IM 821: Just Count the Server Racks - Veo 3 in Action

Summary

Intelligent Machines Podcast: Episode IM 821 - "Just Count the Server Racks - Veo 3 in Action"

Release Date: May 29, 2025
Host: Jeff Jarvis
Guest: Adam Becker, Science Journalist and Astrophysicist
Theme: Exploring the rise of Intelligent Machines and their impact on society

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I. Introduction

In Episode 821 of the Intelligent Machines podcast, host Jeff Jarvis welcomes renowned science journalist and astrophysicist Adam Becker. The discussion centers around Becker's latest book, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity. This work delves into Silicon Valley's utopian visions and the potential pitfalls of emerging AI technologies.

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II. Adam Becker's Book and Core Themes

Adam Becker presents his critique of Silicon Valley's ideology of technological salvation, questioning the feasibility and motivations behind grand projects like colonizing Mars and the concept of the Singularity. The book emphasizes the importance of discerning between genuine technological advancements and exaggerated hype.

Notable Quote:
"More Everything Forever presents a fair and meticulous case before tearing it apart, highlighting the thin evidence behind Silicon Valley's exponential growth claims."
— Paris Martineau (03:13)

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III. Critique of Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity

A significant portion of the discussion focuses on Ray Kurzweil's belief in the Singularity—the point at which AI surpasses human intelligence, leading to unprecedented advancements or existential risks. Becker challenges this notion by scrutinizing the evidence supporting continuous exponential technological growth.

Notable Quote:
"Kurzweil takes the one thing we know is true about exponential trends—they always end—and denies it, believing Moore's Law will persist indefinitely."
— Adam Becker (06:12)

Becker argues that historical trends do not support the sustained exponential growth Kurzweil predicts, citing the eventual slowdown of Moore's Law as an example.

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IV. Mars Colonization as Humanity's Backup Plan

Becker offers a critical analysis of Elon Musk's ambition to establish a human presence on Mars as a contingency for Earth's potential catastrophes. He underscores the inhospitable nature of Mars, highlighting issues like low gravity, high radiation, toxic soil, and the challenges of creating a self-sustaining civilization with merely a million settlers.

Notable Quote:
"There is nothing bad that could happen to Earth that would make Mars more suitable for human habitation than Earth."
— Adam Becker (13:23)

Becker emphasizes that Earth's resilience surpasses Mars in every aspect, arguing that investing resources in Mars colonization diverts attention from preserving and improving our own planet.

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V. Examination of Longtermism and Associated Philosophies

The conversation shifts to longtermism—a philosophical perspective emphasizing the importance of positively influencing the long-term future. Becker critiques prominent longtermists like William MacAskill and Nick Bostrom, as well as Elie Yudkowsky's paperclip maximizer scenario, which posits that a superintelligent AI could pursue trivial goals detrimentally.

Notable Quote:
"Longtermists want us to pay more attention to the rights and needs of the people who live in the far future, but they take it to a full galaxy brain level that disregards present realities."
— Paris Martineau (12:12)

Becker argues that such philosophies often overlook immediate and tangible issues in favor of speculative and high-stakes scenarios involving AI.

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VI. Media Misunderstandings and the Role of AI

Becker and the hosts discuss the media's portrayal of AI, often oscillating between sensationalism and understated narratives. They highlight the public's misconceptions, such as believing AI has agency or intentions, which can lead to unproductive fear-mongering or unrealistic expectations.

Notable Quote:
"AI systems are just language machines. They're word and text generation engines, not sentient beings plotting to steal your wife."
— Benito Gonzalez (26:43)

The conversation underscores the necessity for accurate journalism and improved public understanding to navigate the promises and perils of AI effectively.

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VII. Addressing Misconceptions: Solutions and Social Norms

To combat misinformation, Becker suggests enhancing journalistic standards and fostering social norms that encourage critical thinking about AI's capabilities and limitations. He advocates for shaming individuals who anthropomorphize AI incorrectly, thereby discouraging unhealthy beliefs about machine agency.

