What Freedom Means In the Age of AI [feat. Venice.ai Founder Erik Voorhees]

30:11And if that kind of diversity of thought is important to humanity, which it obviously is, we can't accept that future. So perfect segue, because this is what I was going to ask you about next. So my read is that part of why, again, if you sort of step back and look at the trend lines, big tech, technology as an industry has been getting more and more powerful, basically since especially the dawn of sort of social media, when all of a sudden platforms went from, you know, hundreds of millions of sort of engaged users to dominating big portions of our time, right? Billions and billions of users, algorithms shaping perspectives.

30:48I mean, I think TikTok, the culmination of this pre-AI was sort of the debate that we've been having around TikTok and what that algorithm does. But the point is that big tech relative to the previous relationship between sort of the private sector and the government, it's thrown it off balance compared to where it was. Big tech is obviously much more powerful than previous generations of companies. It seems to me that the government is trying to, that there's an inevitable, that there will be an inevitable push for the government to grab more power as a bulwark against big tech. And so you basically have this two sets of actors who are getting more powerful at the same time, nominally in an attempt to constrain the other one.

31:38But the outcome is just these much more powerful centralized entities all around, right? The net average power of a centralized entity that you deal with has gone up. You speak eloquently about how open source and decentralized solutions potentially provide a bulwark to that, especially with AI. How do you play out the scenario where that actually can happen? What is the sort of the fundamental determinant of whether that will help and hold aside regulation, whether it's allowed to? Is it consumer choice? Is it consumer education? Is it people? What actually kind of constrains the power of big tech, for example?

32:20Yeah, such a good question. I think the English language needs two different terms here for power. because the nature of power from a government and the nature of power from a company of any size are fundamentally different. When we say power of a government, a government has power to literally murder people at scale and does so frequently. Google doesn't murder people at scale or ever. A government has the power to imprison people at scale for their own personal choices to take away their entire life and freedom. And I don't really care how big Google gets because it doesn't ever have that kind of power, right?

33:06It's a different, like, a coercive power is a different thing than market influence. Why am I not scared of TikTok? Because I don't have to open the app. And I feel like culturally, we have removed so much personal responsibility from people that we've forgotten or lost the plot that someone can just not use the app. And people say, oh, yeah, but society pressures us to do these things. Well, take some responsibility. If you don't like an app, don't use it. If you don't want your children influenced by TikTok, don't let them use TikTok. The idea that we need the government to come in and ban something because we simply can't make the choice ourselves really betrays that we are becoming sheep under a shepherd.

33:54And I don't think we should try to construct society in that way. So what constrains the power of big tech, as you say? We do. I constrain Google by not using it. I constrain TikTok by not using it. They can never force me to use it. And I'm just one little guy, and they have billions and billions of dollars, and yet I don't have to use it. That's so fundamentally different from a government where they can do whatever they want to me, including kill me. That's fundamentally different. I'm more worried about how we constrain that power because I can't just not use the government. I can't, you know, I can't opt out of that.

34:35So that's, I think that's the crux of this conversation is that like those two types of power are very different. And if you constrain tech or corporate power by giving more to the coercive one that can murder you, don't be surprised when you end up with a society that is much darker. This might be the sort of optimist in me, but I do think that sometimes we're living through genuine big patterns of history changes, I think, right now. And in the midst of that, when you're sort of in the eye of that storm, things that historically will be seen as very short periods of time feel very long. And we're calibrating right now what we want our relationship to be with these uber-powerful algorithms, right?

35:22And it feels like it's been a long time. Like, we've been watching this sort of happen. You know, Eli Perizer wrote Filter Bubble in like 2009, right? The guy who founded MoveOn.org. And, you know, that sort of problem has gotten bigger and bigger and bigger. It's like, it's 15 years later. 15 years is the blink of an eye in the context of history, right? And if you take that sort of larger view that the way that this has to get addressed is It's just by people making different decisions in aggregate. There are some early indicators to me that that's starting to happen, and it's being reinforced by markets.

