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From the historic campus of Hillsdale College
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in Hillsdale, Michigan, where the good, the true and the beautiful are taught, nurtured
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and honored, this is the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour, bringing the activity and education of the college to listeners across the country.
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And it's the rich who are really at the heart of the ecosystem of protecting AI from Elon Musk to the people who start and fund anthropic. And that's not surprising because this is very high risk effort.
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This is your host, Scott Bertram. Welcome to the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. That was John O. McGuiddes. His new book, why Democracy Needs the Rich. We'll dive into that book today with John. Also later on. On today's program, Maria Servold from Hillsdale's journalism department talks about the state of student journalism. And also John Seifert from Hillsdale's COMPUTE Science department will talk about artificial intelligence. First, we're joined By John O. McInnes, law professor at Northwestern University, widely cited scholar of democracy and constitutional law. His new book is why Democracy Needs the Rich. John, thanks so much for joining us.
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Delighted to be here.
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Let's define the term as we start. What do we mean or at least what do you mean by the rich in the conversations inside the book?
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C
The rich, I mean, are people who have substantial wealth, the kind of substantial wealth that gives them both the independence and resources to fund things as an avocation or as philanthropy to deliver messages to their fellow citizens or help produce public goods like better education and other things that help their fellow citizens. So we're talking about, I think, people who have beginning around $50 million and of course, going up to people with billions of dollars.
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We're talking about people who are not you and who is not me, correct?
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C
That's right.
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The introduction of why Democracy Needs the Rich looks at this generally negative attitude toward the wealthiest members of American society in politics and in culture. Where did this start? When did this start? What's the origin of this negative attitude towards the rich in American society?
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Well, first of all, there's always somewhat of a negative attitude towards the rich and we can talk about the reasons for that. One of them, I think, is deep in human envy. People who have more are often envied. But I also think that it's become part of an effort to actually shift influence because the rich are only one of many groups with quite a bit of influence in society, though. Media, academics, bureaucrats, entertainers. And as those groups actually have moved farther to the left and one can document that they find the rich an obstacle to their greater influence was their counterbalancing force. It's not because the rich are also right wing, but because they have a much greater diversity of views. I'm an academic and there's a kind of academic monoculture, even in law schools and more strongly in the arts and sciences. And that's not true among the rich. Rich people of a wide variety of view. We see George Soros and Tom Stier on the left, we have the Koch brothers, we have Elon Musk on the right. And that's what's more important for the right, because at the margin they can get out a message. The left, the liberal rich really aren't as important to getting out the liberal message. Was there all. There's another group, there's the media, academics, what Samuel Coleridge, way back in the 19th century called the clericy. And they're delivering that message pretty relentlessly and structuring the political agenda. So I see it as really a power struggle between different elites and primarily the elite, which I call the symbolic class, the chattering class, which sees the rich, I think correctly, as the one group that they do not dominate.
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John O. McInnes is with us. His book why Democracy Needs the Rich. You mentioned this feeling of envy that perhaps has existed for some time, but there's this more recent view that the very existence of the wealthy, the very existence of the rich, is creating social costs and social harm. What's the claim here? What's the harm that's alleged?
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Well, the claim is that the rich prevent democracy from functioning as others would like democracy to function, I think as more of a redistribution machine. Because, of course, most people aren't rich. And I think a lot of the people, the clericy thinks there should be more redistribution and more control, therefore, by democracy. Because once, of course, you have redistribution, you have to decide where the money goes. As opposed to a commercial republic, which money goes to people who earn it, together with some taxation for public goods. And so that's the big difference. They see the rich as an obstacle because they have some influence in preventing a scheme that is more socially democratic, that might look more like European nations.
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Most of why Democracy Needs the Rich is a response to those critiques, and we'll walk through some of those here. You say that the rich rich offer a counterbalance to the government, sapping the nation of energy and ambition. Without the rich, without the wealthy present, where does that energy and ambition go?