Notable Quote:
"Shame is probably the only way that we could collectively decide it's embarrassing and cringy to believe earnestly that AI is real and wants to steal your wife."
— Adam Becker (30:00)

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VIII. The Influence of Billionaires in AI Development

The discussion turns to the disproportionate influence of billionaires in shaping AI's trajectory. Becker critiques the accumulation of wealth by tech magnates, arguing that their grandiose projects often serve as façades for avoiding accountability for immediate societal issues.

Notable Quote:
"These ideas provide billionaires with excuses to pursue their goals without addressing the real problems they're creating now."
— Benito Gonzalez (34:52)

Becker calls for regulatory measures, such as implementing wealth taxes, to ensure that billionaires contribute fairly to society and do not monopolize technological advancements.

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IX. Personal Experiences with AI Tools in Journalism

Becker shares his pragmatic approach to AI, utilizing tools like text transcription and translation engines while avoiding generative AI platforms like ChatGPT due to their inherent inaccuracies and ethical concerns. He emphasizes the importance of using AI judiciously to enhance productivity without over-reliance on flawed systems.

Notable Quote:
"Generative AI has a hallucination problem built into its technology because there's no thought process behind the text or the images it generates."
— Benito Gonzalez (40:00)

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X. Conclusion and Takeaways

The episode concludes with a consensus on the necessity of balanced perspectives towards AI—acknowledging its transformative potential while remaining critical of exaggerated narratives and the concentration of power among a few tech elites. Becker's insights encourage listeners to advocate for responsible AI development and informed public discourse.

Notable Quote:
"AI is a technology like any other—it can do some things well and others poorly. It's not a monolith that will either save or destroy us."
— Jeff Jarvis (44:40)

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Final Thoughts

Episode 821 of Intelligent Machines offers a nuanced exploration of AI's current state and future implications, challenging listeners to differentiate between reality and hype. Adam Becker's expertise provides a critical lens through which to assess the promises of Intelligent Machines, advocating for a grounded and responsible approach to technological advancement.

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Key Topics Covered:

• Singularity and Exponential Growth: Critiqued Kurzweil's predictions and the unsustainability of continuous exponential trends.
• Mars Colonization: Analyzed the impracticality of Mars as a contingency plan for humanity.
• Longtermism: Examined philosophical perspectives prioritizing the far future over present issues.
• Media Representation of AI: Discussed misconceptions and the need for accurate journalism.
• Billionaire Influence: Highlighted the concentration of power and wealth among tech elites shaping AI's future.
• Practical AI Usage: Shared insights on effectively integrating AI tools in professional settings without over-reliance.

Notable Guests Mentioned:

• Ray Kurzweil: Futurist advocating for the Singularity.
• William MacAskill & Nick Bostrom: Prominent longtermists.
• Elie Yudkowsky: Known for the paperclip maximizer thought experiment.

Recommended for Listeners:

Those interested in the intersection of AI, technology ethics, and societal impacts will find this episode insightful. Adam Becker's critical analysis serves as a valuable resource for navigating the complexities of Intelligent Machines in the modern world.

Transcript

[Jeff Jarvis]

Jeff. It's time for Intelligent Machines. Jeff Jarvis is here. Paris Smartno. Our guest today, science journalist and astrophysicist Adam Becker. His new book, More Everything Forever, talks about Silicon Valley's ideology of technological salvation. Go to Mars, never die, and other pipe dreams. Next on Intelligent Machines, podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. This is intelligent Machines, episode 821, recorded Wednesday, May 28, 2025. Just count the server racks. It's time for Intelligent Machines, the show we talk about. Well, all those intelligent machines all around you. Not just AI, but robots and the little, you know, smart doohickeys that are wandering around on your floor right now. No, you don't have those. Yeah, those robotic vacuums, that kind of. We do Intelligent Machines every Wednesday with the wonderful Jeff Jarvis, professor of journalistic Innovation Emeritus at the City University of New York. He's now at Montclair State. What is it?

[Paris Martineau]

Montclair State University, Montclair State University and Stony Brook University.

[Adam Becker]

One of these days you're going to get it right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, I got pretty close. Paris Martineau, who is.

