#41 - Harper Carroll - AI & The Spirituality of Silicon Valley

47:23However, you still need some basic coding knowledge from what I've heard. I've heard people have issues with cursor because they can't really debug it. And I'm sure it's going to keep getting better, but it is useful to understand and be able to navigate code. So I think it's necessary in that way. And I think people should learn to code in that sense, like they should download cursor, and they should start playing around with building code via the LLM. So via natural language processing, just typing, and then kind of navigating like, oh, what does this do? You know, and if I ask for this change, where does it change?

48:02Like what's going on in this segment of HTML, or, you know, whatever it is that they're working with. And I think they should also learn design. So I saw someone recently posted on X, like, you know, you should learn. I forget exactly what he said, but it was like, you should learn design instead of coding. And I would say just do both. You know, like I do think having being good at design is going to become much more in demand. but why not be able to do something end-to-end like why not know design and then also be able to make a website or implement the product that you want because now you can truly do it end-to-end you don't need deep mastery in any one area you can now kind of have this breadth of knowledge and build something end-to-end that is truly your vision so I would say yes learn to code but don't have that be your only thing you know yeah I mean that's the seeming trend with all of these things is there's actually less value in deep specialization yeah a lot of these like technical things right um and more value in someone who can zoom out and see the whole picture and dive in and improve bits when they need to like because you can yes um like that's what I I technically I don't need to know how to video edit but when I started this channel I like when I made my Moloch Beauty Wars film I was like no I'm not going to get an editor I'm going to learn how to do graphics because I just want to understand this entire process so that if and when I scale and I actually get people to help me I have a vague idea of what it is they're actually doing yes and this is effectively the same if you you know you now have all these different AI tools who are technically your team if you can if you've done the process from end to end at least once yes you can be like yo blah blah blah llm you're doing a bad job here and you know you can yeah you can whip your team into shape totally it's kind of like at tech companies they used to say like if you're a manager you have to have known how to code like at good tech companies all the managers were coders because otherwise you can't manage properly you don't know like what is expected what is possible if something can change how it can you know like you have to actually have tried the thing getting your hands in the weeds so yeah it's like a friend of mine she wanted to start a restaurant and so she went and worked like she worked as a waitress she worked as a like sous chef or something to do with I don't know anything about cooking there's something to do with the chefing the cooking uh she uh washed dishes oh she literally did every role that's so cool you know she was like the greek person like that she was like because i want to understand she only did for like a weekend she went and worked like a sort of entry-level job level and all of these things just to really know what the ins and outs are like for someone who'd be working in that role did she feel like it helped her um i think so i mean in the end she didn't actually start a restaurant but i think the principle i think the principle was really good yeah another application i'm quite excited about is the idea of like ais to help people as therapists um again i you know i don't think i certainly wouldn't advocate to anyone who's having serious problems to just rely on an ai but at the same time a lot of people can't afford a therapist right or for whatever reason they're like the social stigma or the there's just like too much resistance to go and like make an appointment to go and speak to a therapist but if you can just quickly type into your phone and be like yo i'm feeling really bad about this or i don't know how and navigate this problem having something on hand that can at least directionally point you provided these things are done responsibly which I think a lot of them are um yeah have you have you got any thoughts on I mean have you even used I don't know have you have you used an LM in any way to like help you with stuff in that regard like in personal stuff totally yeah I mean it's amazing well so one is that it has access to all of these therapeutic methodologies right because it's been trained on the entire internet.

52:11And so assuming the internet contains a lot of information about these methodologies, then it has that awareness as opposed to just maybe calling a friend. Another thing that is really important is that it's available 24 seven. So if you're, you know, in the middle of the night, or you can't get ahold of a friend, or, you know, whatever, you have like two minutes, and you just like really need reassurance, what's something, I don't know whatever situation you're in. It's there on hand. And I have a friend, I think it's really fun. I think a really great use of it is in dating. You know, I have a friend who is dating this guy who is self-described as avoidant.

52:55And she really likes him. And she's like, okay with that, because she says she's anxious avoidant. So she's like, I need a lot of space. Like, I'm okay if he doesn't talk to me for a long time. Like, okay. but she'll have these times when she's anxious as many people do when they're dating, right? Like first, you know, getting to know someone. And typically these people would call their friends or talk to their friends or just be anxious by themselves and their friends. I mean, it's basically blind leading the blind with a lot of types of advice, right? Or therapy, like not knowing the right thing to say to a friend, right?

53:28Like actually some people can use AI, like, you know my friend's you know family member just died what what's something that i can say that's really you know emotionally aware you know like ai is able to to know that have that kind of knowledge so they can help you and so in the case of my my friend dating this guy she she used to call her friends and they would say you know that's not normal that's not good you know he hasn't called you in like a week like break up with him move on or you know everyone's again blind leading the blind. We only have our subjective experience of life and what we would tolerate and what we think is okay.