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Well, I think it goes into actually growing government. So the rich have a perspective on the world that comes from being part of the commercial republic where they think that the energy of America comes from business. And that's an important aspect of it. And I think there's a lot of evidence for that. I talk a bit about this in the book. That much of the innovation, certainly almost all of the tech innovation comes from America and other nations like Europe pre ride on us. And that's what gives our country kind of its energy and dynamism. And I note that I'm not the first person to say that Alexander de Tocqueville, who I think Harvey Mansfield correctly called not both the greatest theorist of America and the greatest theory of democracy, sees our commercial society as a really crucial to our vibrancy. In fact, he compared the north to the south at that time, north being much more commercial, and saw the north as a much more vibrant. And I see the rich as really still creating that dynamo. And that helps democracy in a variety of ways. Economic growth is really advantageous for democracy because unless there's economic growth, once there's a static pie, people are more likely to fight over who gets what than if there's a growing share of the wealth. So the rich are in that sense keep democracy more peaceful or their participation in our commercial society, their help by their both entrepreneurship and investment in risky enterprises that may or may not pay off really help push our society along in contrast to other even democratic nations. And so that's one advantage of theirs. Another advantage that I note in the book is that particularly the technological production, that innovation coming from entrepreneurs who want to become rich and from angel investors who invest their money is actually, I think breaks down, makes people more equal. As you know, we now all have the information, the same information in our smartphones. People used to have to have private libraries for it. We in some sense have be able to call a chauffeur buy Uber. All these technological innovations I argue in the book are dematerializing the world and actually making the lifestyles of the middle class and the rich more similar than they were 100 years ago, certainly 200 years ago. My the way I live and the way Peter Thiel lives is very much more similar than the way a duke lived in some Oxford don in the 17th century.
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Talking with John O. McGiddis, he's the author of the book why Democracy Needs the Rich. You mentioned this earlier, but the rich are not monolithic. The wealthy are not necessarily conformist. They don't all think the same way, vote the same way. And there are billionaires on the left, whether it be George Soros or actual politicians like JB Pritzker, the governor of Illinois. The do they really like those billionaires or are they just using them?
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Well, so of course every ideology is going to welcome wealth that will help them project their messages. But I think their perspective is that, on balance, for the reasons I've suggested, the rich are not helpful to them precisely because of their diversity of views, as opposed to the other elites in society. One of the premises of my book is that in a representative democracy, you cannot have equality of influence. Some people are going to be eloquent, some people are going to as the clericy. Part of their job is influencing democracy. That's going to give them a big influence compared to most people who go to work and don't have really any influence on democracy. And so the rich can influence democracy as an avocation. And precisely, as you've noted, because they have a broader variety of views, they're not very helpful to the left. So I think the left would quite happily give up J.B. pritzker and George Soros if the right gave up the Koch brothers, because who'd be left? It would be the clerici. And that is, as I've suggested, a much more ideologically homogeneous and in some cases monolithic view. And therefore the left would have a much greater proportion of the messages in society. And it's important to understand that once you get out a message, then the people do have something to say, the broad masses of society. But if they don't hear the message at all, it's very hard for the messages to compete in an echo chamber, the kind of echo chamber we see in our university. So that's what the rich, with their varied view can do. They give a lot of different views and moreover, they produce different kinds of public goods. I talk about in the book K12 education and the rich have been very important in varying the ways that K12 education is structured through vouchers, through charter schools. Some, on the other hand, have tried to make public schools, just the traditional public school, better, then one of the things that the rich do from their entrepreneurial, commercial background, they're very interested in evaluating the results. And so if democracy works by trial and error, what the rich do with their variety of views and their variety of public goods is allow a democracy to try out more things than you would get if you just had a democracy work by creating the public goods just by the government. And so that's another big advantage of the rich. And it happens because of their widely varying views together with their resources.
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John O. McInnes with us why Democracy Needs the Rich is his book. You discuss that the rich bring a kind of practical realism into politics. They care about results rather than rhetoric. How does that contrast with those of the left and those who are critical of the rich, who perhaps want to be judged by intent rather than results?
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My argument is that in politics people are very sincere. Actual vote doesn't really much matter. What matters is the politics is their self image. And the self image of a typical entrepreneur is someone who gets results. And so not surprisingly, they're rather focused on the results. But in academics, I don't want to say all, there are some empiricists in academics, but it's been pointed out that academics really are rewarded for grand theories. Often they're not very focused on results. They have more of an aesthetic view of the world, that a world will look good in this way with certain distributions of wealth and power, rather than focusing as much on the results. And so that's a perspective that the rich bring that I think is somewhat lost. Of course, it's not surprising. I speak from something that's called the ivory tower that sums up many people's view of academic is somewhat removed from the world, is somewhat removed from the effects of the world, and somewhat interested in looking at the world from this rather lofty perspective. And I'm not saying that's a bad perspective. I think we need these regulatory debates about these regulative ideals. So I'm not forgetting rid of that. I'm an academic myself. But we need also the perspective of the wealthy who bring this rather practical perspective just from their background and their self image. Because what people are interested in in politics is projecting their self image. That's what makes them feel good.
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There's a fear in some quarters that the rich can simply buy any election they want. They can pour millions of dollars into a particular race, pour millions of dollars into a particular candidate and swing the way the electorate might vote. Do we see evidence of that? Is money everything in politics? Or is there a point of diminishing returns when so many millions of dollars are being spent?
