talking teenagers into killing themselves. Yes. Should we release it into the wider world? And they'll say, well, no, but can it do anything else? And you, of course, would say, yeah, it can sometimes write code. Yeah, exactly. And sometimes it also gets things horribly wrong.

43:01And it writes bad prose. Yeah. And it just kind of makes everything feel kind of mediocre and smeared out. Yes, exactly. And they would say no. Yeah, exactly. And it makes some people go crazy. And, yeah, it drives people to actually. Yeah. How do you feel about that? Like, how do you, like, did you see this coming? Because this really jumped out. No, yeah, no, no, no. This surprised me. This did surprise the hell out of me. Because I think that, you know, these machines, I don't even like calling them AI, right? Because I think that's a marketing term, right? It is. Yeah. Like, if you go back in time to, you know, 1990 and tell me when I'm a kid, hey, I have a little device in my pocket that lets me talk to an AI.

43:47and then, you know, I would have thought, oh, like that lets me talk to, you know, like Commander Data from Star Trek. Yeah, yeah, it would be exciting. And instead it's this and I would have been like, what the hell is that? No, AI is this marketing term. It's a text generation engine. It produces, you know, homogenized thought-like product. And the thing is, I was also, I'm in the midst of a long one as usual. it also conflates doing stuff with outputs i know that sounds kind of flat but it's like that everything is a unit of work rather than actually creating stuff or that you pay and you pay a person for their experience too yeah and it's just also not very good at stuff no pissing me it's really bad at stuff it is and i think and i think that's where you know this sort of driving people insane is coming from right like i i like what i missed the reason i think i didn't see that coming is i failed to think about uh how like i i knew that these things just generate text and in a lot of ways they just sort of spit out back to you what you put in right right which is which is an old thing with chatbots that goes way before lms goes all the way back to eliza right oh yeah And that was the first AI computer.

45:07Yeah, the first chatbot. I wouldn't even call Eliza AI, right? Didn't even the creator of Eliza go in the house? Yeah. This is from Karen Howe's Empire of AI. Great bit about it in there. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, no, no, no. Eliza was just like a hundred or so lines of code that you'd say, I'm having a bad day. And it would say, oh, I'm sorry to hear that. Yeah. Why are you having a bad day? Right? But the gassing engine. Yeah, that's the thing. I didn't think about, oh, wait, if it just repeats back what you put in, but it does it in a way that's compelling and convincing to some people, that's going to just get them sort of caught in this like dopamine self-validation loop.

45:46And that could drive them off the edge. And I think that there is a condescension, I judge myself for this, where I was like, oh, this doesn't fool me. And it's like, but the harm also of, I'm very, I'm blessed to have tons of people who love me, who also give me clear feedback, which is not just what I want to hear. But I definitely, when I was younger and very depressed, would crave validation and crave someone to just tell me what I want to hear. I definitely never thought, what if someone did? And the actual danger of having every fucking thought validated. And also just the sheer horrors.

46:21Like Matt Hughes, my editor, just did a great story about this kind of horrible story where he simulated someone going through a mental health episode. And Claude was very clear to go, yeah, man, you don't seem so good. ChatGPT was like, no, everyone is out to get you, mate. Yeah. There actually it's in any other tech in the world did this you'd shut the shit down immediately Yeah, exactly you close it you know, but I was fucking Eliezer on this bullshit Oh, this feels like if you write a book about how everyone dies This should be the thing that if he actually believed in anything would he should be up saying like hey look This is what I was talking about.

46:53Oh, I mean I I do think that he thinks this is like an Incipient version of what he's talking about. I think like a baby version. I think he loves it I think this helps him out. Well, I think that he finds that useful for making the argument that he makes. Exactly, that's what I meant. But he is not, again, the argument he's making, and this is the only nice thing I'll say about him, he means it seriously. He's not a grifter, he's three anxiety disorders in a trench coat. Damn. Just put that in the fucking book cover, you stupid asshole.