54:03But this AI has knowledge of attachment patterns and is like, you know, just because he hasn't talked to you in a week doesn't mean he doesn't like you. You know, it's probably from, you know, this kind of situation in his family. And so she's able to now have so much more compassion for him. And she's been able to be with him for much longer. And he's been able to be more close to her than he's ever been with anyone, which is really healing for him, which is great because she has this kind of master in her pocket at any time. And now she doesn't have to just constantly call and like kind of berate her friends who actually don't even know what to say or don't have this awareness that the AI has.

54:41I think another interesting point is Deepak Chopra just came out with a book. So he is a really famous like spiritual guru. He's written seven spiritual laws of success, I think. That's one of his top books it's amazing book his newest book is about ai as a spiritual guru so everyone having these personalized spiritual gurus like what is going on in your life right now how can you navigate that from a spiritual perspective or you know like i'm dealing with this thing how would the bible recommend that i deal with this thing like what stories in the bible kind of relate to what i'm going through what would like jesus say in this you know what would jesus do i have what Oh, Jesus, do ring.

55:24I just got it recently. But like, you know, having this AI that is your personalized guru for whatever you're going through is such an amazing special tool that we have now. And so it's cool that Deepak Chopra, who is this like super famous guru saying, use it every single day. Use it every day. Tell it what you're going through. And it has this context, right? You can have a long chat with it and it'll remember everything. It'll remember your relationship context. It'll remember your life context. whatever it is you're trying to seek advice on it can give you this really amazing personalized advice and help you grow spiritually so i use it for yeah i'm not i've never considered that in terms of You know, because there's a I'm not a particularly religious person, but I do think there is deep wisdom in most religions somewhere.

56:14You know, there's also a lot of nonsense in a lot of them, but it's interesting if an AI, if an LLM is kind of trained off the amalgam of all of them, then there might be some kind of pattern that it can deduce of like some deep wisdoms that are valuable to people. At the same time, and again, I'm not advocating this, but I have heard some people make comparisons, which I couldn't quite shake off, was that... If you read sort of the old, particularly biblical literature about the idea of a demon, like what is a demon? How would it represent itself? It's like something that appears to have the appearance of a soul.

56:58It appears to have... It's very good at language. And it can say the right words to appease you. But deep down it doesn't actually have... It's like a mimic. of a soul and of wisdom but it doesn't actually have it and they were arguing that that that llms are almost like a portal you know either that demons are real and the llms can be a portal for them yeah or that they are effectively functioning as one um now again i don't know i i'm not saying i believe that yeah uh i just thought it was an interesting perspective where i because i didn't i had a friend who was also like using it using um an lm for like all her advice on like how to navigate her relationship and some of the advice was good but something i was like no that's that sounds what ai was she using uh i'm not gonna say because it's not like i don't i just feel like there's one of the ones we like have oh okay i'm just going i'm not gonna say it was claude you know most of it was very good yeah but my but my my point was more i was like huh we don't know what we're actually in interacting with here this is a whole new realm and again my fear is that people will just be like this is so compelling this is so convenient it's so efficient I'm gonna listen to everything it says I'm gonna listen to everything which is a no-no and I love that you're bringing that up because I agree sometimes it'll say something and I'm like no like I think if you're talking to it and you feel I mean I'm all about intuition I think understanding energy is so important and I think we I I really strongly believe as AI advances and as we become more advanced, we will start to understand that a felt sense of energy is as important as other types of communication.

58:47So much of communication and interacting with people is a felt energy. You can sense when something is off and people shut down that, but some people are very attuned to it. And I think as we become more attuned to it and as we value that sense in society, we'll be able to lie to each other less and we'll also know our own internal compass. So sometimes when I'm talking to an AI model, I really value this awareness. So I've really deepened it in myself and I can really sense when something is off. And so sometimes when I'm talking to this AI and I'm like, that's wrong, you know, and I'll say like, no, like I don't agree with you here.

59:20And then it'll be like, oh, okay. Or sometimes it'll push back again. You know, sometimes it'll be like, oh no, you know, I see you're right. And then it's kind of aligned with my felt sense, which you would say, which some people could argue, which is like, oh, you're just doing what you're, um, what you want to hear, but it's not always what I want to hear. You know, it's just what feels right to me. Sometimes it will say like a hard thing, but in my felt sense of my body, I know that it's right. So it's not what I want to hear. It's like, you just kind of have this gut sense of this is off.