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Right, that's really the flip side of what I'm saying. Why the conservatives are more important because otherwise they get a lot of bang for their buck. Otherwise no one will be getting this message out. But once you've got a message out or once you've introduced a candidate, it's important what their message is. You introduce it and the people have decide. And there's a lot of actual empirical social science about that. That as you spend more, the marginal dollars are less important. So a wealthy person, for instance, running can get himself heard. They can't necessarily get themselves elected. Indeed, it's a mistake to think, for instance, that Donald Trump is president because he's wealthy, is indeed wealthy. What he capitalized is both on his celebrity and also a really a very powerful populist message that, whether you agree with it or not, resonated with people and resonated with people. And someone with the same amount of money or spend a lot more money than Donald Trump, basically, he wrote on free media, wouldn't do as well. We've had examples of that. Meg Whitman, for instance, ran for governor in California, a very, very important entrepreneur, and really didn't get much of anywhere, despite spending, I think, hundreds of millions of dollars on her own candidacy.
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You mentioned this earlier, John, but if there are fewer rich, if there are fewer wealthy Americans, that energy goes toward perhaps state power. More bureaucracies, more intellectuals, more professional guilds is where the power ends up. So how do the rich help to facilitate this web of association that can stand between the citizens and the state?
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Well, Tocqueville talked about that as really distinctively American and that associations were important because they both educated people in democracy, because people had to deal with people of different views, and that they allowed public goods to be created outside of democracy. So that's a distinctively American characteristic noted almost over 200 years ago. The rich are as important for that today. They have resources do that. And they may need to be more important because, as many people have noted, the associational strengths of America have been sapped in some sense by the great strength of innovation in America. So we have so many opportunities to look at so many kinds of different kinds of entertainment in our homes. It's less important to get out. That competes with going out and meeting people in associations in a way that it did not in the 19th century, when a literary association might have been really the only avocation in an evening in a town, or only. And so what the rich do is they make associations attractive in a variety of, for instance, environmental associations. They give money so that people are able to take nature walks, in a way, and they fund them. And that makes it more attractive to be an association. So actually, associations need more money today to attract members, given the other opportunities that an advanced capitalist society gives them, entertainment activities. So that's some of the things they do. And they continue to fund those associations, and they continue to fund also important public goods like museums that really aren't going to be funded by the government, or at least not as well. It's hard to think of a government deciding might be worrying for a government to decide what art should be shown. That's something that civil society should do precisely because we don't want the government to use the heavy hand of ideology to present what is good art. And the rich people do that through trial and error, buying things and then giving them the museums. And that's another element of which they do. They protect our national greatness as well in that respect.
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John O. McInnes with us why Democracy Needs the Rich is his book. You make the point late inside the book, John, that the rich could be a huge help in helping the country navigate the challenges and dangers of AI development. So much discussion about that data centers and how AI will change our lives. How can the rich help us in navigating that?
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Well, I ended the book on that note because I think that AI is transformative technology, I would claim like no other in human history. And it presents the United States has no alternative but to be involved in it. But it presents dangers the rich no alternative but to be first in it because it's so close to national security. Drones, all sorts of things are going to be connected to artificial intelligence and those who unless America wins the AI race over China, I don't think our geopolitical future looks very bright at all. And it's the rich who are really at the heart of the ecosystem of protecting AI from Elon Musk to the people who start and fund anthropic. And that's not surprising because this is very high risk efforts. Some of these companies are not going to succeed even after having billions of dollars invested in them. And it's going to be venture capital funds and people who are able to lose a lot of money who are going to be able to fund this together with very wealthy entrepreneurs who are going to have also different perspectives on things. Elon Musk's perspective on how to build AI is different from Sam Altman's. And again, we have this variety of perspectives from which the best will emerge. We also don't know it might be someone in a garage that's going to do even better. And again, they're only going to succeed if they have the kind of venture capital support that the rich bring. So they're very important to the production of this essential public good. On the other hand, this good is dangerous. Some thinkers have suggested that AI could be an existential threat, that AI could take over. And this isn't. We're not talking about 100 years from now. We might be talking about 10, 20 years from now. And so the rich have also been very influential in putting their resources in thinking about how to address that and putting millions and tens of millions of dollars into thinking about how to keep AI safe. And it's not likely the government can do that. They can't hire people at a high enough salary to efficiently think about these things. And the government, not surprisingly, is mostly concerned with the race against geopolitical rivals. They might not have the sober thoughts that some of these think tanks and institutes may bring to considering AI. And some of the companies themselves have ethical units that are trying to make sure that AI is aligned with human flourishing. So I see again, the rich as important both in the production of what is a necessity for the United States and also producing the kind of public goods to think about how to keep us safe. So in some sense, I think it's a great test case for the rich. And we should be in some sense more grateful that we have these wealthy people than ever before. It's keeping us both out in front in the AI race, but it's also funding an infrastructure that's going to help at least make it more likely than anything else we can do to keep AI safe and to not have it to be a catastrophe for humanity. I end the book on that note because I think AI intersects with the wealthy in a way that shows our good fortune in having the wealthy at this time, which I consider a hinge in human history. I do not think we will be really the same in any respect in 20 years from now. Because of what's going on in artificial intelligence. The world would be hard to comprehend in many ways. I think. I think one of the last point I would make about this is it will continue the dematerialization of the world that people will be able to have experiences very much like the rich. Maybe even experience being in a large yacht just virtually and being indistinguishable because of the kinds of things AI will bring. So in some sense, I think the rich with AI are bringing, even are going to make people's experience even closer to that of the very wealthy than they are today.