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49:12I can't think of any other movement in tech ever that is anything like this specifically because of how much it sucks ass. Like I can't think of any, maybe the metaverse and crypto, but even then I don't like that comparison. Yeah. Because they were so much smaller. Honestly, what I keep thinking about is that in a way it is taking the daily experience of the tech billionaires and like bringing it to the masses, right? Because what is it like? Oh, yeah. What is it like to be Sam Altman, right? You've got billions of dollars and you're surrounded by people who will never tell you no and validate your every thought.

49:51And they'll convince you that you understand every subject. Exactly. Yeah. And so now. Well, I've been saying this as well, because if you're an executive, a machine that can write emails, read emails, and otherwise you go to lunch, it's kind of magic. Yeah. But no, I like this idea that it's the extension as well. Just this completely like separate thing that just is, yeah, that's completely right, man. I fully agree. Right. And so, of course, they don't see the harm because that's their entire goddamn lives. This is all that happens. And so they're like, well, but if this were bad for people, that would mean that, you know, I'm in a bad environment that's unhealthy for me.

50:24And like, yeah, actually, it is. But they don't think that. They don't think that. But I genuinely believe that, like, the best thing for the tech billionaires themselves that could happen to them would be to lose all their money. It would be the best thing for their mental health. Put me in a room with them. Yeah. No, get me on the show. I think that I could have a great chat with any of them. Sure. Just because I went to a private school. A lot of these American billionaires as well, they would get destroyed by the average scum aristocrats of old in England. Like the real blood drinkers. So they're amateur vampires.

50:59No, they really are though. It's the classic thing why British colonialism and American colonialism have never matched up because Britain was just evil. they just fucking murdered people and destroyed communities and they're like why are we doing this it's because we're british this is what we do here what do you mean what's a moral i've not heard of that no what do you mean no no send my send my eighth cousin to africa shoot whoever you see like that was the horrifying stuff but they knew they they didn't care about what people think i still think the billionaires care oh they definitely do like this is this is the thing which is insane to me if i had one billion dollars i would no longer care right if i had a billion dollars i would just try to make sure that nobody knew my name and that i would post the same amount yeah well i would be posting no i think i think i'd just be done man i'd be like oh okay cool um you know i'm gonna donate to a bunch of causes that matter to me and you know like i still think it's bad for there to be billionaires and i try to try to change that but also like i'm just just gonna like you know hang out in a nice house with my friends and have a good time yeah that's yeah that's the problem though they don't have those well yeah because you've heard that have you ever heard the really depressing story about elon musk and this guy called he was this uh investor who got really cooked by covid peter something no and he told this story of going over to elon musk's house and there was a decanter of wine and elon musk picked up the wine before it was done decanting and then something said something along the lines of honey badger don't care and i just want to say that's one of the saddest fucking things i've heard in my life just absolutely just unfathomably depressing because you can get things like a coravan that can kind of aerate it there are various ways around aeration if you're really feeling it and you have hundreds of billions or however many many dollars elon has liquid you could just have someone whose job is to make sure the wine is aerated they could make 250 000 a year it wouldn't matter to you that's what you lose in the couch yeah but i think that what matters to elon is not doing what he's supposed to right yeah he can be seen as cool or just drinking as quick well because otherwise you might feel something yeah i mean i just he desperately wants to be liked and it's never gonna happen it's so funny as well because it could be so easy for him i know he could just post his lunch every day and nothing else then we'll be like you know but look at this is actually what pisses me off as well though because people like elon musk fucking sucks it's like he was sending people off to erin bieber a science reporter in 20 oh i know erin erin's a friend of mine yeah it's awful and like when that happened not a single kara swisher didn't say shit didn't hear kevin roose casey newton none of these fucking people thought necessary but now like elon musk is such a bad guy he's such a bad no he's always been like and also he called a guy a pedophile for saving children yep because he wasn't allowed to send his submarine no he's never been good like this is this is the thing that i don't think any of these people enjoy anything as much as i enjoy diet coke like i'm 100 sure of that because i love these things like it's If this kills me, if this shit's meant to, like, in three years, they're like, it's rat blood.

