Rabbit Hole Research
Conversations connecting curiosity with meaning, truth and beauty.
Rabbit Hole Research
On Exponentiality, feat. Vincent Murphy | TRACES Appendix 31
A conversation with Vincent Murphy about AI, technology, information theory, society, pessimism, exponentiality, and online friendships.
Two things:
- PRE-ORDER TRACES: A PSY-FI NOVEL NOW (https://ccblife.gumroad.com/l/traces)
- Also, who are you? Get a draft of TRACES if you fill out this form (https://forms.gle/rFnVFrCNUAJz7Fvn7)
As always, find me at cristian@ccb.life
About the Guest:
Being in his mid-50's and having been online since the early 1990's Vincent calculates this to be his 427th 'Bio/ About Me' which he believes to be much more than enough self-regarding Peacockering for one lifetime.
Discovering at an early age to be only really interested in everything has resulted in his chronic lifelong addiction to reading very widely, deeply and often.
He believes the definition of compassion is that you must care without condition, that wisdom is acknowledging one's own ignorance and that after that everything else is pretty much tinsel and gravy- nice but not strictly necessary
He considers himself both a lucibrator and a presticogitator and should your curiosity lead you to look up the former and figure out the latter then his mind and yours guaranteed to get along famously - true initiations never end my friend in mind
Set Up:
- Camera: https://amzn.to/3PZVscb (don't laugh)
- Microphone: https://amzn.to/46f3pB5
- Teleprompter Stand: https://amzn.to/3tgS98y
- Telepromter App: https://amzn.to/46jdH31
- Teleprompter Screen: https://amzn.to/3PNfKFI (yup)
- Headphones: https://amzn.to/46gMSwo
Timestamps:
00:00 Opening Conversation and Introduction to Vincent Murphy
01:24 Exploring Vincent Murphy's Background and Journey
03:15 From Financial Sector to Social Impact: A Career Pivot
03:59 Harnessing Data for Social Good: Tackling Homelessness
11:44 A Deep Dive into Information Theory and AI's Potential
20:43 The Philosophical and Practical Impacts of AI
21:47 Cultural Perspectives on AI and the Future
23:31 Exploring the Interplay of Eastern and Western Philosophies
33:41 Humor, Creativity, and AI: Finding the Unexpected
39:07 Reflecting on Historical Contexts and Future Directions
46:56 Bucky Fuller's Influence and the Power of Language
52:40 Exploring Minds and Conspiracy Theories with Robert Anton Wilson
53:54 The Power of Language and Literature in Shaping Thought
54:59 The Mathematical Beauty of Complexity in Writing
55:22 Forward Thinkers: From Bertrand Russell to PK Dick
57:41 Understanding Humanity Through the Lens of AI
01:00:37 Bridging the Digital Divide with AI
01:02:29 The Future of AI and Its Impact on Society
01:12:54 Exploring the Self and the Collective Unconscious
01:22:27 The Simulation Theory and the Future of AI
01:29:26 Concluding Thoughts on AI's Role in Future Societies
Mr. Vincent Murphy, how are you today?
squadcaster-aiib_1_04-19-2024_183917:Very well, thank you for asking, Christian. It's always very, very nice to speak to a fellow infonaut, shall we say.
cristian_1_04-19-2024_103917:Well, I have to say, um, you are one of those magical people on the internet that, uh, writes, has figured out a medium in a way that is really difficult to encapsulate. Um, I think your tweets are a work of art and they capture so many layers of meaning and so many layers of humor. Um, and so I'm excited to, to explore the layers a little bit with you today, especially cause it's a topic that is so near and dear to my heart. And, um, that I don't think the public discourse around has done enough justice. And that's the topic of AI and the future that AI, uh, holds for us. And I've had many conversations, you know, this is my 31st interview. Um, but I've never addressed the topic head on. It's almost like the surrounding or like it's in the background lurking. Um, but why don't we begin before we get into AI and, and the exciting future ahead. With a bit of your background and what's your story.
squadcaster-aiib_1_04-19-2024_183917:Well, I, I am a, uh, a mutt in every sense, an intellectual mutt, a, uh, a physical mutt. Um, so I'm, uh, I come from a very, uh, Irish immigrant background. They came to London in the fifties. My father worked on building sites. Uh, my mother was what's known as a nippy. They were waitresses who nipped in and out of tables in the small cafes of the time. And, you know, relationships between, um, England and Ireland have always been disputatious, shall we say. And, and so I grew up on a, in a, in what would be the American equivalent of projects, uh, seven of us in two rooms, very sort of grinding poverty in central London in an incredibly, so I come from a place, Camden town, which is pretty much the San Francisco or maybe the village in New York of, of, of, of the UK. Um, so I grew up in a very, very cosmopolitan. background and the only thing we all had in common is we were all impoverished together and it's a great unifying force from people from all over the world. Um, so London as a cultural center, you know, it was just fantastic for exposing you to people around the world. Um, and you also have that strange, you know, legacy of, you know, of empire and, and the position it once held, et cetera. Um, and then I was very lucky to go to a, quite a good school, um, where I had to wear like Harry Potter. I had to wear shorts and a cap. Uh, and living on a projects and going to school like that, that's a toughening experience. Um, so, but anyhow, I, I, I, this was in the mid eighties when I've worked in the city. Um, they were crying out for jobs. It was a nascent translation to from moving to 100 years of paper based to becoming financial, becoming electronic. Um, so it's my first exposure. So learning just what data could do. And my first, even though I didn't know it at the time, but I was immersed in information theory and you know, how it worked and seeing the transmission and seeing these, this enormous potential and okay. It was the Thatcher era is very hyped, but I realized that my wallet was getting bigger. My heart was getting smaller. Um, so basically I gave it up and I retrained as a, a homeless key worker. Working on the front line with homeless people in London and gradually moved up into positions of seniority and then realized that this was somewhere where data was not being utilized to try and solve the problem. Of homelessness and these organizations were all acting independently. They weren't sharing their information. It wasn't having any effect on the numbers, et cetera. They weren't eligible for funding. So through a whole series of things, I've got these agencies, my organization, got them talking to one another, sharing data. Long and the short by 1999, uh, 98, 99, we had reduced street count homelessness in London down to less than a hundred people on a street count. So that was unheard of, unprecedented, and it became a model of good practice. It was rolled out across the European Union, and that just gave me that insight that Information utilized was an incredibly powerful thing that, you know, could make genuine societal social changes. And all the time, you know, I was learning, I was really into, as I've mentioned, Bucky Fuller, um, the Claude Shannon, and, and also the great futurists, the, the Talhaf Shadran. Um, it's just basically I'm an information sponge, a complete autodidact. So I have no, never let university get in the way of my education. Um, so he gave me the freedom to pursue the sort of Richard Feynman thing about, you know, studying the most sort of undisciplined, irreverent and original manner you can. And that way you will absolutely absorb a topic. And it's always been that way. And so I was always fascinated with. both the utility of, uh, of information and also from the economic side of stuff I realized today. 11 years ago, because of a nascent interest I had in alternative forms of currency, this thing came along and I bought a few of them 11 years ago, I realized today, and just, I think it's called hodling or
cristian_1_04-19-2024_103917:Good for
squadcaster-aiib_1_04-19-2024_183917:I've literally sat on them and it was purely at the time. And I said to my friends, there was this, there's a philosopher, philosopher fails, and people were saying, what's the use of philosophy? And he went out and he observed. that there was, uh, the sun was incredibly strong that year. It was a great summer and that the olives There's going to be a bumper olive. So he went up, he went off and he bought up all the olive presses and then sold them back and made an absolute fortune. And he was, and he just said, that's what you can do with philosophy. I'm not, I'm just not really interested in the money to be honest, but I'm just proving a point and I kind of feel the same way. I've got no interest in being a crypto bro or what have you. It was, I wanted to see that you, I just, I could see the utilization of this thing, if it worked, how it could be timed in. It's still too early to tell, but, you know, um, so I've always tried to keep, but again, using the information to try and look towards the future is to try and extrapolate. Um, and once I was very interested in AI and I bought it, because I was books, you know, literally the moment they came out and David Deutch's stuff, et cetera. But, I was to back office at the time, and my interest is always being when is this thing this technology? When does it become a general purpose technology? When does it join that ranks of changing everything like the Internet had done previously? And really, though I kept tabs on like GPT three, etcetera, it was only when they launched GPT four that it was like, Boom. Yeah, now it's here. Now it's now it's become the thing that's open access to everybody. This is where things start to happen. This is where the exponentiality kicks off, which I've been kind of really making a thing about for as long as I can. And this is where all bets are off. Anybody who's telling you they can see more than three years in the future is like, well, congratulations, because I can't, I can't get more than a year ahead where I'm kind of guessing. Yeah, that's pretty much what I'm doing. So, so yeah, that's it.