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And quickly, John, as we conclude, the last paragraph of the book begins that wealth is not democracy's rival, but one of its catalysts. There are many today trying to knock down billionaires, trying to find new ways to tax their wealth, not just their income, in a very real way. John, should we all be rooting for more billionaires and multimillionaires in the country.
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I think we should be this book is not about taxation. I think billionaires should be taxed, not a technical book. But they are a positive externality, unlike people who say they're a real problem for democracy. They're a positive externality for particularly for American democracy. And they have been. And it's because in part, I'm not saying it's not only because of the rich, but in part because of the rich, that our democracy remains the preeminent democracy. It remains the essential democracy in our world.
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John O. McInnes is law professor at Northwestern University, and his new book is why Democracy Needs the Rich. John, thanks so much for joining us here on the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour.
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C
I was delighted to be here. Thanks for the good conversation.
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B
Up next, Maria Cervold is with us. She is assistant director of the Dow Journalism Program here at Hillsdale College. We'll talk about the state of student journalism. I'm Scott Bertram. This is the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. You know the Robertson family from the hit TV show Duck Dynasty. Now Hillsdale College offers you the unique opportunity to learn alongside the Robertsons as they dive deep into Hillsdale's online course, the Genesis Story. Every Friday on the Unashamed Podcast, the Robertsons will share their insights and perspectives. Learning from Hillsdale professor of English Justin Jackson. Take a trip down south to Louisiana for this one of a kind learning experience we call Unashamed Academy. Visit unashamedforhillsdale.com and enroll today. That's Unashamed. F O R hillsdale.com to experience the genesis Story alongside the Robertsons.
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Great books, great people, great ideas. Learning about these things is critical to being a well educated human being and we can help with the Hillsdale Dialogues. Each week, Hillsdale College President Larry Arne joins radio veteran Hugh Hewitt to discuss topics of enduring relevance. And from time to time, they also talk about current events, but always with an eye toward more fundamental truths. And they want you to tune in to a conversation like no other. The Hillsdale Dialogues are posted every Monday on the Hillsdale College Podcast Network at Podcast Hillsdale Eduardo. That's Podcast Hillsdale Edu or listen via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you find your audio.
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Welcome back to the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. I'm Scott Bertram. Be sure to check out more Hillsdale College audio on the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. Find older episodes of this program plus the brand new Larry Arn show where he talks with Charles R. Kessler, editor of the Claremont Review of books and professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. That's new on the Larry Arn Show. We're joined by Maria Cervold. She is assistant director of the Dow Journalism Program here at Hillsdale College, also the author of a recent essay, the Complex World of Student Journalism. You can find it at the James Martin center website. JAMES G. MARTIN Center Maria, thanks for joining us.
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Thank you for having me.
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This essay talks about the tension between student press freedom and institutional support from a college or university. Why is that balance so tricky to find?
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D
Well, the main sort of tension comes from the different parties wanting different things out of this relationship. So student media outlets are trying to produce some sort of journalism, whether it be newspaper, radio, TV, etc. The school university housing them is out to be a school and to sort of, you know, have a mission and a goal. And often these two things can come in conflict with each other because, you know, newspapers are staffed by students with their own ideas. Administrators might have different ideas about what that paper is for. So it is sort of rare to find a school with a newspaper where those that vision aligns should mention.
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You are the faculty advisor for our student newspaper here at Hillsdale. How does the legal landscape differ for student media at private institutions, private universities, compared to, say, public university?