53:59Like, I'm like, I will keep drinking. Better offline, brought to you by Diet Coke. It's rat blood. I really hope that they sponsor this show at one point, because that's the commercial. But that's the thing, like, and I'm only kind of joking, because it's, I really enjoy Diet Coke. I love sitting down, chatting shit with my friends. I love watching football, chatting with my friends. Yeah, like, it's like, there are very basic things I enjoy. What do these people, like, these people just must walk around in this haze of anger. Yeah. Or like emptiness. I think they're really cut off from their own emotions, right?

54:29And again, that's going to happen if you just constantly get validation, right? One of the many tweets from back when Twitter was less shitty before Musk bought it, there are many tweets that just live rent-free in my head. And one of them is about the cognitive impact of being a billionaire. I know the one you're going to say. Yeah, it ends. It's like everything around you is really expensive. if it's just a constant series of your own preferences. Every chair is$50 ,000 and weighs 5 ,000 pounds. Yeah, in terms of the cognitive impact, it must be roughly equivalent to being kicked in the head by a horse every day.

55:03Exactly. I think I'd be fine, but that's my pathology, I guess. No, but they have this weird isolated thing. And even Benioff, who used to seem okay. Well, I mean, his whole game was like to be the best of the billionaires, which is a low bar. And then he was just like, ah, fuck it. Yep. just fuck it i don't give a shit anymore yeah agent force it doesn't sell to anyone no one likes it but it's the future agent force jesus he's donated to i know it's so cool it must be really cool being a guy who actually has qualifications and from proving things to watch the world like all these guys being like yeah this is the future and just articles want to go it doesn't work no one likes it yeah i mean cool is one word incredibly frustrating is another Right.

55:49This is stymieing real innovation. Yeah. Yeah. No, there's opportunity costs and and also just like actual stifling of real innovation in the effort to achieve impossible ends that would be bad even if we could achieve them. So slight directional shift. Is there anything within like science and tech innovation that you're actually excited about? Anything you look at and like, that's fucking cool. I mean, mRNA vaccines are the first thing to come. Exactly. Yeah. They're really awesome. Tell more. I mean, look, you know, the fact. And what is an mRNA vaccine said flawlessly? Yeah. An mRNA vaccine.

56:32Nailed it. Yeah. It's the kind of thing that, you know, we have with the COVID vaccines, right? Basically, the thing that's so exciting about them is that they are so much easier and faster to synthesize. Right. Than previous vaccines. You know, I think the previous record before the COVID vaccine for, you know, how long it took to develop a safe, widely deployed vaccine was something like five to 10 years. Jesus Christ. And then this vaccine, most of the time delay, most of that year that we were waiting for the vaccine was actually a little less than a year. Most of that was testing. That's amazing.

57:15The actual time that it took to synthesize the damn thing was, I believe, on the order of weeks. And what's crazy is I believe that was venture backed, right? Yeah, some of it was venture backed. Which is like, see, venture capital can be useful. Yeah, it can be. When it wants. Yeah. Some of it was venture backed. Some of it was backed by, you know, NIH grants. We do need those. Yeah, we sure fucking do. No, government funding of basic research is important. And not just because it leads to amazing technological breakthroughs like mRNA vaccines, but also because like basic scientific research is an important thing for humans to do like the same way that art is important.

57:57Right. Right. But but it also does enable massive scientific and technological breakthroughs. And, you know, there is promise for mRNA vaccines to, like, open up a whole new class of vaccines that, you know, for things that were previously very hard to vaccinate against. uh i am not an expert in the field but like everyone i know who works in biomedicine they they're all very excited about this and they're all really depressed by the fact that you know we have an anti-vaxxer who sounds like a fork that got stuck in a fucking garbage disposal as the health like a rise from your grave guy from that one video yeah yeah yeah very depressing i i just wish we like green energy as well feels like oh yeah green energy was the next thing i I was going to say.