35:55And so here's the example that I'll give. Schools, by and large, haven't banned smartphones yet, but it's such an obvious thing to do. I think the analogy that I've often seen is, would you have let people bring a TV and a VCR and their full DVD collection to school back in the day? It's like, of course not. Schools have that choice and they're just starting to do this now. But the other thing is, hold aside just the schools, parents are starting to find the line that's not, you can't be in touch, but you also can't have free access. And it turns out it's like non-smartphones. The Nokia brick is coming back.

36:34Nokia is actually having a resurgence with this like nostalgia driven, you know, it's is becoming the popular phone. And like, I have a three and a five year old. And so we're a little ways from having to fully think about this. But it kind of feels like an obvious in between to have a thing where it's like, yes, you can text your friends and stay, you know, touch and feel connected. But no, you can't, you know, just wander onto the darkest course of the internet with with unlimited, you know, freedom. And that's like, that's, you see parents making those decisions that are different. You see schools starting to make those decisions.

37:07And again, like I said, it's very nascent. I don't want to overstate the type of trend, but I think it's reflective of what you're talking about, that there are actual solutions that don't involve banning TikTok. It's sort of, people are figuring out how to limit access to it. Yeah. Should the federal government dictate how and when children can use cell phones? Obviously, cell phone use for children or adults can be and is damaging and harmful if done in certain ways, right? It's apparent that damage can happen if used poorly. Does that mean that the federal government should be telling people how to use phones?

37:45No, like that's up to the individual people. And that's part of like what makes a diverse, free society is when you decentralize those kinds of decisions. And even though you say it's obvious that schools should ban phones. That might be obvious to you and is probably obvious to many other people, but others might have a different opinion. And I think that's okay. Like I think schools should choose for themselves what's happening, what their policies are in the school. I think parents should choose for their children, what happens with their children. Like this decentralization of property rights and control is how you prevent bad decisions from becoming systemic.

38:27Because as you said, like 15 years is a very short amount of time historically. We don't really know what the right way for humans to use cell phones is. And cell phones are changing, right? In five years, they might be quite different than they are today. None of us really know what is best for every other person on earth. And we should have that humility. And so while we believe we know what's best for ourselves or our children, or maybe our neighborhood or something, we should have the tolerance to permit different views and different beliefs. and that's why we should not outsource and delegate all control of everything in our lives to one set of politicians thousands of miles away.

39:03They believe they know what's better for everyone and sometimes they might be right, but often they're wrong. The food pyramid in the United States is a great example of this, right? That food pyramid the FDA put out and that food pyramid has been gospel in the United States for a few generations. I grew up understanding the food pyramid and believing that that was like pure science, that this is how you're supposed to structure your diet. And if you do that, you'll be healthy. And then over the last 10 years, a lot of people are like, actually, it's like maybe inverted. Not just that it was marginally wrong, but like the whole thing might be inverted.

39:43We should not trust anyone to control the lives of every other person on earth. That seems obvious to me, but I don't know why so many people struggle with that concept. So let me ask, this is another perfect segue. It's like we planned this. There will be a conversation on a national level about AI regulation, right? Whatever happens. In fact, I think that if Governor Newsom decides to, I mean, he might veto SB 1047 if he decides to advance it, it almost mandates that we have a national conversation faster because the California dragnet then scoops up every company that does business with residents of California in ways that become problematic, right?

40:21This was a central pillar of the opposition for many of these companies is that it's not just making a choice for Californians, it's making a choice for everyone, right? In the same way that money laws that are state by state create their own problems as well. As we head into that sort of national conversation around AI regulation, you obviously are sort of totally admitted and clear about being on a sort of fully to one side of sort of a set of philosophical and ethical principles in this. What would you want to contribute to sort of the regulatory discourse, or at least the underpinnings of the regulatory discourse?

41:00If you could sort of enshrine one way of seeing or thinking as part of the conversation that started the sort of regulatory discourse, what would it be? that the biggest danger is some kind of curtailing or banning of open source development in this field. I would obviously love there to not be any national regulation on AI, period. But it will happen, unfortunately, because people believe the government should regulate everything. But I think the most important bulwark against the bad outcomes is simply that open source be permitted. As long as open source is permitted and isn't And hamstrung in certain ways by certain laws that drastically favor closed source models or something.