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Well, this is sort of the main crux of this issue that I wrote about and that has sort of been in the press recently. Student media outlets at public institutions are a little more free in that because the schools receive taxpayer funding, they are more subject to freedom of speech laws, and they're often independently funded, funded. So they have a little more freedom in that their money, they're not dependent on their money from the school. Private colleges, on the other hand, typically fund the student media outlets directly, which means there's a lot of oversight, right. Sort of by virtue of the money. Oftentimes also, student media outlets at private universities are considered clubs, thereby being subject to any sort of rules that a school might have for clubs. So private universities, private colleges, the media outlets there generally have less freedom than they would at a public institution.
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One of the public institutions with a story recently in the news is Indiana University and the Indiana Daily student case, which you write about over at the James Martin center essay here. The university cited finances. Essentially, there was no money. And in fact, the paper owed the college money for printing the newspaper over recent months and years. And they said, we're going to limit your ability to print. We're not going to pay for that anymore. How does that idea of financial responsibility then become Conflated, at least in this case, with a sense of student editorial freedom.
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Right. And this, it was particularly interesting because you're right, it was really a financial decision, but part of that agreement that the school and the newspaper came to involved sort of these few times they would print. There would be specific topics each time, like one's a homecoming issue and, you know, things involving around certain events. So then when they tried to print this fall issue, that included more than just the homecoming stuff, and the school said, well, wait a minute, you're not meeting our agreement. Right. We only agreed to print these certain things because that's all we have money for. The students read that as they're censoring us, right? Because we printed what we want in addition to this other stuff that they're looking for. They don't want us to exist. There's a very interesting quote from the chancellor of the school there. He said, perception, even when not grounded in fact, can carry the weight of reality. And I think that was really interesting because the perception the students had of the situation was that, oh, they're stopping us, right? Which. That in and of itself may be true, but it was for financial reasons, not for content reasons, but in the mind of a student journalist, they're going to sort of read any sort of involvement from the administration to censorship.
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Side question, and I know my answer to this. I talk with our students about this basically every year. Why is it worthwhile to continue a print edition when so many, particularly young people and students, end up getting their news digitally? Why even have this conversation or debate about a print edition, Right?
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D
Well, a couple things here at Hillsdale, I think, and nationwide as well. But an important thing to consider is the community that the printed edition builds. There's something really special about here on Thursday mornings, walking through the student union and just seeing everybody with the collegiate in their hands. There's also something, I think, about the idea of you're working toward creating this product that's in some way lasting, right? Like, it's funny because truthfully, the Internet's forever and newspaper isn't. But it sort of feels the opposite way to me when I'm teaching. Like, whatever's on the Internet can be updated constantly or deleted with a click, whereas something about it being printed, because that hearkens back to, you know, the hundreds of years of printed matter, feels more serious. I also just think it's a good. A good exercise in, like, we're creating something that we want to show people, and there's something special about the print that Way.
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Talking to Maria Serbold, who is assistant director of the Dow Journalism program here at Hillsdale College, also our faculty advisor for the student newspaper here, writing a piece. The complex world of student journalism over at the James Martin center website. When student newspapers are reporting on their own institutions, what are those unique pressures and questions that they. They face compared to professional outlets?
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D
Well, yeah, this is very interesting and comes into play all the time in these discussions about student newspapers. There's an inherent conflict of interest. When a student newspaper is reporting anything happening at the school, they're basically reporting on their publisher. Right. So especially at a private institution where the school is funding the outlet, you're basically reporting only, you know, on the people giving you money and nothing else. It'd be like as if the New York Times only wrote about their publisher and that was it. Right. So rather than even if newspaper, student newspapers do cover some other news out there in the world, the bulk of what they're writing about is the place that's like housing them, allowing them to exist, which is just unusual and what we call a conflict of interest. And you just don't really see that in the real world.
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B
Yeah. Have you seen good examples of where student journalism can thrive under these challenging conditions and what made those environments?
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D
Right, right. Well, I think the Collegiate is a great example and WRFH here, because there's a balance. There's just a balance and there's trust. I think that's the key thing. There's trust from the students of the administration and vice versa, where you have students working to create trustworthy, true, good journalism and an institution that allows that to happen. So rather than an institution sort of expecting students to produce only a marketing newsletter and students not only wanting to do just, you know, muckraking sort of journalism about the school, if you have sort of a balance and each party understanding that they're responsible to the other party, you have success. And I do think we have that here at Hillsdale.
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B
That trust, that respect between administration and the student journalists helps journalism flourish and helps these student journalists learn. What does this look like in practice on a campus?
