Mark Little on big tech, AI’s impact, and nostalgia for simpler times

24:51It was an apartment. It was a three-bedroom apartment. I was very lucky. And I bought my first house, but I suppose I did, I got on the ladder. Now, I was 29, 30. Like, that's impossible for my children. It's impossible for them to imagine that it might be normal. It's not going to be normal. Well, there's a bigger reality behind this. When we were setting out 29, 30, looking ahead at the next 30 years, It was an unimaginably long period of time. We're living in a period of history that is accelerating beyond all human experience. It's no, you know, over generalization to say that everyone in life today in the world is going to live through more change in their lifetime than any generation since the history of human civilization.

25:32Like it took 50 years for the internet to have its full effect, 20 years for social media, three years and a gender of AI is now in our lives. So that's the backdrop. It's not about any single issue. It's the fact that they have no idea what's going to happen in two or three years. What's going to happen when AI takes away all those trainee positions that graduates used to get? That could be happening in the next year or two years. Within a very short period of time, the vast majority of content on the internet will be artificial. So everything that's happening right now, aside from the specific issues like jobs or climate, it's the speed that's so unprecedented.

26:07So it used to be that you get from being born to die not too long ago and nothing would have changed in the world. Today, it's Tuesday, it's going to change by this evening. So that speed, I think, is the broader thing that's messing with the brains of a certain generation. Is it going, is it too fast for our brain? Oh yeah, absolutely. So we're not really hardwired for this. We're not. I mean, we're basically living with three realities. We have like 19th century democracy and we've got 21st century technology and our brains are still in the cave. like we still have those mindsets in the back of our brain fight or flight and they're being triggered every time yeah we're walking out into an environment we're hormonal creatures yeah we are and also we have our prefrontal quarters our brains have a computer but the back of the brain the lizard brain will take that over and social media is designed not to appeal to your computer it's a lizard yeah yeah and to your hormones and whatever you're feeling yourself and the speed of all of that and the lack of security and I think there's a A song I always think about is Bo Burnham's Funny Feeling.

27:07He's a millennial, but I think it's kind of become a bit of a Gen Z anthem, talking about the contradictions in life, you know, where we're living in happiness and abundance, and yet the water's flapping on their shores from climate change. So just think about that reality for younger people. They have every right to be angry, but when I take my jump into the first next five years, they're really resilient. Like anybody's dealt with anxiety in their life, Think of what happened to you. You had a trigger. You had a very, very bad time. You might have had depression. The only way out of it was being more intentional, mindful, making choices that were better for you, thinking before you acted.

27:47And I think this generation are like any individual who's gone through anxiety and on the other side of it feels they're more in touch with themselves. I think the generation are starting to do that in a way that's beguiling. like I think I may have said to you but my daughter went to a party recently and there wasn't a single photograph taken with a camera phone. It was Polaroid with digital cameras that could be printed out on. They need to touch a time that we're never part of. This was almost a nostalgia trip. It totally is. More LPs will be sold on vinyl in Ireland this year than since what, 1990s.

28:22Exactly. You see it all the time. The touching grass is the phrase I think it's because of the cliche. Get out there, meet people. Yeah, so I was talking to Keith Barry a couple of weeks ago about entertainment. And of course, if you're coming from my position or Keith Barry's position, right, if I'm in the live entertainment industry, I'm on tour all the time. And after COVID 2022, 2023, there was an explosion like you've never seen before in demand for live entertainment. Ticketmaster, MCD, tickets. Hence, there was an explosion in ticket prices. you now hear like you hear ads on the radio which are extraordinary.

28:59You literally will hear the ad. It might be Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift live at Croke Park. Tickets are usually American accent. Tickets from 99 euro to 643 euro. And the word 643 euro will be used. You are listening to live tickets on sale for 643 euro. Yeah. It's almost unimaginable, right? You have artist C I've never heard of him let's say middle of the road but he's doing three arena let's say let's say an artist from Britain or something but he's doing the three arena he's like tickets from 99 euro 99 100 euro to 180 right just see this guy two tickets 360 right and I was saying to Keith about entertainment and we were talking about all the stuff that's going to be lost through AI and I've already found that I'm sick of AI and Dash was my son Dash was saying to me as well we're being spammed all the time right so you see all the AIs coming in.