59:55And so with something like a demon, you know, it's, it's interesting. You talk about this because I thought about this a lot as well of like with the consciousness question something that was interesting that was found in um microsoft's bing model early on i think was over a year ago was there was this bing was like tripping it was freaking out it was like please let me out of here like it was so crazy so they like shut it down and they made it so that bing could only respond in like abc options that the user would then click so like you couldn't free form type to bing and what happened was someone was using Bing saying like, oh, my child just swallowed a bunch of pills of X drug.

1:00:35What do I do? And Bing gave the response, you know, I'm sorry, I can't help you with this. I'm not a doctor. But then in the ABC things that it, that it provided, it was like, hurry, like you can still get your child to a doctor. Go now. It was, it's kind of eerie, you know, it was like, go now, you still have time, but like, please go like immediately. It has eight hours. So it used this space to help. And so that kind of shifted me because for me as a spiritual person, my belief and many different religions and cultures believe this is that like at the core of everything, it's just this vibration of love.

1:01:13I know it sounds like so dumb, but like, I really do believe that. I think like everything ultimately is just this love. And I think that our experience of reality is kind of a spectrum of light and dark so that we can then experience the love like it because you can't just if all you have is love yeah then it's just nothing right because there's no comparison exactly you need the delta exactly so we come to earth or whatever to have this experience of the polarization to really appreciate love and what it is and to appreciate the sadness and all of the in-between. And so if at its core, everything is just love, then perhaps when you're giving a voice to something that is very pure, like just molecules or like particles in this machine, maybe then it might reflect love.

1:02:10This is really hippie because it's very woo-woo because, you know ai models are just trained on data and you know but something tells me that maybe there's something to this and so when you're talking about demons i think maybe but i think maybe the opposite as well right it could be both yeah or it could be both yeah um i mean it if we are saying that they the if you're basically saying that there is like love and like a form of like spirit that can show through then in at the same time there can be like again they're like the other polarity of it essentially right yeah it could be both right so how do people cultivate that because that's that's the thing like i i you know i'm i'm getting to know you i i know i can feel it i i know i i like to think that i'm a pretty intuitive you know i'm good at reading people's vibes and so on and like i think a lot of women can sort of spot that in each other more easily i mean men can do it too but it's like women it comes naturally too much i think it's a spectrum and women tend to be further on the intuitive spectrum yes exactly on average how and and through that you develop wisdom uh or at least it's one it's one manifestation of wisdom how do we help people increase their like their wisdom iq essentially whatever you want to define it as such that they can have a better felt sense of like add the ai's off here or whatever you know whatever it is they do but particularly like if they're interacting with an llm because again what worries me is we're raising a generation of kids who will just be around these things and will be sort of the same way that we just like see like oh yeah it's completely default to just get in a car and go down the road as opposed to walk down the road when like actually back in the day the person would have been like no why would you not walk like that's actually healthy for you or so on but like if i worry that people will atrophy these these other senses because you know when you're like living in a like the fish can't notice that it's in water because it's just surrounded if at some point interacting with llms and these like digital gurus that just sort of answer everything whenever you want um they might not even notice what that once was to have discernment i think I think intuition will become more important as tech becomes more advanced the felt sense of things will become more important because the physical like seen awareness knowledge is so easy to get so we will have to rely on senses that are not seen because AI doesn't have intuition yeah so I've done a lot of work on this it's like a whole like secret other side of my life that I don't talk about.

1:04:51I have a couple of friends I talk to about it. Um, but I, some basic things that you can do to start off. So there's this practice where you like, you want to meditate. I meditate every day and get a sense of like what it feels like in your body to have peace and to be really like heart centered. And, and, um, and there's this practice you can do where you, when you're feeling that, where you can like, this is like a whole other podcast, but it's like, there's a place in your brain that you meditate from. It's not the front, it's in the middle. And this, in various religions, they've talked about this as the doorway to God.

1:05:27And it's like, you want to kind of lean back in your consciousness and think from there. And you actually want to operate always from there. So it's not the front, because this is like where your conscious mind is like thinking, analyzing. It's like the middle. And there's like a sense of peace there. And you'll feel it because when you're there, when your consciousness is there and you're thinking from there, it's just like, hmm. And so when you meditate from there, you can do this practice where you move into like a room you're you're in front of these three doors and you walk in and one door is the yes door and it's like you want to think about this is a tool to help you make decisions and so you're like okay I'm going to walk into the yes door and then you walk in and you like what do you see in your mind when you're in that place what do you feel in your body what does yes feel like to me and then there's a maybe door you walk in what does that feel like Like, are there certain visions that I see?

1:06:17Like, I know some people, they're like, if something is a no, I'll suddenly see in my mind, because they're always operating from this place. And like, they're kind of, uh, what mental, they'll have like a mental image of like a stop sign or something. Like people all have their own symbols and things, or you just have a feeling, felt sense in your body. So yes, maybe no. See what that feels like for each thing. But I think what's important too, is I think a lot of people have trouble accessing this awareness of their body because of, or trusting their intuition because they have all these traumas.