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D
Yeah, I think first and foremost is communication, which feels, again, sort of counterintuitive if you think about real world journalism, where there's kind of a firewall between the people in the newsroom and the people on editorial and the people upstairs for a campus newspaper. I think because it's a place of learning, it's a lab, it's good to sort of have these lines of communication between the students and the Advisors, administrators, administrators of the college. Because if they're all sort of in communication, no one's going to be surprised by anything. And if you're in communication, I found anyway, you're more likely to have trust that allows each party to do what they need to without stepping on anyone else's toes. And so on a day to day basis, especially here at Hillsdale, what that looks like is the collegiate student run, student edited, students produce all the content. John Miller and I are there to sort of have some oversight, but we're not, you know, telling them what to print or how to print it. The college at large trusts John and I to just sort of keep an eye on things and to guide and to help teach. Likewise, the students trust that John and I have sort of an ear on what the college is thinking. And we, we know we have the college's best interest at heart. And so we're sort of bridging that gap. But both sides are working for the good of, you know, we're spreading truth, we're reporting true things, we're telling the story of Hillsdale.
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B
Do these dilemmas, these questions that students face help prepare them for the kind of pressures they're going to face in real newsrooms down the road?
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D
Yeah, absolutely. It's not like conflict of interest goes away once you graduate. There's certainly, yeah, there's something to said for learning how to balance competing interests. Right. Different groups of people wanting different things from you. An editor is going to want something different than a source is going to want. The publisher of the paper is going to want something different than an advertiser is going to want. So sort of being able to hear all those competing opinions and balance them and know how to, at the bottom of that, just tell a good true story is really beneficial. So I think it's important to not sort of gloss over these issues as they come up because there's never going to be a, you know, it's never going to be perfect. Things will always come up, but handling them professionally and respectfully will prepare them for the real world very well.
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B
How do you see the culture of student journalism evolving over the next 10 years or so?
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D
Well, yeah, this sort of a scary question. I think, sadly, what we're going to see a lot of is an increase in sort of activist journalism, which is what we see writ large in the world of journalism. A lot of, of reporters, quote, reporters just telling stories from whatever side they want or whatever side their outlet wants without really exploring the full issue or telling the whole truth. So I would sort of expect that a lot of especially big institutions, student journalism, will be learning how to be activists basically instead of reporters of the truth. So I do sort of see that heading that way because that's where a lot of journalism in general is going here at Hillsdale. And there are other schools that do this as well, do it well. Also. We're teaching, teaching them how to report well, write clearly, have good conversations, listen to people, tell the truth. And that we hope will give our students success in the world of journalism.
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B
Maria Servold is assistant director of the Dow Journalism Program here at Hillsdale College. Her essay the Complex World of Student Journalism can be found at the James Martin center site. JamesGmartin Center, Maria, thanks so much for joining us here on the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour.
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D
Thank you.
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B
Up next, Dr. John Seifert from Hillsdale. Hillsdale's computer science department tells you all you might want to know about artificial intelligence. I'm Scott Bertram. This is the Radio Free Hillsdale Power.
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Hi there. It's Bill Gray from Hillsdale College. Before you skip ahead, can I ask you a question or two? If you could teach 50 million Americans one thing, what would it be? Would you teach our great American story that this nation is unique, founded on self government and individual liberty? Maybe you would teach the truth about free enterprise, how hard work and opportunity allow anyone to rise. Or would you teach the gospel and the Christian faith that helps us live good and meaningful lives? At Hillsdale College, we're doing exactly that, teaching the best that's been thought and said through our free online courses, K12 programs, Imprimis, podcasts and more. We reach and teach millions every year with the principles of liberty that make America free. And with your help, we can reach even more. Your tax deductible gift today will help us teach millions more people to pursue truth and defend liberty. Just text the word give to 7 1844. You'll get a secure link to make your donation in seconds. That's give to 718 44. Thank you for standing with us. Now back to the show.
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You know the Robertson family from the hit TV show Duck Dynasty. Now Hillsdale College offers you the unique opportunity to learn alongside the Robertsons as they dive deep into Hillsdale's online course, the Genesis Story. Every Friday on the Unashamed Podcast, the Robertsons will share their insights and perspectives, learning from Hillsdale professor of English Justin Jackson. Take a trip down south to Louisiana for this one of a kind learning experience we call Unashamed Academy. Visit unashamedforhillsdale.com and enroll today. That's Unashamed. F O R hillsdale.com to experience the genesis story alongside the Robertsons. We're back on the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. I'm Scott Bertram. Be sure to subscribe for the newest episodes of the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. Do it at Spotify, at Apple Podcasts or over at YouTube. We're joined by Dr. John Seifert, assist associate professor of computer science here at Hillsdale College. Dr. Seifert, thanks for joining us. Thank you. Talking about artificial intelligence today and hopefully giving our listeners a good overview of what is artificial intelligence really being talked about in so many places? Why is it called intelligence? So is AI really intelligent in the way that we think about that term, or just complex pattern recognition? What is?