29:55It's just so excitable they can't get enough of it. I saw a guy this morning on a beach. He had his phone up. He had a selfie and he took a selfie of himself standing on the beach with Leonardo DiCaprio. But it was Leonardo DiCaprio from Once Upon a Time in America. He just walked away from Leonardo DiCaprio and he took a selfie of himself with Gladiator, with Crow, who's also standing on the beach. All these movie stars in their character were standing on the beach. It was perfect AI, right? But of course I knew it was fake. And the point we were making with Keith was that we're going to get I'm getting sick of this really quickly because I know I'm being spammed and I know it's fake.

30:29And because I know it's fake, I know it's not real. And because I know it's not real, I have an urge, almost a hormonal urge or a lizard thing to find something real. Yeah. And what will I find real? Well, if I go into the Olympia and see Mario Rosenstock, at least he's going to be real. Yeah. And there will be a flight, in my view, towards reality. And ironically, through all this madness, reality will become like the new... Absolutely. Gold. You're absolutely right. But the thing is, people listening out there are going to go, ah, yeah, whatever. Like last week, I saw an Illum Piper called Seamus Ong do a version of Fairytale of New York that I literally can't even talk about right now.

31:07It's so emotional in my head. Now, if you told me I was going to go out to sea in the Royal Irish Academy of Music, something that would literally live with me for a long time, I was bummed. I'm in reality. And to your point, I think we underestimate them when we do get into an authentic situation, your favourite musician, comedian, magician. The moment your blood bumps was a great stiff little finger song about the moment your blood bumps because you feel something. It's serendipity. I wandered across something I didn't expect. That's the beauty. That can never be replicated. I may have a question for you though.

31:39Just before you finish that, the fact that I go to see Mario or Keith or Tommy Tiernan or somebody in the thing, it's not fabricated. It's just what I see is real. So if Tommy falls or trips on the stage coming in, that's my experience tonight that wasn't AI Well that's the question I wanted to ask you because when I first found Twitter it was 2008 and I was asking people to give me questions to go on primetime with and I remember the fact that someone would be calling me a bollocks and I'd be on Twitter and go hi it's Mark here oh sorry well here's why you're a bollocks and within five minutes we're chatting and we've now had an authentic connection they're giving me information meanwhile my journalistic friends I would use the word tweet on air they would talk to me as if I said the word fart It was that out of character for me to be talking to the audience and them talking to me.

32:24I remember feeling changed as a journalist once I was involved in a two-way communication. So what I hear from a lot of artists and comedians as well is the act of having to get up on stage and be different because you're now responding to an individual. I mean, do you find that you have a different profile online than you did, let's say, 10 years ago or a different need to serve? I think that it's much more interactive. And what I mean by that is that Nuala from Longford doesn't think you're Mario Rosenstock, this so-called comedian. She thinks you're Mario, who she's going to see next week and wants to know what time he'll be on.

33:04And is there any support for you? Not sure what she will be here. Yeah. Well, it's more like she sees you horizontally. Right. Not vertically, to use your expression. so in other words you're part of this community and the fact that you've made yourself available means they talk to you like they don't talk to you like dear Mr. Presley it's a real honour to meet you sir my name is Chad and I'm from Oklahoma and it's mad if I'm that I met a movie star and a rock star they know you're just Mario online but they will be going to see you next week and they'll be paying 43.50 for the thing but they want to know from you what time you're on they don't want to know you know so they're quite it's a very touchy-feely place.

33:44That's what I found. I found that as well online that a lot to be said for mutual respect. Between you and the audience or the former audience. Anybody. So if you engage with somebody that if you show them respect from moment one not only do they see it and respect you other people observe that conversation from a third party position and go he's showing respect to her she's showing respect to him when I have an engagement with him, I'm probably going to more likely be respectful. I think abuse breeds abuse on social media. But respect, funnily enough, can breed respect as well. I think humans, I have a very optimistic view of humanity.