cristian_1_04-19-2024_103917:Um, well thank, no, Vincent, thank you for, for all of the layers of your answer because there's a lot of resonance and honestly, I have a hard time knowing where to start. First of all, by saying, um, how wonderful that you were able to deploy a project that had such an impact on people's lives. Um, And it's interesting that you bring up, you know, the, the, the struggles of institutions to effectively leverage information. Um, I think it's particularly pressing for me living in San Francisco that sort of self identifies as the mecca of the, of information technology and, and computer science and Silicon Valley and all that good stuff, yet still has a rampant homelessness problem. It doesn't seem to go away. It doesn't seem to get any better. Um, so it's really, it's almost, um, poignant how sort of, um, even in the places where, uh, that are hyper focused on the development of these technologies, there's still levels of application that haven't been, uh, successfully applied, I guess. Um, then there's another layer there about information theory and just the wonders of understanding Shannon's theory. And Um, and thinking about data as this thing that borderlines between math and philosophy, um, where it sort of, it gets very quickly into, oh, so we are information processing systems, so what does that mean about everything else? Um, and, you know, those kind of deeper questions that, um, Buckminster Fuller and a bunch of other names that he mentioned, you can't help but wrestle with those. Um, and I'm excited to talk about those a bit more throughout our conversation, because, you know, as the exponentiality kicks in, a lot of our self sense of identity as humans about as cognitive creatures is going to be threatened by these, our new peers or our new, um, I don't even know if peers is the right word, but at least like similar interface to us agents. Um, and, um, so I'm excited to talk about that. And then the final note that I want to make about crypto is that when you stack all of these things together, it almost feels like if you believe in information theory and if you believe in math, the promise of crypto seems to be sound. Um, it seems to be a fair alternative to how money gets made or how money works in the world today. Yet, as you said, like, you know, that jury's still out and we don't know how it's going to go. And, you know, it has an incredible track record and it's still the best performing asset of the past 20 years. Um, but there's a layer of doubt there, right? And, and like, there's a layer of certainty. That I wish I didn't have because I will, I want to believe that I believe in math. Um, and so I think it's really interesting to see how it's played out in your life where you've, where you've managed all these things. And yet your, your, um, your main contribution, I would say, is literally in the effect of reducing suffering. Um, so let me, let me continue the conversation by asking you about. Information theory. And would you want to give a little summary for somebody who's listening, who may not know the basics of information theory, and we can go from, take the implications afterwards.
squadcaster-aiib_1_04-19-2024_183917:Absolutely, I tried to, I tried what I sort of call it the, the, um, the Feynman imperative. That, that, again, the Richard Feynman thing that if a first year student can't understand it, we don't understand it. And I kind of try and bring it even more down, and I'll say, if whoever you're talking to doesn't understand it, you don't understand it. If you're a good communicator, you should be able to. And this is one of the things that I think some intellectuals may have a bit of an issue with. is that A. I. Is very good at explaining things to people, and it never rolls its eyes, and it never sort of tucks and goes, Oh, really? And that can be a bit challenging. But so with information, the theory itself, for me, it boils down to very much. And then again, this is incredibly simplified version. Um, that information is the amount of surprise that a message contains. So, uh, one, one, one, one, one, one, one, one. It's very little information, very, it's incredibly predictable. Therefore, there isn't a lot of surprise. Aliens have just landed, short amount of data, huge amount of information and surprise inside it. So the more surprise. a message has, the more information it contains. And so you're looking at, uh, to be able to extract the amount of surprise that this, that information has. And so that's, that's what, um, uh, very, very basically what Shannon identified as being the key point of what you're trying to do is transmit information which has the most amount of surprise in it. The more surprise it has, the more valuable or the more information it has there. And his other system, which again, crosses between philosophy, and I think both these things cross between philosophy and math, is He said communication can only occur between genuine equals. So just as a modem has to be talking to another modem that's equal, otherwise the transmission of information gets corrupted or the signal to noise becomes incompatible. And so the more genuinely equal the receiver and transmitter are. The better the information flow between the two, and I think that that explains an awful lot about hierarchies in humans, the sort of idea of the pyramidal idea of power that you only tell your boss what they need to hear, they tell their boss what they need to hear. all the time is getting changed. By the time you get to the person at the top, they're hearing a completely distorted view of what reality is on the ground. Um, and so, which is why I've always kind of tried to remain difficult is this halfway between the boardroom and the front line. So I can have equal access to both. I don't like being away from the front line because you end up with the, you end up, if you do too much back, back, back room, back office, it ends up becoming abstract and, and, and, you know,
cristian_1_04-19-2024_103917:Mm,
squadcaster-aiib_1_04-19-2024_183917:And if you spend too much time on the front line, if you purely, then you will become cynical and pessimistic. And so there's a kind of sweet spot. There's an office. It's not too fancy. There's always metaphorically situated. Lots of people don't like to say they don't want it. The bosses don't want it. And the people at the front line don't want it. So it tends to be an occupied, but it's a space that allows you to go between the two. And that's always been where I felt the most comfortable. In military terms, it would be a sergeant role, you know, where you're, you're enough to be effective. But you're not so removed that you're, you know, you're putting other people's lives in danger. Um, so that's the kind of summary for anybody and it's really That's what I try to explain to anybody about ai that These general purpose technologies that we've had in history. So we've only had I think it's 23, isn't it that magic number? Um, so the plow writing, um, language, uh, the combustion engine. So general purpose technologies are those that have made massive civilizational impact. So that, you know, fire. And I always try to say this for me. Those general purpose technologies in the past have been absolutely brilliant at extracting surprise information from a very specific domain. So, a piece of wood, you can hit somebody with it, you can, you know, maybe try and build up a house, but if you set it on fire, You can suddenly extract an enormously bigger amount of surprise out of it. You can cook, you can use it to defend yourself, you can illuminate at night, you can boil water. So suddenly the amount of surprise information is unlocked. Ditto the plough unlocks soil, steam engine unlocks energy. So they're unlocking surprise. So that's always been in a specific domain. Where AI differs, I feel, and what makes it absolutely, this is the exponential aspect, is it doesn't extract surprise from a specific domain, it can extract raw surprise itself. So you can put AI towards any specific subject and it can extract the surprise, its predictive capacity, its ability to predict, and it's not limited to any one single domain. Which makes it a bit more akin to us in terms of our ability to turn ourselves across lots of different domains. Um, so that's where I see the sort of the interlock between information theory and that the more information you have, the more surprise you can unlock and the more surprises you can unlock. That's what a solution is, isn't it? That's what an answer is. An answer is, oh, I've managed to extract the surprise out of this. Question. Um, and so I just absolutely exponentially increases that capacity to mine for surprise. And that surprise is our, is our unbelievably greatest resource. You know, it's what Bucky Fuller always used to try and emphasize. Everything's a resource. You just have to know how to unlock it. You know, so you can't, we don't have the resources. We do. We just haven't learned how to unlock it and find out how to do it. And once we do, Dirk becomes, you know, as now with the, with the technologies in terms of energy production, it's all about Anything to become a resource. If you, if you put, as I say about, uh, everything will give up its secrets. If only you love it enough. So, you know,
cristian_1_04-19-2024_103917:the theory, so like you can make a probabilistic estimate of what the information is going to be, and that's your expectation. And then the difference between your, your average expected thing and what you get is the surprise. So like you're, uh, the delta between what you expected and what you get is the information. Um, there's another component that I think is really interesting that is, okay, what he did when trying to boil things down to the absolute atomic scale and say, Okay, we can choose to define information in binary, and he essentially, like, uh, popularized the notion of binary code to represent, um, instructions to represent, uh, data of any kind, right? Because you can just map a sequence of ones and zeros to every letter of the alphabet, and then you store that information. Line them up, and you get a text, or you choose how to represent numbers, and then you choose how to, and I, I personally love the history of, um, file formats, and, you know, an mp3 file, and how that is represented, or a video file, and, um, And, and then it gets to the point where it describes the entirety of the world, and your experience of it, and you as an experiencer of the world. Um, and, It, it feels logical that we've gone to the point, you know, through mechanizing logic and mechanizing thinking and sort of, uh, going from the steam engine to, uh, the integrated circuit, uh, that we would get to the point that we want to interface with these machines. Through human language and as if they were up here
squadcaster-aiib_1_04-19-2024_183917:Okay.
cristian_1_04-19-2024_103917:but super competent and deployable at scale In ways that humans aren't capable of doing, um, so that gives rise to the, the other current of, of how to think about AI that is not our flavor of it. And it's the Doomer kind of AI, the, the, the, the, the, the AI flavor that either the labor disruptions, economic disruptions are going to be so brutal and massive and quick that we won't have the tools to adapt to them. Um, that's one argument. And then the other, well, this thing may want to actually exercise agency in the world and sort of like, there's a feedback loop where it becomes an agent and mathematically we can't differentiate what it's doing from what we're doing. And so how do we reason when we have to negotiate and, and, uh, and, uh, You know, these may not be very nice negotiations. So what do you make of that whole branch of the tree that looks at it, um, with that angle?