41:49If it's just permitted, then I think the world has the tools that it will need to navigate any of the challenges brought by AI. The really dark outcome is if open source gets curtailed in some way legally. That's really what I'm fearful of. I have another question, but I think we shouldn't do it now. It's a preview for a future conversation. One of the things that I'd love to discuss with you in another show is we're sort of in like this first paradigm of generative AI where the modality is chatbots, right, and assistants. And we are quickly heading into potentially another paradigm where we're outsourcing even more of the actual decision making and reasoning to, you know, agentic systems.

42:40And I'm really interested in your take on how that amplifies or changes some of these issues that we're discussing here. It's hard to know because we haven't really seen it occurring yet. It's sort of like always on the immediate horizon, and it's obviously inevitable, but it's not quite here. So it's hard to see how that manifesting comes out. I think it's going to draw a lot of attention to how do you protect yourself from a world of different agents, some benevolent, some evil and many in between. And it might actually bring a lot of attention back to public key cryptography. And I think like public key cryptography is really the one thing that we know AI can't break or can't do.

43:32right like everything else is like ai will do that it'll do that it'll do that probably better than all of us um but it can't break strong encryption and so that that confinement um really becomes like a foundation on which humans can protect themselves and understand what's going on in their own world uh you know i i often think of things through the cryptocurrency lens and um when you have when you have agents running around the world but you can protect your own wealth and control your own wealth through public key cryptography then uh you really don't need to care too much about what those agents are doing um similarly while it's hard to know what if something is fake you can prove that you created something through public key cryptography right you can create a key publish that key and then when you create something sign with that key and that proves mathematically to the world that that thing originated with that identity of the original key and those primitives you can really build like a lot of um very honest uh honest parts of our modern society that have a lot a great deal of integrity and it's about like trusting that math again instead of trusting people or laws or regulations so one thing i think is clear is that we're likely to see a lot of realignment and readjustment, right?

45:01I think that right now we're in a moment where the introduction of sort of these wildly new technologies and different systems, it's not clear how any one type of actor or any one type of person is going to react to this. I think a great example of this is Zuckerberg and Meta becoming the sort of, you know, the loudest champion for open source AI. I don't think that's something that many people would have had on their bingo cards a little while ago. Zuckerberg recently also wrote a letter that deals with a lot of these issues that you've been mentioning on the show. What did you think when you saw that letter?

45:39Maybe give just a little bit of context for those who hadn't seen it. Yeah, I was surprised that this wasn't a bigger story. um zuckerberg basically wrote a letter to congress like uh three four weeks ago um it was both a mea culpa but also like a he was he was basically revealing to everyone what was sort of thought of as a conspiracy theory which was that um the government was pressuring facebook uh and obviously they were doing this with others to uh censor certain information during COVID or to not report on one thing or to not say one thing or to control the information that was getting out.

46:19And I think a lot of people felt like that was probably happening, but it was always one of these debated things. But he basically came out and said, yes, the government was telling us to not talk about certain things or to censor other things. And what was great and inspiring and he deserves a lot of respect for this. Not only did he say that, but he said that he wishes he had pushed back more strongly on that, that he wouldn't have been as compliant or as willing to make those kind of censorships back then. So that took a lot of courage for him to do that. And it's been really impressive to see, like, over the last couple of years, there's something obviously different about Zuckerberg.

47:02He's changed his behavior in some interesting ways. But this is obviously relevant for the AI space because people don't know what truth is often, and especially not in the moment. And if we have a world where AI is controlled and licensed by government, then when there is something big and consequential and controversial, the government's truth and facts and science will be what everyone is supposed to abide by. and when we all you know we all lived through covid and it was scary and confusing and difficult but i don't think that we would want uh situations like that to to have their narratives controlled by central parties in the in the moment like imagine a near future where the u.s is in some kind of like big military conflict with china or something um how do how would you feel if artificial intelligence was only permitted to talk about certain things in that conflict, like couldn't answer certain questions or had to answer certain questions in certain ways, would that serve the American people?

48:20I don't think so. And really what makes, I think, America special is that we do not have some kind of totalitarian government telling us what is right. We can believe for ourselves what is right and we can debate what is right. And truth with humans often needs to emerge through vigorous discussion and skepticism. So that letter from Zuckerberg was, I think, a big eye-opener, or should have been for many, and I wish it had gotten a lot more publicity. Like, why aren't people outraged that that was happening? It seems like maybe the media was just, because it was happening with all of them, and they were involved in that kind of censorship, and so they were a little embarrassed to even talk about it much.