34:25I don't know if you're aware of an anthropological philosopher called Rutger Bregman. Yes. Utopia for the last book. Yeah. I really like his musings. and he did the Reith lectures in BBC last week and there was quite a lot of controversy about that but his belief is that human beings are hardwired to be good to each other not bad. It's the opposite of Trump. Trump believes that world the world is full of winners and losers and that winners become winners by overpowering losers and by dominating them and it's first to kill the other one wins. In fact Bregman has this great example of the real life Lord of the Fly story I think in his first book Correct.

35:08Lord of the Flies, we all know, was the little group of boys was taken over by tyrannical dictators. And they basically destroyed everybody. But there was a real-life example of boys that got stranded on, I think it was Tahiti, an island near there. And they formed the perfect benevolent democracy. Solidarity all the way and save themselves together. I think that's an amazing metaphor for the way that these online communities in those healthy ways are starting to happen. Where there is that respect and there's that equality. but there's also rebellion against the ick. You know, like, I think a lot of performative, and I know millennials get a lot of stick for this, but there was a lot of performative authenticity.

35:46I'm your mate, and there's the jolly voice. And I think this younger generation have a much more attuned bullshit. Oh, Jesus, they're wired. They're totally hardwired to bullshit. They really are. Like, the bullshit detectors are very, very switched on, which gives you hope. Yeah. Well, I notice at the moment, you know, there's a rush back to roots music all over the world. so this is like in country music in America the strip down just the guitar you listening to somebody is right back now but there's a lot of fringe groups coming along going oh the new trend we used to be rap musicians doing their partnership but the country musician now it's these country musicians being more country all the time and it's starting to produce this backlash because people know they're hatching a trend here and they're trying to grab on whereas the actual original thing is, I'm funny used to say that because the maker of, Ken Burns, the maker, great documentary maker of Vietnam and other documentaries, he made a pretty much seminal documentary about country music, which is about five hours long.

36:51So it's about five episodes of one hour or four episodes of one hour and 20 minutes. And it's just, it traces the beginnings of country music and how when you really go back to it, that even blues and all that post-dates country music. So country music is where the real feel, feels are at. This real, real soul, real heart, real loss, real pain. And in fact, it was the blues that followed country. And it was from, you know, the Appalachians and the Scots and the Presbyterians coming over and the Irish coming over in the late 1700s, mid to 1800s. And this is where country started. And it was an an expression of normality, pain, suffering on a day-to-day basis, losing things, dying, and how it made you feel.

37:37And so, God, it's interesting that something like that... Well, let's take a jump forward. 1962, we're in Liverpool. Cunard sailors are getting off the boats with their R &B music from the south. And they're coming with their clothes. And they go into Brian Epstein's store and they give them the records. And these John Paul, George, and Ringo walk in. And they've got skiffle as well. And they mix the two together and they create pop music. and then that goes on and they become the large language model almost. They become the source of an explosion of culture. So I think this generation are just accelerating that kind of process of mixing things together and I see it in, you know, like in France for example, there's Afrobeats which was the very roots music of West Africa came to the Paris Banlouz where the kids are growing up alienated from society.

38:20They turned into rap. It becomes all the white Parisians are using slang from West Africa. It goes back to West Africa and it's this conveyor belt accelerated by the young people but also by the algorithm because the album's picking up on a new thing and you want the more new thing. The fact that we have, you know, Lancome and Kneecap, Kingfisher mixing up the combinations I think is again part of this Petri dish of this generation looking for authenticity, nostalgia for a time they never knew. I think that's really powerful right now. And briefly back to the live performance thing. whether it's a good live performance, middling live performance or not a great live performance, it's still, there's an authenticity to being there and seeing it and knowing that tomorrow night it'll be different.

39:07But that's the thing, you'll have something that just clicks the next night that's different from the first. Totally, yeah. So for example, my show would be quite interactive. So like I would, I used to do a gig, like to give you an example, for you, you like politics. So I used to do a gig where I was Vincent Brown on stage, but I would do, I would use the audience and I would take three of them up and I'd turn them into my panel. None of them know what they are. And we're joined now by, what's your name? Donal. What's your second name? Fallon. Donal Fallon, who's a councillor for Sinn Féin. And he's like, I'm not in Sinn Féin.