[Adam Becker]

I never forget where Jeff works. That's my job.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That is not your job, but I'm glad you do it. Let's put it that way. I'm just grateful that you do that. As you probably know, this show used to be this week in Google with a nice handle theme of recorders going boop boop, boop. Now we have a. We are much more modern with a theme from our esteemed technical editor and producer, Benito Gonzalez. It goes boopity boop. And we also call it Intelligent Machines because it's about AI. And we begin every show with an interview. Today we've got an astrophysicist, which I think is fabulous. You may see behind him his book what is Real, which is really what I'd like to know. But today, what is real? We're going to talk about his latest, More Everything Forever. Adam Becker, welcome to Intelligent Machines.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Oh, thanks for having me. It's good to be here.

[Jeff Jarvis]

More Everything Forever is what the Silicon Valley boys promise, right?

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Benito Gonzalez]

That's what they want and that's what they think they're going to get.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Subtitle is AI overlords, Space empires and Silicon Valley's crusade to control the fate of humanity. Yeah, so I love the idea.

[Paris Martineau]

Adam. Adam, I love this book. I listen to it. So I.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He's been singing its praises for months.

[Paris Martineau]

Singing along with your harmony here. And as I listen to the car, I'm raising my Fist saying, yeah, yeah, what he says, what's great about your book, if I may, if I may be so bold as to praise you, is that there are lots of other books out there that are moral panicky and technology's bad and you're not.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You give. Oh, no. He said the words moral panic. It's like Groucho Marx. You said the secret word. Now the duck has to appear. Only in this case, he is walking out.

[Adam Becker]

Adam hasn't realized the show he signed up for.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Sorry, Adam.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah, no, I'm still getting a handle on what this is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I understand the Groucho Marx reference. Yeah, we've been doing it for 20 years, so.

[Paris Martineau]

So don't interrupt my praise. So what's great about Adam's book out there, folks, is that he fairly and meticulously presents a case before tearing it apart. Fairly and meticulously so. Some weeks ago, we had on Ray Kurzweil on the show, and, you know, we're fair to give Ray his time. And he certainly has the history of invention and innovation that was worthy of attention. And so, Adam, you present McCaskill and Kurzweil each in a chapter at the beginning, I think very, very fairly presenting their views. In fact, I talked to the author of another book we had on lately, and she just started reading your book, and she said you were being too nice. I said, well, no, just wait, he gets to it. But then you carefully dissect them. And I wonder if you could start with Kurzweil and go through what's wrong with his worldview.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Certainly. Although at some point after the show, you're gonna have to tell me who thought I was too nice. That's not usually the criticism I get.

[Paris Martineau]

She hadn't yet gotten to the. To the punchlines.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Fair enough. So, yeah, so Kurzweil, he. He believes in this thing called the Singularity, Right. He thinks that what's going to happen is that we're going to get machines that are as smart, as intelligent and capable as humans and that they will then improve themselves and that that will lead to this exponential process. That is of a piece with this larger trend in technology that he claims to have discerned in human history and the history of the universe before that, of just increasing technological ability, increasing complexity, biological and then technological, that will lead in short order, just in, you know, he says about, I think, 15 years at this point. He thinks the Singularity is going to be here. He's really going to start kicking off in about five years. He thinks that this will lead to super intelligent AI that will be able to do way more than even all of the collective efforts of humanity can do. And it will have godlike powers of creation and destruction and will fundamentally alter all of human life and the future of human civilization and post human civilization forever.

[Paris Martineau]

So that's the fair part where you fairly summarize his views.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah, I mean now the fun part.

[Adam Becker]

Also computronium is in there. I just want to highlight the word Computronium.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yes, that's right.

[Adam Becker]