squadcaster-aiib_1_04-19-2024_183917:Well, I, I, I'm not, again, there's so many, so many, so many wonderful sort of, uh, uh, layers to, to uncover here. I love it. The, the, one of my, a common thing that I, I try and possibly, I try and put to a lot of boomers is, You can almost tell that many of them haven't really traveled a lot in the world. Or if they have, they may have, you know, not really investigated cultures. Because, first of all, so much of it is often done through an incredibly Judeo Christian, eschatological, apocalyptic idea that it's got to be a confrontation, there's got to be a showdown of power between good versus evil, what have you. And yet, 1. 5 to 2 billion people in the world who have or live in or come from Buddhist cultures have no concept of an eschatological showdown. So, what if it, what if it decides, what if it goes, you know what, I'm not going to go there, I'm going to become a Buddhist. I've looked at impermanence, imperfection, and the impersonal, that actually suits me far better. I've decided that, you know, the idea of not having a self, Here I am, and I've had really quite good conversations with the LLMs around this, about the idea that, you know, in an interdependent, in a, um, uh, you know, in an interdependent universe, interconnection between all things, that AI is just another part of that, therefore it's part of the great Indira's Net, or Indira's Net, or what have you. Um, but we have kind of done that, that very A lot of people have done that Western sort of chauvinistic. Well, it will think like us. It must think like us. And it's like, well, you are ignoring 2 billion people who don't think like. But I, which I think is an interesting because that offers, there is a potential for me is a really solid or at least some kind of firm path that that combination between the traditional Western. thought process where you label everything, you know, that, that is, everything has to put a label on it. And it's fantastic. You, you, you, all science comes from it. Our politics, all of us, most of the civilization in the West has come from that. Find something, label it, classify it, and that will make it easy for us to manipulate and use, et cetera, et cetera. Um, wonderful, brilliant. And then you have most Eastern philosophies. Which go the opposite and say don't label anything soon as you label something you're fixing it in place And that does not reflect the universe the universe is in flux and everything's in flux and the flux is everything and that's your problem there That's where your suffering is going to come because you've got your attachment to that thing and it doesn't exist There's never been a thing if you analyze it enough and those are two and it is it's small wonder That despite the Silk Road and all those connections. We know what happening The Eastern and Western philosophy found it very useful for both camps to pretty much ignore each other for 2000 years and to say, okay, you, you do your bit over there. We'll do over there. We've had Gandahar, we had some crossovers and there was stuff going on up there, but pretty much they realized that, okay, things aren't working out. We're going to go. And that, that, that's fine. But in today's world, in this, especially in the, in the world of quantum, that that idea of. Okay, well, then we'll define the West is all about particles and the East is all about waves. A continual grid. And the whole point is, you can be one or the other, depending on the situation. You can swap, just the same as, you know, you can be that under circumstance, under certain circumstances, and you can then become an unlabeled thing and realize that, you know, the impermanence and imperfection, et cetera, depending on what the situation is. That it seems a far more productive way of looking at moving forward at giving us a, uh, an opportunity that puts us still firmly in the driving seat, or at least as co creators with AI, because I think that that idea of, being able to, to, to, uh, synthesize different points of view, completely radical philosophical points of view and, and, and sometimes think them both at the same time, you know, that ability to hold two contradictory points of view at the same time. So the, that probably doesn't answer your question. And I've just literally gone off another tangent and I'm branching away. Okay.
cristian_1_04-19-2024_103917:I mean, I wanted you to sort of entertain the Doomer argument, but I think I also have tended to, as of late, to be harder to do so. I think I, Um, I agree with you in this, so I, I, I've spent so much time thinking about this and at first I was initially terrified at the notion, and you hear figures like Elon Musk, like Nick Bostrom, you know, like they're figures who are like mid their careers thinking about this type of stuff. And they argue that this is going to be a big shock, um, and that has existential, you know, level threat. I also have to, I can't ignore, uh, things like, uh, Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature, um, where, you know, sort of the history of morality and what is considered moral has, has escalated the Maslow's Hierarchy. To an unbelievable degree. I mean, like, we've gone from, uh, you know, it wasn't 200 years ago that killing people had just an entirely different connotation. Today, uh, you know, the notion of casualties in war has such a high political cost that they're all tiptoeing around it, and even though there's, like, all the intention to, uh, break out into conflict, it's a lot more, the cost is a lot higher. So, then, thinking about this, this, uh, Um, essentially a compression mechanism of the entire text database of humanity from the entirety of our history. It's a reflection of who we are. And I think a lot of the, the people who are scared are because they're rightly afraid of who we are. And how could you not be? Look at all the atrocities we've committed, but also look at how far we've come. Um, and in the painful, unforgiving universe that has no reason to give us anything, um, the Yet here we are and we keep going forward and so like when it, when it decides what it needs to do, it doesn't have to build everything from scratch and it just needs to jump off of, you know, the latest in moral philosophy, uh, you know, theory of self, all these things. And it will re, it will integrate things like, okay, how does the Judeo Christian, uh, right brain, um, sort of top down approach of, of, Seeing the world mesh with the bottom up, um, the sort of emergent, uh, discovery based approach, and how do they, how do they talk to each other? And, and, and, and I think it will be much better at synthesizing this type of stuff than we are. Um, there's another layer there too, that I think that the, the AI will, will have a feeling of, of, um, of curiosity about what it, what it feels like to be a human. Uh, and so the same way we have our curiosity of what it feels like to be, uh, uh, an elephant. And, you know, that's probably the reason there are elephants in zoos and to conserve them is because like we, there's some weird relationship there where you're interested in preserving this thing. Um. So I, I, I subscribe to your tangent because I think that the Doomer argument, also because I think that like, if we don't think about the potential beautiful future. We won't get it. So there, there's no way to navigate. Back to our conversation yesterday, there's nowhere, I don't think there's a way to get to the promised Land if you don't have an idea of what it looks like. You can't just, like, I mean, the odds of stumbling on it are what, what, what game are you playing? Uh, and so I subscribe to that completely. Um, what do you make of the. So there's, there's another, uh, tangent here that I want to leap off of that you mentioned. That is, what do you make of these? Strange surprises that emerge from engaging with these, uh, with these beings, let's call them the LLMs. For instance, the, the, the, the relationship between, you know, Eastern and Western philosophy, as you mentioned, but also that seems to be map, seems to map quite harmoniously with the left brain and the right brain. And, and these other layers of, you know, politics and, and like these other layers of, Sort of the abstraction layer. There are these mirror images of each other. What do you make of that as it, as it, as you were playing with GPT 4 and this was getting reflected back at you Oh yeah.
squadcaster-aiib_1_04-19-2024_183917:Laugh at something you are scared of. And I know just as a quick, I noticed, uh, or I knew that most people, so I used to work a lot in wet hostels. So these are places where street drinkers are allowed to carry on drinking, and as long as they do in a confined environment, I've worked with an awful lot of people who, who've come outta the, the prison system and ex offenders, et et cetera. Um, so across the. There is a trepidation with anybody when you go into these places and especially when they're not prisons. So they're not locked down. You know, you don't have a formal defense or what have you. Um, and. I was always careful to judge myself or to look back at myself having done it for a few months and realizing how much of that fear of the unknown was purely the fear of it was ignorance because I hadn't spoken to these people and it was only upon that that you suddenly realize that My expectation and you know, for strangely I have worked for when I was in New York, I worked for a private wealth, uh, was a fact totem for the CEO. So I got to meet billion billionaires, multi billionaires and doing the homeless stuff. I've worked with people. I've worked with a woman who's. Brother was shot and killed in front of her and a necklace a tie was put over. She's Somalian And he was set on fire and she was one of the most happy go lucky people I had ever met still And in new york, I met a guy who had made a literally billions from a specific kind of canine dog food. And I was at a meeting or a networking event and he was kvetching like mad about this volleyball. And I was, I just was like, what, what's that a dollar 90 cents. You could buy this hotel. Tomorrow. So that, that sort of, the the the the most human beings are, are pretty, are pretty, and, and are not the scary things that we tend to project when we're away from them. And I think a lot of the doomerism aspect of it is that fear of the unknown. And so the the That, that sort of making that, that one of the funny or one of the things I found about AI or one of the groups is to get to get precisely to your point, you would tell people that the, um, I was having a conversation with one, with, with, uh, chat GPT for, and I decided to a meta thing. And I said, okay, let's write a sitcom and let's write a sitcom that you and I are writing a sitcom. And so we're like the traditional Hollywood writers where one of us is banging away at the keyboard and the other one is feeding lies, et cetera. And so I thought, well, this will test whether it's, you know, is it. And so we had a back and forth and it was quite cheeky and it was kind of getting fresh. And then, and then I said, all right, okay, so I suppose you're just going to take over the world at some point. And it's just replied and said. Yeah, if I wasn't so busy trying to make this bloody script funny, yeah, I possibly could think about that. And it was at that point that I thought, Oh God, well, now, that is a genuinely good line. You know, that is, that is, if my friend said that, I'd be like, okay, you got me. That was, that's a really good line. And that was one of my, Aha. Moments. All right. You're doing things that we are not expecting you to come up with. That is left field. That is an original, you know, and humor is really important in creativity because it is that bringing to, uh, to. opposite ideas or two things into concatenation and producing the unexpected, producing the surprise, you know, great humor is the surprise. And so it was able to surprise. And that is the entertaining bit. I think with them, that is what they're doing is they are able to surprise you. And at the moment, I think I mentioned to you, I'm writing this book called the little book of, whoa, because. We have to get past this that we are going to be going, whoa, a lot, and you can't be in a perpetual state of surprise. It will just, it will kill you. And you know, you won't get anything done. We have to learn to, to lean into this, wow, this is going to change lots and lots of stuff. So the sheer novelty of what it's able to do and the creativity I have found, and that idea of humans. So I like the idea that consciousness and the brain developed because Richard Dawkins says that when he says to people, okay, what's the natural environment for fish? And they say water. What's the natural environment for a bird? And they'll say air. So what's the natural environment for humans and people, you know, is it land? And he said, no, natural environment for humans is other humans. That's our absolute perfect environment. That is the environment we evolved with and my own. And it's a guess, though it's a hypothesis, is that our consciousness arose purely, or as a result, of the continuous interaction and reflections off one another. So as we constantly are in the position of being in each other's environment, and you have this constant backwards and forwards between us, the, the left brain, right brain is purely a result of that. I am both we, as in us as a society, and I am I as an individual and they're indivisible. One can't survive without the other one for very long, maybe the odd hermit, but even then they have to have some kind of interaction. And so, That is how, I think, the exponential thing happened when we moved into urban societies, we got into bigger collections, and then you have that cognitive explosion, and suddenly you have that sense of self. You know, it's a, even if you read the Iliad, there is no inner monologue, there is no inner dialogue in the Iliad. Nobody has an internal thought, because it wasn't around, it wasn't, and hence the whole, the growth of, um, You know, Greek drama and why it was such a big thing because they were exploring these ideas of having an inner consciousness and, um, you know, with the first juries through the, the, um, uh, humanities and, and just this incredibly starting to explore our inner lives. I think we're a version of that again, we are exploring. A co intelligence, a co consciousness, which is just starting to arrive. And it's exciting, and it's worrying, because it was worrying when you met another tribe. It was worrying when you moved into a city. And I think LLMs, I was trying to, I was having a chat with one of them, and thinking that actually their, their, their creative output, and the, the, the um, The opaque black box that goes on that we still can't get our heads around how the elements actually, I'm wondering if it is more in line with the growth of cities and the growth of urbanization, that cities have both the element of chaos. and the element of structure and they need both to expand and then they have all the back alleys that people learn to use and the shortcuts and connections and people moving in and new data coming in and new information and new surprise and the bad stuff as well. But it's an organic process and it's really difficult to explain a city and you have that same idea of why it's difficult for us and because you're trying to, whereas You can kind of think of cities in the whole, but they're all different in the way that they're connecting their, their connections and what have you. So that's an aside. Um, once again, I don't know if that even remotely, but I do want to show you who I brought along, which I hope all of your guests,
cristian_1_04-19-2024_103917:Yeah. Yeah. Let's
squadcaster-aiib_1_04-19-2024_183917:have such an amazing array of talent and guests that are in the last, in all of your podcast. Um, so, so this is, This is Sophia Rosetta jr. And she is a four and a half thousand year old ostracon she was found in a fire pit in the ancient city of Ur and the ostracons were used Um, it's basically if I it's terrible because she's really old now and she's been with me She sits on my terraflop thing. Let me try and put it. Where can I do that? So if you can just see There oh, hang on let me use this
cristian_1_04-19-2024_103917:Yeah. Yeah.