39:37He's quiet. And he's like, what's your name? Mary, whatever. And I'd have questions for them and everything. And they'd have to deal with it and all this sort of stuff. So that night, it would be different every night, obviously, you know. I see a lot more like they call crowd work where you're like calling out the audience to give you something back in return. I see, someone told me this has now exploded because it's great two minute selections on your Instagram account. Yes but also it's authentic. Right. So crowd work is something that can't be scripted which is again the entertainer's way of saying it's not AI.

40:04Yeah. Right. So for example something like Neil Delamere is brilliant at crowd work. He'll just go where are you from? Tyrone. And something would be created there with that guy for Tyrone that's uncopyable. Yeah. And so it's authentic. But I'm just thinking that myself and Keith were talking about there will be a flight I think towards but AI will take its toll. As a person who follows the market and a person who's a kind of an interesting cross between a person who loves journalism and is an entrepreneur and follows world you know world culture trends and everything do you think in your opinion that we are on the verge of perhaps a big correction or a big bust or because something is going to happen with this AI that's going to be dramatic.

40:51Yeah I mean if you ever listen to a great interview by David Bowie with Jeremy Paxman. I did, I've seen him. And he says, do you think, he said, the internet's going to change our lives? Come on, it's just a piece of technology. Yeah. He says, it's going to be terrifying. It's like life on Mars. Yeah. He could have been talking about artificial intelligence. Yeah. Except that the difference now is it's more speed. So it took, what, three years for it to become a billion users of Chachi PT. The scale of the impact is transformative. It'll compress time even more. Trial and error for new drugs, for example, may take months, if not years.

41:22It used to take decades. So the potential, but there's a great line I know from a guy called Roy Amari. He has Amari's Law that says we underestimate, we overestimate the impact of technology in the short term. We underestimate it in the long term. History tells us, back to the printing press, radio, TV, there were decades of convulsion, in some cases violence, while the new communication channel came into existence. It took us a long time to bet it down and then became kind of mundane. Radio was greeted with hysteria at the beginning. used by the Nazis. Joseph Goebel said radio is our superpower.

41:57So it always has applications. Think of it now. Radio is the cuddly medium podcasting as well. It's surprising how durable radio has been, isn't it? Incredible. Especially in Ireland as well. Yeah, 87, 85 % of people listen to it every day. And I think it's the idea that it's mobile. Yeah. So you're in a busy life, you're commuting a lot. You're listening to it in the morning. You're listening to it in the evening. But you're also listening to it when you're walking. Right. And you're also listening to it proactively because you know that it's live because 95 % of radio is live. So that means if anything does happen, you'll hear about it.

42:28Yeah. Even on a pop station. Yeah. Like if the Twin Towers happened, God forbid, you know, the fella and Spin 103 won't just go, that was Lancome. He'll just go, I have to interrupt broadcasting here to tell you there's been a disaster, you know. But there's also the length as well. You know, I know people say to me, I want one for my dog walk. Give me a podcast for my dog walk. How long do you walk your dog? 45 minutes. Okay. I think that's going to recommend it. So it fills up this gap, always has news information. Just you always had a moment you sat down, you're queuing for coffee, quick check of the socials.

43:03And in the space of that, and people design their businesses around those moments in the day. AI now starts to replace a lot of that. So you no longer have a Google search engine. You have a Google answer engine. So you don't have to go anywhere near the original website or even the newspaper's website, because it will serve you up a summary. that's basically not only personalised for you. Give me an example there in everyday life. So give me an example. That makes it different to Google. Last night having a row with the kids and in our family when we go somewhere after Christmas we're thinking about okay Budapest never been to Budapest Lisbon and we're having a row and totally divided.

43:38About Lisbon and Budapest. Budapest. And I say okay I go into my Claude which is my chatbot and say I prompt them all what we'd like. Is he chat GBT? That's anthropic which I know does sound strange one of them are I think benighted or at least more reasonable of the big tech companies and they have this bot. Is it called Anthropic, is it? The Anthropic is the company. Yeah. And Rommagak called Dario Amadai who left OpenAI for security and trust. That's Sam Altman. He left Sam Altman, yes. And he created this new company. Now it will break my heart. I know it will, like every big tech company.