That's my favorite part of Rick or this whole deal.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Oh yeah, I definitely do talk about that in the book. He, he thinks that, you know, the fate of the cosmos is that this giant computer based civilization that we've put together is, is going to go out into the universe and restructure it into a giant computer, something made of computronium, a phase of matter that is optimized for computing power, and that the universe will become one giant computer serving our needs and whims and we will live inside of it as part of it. Not totally clear, but, but as for tearing apart all of that, well, it's interesting that you say that that's a fair description because I agree that that's a fair description. I also think that it's sort of, on the face of it, somewhat ridiculous. But, but I also think that because there are people aside from just Ray Kurzweil who take it seriously. We need to take these ridiculous sounding ideas seriously. And if we want to take them apart, we have to take them apart seriously. Because it turns out there are very serious problems with that idea of the singularity that go beyond, oh, it looks ridiculous. For example, you know, this, this exponential trend that Kurzweil talks about in the history of, you know, biology and technology is not really there. The evidence for it is incredibly thin. Kurzweil has this whole chart that he's put together to explain why he thinks it's real and how it works. But he's a victim of his own perspective. If you ask me to make a list of the most important events in, in the history of humanity or the history of life on Earth or the history of the cosmos, that list is going to have more things on it that happened more recently than things that happened longer ago. Because that's just the way that we think about history. It's not something inherent about history, it's just a function of our perspective within history. You know, I was talking about this with a friend of mine, my friend Carl, and he had a really nice analogy for this, he said, you know, you can remember what you had to eat earlier today, probably, and you can remember what you ate maybe yesterday, and you probably remember most of your meals from last week, and then you maybe remember a few good meals over the course of the last year. And then over the last 10 years, maybe there's only one or two specific meals. And beyond that, maybe one. This doesn't mean that you're eating exponentially more now than you did when you were younger. It's just how memory and history works.

[Paris Martineau]

So it's this presumption that we are in this, in this, in this age of, of everybody tells me, I was just went through this on LinkedIn. Yeah. Can't you agree that the change is accelerating?

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

And if you do the chart of what the things you can remember, it looks like that, but you leave out a hell of a lot of history, is what you're saying.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah, exactly. And I mean, it's certainly true that there are some things that have had accelerating exponential trends over the course of history, but many of those trends are over. And the one thing that's always true of an exponential trend is that it ends. Exponential trends cannot last. There are lots of them in nature, and they always, always end. Either they smooth out or they lead to a crash. And the classic example from biology of an exponential trend is the population of a bacteria colony in a little dish of nutrients. And it's true that the number of bacteria in that dis will grow exponentially until they've grown to fill the dish and eat all the nutrients, at which point the growth stops and they all die because they starve. And every exponential trend in nature and in technology and just in reality is like this. They always end. And so what Kurzweil is doing is he's taking the one thing that we know is true about exponential trends and denying it. You know, he. He loves to talk about Moore's Law, which is this exponential trend in how many transistors we can fit onto a single computer chip. And it's been running for the last 50 years. It's what led to the tremendous explosion and miniaturization of computer technology in the last 50 years. But Gordon Moore himself, the originator of Moore's Law, knew that Moore's Law had to end. And in 2010, he said, yeah, we've got maybe another 10 or 15 years. In other words, he said it would end right about now. And lo and behold, it's ending, or has ended, depending on who you ask, because you can only make transistors so small you can't make transistors smaller than one atom because they're made of atoms. And sure, maybe there's some other technology that will come in and enable us to make them even smaller for a little bit. But first of all, there's no sign of that on the horizon. And second, there's always eventually going to be a limit.

[Paris Martineau]

So this is where you bring your physicist hat. I'm sure it's a very nice hat too, to the topic.

[Adam Becker]

Really fancy.

[Paris Martineau]

Which is what you also bring. So the other thing is you take apart, you dissect, which I quite like is the long termists is MacAskill and Bostrom who we've talked about in the show, and Yudkowski and his paper clips.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yes.

[Paris Martineau]

And also going to Mars and there are some other books that are very good, tearing apart the idea of going to Mars. But since you are an astrophysicist and since Elon's latest rocket just blew up in honor of that, why don't you dissect that idea that we're going to populate space as an astrophysicist?

[Benito Gonzalez]

Absolutely. Sure. So yeah, Musk loves to say that we're going to get, or that correction that he's going to get a million people on Mars by 2050 as a backup for humanity. And there's just so many problems with this idea. First of all, using Mars as a backup in case something bad happens to Earth is just a really bad idea because Mars is terrible. Mars is just an absolutely awful place. You know, the, the gravity is too low, the radiation levels are too high, there's no air and the dirt is made of poison. But sure, let's all go to Mars.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Sounds like a great place to live.

[Adam Becker]

What are you talking about? Can't breathe, can't live, can't grow food.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Exactly.