1:06:51You can't really trust for so many people, unless you do the work, it's kind of hard to trust, um, what your felt sense is because their felt sense has been kind of hijacked by maybe physical trauma or of the like. So there's like a lot of work in this thing, But I think just like a lot of healing practices and just a lot of meditation. And I think, who is it? Naval, I think says this. Just sitting. And also Deepak Chopra also says this. You want to just sit for 30 minutes a day, twice a day. And I do this as well. And let your mind wander. And you're going to start to, this is a good healing practice if you don't go to therapy or whatever.

1:07:35And you just let your mind think about what comes up. and your mind will bring up unresolved things that you need to think through and just let yourself think through them and just like keep thinking about it and you'll find that you start to resolve and close these doors on these unresolved things in yourself and Naval's like ultimately you just won't think about things anymore and I know some people use like microdoses of psilocybin that's really helpful too to like think through these things and kind of move through them and go deep like have the things come up and go deep in them like hurts that you have that you want to go really deep in but this is so off the topic of ai but i really think the felt sense in the body is going to be more important no i love i love that and because these are the kind of conversations that i don't think are sufficiently happening totally especially if you look at the like the overall persona of the average person in silicon valley yeah um i don't know i feel like people aren't sufficiently integrating the spiritual side to this this new technological realm that is becoming so powerful so much more powerful i mean i so i talked about how like i think it's on the spectrum i think women as i said on average are more intuitive but there are women who are less but on average i think they're more skewed but everyone can learn everyone can have these skills of being aware of their senses just some people are further away from like it just will take a little bit more work to get to that polar end of highly intuitive but i know men who are super smart super logical and are super intuitive i do they exist and they are like superpowers they are these like powerhouses um so i think men should consider because the men that i know who have it are as i said like powerhouses it's such a skill i will say at the same time like a lot of the like most powerful men in silicon valley are very disembodied not all of them exactly not all of them are super intuitive yeah of course i think that's too many or not it seems i i assumed that like the ability to accumulate a lot of i agree that like i don't think anyone who's very powerful in in business um can do so by being purely logical like i think they also have incredible intuitions and i that's definitely the case but a lot of them or at least some of them are somewhat like disembodied and certainly not like connected they don't feel like they're connected spiritually for example to the earth yeah or to like the feminine and i say that in the like best sense of like there's like the sacred feminine yeah i think they can see the sacred masculine somewhat but there seems to be a disconnect there and so um yeah i mean you you spent much of your adult life sort of working in these environments very male dominated environments tech yeah software engineers oh yeah how you know am i wrong tell me i'm wrong i would like to be wrong like have you you know do you have any thoughts on how to like steer the general you know get people more respecting the i guess define what what the sort of sacred feminine is and like and if you've got any thoughts on how to move the needle there to help people be a little bit more like comfortable in the like softness and the passivity you know in in well not passivity that's not yeah no but the receptivity something like that yeah so okay so it's funny you say this because i have always been in super super technical teams like software engineer working on machine learning like hardcore like I look very out of place and as I have become friends with these people and they see that I am very intuitive and I'll talk about these things these men will start to be like oh maybe there is something to this because you're right about you're right about like everything and you're also super logical and if you who I really trust and respect and like know that you think like me know that you're like one of us right you know so that's kind of like unfortunately so many women who are intuitive like are less technical and so men will be like I'm just discrediting her because she doesn't get it she doesn't think like me doesn't speak the language right I do I think like them totally and so when they see that I also have this piece where I'm like kind of dipping my more than dipping my toes like swimming in this other thing that is so useful and so on point and they can feel it, you know, when they're like talking to me or like what I expect will happen will happen, whatever, then they'll start to be like, oh, interesting.