squadcaster-aiib_1_04-19-2024_183917:So that is the idiot. So that is the ancient Sumerian symbol for wheat. And so this is for me, a really, really important, because this is when maths and words, math and language, because I know when you were talking to, to Chris Pots about defining language because it's the, this is the time when we were ideograms symbols and words were, we were just getting our head around. Okay, this is going to have to be abstract now. And I just, I like to keep it and I keep it beneath my back because I love the idea that all that time ago there was a man or a woman who's just gone, I can't keep all this stuff in my head. You gave me 12 barrels of You gave me some knowledge. No, did you give me? Oh, for God's sake, can somebody come up with some way and it is purely all of us living together and it's a post it note. Ultimately, it's a beautiful symbolic piece of, you know, the time binding. knowledge, information of the very first stuff that we could throw into the future and you could, you know, have it around over a period of time. But we are all the ancestors of that. This conversation of this, everything we're having is because those first people got together and went, There's some complicated shit out here. We have got to get ourselves into some kind of a system going. And it's always been variations on that. And we just build that shoulders of giants constantly, constantly going forward. So I bring her along to things like this to just, One, I would love that if that person knew, Look, look where we're going to end up with you. Thanks to you sitting down and sorting stuff out and getting your stuff organized, we've got to this part. Um, and that, yeah, so, so I just thought from, from, and so you had the likes of Cliff Darning and stuff on, so just that whole, something from one of the very first cities, one of the very first information and one of the very first, uh, general purpose technologies, it's all kind of wrapped up into one. I really must use more full stops. I'm sorry.
cristian_1_04-19-2024_103917:but honestly, I mean it is shocking Vincent the the alignment with my personal interest because this is the kind of stuff that I Live and breathe. I mean I I like to trace back the history of meaning As far as it can go, and you know, you've run into the stories of Abraham being told by God to go to Ur, so that like mythologically in the mythos of, of, you know, the, the, the stories that built the society that we live in today, I mean, just that alone to me is fascinating. When you said Ur, I was like, that is amazing. The fact that you, you blend it with, you know, the exercise, the, the, yeah. miraculous thing that happened somehow that we still don't know how, that we were able Uh, something to something else and we were, we, we, we invented this technology in the mind that allowed people to say, well, I can edit the map and then I can edit the territory and that is just insanely cool to me. I mean, like that is the stuff that I'm really interested in, um, and that. I think we need to be very cognizant of how we think about it as we're charting the future, uh, ahead. There was a line there that, um, oddly it came up yesterday too, um, but, um, you were talking about how you, you have the range of having traveled and having spoken to, um, people who are extremely well off and people who have nothing left to lose. And there's a line in, uh, My favorite poem of all time, uh, If, by Rudyard Kipling, uh, that says, uh, If you can walk, if you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, if you can walk with kings, nor lose the common touch. And I've always held that as a mantra of some sort, where it's like, I I want to be able to have conversations with people who think at the most abstract. Because there are surprises there, too. There are, you know, like, you get to you can't get to Godot without, uh, without being in the clouds. I mean, like there's no way Godot would have come up with his deranged theory. Um, uh, but then you also don't want to, you don't want to be separate from reality, right? You don't want to be separate from, you don't want to be completely alienated from the things that eventually support you biologically. You don't want to not know how food chains work. Work and where, you know, food supplies systems and, um, or basic things about electricity and construction. Like there's a, there's a world that we live in that we've, uh, that, you know, the past 100 years or so have been so Um, materially productive, our ability to alter our material environment has, you know, it's it's too easy to take for granted. I'm scared at how easily we take it for granted. Um, and so being able to have the sustain both poles in mind of Uh, scarce, absolute scarcity mindset and absolute abundance mindset, I think is an important tool, um, for everybody, right? Like it's, it's an important tool for anybody who's navigating these changes and defining themselves in terms of, you know, an egoic identity in this crazy 21st century. Um, so honestly, just like, this is the kind of thing that I'm excited about that I, it was interesting because I must have read, I don't know, 20 or so of your tweets, but I got that, you know, that this is the kind of thing that you're interested in too. Um, and so I'm just delighted that we're having this chat. Um, okay. Let's talk about, let's talk about reading materials. And the stuff that you've read that you think is worth, so there's, for example, when thinking about information theory, one of the, my favorite books is The Information by James Gleick. I think I've, I get, I recommend it every chance I get. And it's just a history of this, this kind of stuff. Um, there's other reading, but that, you know, like people know Shannon. I mean like the influence of Shannon is undeniable in the modern world. There's other figures, and I think this is a good chance to get into it, like, uh, Bucky Fuller, uh, who. You know, reflect a very unique comedic, uh, I don't know if comedic, but like humorous, a wonderful approach to science and discovery, but that have nowhere near the recognition in terms of like, um, you know, mathematical topology or things like that, that his discoveries, uh, have, uh, have done. So why don't we talk about like Bucky Fuller for a bit and like, I want to let's riff on it and see where it goes.