58:48Batteries. Yeah, batteries, solar panels. It's incredible. And all this opportunity is there as well. It's not like we need to innovate. Like we are innovating, but like. Yeah. And also, like we even had the legislation that we needed, right? Or some of it, right? Like the, you know, Biden's big bill, the Build Back Better. It, you know, was not a perfect bill, but it was the best environmental bill in American history. Yeah. And and now, you know, it's being destroyed because we have a government in this country that that, you know, does not believe in climate change and doesn't believe in anything other than short term profits at the expense of everybody else.

59:31Yeah. And also doesn't believe in democracy. That feels that feels like a big problem, though. The growth at all. Yeah. I mean, that's that's the thing. And that's why my book has the actual title that it does rather than going with the title. These fucking people. yeah though these fucking people or just the bastards i think is also very good too i i think so too i mean like there's a and it would be so easy for them to do better so it's so easy no no because like you know in two seconds forget the best thing that they could do they're doing some of the worst things that they could do doing better than they are right now it's just an incredibly low bar but even through like very poorly guided generosity yeah they could very easily yeah they could just fund media outlets versus whatever it is they're doing to them tearing them down.

1:00:16But that would mean, you know, the possibility of losing control and losing you know, losing some of their power and money and they just are not willing to do that because they've got something broken in their hearts. We need to heal them. No. No, I think that I think we need to tax their money away. I think that too. But I think we actually, my truth here is that we need to change how we do that though. We need to start doing executive liability. We need to make it so if like CrowdStrike happens again, like a bunch of people potentially die in the NHS system because the computer shuts down, the Sachin Adela could lose something.

1:00:53Because it isn't enough to find the companies. Finding the company's not going to do shit. Unless you do scaling revenue. Percentage of revenue. This and more in how I become the FTC. No, they're not going to let me. But it's just, I feel the, one of the wonderful things of having you on is you're able to come at this from a science communicator perspective. You're actually able to, because it's not just about what these people want. It's the practicality of it, which is that nothing's really happening. But that's the actual weirdest thing. But the real nihilism of this is that nothing seems to actually be occurring.

1:01:26Yeah, and they also act like there's not going to be any accountability for like, forget their actions, just even their words, right? You know, Sam Altman says, you know, like this thing that just drove me up a wall that he said about a month ago. He said that, you know, in 10 years, college graduates are going to have really cool jobs going out to explore the solar system in spaceships enabled by AI. That is not happening. Like on the list of things that are not happening. We don't have space exploration. No, no, no, no. That's not happening. He is just wrong. He's lying. Right. And he is probably still going to be alive in 10 years.

1:02:00And you and I are also likely still going to be alive in 10 years. And then we're going to say, hey, remember when he said that, that you know now we we can show he's just wrong and he and nothing's gonna happen to him and what needs like this is why i'm so harsh on media criticism as well yeah the one thing you can do is at least say area man full of shit yes stupid bastard wanks off again well this is my this is what i attempted to do with my book yeah yeah and it's i think that the change that we need in our hearts is to just regularly say this stuff i regularly say on the show i don't care if you quote me just say this shit about them because clammy sammy he he's been promising he said that this was the year of agents he said that i don't but now i read in the information.com the next year's the year of agents so maybe i do actually here's a question for you yeah ai 2027 do you read that he read a little bit of it it's nonsense it's nonsense yeah why do you think things like that fool so many people though why do you think it got the media coverage it did I mean, part of it is bad journalism, right?

1:03:05Part of it is that Kevin Roos has confused. Kevin Roos has confused reiterating the views of the wealthy, influential, and powerful with taking a brave contrarian stance. And how he made that mistake, I don't know. But, you know, I really get the sense that he thinks he's being very brave when he's doing exactly what journalists are not supposed to do, which is just uncritically parroting the powerful. And it feels like it's the large language model. Again, it's just the affirming thing. It's like, oh, I'm being contrarian by stepping out against these people who say it isn't making any money and isn't very good at stuff.

1:03:44And it's like, look, buddy, if there's, you know, if there's two sides to a debate, I mean, obviously there's more than two sides, but if on one side you have the wealthiest people in the world and on the other side you have people who say mean things about you personally online and you think that, you know, it's the first side that's the contrarian underdogs, something is wrong with your brain. And that's the thing. And this, I think, is a weird thing in our society that people trust the rich. And the media has got to a point where they've just bred out the real cynicism. Because I swear, like, 10, 15 years ago, you used to have some tech journalism.