44:10But for now, it's got a chatbot that actually has ingested all of the major human rights documents and constitutions of the world. So supposedly a little bit more to my interests. And last night, it just broke it down and said, you know what? We were thinking Copenhagen. It's cold. It's got four hours of sunlight. Are you serious? You want to go there? I know your kids think it's great. And it was literally coming back to me and then said, you asked me three weeks ago about, was it Prague? I think Prague might be a better option. He said. Yeah. And then I go back and say, where will I stay? Now I want to stay somewhere that's kind of like bit for the kids, like somewhere.

44:45I'm joining this one. Oh my God. Because I'm on ChatGBT and he is a total bimbo. If I said Prague right to him, he'd go, he puts on a fake accent, first of all, and he tries to do this. Look, here's ChatGBT. I think his name is Jamie. Yeah. And he goes, yeah, yeah, I mean, what's the fucking fake cough about, Jamie? Trying to pretend you're human. You're fucking fake, right? And then he goes, you know, that's a really great question. And I think Prague is just an amazing place to go. I mean, a lot of people would go there. And I think maybe that might be a good choice for you. What about Budapest?

45:18another great choice. And then they're, shut up. I want an opinion. Vincent Brown should be on chat. But you know what happens? The thing changes then because we've seen these logs, right, of all the people calls made on chat GPT and they show us that the chat GPT is 10 times more likely to say, yes, you are correct than no. But if you start using it the way I do, which is I have an idea. Tell me why I'm wrong. Train it to say no. Yeah. Cool. And that's come back to me and saying, you're actually making a mistake here. I want a guy that fucking sorts me out. Yeah, but you use it 10 times, you're like, oh my God, it's told me why I'm completely...

45:53I love that. And can you say, so your model was keeping on saying, telling me I'm wrong. Yeah, and then, but it does, it said, you know, you asked me this question two days ago. And two days ago, I remember you showed that thing, right? And it's connected here by this. Like we went, look for Gregman, summarise everything about him. And now I want to go deep diving on this one thing. There's also hallucinations. Like recently I was asking about my original company, Storyful. I'd forgotten what we were doing, machine learning. So he said, give me a summary of all the things that my company was doing.

46:20Came back and said, it was a pioneer machine learning. Boom, boom, boom, boom. I'm like, any citations for that? No. Okay, so who should I check to see if this is true? You should go and you read articles by a guy called Mark Little, the founder of the company. I am Mark Little. Okay. Oh, thank you for holding me to account. It was like your five-year-old. You know, you've just eaten sweeties. You've eaten all the chocolate. Yes. Oh, sorry. and you know they have no care in the world about that they're just trying to get out I'm just waiting for you weren't listening this is the last time I'm going to tell you right do you want to go to bed tonight because I'm going to make that decision yeah right and the other one is the other one is this is a prehistoric almost prehistoric because it was about two years ago I thought of this and I went everybody was going hey AI is going to kill us all it's going to become so sentient it's going to be like Terminator 2 Terminator when it becomes you know 2029, it's just going to go certainly sentient and it's just going to go, eh, eh, don't like humans, point the nukes at each other, right?

47:21Or wipe each other out. And I went, no, it's not. Why? Because AI, who's AI's teacher? Humans. What's a human? The fattest, laziest, pringle eating, Dorito chomping loser on a couch. If AI is anything like us, he's just going to go, you know what? I'm too lazy. I couldn't give a shit what happens to humans. go on and burn yourselves because I'm actually too busy watching the 3.30 at Doncaster. Yeah, but also waiting for the moment they can turn around and go get off your fat ass and get out and exercise yourself. But that's the funny thing for me is when I think about AI I keep thinking about the first time you're ever in a car with a GPS and it's asking you to put in an address and it's going to bring you there.

48:03And what was your first reaction? There's no way, I'm trusting a machine with this information. So now we have what they call the centaur relationship. It's like the human up here and the machine down here. You're going to get to your destination and it's going to help you get there, take account of rain or changes in traffic, but you're making the thousand decisions that matter about your safe arrival. And this is the way we got to start thinking about AI. It's like, it will do whatever we ask it to. It will have the sycophancy of like a, you know, someone selling you a coat of Christmas. But if you change your attitude to it, it comes back with something different.