[Adam Becker]

We'll be fine.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah, I mean, so the number of reasons why we can't live on Mars is, is longer than I can get into here. But I'm just going to pick on a few of my favorites. Musk really wants Mars to be a backup for humanity. He says we need it in case something bad happens to Earth. There is nothing bad that could happen to Earth that would make Mars more suitable for human habitation than Earth. Everywhere on Earth is going to be a nicer place to live than anywhere on Mars.

[Paris Martineau]

Even New Jersey. Dammit.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Hey man, don't diss New Jersey. I'm from New Jersey.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, but I'm in New Jersey.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Jersey. Strong, but yeah, look, the worst day in the history of complex life on Earth. The worst single day was about 66 million years ago When a rock the size of Brooklyn Slammed into the earth 10 times faster than a jumbo jet. And that killed off all of the dinosaurs except for the birds. And that single day, a lot of creatures just died that day, and then many, many more over the course of the next, like, 10 to 20 years after all that dust blotted out the sun and killed off the bottom of the food chain. But, but that day itself, rock was ejected out into space. There's probably little bits of dinosaur bone on the moon from that impact, but. But a lot of that rock then came back down to earth and caused the atmosphere to heat up and cooked a lot of things at the surface. Widespread wildfires, enormous earthquakes. Just a really, really horrible day. Six hours after that thing hit, or half an hour after that thing hit. Whatever you want. The day that thing hit, 66 million years ago, it was a nicer day for mammals on earth Than it has been on Mars ever. And the reason we know that is that mammals survived. There were already mammals around, and they survived. There is no mammal that has ever lived that could survive on the surface of Mars without a spacesuit. Because if you are on the surface of Mars without a spacesuit, the saliva will boil off your tongue while you asphyxiate.

[Adam Becker]

And we can't even keep the robots working on Mars.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah, that's right. We can't even keep the robots working on Mars. And the robots were designed to work on Mars, but, like, you know, I'm pretty sure they didn't have spacesuits here on Earth 66 million years ago. So, you know, our, our life here on Earth is proof that there is essentially nothing that could happen to Earth that would make it less habitable than Mars. Even if the climate change scenario gets as bad as possible, Even if we have nucle nuclear war, it will still be better here. And, and you know, there's all sorts of places on earth that are way more habitable than anywhere on Mars that people don't want to live. Nobody wants to live in the middle of nowhere. Antarctica in the polar night, you know, and I don't mean, like, stay there for a science research station. I mean, nobody wants to, like, set up house and have a family and, like, have schools and supermarkets and stuff. Nobody wants to do that in the middle of Antarctica in the middle of the polar night. Antarctica in the polar night Is nicer than it's ever been on Mars. The top of Everest is nicer than it's ever been on Mars. And, and you know, Mars gets more asteroid strikes than Earth does anyway, so why would Mars be a good lifeboat? And this is another one of my favorite things about the whole nonsense. Musk is very, very clear. He, he wants a million people on Mars so that way they can survive and have their own self sustaining civilization in the event of a disaster here on Earth. So the rockets stop coming. He says they need to survive even if the rockets stop coming. A million people is not enough for that. Because if you want to survive on Mars without supply ships, you need to have a fully self sustaining, high industry, high tech civilization. The economic base that you need for that high tech civilization is estimated to be somewhere around half a billion to a billion people.

[Adam Becker]

Oh my.

[Paris Martineau]

It's a lot of rockets.

[Benito Gonzalez]

That's a lot of rockets. Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

A lot of baby babies born into an uncertain, perhaps irresponsible atmosphere.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Right, exactly. And like we don't atmosphere that will.

[Adam Becker]

Literally poison you to death.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Right, exactly. And even if you somehow take care of the poison, even if you have everybody live in pressurized tunnels underground, even if you somehow take care of the fact that if you have millions or a billion people living in pressurized tunnels underground, at some point something's going to go wrong. We don't know whether you can have babies on Mars because we don't know what the effect of Martian gravity, which is about one third that of Earth, we don't know what the long term effects of that are on human development and growth in the womb and in infancy and childhood.

[Paris Martineau]

And that's why Elon's trying to have enough here. Right. That he can go.

[Adam Becker]

All right, I have a sense as to. One last Mars question. Yeah, sense as to why Mars. Why Mars in particular is because, I mean, Mars is always the one that people are talking about.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean, what other planet you're gonna go to, really?