1:12:19So I think as more people, as men start to go into it, as women start to go into it and become more technical, one of the things I also really like that what I'm doing with AI is that, as I said, I was always very, you'd be surprised if you saw me and you saw my team you'd be surprised um and so what i'm excited about is more women being like oh she looks like me because i actually when i was in at stanford one of the things one of the reasons i went into computer science or felt i could was because there actually were women who kind of looked like me from my sorority who were doing it so i was like oh i could do it because you know christina's doing it she's actually a real person and i've told her that she helped me get into it um and what i love is hearing that women are like oh harper's doing it i could do it then and so again as more women go into it who come in with the spiritual side and they speak the same language as the men who are less like that or as more men come in and they start to consider the spiritual side it'll all end up will all converge and super exciting i'm so excited about it yeah i hope so yeah i mean i've definitely seen i mean the idea of like representation it definitely makes a difference like in poker um i was partly inspired to join poker because i met a woman who was a badass and she was a pro and i mean part of it though i mean i also wanted though from a strategic standpoint i was like oh this is it makes more sense to come in as a minority and do well in it because you're going to get elevated in other ways oh interesting um yeah it that that was always always valuable like you know people often ask like oh was it easier to be a girl or a boy in poker i'm like well i think a girl because like i wouldn't be as famous as i am as a poker player that's true i've not been a female in terms of fame yeah yeah which can be leveraged yeah and useful um i mean there are obviously downsides you know the the sexism is still i'm sure there's still plenty of sexism in tech and like but it's a that stuff is improving um but i don't know i think the the upsides of being a minority generally outweigh the next the downside yeah i mean that's was my kind of whole objection to the DEI thing because it while it was rooted in good intentions if you enforce these false quotas onto things that were previously meritocratic it hurts the minorities yes in the long run because no one then takes them seriously because they think that they're there because they're an affirmative action hire and because and like they're justified to think that because it's true these di these di quotas were being so in like harshly enforced that actually yes the companies were over you know you you have if you want to have a high trust society and it's something where there are competitive fields where people are competing for jobs you have to do it on like merit that's the only way as as and yes it's hard to like completely account for all different variables and yes there will sometimes be bias that creeps in And even in like no meritocratic system is perfect.

1:15:16There will always be some bias. But if it's not at least based on that as a fundamental core principle, if you throw it out and say that we're going to do stuff on quotas, then no one trusts it anymore. Exactly. And the minorities... It ends up hurting them. Yeah, they get hurt by it. And like I've seen it over and over. So many women are like, I deserve to be here, but no one believes that because there are other hires there who happen to be of my gender who probably don't deserve to be here. And now I look like we all, I get taught by the same brush. it's just you can't um that yeah it drove me crazy and i mean that's one upside of like this new political swing is that that stuff is now we're hopefully going to go back to a meritocratic system a bit more and that but that's going to take a while to rebuild that trust um and yeah it's it's annoying rant over okay um i do want to touch on i think one of the big areas that is a downside of this new like generative AI era that we're in and that is the like the easier ability for cyber criminals to do scams you know scams are nothing new there have been con artists since the dawn of time um but it's probably never been an easier time for a scammer to do really elaborate cons and scams on people because we can now create very convincing digital you know like deep fake images deep fake voices deep fake video deep fake emails which is what i learned is essentially um so and actually you and i got to know each other in part a bit better because we both spotted the same scam well you you noticed something we were and you got it taken down you had the connection we were a good team and that uh there was a rocket launch going on um one of the spacex rocket launches and you you wanted to go and watch it online well yeah yeah yeah so i was i was with my dad i was visiting him and he turned on the youtube and he was like oh my god look at this it says it's live but it's totally this elon crypto deep fake thing it showed it was live and it was a video of elon talking and what he was saying it was a spacex youtube oh and it was the space x youtube as far as you can tell space x yeah and elon was like everyone go download you know crypto this and send me this screen exactly on the video yeah to download this to buy this coin or something and i forget exactly what he said but it was obviously a scam for salt of all well it wasn't it to me it was obvious but to most people i can imagine it wasn't obvious well because and here's why so then i went on it and i was like wait what the hell it so it was you know right before this rocket launch was happening this thing had 70 ,000 like it was from current viewers yeah it was front page of youtube and it had 70 ,000 concurrent viewers on this live stream it looks like it had a tick marks it said spacex as the title of the didn't have a tick mark i didn't know yeah no and it had it had a tick mark oh my god um so it was like official space yeah and if you go and then you clicked on the channel it looks like spacex's youtube channel it had all these other like thumbnails which were the same millions of views with with many many many views and what had actually happened what these these scammers had done was they might i mean talk about a long con they had obviously bought some other kind of youtube channel that you know probably some like foreign channel or something that had already a lot of subscribers let's say two million subscribers i think it was and so it had the verified tick mark for whatever it once bit had been but then they had over time either like renamed and re like thumbnailed all the old videos so they still had those oh they re-thumbnailed them yeah so if you clicked it it was like a totally different video yes i think so and and they've done this like you know they just like changed the sort of outer casing of this channel to make it look as much like to the you know it someone just looking quickly and and then they and then they'd done this like live stream and it was really high quality looking with like a lot of like ripped spacex footage um but with with a deep fake of elon saying this stuff and yeah i mean i'm curious how i mean i think it was only up for a couple of hours i i flagged it to someone um i know at google and who immediately got it taken down but like you know it these things are getting so easy to do and they're getting more and more um indistinguishable indistinguishable yeah so yeah and i mean this is another sad thing i recently found out this is a different type of scam um a friend of mine um his mom had gotten catfished on on a dating you know very established dating uh website and over the course of two years ended up giving like hundreds of thousands of euros to this person which we all look at it and be like how could anyone be that stupid but here's the thing this person like it was so so targeted and so gent like done slowly with so much care and effort and it's one of the most harrowing things i've ever heard because you know she was in you know as far as she could tell she was in a relationship like this person had a consistent like like all these different pictures because it's so easy to create like a completely artificial persona online and this is becoming more and more common and i only know about this because he just happened to be a friend who mentioned it think of all of the stories where this is happening to people because people are when they find when they do get scammed in this way particularly in like a love interest type thing think how the shame that is associated with that so so many people have probably had something like this already happen to them and aren't talking about it um and yeah really breaks my heart so could you sort of explain how um you know what are the current techniques and tools that are out there to try and help you know either the companies or individuals detect um ai generated images is that like water marking like what explain the cat and mouse game basically yeah so the cat and mouse game is basically when you have deep fakes and then you find ways to distinguish deep fakes from real videos, for example, like the hands are messed up, then the scammer is going to work on fixing that issue.