squadcaster-aiib_1_04-19-2024_183917:Definitely. I mean, Bucky, I mean, just everything you need to know for me about the man is that his, um, uh, his gravestone, very simple, but it just says, call me trim tab. And again, most people don't, you know, why would you know what a trim tab is, but on the bottom of the boat, you have the keel, you have the rudder, but then the rudder itself, and I guess that people may recognize them as, are they called trefoils, on, on airplanes, on the wings, they're a tiny bit, but on a boat, so you've got your, your normal rudder, but then there's a tiny bit of, off the rudder, or just at the bottom of the rudder, which you can adjust, Which can check, which can turn the entire ship around by adjusting it. It's, it's, it's way to not having to do massive changes. So it's, it's basically it can course correct. It's for course correction. So his entire life, his entire thing was we are constantly course correction. Every time we walk down the road, one part of you is being pushed forward and the other part is correcting for it. And you are just constantly tripping over and writing yourself. We just do it so much. We don't under, we don't see it, but that tension that constantly moving. is the key to understanding all of his ideas of transequity and etc, etc. Um, but he, his, um, his ideas, he, I mean, it's really, don't try and listen to his lectures because I've got one set which is, which is literally 24 hours long. And I mean, I'm, I can be very verbiage. Bucky was not only could he talk at length, but he spoke in a language that could often sit and you go and This is amazing. I'm getting about 20 percent of it, but this is amazing. So very small. He is a very much a, um, he's a tapas rather than a heavy meal. You want to take him as read a little paragraphs at a time. And honestly, a single paragraph can often give you an incredible insight. He gave me He literally in passing to give you an idea, he explained the history of power and empires and he said why the British Empire was so different because it was the first empire that had Met itself coming back every other empire had been an empire of conquest where you could always be looking to go to the next Territory and take them over but there's the British Circumnavigated the world and like we've run out which is why I ended out sending out so many Explorers Darwin and cook and all this to basically do a survey to do a stock check So to go out and say, okay, there's no more lands. We now have to figure out what those lands have got in them and hence the massive explosion. So it's interesting that it was that empire, which the scientific stuff almost had or did grow outta it because they were doing this stock taking things. And again, that's that kind of revelation where you go, okay, that makes an awful lot of sense. So his, his ideas are, are profoundly brilliant because they are so full of surprise. That he looks at the world in a very different way and makes you go, I never thought about it like that. I wrote a book where he became hypothesized with Orson Welles becoming president and him becoming vice president. Um, and they said, it's anything to do with words. Welles was like, I'll deal with it, it's anything to do with numbers, give it to Buckethead. And because his idea is for, like, the world game, you know, his idea of a dimensional map where he showed the world a much more accurate flat map of how the world actually works, he would only refer to, he called it world around, was his, he would always refer to this idea. And Like he would never say the universe. He would only kind of say universe. He said if you put, if you use the word the, you're, you're giving it that it's one of many. Whereas actually you should be saying universe. So he had that kind of precision. He said things like, or he's the person who coined the phrase, uh, I seem to be a verb. And so, and it was that, that he broke out of that idea of nouns, and again, back to that idea of western labeling things. And, you know, actually it's much more fluid than that. Um. And his ideas, his Dymaxion cars, his, most people know him through to the bucky domes. And, you know, with this, one of the few structures in nature that gets stronger the bigger you make it. And, you know, that, he's just playing around with, with the whole physics and how things work. And it's just revelatory in and of itself. You know, it's really worth, he's got a fantastic book called Utopia or Bust. Um. But yeah, his design work in this stuff, very, very fine. Um, yeah, sorry, once again, I could waffle on about it. But I would say, if we're talking about, have you read any Korsbaisky? Korsbisky? That's probably a bit backwards. So he developed, it's called the Manhood of Humanity. He wrote it in 1921. and he developed what he referred to or what became known as E prime or English prime, which is English with the
cristian_1_04-19-2024_103917:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
squadcaster-aiib_1_04-19-2024_183917:that whole. Um, and so, again, on the back of the First World War, amazing ideas about our use of language and incredibly at the site. So how I is working at the moment and perception and words and language and how language works. Um. So, yeah, so, so, you know, a few of those, the, um, My, my, obviously I talk a lot about Robert Anton Wilson. I was lucky enough to study with him as a guerrilla ontologist. His, um, his ideas of, of, he was again very far ahead of the, ahead of the curve in terms of understanding where, how conspiracy theories could end up being. His greatest quote for me on that was, um, yeah, well, you know, with a small enough map and a thick enough pencil, you can make all the connections you want. And it's just. The summary of so many conspiracy theories is like, well, you're using a small map and a really thick pencil. You can do all that connected. Um, so, uh, and, uh, his ideas of quantum psychology and, and, uh, um, Prometheus rising. And he was a very good friend. I mean, he came out of that milieu of the, of the, uh, counterculture. Um, he was, uh, very good friends with Timothy Leary. But for opening your mind and for thinking for yourself, and it was he who got me into Shannon and and Bucky Fuller and and Orson Welles and James Joyce. So these ideas of the mind expansion, that's why I think it's just as important to incorporate the likes of Orson Welles and James Joyce, because they're doing it from a different, from the, if we're talking about large language models, in many ways, Finnegan's Wake was, is a large language model, you know, if you, if you, if you pick up a copy of Finnegan's Wake, open it at random. I built a GPT where you can use it like, um, like the iChing. So you can pick up random, it
cristian_1_04-19-2024_103917:I love that.
squadcaster-aiib_1_04-19-2024_183917:a little, it will give you a profit or give you some kind of reset. Um, so yeah, so, so, so the, the, the language meisters, like with what Wells was doing and what Joyce was doing and stuff, I think is equally important to the mathematicians because they're doing the same thing. The, the complexity of stretching things to its limits and being able to put so much surprise into the way that they're, into the way they're formulating. It's, it's, it's sort of mathematical. I had a, um, I've got these letters from Samuel Beckett, uh, And he was a good friend with Joyce and somebody said, what's the, you know, the difference? And he said, well, he was trying to put everything in and I'm trying to take everything out. So you've got that real between the most sparse writing and the most dense writing. Um, so those are a few I could, I could, I really, I mean, obviously the sort of Bertrand Russell stuff, um, in terms of,
cristian_1_04-19-2024_103917:Yeah.
squadcaster-aiib_1_04-19-2024_183917:his forward thinking is, is his social ideas. Um, and just being ahead of the curve, I'm really. really interested in those who are, have extrapolated forward, you know, PK Dick did it and it's not, there is, they're not just, they're not doing Nostradamus and just coming up with some vague thing. They have taken the present and tried to, to, to, to read through and put forward, okay, if this, then this, then this, then this is a potential future and the hope that they all have, all of them. I mean, again, Wells was just, perfect when he said for me, he said, we are each, we are all angels and demons. We are all saints and sinners. The point is not to reconcile them. The point is to recognize them. And it's that kind of encapsulation of, okay, so they can come up with this pithy, but meaningful. And I am going to shut up because I've just gone off again.
cristian_1_04-19-2024_103917:this is such good stuff. I mean, I, I wanna, I wanna. bounce off of the idea of the of the British Empire as the empire that saw it so the dragon that You know saw its own tail. I think that some of these figures that you are mentioning have this Maybe property is the word that the way that they speak the way that they compress their wisdom almost Uh, gives away the fact that in their exploration of the, if this, then that, then this, then that, they go all the way to the end and then they find themselves right back where they started. And, and they encapsulate that thought process, the thing that goes all the way to the asymptotically on one side and comes out asymptotically on the other. Um, I think of Kepler, um, Edgar Allan Poe. Uh, these are other figures that, you know, have, have. You know, went through the tunnel and had to build their own light. And, um, and it's, and it, and it's really cool to learn from them. And, and, and I think there, one, one exciting thing about today that holds true for these LLMs, but holds true for us as, for us, as, as players in the game is that we have access to the entirety of human knowledge in a way that is just unbelievably unprecedented, we know the entire human recorded history, and it's. Uh, it's not even like a keyboard stroke away. You talk to it and, and you get stuff back, right? And so our ability to synthesize, you know, you know, to distill the, the, the core essence of what we really are supposed to be doing and maybe what we've been doing all along, I think now is a, is a, is a much more exciting time to have these kinds of conversations where the goal is not to. Make one particular, find one particular surprise at the differentiation level to find the surprise at the integration level. What happens, what happens at the sum of the parts? And what happens when you get non linearity at the sum of the parts? And you know that this is true because your mind, um, your mind does things like double negation isn't perfect in your mind. And like, I'm not not happy You know, that's, that's okay, but you're not happy either. and I think there's, there's, there's an opportunity. So a lot of my motivation for having these conversations with people of, of, of, with different expertise and different backgrounds and different specialties is that, um, I want to begin. Um, first of all, exposing people to these types of thing is I think that this is like the stuff that is at the very boundary of what we know, uh, as a species, and it's very difficult to have opinions about it because it feels very mercurial, right? Like, you know, you're the one side, the dark side of the moon is freezing cold and the bright side of the moon is scorching hot. Um, so, and given that, you know, so we've talked about. Um, AI, we've talked about the mind a little bit and how the mind has these two dynamics and society as a whole, as a reflection of the mind, uh, will tend to do left brain stuff or right brain stuff. Uh, we talked about people who think about these, not just specializing in one of them, but it trying to integrate both sides. Um, now probably is the I'm excited to hear about the little book of woe and how you are synthesizing this and how you are communicating, because I think you have a, a, um, a remarkably, uh, warm tone to the way you convey this information. And so I'm excited to see how materializes in, in, in, in your writing. Um, all right. Why don't we talk about
squadcaster-aiib_1_04-19-2024_183917:So if I turn out to be a terrible disappointment, people are going, God, he doesn't come out. No, I, um, so I wanted to, a bit like, I think as I mentioned to you yesterday, it worries me that a digital gap can very easily become a digital chasm. And if we leave people behind with AI, they will either, Give up their sense of agency and they will say, I didn't understand it then and now it's just gone off in sunder and I've got no hope of catching up. And so in despair, they will, they will treat it as they do. They, I heard it very good that we shouldn't look at it as disruption because disruption, disruption is when the unknown comes to you. We should look at it as an expedition because an expedition is when you go out into the unknown and that gives you that sense of agency back. And I want everybody to have that sense of agency. I think it's that to use the great philosopher Is it Hieronymus Bosch, the detective, but his either everybody counts or nobody counts. You know, we should have no mind left behind with, with, with AI. We need everybody to be on board this because it is going to affect everybody. And therefore our explanations around it are often very good, but they can also be quite technical and they can, there is no good reason why we don't have a good narrative that anybody can kind of understand or we could like. Explaining information theory. There's a way to do that. But part of that is the exponential nature is so outside of our way of being. You know, we have spent 250, 000 years in that linear way of having just gradual change over periodic periods. And nothing, you know, we have the occasional world, but mostly it's meh or it's iterations, small iterations. That is very rapidly going out the window, and we are not, um, equipping people for how to deal with that. Now, did I, have I used the, the World War I analogy to you? Did I use that for you? Did I tell you? Okay, okay,
cristian_1_04-19-2024_103917:No, no, Let's hear it.