[Adam Becker]

I mean, I mean, Mars isn't a good option.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Mars is Mercury and Jupiter and Saturn. What else, where else are you gonna go?

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah, I mean, part of it, part of it I think really is stationary.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, that's another, that's another thing Adam investigates.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah, no, I do, I do talk about space stations. They're, they're not much better. But I will say, you know, if you say we can't stay on Earth, like if you say no, no. Aside from Earth, what's the best place in the solar system? Mars probably is the next best. And it's as bad as I just said, which tells you something about how inhospitable the rest of the solar system is. And space in general.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah, exactly. There's, there's nowhere for us but here. This is the only place with the biosphere and ecosystem that we need to survive. It's the, it's, it's where we evolve to be. And it would be extraordinarily difficult for us to ever live anywhere else, which.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Argues for us doing everything we can to preserve the planet. But Adam, what if we can't? What if. And it's increasingly looking like, yeah, we don't have the will, the political will, the intelligence to do that.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean, I just read an article that said the sea is getting darker.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And that, that doesn't sound like a big problem, except that it's completely disrupting the ecosystem. And we get 30% of our oxygen from the sea and from plants in the sea. We are not doing a good job of saving this planet.

[Benito Gonzalez]

No, we're not. But even if global warming gets as bad as possible, it's still going to be nicer here than it would be.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's an excellent point.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Benito Gonzalez]

And, and you know, Musk, Musk also talks about terraforming Mars. He says, oh, we can solve all these problems by making it more sci fi atmosphere on Earth. It is a sci fi concept. Which is also why Mars, by the way, is that he's just read a lot of science fiction and read it badly. But, but the other thing is, if you did have the technology to terraform Mars, why not use it to terraform Earth? Any technology that you could use to make Mars more habitable, you could use to fix global warming.

[Adam Becker]

Because that's not fun.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Right. And that, I think is actually the key.

[Paris Martineau]

So I want to go to one more. I want to get to your solution, which involves billionaires in a few minutes. But I want to go to the other, the other delicatessen slicing machine you go through, which is my favorite topic, which is William McCaskill and Nick Bostrom and the longtermists and to the side, Yudkowski and the paperclip nuttiness. I've talked about Tesqueal a lot on this show and have talked to Emil Torres about this and they're great on the topic. Give us your view of that tesqueal long termism, because it kind of fits into what you're saying with Musk. He's part of that fraternity. Yes. Because a lot of you so far, you really haven't talked about the technology. The technology doesn't seem to be the problem. The problem is to be the technologists. So talk about them.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah, so the long termists, they want us to pay more attention to the rights and needs and wants of the people who live in the far future. And there's nothing wrong with that, that in theory, the problem is that they take it full galaxy brain. And I mean that very literally. The issue is that we don't know what people in the future will want or what will be best for them because we don't know what the future holds. And the long termists have this way of getting around that problem by saying that they know or claim to know, that the best way to think about how to make the world a better place is to make more people. Is that a future with more people in it? As long as they are living lives that are good enough to be worth living, barely good enough to be worth living, then a future with more people in it is better. And so this creates what McCaskill calls a moral case for space settlement. And you know, that's already a problem. Like I was just saying, space is not the place. But, but there's also this other problem that shows up, which is it makes them focused on very specific problems, the exclusion of all else. And many of those problems are just kind of made up because they've decided that the risk of human extinction from non existent speculative technologies like what they call artificial general intelligence, is greater than the risks and harms from real problems that are here right now. And this actually also takes us back to Kurzweil, right, because their concern is about a kind of intelligence or superintelligence in a machine that we don't have and don't know how to build and are not anywhere near building. And they are concerned, and this is a concern that MacAskill and the other Oxford philosophers that you were talking about, the long termists, they picked up this concern from this guy Yudkowski and also from Bostrom and the paperclip scenario that you were alluding to, the idea that you could have a super intelligent AI that improves itself in the way that Kurzweil and others talked about and maintains a desire to do whatever it was originally designed to do, which in this scenario is create more paperclips. And so the concern is that such a machine would then kill everybody in order to get them out of the way and keep them from preventing it from making more paperclips. And then once everyone's dead, they will turn everybody and the material that all the people are made of and material that the earth is made of, and all that stuff into paperclips. And this is again, preposterous on the face of it, but a lot of serious people believe it, so we have to take it seriously. And then when you do take it seriously, it falls apart. All of the assumptions that underlie that argument just fall apart if you breathe on them wrong. It's a house of cards.