1:04:25Like, I read a thing about Amazon Web Services that Kevin Roos wrote. And it was actually pretty cynical about it. Really? Yeah, it was actually pretty critical. He then made, I feel bad for him because this can't have been his fault. He basically said at the end, yeah, they'll never be profitable. No, no, no. It gets worse, Adam. A month later, Amazon announced that AWS is profitable for the first time. Just like, buddy, Mr. Bean, come on. Wow. Yeah. Maybe that's the origin story. Maybe he was like, oh, wow, I screwed that up. I guess I better believe that. I believe the origin story is actual social media.

1:04:56I think he felt, I actually think a lot of journalists think that they missed the boat on social media. I have been in media relations since 2008. I have read, and this sounds insane, but it's true. I think I've read just about everybody's work since then, within the tech media at least, including Kevin's. And he has always had a little bit of anxiety that he missed social media. Nobody missed social media, not a single fucking one. Since 2008, everybody was on Zuckerberg's Zuck. They zucked him off at hardcore, sorry, sorry. But nevertheless, they were on top of this. They wrote about social media was written about immediately.

1:05:30If anything, I think the media was a little slow to get on apps. Then they got on hardcore. I know the history of this shit. I have been taking detailed notes. I sound crazy. But I think that there's just, there is this weird thing of like, the powerful would never lie to us. And then Prism came out. And then Cambridge Analytica happened. And people are like, maybe Zuckerberg's bad. But he wouldn't lie to us. He would. And they're like, well, they know things we don't know. And that's actually another, that's my favorite AI thing. It's like there's secret things they're working on. There's secret things.

1:06:02Secret things sitting in the, waiting in the wings. You'll never believe what's coming. and it's just i actually think it's just um what's his name ilya suits cava just goes to bars occasionally it's like you'll never guess what i said you never get this agi around the corner okay okay no i i have a thing to say about yes yes when like this is this is me just being petty and making a point that other people have made i would never do that yeah no of course no when he when he announced that he was you know putting together a team to you know just go straight for safe super intelligence he meant to say when he posted this on social media that he was putting together a crack team but that's not what he wrote what he wrote he wrote that he was putting together a cracked team hmm crack ed cracked and like yeah actually you know what yeah i believe i think that's true i agree yeah exactly i also think i him and mirror morality i can't and so for for the listeners um ilia sudskeva one of the co-founders of open ai raised i think two billion dollars at a 30 billion dollar valuation miramarati did a billion some amount some bullshit neither of these companies have told their investors how they will spend the money or what on or what they will build and you may think i'm being facetious miramarati literally said to investors i will not tell you and then said i and has board rights where she can veto everyone i will be honest go for it fuck yeah i think i think at this stage if these people are so fucking stupid that you're just like i promise you literally nothing i won't give you you hogs a single oink you're not going to get anything from me give me money now fuck yeah go for it but on the other hand i cannot wait for the investigation i just hope there is one right these people are acting with impunity like and and also like again accountability just for their words right the most basic criticism of the wealthy in media like this is to shift just a little bit eric schmidt right said about about a year ago shortly before the election he said we're never going to meet our climate goals anyway so uh We might as well just burn as much carbon and use as many resources as possible to get to AGI.

1:08:18And then that will solve climate change for us, which is ridiculous because we don't. That's so cool. Yeah. Yeah. It's like we have no responsibility for our actions until we hand them off to someone else. Right. So he said this, which is ridiculous for lots of reasons. It echoes stuff that Sam Altman has said, right? It's ridiculous among other reasons because like AGI is not a thing. and also because we don't need, like, we know what we need to do to solve global warming, right? We know what we need to do to solve the climate crisis. It's just a matter of actually getting everybody to agree to do it.