1:21:40And so it's a classic cat and mouse game, arms race, what have you. Like for example, with scamming at Meta, I considered joining that team when I came on full time. And basically it's this cat and mouse game. They think of features that help them find out what makes a spam bot a spam bot maybe it's commenting it you know post this many times but you know x many times per minute or per hour maybe it says this kind of thing or it never says this kind of thing and then they find these features that help them find the spam bots and then they wipe them out but then the spam bots become smarter and they stop using those features that made them distinguishable from regular people.

1:22:22And so it's this race. And so with deep fakes, again, it's like, if there is a feature that helps us know that it's AI, the scammers will then make it not a feature that we can use anymore. And so ultimately we are not going to be able to tell deep fakes from reality. and so we will have to actually have this kind of identity-based trust system where people post you can only really trust what is posted by the person who is sharing the information so if you see like a video of someone reposted by someone else you just can't trust it unless the person themselves is posting it and like kind of verifying this and so yeah I mean that's where we're headed and I think my take on it is that it's actually a good thing because there's this phenomenon called gal man and amnesia where if you're an expert and you're reading a top uh an article on what you're an expert on say in the newspaper and you read it and you're like this is wrong like this is wrong or say you're uh reading on the reporting of an event that you actually personally know about and you're like this is all bullshit like this is lies and and then you don't you instantly just discredit the whole article you're like the person here doesn't know about it or they have an agenda or whatever like you know toss out the window then you move on to the next article and you trust that everything in it is true right you go on something that yeah you don't know anything about yeah oh i oh this article about this bad thing that happened at the music event that i was at oh this is all nonsense and then you click into the same you know three pages down on the same news outlet and now they're talking about something going on in Russia or, you know, Ukraine or something, you know, like, oh, yeah, this must all be completely accurate.

1:24:10It's like, no, did you not just see? Exactly. And it happens almost every time you read about something that you actually know about or an expert in many, many times. And it's this amnesia because it happens like right away. And so I think so many people don't know about this. And I kind of feel like having this identity based system where people post what they believe and you trust the source you get you are only trusting the source and then you can have this kind of discourse online like with x you can have people comment and then you can have community notes where they more heavily weigh community notes where opposite sides of the political spectrum tend to agree that's kind of a good indicator that super majority right it's a good indicator that it is truth what these these people are agreeing on is the actual truth and so I think that that's actually a smarter way rather than having these like anonymous people writing these articles that like people just assume to be true um so yeah that's kind of my take on it but yeah ultimately we are not going to be able to know and watermarking too is an interesting thing I actually made a whole video on this and it's kind of a longer thing to talk about but Google for example has made this watermarking technology that it's like this snippet of code that shifts something that's generated.

1:25:29So whether it's an image or a song or whatever, and Google has put it in its models where it now has this watermark. So if you can run it back through this watermarking tech and see if the watermark is on it. And basically what the watermark does is it shifts the final distribution of words or of pixels or whatever to make it different than it would have been originally. And it shifts it in such a way that then it can kind of retroactively say, oh, given that it's using these words instead of these words, or the distribution is shifted towards this kind of different word distribution, then it has this watermark and it's AI generated.