49:00Could be. You know, I think Zuckerberg is fascinating. I mean, having watched his whole career, I think the one consistent thing is that he does pretty constantly reinvent himself, not in like a flip-floppy way in a takes in new inputs, learns new things, and comes to different conclusions sometimes. And he's one of the few people who has one of the byproducts, I believe, of the total control that he's had over Meta for its entire life is that he has the privilege of actually just being who he wants to be and making the decisions that he wants to make without being sort of threatened. So he's kind of been able to do things a little bit differently.

49:37And I think this latest manifestation of that has been a really positive one that I think a lot of people have been excited about. But going back to the broader point, because obviously Zuckerberg's sort of much more secondary than the point of the letter, you know, or taking it into a slightly different place, you know, it's inescapable that right now the context that everything is being seen through, at least in the U.S., is the presidential election. Have you been surprised by the level of or lack there of misinformation, explicit sort of use of AI to influence conversations? I think one of the biggest fears heading into this election cycle was that AI would be running rampant, tricking voters and trying to push them in different directions.

50:27What do you think, is what we've seen sort of what you've expected? Or what do you think about that whole side of things? I think the fear that society understandably has had over the last few years was that like deep fakes were going to be a really serious problem for humanity. And actually, I think it isn't because people quite quickly realize that deep fakes can look completely authentic and sound completely authentic. and very quickly everyone just built a skepticism. So like if you see some video come out that is just like unbelievably bad in some way, many people's first reactions are gonna be like, oh, that's probably not real, right?

51:08So like there's a healthy skepticism, I think, that limit the damage that deep fakes can do. And that's gonna be a learning process. So like it's society will have to learn to be skeptical of what they see and hear, which is probably a good skill anyway. um two is you know no matter how nefarious uh ai bots are i'm not sure that they can ever lie more than the actual politicians themselves like i watched the the debate a couple nights ago between trump and harris because i feel like it's important to watch these things and i just i'm just embarrassed for the country like both candidates are are not respectable people the amount of lies and deception just in terms of like how they frame the debate, what they, what they claim, what they don't acknowledge.

51:56Um, you could, you could go to, you could go to any like high school debate group and see people with more rigorous intellects talking. And these are supposed to be like the cream of the crop that democracy is, you know, brought up for us to consider, um, that we have Harris and Trump as like the cream of the crop of American democracy is pretty damning. And I think far more, far more of a problem than like what the AI bots are doing. Like the candidates themselves seem like the problem. There is a Joe Rogan had a conversation, I don't know, maybe a year ago now, maybe a little bit less than that.

52:36Everything's is faster with with Lex Friedman, I think. And they were talking about whether Rogan would vote for a bot for president at some point, whether, you know, just let AI take in all the information, make different decisions. And he was sort of, you know, for it, maybe a little bit tongue in cheek because he wasn't actually being forced to consider it. But I joked recently at a presentation that when that came out, a lot of people were super skeptical. And like the farther into the election season we've gotten, the more people I see being a little bit more open to that possibility in the future.

53:11Yeah, well, I mean, the bar is pretty low. I'd like to just be able to vote for like an inanimate object. Like if I could vote for like a FICA or an orange to sit in the Oval Office, that would be great. They would do less harm. They would lie less frequently. They would be less deceptive. And I would really know what I was getting. So I would prefer that as like an option on the ballot. So I think based on that answer, I have a fairly strong guess of what you're going to say. But how consequential do you think this election is for future development of AI in sort of the immediate term in the US?

53:53uh yeah i don't i don't know um

53:59i don't know i feel like the it's not consequential on the bigger issues and the bigger the biggest issue i think is the federal debt which amazingly wasn't even asked about during the debate um yeah i i think ai is so new and like these candidates it's not clear like which candidate is actually better for AI or not, frankly. I just, I don't trust either of them. I, I'm not going to vote for either of them. I just, they're, neither of them are respectable people and I would never endorse either of them for anything. I think it's a, I think it's a reasonable take. I tend to think that we don't really know yet where political alignment is going to lie as it relates to AI.