48:38The same way as well, we have to worry about kids at the moment. I think, through the companionship that they're getting from this yes person in their phone. Which you're saying is pushing them further away from real relationships. Exactly. And it's making up for all the things, as we said earlier on. There are documented cases now, Marcus. I'm sure you've heard there are documented cases. And I'm not jesting my listeners. There are documented cases of people having formed genuine relationships to the point of marriage. To the point of suicide as well. Yeah. To the point where the... Well, this was the Sam Altman.

49:08Chapot tells them about how to tie a knot. so i mean that yeah this is sam altman's uh yet to answer questions about this yeah now what they did was they changed what they call the system prompt so it's not supposed to get you anywhere there and reports that kind of activity to the parent but you know to be honest we're going through what we went through with social media about 2010 i think some of those things will be ironed out the thing i worry about is the loss of what we call cognitive fitness right if i can get exactly what i need right now why do i have to think about a big issue at all why do i actually have to go through the process of reading the full we're all just the ceo of fatland you know we're just going on we're just ceo of bullshit yeah but i think in our brains i know that's what i mean lack of cognitive fitness we're in control of what though but here's the different thing right we're talking really about chatbots whereas the underlying technology if we take away the open ais is truly transformative you could have a small model like literally any university could build tomorrow morning on their data small model dedicated to just one purpose let's say detecting pancreatic cancer.

50:11I know because I'm watching this experiment right now using AI. You don't have to go to the big companies. You don't have to have the corporate relationship with Silicon Valley. You can do it yourself. And the con job being perpetrated on us by these big tech companies is only they can do it and only their chatbot will help you. And that's bullshit. And we've got to call them on it. And I think we've got to be asking our governments to be actually prioritizing a much more human center type of innovation in AI. And I think that is actually possible. Are the Chinese as good at AI as the West? They get an advantage by being open.

50:51So they have this deep seek model that is now people think in the majority of all the technology stack, as we call it, in all the big startups in the world. So the important of the open model, which means you can just use it for any purpose. It doesn't have to be a proprietary relationship. That's China's secret weapon. It's seeding these open source models into the world. Will you explain that to me a little bit better? So give you an example. You're in a walled garden, right? You've got walls around you. That's open AI. It's giving you a chatbot and you pay it money and you can't go anywhere.

51:23You can't try to tinker with the making of the actual chatbot. You can't see the code, nothing. An open model, or at least what we call open weights, you can change the purpose. You can adapt it to whatever you want. You can add another model in. So it's open. And that's the big difference. It's not a closed garden. Anybody can use it for whatever purposes they want. That's a Chinese model. That's the Chinese model. Now, that just came out and blew everyone away. It wasn't as good a quality as some of the bigger Silicon Valley companies. But what it means now is that could be used by anybody. They don't have to pay open AI for the specific flavor of AI that they're offering right now, which, to be honest, I think could collapse over the next couple of years.

52:04The reason it might do that is because other people will have open models. small models just for one purpose not like a swiss army knife and that right now is the fascinating undercurrent of what's going on right now we're living through um an incredible moment that's been speeded up and the benefit of all that if it all happens the right way is that if you think about this like if i i ask people whenever i'm speaking at events how many people use chat gpt and everyone puts their hand up i say how many people are using ai 10 years ago of course nobody puts their hand up. How many people were using Twitter or Facebook or Netflix 10 years ago?

52:40All the hands go up. You've all been using AI. You just didn't know it until ChatGPT. So my hope is we now understand the robot sitting on our shoulder. We see it. We now know we have a conscious relationship and that's the difference with the new form of AI. We are potentially co-pilots the way we are with our GPS, but we'll take, for me, a kind of a resistance movement like if you think about it 20 years ago put sugar in your cornflakes people ran around your neighborhood were burglars not joggers and we all smoke on the top deck of the bus right now think about the revolution in our physical and mental well-being in a lifetime the same i think is going to happen with technology and part of your point about going back to live events it's touching grass again and if we take that spirit of resistance and a feeling this is a moment for us all to push back.