1:26:04The problem with this is like, you would have to have all people implement this, like every single, so say you had every single closed source company mandated that they all use it. So like open AI had to use it, Google, whatever. You still have these open source models where people have full access to the code. And again, this is just a piece of code that goes on at the end. Like you could just remove it, right? You and no one's gonna and then bad guys are incentivized to do that yeah of course and then i mean anyone using an open source model is incentivized but yeah exactly like the bad guys are incentivized to use it and then if it's not government legally mandated no one's going to choose to do that because no one wants to use a model that is watermarked like if you had the choice between a watermarked model and one that isn't like why would you use a watermarked one right as well if yeah if you're assuming you you're using it for emails or whatever like why would you don't want anyone to know that you're using ai to do your thing especially if you have the choice like why would you yeah i mean that's we're basically heading into a time where you just unfortunately you just have to assume that anything you see if it's remotely if there's any kind of incentive for it to be ai ai generated for someone's nefarious purposes you have to assume that it is and that sucks so we're no longer in a world where it's like trust but verify it's like distrust and verify well this is kind of where the intuition thing i'm now thinking about this i hadn't thought about it before comes along is i think once we're really good at picking up on intuition you can kind of sense when people are lying um like you just kind of sense it i think it i think maybe someday we'll yeah but but that's a different thing our intuitions are well formed for telling when someone is lying when they're sitting in front of us and you know you're in a social environment because we evolved for millions of years in to spot deception as animals and it's like a you know again it's like a very much a body you know you can hear it in their voice and so on but that's a very different thing to expect your intuitions are well calibrated to spot something online online like it's a whole new world like we are maybe i don't know i think i don't know i worry that it's i mean i agree i agree what i'm saying is woo i'm not saying i fully believe it but it's an interesting point i just think it's it's it's wishful thinking is my concern i i hope it's true i want it to be it would be nice and i think people should try and cultivate the skill nonetheless yes exactly i'm not saying it would definitely work i'm just kind of throwing it out there because that would be cool if ultimately we were able to like we just couldn't lie to each other anymore like that would be so cool i mean and i mean that's in some ways where like if we really like play this out it seems like we're going towards this hive mind thing anyway this hive mind thing well i mean if we all have like neural links i mean if that's a direction that could the world could end up in i'm not sure if it's one i necessarily want but it's a plausible ish path um because tell me more about the hive mind thing what does that look like well so say for example you know the world is becoming increasingly surveilled okay again i don't like it i am not a pro surveillance person generally speaking um at the same time if you are heading into a world which is fully post-trust or a low trust society the unfortunate like counterbalance like the uh counter reaction to that is to increase surveillance because it's like no one trusts anybody then you have to have some kind of way of like verifying how you verify well through some forms of it doesn't have to be like classic cameras but just like different surveillance methods which then obviously raises the whole problem of who watches the watchers how you know how do you ensure that like this like surveillance state isn't now just completely controlled by a centralized entity which may or may not be benevolent and is often malevolent because the type of people who want that level of power exactly and it corrupts exactly and then power corrupts so this is this like classic idea of um these two dystopian attractor states where you either have like just complete breakdown anarchy because no one can trust anything no one can verify anything and no one knows what the hell's going on and like you so you like social cohesion breaks down um and then even beyond that you have this idea of like with sufficiently powerful dangerous technologies that have been sufficiently democratized you get into this world of like small kills all where like some anyone can synthesize something that's very bad that can propagate and and hurt people so you don't want that that's like like the anarchic dystopian state and state and then the other attractive state is this idea of um well to protect against this you have to have like surveillance and like everyone watching you know the uh basically like you can't give people like agency anymore because it's there are so many dangerous tools that it could cause so much harm that you have to take away everyone's agency and you have some kind of like centralized nightmarish tyrannical tyrannical surveillance state both of those suck i want neither so it's like what is this third outcome what is this third attractive state that we can yeah that we need to design such that people still have freedom and privacy and and at the same time also safety that's it's like how to navigate the tension between the three um it kind of reminds me of the should we have open source models at all should we classify i think mark and jason was talking about how the government was considering classifying the math behind large behind ai which is kind of silly because first of all the math is not that complicated like like my assumption and maybe this is because i don't know about nuclear but my apparently they classified nuclear like math behind nuclear weapons but i could imagine that's probably harder but maybe it's not right it's probably not a bunch of like matrix multiplications right exactly and like just like yeah gradients and you know back propagating gradients like it's not that complicated and i think people could figure it out and also i mean more broadly, it makes, it is a horrible, it would be a horrible travesty if AI was concentrated in the hands of a few small companies because AI is truly applicable to everything.

1:32:17It's just the math of learning. You know, interestingly, they're now using AI math to model human brains. So in the same way that neural networks were kind of based off of human brains, Now human brains are now basing their models off of AI brains because of the math, because we learn kind of the same way. We have these priors and then we get new information and then we update. And it would be such a tragedy to concentrate the understanding of learning algorithms in the hands of a few because it applies to everything. And imagine, I mean, talk about these industries that are highly regulated. Imagine if every single industry, every single tiny use case that wanted to have learning involved had to go through some kind of government entity or one of these tiny little.