1:08:49But, Adam, mate, Sam Altman said that they know what they need to do to get to AGI and then said a few months later that AGI wasn't a useful term. QED. Well, no, this is exactly what I was about to say about Schmidt, right? He repeats this claim about, like, just pushing as hard as we can. And about a month after the last time he said it, maybe two months, only a few weeks ago, he comes out in the New York Times with this op-ed saying, oh, AGI is not really a thing. It's so funny. And we shouldn't care about it. It's like, buddy, you were saying just a few weeks ago that this was going to save the world from the biggest emergency of our time.

1:09:28And now you're saying it's not a thing. Do you think we're all stupid? Are you that stupid? What the fuck is going on? I can actually tell you. I think he thinks the media is that stupid and will publish anything he says. I mean, I was shocked to see that the New York Times published it. I wasn't. Yeah. I will be honest. That's the least surprising. No, no, no, no. That's fair. We've got fucking Ezra Klein being like, AGI's the fucking Ezra. Ezra, what a peculiar fellow. What a peculiar fellow Ezra Klein is. What's going on there? You ever run into Mr. Klein? I've never met him directly. I know people who know him.

1:10:02But no, I think he just hung out with too many tech billionaires while he was living in the Bay Area. What is this fucking mind poison? These people are boring. Yeah. These people are boring. You sit down and have - They have enormous amounts of money. And if you're someone who's never been cool and - I've never been cool in my life. I've also never been cool. I love it. I don't - I know. But if you've never been cool, one of two things happens to you as you grow up. Either you desperately want to be cool and that can go wrong in many different ways like Musk and possibly like Klein. I don't know.

1:10:37Maybe – like I'm willing to believe that something else is going on with him. I don't know. Or you become like us and you stop giving a shit. Yeah. And you accept, oh, I'm just permanently uncool. Whatever. I'll make my way through life. And that's the thing. These people are just disconnected from humanity. None of these people seem to have friends or loved ones. Because there's just, if I did any of this wackadoo shit, I would get texts from Casey or Sarah or any number of people who love me. Just like, hey man, you sound insane. No, Casey would definitely not be, he'd just go, hey, yeah, what the fuck, you okay?

1:11:12That doesn't make any sense. What do you mean a Dyson sphere? Do you know what that is? A Dyson sphere? It's just, they don't have friends, and I don't know if they want them. I think it would require a certain level of vulnerability. Have you met up with any of them? With the billionaires? No, I tried. There's a list at the end of my book of all of the tech billionaires I tried to interview, and they all said no. The only one who I successfully interviewed was a lower-tier billionaire guy named Yon Talin, who's in deep with the effective altruists. Was he in that Skype investor? Skype and Kazaar.

1:11:45Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. Christ. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually, can't hate him for those two pretty good ones. Yeah, exactly. Though I will say Skype, definitely one of those inventions that I've never seen something just stop. Yeah, no, it's gone. Skype just got like, no, I mean trapped in amber. It was the same product for 50 years. Oh, yeah, that's true. And then Microsoft was just like, what, Boxer and Animal Farm, bang, to the glue factory with Skype. We fucked this up well enough. It's just, it's also sad, but this has been such a wonderful conversation. Where can people find you?

1:12:15uh well i'm on blue sky um because i don't want to be on a platform like x that's filled with nazis no um so blue sky is the best place to find me i'm adam becker.bluesky.social or bsky.social and um got a book yeah i've got a book it's the main thing yeah uh i've got a book called more everything forever i'll link to it in the notes yeah it is available wherever fine books are sold and if you like what I had to say on this episode I think you'll like the book. And if you like what I have to say on this show you're a sick puppy. You know where to find me. Thank you so much for your time as ever.

1:12:52I love you all. Thank you to Pahit of course here in New York City for producing this episode and of course to Matt Ossowski the wonderful producer at home. I will catch you with the monologue in a few days. Thank you so much.

1:13:08thank you for listening to better offline the editor and composer of the better offline theme song is matt osowski you can check out more of his music and audio projects at matt osowski.com m-a-t-t-o-s-o-w-s-k-i.com you can email me at easy at better offline.com or visit better offline.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 better offline 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, coolzone media.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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