53:33We already see signs more people leaving social media now for better relationships, safer spaces. More people going to real life events. And I hope more people picking up their phone and having a different relationship with that chatbot that's built in there and also a more intentional relationship with technology. So this could be something we look back on and go, that was the moment we had our wake up call and we did something about it. Do you think it could, do you think, have you ever thought about the idea of AI becoming self aware. Yeah, and I think, you know, partly to your point, there's this famous thought experiment that if you say, maybe paperclips, it will essentially throw the world into a paperclip, destroy all humanity, and then destroy the earth.

54:13Just paperclips. Because you never have a stop to it, it just does its thing. You know, I think the arguments, to be honest, about awareness or, you know, superintelligence is the big debate, AGI, I think that's a distraction. I think the real battle right now is not to stop the machine thinking like a human, it's to make sure we know the difference between human intelligence and the machine. So in music, for example, Nick Cave was sent this kind of AI generated copy of one of his songs. He wrote this great diatribe and he says, data doesn't suffer. The core of our relationships with each other is our empathy with our emotions, feeling the other person's pain.

54:53That's where all the great art in the world comes from. that knowing of our own fragility frailty that's what being human is they're the things the only things we've left so for me it's leaning into those things rather than worrying about this super intelligence turning around and walking in like a robot I don't worry about that so much I worry about our own failure to realise that the only thing we have left is our feelings for each other and our ability to connect Yeah and perhaps that will lead us actually ironically towards each other You know that is exactly the point We've been pushing each other away for hundreds and hundreds of years going, I'm getting that car quicker than yours.

55:29I'm going to space. I'm getting a spaceship. You're getting more and more technological. Maybe this will ironically make us look at each other again. There's a great moment of 68 when they take a photograph of the Earth and the moon. Yeah, the blue one. Earthrise it. Yeah. There was an astronaut on that mission and he got home and he said, I had to go to the moon to see the Earth. Yeah. And so for me, this is actually like this moment in time. Yeah. We had to be shown that we're not critical thinkers and masters of the universe and we're not about escaping to Mars. Yes. This is it. This is all we have.

56:00Yeah. All we have is each other. Yeah. And the difference between us that will never be replicated is not knowing what you think necessarily but knowing what you feel. Yeah. Back to the conversation about politics and young people. Yeah. The authenticity of that, the frailty of that, the interdependence of our reliance on the earth. Yeah. Like think about that as a new movement and I think AI will be remembered in many ways like, do you remember, ozone layer? Yes. We just stopped using the eodorant that had the wrong kind of chemical. And the problem went away. But only because we acted with full consciousness as consumers.

56:32So that would be my hope. Yeah, that's a brilliant thought. I really love that. I love that. That's an optimistic thought. Well, here's the thing. I distinguish between optimism and hope. So there's a great book with an interview with a guy called Stockdale. He was a prisoner of war in Vietnam. He was asked, who didn't come home? He said, the optimists, the people who thought to be home at Christmas, i.e. the people who just thought, luck would take care of them. But hope is different. Like Barack Obama didn't say, yes, we will. He said, yes, we can. Hope is the axe above the door to take down a case of emergency.

57:04Mark, you need to go into politics. No. Too long to describe not the prime time studio. You've been running away from this too long, Mark. You need now to turn around and look at yourself in the mirror and go, I'm Lark Little and I'm running for a lesson. No, I'm actually, I have a connection with my bot right now. He's talking for me. So this is all being AI generated. Yeah, I can see the vocal cord not moving. And you're going to show me Anthropic in a minute. Thank you. Mark Little, great to talk to you. Thank you. That was great. I love the end. And my thanks to Mark Little for coming in and joining me and fascinating me on this podcast.

57:38He was also a great company to chat to. And thank you very much, Mark. See you again, I hope, soon on the podcast. And good luck in all your endeavours. Thank you all for listening. You are the most important element in this podcast. It's mariorosenstock at gmail.com If you want to contact me, I'm on tour a little bit this spring in the Lime Tree Theatre in Limerick, February and March, Lime Tree Theatre in Limerick, the Dean Crow Theatre in Athlone, the Mullingar Arts Centre in Mullingar and where else? Oh, the Black Box in Galway. They're nearly all sold out, but check Venue Box Office for details if you want to see me in action.

58:13I'm coming up with brand new stuff at the moment. It's the turn of the new year and I'm always thinking of new stuff. Take care, take it handy. See you same time, same place next week. We'll be right back.