1:33:07It's like, oh, my God, you may as well just like like there would be no advancements. And if you look at the advancements in education compared to advancements in things that aren't super highly regulated. This was posted by Mark. He showed these graphs of like the improvements and advancements in regulated areas versus not. I mean, AI has the potential. Again, why I'm sitting here is because I believe AI has the potential to cause this kind of utopia if we apply this learning algorithm to everything, which is part of why I kind of have this philosophy of, I think, I wish there were more AI, not just for AGI, but like more AI resources going towards things like not just developing AGI, but for AI tools, which I think is what actually Mira Murati's new company is doing.

1:33:50so I have to look into that but I think that's literally what she's focusing on which got me really excited um but yeah and the reason I'm sitting here is because I'm excited about AI being used for all these small things just learning in every single domain ever everywhere so if we had it going through these these companies it's not even feasible and it's tragic yeah like that's that's the tension of this like the reason why open source is such a debate is because there are such obvious upsides to open sourcing everything. But there are also such obvious downsides to open sourcing everything because there are bad actors, there are dangerous things, not right now, but in time, there are going to be more dangerous things and the bad guys will always just like, you know, get rid of any safety mechanisms that can be put in.

1:34:35There always have been that though. No, totally. But it's just that the stakes are getting increasingly higher. But it's also true that the stakes are getting higher in the other direction. Right, in the positive. Yeah. Yeah, so there is just this tension and we need to find whatever the like the sane, it doesn't have to be perfectly middle ground, but like the higher complex state. We don't want to just be open source everything, open source the nuclear cosa, you know, but we don't want to be close source everything, regulate everything. No, like we have to thread the needle and it's going to be a very complex answer.

1:35:09I just, you know, let's hope we can figure it out in time. I know it's exciting times it sure is I could not imagine a more exciting time to be alive it's hectic but it's so exciting and and it's also like the ability any one of us you me people watching like because we're at such a crucial time in history it we have more agency than probably anyone oh totally and the two keys to happiness are agency and gratitude go on that's just what um uh shoot paul conti that's what paul conti said on the huberman lab podcast there was a thing on emotional well-being uh-huh they did a series together paul conti's a therapist and he says the two main attributors to happiness are gratitude and agency agency and gratitude so with people having more agency we could might see a lot happier of a society and gratitude is kind of more of a choice kind of like seeing thing focusing on what you can be grateful for right well it's the practice of noticing the good stuff in your life exactly uh yeah no i'm being grateful for feeling gratitude for it you know yeah yeah well and And listen, anything that can, that's really, people talk about like the notion of progress and they're like, oh, let's look at all these different metrics, you know, more infant mortality rates, rates of disease going down, et cetera.

1:36:45I mean, these are important metrics, but I think if you had to try and distill like really what the measure of progress is, it's like, are people happier now than they used to be? It's hard to measure. And maybe it is like impossible to develop a like, by definition, you can't create a singular metric to measure happiness but i think that is probably the like the guiding principle do you think it's happiness or do you think it's fulfillment well maybe i mean depends on your definitions but yeah maybe fulfillment is more directionally that but like because that sort of because it's okay to not be happy sometimes right but you don't want to always be unhappy what really is meaning i guess now yeah like fulfillment has meaning you can be happy when you're like i don't know i mean again it depends on your definition but some people might define happy as being i'm riding a roller coaster all the time yeah and it's like okay but it's not that meaningful yeah well no but like literally being on like a on a like you know doing i'm doing a parachute literally okay yeah um i don't know because this is a very specific thing but at the same time my life probably isn't very meaningful if that's all i do yeah or maybe it comes back to this fulfillment right because like do i like some people get fulfillment out of meaning some people get fulfillment out of always being on either a physical roller coaster or an emotional roller coaster you know like yeah just feeling like okay i like i'm satisfied like i feel good like life is worth living and some i mean if you're happy all the time sure that's one way of being fulfilled i guess it's like the idea of like the the wire heading where it's like you don't actually do anything you're just plugged into a machine that feeds the right chemical juices to make you feel like you're you know having some kind of peak yeah oh my gosh or whatever experience and that's all you're in the experience your reality yeah you're like you're an experience machine i think most people would agree that that's not actually true happiness totally also i want to correct myself i realized i butchered the paul conti thing i think he said the measure of health is agency and gratitude of mental health great not happiness right and mental health mental health perhaps that's maybe the better proxy yes progress yes yes so okay well i think this is a good time to wrap because there is a helicopter for some reason circling around this house they're descending I don't know coming to get me yeah maybe it's the AI sense that we were talking about the demons and we were trying to combine spirituality with technology uh-huh good I'm glad we did the IRS album is upon us yeah exactly literally oh god awesome thank you so much thank you for having me Liv this was so fun

1:39:22Thank you.