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It's helpful to distinguish the use of a technical term of art within a discipline from the way that those words can be used in other disciplines. The way the history of computing worked was that the term computer in the 1930s referred to human beings who were in a room working out mathematical calculations. So when we were able to, in the next decade build machines that did that, we called them computers as well. And by the end of that decade, people started thinking about ways that these machines could do more than just calculate large tables worth of numbers or just run through the calculations of some mathematical procedure. They started to think that maybe they could write music or write stories, et cetera. And by the mid-1950s, the name artificial intelligence had been attached to this foreground, this front of what computers could possibly do. There were a number of names for this running around. And in our technical discipline, we don't think too much about what we name something. So it was like, this is the sort of thing that humans do. We don't think that humans are necessarily really. We don't consider it impressive if someone can calculate really quickly. It's not really a party trick, to my chagrin. That gets attention at times. So we wanted them to be able to do other things. So on the technical side, we don't really worry about it. We take more of a William James approach to what intelligence is, which is just the ability to achieve the same goals through different ways. So you have a system that wants to do something, you perturb it a little bit, you put up a roadblock, it can still solve it. That's fine. On the more philosophical side, artificial intelligence has the ability to open up deeper questions about what human intelligence is. And if we can build a machine that is pretty close to it, is doing a Lot of the things once thought only humans could do. It really allows us to expand upon some of the insights of the classical metaphysicians and see new things about who we are, which is really kind of the promise of what artificial intelligence as science can do.
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What are the major types of AI and where might we see each type in use?
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So we have AI that does recognition tasks. For example, you can run it on video and you can pick out certain moments in that video. If you have closed circuit television and you want to, it's really going to be boring to just watch all that video. So you could just have recognition pick things out. We have something called reinforcement learning, which learns from experience in the world. You set an autonomous robot out there into the world and it gets better at doing its task as it goes. Those are two of the main areas in artificial intelligence.
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B
And then what's the difference, say, between narrow AI, which is something like ChatGPT, which people might be using or trying, and general AI?
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Yeah, well, narrow AI is real. General AI is something that doesn't really have a firm definition. It's again pointing towards this idea that maybe there's something more a computer can do. Can we have a system that does more of the things in terms of AI as a tool? We haven't yet needed to make a specific tool do all of the things, but people are thinking in terms of this general artificial intelligence. Can it do the wide variety of things that say a person can do, or maybe even more of those things? So it's more of a hope and a dream and a path forward that some people are focusing on, rather than a specific definitional thing.
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And then what does explainable AI mean? And why is that perhaps a growing area of research?
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One of the things that people outside the field are surprised about AI is one way to characterize AI computers is that they are programs that instead of doing a specific thing, their job is to write another program to do the task. So it's like the leadership adage of, you don't tell someone how to do something, you just tell them what to do and let them figure it out. So what makes an AI algorithm really interesting to us is that while we know the mechanics of how we've told it to kind of think about writing a program, we don't know what the program is that they finally write. And that's why we can say things like, we don't know how the AI works because we don't know what it's finally come up with. So explainable AI interpretability research Seeks to try to figure out. Once we have all the wires and all the math that are inside the machine, can we figure out maybe what the program is that the meta program actually came up with?
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B
What's the most common public misconception, perhaps, about the way that AI works?
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Some people think that it's specifically programmed to do things like when you interact with one of these new large language models that are all the rage, they think that maybe it's like an if then statement where if a particular input is given, that there's someone back there specifically saying how the output is going to be. And that's not the case at all. In fact, we don't know how it's going to be. One of the why this is a science and why it is so exciting is we can build this machine and then we're not exactly sure what's going on in there, and now we get to study it. This is just incredibly exciting to us that we get to now have this new artifact in the world that we can look at as if it's a natural system and do science on talking
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with Dr. John Seifert, Associate professor of computer science here at Hillsdale College, about artificial intelligence. What is it and now how is it changing our everyday life? In what ways is AI already part of our daily routines, perhaps even if we don't know it?
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Yeah, AI is in some sense just what computers do. And so think about how computers themselves have changed life over the last seven decades since they've been a thing, and it's been absolutely remarkable. We have AI, for example, inside our automobiles. There's chips inside the engine that help optimize the fuel economy of the vehicle. And people have never freaked out about that. People have never thought that that was not a good thing to get better fuel economy. We now have language models that some people are wondering, like, what's going on with this? This is a new way to interact with a computer, and we, I guess, as a society are going to work through this.
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B
Are there particular industries that are being transformed more quickly by artificial intelligence?