54:46It has not calcified and hardened into clear partisan lines in the same way that every other issue ultimately kind of becomes, you know, calcified and hardened into partisan lines. Now that there aren't indications of where it might go, but I think Chuck Schumer, when he came out with sort of a roadmap recently or not recently now, six months ago now, it was much more rah-rah innovation and we got to compete than I think people anticipated. I think people kind of had just assumed that Democrats would be pro-safety and pro-control. And it was sort of differently positioned than that. Although, again, it wasn't policy.

55:22It was just suggestions for where they go next. So I tend to think that it would be overstating the case that it's, you know, that either choice is going to lead to clear directions that the other one wouldn't when it comes to AI policy. Yeah, it's hard to know what they will do because they don't base their policies on any kind of consistent moral framework or principle. So I don't even know what the Democratic Party is today or the Republican Party, right? Like they both just grow the government. One of them acknowledges that they want more government. The other pretends they don't, but still keep voting for it.

55:56I don't even know what these parties are. Like Dick Cheney is now endorsing Kamala. Like the whole thing has just become such a circus. And unfortunately, like in a circus, you can just leave. But here we're stuck in the tent. So let's flip it around. Let's come to the other side of this and talk positively. Not for the sake of beautiful symmetry, but because I like, look, you're, you know, So as someone, I believe that it's impossible to be a builder in the way that you've been a builder without being on some level, base level an optimist, you know, or at least sort of have belief that things can change.

56:33What's most exciting to you right now in AI, which could be technological, could be the way that people are responding to it or changing, could be discourse around it? You know, what gets you hopeful, jazzed, excited? Time savings. Time savings. I think whenever civilization creates tools which save time for a given unit of work output, society gets substantially wealthier. True when the shovel was invented. True when we had a tractor instead of a horse on the field. True when we had electricity. All these things allowed humans to build and create what they want with less input cost. And AI does that in a powerful way across many industries.

57:23And perhaps the most powerful being like coding and engineering itself. Right. Like a competent coder now with with AI can produce just an incredible amount. And that is a that's a huge unlock for civilization. So, yeah, I I'm definitely an optimist on the on the world. and it's the savings of the input costs that make AI so powerful. And I don't think people appreciate or respect that enough. Often people are like fearful of it. You know, they think that like now that AI can do all these things, people won't have jobs. It's like, yeah, 99 % of people used to be farmers. And you know what? We lost pretty much all those jobs.

58:10Do we want to go back to that world where everyone was on the farm and had a job on the farm? I don't think so. We should not look at work as something that we want. We should look at the output as something we want. And if we find a way to get the output more easily, that's virtuous. Yeah. Listen, I am in complete agreement. Whenever I have this conversation, as it relates to likely impact on jobs and economies and stuff, the thing that always stands out to me is that the fear of job loss, at least when you move to the medium or short term, or in the long term, right? The short term, of course, there's going to be lots of chaos and transition and lots of pain and that will have to be dealt with.

58:55But when you look at the long term, it's like in a world where you can make the same amount of code with one-tenth of the effort, are we all going to say, cool, the stuff that we have now, the stuff that we built, that's enough stuff. That's enough creation. We're just going to use, you know, just do that, that one 10th. It's like, no, we're going to do 10 times as much stuff, you know, but it's actually going to be a hundred or a thousand times more stuff. And I think the entire pattern of human history shows that we have a basically unlimited appetite to create more and consume more. And that's, you know, that's never going to stop.

59:25Yes. Our, our base needs are somewhat limited, but our, our desires are unlimited. And, uh, many desires that we have today didn't, weren't even conceived of long ago. So like the human mind is an incredible creative spirit. And when we have more powerful tools, I think net, you know, that's, that's just good for us. Absolutely. It'll cause disruption. And I think, you know, while I use that farming example, the difference with AI is that I think these changes are going to happen much faster. So I, I don't want to be glib about it. Like there will be pain and a lot of confusion and struggle, but we should recognize those as consequences of civilization moving ahead rather than things that we should reverse.

1:00:09Couldn't agree more. Well, Eric, awesome conversation. Let's have you back again, and we'll keep talking about these themes, but always appreciate your time. Cheers. It's been great. Thank you.

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