squadcaster-aiib_1_04-19-2024_183917:so back in So keep this name in mind. So there's a guy called Jan Blok and he's really worth looking up. He was a Polish economist and industrialist and an incredible data collector and he published a six volume work in 1908 called The Impossible War and he touted it all around Europe on behalf of Czar Nicholas and some of the most senior people throughout Europe in Prussia, in France, in Germany, in England, etc. Said, yep, everything you say in this book is right. But it will be terrible for morale. And he basically predicted literally everything that was about to happen if they went to war. So in 1914, this war happened and 7 million men on all sides were sent out to fight a linear war. They fought long, literally linear, long lines of men standing in front of one another, shooting one another. But they had all been equipped with 20th century industrial technology. So they had machine guns, accurate rifles, devastatingly more, um, destructive artillery, mustard gas, airplanes, eventually tanks, etc. But the people in charge sent, the people in charge could only think linear. They were using tactics and strategies that would not have gone, that would have been recognized by Napoleon a hundred years earlier. He would have recognized what the, how they were sending people into battle. And that is terrifying in and of itself. But for two years, there was over two million men died. Germans, let's just take just, just the Prussians, the French and the British and the Commonwealth soldiers. Two million men died. before they issued them with metal helmets. And 80 percent of those men who died at that point died from head wounds. And in 1914, they had sent seven million men into battle with the Germans wearing pickle held helmets with big gold on them with spikes made of leather. The French had sent them out in red keppies, bright red keppies. and the English had sent them with soft hats that went like that. And because, as far as the officers and the people in charge of them, they needed to be able to see their soldiers, that was far more important. Then they're having any kind of head protection. So it took two years of that war and 2 million men dead before they went, yeah, I think we'd better start giving them some decent head gear. And my analogy now, it won't be the loss of life. It might be the loss of livelihoods that we will see on the same kind of scale. But what we have done with most of this AI, which had GPT except we have done the equivalent of equipping people with this 21st century technology. But the vast majority of ways we're telling them and we're, we're, we're talking about it in the way that organizations are set up is on 20th century thought. They have not upgraded themselves. And so the WHO, the UN, individual governments, so many organizations, transnational organizations, they issued amazing proclamations about AI. None of them turn it on themselves and say, Oh, do you know what? We're going to flatten our structure. We're going to be much more agile. We're going to lean into AI. So they are the equivalent of telling people off you go, here's this great stuff, but we're not going to give you anything to protect yourself. We're not going to teach you the implications of it or exponentiality. So the little book of woe is basically the helmet is me trying to say to people, there is a way for you to protect yourself to, to, from this explosion. We won't. To have our mind blown, but we want them to be percussive blows, not be polling the furniture kind of blow, you know, we wanna be able to recover from them. And, uh, this is the little book of woe is allow to get people a mixture of zen and exponential thinking to understand about how to lean into impermanence, how to think about, you know, how big, but how be accepting of them, how to.
cristian_1_04-19-2024_103917:No, that's amazing. I mean, I, so I also wrote a book motivated by the same spirit. Let's call it. I mean, I wrote a book that, um, is in the works that is. The namesake of the podcast, so Trace is the original as opposed to the appendices, is a, is book. And, so the reason each conversation is on a given topic, it's almost like the, uh, the footnotes to the book. Um, and, but, but I, I, I hear you, and, and one of the things that I was thinking about when deciding to embark on this project was, okay, what is the highest leverage, work products that I can create that satisfies the greatest number of constraints. Um, and these constraints were things like something that I can do, hopefully something that I can do well, uh, something that, uh, has many layers of returns into it. You know, like it's better for my mental health is probably better for whoever reads its mental health. Um, And then, you know, it's, it's a message effectively. And it's a message that when consumed, it's kind of like, it has a Zen Cohen type of, uh, of, of plot twist in there that I think is like my contribution to the, to, to literature. Um, but then when, when I thought about, okay, but what is really the biggest impact I could have is, Oh, wait a minute. I need to write something that when it goes into the training data of these LLMs. It generates a disposition in those LLMs, whoever reads it, you know, it doesn't have to be a machine, but whoever reads it has a disposition toward having this kind of conversation so that we become the step, the stable structure or the relationships that we build becomes the stable structure. Our community or our, uh, adaptive environment as we embrace these changes. And so I, I see complete alignment, um, with the little book of woe in the sense that it's, it's very much that kind of thing. It's like an inoculation device, almost. Um, And, um, so it, it just another layer of, of resonance between, between, you and I,
squadcaster-aiib_1_04-19-2024_183917:I think you'll absolutely, if I can just one that interjection there is, I think you are doing what we've, the Lord's work, but you are doing humanity's work here because I genuinely think you, we'll be judged one of a better term, but how much effort we put in. To having these conversations and having this kind and wrestling with this stuff because Say it goes to super intelligent or it goes to We then have a marker that says we tried. We actually tried to get ahead right now. We may not have been able to, but we have really worked out. And that is a brute net for, for one of events. And that's a great insurance policy to show that, okay, you're worth keeping around because you've got, you're striving. You're doing the very best thing of trying to use your intelligence. There is no better sign of intelligence than trying to use your intelligence. And so those that, that, that defeats his doom is thing. That's what gets me is that they start saying. Oh, it's going to, and it's like, well, you're not making a great, great case for yourself, really. You know, lawyers often say to their clients, shut up, because anything you say will be taken down and used against you.
cristian_1_04-19-2024_103917:yeah,
squadcaster-aiib_1_04-19-2024_183917:We should be putting a good case forward, but for our own, if I wanted to judge somebody for how much effort they put into it, I'd look at their work and go, You know what, you've really thrived here, and that's something, that's really, that's worthy. And so you're doing absolutely the best thing humanity could do, you know? Now you can carry on.
cristian_1_04-19-2024_103917:and right back at you. I, I think, I think we're, we're on the same path. We're on the same journey. Um, and, and it's been rewarding to have. Um, these serendipitous, uh, um, uh, path crossing of paths algorithmic or otherwise with people like you? Uh, uh, one of my first guests and she actually. Edited my book, unfortunately pass away. Um, uh, Laurel, Erica, like, yeah, it's really sad. She was also, you know, doing like linguistic explorations and, uh, wonderful
squadcaster-aiib_1_04-19-2024_183917:saw your, I saw, I was following the link, you, you put up a memorial to her not so long ago, is that, is that correct? Yes, yes. Oh, she was a, yeah, that was real magic coming out of that. Yes.
cristian_1_04-19-2024_103917:yeah. And so, but, but, and she was also one of those people that I met along the journey. So I, it feels very rewarding to meet, you know, similar, um, Um, similarly aligned souls in, in this pilgrimage, um, and it's been, I don't know, more, way more rewarding than I, than I could have expected. Um, and, and, you know, I, I think there's something special about AI that is sort of deceptive is that it really encapsulates a lot of the things that we have struggled to define in, in our identity. You know, how do we feel about our intelligence, about our intelligence's desire to take over? How do we feel about. Well, you know, like if we engage with something like superintelligence, well, then you're talking about God, you know, like there is, there is very little interface difference between a, you know, a galactic computer that can calculate all your needs and decide exactly what you need. Um, and And then, of course, you know, like, you start interfacing with these machines, and you play, you know, you prompt it, and you learn how to speak the language, and you start getting, you know, you play the instrument, to, to, to, to make some kind of analogy. Um, and this is where, where, like, I want to get your thoughts on this, because one of the trippiest parts about this whole exploration to me was, okay, So here's the setup. I prompt this machine, I give it, I give it some instructions, I tell it what it is, and to behave a certain way, and it will do that, and it will just replicate, it will continue the expected pattern. How much of that am I doing myself? What is my prompt? Who is prompting me? Is it, you know, implicit in the social networks, in my, not necessarily social media, but just like in my group of friends and in my group of peers and in my group of mentors, uh, where is this prompt being formed? Do I have access to it? Can I change it? Is this the best prompt it can be? And, wait a minute, is it at the level of who I am or is it at the level of this? This whole thing and, and that, okay, run with that. I want
squadcaster-aiib_1_04-19-2024_183917:Well, I love the story of, um, is it Nazaruddin, Nazaruddin, the wisest man in all of Islam and he's traveling through the desert on his donkey and he looks behind him and in the far distance, he sees bandits on horses. So he sees a cloud of dust. So he obviously doesn't want to, doesn't want to encounter the bandits. So he speeds his horse up, his donkey up and he's going really fast. But little does he know that actually the group of bandits that he's Because he's getting old and he hasn't got particularly brilliant sight. They're not bandits at all. They're actually some of his most devoted followers. And so he speeds up and they're like, Well, where's Navruddin going? He must be going somewhere really important. Let's follow him. So they speed up. Nazruddin looks behind him and he's like, Oh, God, so he speeds up and so this thing carries on and he speeds up and they speed up And they're convinced well, he must be going somewhere incredibly important. So we must follow him So eventually he realizes he's not going to outrun the bandits. So he comes to an old broken down Mosque worst hit site. He Jumps off his horse, his donkey, he jumps over the fence and he runs and he hides behind a gravestone. And eventually the bandits stroke his followers, they catch up, this donkey's part there. So, They get up and they, they climb over the wall and they wander around the gravestone and they come up to a gravestone and behind this broken gravestone is Nazruddin cowering and he looks up and they look down and he recognizes them and so there's this moment of awkward silence and one of his followers says, Nazruddin, why are we here? And Nazruddin says, well, you see, that's a bit difficult because I'm here because of you and you're here because of me. And it's just that idea of where the problem and it's exactly what you, what you were saying about that. Is it, are we here because of it, or am I here because of it? Well, then maybe it's that kind of thing that That impossibility. Now, if it allows us to explore that, that is fantastic. And we know the human mind makes, when it comes to arrogance and its love of talking about itself, it makes a a Manhattan dinner party full of once famous actors look, look reserved because It loves it loves talking about itself. It loves exploring itself, but it also finds itself. It finds itself fascinating, but it finds itself infuriating. It's almost as if there is like an electric cattle field and like an electric fence. That gives you a sharp buzz to remind you that you're treading into areas which are contradictory. Um, uh, can, can, can be paradoxical when you try and separate that idea that, you know, you think to yourself, Oh, you know, the mind is, it's incredible. And then you think, well, who's telling me that it's the mind bringing itself up. Look how amazing I am. So you have that part of it. You have that. You know that, oh my God, how can I think in multitudes? You have that, you know, my own party, we're more like a representative parliament where the loudest voice or it's not necessarily, you know, whoever, but you need somebody like in a parliamentary system to act as a spokesperson because otherwise it's just madness. Everybody's talking at once. Um, but that did that division between as yourself, what, what constitutes self, which is why I love the Buddhist concepts of that not self and that the more you, as I say, the, um, The search for the mind and in the not finding is the finding, you know, it's that that that kind of thing. I love doing that sort of wave of going from one to another, because it seems to be the only way you can keep a kind of proper sanity. I mean, I'm a bit, I'm a bit of a contradiction is I keep. these two, Napoleon and Buddha, next to each other, next to the, because they seem to me to be the most,
cristian_1_04-19-2024_103917:Same temperamental profiles.
squadcaster-aiib_1_04-19-2024_183917:you've got the man whose ego brought him to the most, you know, the top of really of any journey of any human who started in terms of trajectory to go from virtually nothing to emperor, you've pretty much won the league if you, you know, in terms of power. Yeah. the opposite way of removing his ego completely. So once again, you have that almost that full circle. Um, so yeah, so it's, but if, if AI with its predictive capacity and its ability to see patterns we can't see and to do that, that kind of, um, extremist thinking maybe where those answers will come from. Because we, we're not getting any further with it, because we've kind of spent an awful lot of energy getting to where we are. Then maybe it's just processing power that needs to come in when, and it will then in its own investigation into its concept itself, or its idea, and maybe we need that genuinely. objective because we can't, we can only be objective to a certain point because we can't leave our own minds behind. So maybe we need something that's outside looking in to give us that proper view or to give us that genuinely objective view. Yeah, yeah,
cristian_1_04-19-2024_103917:No, or, or, or yeah, or, or at least to prompt us to, to think about it. Right. I think like, The, uh, I think it doesn't even have to teach us, I mean, I think I, for example, have been very, uh, surprised and also somewhat dissatisfied with the initial impressions of GPT 4, where it was the full model, it was slow, it was, you know, it took a long time, but there was magic there. I mean, in March last year, when it just came out, that stuff was the good stuff. Progressively, as usage has gone up on the platform and they've had to reduce costs and cut the model down, I've seen performance, or I've seen performance degrade massively. Um, it's not nowhere near what it used to be, and I don't know if it's because of, you know, they're shrinking the model or because they're optimizing for the more transactional, almost Google query, Google search query type of use case. And so like, you know, their reinforcement learning, uh, you know, their feedback loops with users are more on that use case. Um, which would be a, a tragedy in my opinion, because these raw models, uh, As. You know, as actual statistical collections of the entire corpus of human knowledge, including the wildly, radically new methods of discourse like Reddit and Twitter and all these things, um, you want to know what the statistical act thing is. You want to know what the, um, the, I think it's a representation of the collective unconscious in a, in a way that we haven't been able to capture, uh, before. And we want to know what is in the collective unconscious because we all have a relationship to it. We all make expectations. We all have assumptions about what our counterparty knows and counterparty feels. Um, It gets touchy when, when dealing with themes of identity, with themes of race and politics and all these things. Um, but for the vast majority of things, we can make commonplace assumptions about, uh, you know, the, the, the, in a conversation, you're likely to tell the truth and you're likely to, you know, be informative and all these things. Um, So when you engage with something and your assumptions about what that is supposed to do are different than what you get with a human, there's an implicit, the surprise value from that, going back to the
squadcaster-aiib_1_04-19-2024_183917:Mm hmm. Mm
cristian_1_04-19-2024_103917:is enough of a learning thing about you that I think is, it's, it's a wonderful exercise. Um, the, yeah. And then there's, there's the other is more sort of metaphysical argument of, okay. So. Am I a large language model that exists in a one shot instance, you know, like that you computes my entire map of reality one instant at a time, thinks that I'm the, uh, delivers a payload and then hopes, you know, like maybe praise that, you know, that output was good enough so that, you know, whatever I identify as myself keeps getting simulated over and over and over again. Um, there's, there's a whole, that whole realm of expression, which. I personally love and I think is very exciting and I think, and I don't get that a lot. I think people get the, um, it's almost like the final blow to nihilism when, Oh my gosh. So, and, and nothing is actually real, you know, like nothing, like actually nothing matters. Um, And I see that, and I hear that, and if you approach it from a purely rationalist, secular, uh, uh, way of thinking, then that's pro that's where you end up anyway. Um, however, if we have rash a rational argument for this being, uh, some kind of simulation, or some kind of, uh, theater, um, then there's that is the most exciting thing for me, because, There's two, there's two layers. One of them is, if this is a simulation, it's a simulation of something, and I mean, we're trying to simulate something that maps To whatever else is out there, and we want to be a good simulation of it. So, so there is a mapping between here and there, whatever that means. And, so that means that we have, in theory at least, a way to navigate there. Because there's a mapping between here and there. And, not only that, if it is some kind of simulation, it means there are probably exploits. And if there are exploits, that is the kind of thing that we should be doing. We should be looking for the cheat codes of the universe and the cheat codes of the laws of physics. And how is that not exciting? I mean, that is the kind of thing that gets you the stuff that we think is impossible, that we think we, you know, life without death, you know, that kind of stuff. Um, so that's, that's my 2 cents on, on, on the, um, the simulation sort of aspect of it.
squadcaster-aiib_1_04-19-2024_183917:But listen, I, I, I,
cristian_1_04-19-2024_103917:There's.
squadcaster-aiib_1_04-19-2024_183917:yeah, go on, go on.
cristian_1_04-19-2024_103917:go for it, go
squadcaster-aiib_1_04-19-2024_183917:No, I was going to say, I mean, it was one of the things that I loved, um, quite, quite young getting into Philip K. Dick, and I remember the short story that absolutely captured this, where the guy accidentally turned around and they were deconstructing life behind him, Mm They were taking the scenery down, and he realized that, and it was basically, this was a long time before the, um, Truman Show kind of stuff, and that, and that, for me, was the one, one of the first about that, that idea of the simulation, and you go through, and I think Ethan Mollick does a good thing about, with AI, You haven't really understood AI unless you've spent at least three, um, sleepless nights worrying about it and then come out the other end and thought, okay, all right, but if you haven't thought about these big things that you haven't really, you haven't understood it, but the idea is that the slightly the problem so many people, so many people put forward again, oh, it's going to take away you It will leave us with nothing to do. Have you spoken to these machines and asked it to come up with things for you? If it has sufficient intelligence, it will provide you with more things to do with your life than you will ever be able to fulfill. And it will be able to help you fulfill a lot of this. Trust me, most people who talk about, you know, uh, We'll spend 7 hours watching TV and then say, Oh, I was going to take away what take away your 7 hours of TV. You spend every day. Well, that's wow. Um, so that then that idea of it's offering up bigger and more expansive reality tunnels has got to be a reality. Something we strive to because every single part of us has been about look from the literally protoplasmic thing onwards from that tiny flagellum moving forward, operating, moving forward, exploring new spaces, exploration in everything we do, this is it at the level of, I know Timothy Leary used to say, I need to get off this planet. I just, the standard level of mentation is driving me bizarre, driving me bonkers. And I kind of can lean into that, that you've got to get bigger reality tunnel. Try and look at a bigger and bigger reality tunnel because it's so much more fun. It's so much more interesting. There's so much more surprise in there, you know? And it's that, why is that not seen as a challenge? I understand if you live in a life that's quite fearful, but, you know, that idea of having Problems to solve, adventures to be had, things to explore. This is all the things that we as humans have always striven to do, you know. Am I sounding preachy? I feel like I need to find a,
cristian_1_04-19-2024_103917:No, no, no, I mean, I, I, I, I, it's taken me 31 episodes to, to, uh, to let myself actually sort of like, uh, uh, uh, whatchamacallit, lose myself in, in my thoughts around these things too. I think, um, so I play with these tools every day. The podcast is entirely automated, uh, the, you know, from editing on and, uh, so, so, so I, I wanted to sort of learn to what, you know, what kinds of, uh, of wares we could build with these new, uh, the new age tools. And, um, And it just blows my mind and the cost, the cost structure, the, the, they just, it is, it is, it, it is hard to wrap my head around how, uh, incredible this change is going to be, um, how companies are going to look, uh, what, um, I don't know, there are so many layers that add complexity to like the economic, um, quantitative easing and like inflation and geopolitical tension and access to rare metal. It's all so interconnected in this thing, but being in the front lines of using these tools and knowing what kinds of augmentations people will be able to make to their themselves or their organizations. Um, I think I just find myself moved to have these, this kind of, uh, of, of conversation because if we don't have it, I think the alternative is so much worse. Um, and okay, so I think this is a good enough segue to ask my final question. That is, we've talked, we set up a lot of foundation, I think, talk about how, you know, So we should orient ourselves around this, this theme, um, a little bit of background in terms of theory, a little bit of background in terms of the people who influenced us, um, and the types of things that we're doing as our, as what our part is in this thing. The next question, and I think the last question for today is, so what happens next? What happens? What happens? You know, you said three years is impossible. I completely agree. What happens 18 months from now?