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Use any sort of job where you are doing the same thing that is being done by the machine when it fulfills a prompt, is in trouble. And this is not AI specific. This is how technology works. When tractors and motorized farm machinery became prevalent, the farm laborers shifted to different professions. We don't have newspaper delivery boys in near the quantity that we used to anymore because we deliver the newspapers online now. So if to the extent that a job is capable of being automated by these language models, Then we're going to see less of those.
- [48:34]
B
So I'm in journalism, right. And there is a concern about AI that can write articles, perhaps that appear to be as good as written by a human being. But there's also concern about the fakes, right. Where you can take someone's voice and make it sound like he's saying something he didn't say. Or a video where now it looks like he's doing something that actually wasn't done. Are those things that are manageable? I mean, can we work our way through that?
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I think it takes time, but we can. In 1917, there were these two sisters who did photo doctoring at that time, and they cut out some fairy pictures from a coloring book or something at the time, and they put it on the photos as if they were seeing them in real life. And this fooled a lot of people. In 1917, photography was kind of new and people thought, oh wow, there really are fairies. And the story goes that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the guy who wrote Sherlock Holmes, was one of the people taken in by it and said, if I see it in this photograph, it must be real. So today, yeah, there's people that are kind of out of touch and don't really realize that we can create entire videos now of people that aren't real. But it's something we've managed before and we'll manage again.
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B
In between that point that you explain and the point we are today, we had and still have Photoshop, where someone can go in, manipulate a photo and make it look like something that. And we managed to survive that too.
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Exactly, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. The bleeding edge is always going to catch people off guard right away way. But I think in a year or two we're just going to start. What it's going to do is it's going to, I guess, reduce the power of legit photos and videos. When every time you look at something you have to wonder, is that AI, is that real? There's going to be that going on.
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B
Are there ways in which artificial intelligence still needs to improve its efficiency? Are there specific places where you'd look and say it's still falling short of perhaps being a functional sort of aspect?
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A
Yeah. So I wouldn't look at artificial intelligence as a monolith. There's all sorts of applications. Industrial robotics is a really interesting area. We're still getting to the point where we can build humanoid or specialized robots that can perform factory tasks really well, for example. So there's definitely room for improvement, even on the more popular services like chatgpt or GROK these days, they still consume an awful lot of power and need an awful lot of data. So more advancements on the algorithm side can help with that.
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Talking with Dr. John Seifried, Associate professor of computer science here at Hillsdale, about AI, how it's changing everyday life. If we look into the future a bit and see some of those improvements come to fruition, are there particular advancements that could significantly change how we live in the next decade or so?
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The big question is, can this technology make a real, genuine scientific discovery? Can this technology cure a disease that humans haven't been able to? Can it solve some problem in physics? And so far, that hasn't happened. If that happens, I think that'll be a real turning point in how we interact with this technology.
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B
Something I've seen a little about is what's called AI alignment, making sure that artificial intelligence systems follow the human goals. Is AI alignment a real concern today, or is that still theoretical?
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It's an issue if you have a ton of autonomous systems out there. So the science fiction dystopia is that we build all these robots to help us out, and then they turn on us and start to rule us.
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B
The Terminator problem.
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A
Right. So that's where the AI alignment comes in. How can we make sure that these systems, especially if there's more disembodied systems that are just trawling the Internet and running around, how can we be sure that they aren't going to optimize for some other condition and end up really misfiring?
- [52:23]
B
And a bigger question here, I guess, but as we close, is there a particular importance that. That the United States is leading the way in some of this research and moving forward on artificial intelligence, as opposed to China or someone else?
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A
Well, as an American, it's nice to be in the country that is at the forefront of it. And it is good that a country that has some of the freedoms that we have and some of the capabilities that we have, as long as we don't shoot ourselves in the foot and slow down scientific funding and not allow people to attend our universities anymore, as long as we keep moving forward, we can really be the leaders and that can help shape things. If we have a particular view of the world that we think is right and other people maybe will misuse the technology, then it's good that it's happening here.
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B
Dr. John Seifert, Associate professor of computer science here at Hillsdale College, talking about artificial intelligence. What is it and how is it changing our lives already? Dr. Seifert thanks so much for joining us here on the Radio Free Hillsdale
- [53:27]
A
Hour, and thank you.
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B
That will wrap up this edition of the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour. Our thanks to John O. McGettis, his new book, why Democracy Needs the Rich. Maria Servold joined us from Hillsdale's journalism department and Dr. John Seifert from Hillsdale's Computer science department. Remember, you can hear new episodes every week on this station. You also can find extended versions of some of our interviews or listen anytime. The Podcast podcast. Find it at Podcast Hillsdale. Edu or wherever you get your audio. Until next week, I'm Scott Bertram, and this has been the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour.