Intelligent Machines 814: Chesterton's Fence

Summary

Podcast Summary: Intelligent Machines 814: Chesterton's Fence

Introduction In Episode 814 of Intelligent Machines, hosted by Leo Laporte and featuring returning guest Paris Martineau alongside special guest Corey Doctorow, the conversation delves deep into the multifaceted world of artificial intelligence (AI). The episode, titled "Chesterton's Fence," explores AI's impact on art, business practices, legal representations, and the ethical dilemmas arising from its integration into various sectors.

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1. Welcome and Guest Introductions ([00:00] - [03:28])

• Leo Laporte opens the show by welcoming Paris Martineau and Corey Doctorow, noting Jeff Jarvis's absence as he is called away to Salem.
• Corey Doctorow, a renowned sci-fi author and EFF consultant, is introduced as a longtime collaborator, celebrating over two decades of involvement with the network.

Notable Quote:

• Leo Laporte: "Podcasts you love from people you Trust. This is TWiT. This is Intelligent Machines." ([00:00])

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2. Corey Doctorow's Literary Contributions ([03:28] - [07:02])

• Corey discusses his latest novel, Picks and Shovels, part of the Marty Hench series, set in the early 1980s tech boom.
• The narrative revolves around Marty Hench, a forensic accountant navigating the murky waters of pyramid schemes in the PC industry, highlighting themes of DRM and corporate malfeasance.

Notable Quote:

• Corey Doctorow: "It's set in the early 1980s, which were, you know, the heroic era of the PC... people made weird ass computers." ([04:37])

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3. The Debate on AI Art ([10:13] - [19:17])

• Corey presents his theory that AI-generated art lacks the "communicative freight" inherent in human-created art. He argues that while AI can produce aesthetically pleasing works, it doesn't convey the deep, numinous feelings that human artists embed in their creations.
• Leo counters by suggesting that AI might add value by making unexpected connections, akin to innovations seen in programs like AlphaGo.
• Paris emphasizes the importance of authorial intent, highlighting that art from a conscious creator carries an irreplaceable depth that AI cannot replicate.

Notable Quotes:

• Corey Doctorow: "AI is just making some guesses about what goes at the next pixel or the next word... it's eerie." ([18:59])
• Leo Laporte: "If you agree that it's possible that it's adding information to the system, then that changes the equation." ([24:19])

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4. AI in Business and Ethical Concerns ([19:17] - [46:21])

• Corey critiques AI's role in business, pointing out that AI companies often prioritize profit over societal good. He cites examples like Meta's manipulation of AI benchmarks and DeepMind's ineffective material science breakthroughs.
• Paris discusses the potential dangers of AI in automated decision-making within government sectors, such as immigration and law enforcement, stressing the lack of accountability.
• Leo raises concerns about AI's impact on jobs, referencing automated tools in radiology that may increase workloads and create moral crumple zones for professionals.

Notable Quotes:

• Corey Doctorow: "AI can significantly harm people and probably is right now." ([46:59])
• Leo Laporte: "If AI came up with a cure for cancer, it'd be of use. But you don't know." ([37:41])

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5. Regulatory Challenges and Corporate Practices ([46:21] - [77:03])

• The discussion shifts to legislative efforts to reform Section 230, with Corey and Paris expressing concern over bipartisan moves that could dismantle protections essential for platforms like TWiT.
• Leo highlights the vulnerability of smaller platforms to lawsuits if Section 230 is repealed, emphasizing the importance of these legal shields in maintaining user-generated content spaces.
• Corey underscores the irony of AI companies lobbying against reforms that could actually harm societal interests, focusing instead on their narrow profit-driven motives.

Notable Quotes:

• Paris Martineau: "Let's see how's that going with tariffs? Let's assume that'll work... it's already a craziest assumption." ([74:05])
• Corey Doctorow: "AI companies have lines of business that are threatening, like automated judgments about who should be an immigrant." ([46:59])

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6. AI in Healthcare and Legal Systems ([48:25] - [77:03])

• Corey shares insights into AI's role in radiology, noting that while AI can detect tumors humans miss, it also generates false positives, increasing radiologists' workloads without genuinely improving patient outcomes.
• The conversation touches on the misuse of AI in legal contexts, referencing cases where AI-generated content has led to wrongful accusations and the challenges of proving harm when AI decisions are opaque.

Notable Quotes:

• Corey Doctorow: "AI only works as an automation tool that saves money as opposed to one that improves outcomes if you abandon due process." ([48:39])
• Leo Laporte: "AI detection products produce false positives that radiologists are responsible for following up on." ([51:56])

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7. The Future of AI and Regulation ([77:03] - [107:24])

• Corey argues for a balanced approach to AI development, advocating for its use as a utility rather than a transformative force, cautioning against over-investment based on speculative benefits.
• The panel discusses the challenges of reshoring manufacturing in the AI era, emphasizing the complexities of replicating highly specialized processes like microprocessor fabrication.
• Paris raises concerns about the potential for AI to entrench existing power structures, making it difficult for smaller players to compete and innovate.

Notable Quotes:

• Corey Doctorow: "Approach AI as a useful piece of utility automation and not as a transformative technology." ([46:32])
• Paris Martineau: "How are we going to be teaching? This is rudimentary, but how are you going to teach a college course about an AI painting?" ([86:09])

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8. Reflections on AI's Cultural Impact and Authorship ([107:24] - [137:04])

• The discussion shifts to the cultural implications of AI-generated content, with Paris expressing skepticism about AI's ability to create art with lasting cultural significance comparable to human artists like Van Gogh or David Lynch.
• Leo acknowledges the debate around AI's potential for creativity, questioning the inherent belief in human uniqueness versus AI capabilities.
• Corey reinforces the idea that while AI can assist in creative processes, the deep, intentional communication embedded in human art remains irreplaceable.

Notable Quotes:

• Paris Martineau: "There is something about the human authorial nature... that leads us all to constantly wonder, what was this person thinking?" ([132:38])
• Corey Doctorow: "The information density came from the fact that a human put the labor into it." ([136:30])

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9. Closing Remarks and Announcements ([138:00] - [140:25])

• Leo Laporte wraps up the episode by promoting upcoming events, celebrating the network's 20th anniversary, and encouraging audience participation through video submissions.
• Advertisements for sponsors like Monarch Money, Melissa, Shopify, and Robinhood are briefly mentioned.
• The hosts engage in light-hearted banter about AI-generated memes, secure messaging, and the challenges of maintaining privacy in a connected world.

Notable Quote:

• Leo Laporte: "You're watching Intelligent Machines. Episode 814." ([139:55])

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Conclusion Episode 814 of Intelligent Machines offers a comprehensive exploration of AI's current and potential impacts across various domains. Through insightful discussions with Corey Doctorow and Paris Martineau, the episode underscores the complexities of integrating AI into creative, professional, and regulatory frameworks, while highlighting the enduring value of human intent and accountability.

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Key Takeaways:

• AI Art vs. Human Art: AI can replicate styles and generate aesthetically pleasing works but lacks the deep communicative intent inherent in human-created art.
• AI in Business and Healthcare: AI tools may offer efficiency gains but can also introduce ethical dilemmas and increased workloads without proportional benefits.
• Regulatory Concerns: Potential reforms to Section 230 could disproportionately impact smaller platforms, emphasizing the need for balanced legislation.
• Cultural Impact: AI-generated content faces skepticism regarding its ability to achieve lasting cultural significance comparable to human artistry.
• Future of AI: Advocating for AI as a utility tool rather than a transformative force may lead to more sustainable and ethically aligned advancements.

Final Notable Quote:

• Corey Doctorow: "Privacy is not no one knows stuff about you. It's that you choose what people know about you." ([100:19])

For more insights and discussions, tune into future episodes of Intelligent Machines on TWiT.tv.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Intelligent Machines. We've got a great one for you. Jeff does have the week off, but Paris Martineau is back from Europe. And filling in for Jeff, our special guest, Corey Doctorow. Sci fi author, activist, EFF consultant and a good old friend. We have a lot to talk about. AI art. Is it really art or is it just eerie? We'll talk about meta. They've been gaming the AI benchmarks. What a surprise. And why you should never use AI to represent you in court. All that and more coming up next on Intelligent Machines. Podcasts you love from people you Trust. This is TWiT. This is Intelligent Machines. Episode 814, recorded Wednesday, April 9, 2025. Chesterton's fence. It's time for Intelligent Machines, the show where we talk about AI, robotics and intelligence all around us. Not human in most cases, although in some cases. Paris Martineau is back, ladies and gentlemen. Hi, Paris.

[Paris Martineau]

Hi, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

How was Paris?

[Paris Martineau]

Paris, it was fantastic. It was tres bien. I had so much fun. Yeah, I had a great time, but I was missing you guys.

[Leo Laporte]

When you're in Paris, do you have to call yourself Paris?

[Paris Martineau]

No. Even when I, when I was in school, in college, I studied abroad there for almost a year. And at that time I spoke like fluent French. I do not anymore, Definitely degraded. But even at that time, at the peak of my French speaking ability, where I'd be having a 5, 10 minute conversation with a random French person on the street, they then ask me like in French, what's your name? And I'd say, paris. And I did versions of this with all different pronunciations of the name. Every single time the response was immediately switch to English. No, I asked you what your name is, not where are we? So I, when I am in Paris, I specifically do not go by my name Paris, because French people don't.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

They don't get it. And that's fair. That's a fair point. It's a weird thing for me to be there.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, we missed you quite a bit. I'm so glad you're back. You missed some very good conversations, but we have a good one today as well. Jeff will not be here. He was called away to Salem.

[Paris Martineau]

I hope it's not for he's finally being tried.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he didn't explain. He just said, oh, I have to go to Salem. I said, oh.

[Paris Martineau]

He's like, they're asking me if I'm lighter than a feather.

[Leo Laporte]

But we have both a great interview guest in his place and a guest host in his place, the wonderful Cory Doctorow is here. It's great to see you, Corey. Always a pleasure to have you on. You've been on this week in Google in the past and of course this week in tech many times. Did you know, by the way, Corey, we are celebrating our 20th anniversary on Sunday.

[Cory Doctorow]

Oh my gosh, that's.

[Leo Laporte]

I know. Make you feel old. Wow.

[Cory Doctorow]

Well, my daughter's going to college in the fall, so there we go.

[Leo Laporte]

You've been on the show since before your daughter was born.

[Cory Doctorow]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So at least, you know, probably much of those 20 years you've been on.

[Cory Doctorow]

So I mean, I used to come on the screensavers.

[Leo Laporte]

That's true. I've known you since before then at.

[Cory Doctorow]

Least because it was at least my first year at EFF, so it's been at least 23 years.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. Anyway, it's always great to have you. Corey is both a fantastic science fiction author. His latest is a continuation in the Marty Hench Forensic Accountant series, Picks and Shovels, which I hear is doing very well. People love it. I hear a lot from our audience because it's got retro tech in it. You know, it's like the, the good old days of technology. So congratulations on that.

[Cory Doctorow]

It's set in the early 1980s, which were, you know, the heroic era of the PC. Back before we knew what PCs were for or like who was supposed to sell them or who was supposed to buy them or what shape they were supposed to be, people made weird ass computers. In Ontario, the Ministry of Education made a computer called the Sammy icon. Sorry, are you trying to get to Martin Hench there or.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no, don't look at that. If you're seeing that, click the tab. We should have said this before the show began. At the top of your zoom and have the meeting instead of my camera. And I'm going to thebezel.org by the way, but don't let me interrupt the anecdote. Go ahead.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, so we had these weird computers called the Sammy Icon and they were giant injection molded chassis with an inset enormous trackball like you would get on the arcade game of Centipede. And then it booted three different operating systems including a logo prompt. So in case you just wanted to like use a logo shell as your daily driver.

[Leo Laporte]

I like that.

[Cory Doctorow]

One of your many options. It was great. It was a beautiful computer. So in Picks and Shovels, Marty Hench, it's his first adventure. He fails out of MIT Computer Science because he's too busy programming computers to get a computer science degree and he ends up in a CPA program because he likes the Apple 2 plus they bought and wants to learn more about VisiCalc, which he can't afford out of pocket. So before he knows it, he's moved out to the Bay Area with his genius coder roommate and he ends up in this weird PC company called Three Wise Men. Or sorry, called Fidelity Computing, run by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest and an orthodox rabbi. The punchline is that it's pyramid selling, that they are selling these DRM locked PCs that like, use special paper for the printer and special floppy drives. You can't get your data off of them. They're selling them through pyramid sales into the faith groups and locking them in and taking millions of dollars out of their hide. And Marty pretty quickly figures out he's working for the bad guys and switches sides and goes to work for their competitors. A company called Computing Freedom that was started by three of the sales managers from Fidelity who have quit to build computers that unlock the Fidelity PC. You know, a drive that will take any floppy, export tools for your data, new sprockets for your printer so you can standard fanfo paper and so on. And they are an orthodox woman whose family's kicked her out because she's queer, a, a nun who's left her order because she got involved with liberation theology and, and a Mormon woman who's left the faith because she's pissed off that they opposed the Equal Rights Amendment. And what starts as a, as a commercial dispute becomes a shooting war and the safes get really high. So it's, you know, it's a thriller set at the beginning of the AIDS crisis in San Francisco in the 80s. Jello Biafra is playing every weekend. You know, the PC bubble has just kicked off and everyone is trying to figure out what the computer is supposed to be.

[Leo Laporte]

I love it. I mean, it's Marty's origin story. That's awesome.

[Cory Doctorow]

That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's fantastic. I mean, Corey's not just a novelist though, he's also an activist. As you mentioned, he worked for the EFF and he's been on his pluralistic.net blog a really outspoken champion of the right to repair of fighting surveillance capitalism. You know, one of your books, the most recent, is the Internet, how to Seize the Means of Communication. I talked to you, Computation. Yes, sorry, I talked to you and Rebecca Giblin when the Choke Poke Point Capitalism came out. I mean, just you've done so much for all of us. And of course, most famous for, I hate to say this, but for coining the term inshittification. Thank you for doing that. I appreciate it.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, yeah, it's definitely going to be on my tombstone. But the insignification book, it's in the can. It's coming out in October the following year. There will be a graphic novel. And as I was mentioning before we started recording, we just sold the Polish rights, and I think that's the eighth different language it's been sold into now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it captured people's imagination mostly, I think, because we all recognized that's what was going on in the world. Like, this is. This was a perfect encapsulation of why everything seemed to be going downhill. You know, they were extracting the maximum value out of. Out of us all at this point. And. Yeah, so I think everybody identified it and immediately understood it and agreed. I think nobody disagree.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, I think that's right.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, definitely. You know, we. We have hit a point now where the platforms are the only game in town. It's. We're all dependent on them to some degree or another, but they are making our lives so miserable. So we're kind of trapped in this fight between do I stay or do I go? You know, like, do I take the hit of leaving behind if I'm on Facebook, say all those friends who I know from back in the country I moved away from, who I only communicate with on Facebook, or do I stay and allow Mark Zuckerberg to continue abusing me? And he's really tough choice. They've taken us hostage.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, this show is primarily these days about not Google anymore, but about AI. And actually it's really broader than AI intelligent machines, which covers even more than AI robotics and IoT and et cetera. The edge. Intelligence at the edge. It's everywhere. Now, you've written quite a bit about AI. Do you use AI at all?

[Cory Doctorow]

No, I am a AI skeptic. And not just an AI skeptic, but a violent AI skeptic. Not a violent AI skeptic. Yes, committed AI skeptic. An extremely skeptical AI person. I mean, yeah, I use AI in the sense that, like, when I turn on the camera on my pixel, it figures out where the faces are.

[Leo Laporte]

You can't. Not right.

[Cory Doctorow]

But yeah. Do I, like, rely on spicy autocomplete? No. And the weird little collages that I make for my blog. That's me. And the gimp and the Lasso tool, using sources from the Library of Congress and Wikimedia Commons and so on.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you're so retro.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, that's delightful. I Like making collages that way. I have a whole theory on it. Maybe we can get into it about like, why what I think is missing from AI Art and why art made by people has something AI Art is missing. It's not really a romantic thing. It's. It's kind of an information theory thing.

[Leo Laporte]

I didn't realize that all of these were collages that you did. That's kind of.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, they're handmade. I'm doing a book of them in November. Just a little one, probably like a 500 copy print run. And I think Creative Commons is going to take most of them as premiums to give away to major donors because it's their 25th anniversary. But it'll be called Canny Valley.

[Leo Laporte]

Canny Valley. I love it.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah. And Bruce Sterling's going to write the introduction. So it'll be a nice little book. Fun little art book.

[Leo Laporte]

Fantastic.

[Cory Doctorow]

Just in time for Christmas.

[Leo Laporte]

So all these images are handcrafted, ladies and gentlemen. So what is. Tell us your theory about AI Art. Yeah, yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

I think this is the perfect venue for this. Also because Leo is a huge AI Everything defender. Especially AI Art.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, don't doubt me, man. Don't out me to Corey. He used to have some respect for me. Now he's. Well, you know, I'll say. My attitude towards it is I'm not a true believer yet because it has been yet to be proven. But I went from agreeing with you that it was spicy autocorrect, it was a parlor trick to as I think a lot of people saying, wow, you know, there is something happening here. It is more than just probabilistic prediction about the next pixel or the next word. There's something else going on and how it will end, I don't know. But I'm kind of open to the thought that maybe it will. I mean, I'm not a. My thought is that we are not necessarily anything more than stochastic parrots. So it is. It is not much of a criticism to say that that's all AI is. You know, I mean, how do we know that what we're doing is not autocomplete, you know, based on our experience in life?

[Cory Doctorow]

Well, I think that's a separate question.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe. Maybe.

[Cory Doctorow]

I'll tell you what I think about the art. First, talk about whether what, what, what the true nature of human consciousness is. Because that's.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, because that's what the question is. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

So let me start with a little parable. So I have a friend who's a Law professor. And it used to be that if you were a law professor, only your very best students would hit you up for a letter of reference, because everyone knew that they were a pain in the ass to write. And getting a letter of reference from a law professor when you were considering a postdoc was considered meaningful because it was kind of proof of work, right? Like, someone put a lot of thought into writing this letter on behalf of the student, and they wouldn't do that if they didn't think highly of the student. So the existence of the letter was in fact an act of communication. In the same way that, like if you hire a fancy law firm to send a threatening letter to someone, irrespective of the contents of the letter, there is a message that travels along with it, which is like, I'm angry enough at you to spend a thousand dollars to pay someone to threaten you, and maybe I'll spend lots more money to pay people to threaten you later, right? Or to, to, to make your life miserable. So there's some, there's some like, semantics of the letter. So fast forward to the days of LLMs, and my friend now has every grad student ask for a letter of reference. Because everyone knows that the way you make a letter of reference now is you write three bullet point points and you ask the LLM to inflate it to five paragraphs of nonsense. And as a result, when my friend is considering positions for a postdoc, they are flooded with bajillions of reference letters from other profs that are again inflated from three bullet points. And so what do you do with those letters? Because there's no way you can parse them all, you feed them to an LLM and ask them to be reduced. Now here's the thing. Even if we stipulate that the three bullet points that come out of the LLM are the three bullet points that which we know they're not. But even if this were a lossless process, it is, I think, incontrovertible that nothing else in the letter, right? The other five paragraphs matter in the sense that the LLM knows nothing about this law student and cannot convey a single meaningful thing about the law student, right? They are just doing probabilistic guessing. So the communicative freight in the letter consists of three bullet points that it cannot consist of more, right? There's. Where would, where would the information come from? Right? Claude Shannon decrees that the only information in the letter of reference is the prompt and everything else is nothing. It's padding, okay? So when I write a novel, I am making hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of tiny little subconscious communicative decisions, right? Which word goes where is about trying to convey to you, right? And I think that, you know, art is the process of taking a big, irreducible, numinous feeling that is in the creator's head, imbuing some intermediate medium with that numinous thing as best as you can, whether that's like a dance or a painting or a sculpture or a novel or a song, and then hoping that some facsimile of that materializes in an audience member's head when they experience the work. And so I am making millions of tiny decisions in service to transpiring that big, numinous, irreducible feeling from my mind into yours. And so the communicative density of a novel or of a painting, if you're doing brush strokes and we were talking about these weird collages I do, you know, I Download these, like, 15,000 pixel wide Hieronymous Bosch scans from the Internet Archive or from the Library of Congress, and I trace out individual figures at maximum magnification, and I'm touching the brush strokes of Hieronymus Bosch, and there is some communication there, right? I am. He and I are reaching across time and space, and I am learning something about what he was trying to do by the decisions that he made when he put his brush on the canvas, right? So when I prompt an LLM to draw something or write something, the most communicative freight it can have is the prompt, right? By definition, the LLM isn't communicating anything to you. The LLM has no thing to say to you. It is not in possession of a big, numinous, irreducible feeling that it hopes to materialize in your head. It's just making some guesses about what goes at the next pixel or the next word. While those may be good sentences, or while the draftsmanship of the LLM or the image generator may be good, the communicative intent cannot be expanded beyond the amount of communication in the prompt. The communication in the prompt is all of the effort that the creator has made to transfer a big, numinous, irreducible feeling from themselves to you. That's all there is, right? So the more communications that the creative worker has with the AI, the more density there will be. So if you generate 50 of them and pick one, well, that's two communicative decisions that you've made. If you reprompt, that's three or four, maybe 10, maybe. The re prompt is very Complicated. And of course, not every communication needs to be big in order to be meaningful, right? When you have Duchamp like, you know, getting a urinal and putting it sideways and writing Armada on the side, was a very famous piece of art, right? It carries a lot of communicative freight. But most very significant acts of communication are more than a few words, right? They require some material in order to be unpacked. There are some very moving haiku, but not as many as there are moving novels. And so at best, what you can say is that a creative worker in possession of some extremely compact and very meaningful artistic statement has fed it to an LLM that has then diluted it, that one meaningful thing among a million machine generated decisions, such that the average amount of communication per pixel or word is still like homeopathically low. And so for me, this is why AI art feels at best eerie. Where eeriness is defined as the seeming of intent without an intender. Like the way the, the planchette of the, the Ouija board moves, right? That's what makes it eerie, the seeming of intent without an intender. And so at best it is eerie, and at worst it's just soulless, right? It's that. It's that whatever communicative freight it's carrying is spread so thin that it becomes in undetectable amid the plausible sentences and the excellent draftsmanship. So that's my AI art theory.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it's interesting, certainly. I like that you're applying information theory to this and it's almost Newtonian. There's no additional energy provided. You can't get any more energy out of it. The question I would have is, okay, yeah, but is it possible? So for instance, with Duchamp's urinal, a lot of the information was added by the viewer. That's often the case with art, right? And that's, that's that eerie thing that you're talking about. The intention without an intender is added by the viewer. So there's some information added there. But is it not possible that the AI itself is in fact doing more than simply churning on existing content? Isn't it possible that the AI is making connections that are in effect adding information?

[Cory Doctorow]

Well, even if you. I'm sorry, go ahead, go ahead, Paris.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm excited to hear your point. I just wanted to add something because I see also in the Discord chat, people are kind of raising the same kind of comment with regards to, I don't know the artist's name, but the famous banana taped to a wall in addition to Duchamp. But I think in both cases the thing that differentiates what could be perceived as low effort in comparison. I say that with air quotes because I, I don't personally believe that they're low effort pieces of art, but things that are perceived as low effort, what differentiates that from AI art is that there is an artist that is creating it. There is an intender, there is someone who has conceived of this and is making decisions with the intent that it is going to be perceived. That does not exist when you have a machine that is purely like pattern completing, creating some of these things.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, I think that's really well said. And, and I mean, even if you stipulate that the AI is somehow adding information, the information it's adding, like, we do know enough about how, how the AI works. So what the AI is adding is the most plausible information, right? It's, it's, it's finding the median information that would likely accompany this thing. And so to the extent that art is mostly about surprise, I don't think that it will make the art better. But even if you're like, well, no, even the median information is good information to be adding, it is not information about the big, numinous, irreducible feeling the author or the creator is feeling. And I don't think AIs have big, numinous, irreducible feelings. I think AIs do really interesting statistical work.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's almost a religious belief though, isn't it? I mean, it's a belief that somehow we are different, that we are, we somehow have a soul. You know, I always, I'm not entirely.

[Paris Martineau]

Sure because if we are trying to. The part, part of the modern, and not even, I guess, modern part of our long standing as a collective, as a human society's approach to interpreting and engaging with art involves subjectivity and involves having an understanding, a perception of a debate around author, authorial intent. And you can't do that if there is no author. If an author is an unthinking, unfeeling.

[Cory Doctorow]

Again, that is unmotivated thing.

[Leo Laporte]

That is a perspective that we have as humans that somehow we are different, that that machine is unthinking, unfeeling. But I don't know. I think that's a little bit of a chauvinistic point of view. I'm not convinced that that's the case. And at the very least, I think you could say that AI can make connections that a human wouldn't necessarily think of. That might in fact be insightful. I'LL give you, as an example, move 37, the famous AlphaGo move in the Go match between Lee Sedol and AlphaGo that all the humans thought initially was a mistake and ultimately thought this is a breathtaking innovation that no human would have ever thought of. So where did that come from?

[Paris Martineau]

No, I mean, again, I think that's different than art, though.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's not. It's creative. Whatever it is, it's creative. I don't think it's different than art.

[Paris Martineau]

It's an innovation. I think that innovations in terms of. In terms of things that a machine is being created to do, sure. Of course it's going to innovate when it comes to tasks, or potentially complete tasks in ways that are unexpected. I don't think that either.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's always been my criterion for saying that there's something valuable coming out of AIs. If it is indeed just a remixing machine, then you're right, it's not meaningful. But if it at any point can make a connection that didn't exist before, that a human might not have seen, that is adding information that is something of value, can it do that?

[Paris Martineau]

I don't want to put words in Corey's mouth, but for me, at least, I don't think I was arguing that AI and technology will never be able to create value as defined as some sort of connection that didn't exist before. Of course it will. That's what a lot of these machines are trained to do. I think that's different than does this have artistic authorial merit? Sorry, I've interrupted you twice now, Cora.

[Cory Doctorow]

No, no, that's okay. I wanted to say, just jumping back a couple of steps, it is possible to be a materialist, and I consider myself a materialist, to disbelieve in the soul and to still think that we are not just in a continuum with AI. In the same way that it's possible to say, I don't care how fast these horses that you've been selectively breeding are getting, there is no point at which one of them will give birth to a locomotive. Right. The fact that it's getting better at guessing words doesn't mean it's becoming more intelligent or more like us. So I can believe that what we are doing is mechanical in some sense without having to believe that it is the same mechanism that takes place in these word guessing programs. That would be the first response I would have in terms of addressing whether this is art and whether the machine is creative on the go move. I don't know enough about it. But I would say that, and I don't know if anyone ever did any forensics on the underlying process that produced that Go move. But imagine for a moment that what we have is a program that does directed random walks through a problem space. And so what it's doing is it's saying, I can, in tractable time, compute nine moves ahead, and I am going to, with some randomness, compute as many of these nine ahead moves as I can and try and find ones that take me into unexplored parts of the problem space.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Cory Doctorow]

Now that's a mechanical exercise. It's a thing a human could do with a piece of graph paper and a million years. Right? But it's not a thing that humans do normally. And it is the kind of thing that automation can do for us. That's really exciting, right? Like asking a computer to solve, you know, computationally hard programs like variations on traveling salesmen or whatever, will often give you results that are quite surprising. We get this all the time with agent simulations, right? Where, you know, famously the Santa Fe Institute, for years and years would get called in to consult on how to decrease traffic in cities, and they would recommend choking off traffic on certain streets so that it changed the cadence with which the traffic was reaching the main arteries so that cars would be more broadly spaced and you wouldn't get the ripple effects where when someone touches the brake, the cars all slow down and that creates a continuous eddy where the cars are just slow at that spot for 45 minutes or whatever. And they got there through agent modeling, right? They got there through this surprising counterintuitive, quasi brute force computational exercise. And it is a very counterintuitive, and I think you could say creative way of solving the problem. And the person who wrote that program was being creative, but the program wasn't creative. The program was a tool for creativity of the programmer.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, this comes back to the. The kind of. The fundamental question that I have. If everything's deterministic, you're right. You know, determinism, it says, you know, given a starting point and a set of steps, you're always going to get to the final point. And that's what coding does. Your description really is reflective of how chess works. It's very much computational, but that's why GO was a little bit more interesting, because the position, the possible moves in GO are so huge that it isn't really able to solve it computationally. Even in a chess program, you have to at some point make a positional judgment, which is not Based on computation. In the case of a rules based AI, it looks at whatever rules it has and says, well, based on that, I say Black is ahead by 0.7 points. Go is more complicated. The positionality is very complicated. I think you're verging on the noumenal. But that's really the question to me ultimately. And I don't know what the answer is, but I think we are seeing a glimmer And I think move 37 is an example. I think there are many other examples in fact in later go programs like AlphaZero where it wasn't in fact given any games or anything but the rules of the game and it was taught, it learned the game itself by playing them, that there are connections that are made. This was Stephen Wolfram's contention a few weeks ago on the show that maybe humans wouldn't have seen or wouldn't have come up with. And that is adding. And in my opinion, that is adding information and proves the point that it is possible for this stochastic parrot to actually be more than simply spicy autocorrect, but actually to insert more information into the system. Now maybe it's just a bit initially, but if you agree that it's possible that it's adding information to the system, then that changes the equation. It isn't simply a mechanistic deterministic, well, this than that. It is now adding something. And I think adding information is as good as we're going to get. We can't define consciousness, but I think it's as good as we're going to get. It's what I've always said for me will be the ultimate criterion of whether a machine is doing something valuable is if it's, if it can create in the sense that it can add information, it could do something a human wouldn't necessarily be able to do, then it is valuable. Whether it's AGI or superintelligence is irrelevant to me.

[Cory Doctorow]

So again, I want to just tease apart a couple of ideas. So first is whether I think things can be mechanical without being deterministic. We have lots of mechanisms that we struggle to predict the outcomes of. And very famously the halting state problem says that computer programs beyond a pretty trivial level of complexity cannot be predicted. Right. They are not deterministic. This is where bugs come from. Right. We, we don't know what a what, what state.

[Leo Laporte]

If we had perfect information, we would know where the bug came from. But I would agree with you that that's the thing. That's what's going on with these machine learning models, with these Transformers, that is. What is different is it's. It's somewhat of a black box. And we can't. It's not deterministic. We can't figure out what's going on.

[Cory Doctorow]

I believe it's Turing, Church who defined the halting state problem. But their contention. And I don't have the math to follow it, but their contention is that, no, even if you understand the program perfectly, you cannot predict how it will turn.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. Okay. So it's not a lack of information, it's just not predictable. Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

Halting state problem is what you're looking for.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, sorry. Yep. You're still looking at my screen.

[Cory Doctorow]

Knock it off. I don't want to get it off.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what?

[Cory Doctorow]

I've stopped using the Zoom app. Because you're on the web.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe you don't have the choice.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you see a three up right now at all?

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, I got. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Across the top.

[Leo Laporte]

So, yeah, that's fine as long as you see the three up. Remember, that's what's going out. And you're gonna. You're gonna see my screen.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, your screen is spotlit for reasons I don't understand.

[Paris Martineau]

You're gonna see how much Leo uses Perplexity for every single thing on this show.

[Leo Laporte]

It's supposed to be secret. No, that's just my search. I don't use. I no longer use Google for obvious reasons.

[Cory Doctorow]

I use Kagi.

[Leo Laporte]

I use Kagi for a long time. I stopped paying 25 bucks a month to use Kagi.

[Cory Doctorow]

Well, that's for your whole family. It's 10 bucks a month for just you.

[Leo Laporte]

I was the only one using it, so. Okay, 10 bucks.

[Paris Martineau]

The most expensive subscription possible, of course.

[Leo Laporte]

And I pay 20 for perplexity, so it's not free, but.

[Cory Doctorow]

So that was. The first thing, is that I don't know that just because things are mechanical, it implies that they're.

[Leo Laporte]

Is. Is dividing by zero a halting state?

[Cory Doctorow]

No, that's just a mathematical problem.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Cory Doctorow]

No. Halting state problem is that it's. Yeah, there we are. So again, we are now, as we look at. I'm looking at your screen, and we are now at a point where the math is going over my head. So as the son of a mathematician, I know what math. I'm not qualified.

[Leo Laporte]

Me, too. Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

But I. My. My lay understanding of it is that the halting state problem says that we do not know how a program will terminate until we run the program. So it can be mechanical without being deterministic is my broader point.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Cory Doctorow]

So it doesn't. Just because I think we are mechanical.

[Leo Laporte]

It doesn't stipulate that. Okay.

[Cory Doctorow]

And the second thing I wanted to say about adding information is surprising you with juxtapositions that you hadn't contemplated is, is indeed a very fruitful creative exercise. You know, there's, there's the Exquisite Corpse game where people write sentences without knowing what sentence comes before it and so on. When I was at the Clarion science fiction workshop 30 years ago with Nancy Crest, the great writer, she said, you know, we can plot stories that begin with a person in a place of the problem. So each of you write a person, a place and a problem on a separate sheet of paper. We're going to scramble them up and hand them back to you, and you're going to try and write a story to that prompt. So these random prompts can be extremely creativity provoking. You know, people talk about how laying a tarot helps them clarify their thoughts or make novel connections they hadn't made before, even if they don't believe in anything metaphysical going on with the tarot deck. And there are storytelling cards that are like this too. Very famously, you have Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies deck, which is full of prompts that he used when Talking Heads and Roxy Music were recording. Like, be the first person to not do something that no one else has ever thought of not doing before. And you know, like, all of these things are super interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

And you can imagine how a machine that makes unexpected connections on the basis of some algorithmic whatever, whether it's statistical analysis of a huge corpus of language or whether it is some interesting stuff where, you know, you're trying to hill climb towards a certain maximum, but you're traversing the informationscape horizontally because you think you've reached a local maximum. You're trying to find somewhere to go up. So you get these weird, unexpected connections and then the human reviews the connection and goes, aha. That's really interesting. And that's what I think you have to do when we're talking about art. Because art does not have an objective.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's why art is a bad objective, maybe a bad way to measure this, because there is no. That's why I like go, for instance. There's no measurable victory or no, no end. Right. But we have very clear goals with a lot of other human endeavors that we can say, yeah, you did it or you didn't do it. So.

[Cory Doctorow]

And I can, I can believe that you can have a Computer program that self varies where there is another program that says, you got closer that time, try some variation.

[Leo Laporte]

In fact, that's, that's what these reasoning models are doing these days. Right.

[Cory Doctorow]

Which works when you have an objective function. So. But, but it also, you know, we have to remember the AI companies have been less than forthcoming in terms of their, their outcomes.

[Leo Laporte]

So. Yeah, we don't know. It's. It's a black box. Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

DeepMind and it's DeepMind and its material science breakthroughs, where they said they've done 800 years of material science breakthroughs, generated something like millions of synthetic materials. And most of them were worthless.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah. Well, no. Zero of them in a random sample.

[Leo Laporte]

Were worth anything either.

[Cory Doctorow]

Either a thing that you could make. So most of them required that they would only exist at absolute zero. And the ones that, that could exist in tractable temperatures either had no novel properties or no useful properties or both.

[Leo Laporte]

So material scientists were not able to use any of that generated zero for me. Zero. That's true.

[Cory Doctorow]

I mean, it's a huge number of materials. So they did random sampling. They tried to find a, a statistically relevant sample, a representative sample.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Cory Doctorow]

And then they, they examined each of them and they, they found.

[Leo Laporte]

So that would be. For me, that would be my Turing test, my measure of something happening is if they, if a machine could come up with a new material that was of. Create a creatable and be usable, that would, and that would validate by itself, validate the work done on these things. Right. It would be of use.

[Cory Doctorow]

Sure. I, I mean, it wouldn't necessarily be of a hundred billion dollars worth of use.

[Leo Laporte]

I agree. We don't know.

[Cory Doctorow]

Maybe.

[Leo Laporte]

But if you came up with a cure for cancer.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

That would be of use.

[Paris Martineau]

We're always saying, yeah, if AI came up with a cure for cancer, it'd be of use. That could be said of a lot of.

[Leo Laporte]

But you don't know.

[Paris Martineau]

The cat came up with a cure for cancer, that'd be of use. But we're not giving her $300 billion.

[Leo Laporte]

But. But, yeah, but it seems like it's worth trying, does it not? Or are you saying it's not? Do you feel like it's not worth it?

[Paris Martineau]

I think it's certainly worth it. I question is, wow. Gizmo heard her name and is now sitting up in the background of my shot.

[Leo Laporte]

See, she says, I got a cure right here. You just never listen to me.

[Paris Martineau]

I just never give her $300 billion. And she's holding out. I can while I Think that the thing that is still. That we still haven't figured out is whether or not it's worthwhile spending a unprecedented amount of capital and resources and devoting an unprecedented amount of collective attention worldwide. Like I'm getting.

[Leo Laporte]

My watch just told me it's going to call 91 1. So I'm going to calm down right now.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay? To help you calm down, I'll.

[Leo Laporte]

I have to do an ad. That's how I'm going to calm down. Don't introduce anything else. Hold on. Hold that thought. No, you could do it in a minute. I do have this article from MIT's Technology Review saying that DeepMind did in fact create 700.

[Cory Doctorow]

I'll find you the article that reviewed that conclusion.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay. Interesting. No, I believe you. This was from a paper in Nature. Okay. Interesting. But first, a word from our sponsor. It's so good to have you. Cory Doctorow is here. It's so good to have you back. Paris Martineau. From the information, Jeff Jarvis is kicking himself that he couldn't be here today. Corey's new book is now out Picks and shovels. You find it at thebezel.org or craphhound.net is it.net or.com pluralistic.net for his blog. Our show today. I'll tell you what I can prove to you. This tool is worth every penny you pay for it. It's brought to you by Monarch Money. Nowadays, keeping track of your money is a chore. A chore computer can do quite well. Finances can be very tricky, very confusing. Monarch Money. Remember that name. Monarch Money acts like you're, I don't know, your personal cfo, giving you full visibility and control so you could stop earning and start growing. It's more than your average budgeting app. Monarch Money is a complete financial command center for your accounts, your investments and your goals. I put everything in there, everything. And makes it. By the way, it's very easy. Took me 10 minutes to set it up and now I'm doing more than just managing my money. I am looking at what's going on. I'm seeing where I can make changes, make improvements. I'm building my wealth. And by the way, you can do it too with 50% off for your first year. If you go to monarchmoney.com and use the code im there's so many valuable things. I get alerts from Monarch Money. It also with the stock market being a little nutty right now, it helps me see what's happening. Where there are options. It really helps me manage my finances to build the life I'm planning for. And as I approach retirement, that becomes more and more important. But I think it's important for everybody of every age. Without a clear financial picture, you don't know where your financial dreams are. They might be way out of reach. Monarch Money makes managing money simple, even for busy lives. There's no data entry. Once you set it up, it automatically keeps track of everything on your computer, on your phone, on your iPad, on the web, wherever you are. You could see everything. Your accounts, your credit cards, your investments, all in one dashboard. You'll always know where your money stands without the hassle. And it's great. It's great for budgeting. I don't budget. I suppose I should. But if you wanted to set up a budget without all the tedium of it, this makes it so much easier to track your spending, your savings, your investments. You could focus on what matters most, making your biggest life goals a reality, saying, I'm gonna spend a little less here, so I could spend a little more there. It's the financial tool people actually love. Over a million households now using Monarch Money. Wall Street Journal said it's the best budgeting app of 2025. I would agree. It's the top recommended personal finance app. Recommended by users and experts. 30,000 5 star reviews. I love it. I love it. I sign up for a year immediately. Visit monarchmoney.com get control of your overall finances with Monarch Money. And when you use the code I am for intelligent machines monarchmoney.com in your browser, you'll get half off for your first year. 50% off for your first year. That's. That's another way to save, isn't it? Monarch Money, come to think of it.com use the code I am. And you, I promise, will thank me later. Monarchmoney.com offer code I am for 50% off for your first year. Corey has sent along the. The article from. Is it. Who is that? ACS Pubs. Acs. Artificial Intelligence Driving Materials Discovery. Question mark It's.

[Cory Doctorow]

It's the American Chemistry Society or Chemical Society's journal.

[Leo Laporte]

That makes sense.

[Cory Doctorow]

I mean, it's not Nature, but it is the leading journal in, in material science.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it's kind of the response to the Nature article, in fact. Yeah, that's right. Okay, so there's a debate that's interesting and I, I think I would trust the chemists to say they said we believe the experimentalists would find it helpful if the results are presented in a more organized manner rather than a seemingly Random walk through the periodic table. Okay, so there's some suggestions for how to make it better. Do they deny, though, the possibility that new materials could be created by deep mind?

[Cory Doctorow]

No, don't deny that at all. But I think that line about random walks, it's not just a burn. Right. It is a critique of this brute force approach and really critique of what? The objective function that they're asking the AI to have. So I could conceive of a world in which you say to the AI, go find me materials, but don't tell me about them unless they satisfy these 11 criteria. That would mean that they have a colorable case of being useful. But I think if that were the case, then your press release would be like, we ran a program for a year and we found one thing we might. That might be useful and not, we ran a program for a year and we found a million things that are. Have advanced the science by 800 years. Which was the original claim from DeepMind.

[Leo Laporte]

That they do say in their very last sentence, while we are confident the tools of artificial intelligence and machine learning have a bright future in the fields of material discovery, more work needs to be done before that promise is fulfilled. So they, they don't deny the potential value.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, they're not saying, like, automation won't produce dividends. But I think back to what Paris was saying before. Even if you stipulate that after $800 billion or however many billions of dollars that we're going to spend on AI, you get one cure for one kind of cancer, we have to make sure we're not excluding the middle here. And the other possibility between we spent $800 billion and we got one cure for one kind of cancer with AI and we spent nothing and we didn't get a cure for cancer, is we spent some fraction of $800 billion on some other technique and we got one or more cures for one or more kinds of cancer too, Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. It's to some degree a zero sum game. You don't have an infinite amount of dollars to spend, and so you want to spend it in the place that will be potentially the most useful. But how do we know?

[Cory Doctorow]

Well, we don't, but we do have people pursuing various techniques who are starved for cash. Right. And who have had good results. And particularly now in the Doge austerity era. Right. We have a lot of public sector research that, unless it connects itself to AI in order to be buzzword compliant, struggles to find funding, even if it's already had successes in the past. So I would say that given that we have taken capital from those people and in some meaningful way reallocated it to a much more speculative AI technique, that that capital is not being rationally allocated even if it pays off. Right. You can hit the craps table and hit sevens three times in a row and walk away with a lot of money. That doesn't make it a rational bet. Right. Just means that you got lucky and maybe we'll get lucky. Right. And you know, what do you propose?

[Leo Laporte]

Should we not be spending money, time and let's face it, global resources on AI?

[Cory Doctorow]

I think we should approach AI as a useful piece of utility automation and not as a transformative technology that is going to be worth $13 trillion, which is what we're doing right now.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Sam Altman said we need to spend at least a trillion to get to where we want to go. And that's a lot of money.

[Paris Martineau]

I think that's there. Most things in the world, be it technology or otherwise, you could argue would be world changingly transformative if you spent a trillion dollars on making it so.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Where do you stand, Corey, on the threat that AI poses to humanity?

[Cory Doctorow]

So I think that as, once again, as a materialist, I think when you're critiquing what people do, you should think about their material circumstances. So I think that AI companies have a bunch of lines of business in, in their business plan, in their PowerPoint deck that are threatening to us like automated judgments about who should be an immigrant and who should be turned away from the border or who should be denied bail or not, or whether your kid should be taken away or whether you get a job or whether you get a lease, whether you get a loan. Those are all things where AI can significantly harm people and probably is right now. And probably are certainly are. I mean there was just an academic who was blackbagged by, you know, Donald Trump goon squad because an AI generated pro Israeli newspaper called her an anti Semite because it said that she had attended this rally and that rally had had this speaker and that speaker had been somewhere else and that person had been affiliated with Hamas, therefore blah blah, blah. Right. So you know, we already have a world in which AI based nonsense, although.

[Leo Laporte]

The flaw there is abandoning due process because AI told you so.

[Cory Doctorow]

Indeed. So the thing is that AI really only works as an automation tool that saves money as opposed to one that improves outcomes if you abandon due process. So I see on your screen you keep bringing up this radiology story.

[Leo Laporte]

This is from the Washington Post earlier this week. AI hasn't killed radiology, but it is changing it. The claim being it has been helpful to radiologists and they were getting better outcomes with the help of AI.

[Cory Doctorow]

So I am really interested in this because I have an extremely treatable form of cancer. So I am suddenly someone who's a lot more interested in cancer than I was a year ago.

[Leo Laporte]

Corey, I did not know this. I'm sorry.

[Cory Doctorow]

I've written about it. It's fine. It is totally fine. I'm having some minor radiotherapy in June and the prognosis is excellent.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Cory Doctorow]

But this is a subject I'm now very personally interested in in a way that used to be a lot more abstract. So here's what I. I think there are, and it appears to be the case, there are algorithms that are better at spotting certain kinds of solid mass tumors than human radiologists. Right. So the ones that the humans miss, the software can pick up. It doesn't imply the other way around, by the way, that the ones that the humans get, the robot will also get just as well. But if this is the case, then you could imagine a hospital saying, okay, we have a radiologist, and right now that radiologist reviews 50x rays a day, and we are going to add some software to it that's going to do a second opinion on all those X rays. And when they disagree, which is going to happen about once a day, that radiologist is going to go back and recheck their results. So now that radiologist is going to do 49x rays a day. There is no hospital administrator who is buying AI because they want the radiologist to do fewer scans. The pitch from an AI salesman is fire. Most of your radiologists have the machines do all the work and have the human act as what Dan Davies calls an accountability sink, or what's also been called a moral crumple zone. So it is their job to absorb the blame when you die because the software missed your tumor. Right. Because they were the person who the human being who is supposedly in the loop, who put their initials next to the robot's conclusion, but who was asked to work at a pace where there is no conceivable way they would review the robot's findings. So again, I think this is like a socially determined outcome, not a technical one. But I think that. Back to business plans. Nowhere on the business plan of the AI company making the radiology bot is the thing where they say, well, this is how much money we expect to make from hospitals that are going to increase their costs. And this is how much we expect to make from hospitals that will decrease their costs, right? They only have a line item for increasing their costs. And so when we find ourselves arguing about things that AI companies don't plan on making money on, like the AI waking up, becoming super intelligent and turning us all into paperclips or even AI disinformation and elections, there's no AI business plan that's like we are going to make so many millions this year selling AI disinformation tool for the upcoming election. So when we focus our attention on that, we focus our attention on a thing that even if we all agree that this is bad and we have to do something about it, no AI company is poorer as a result. And when you have companies that are spending the largest amount of money any companies have ever spent in the history of the world and all the debate about their activities focuses on things they never plan on making money on, I'm inclined to think that those two things are related, that those AI companies are asking us to train our focus on things they never plan to turn into a product so that we are not focusing on the things that they're actually out there selling right now that are not fit for purpose.

[Leo Laporte]

And to complete the thought on this Washington Post article, they do say most AI detection products produce false positives that radiologists are responsible for following up on. Here's a quote that says AI that's focused on detecting abnormalities can actually create more work for the radiologist. So I think your moral crumple zone analogy is quite I can write you.

[Cory Doctorow]

A one line pearl program that catches every tumor that the radiologist misses.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Cory Doctorow]

All it does is says that every X ray it examines has a tumor. By definition, it's going to catch every tumor that the radiologist misses.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, really an excellent point. We're talking to Cory Doctorow who's always, I have to say, always been a real refreshing antidote to some of the frothiness that you see in technology. And AI is as frothy as you can get. Meta just got in a lot of trouble because they basically played they gamed the benchmarks with their release of Llama 4. This is from the Verge With Llama 4, Meta fudged the benchmarks. This confirms, by the way, Corey, what you've been saying to appear as though the new AI model is better than the competition, but in fact the model that they submitted is not publicly available a and in fact it may be that it was trained on the test in effect.

[Paris Martineau]

Wait, so how did it fudge the.

[Leo Laporte]

Benchmarks in Fine print. Meta acknowledges the version of Maverick tested at LM arena isn't the same as that available to the public. According to Meta's own materials, it deployed an. This is all from the Verge, an experimental chat version of Maverick that was, quote, specifically optimized for conversationality.

[Cory Doctorow]

Hi, this is Benito. Like, we should never trust Meta statistics, ever.

[Leo Laporte]

I think you're right. We've learned that lesson. Haven't we learned that in pivot to video.

[Cory Doctorow]

Hands up everyone who pivoted to video.

[Paris Martineau]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, what's interesting though, and Meta knows this, is that the news that they were the best at LM arena traveled the world, and I think that this disclaimer probably is not as well known. It's still putting its pants on.

[Cory Doctorow]

Well, you know, I gave you a link in the chat to Goodhart's Law, which is that any benchmark becomes a target and then ceases to be useful as a benchmark.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I love that. And that does happen, doesn't it? We've seen it again and again.

[Cory Doctorow]

Every time. GDP is like the embodiment of that. You can make number go up without making national prosperity go up. Yeah, for sure. Moments like this remind me that are habitual liars. And memorizing the test is a great way to pass the test. You know, this is all that stuff about AIs passing the. It seems really likely that AIs were trained on the LSAT. That doesn't mean they're a lawyer.

[Leo Laporte]

So is there any justification for continuing AI research, continuing work, or is this just a complete waste of money?

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, I wouldn't say there. Everybody should shut down absolutely everything. I think that's certain. I don't think it should be as binary and black and white as. I don't think the two options.

[Leo Laporte]

So what, how do you respond?

[Paris Martineau]

Millions of dollars, we spend zero. I think there's a way to treat this like any other technology and invest a reasonable amount that the market can bear and that we think could, you know, produce results and be aligned with the amount of capital invested.

[Leo Laporte]

Corey, what do you think?

[Cory Doctorow]

I think that's completely right. I mean, there are lots of things that people have done with AI that I find super interesting. I think maybe when the last time I was on Twitter we talked about 4th use vinegar collective, which is this group of rogue pharmaceutical chemists who this.

[Leo Laporte]

Year are they using AI?

[Cory Doctorow]

So they have made a chemical synthesis answer machine search engine. So if you go to Wikipedia and you look up any small complex organic molecule. So like the one shot hepatitis C cure for Example, it has a. What's called a Smile code, which is a short string of ascii, and there's even a button to copy it to your clipboard. You go to their search engine, you paste it in. It has ingested the entire organic chemistry synthesis literature. And it says you get these precursors and you get these reagents and you combine them in this order at these temperatures in this way. And this is how you synthesize this molecule. And it's extremely reliable. Like, that's a super interesting application. And they pair it with an open source compounding pharmacy robot that's basically functionally equivalent to the ones that compounding pharmacy would buy for $50,000. But you make it yourself with a Raspberry PI and some peristaltic pumps for like 500.

[Leo Laporte]

Have you built this for yourself, Corey?

[Cory Doctorow]

I have not, but I watched them assemble one on stage from scratch during the talk and then take requests from the audience for molecules. So the first thing they made was the one shot hepatitis C cure, but it was defcon. So it. There were a ton of people who were on various kinds of hormone therapy because they were trans. So they made testosterone and estrogen. They made a medication abortion. They made. What else did they make? They made, oh, Vyvanse, which is the ADHD drug that was having supply chain problems where if you go cold turkey on it, you get seizures. So they made, they made their own Vyvanse. So they were taking requests for molecules on stage and making it. You can go and download.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm on their website.

[Cory Doctorow]

They made plan B. Yeah, yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

That has also extra stuff in it. Awesome.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, no, they're amazing. They're. And their goal, like they saw the Trump administration coming and this was their goal, was to say that you should never be reliant on the pharmaceutical industry or the government to get the drugs that you need to stay alive. And so they made this open source hardware robot. It was the most interesting presentation I've ever seen at defcon. I've seen some pretty interesting presentations at DEFCON over the years.

[Leo Laporte]

Are you still working with eff?

[Cory Doctorow]

I am, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I thought you were.

[Cory Doctorow]

I'm a special consultant, special advisor. I'm an activist with EFF.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So you write. In the 23 years I've been at EFF, I've been privileged to get a front row seat for some of the most important legal battles over tech and human rights in history. This is from your article that the EFF is suing doge.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, we were the first people to sue doge, we're suing them on behalf of two unions representing federal workers. And we brought a case under the Privacy act to say that by the Office of Personnel Management giving access to their records to DOGE that they had violated the Privacy Act. And the. The court dismissed the government's attempt to get our case thrown out, but did say that we have to bring our claims under the Administrative Procedures Act. So this is getting a little esoteric, but the Administrative Procedures act just determines how federal agencies are allowed to work. But you're not usually allowed to use it until you've exhausted other remedies. And what court said was that we could skip straight to an Administrative Procedures act claim, which is good. It's very good. And they threw out all of the government's objections, and they said that all of our claims are adjudicable. And so as we move forward as the actual trial, all of our claims will be heard.

[Leo Laporte]

Who adjudicates these procedural.

[Cory Doctorow]

So is it a court process? This will be heard by a court. I don't think this is an administrative law judge that will hear this. And you're now getting out of my legal knowledge. I am an activist, not a lawyer, so.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, they got some very good lawyers at eff.

[Cory Doctorow]

We sure do.

[Leo Laporte]

And they're joining a chorus, of course, of lawsuits, some of which have been thrown out. Scotus, I think, rejected somebody for lack of standing yesterday.

[Cory Doctorow]

So that's what we want. We want a standing challenge.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. To prove that you have the. And it would seem the unions would have standing, but.

[Cory Doctorow]

Right, but this is always a problem. I mean, look, one of the problems is when. When everyone is implicated, you have to prove that you are implicated.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Cory Doctorow]

So we had this problem with our. Our case jewel and another case that we brought as well, that were both NSA spying cases. So in 2006, an ex AT&T technician named Mark Klein walked into our offices around the Corner from Tech TV Studios on ShotWell street. And he said, I just retired from AT&T, and my boss made me build a secret room in the Folsom.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yes, he just passed the other day. Yeah, right.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah. And we put a beam splitter in, and we let the NSA wiretap the whole Internet. And we brought a case. We brought two cases.

[Leo Laporte]

That was your case.

[Cory Doctorow]

And the thing that the court wanted us to do was prove that our clients had been spied on by the nsa. But the NSA said all of the evidence that they'd been spied on was secret. So we had all these secrecy Challenges. One of the cases lasted about 10 years, the other one lasted about 15. Both of them were eventually dismissed for lack of standing. So this is often a problem when you have these really cases that implicate everyone is you have to find evidence of particularized harm, not general harm. And so there's this weird way in which the courts say, no, they spied on everyone, so you can't prove they spied on anyone. And that's really weird. It's a terrible catch 22.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And I would agree with you that using AI as doge is using it to decide who to fire to rewrite the code for the Social Security Administration. And it looks like now the IRS is probably a bridge too far. As much as I like AI, that's not where AI. That is a place where AI can cause a lot of harm or having.

[Cory Doctorow]

It craft a tariff policy, for that matter.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I, you know, I don't. Who knows where Trump got his mathematical formula?

[Cory Doctorow]

We think a human being sat down and just went through all the cctlds and did the math. No, that's an AI.

[Leo Laporte]

But somebody came up with the idea of, oh, we'll take their deficit, we'll divide it by, you know, maybe.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, maybe.

[Leo Laporte]

Or maybe as to chat gbt. So tell us what make this chart for us.

[Cory Doctorow]

Maybe they said to the ChatGPT, though, maybe they said, tell me what a good tariff policy. Maybe we don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Again, we don't know. A number of people have tried asking that, giving that prompt to all the major models, and all of them came up with the same mathematics as far as I know. So maybe there. Maybe. Maybe that's what they did. It is was telling that the chart was in some sort of AI order, not, not alphabetical or numeric. Yeah, that's the kind of thing AI will do, you know.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, I mean, look, if it. It didn't quite have the phrase as a large language model, I am not capable of advising you on this.

[Leo Laporte]

But it was close. It was close.

[Cory Doctorow]

It came pretty fucking close. Excuse me? Pretty dang close.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, the good news. The good news is as of about five hours ago, most of those tariffs have been walked back, paused. Pause. Well, pause. Yeah, I mean, the uncertainty remains, but the tariff against China is now ratcheting up past 90%.

[Cory Doctorow]

90% for small packages from Sheen and 10.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's going to put she in and Temu and out of business. And it's got to damage Amazon.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, most goods that come or from China or pass all that fast.

[Leo Laporte]

Fashion in your closet there.

[Paris Martineau]

Not even just fast fashion like small. The parts of anything that ends up.

[Cory Doctorow]

Assembled in America as well as everything you might use to build factories in America that can do high tech, high precision manufacturing.

[Paris Martineau]

We got 90 days to build those factories, so it'll be fine. Actually.

[Cory Doctorow]

Reshoring is hard. So I had an interesting conversation with Bunny Wang, who's a real like hardware hacking virtuoso about the CHIPS act. And he predicted that the CHIPS act would fail. And I asked him why and he said, look, to make a, an extremely advanced microprocessor, something with sort of 4 nanometer features, you need to have a country with an amazing education system and a useless passport. And that's Taiwan. Because the job, the process of making those 4 nanometer features starts with you getting into a bunny suit for eight hours at a time without a pee break. Three shifts a day with your PhD in electrical engineering while you oversee a machine whose first step is vaporizing tin into an evacuated chamber. Tracking each of the vaporized droplets with one vision system, hitting each one with a laser, with one kind of laser to flatten it into a coin shape, hitting it with another laser to vaporize it so that it creates the right wavelength of light to etch the wafer. But the wafers have to be prepared in like a 10 hour process so that they're within one atom of each other's weights. And they spin on a turn turntable like this. And if they're like off by a bazillionth of a gram, then they are out of whack and they start to, they start, you know, your, your features aren't etched correctly. And he said like, you can only do that if you have a PhD in electrical engineering. You need to do that. You, you need to have that level of knowledge to keep that machine running. And they pay $55,000 a year. So if you know anyone with an American PhD in electrical engineering who wants to spend from midnight to 8am in a bunny suit with no pee breaks babysitting that machine for $55,000 a year, then sure, but like we are a ways off from reshoring that capability. Even if you think that reshoring it is a good idea, which I do, it's not going to happen tomorrow. It's going to require a lot of very complex long run phenomena to play out.

[Leo Laporte]

I've paraphrased you, you actually mentioned this on a twit episode some weeks back, and I paraphrased you many times since then. You're just not going to get these people. And the important point there was the weak passport. They can't leave Taiwan. Many of them have been imported into Arizona for the, you know, these TSMC factories. But whether they'll stay is another matter.

[Cory Doctorow]

And whether they'll do the job for $55,000 a year in Arizona is also a question.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, yeah. You go through almost a decade worth of schooling all to stay in a room in the hottest state wearing your Bunny Su having to pee.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

Even, even the odd trip to the Grand Canyon won't make up for it.

[Paris Martineau]

When you, when it's, you know, November and it's 98 degrees outside, you might be regretting your choice. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You all saw the, the video that was made in China mocking the American. The American worker trying to do the factory work that the Chinese do so cheaply currently.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, I didn't see this, but yeah, this is AI.

[Leo Laporte]

This is AI created a lot of.

[Paris Martineau]

Memes of NBA bros wearing their puffer vests sitting at a. To make iPhones.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. This is not a good job. This is not a job Americans will do.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, and, and maybe that, you know, maybe there are like, I think reshoring some capability to manufacture critical goods is a good idea to as a hedge against climate shocks, geopolitical shocks and so on. Even pandemic future pandemics. I just don't think you do it by shutting everything down.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Cory Doctorow]

Like, that project would require an enormous amount of technology transfer from China. And you don't get that while having a belligerent relationship with China. China did not crack down on US big tech until it had incubated a Chinese big tech sector. They weren't like, oh no, we're not going to let Facebook in here ever. They're like, oh no, we'll let Google and Facebook in here long enough to figure out how they work, allow local firms to clone their best features, and then we'll kick them out. That's what we should be doing if we want to steal a march on China, that kicking them out before we figured out how to do what they do.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a bit of a whoopsie at planning whoopsies. You don't think robots will be taking these jobs?

[Cory Doctorow]

Maybe, maybe robots will do some of these jobs. Manufacturing the precision robots is also a precision manufacturing.

[Leo Laporte]

That's right. Somebody's got to make the robots. Oh, yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

Right. And yeah, look, I think automation is real and good and I rely on automation and I have benefited from it immeasurably. And I remember compilers that could do some error checking and how transformative it was. And I had a friend tell me a couple of years ago that he was using Copilot to write css, which is just like a giant pain in the ass to write valid CSS that works across multiple browsers. And the LLM was doing it really well. And I was like, that's really amazing. And I said, if you had told me my latest compiler has a CSS debugger that's really good, I would say that's very exciting. But what you're telling me instead is that the job of programmer is now threatened because I have some error checking for CSS which I don't think follows. I think that's great if you're trying to raise a trillion dollars to be Sam Altman and steal everyone's eyeballs, but it's not great if it's not, like, realistic, nor does it make it a good investment.

[Leo Laporte]

He's talking about worldcoin, which is the orb that you scan your eyeballs into and then somehow the world works better.

[Cory Doctorow]

These guys gotta respect the orb.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we are very pleased.

[Cory Doctorow]

Domes.

[Leo Laporte]

Domes. Orbs.

[Paris Martineau]

They're obsessed with spears.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I love your. Your collage with. It's a sphere with Donald Trump's hair. Is.

[Cory Doctorow]

That's right. Yeah. So don't Donald Trump. You know, one of the best things about Donald Trump being president is there's a million public domain photos of him now because all the things the White House produces are in the public domain. So I can just use those without even having to credit them, which is great.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's fantastic.

[Paris Martineau]

I do think it would be kind of fun to have like a brush tool that just paints the texture of his hair.

[Cory Doctorow]

Right. Trump hair. I have some. I have some Trump hair PNGs. But. But I've been. I've made my own from the official presidential portrait.

[Leo Laporte]

I think a. You're right. A Photoshop brush of Trump hair would be very useful.

[Paris Martineau]

It would. Maybe AI can get on that and.

[Leo Laporte]

The GIMP could do it too. Yeah. GIMP is actually getting better and better. Do you use the newest GIMP that just came out?

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah. Version three. Right. The first big update in 20 years.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

Is a bit like the time we renovated the kitchen. I couldn't remember where the cutlery was.

[Leo Laporte]

All new, all new.

[Cory Doctorow]

The wrong spot and it's crashier. So I've lost a ton of work. You have to really hit save every couple of seconds because it is not as stable as GIMP2 was.

[Leo Laporte]

We are very fortunate Jeff Jarvis has the week off, but Cory Doctorow has agreed to sit in and it's so nice to have you. Sci fi author, brilliant author. Thebezel.org for his new books, including the one that just came out. Picks and shovels the origin story for Marty Hench, forensic accountant and the work he [e-mail] There it is. Picks and shovels, a Martin Hench novel. Paris, Martineau's back. It's great to have you back. We missed you so much. She's working at the information. I didn't get a chance to credit you. I credited you. I didn't get a chance to thank you in person for that excellent section 230 articles article you wrote just on your way out the door.

[Paris Martineau]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

That was really well done.

[Paris Martineau]

And also a hell of a. I mean everything's a bit in stasis now. I think even as I was reporting that folks were like, oh, you know, we could release this bill as soon as this week. But that would rely on nothing calamitous happening in global national politics that week. And what would you know, a lot of things are happening.

[Leo Laporte]

How did that, that's amazing that that that happened.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, yeah, we had, we had like an all hands, like let's get to work on this bill thing at eff. And I, I asked my colleagues, you know, like, do you really think a bill is going to move in Congress? And they were like, yeah, no, we're told by all of our, our friends, you know, our legend, our legislative analysts were like, we're told by, you know, the staffers this is moving in Congress. And I'm like, okay, I'll, I'll pitch in, you know, but like then it didn't move in.

[Leo Laporte]

Well. And the reason it's scary and the reason you point out in your article is it's a bipartisan move. I mean, yeah, that's, that's what's scary.

[Paris Martineau]

And I knew I like phrase that sentence very specifically because I knew some people were gonna be like, there've been bipartisan efforts to reform section 230 before. I'm like, yes, proposed, never introduced before.

[Cory Doctorow]

Right.

[Paris Martineau]

We never had a comprehensive bipartisan effort to not just reform section 230, but repeated peel it whole hog introduced. And that's, that's scary. I think the main thing is are we going to get a. I assume probably sometime in the next four years there'll be a period where there's a little bit where there's, you know, less.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a little calmer.

[Paris Martineau]

You think? I hope so. But I don't know. Maybe we won't. Maybe it's just going to keep getting worse from here and then we won't have to deal with this, but we'll have to deal with other bad things.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, if you care about our chats in our various streams, we have eight of them going at the same time. Discord, Discord. YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, X.com, linkedIn, Facebook. If you care about our TWiT [e-mail] mummunity. If you care about our Mastodon instance at Twit Social, if you care about leaving comments on our videos. All of that would go away the minute section 230 goes away. Because I'm too small. Unlike Facebook and X and Google, I'm too small to suffer a barrage of lawsuits to have to defend a barrage of lawsuits. Paris, you estimated each one would cost me a million dollars to defend. I couldn't afford one. So we would shut down. We would immediately have to shut down all of our user contribution areas because.

[Paris Martineau]

We couldn't afford is this plan is being made with kind of the reason why they're angling, or at least people told me they're angling for a full repeal is like, oh, that will. Then we negotiate companies into negotiating. But that means the people. Let's, let's see how's that going with tariffs? Let's assume that'll work, which I think is already a craziest assumption. Let's assume somehow that works. The people and companies that are going to be negotiating are probably going to be just the biggest players.

[Leo Laporte]

Not me. Not me.

[Paris Martineau]

Is not going to be negotiating.

[Leo Laporte]

No, not that little fixie site in the UK that is already gone.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's really scary when you see Dick Durbin, Lindsey Graham, Josh Hawley, Marsha Blackburn, Sheldon Whitehouse, Amy Klobuchar, Dick Blumenthal and Peter Welch all in the same room.

[Cory Doctorow]

That should scare you there because they think it's doing antitrust work. And what they don't understand is it's creating a compliance moat that will keep small market entrants out and only allow large firms to function. The other thing that's going on in the background, there's a New York Times crime reporter investigative journalist called David Enrich who had a book out this month called Murder the Truth. And it's about the, the group of people who overturned Roe who have spent the last 20 years trying to overturn Sullivan, which is the Supreme Court case.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank God that got protected. Holy cow.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah. Well, now it's in Danger.

[Leo Laporte]

Steve Wynn's lawsuit was turned back, though.

[Cory Doctorow]

That's right. But they have a whole bunch of these key cute ones to overturn marriage equality and so on. It's the literally the same people, it's the same judges they're targeting. Clarence Thomas hates Sullivan because Sullivan protects.

[Leo Laporte]

The right of the free press to say things if they're not malicious about people like Steve Wynn. And it protects malicious.

[Paris Martineau]

They're maliciously wrong. Like libel someone with malicious intent to harm and in this case, like so long as you are not one wrong and libeling someone, and you did, you could be wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

As long as it's not malicious wanton.

[Paris Martineau]

Disregard for the truth or a malicious intent, then you're okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Cory Doctorow]

And so you know, the move to overturn Sullivan combined with the end of a safe harbor for user speech means that a much larger group amount of user speech will be swept up in potential liability and then the platform will have vicarious liability for allowing the user speech. So you could imagine a future in which the New York Times publishes something and rather than suing the New York Times over it, they sue a platform for allowing users to talk about it and quote it. Yeah, right. Because Sullivan goes away. So this is the ability of rich people to decide who can criticize them and how has been a very big project for a long time and it's coming closer than ever. And the fact that Mark Zuckerberg is an Advocate for Section 230 reform should tell you everything you know about whether Section 230 is good for big tech.

[Leo Laporte]

Regulate us, please, he says, create a.

[Cory Doctorow]

Compliance moat so that our competitors can't do unto us what we did unto.

[Leo Laporte]

MySpace, also known as pulling up the ladder behind you. Corey, great to have you filling in for Jeff Jarvis, who's off this week, Paris Martineau. Great to have you back, Corey. I know I'm going to be respectful of your time. We're going to get out of here in a half an hour. Let me do one more ad here before we go. Our show today, brought to you by Melissa. I got off the phone the other day with Melissa. They have been, it's really interesting. They've been around 40 years since 1985 now doing address verification. But these days in business, it's more than address verification. It's really data science, it's data quality. And they have been acquiring companies with AI, with data scientists. I talked to one of their new data scientists and I was so impressed with where Melissa has gone and what they are doing. They could have rested on their Laurels. But no, they have stayed up to date. Whether it's manufacturing or supply chain management, the healthcare industry. Melissa's using AI to boost efficiency, personalize customer experiences and spark innovation. See, poor quality data is bad, right? It can result in expensive mistakes, embarrassing mistakes. And in areas like healthcare, it can kill people or give you a wrong diagnosis. One of the things Melissa's doing in their healthcare arm is validating patients prescriptions with the actual medicines put in the bottle with the patient's record to make sure they're getting the right medications. It's incredible. Recent study found that 4% of companies consider their data ready for AI models. Even the most advanced AI models however, cannot correct underlying data quality issues. So it really goes hand in hand. Melissa is the data quality expert. Imagine having a data expert that never sleeps. Melissa's intelligence system will verify identity to prevent fraud in gaming operations. As I said, ensure valid patient and medicine identification in healthcare systems. Securely update and verify constituent data across government databases. The know your business requirements enable verification and monitoring for financial institutions. KYC Melissa guides you through complex data management with ease. It makes advanced data quality accessible to everyone from small businesses to enterprises. With real time data validation, comprehensive enrichment, cross reference verification with gold standard reference data, Intelligent anomaly detection. It's no wonder Melissa is the trusted data quality expert worldwide. Your business needs Melissa. And good news, you don't have to worry about your data. Melissa securely encrypts all file transfers. They have an information security ecosystem built on the ISO 27001 framework. They adhere to GDPR policies, SOC2 compliant all the obviously they want to protect your data as much as you do. Contact Melissa's team to learn how they can elevate your business and improve your data quality. It's like having a data scientist working for you. Get started today with 1000 records cleaned for free. Melissa.comTwit we thank him so much for supporting intelligent machines. We thank you for supporting us by using that address. Melissa.comTwit Melissa. Thank you Melissa. You're going to get a home robot. Corey, help you around the house.

[Cory Doctorow]

I mean we had an incredibly disappointing string of roombas just file for bankruptcy. I think they did.

[Leo Laporte]

My robot's been struggling. You know what happened? Although I think they might have been premature because the reason their business has faltered is Chinese clones.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, I think it's also also because they were going to be acquired by Amazon but the deal fell through because I assume, I believe the Lina Khan's FTC denied.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, regulatory.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, right. Move to scrutinize it. Yeah, but this is where tariffs could.

[Leo Laporte]

Have helped them, right? A 200 tariff on Chinese robots. Chinese.

[Cory Doctorow]

I don't think they make roombas in America.

[Paris Martineau]

I don't think they make shooting.

[Leo Laporte]

They need to quickly spit up that Roomba factory.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Every Roomba you see carrying a knife, that's America made.

[Cory Doctorow]

That's right. That's right. The Roomba that they put a bomb on to kill the terrorists, you know.

[Paris Martineau]

That'S an American Roomba.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that a made up story or did that really happen?

[Cory Doctorow]

Well, they put a. They put a. A bomb on a bomb robot and used it to kill the guy who was shooting at cops in Dallas. Like.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I remember that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Cory Doctorow]

Paris, I have to ask in the. In the journalist being added to the wrong chat scandal of last week. Given all that, do you ever get autocompleted for Paris Marks and get his email? Because you could type P A R I S space M A R like you get pretty close.

[Paris Martineau]

But I should. I've thought about this as well. I can't believe we haven't gotten confused for one another in this way more.

[Leo Laporte]

But getting Paris Marx's messages is not as good as getting Pete Hegseth.

[Paris Martineau]

No, it's definitely. It's definitely not as good.

[Cory Doctorow]

Paris is more coherent and less drunk.

[Paris Martineau]

That's true. I mean I could. I could kind of do a little drunken role play. If anybody wants to add me to top secret government chats, I'll do that for you.

[Leo Laporte]

It's so funny. The government is now blaming Apple. We talked about this yesterday. Mac Break Weekly.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's all Apple's fault because the iPhone makes it might be. By the way it's not completely far fetched. The iPhone makes suggestions about adding contact information and apparently added Jeffrey Goldberg's contact information to a different JG and then that was than that JG only.

[Cory Doctorow]

The US government had spent millions of dollars building apps for classified conversation that are specifically designed to ensure that only people with clearance can be added to the chat and proper records are kept according to Sunshine laws. If only those were issued to everyone who worked in a national security role. And then where. If only there was a training session which they were told that they were legally obliged to use just that and anything else would be a potential criminal act. If only those things were the case.

[Paris Martineau]

Only that would be clearly.

[Leo Laporte]

It seems pretty obvious to me they like signal because of its automatic message destruction that they didn't want records of these conversations.

[Paris Martineau]

And also they probably just didn't want to Go to the secure room.

[Leo Laporte]

They didn't want to use the skiff in their house, by the way.

[Paris Martineau]

Listen, you gotta. How else are you gonna be sending bombs falling, prayer emoji, fist emoji while you're picking up Starbucks if you have to go to your house to say that he's on those computers?

[Leo Laporte]

Do you use something for secure messaging? Do you feel like you're. You need to do signal, Use signal.

[Cory Doctorow]

I use signal, but I, I am not. In a circumstance where you're not sharing war plans, someone else gets to decide whether or not it's a crime for me to add someone to my chat and so I don't have to worry about it. But also, I am, I am someone who really hates real time communication unless there's no way around it. So I like email sending me a message and interrupting me while I'm doing something else. I will never thank you for it unless it's interesting to do it. You know, if we're out, like on our way to dinner and we're in two cars and you're texting me to say like, oh, I found parking. That's one thing, right? But if it's like the middle of the day and you want to invite me to dinner on Friday and you text me, it's like, well, now I gotta, like, if I can't answer right now, which I probably can't, I have to remember to look at that. I am later. And so that's how I end up not going to dinner with you on Friday. And that's why you use the Paris.

[Paris Martineau]

Martin assistant of don't one get read receipts. And then do not click on the message until you're ready to respond. Then you'll know that they know you've seen it and you trick yourself. But then this also has the problem of sometimes you'll leave messages unread for months and your friends will be like, do you hate me?

[Leo Laporte]

I need to point out, Corey, that Paris is closer to your daughter's age than then you, hey, hey, don't blow.

[Paris Martineau]

Up my spot here.

[Leo Laporte]

And so, and this is, to me, this is very interesting. There is a cultural divide about what form of communication people prefer, and there's no consensus on this. Some people would rather be called mostly people my age. Right?

[Paris Martineau]

I could, I enjoy a call.

[Leo Laporte]

My daughter, who's 32, wants me to call her. She says, no, text me. Never text me.

[Paris Martineau]

That's the thing is I, I differ from a lot of my peers in the sense that, listen, I'll enjoy a text with certain. Like I have a group chat. I treat those texts as low effort. I'll check them when I need them. Sometimes I might engage in real time, but everything else really. I don't really like real time conversation in the middle of my.

[Leo Laporte]

So you're like Corey in I need.

[Paris Martineau]

To be in a specific headspace. Otherwise I'm just too easily distracted. I think it's because I have adhd.

[Leo Laporte]

See, I.

[Paris Martineau]

If I am engaged in a conversation with you, then I'll forget what I was doing before. So I can't.

[Leo Laporte]

Email does not work for me because of the volume of crap in my email. And while I have many rules and many. I've done everything I can to filter the sewage. It's easy for me to miss emails, whereas a text message is as much crap as I'm starting to get is not yet.

[Cory Doctorow]

Here's my email survival strategy. So anything that has the word unsubscribe in it goes into a folder called mailing list.

[Leo Laporte]

I have that.

[Cory Doctorow]

I only check that periodically. Anytime I reply to you, your email address goes into an address book.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep.

[Cory Doctorow]

And any email from someone in an address book goes into a folder called People.

[Leo Laporte]

I know great minds. Mine's called Important, but same thing if you're my contact list. Yep.

[Cory Doctorow]

So how is it that if when you look at your the folder of email just from people in your address book that you don't see all the things?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, no, that's true. It's just there's a lot of it. There's a lot of people in my address book. There's a lot of people want to email me. I'm also a public figure to some degree. And that means. Means I get a lot of email and I respond sometimes, which means they're now in my contact list. I don't know. Text messaging seems to me to be kind of a way of prioritizing stuff.

[Cory Doctorow]

So the last thing I want to do. There's actually a great bit in Bruce Sterling's book the Hacker Crackdown, which is a history of the first Secret Service raids on hackers and also the founding of eff. It's a great book.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I got to read that.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, it's an old book. It's from 1992, but it's an amazing book. And there's a bit in it about the history of the phone system. And they talk about how there was like this doctor who who wrote this letter to the editor saying like, this is insane. Any person off the street can barge into your living room without so much as any advance notice by making the phone ring. This is nuts. Who wants this? You know, I mean, fair, right? And I feel that. So I feel like email is like. It's. It's like sending me a letter, right? I get. I get the message and it shows up in my inbox and I can reply to it or delete it or, you know, whatever. And I have some templates as well that I use for replying to certain people if they have a kind of standard query. And. But it never. It only shows up when I look at. Never shows up when I'm. When I'm, you know, in the middle of doing something else. So I will periodically blip over to my email and hit F5, but I do not get notifications. When I get in. I get no notifications if I can help it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I like turning off all notifications. Yeah, I think that's good. But I can't turn off message. You don't turn off messaging notifications?

[Cory Doctorow]

Okay.

[Paris Martineau]

I have all my notifications on, but I have do not disturb mode on. 20. I've had do not disturb mode on for like seven years. So my phone does not buzz or make noises.

[Cory Doctorow]

It.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, I have it set to where if somebody calls me, you have some people, like, burst through phone calls definitely burst through or at least make my phone vibrate. But notification wise, they're there and I can just look at them as I need to, but they're not like my phone is. If I had every notification buzzing me, I would go insane. That's like hundreds of buzzes a day.

[Cory Doctorow]

It's like. Like hooking our random number generator up to a taser and then like strapping it to your abdomen. And. And just like every, you know, several.

[Paris Martineau]

Times a day.

[Leo Laporte]

You'Re watching the intelligent machines. Corey. Dr. O. Paris Martineau. So glad to have both of you back. Jeff will be back next week. I'll save some of these stories. I think Jeff actually was putting stories into the rundown.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, he was. He thought he was going to be here. Clearly. Do we. Do you want to take bets? Do you think he sank or floated in Salem?

[Leo Laporte]

I think he weighs the same as a feather.

[Cory Doctorow]

Weighs the same as a duck.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

A man from the New York Times. I'm sure Jeff put this in. A man employed an AI avatar in his legal appeal. A video Persona. It looked pretty. He's pretty handsome. But it was a fictitious person. The first Judicial Department Supreme Court of the State of New York was not amused.

[Paris Martineau]

Jerome.

[Cory Doctorow]

Shocking. Who could have anticipated such a thing?

[Leo Laporte]

The court had allowed Mr. DeWalt, who's not a lawyer, was representing himself, to accompany his argument with a prerecorded video presentation. As the video, oh, it turns out DeWalt is 74 years old. Okay, look at the guy in the video presentation, right? Don't think he's 74 years old. Don't think he's 74 years old.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm sure he had his normal voice, too, right?

[Leo Laporte]

As the video began to play, it showed a man, seemingly younger than Mr. Dewald, wearing a blue collared shirt and a beige sweater, standing in front of what appeared to be a blue virtual background. Now, credit to the judges. A few seconds into the video, one of the judges, confused by the image on the screen, asked, Mr. DeWalt, is that your lawyer? I generated that. Mr. DeWalt responded, that is not a real person. It would be nice to know that when you made your application. She said, I don't appreciate being misled before yelling for somebody to turn off the video. So, okay, just a hint, maybe don't do that.

[Cory Doctorow]

Right. I. I don't want your chat bot nonsense in my court. I would like to hear salient and cogent things in my court. And, you know, like, obviously, pro se is a. Is a bad idea. Like, anyway, generally a bad idea. Not always, but generally. And. And I appreciate that there are people who, you know, trying to handle their own, you know, appeals while they're in prison or whatever, who find themselves pro se because they.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a little different.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, it is what they. It is what it is. But, yeah, like, the thing about doing, about being pro se is that you can come up with ideas that anyone who knows even a little about how courts work would say, just don't do that. That won't work the way you think it will. You know, my.

[Leo Laporte]

My.

[Cory Doctorow]

My boss and pal at eff, Cindy Cohen, who runs the organization, has spent her whole life talking with hackers who've got all kinds of ideas to do things in relation to the law that she just says, like, that won't pass the giggle test. Like, you know, as soon as you try that in front of a judge, they will say, no, you are trying to subvert the spirit of the law. No. Right. And. And, like, there is a lot of. There's a lot of this. Like, oh, I found one weird trick. And, you know, if you've ever encountered the sovereign movement, this is their whole thing. It's like, I have figured out I'm.

[Paris Martineau]

Obsessed with the sovereign.

[Cory Doctorow]

Oh, my God, it's my fate.

[Leo Laporte]

I love Those videos, there are lots of videos of people getting pulled over.

[Paris Martineau]

Saying, and they're like, I'm not driving, I'm traveling.

[Cory Doctorow]

Right? And you're not a sheriff, so you can't arrest me. And even if you are with the sheriff's department, you're not the right kind of sheriff.

[Paris Martineau]

That flag has yellow trim, which means we're in a naval court right now. And none of this applies. I'm a boat or I'm not.

[Leo Laporte]

Whatever works best. Yeah, it is amazing and it continues to happen, but it just shows people are sometimes a little gullible. Shopify, one of our fine sponsors, love them a lot. Their CEO sent out a memo saying, if you need to add headcount. This is from Toby Lutke. If you need to add headcount before you can hire somebody in your department, you have to prove to me before asking for more Headcounty wrote and resources teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI. What would this area look like if autonomous AI agents were already part of the team? He says.

[Paris Martineau]

He also said in this letter that now Shopify employees, it's going to be baked into all performance reviews at Shopify. Not only self assessment, but peer assessments. And you're like a manager assessing employees. The question how often does this person use AI? And I assume the answer is, if you're not saying in that I use AI 5 out of 5 all the time, that your job could be at risk. Which is incredibly wild to me as a business strategy.

[Cory Doctorow]

I mean, any, any metric becomes a target. It is not hard to use AI 10 times a day. If all you want to do is burn Shopify's store of OpenAI tokens or whatever, you can just ask it to give you directions for removing a grilled cheese sandwich from a VCR in the style of the King James Bible ten times a day. And you are now the Six Sigma AI user in Shopify.

[Leo Laporte]

Shopify is known for productivity and net pronouncements. In early 2023, according to the Wall Wall Street Journal, and actually, I kind of agree with this one. Shopify's COO, they're fully remote, 8,100 fully remote employees. So I praise them for that. Shopify's COO directed employees to quit holding, quote, an absurd amount of meetings. The company then deleted 12,000 events from its workers calendars, freeing up 95,000 hours for more focused tats. You know, I'm not against that. I'm not against that. Delete the meetings.

[Cory Doctorow]

I'm not against fewer meetings. Too. I think that's great.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, yeah, that's all middle management. I was about to say, like how it sounds like to me, from what you just described, that management, like, made a couple broad decisions and suddenly was like 12 or 20,000 meetings gone. And I don't know that I trust a couple people to make the right choices, possibly go wrong.

[Cory Doctorow]

Other people's meetings, I mean, another important law here is Chesterton's fence, which is that you shouldn't remove a measure until you can explain why it's there. And so while there's doubtless meetings that shouldn't exist, there are meetings that need to exist. And if all you do is randomly remove meetings, you are not going to solve that problem.

[Leo Laporte]

There's a similarity to the recent layoffs at many of the federal institutions. You know, I like Chesterton's Law. Do you have a compendium? I think, Corey, you need to write a compendium of laws, of useful laws. Useful laws?

[Cory Doctorow]

No, just two stone tablets. Just two stone tablets, Right. There's Stein's Law, which is that anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. I really like that one.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good one.

[Cory Doctorow]

So I was going to say, you know, like, if I have a law about AI, it's that irrespective of whether AI can do your job, an AI salesman can probably convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI salesman that can't do your job. Yeah, that's not.

[Leo Laporte]

You've really pinpointed the problem that the incentives, they're perverse out there for this. Whether AI is valuable or not, independently of that, there are definitely disincentives.

[Paris Martineau]

Speaking of your boss, Leo, are you using your B right now?

[Leo Laporte]

I'm wearing it right now.

[Cory Doctorow]

Kids.

[Leo Laporte]

Of course, I never go anywhere without.

[Paris Martineau]

This little guy that's recording his whole life and everyone around him 24,7 in flagrant violation of California wiretapping laws. No, because it then gives him very fun and interesting summaries of his day.

[Leo Laporte]

I guess it basically, as it turns out, it does two things that are useful. It writes my daily journal. And. And it's pretty, you know, the idea.

[Paris Martineau]

Of writing your own journal and self reflecting on the day.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, I don't want to self reflect. I just want to read your journal for you too. Yes, exactly. I don't need to read it or write it.

[Cory Doctorow]

The Douglas Adams thing with the automated monk that watches all the shows that you've taped with your VCR you don't have time to watch.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I need that. Yeah. The other thing it does, it automatically makes a to do list that I can approve or reject. But that's very useful because I. I've always wanted something that would remind me that I agreed to do something I, you know, I'm often agreeing to things and forgetting about it. So that's useful.

[Cory Doctorow]

I mean, you need a system to do that. That's. If that system works for you, that's fine.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it does.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah. I mean, lifeloggers have been around for a long time. I remembered Gordon 2005, 6, when I was at USC, Justin hall running around with Microsoft Life lifeloggers hanging around his neck. He eventually. It's funny, after years of being like the world's most confessional blogger with no secrets and wearing a lifelogger, he eventually became someone who's quite interested in his own privacy.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting.

[Cory Doctorow]

Good for him.

[Leo Laporte]

I feel that the ship has sailed for me, Corey. I don't think everything is known and I might as well just live with it, don't you think?

[Cory Doctorow]

Well, look, privacy is not no one knows stuff about you. It's that you choose what people know about you.

[Leo Laporte]

And in my case, everything.

[Cory Doctorow]

Sure, if you make that choice, that's fine.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

I'd really like to recommend the Wikipedia page for lifelogger. Specifically the image at the top of it. Every single photo. It shows five photos of men wearing lifeloggers, and all of them are more ridiculous than you could possibly imagine.

[Cory Doctorow]

Oh, those are good. Oh, one Steve man.

[Leo Laporte]

There's one that looks Steve Man. It was the. Yeah, Steve man was the legendary MIT hacker. There he is.

[Cory Doctorow]

Steve Man. I think there might all be Steve.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, they are all.

[Paris Martineau]

You're right, Steve man situation.

[Leo Laporte]

They're all Steve Man. He walked around. He would walk around the MIT campus with that stuff on.

[Paris Martineau]

I really like the fashion plate, sunglasses, mime look kind of the one on the right.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but it's. We've come a long way. See how it's gotten better. That one on the far left. By the way, the one on the.

[Paris Martineau]

Left is the one that I. That led me to suggest we bring this up because it's quite this.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no, I was talking about this one, which was a Google device. Remember, they put it out and then they realized nobody. It would take pictures. Nobody wanted pictures taken from that angle.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, the bar on my corner when I lived in San Francisco, the Elbow Room. Someone famously, I think, got punched for wearing a. Oh, yeah, the Elbow Room.

[Leo Laporte]

The Google Glass. Yeah, this all predates Google Glass. I don't know what he's wearing in the. In the late 1990s picture in the striped shirt. The one you're talking about Paris. I Right.

[Paris Martineau]

No, what is the one in the 1980s?

[Cory Doctorow]

I think that first one. I think that maybe.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it's all Steve, man. I do.

[Paris Martineau]

What is he wearing? I like the combo helmet, antenna, eye thing. And what was going on on top of his head.

[Leo Laporte]

So this, remember this is 1980. So he has to have a. This is his viewer. It's a little TV screen. He couldn't make him that small in the back of the day. He's got a camera. The antennas are a little aggressive. He looks like he's got a duck to go in.

[Cory Doctorow]

No, on his head. That's the light. I think that's a light on his head.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, is that a light? Where's the camera? Maybe that's the camera and the camera.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah. So it reminds me of this. I just put it in the chat. Hugo Gernsbach, the founder of Astounding Stories and the person for whom the Hugo Award is named, invented this thing called the Isolator to help him focus.

[Leo Laporte]

Zoom.

[Paris Martineau]

Catio.

[Leo Laporte]

Did he. Did he wear it? He did. He wore it. The isolator helmet and does not exist. Wait a minute, hang on.

[Cory Doctorow]

What happened?

[Paris Martineau]

Post the right one in there.

[Cory Doctorow]

Might have gotten the wrong one.

[Leo Laporte]

The Isolator helmet. Zero got in there somehow.

[Cory Doctorow]

Sorry. Oh, yeah, I hit a zero on my way.

[Leo Laporte]

There we go.

[Paris Martineau]

I love this. Oh, this is great.

[Leo Laporte]

Did he write with this thing on? Yeah, yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

That's what I need when I'm forced to write copy in the office.

[Leo Laporte]

That reminds me a lot of that Kickstarter. I think I gave it away.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, the face huggers Kickstarter. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So you could sleep in airports and things.

[Cory Doctorow]

That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

I had that. I wore it even sometimes.

[Paris Martineau]

What is this?

[Leo Laporte]

It was a pellet filled. It looked exactly like this. A pellet filled hat that you would wear. It had two holes on the left and right for your arms. And it had a small hole around your nose so you could breathe. But the rest of you was covered in felt gray. Felt padded with pellets and gosh, I wish I didn't give it away. You know what I reason I gave it away, I think is because it started leaking and it was leaving little pellets leaking.

[Paris Martineau]

Mystery pellets.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I decided maybe.

[Paris Martineau]

Did they let you bring this into an airport?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Well, the idea is you could sleep, you know, because your arms came out. So you could sleep like this, nobody would bother you. Especially because you look like the elephant man.

[Cory Doctorow]

On Amazon. They. They are still for sale on Amazon. The dream of the 90s is live on in Portland.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's made in the usa, I gotta point out, called the ostrich pillow. Ostrich pillow. Wow. That's on Amazon.

[Cory Doctorow]

Discord's on top of it.

[Leo Laporte]

Not on mind. It's not.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, oh.

[Leo Laporte]

Saying discord's on top of my screen.

[Paris Martineau]

Wow, these are some incredible photos.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, the go neck pillow. Oh, they got. You know what? They got a little. They realized how dorky it looked.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, but they have the ostrich pillow too. The. With that. The thing that you stick your head in.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they still have that. Wow.

[Paris Martineau]

It looks like a. I might have.

[Leo Laporte]

To buy another one.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, yeah, they're down underwear.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. It's kind of like wearing. It's kind of like wearing your tighty whities on your head. Imagine a pair of tighty whities, but filled with pellets.

[Paris Martineau]

Imagine sitting down for a transatlantic flight.

[Leo Laporte]

And your seatmate pulls out that I've seen people do. Weird.

[Paris Martineau]

Pull the exit door.

[Leo Laporte]

What about Vision Pro? That's pretty close. Right?

[Cory Doctorow]

There's the product shot there. I just put it in the chat.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. All right.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, my gosh.

[Leo Laporte]

I have to do a little rigmarole to get it from. From the chat into a different machine. But let me, let me.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, the power napping photo is great.

[Cory Doctorow]

Oh, it's pretty good.

[Paris Martineau]

That looks a little suggestive.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the wrong one. All right.

[Paris Martineau]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

There we go. Corey, you're fun. It's great to have you. Really? Oh, yeah. That's it. That's the. That's the real deal. That's. That's. I had that exact one. He's not using it fully to its. Like I said, I am not an animal. The one with the power napping is really more my speed. Where you put your hand in the holes.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, yeah. Stick your fingers in your ears. You can pick your nose while you're sleeping.

[Paris Martineau]

You can just imagine a flight attendant's shaky hand as they decide and they're like, should I tap to wake this man up for the meal service? No, I should leave it.

[Cory Doctorow]

Oh, no. The game is once you take off, you sneak into a business class seat and then you put that on your.

[Leo Laporte]

Head and they don't know.

[Cory Doctorow]

And that you've got a business class seat.

[Leo Laporte]

They don't know. It's not.

[Paris Martineau]

They're like, we can't. We can't get this man to move.

[Leo Laporte]

It could be Hugo Gerstman, we don't know.

[Cory Doctorow]

And if they ask you to move, you tell them you've created an easement.

[Leo Laporte]

I am a sovereign citizen. And your flag is wrong. You wrote an article on pluralistic.net about AI therapy. This article from NPR says that it's all the rage. And I guess if you were nervous about talking to a real person, I mean, this goes back to Eliza. You might think that an AI therapist is of some use.

[Cory Doctorow]

So this was not about the merits of AI therapy. This is about the risks of letting a chap on owned by companies that habitually lie about how they handle data, have the data that you can get from nowhere else.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, good point. Much like my bee, actually, the thing I'm wearing.

[Cory Doctorow]

Does your bee loop through the cloud? By the way, I'm very proud of that collage. You just scroll past it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, did I miss it? Let's see. There we go.

[Paris Martineau]

That's a really good one. I love these.

[Leo Laporte]

And the title is anyone who uses or trusts an AI therapist needs their head examined.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, just these companies have been so consistently untruthful about their data handling, and this data is, it's is extremely compromising. And I just think you, you have no basis for believing them. Like, you know, fool me once, we don't get fooled again. As George Bush said.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, Is that what he said? I couldn't quite parse it. We're going to take a little break. Normally at this point we do picks of the week. Corey, if you want to dial out, you can. You've very patient with us. I thank you.

[Cory Doctorow]

I'm going to ditch before my back starts spasming, but it was great to see you folks.

[Leo Laporte]

Enjoy the rest of the show. Really appreciate it. Corey, you're the best. Cory Doctorow, thebezel.org for his books. Definitely got to read the whole Marty Hench saga. They're all good.

[Cory Doctorow]

And martinhensch.com as well. You can go to martinhensch.com they're all just redirects to my personal site.

[Leo Laporte]

Awesome. And pluralistic.net for his blog. And of course, he's on Macedon Pluralistic. Thank you, Corey.

[Cory Doctorow]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Take care. So great to see you. We love Corey.

[Paris Martineau]

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[Cory Doctorow]

Darwin would approve.

[Paris Martineau]

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[Cory Doctorow]

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[Paris Martineau]

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[Cory Doctorow]

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[Paris Martineau]

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[Leo Laporte]

Have you been on with him before? I don't think you have, Paris.

[Paris Martineau]

No. I'm obsessed with his glasses. I should have asked him more about them. I should have asked him about them. They were just lovely.

[Leo Laporte]

Big curry. Are you still there? No, he's frozen solid, so I think he hung up.

[Paris Martineau]

You know, I think that's a good place for him to be. It's not horizontal than frozen solid.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Poor guy. He's been in a lot of pain. He's had both hips replaced now. Yeah, his back hurts, but he keeps writing, he keeps creating. He keeps fighting the good fight. And it's one of the reasons I deeply respect the man. And his intelligence is second to none.

[Paris Martineau]

Absolutely. I mean, he was a fantastic guest.

[Leo Laporte]

But I still have sand in my shoes. I'm just gonna tell you that right now.

[Paris Martineau]

I was about to say you were on your best behavior there, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

You were like, I am not gonna.

[Paris Martineau]

You're like, I don't. I don't know that I think this is going to be super transformative or anything, but I'm just thinking we should hear him out. I was like, excuse me, Leo, I.

[Leo Laporte]

Am not going to argue with Cory Doctorow. Excuse me. I do not want to be eviscerated. Can you imagine?

[Cory Doctorow]

He would just.

[Paris Martineau]

I know. You even got just a couple little things in there that you believe in. He just correctly put you in your place.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I don't know if he completely demolished my arguments. I don't think it's.

[Paris Martineau]

You're saying the YouTube headline of this is not gonna be Doctor of Smashes Leo's Weak Liberal argument to pieces.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe that's the title of the show. Okay, maybe.

[Paris Martineau]

Maybe that. Maybe that'll get the clicks.

[Leo Laporte]

Jeff will be back next week. Paris Martineau is back. We will get your picks of the week in a moment. You're watching intelligent machines, episode 814. A reminder incidentally, that there are a couple of things coming up. Sunday is the 20th anniversary of this network. We did our first twitch show on April 13th. April 14th, I think it was 2005. On April 13th this Sunday we're going to celebrate. Patrick Norton, who was on that first show, will be joining us along with Alan Malvantano and Sam Abulsamet. But the really important part of the celebration is you. Because what, you know, we kind of had a brought the old hosts back for episode 1000. But I really wanted to acknowledge the fact that Twit would not exist without you guys, without our fabulous audience. So I encouraged everybody and it's not too late to send in a video. Talk about how you first found Twit. Your earliest memories of Twit. Anything you want to share? We've had people in all walks of life from all over the world respond and we are going to have some fun videos. I have a poem I shall read. There's been a lot of great response if you want to.

[Paris Martineau]

A poem written by you?

[Leo Laporte]

No, not by AI, nor me. By an actual human listener.

[Paris Martineau]

And that's art, baby. Sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

That's art, baby. What's the best way, Benito, at this point should I have them? We asked that you post on social media with the tag Twit. But I think it's at this point for us to harvest all that by Sunday is probably a little late. Why don't you email it to leoleoville.com or InfoIt TV. If you've got something, record it on your phone. It's fine. Keep it short. We're gonna have a lot of fun with our fans, with our friends, our cohort. It's really been great working with you. The other thing I wanted to announce, Lisa has told me that we are bringing back the one year subscription to Club Twitch and this is really good news. Now Club Twit is the way we, you know, you see a lot of shows, a lot of projects do this. We are ad supported, but the ads don't cover our entire costs. Not nearly. We need some help and we started doing this a couple of years ago and it's been great. Normally we charge seven bucks a month. You get ad free versions of the shows because you're paying for it. I hate it when you pay for something and still get ads. So no ads, not even this plug. You'll get access to the Club Twit Discord, which is a wonderful place to hang out and be. And some really smart people, interesting people. Many of our hosts hang out in there. And of course a lot of the great creativity happens not just during the shows. A lot of it's during the shows. But the club has, you know, sections for every possible geek interest. So it's really fun to hang out in there. You can also watch special events. In fact, Joe Esposito is always creating fun little posters for us. Here I am as Indiana Jones, Michael Jackson and I don't know, Simone Biles. I don't know who is in the middle there, but join the Club Twit TV Club Twit. You'll also get special events. We've decided to do all of the streaming conferences and keynotes that we've done all this time. You know, Apple's starting to get very sticky about it. We've had takedowns on YouTube and now on Twitch. So we decided to start moving those into the club. Do them on Discord. Discord only. So you won't see those in public. You will see those on Discord. We figure that's, you know, protecting Apple's intellectual property but still letting us do the journalistic job we need to do. First one will be June 9th. I think Micah and I will cover Apple's keynote at wwdc. But we will also, because of this new format, be able to stick around and do the State of the Union address as well. So all day June 9th for Micah and Leo talking about what Apple has announced. There are keynotes coming up. Microsoft Build other events. We will see those in the Discord. We also do our coffee Geek is coming up. Mark Prince, he's bringing Liz Happy Beans with him. And we'll do another coffee episode. We've got Stacy's book club, Micah's crafting corner, photography time with Chris Margaret. All of those are club only events. We try to make it worth your while. And it's only seven bucks a month. And as I said, when you go there now, Twit TV Club Twit, you'll also see the opportunity to sign up for a full year. Still seven bucks a month, but it's $84 in one throw. And we appreciate your support. It makes a big difference to us by month or by year, whichever you prefer. And if you're already, I should mention this for those of you watching live, if you're already a member, you can just go to the subscription page and turn on the yearly for the next renewal period and that'll renew at a year rate. Okay? So if you're already in the club and you want to go to year, a lot of people have said, well, I want the yearly subscription. You can do that by going to the subscription page. All right. Actually that part we should not edit out because I want everybody to know about that.

[Cory Doctorow]

Yeah, the club is going to hear that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, the club needs to hear it. Anybody in the club. I guess if in the club you'll hear it, right? Yeah. So leave that, cut that part out and stick it in. Missions to Mars, driverless cars, AI chatbots.

[Cory Doctorow]

Feels like we're already living in the future.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, Robinhood is built for the future of trading.

[Cory Doctorow]

Robinhood's intuitive design makes trading seamless.

[Leo Laporte]

Spot opportunities and take control of your trades with tools like screeners, simulated returns and strategy builder on Robinhood traders have access to hundreds of popular stocks and ETFs 24 hours a day, five days.

[Paris Martineau]

A week so you can keep up.

[Leo Laporte]

With today's fast paced markets. You can now even trade stocks and crypto all in one place with the new desktop platform Robinhood Legend. The future of trading is fast, powerful.

[Cory Doctorow]

And precise experience it now on Robinhood Investing is risky. Robinhood Financial LLC Member SIPC is a registered broker dealer. Trading during extended hours involves additional risks. Cryptocurrency services are offered through an account.

[Leo Laporte]

With Robinhood Crypto LLC and MLS.ID 1702840 Robinhood Crypto is licensed to engage in virtual currency business activity by the New York State Department of Financial Services.

[Cory Doctorow]

Darwin would approve.

[Paris Martineau]

T Mobile's network has adapted to so.

[Cory Doctorow]

Many locales because T Mobile helps keep.

[Paris Martineau]

You connected from the heart of Portland to right where you are on America's largest 5G network.

[Cory Doctorow]

Switch now keep your phone and T.

[Paris Martineau]

Mobile will pay it off up to $800 per line via prepaid card. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com KeepAndSwitch up to four lines via virtual prepaid card. Allow 15 days qualifying unlock device credit service report in 90 plus days device knowledgeable carrier and timely redemption required card is no cash access and expires in six months.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, time for our picks of the week and usually I let Jeff Start. But I'm gonna. I'm gonna. I have one this week. Paris.

[Paris Martineau]

Ooh, a Leo pick.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm gonna throw in a couple. And actually we even have, I believe, a pick from Jeff because he really did think we do.

[Paris Martineau]

Because Jeff be here.

[Leo Laporte]

So I'll do his.

[Paris Martineau]

Jeff fills in his picks.

[Leo Laporte]

So you remember the last time Jeff wasn't here, I told you about a new puzzle called Bracket City, right?

[Paris Martineau]

Yes, and I love it. I love Bracket City. I've been playing it regularly. It's so much fun.

[Leo Laporte]

It's kind of like a crossword puzzle that you fill in. I figured this is gonna get purchased. The New York Times is gonna add it to their puzzle page. Well, the Atlantic.

[Paris Martineau]

I thought you were gonna be Right.

[Leo Laporte]

But Atlantic got there first. Which actually I'm thrilled about. The Atlantic has some very good crosswords. And now if you go to Bracket City, you will be taken to. Oh, you see, I'm the chief of police today. I didn't do as well as I sometimes do. But this is. So let's play. Let's see. I think I did Yesterday's already puppet master. Yesterday.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, you became death, destroyer of worlds.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. That's perfect. So let's just show you what it looks like. We won't do the whole thing. But you see, the highlighted ones are actually. You just solve them. So blank your nose. That's easy. Just pick it and then. Oh.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, it's blow.

[Leo Laporte]

It's blow. Oh, see? So I got that one wrong. That's gonna cost me points. Are you famous?

[Paris Martineau]

Hard mode.

[Leo Laporte]

Of course. Famous last. The masculine form of Felicity. Or a famous cat. Felix. Okay, you get the idea. So the yellow ones get filled in and then eventually it. It gives you this date in history, which is really fun. Rocks when added to soda will not. Huh? Rocks when added to soda will not.

[Cory Doctorow]

Cause you pop. Pop.

[Leo Laporte]

Pop rocks.

[Paris Martineau]

Pop rocks.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah. And then domain for retail cop. It's the mall. Right?

[Paris Martineau]

A mall cop.

[Leo Laporte]

Low rise kind of mall. You. You know, I'm just going to do this with you guys from now on. Striped canes. Candy canes. You guys are. Good night. You are finally free to demand candy from strangers and Halloween blood type. Huh?

[Cory Doctorow]

Oh, right.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, okay. I don't know. There's a couple. There's not that. Yeah, well, let's look at what's around it.

[Leo Laporte]

So black to blank. Fish, which is catfish. To lure someone in using a something Internet Persona.

[Paris Martineau]

Fake. Fake Halloween.

[Leo Laporte]

Fake blood. Fake blood. Now we know it's cat fish. And there you go. We did the whole thing. Felix V abdicates, ending the reign of the final antipope with a link to the Wikipedia. Anyway, I love Bracket City. Now part of the Atlantic. It is free still.

[Cory Doctorow]

Do we know what the purchase cost was?

[Leo Laporte]

No, but you know, it was.

[Paris Martineau]

We also don't know entirely that it was purchased. I noticed, I think in the announcement donated it. No, I don't think they donated it. It could be like a licensing deal, like it said. The. If you look at the Atlantic's announcement article for. It didn't say. We've not. We've acquired Bracket City. It says Bracket City is now available to play on here and the guy who created it will now be reporting to Atlantic games editor Blankety Blank. So I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they're going to work together. I don't know.

[Paris Martineau]

It was interesting. I was like, did they offer this guy a job? Because I feel like if.

[Leo Laporte]

No, he's a bar. He owns a bar. This trivia contests.

[Paris Martineau]

I know. I just thought it was interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm going to say he got a multimillion dollar payday because you know where the money for the Atlantic comes from. Steve Jobs. Widow Lorraine Powell Jobs and the Emerson Collection.

[Paris Martineau]

She's been turning that tap off or at least closing it a little bit. They've been trying to get it to generate profit at a. You know.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, this is how you do it. That's how the Times did it. Right.

[Cory Doctorow]

It could also be a licensing deal.

[Paris Martineau]

Like a limited license. I mean, I think it could be a licensing deal. I think there's 10 years that are not exclusively. It was bought because typically that's announced as we've acquired this.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. Well, in that case, I Hope he gets 5% of everything I pay for Bracket City, which is nothing. But you gotta figure they think this will be good for subscriptions, right?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. It's been a huge boon for the Times in the sense that people subscribe the Times for games.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, there's two things. Even if I didn't want to support what Jeff Jarvis calls the Broken Times, and I did cancel my subscription to the Washington Post. But even if I didn't want to support the news portion, I love the recipes. I love the crosswords. I love the connections. I think I have to continue.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, there's a lot of it. I love. Yeah. I love cooking. I love games.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

I love the news. New York Times subscribe.

[Leo Laporte]

It's part of my job. Right. I gotta read the news.

[Paris Martineau]

You gotta read the news.

[Leo Laporte]

Jeff's pick from the Pew Research Center Artificial Intelligence in Daily Life. Pew does these great surveys of people, and they talked to a lot of people. I guess I don't. I find the numbers.

[Paris Martineau]

I love this stat, which is that the percentage of AI experts that think people in the US interact with artificial intelligence almost constantly is 79% of AI experts think that. Meanwhile, only 27% of US adults actually do interact with AI almost constantly. Or 7.

[Leo Laporte]

Everybody uses our product all the time.

[Paris Martineau]

Everybody's using it.

[Leo Laporte]

So AI experts think we're using their stuff more often. A third of US Adults say that, though.

[Paris Martineau]

And they got to say that.

[Cory Doctorow]

That many people are using. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

AI experts, when asked what percentage of people who percent who say they blank ever use an artificial intelligence chatbot? I don't understand AI.

[Cory Doctorow]

So have or have not.

[Paris Martineau]

They were like, they were. They asked AI experts like, what percentage of people have used an AI chatbot? What percentage haven't? And the experts say 98% have. And meanwhile, actually, 33% of U.S. adults have.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, they really? Miss, miss, miss.

[Paris Martineau]

That's really funny.

[Leo Laporte]

Among chatbot users, U.S. adults are far less likely than AI experts to say chatbots are extremely or very helpful. AI experts said 61% would say that. Only 33% say. And 21% say not at all or not too helpful.

[Cory Doctorow]

Fascinating. So this is gap, and these gaps were the gap between the hype and the reality, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

And the AI experts surveyed are those who were authors or presenters at an AI related conference in 2023 or 2024 and live in the US which is kind of an interesting sample to take it from. Is all of these people heavily involved?

[Leo Laporte]

These are the true believers.

[Paris Martineau]

Say, yeah, it's everything. Well, this is your sand guy, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, maybe you and Corey have worn me down just a little bit.

[Paris Martineau]

Hey, we're getting. You know, this is. I can't believe Jeff's not here for this.

[Leo Laporte]

I admit Cory's absolutely right. I mean, he's always been right when he says, you know, but these big companies are not there to change the world. They're there to make as much money as possible. And that's not a surprise, is it?

[Paris Martineau]

No. OpenAI is just changing from a nonprofit to a for profit structure because it just really cares about the right thing to do. The right thing. Good. The right thing to do.

[Leo Laporte]

Paris, your picks of the week.

[Paris Martineau]

I got two picks. One is a quick shout out. I finished Twin Peaks on Sunday not knowing that this week was the 35th anniversary of Twin Peaks, which I just feel like is kind of fortuitous the.

[Leo Laporte]

Show before, born, before you were born is now. You've caught up. Congratulations.

[Paris Martineau]

Now I've caught up. I'm reeling.

[Leo Laporte]

Did it end well?

[Paris Martineau]

That's hard to describe. I mean, I found the ending very well. I was going to say satisfying, but it's not the right word. At first I was unsatisfied and confused in the way that I often am whenever I finish a David lynch film. Then we're now, what, three days out from it. I think the ending was a masterpiece. And really much like the ending of the original run of the first, the show's first two seasons really subverted my expectations for where this show was going and how it was going to handle it in a very interesting, novel and challenging and ultimately like, entertaining way. So I don't know, I'd really recommend it. If anybody out there hasn't watched Twin Peaks start from the beginning, it's a delight. The new season is crazy. I don't know how. I mean, the thing that was so mind blowing to me about watching the 90s Twin Peaks, I was like, how the heck was this on television in the 90s? And it had to blow everyone's minds. And it of course did.

[Leo Laporte]

It did.

[Paris Martineau]

And I thought, well, there's no way you can do that again in 2017.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait a minute, there's a new Twin Peaks?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. So after 25 years in 2017. Oh, it came back and yeah, yeah, yeah, they did like a seat. They did 18 parts of it and it was just as experimental and groundbreaking as the 90s one, I'd say, honestly.

[Cory Doctorow]

David lynch, you know.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, still David lynch, but would recommend it. The other thing I have to recommend is just one of the reasons I went to Amsterdam was there was this artist I stumbled upon when I was there for the first time, like eight or nine years ago whose work I love. He's just this artist named Eddie Vera. Camp doesn't sell any of his stuff online. So I just wanted to shout it out. If anybody who's listening ever goes to Amsterdam and like, makes art, go visit.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, these are wood blocks. Yeah. Are they wood blocks?

[Paris Martineau]

He does woodblock. He does woodblock prints, he does paintings, he does drawings. A lot of the, like, he. The biggest volume of work of course he makes are wood blocks because it's easy to make multiple of them.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you pick up an Eddie Vera Camp? Did you pick one up?

[Paris Martineau]

I picked up two actual paintings of his and he happened to be in the back. So as I was checking out, he came up and explained to me one of the paintings was a painting of a cafe. And he was like, oh, here's. Here's where the cafe is. You should go visit it. Here's like, what led me to paint this. So it was delightful.

[Leo Laporte]

Forget bitcoin. Buy art.

[Paris Martineau]

Buy art, guys. It's fun, you know, it's fun to meet an artist and buy and buy some paintings to have in your home.

[Leo Laporte]

So you actually, you saw this on his Instagram and you said, I'm a going there.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, so I had followed him on Instagram because nine or so years ago, I was in Amsterdam, randomly stumbled upon his studio and was. Fell in love with his work and bought two pieces.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, so you've been there before.

[Paris Martineau]

The one that's actually above my mantle, you can't really see it right now, is his. But I had wanted more of it. But he's just a, you know, just a man who lives in Amsterdam and makes art, doesn't sell any of it online. So I was like, if I want more, I should go.

[Leo Laporte]

Gotta go.

[Paris Martineau]

I realized I was on the skeeball team. I was like, I gotta make a trip.

[Leo Laporte]

I. I think. I think you're. You've got excellent tastes. These are great. I love them. I love Woodbine.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, it's got really interesting, like. And the thing is, like, his art that he does that isn't Woodblock still kind of. It looks Woodblock esque.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, so some of these are watercolors, I see. Yes.

[Paris Martineau]

Stencil print passed by up there was the one that I have my mantle, which is kind of cool.

[Leo Laporte]

What? Which one, people?

[Paris Martineau]

Number five.

[Leo Laporte]

You have that over your mantle?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

That's gorgeous.

[Paris Martineau]

It's a good one.

[Leo Laporte]

Now there are multiple copies, right? You don't have the one.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, and I think there's like, there's a number in the corner. I think there's like 30 or something.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay. So they're still pretty restricted.

[Paris Martineau]

He does like.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, is he older guy? Older fellow?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, he's definitely older. I don't know what his age is. I mean, probably like 60s or 70s. But I wanted to make sure that I was able to go and visit him to see his work, just because I really love it and I love supporting an artist like that.

[Leo Laporte]

As always. You have.

[Paris Martineau]

And I also just. Amsterdam is super fun.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, It's a wonderful city.

[Paris Martineau]

I love the museums there. The Stedelijk is great too.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you go to the Rijksmuseum? Of course you did. And saw the Rembrandts.

[Paris Martineau]

I've been there before. I Went to go see the Van Gogh Museum again.

[Leo Laporte]

Love the Van Gogh Museum.

[Paris Martineau]

Just because those are two of my favorite museums.

[Leo Laporte]

It's really wild to see Van Gogh's brushstrokes up close. You can almost feel like they're still wet. They're so strong. And you can get right up and look at them. You don't see that in a two dimensional picture. It's amazing.

[Paris Martineau]

It's really incredible. And also the thing I took away from the museum this time, which I don't know how I'm sure I took this away last time I was there, but it left my mind is just. They go really in depth into his mental health struggles and how. I mean, at one point he was perhaps in the worst mental health of someone that could be described. Like after he's cut off his ear, having a hard time interacting with anyone, he's goes into a psychiatric ward. His treatment is twice a week. He's allowed to have a bath.

[Leo Laporte]

Unbelievable.

[Paris Martineau]

And it's.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's. That's the entire treatment.

[Paris Martineau]

That's the entire treatment. And it's so describes this, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

It could have been worse, to be honest.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, could have been worse. During this time treatment painted most of, I guess like many of his iconic images because literally the only thing he could do to keep himself remotely sane is paint. There was nothing else to do.

[Leo Laporte]

When we were in the south of France, we went to visit the sanatorium that he was there and it was quite a kind of moving experience. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. I don't know. Go see some art people. That's my pick of the week is.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. You know, there's no way you're gonna have a machine create art like that. It might look like that, but it's.

[Paris Martineau]

Not gonna have that. But it's like. And some. I don't think a machine is ever going to create the next Van Gogh. You know, not that it has to be even a remotely similar style, but art that affects people in the same way that has people talking about it here on a podcast. How many years after this person's gone, like a machine is not gonna have that sort of lasting permanence.

[Cory Doctorow]

I mean, I don't know if that's non zero, but definitely not for the next hundred years. But I don't know if that's a non zero chance. I wouldn't say that's a non zero chance.

[Leo Laporte]

One doesn't know.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, no, I mean, sure, there could be something that's phenomenal.

[Leo Laporte]

I think in the next 10 to 20 years we will Be reading novels, going to movies, listening to music, all of which were created by machines and happily doing so.

[Paris Martineau]

As to whether that ends up having the same sort of long lasting cultural.

[Leo Laporte]

Impact, I think there will be connoisseurs who will say it's got to be human or I'm not going to do it.

[Paris Martineau]

But I think part of the reason why something like Van Gogh or David lynch or any of these pieces of work we've talked about today are still something we return to long after they were created and long after their creators had died is because there is something about the human authorial nature of like an actual creation of art that leads us all to constantly wonder, what was this person thinking? And reanalyze their life, reanalyze their work, and come back again and again to the text. And I just don't see, maybe I'm being foolish and I'll be proven wrong in a couple of years, but I don't see that draw happening for AI art. Like, how are we going to be teaching? This is rudimentary, but how are you going to teach a college course about an AI painting? Like, it doesn't seem as reasonable or imperative to be analyzing the author's intent if there is no authority.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think you're necessarily wrong. I wouldn't argue against you. But I also have always been suspicious of human beliefs that we are somehow special or magical.

[Paris Martineau]

No, and I'm not saying I think it's like that we're uniquely. I just think that if you look at the way part of, like even with that example, college courses or academic pursuits, like at the intro to intermediate level, the part of what people end up circling upon again and again is like, oh, what was this person's intent? How does that relate or compare to how it's perceived? How does that framework differ from the frameworks of someone else? Like the ways that we think about these sort of things and the sort of things that end up becoming like very culturally salient often have to do with authorship in some way.

[Leo Laporte]

That's how it's been up to now.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I mean, things change. A pretty big fundamental shift from the last like thousand years, you know?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I mean, you could, you know, I didn't say this to Corey, but you know, he's talking about the lawyer writing the letter or the law professor writing the letter versus the AI writing the letter. And they're more valuable because it's so much work to write a letter if the lawyer, law professor does it. You know, it was a lot more work to make a Bible when a monk had to sit for months in a scriptorium to draw it. Yes. And I'm sure people without Jeff here, I've got to bring up Gutenberg thought that those first printed Bibles were not somehow as magical and they aren't as illuminated volumes.

[Cory Doctorow]

But he's talking about information density, not labor.

[Leo Laporte]

But he was saying that the information density came from the fact that a human put the labor into it, right?

[Cory Doctorow]

No, no, no. That, that every word, that each word is chosen specifically for a reason. And for like, okay, that thing that he calls, you know, I forget, I forget his words. But he had a word for it.

[Leo Laporte]

But is the message of a, of a printed Bible less is.

[Paris Martineau]

I guess it is printed Bible somewhat different than a recommendation letter? We are trying to make a decision based on is this going to be a good candidate for this job? And this letter is supposed to provide me information.

[Leo Laporte]

It's less valuable in that way.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Hey, it's been great having you back. Welcome back. Great to have all of you watching. We do intelligent machines every Wednesday at right after Windows weekly, which is 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern, 2100 UTC. You can watch us live. There are eight different streams. Club members watching the Discord. But you can also watch anybody you can, including club members on YouTube, Twitch, X.com TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn. And there's one more Facebook LinkedIn X.com TikTok I'm missing one. But anyway you get, oh no, that's eight. I just couldn't count my fingers. Right.

[Paris Martineau]

We can count. Yeah. We're qualified to be called artificial intelligence.

[Leo Laporte]

If you don't want to watch live on demand versions of the show, audio or video, we've got both available at Twitt TV IM. You can also of course find a YouTube channel dedicated to it. There's a link on the IM page or maybe the best thing to do, subscribe in your favorite podcast player. That way you'll get it automatically. You don't have to think about it. And if you are on itunes or pocketcasts or if the site that you get your podcast player from has reviews or the app does, please leave us a five star review. Let the world know that this week in Google is now I am. And it's damn fine. Damn fine. Those five stars help us a lot. We appreciate it. Again, new new yearly plans for Club Twit. Go to Twitter TV Club Twit. If you're already a member, you can switch from the monthly to the yearly. If you're not a member. You take your pick. We want to have you in the club. It makes a big difference. Twitter, tv Club, Twit. Thank you, Paris. Martineau find her work at the information. She had to put on the headphones. We did it long enough that the earbuds died.

[Paris Martineau]

My AirPods are constantly on their last leg. Despite the fact that these are a relatively new pair of AirPods. Apple just continues to taunt me.

[Leo Laporte]

And of course you can't replace the batteries. So no. Have to get new pairs.

[Paris Martineau]

No. And you know, you'd think you get a new pair that will solve your problem, that One of the AirPods constantly doesn't charge. But no, it won't.

[Leo Laporte]

But no. But no, it doesn't.

[Paris Martineau]

It doesn't. Can AI fix that? No. Can these Bose headphones that I've had for seven years, will they ever die? No. Because, you know, that's the world we get to live in.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the world we live in. It may not be perfect, but it's ours. Thank you everybody. We'll see you again next Wednesday. Today we're intelligent machines. Ta ta.

[Cory Doctorow]

Darwin would approve.

[Paris Martineau]

T Mobile's network has adapted to so.

[Cory Doctorow]

Many locales because T Mobile helps keep.

[Paris Martineau]

You connected from the heart of Portland to right where you are on America's.

[Cory Doctorow]

Largest 5G network switch.

[Paris Martineau]

Now keep your phone and T Mobile will pay it off up to $800 per line via prepaid card. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com KeepAndSwitch up to four lines via virtual prepaid card. Last 15 days. Qualify and unlock device. Credit service port in 90 plus days. Device and eligible carrier and timely redemption required card is no cash access and expires in six months.

[Leo Laporte]

Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great. You love the host, you seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre produced ad like this one across thousands of shows. To reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsyn Ads, go to Libsyn ads.com that's L I B S Y N ads.com today.