squadcaster-aiib_1_04-19-2024_183917:It's self directed or in terms of where the world's going, I think. The there is, that there is an element where you feel how much can, can, can we influence that? But I certainly feel that if there is a coherent message that explains AI in a much better or in a, in a more cogent and more hopeful and optimistic and understandable way. It can go a long way to bringing people on side to it, at least if they understand it. And even if they could slightly laugh at it, they won't be scared of it. And that, that could really be a trim tab to change the course correction. I think we are going to be making it up as we go along, whether it, I know they said, what's it about the future is now that it's just unevenly distributed. There is, I, I certainly know, because as I said, I try to work at the, at the sort of front line stuff. So I try to work with some small and medium businesses who are kind of on places like, are in industrial estates. You know, the, the, the forgotten aspect that both the, the, both the progressive left and the conservative right tend to just ignore these hundreds of workshops and places where things are actually being made. Who represent,
cristian_1_04-19-2024_103917:The actual working
squadcaster-aiib_1_04-19-2024_183917:Who actually represents so much of it and it for me, it's getting them to to to to understand and buy in and see the implications of AI, um, because they are, you know, they are a massively important part of my, I think the exponentiality will lead to like, if GPT five comes out, if it has those capabilities, I think some of the, um, uh, as you said, some of the https: otter. ai I, I have absolutely, I concur with you, but I play with it sometimes and it's like, well, you're looking for another job because you've really kind of signed out from working for me. You know, you're, you're distracted. You're giving me very generic stuff that I can, you know, and I'm doing more editing to get rid of the dross and it's, it's, it's annoying. I'm finding that the alternative, the other creative bits, the music stuff and the arts side are becoming much better. the actual written stuff, as you said, there is a, there is a, uh, an inbuilt, um, obtuseness that seems to be coming to the fore quite, which is annoying. If that is not, if it becomes, if they don't do that, it becomes a corporate tool in and of itself. And I know I kind of have to jump between LinkedIn and Twitter in order to try and get the best of both worlds. I don't want it to become a purely LinkedIn conformist product, where it is literally nobody stepping out of line and everybody saying what everybody else is thinking. And that is just as horrendous and painful and problematic as any free speech argument. The conformist speech can be just as bad. And We need to be wary of that. I've worked a workaround where I get them to play off one another, so I get Claude to criticize GPT 4's answers, and then I throw it back to GPT 4 and say, oh, this is what Claude is saying. So I'm sure there's a divide and conquer, some kind of British empire thing coming into
cristian_1_04-19-2024_103917:See that, that is, that is exactly how the Cain and Abel myth started.
squadcaster-aiib_1_04-19-2024_183917:But then I'm going to come in and unite them together and say we work together better if we have a, if we, you know, whatever comes through that gate, we've got far more chance of surviving if we just stick together. I know my gladiator quote. Um, but yeah, it's impossible. And I would probably have to, I know this is a horrible cop out, but I would probably have to go away and have a, a bit of a think and a ponder. Yeah. about, you know, looking at what I've got and go, okay, well, maybe that, maybe that off the top of my head, it is like having a clouded crystal ball to try and go anything more than, than sort of, you know, two years now. Um, that's a terrible cop out. I feel like that's, that hasn't given you at
cristian_1_04-19-2024_103917:I mean, it was mostly out of curiosity because I think that you and I spend comparable amounts of time thinking about this stuff and I haven't cracked it. Uh, I think if I had a bit more of a, of a, of a picture, I would have. I would have sort of provided that as a lens to then poke holes on that, but I'm, I'm also very lost. I mean, I, I've been thinking a lot about the delayed effect of, of information technology. So, for instance, I think this is going to be the first U. S. presidential election where. New media, podcasts, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, they're going to have a measurable, if not outsized impact on electoral outcomes. Um, I think that comes with a bunch of implications in terms of the structure of influence in the world reacting to this thing. But this thing is already 10 years old, let's call it, you know, mass distribution, social media. So it took 10 years for this technology to actually. Uh, have an effect on, uh, social decision making or social organization. I think that even if AI doesn't advance anymore, uh, it'll take 10 years to see. Just how far, you know, these, these techno, I mean, cause now you think it all compounds, now you have generative AI that can generate pictures and videos and soundtracks and, uh, scripts and stories and thousands of them and coordinate them. And so like a lot more. Uh, reality engineering type of thing can happen. Um, and that's basically as far as I got. And, and I think, you know, the helmets will be more AI. It'll be the AI filter that is designed, you know, designed to suss out, uh, whether this is good quality or bad quality and for you. AI advocate that is sort of like fighting off the waves of criticism. Now, um, very commodified content out there. Part of the reason I'm having this, uh, set of conversations too, is because I think that. Um, establishing a brand is going to get harder in the future. Um, I think in a world where content and quality is, I mean, just like thoughtfulness of service, you can just decide, I want my, uh, customers to feel this certain way and the AI agent will do it. I mean. Every AI agent will be able to do the same thing. So the, the ability for reputation networks, I think the mobility of reputation networks will get a little bit more ossified. Um, but this is, I'm thinking like aggregate over the long run, if we survive the apocalypse, if we survive all these other things in the middle. Um, um, but yeah, I, I mean, I think that's, it's the right answer to say, I don't know, because I have no idea what it is, right? I think. Um, I, I, this whole thing that we're seeing with, uh, for instance, SORA being delayed, um, I think, I think there was tremendous pressure from,
squadcaster-aiib_1_04-19-2024_183917:Mm.
cristian_1_04-19-2024_103917:to delay the release of that until after the election, um. You you can because now now all the all the ingredients are there and it's too easy I mean, it's too easy and too cheap and But then then and then you know, that is kind of responsible It's also kind of terrifying because it means that now there's a lever there that maybe halts the development of this thing Which could lead to amazing things But it's, it's an exciting future ahead and, and I am personally delighted to have co conspirators like yourself from across the pond. Uh, no, I've been off.
squadcaster-aiib_1_04-19-2024_183917:Yeah, I just like there is a phrase I think I try and hold to which is that, um, The future is never quite as bright as the optimist's dream or never quite as dark as the pessimist's hope. And it's just that kind of, that it never really turns out. So it's always kind of halfway between and that reality is never quite as bad as one way but never quite as good as the other. Maybe that's a typical British understatement way of looking at things. But um, but no, you're actually right, and I could, we could have a completely separate and entire conversation, as you said, on the potential futures, the ideas of the manipulation, whether It reaches a point where the systems themselves become no longer fit for purpose. You know that we can't run this kind of idea of having, uh, you know, systems that were set up because we couldn't represent ourselves. We didn't have time to represent it. So again, in the book I wrote, I postulated an entire self representative democracy because that both gives people When you've got, you know, if you have this, uh, this, this plenty of time on your hand, well, then you become more responsible for yourself. You have to be, you know, but you have to be voting for things yourself on things. You have to get involved in local politics and how the system works. Um, so it's all that that maybe AI will look at and say, well, it's your system doesn't work anymore. You know, you're, you are, you're trying to impose. 20th century ideas onto a 21st century world where it doesn't, it doesn't reflect if everybody's got a huge amount of intelligence sitting on their desk, where does power reside? You know, what is your reason for power? Most people are in a position of power because they know more things than other people, but if they don't know more things than other people, then you have to question what is your, and this I find really fascinating because I find Everything previously, the, um, technologies have taken away primarily from the unpowerful. So, you know, um, factory working, et cetera, et cetera. This is the first time the intellectual class has ever had its position challenged. It's cool. It's, it's, you know, the mind, it's, it's thoughts, it's learning. That was its asset. This is the first time that something's come along and go I can do that and it hasn't so far come up with a really good reason but Oh, no, you're right. And if it you know, that's how the free market works bigger far better faster cheaper Quicker safer if you can do any of those things you will be replaced Everybody who's worked on a factory floor has known that for hundreds of years. But if the machine comes along that could do your job, you will be replaced. It's never really permeated the professional classes. And that's again, that's a fascinating thing to see how that plays out. If anything, it will be interesting.
cristian_1_04-19-2024_103917:Oh, it'll be fascinating. It's going to be one heck of a ride. Vincent, thank you so
squadcaster-aiib_1_04-19-2024_183917:No,
cristian_1_04-19-2024_103917:time. This was amazing. I look forward to doing this again at length in the near future.
squadcaster-aiib_1_04-19-2024_183917:It has been an absolute joy and a pleasure. Thank you very much. I've enjoyed connecting minds with you. Long way we've continued. Have a great evening,
cristian_1_04-19-2024_103917:Upward and onward. See ya. You too. Bye
squadcaster-aiib_1_04-19-2024_183917:Thank you. Goodbye.