[Paris Martineau]

So this week we had news that anthropic with this new model is finds a trouble because one test, and I'm not agreeing with this, but just presenting it, one test said that the system would blackmail the operator rather than be shut down. And then we had a story out in our media world that said that OpenAI has a problem because its model refused to shut down when instructed. And then, Leo, I think I saw you on the TikTok with on security now talking about machines that are now self replicating. So these kinds of things are just this week in the news ecosystem out there.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, actually, I don't want to. We'll talk about this later because that's a bullshit story and I don't want to delve into it. It's a misunderstanding of what those AIs are doing.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yep.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They're just language machines.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, right. But that's what enters into the policy discussion. That's what enters into the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, it enters into it because of media's misunderst understanding. Yeah, I don't want to propagate that. I really don't.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Well, yeah, but that's, that's the point that I'm making here is like.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, no, I agree with you.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah, they're just, they're word and text generation engines. Even calling them AI is a PR move.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And saying to Black they're going to blackmail you or prevent their shutdown is nonsense.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah, there was a. You know, I think like a lot of people my age, there are certain tweets that just live rent free in my head and never go away. And there's this one on this subject that I think actually captures this very, very well. I think it was by a woman named Avery Edison who said, you know, I wrote I am alive on a piece of paper, put it in a photocopier and press start. What happened next has shocking implications.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Exactly. That's a nice way to put it.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes, it is.

[Adam Becker]

Revan Kuss at the New York Times.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yes, exactly. Yes. The most credulous man alive. He has. He's never heard anything that he didn't believe.

[Adam Becker]

Those printers are scary, man. You got to watch out. They're going to steal your Wife.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah. What if you wrote, you should leave your wife on a piece of paper.

[Adam Becker]

And put that in the machine and press start?

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, no, the Xerox machine is in love with me.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yes.

[Adam Becker]

Front page news.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yes.

[Paris Martineau]

So what do we do about media coverage? How the hell do we improve it?

[Benito Gonzalez]

I mean, I wrote a book.

[Paris Martineau]

Credulous. Yeah.

[Benito Gonzalez]

I wrote a book to try to help with that. You know, I'm one of my other fancy hats is I'm a journalist. And so I wrote a book saying, hey, all of this is nonsense. Don't do this, don't believe this stuff. But I also think, you know, we just, we need to change how we talk about it. I think that, that, you know, we need better journalism on this subject. And I think we also need like, like better social norms around this. Right. Like, and I realize that that's a very weak tool to use, but at the moment it's, it's kind of the best one that we've got. I think that we need to help people understand that these things are not alive, they are not thinking, and that treating them like they're people is, is unhealthy and in some cases rude. You know, like substituting a person with one of these text generation engines, I think is, is more rude than, say, going to lunch with someone and spending the whole time staring at your phone.

[Adam Becker]

I think that it's going to be increasingly difficult, as we're seeing already, to convince people to shift their immediate opinions of this. It seems these things, these tools come across in a way that people intrinsically believe they have agency, they have knowledge, and that is kind of the first instinct of a user. And I think that's very difficult to actually address. I feel like, I mean, this is a complete. Just thought that came to my head, but I feel like shame is probably the only way that we could do it is just, just like collectively as a society decide. It's kind of embarrassing and cringy to believe earnestly that the AI is real and wants to steal your wife. And I think that social sh. Shame could do the trick.

[Benito Gonzalez]

I think that that's a good idea. And, and we've seen that work before, right. You know, when, when like Google, Google Glass came out. Remember Google Glass?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I got it there.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah. And, and there was a lot of shame and a lot of. Oh, bro, don't. Don't record me. What the. What the hell? So I think, I think that shame can be powerful for something like that. And, and I think it's sort of the kind of thing that shame is for. Right, because sometimes it's good to shame people. Right. If someone doesn't believe that global warming is real, we should shame them.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, they should get dunked on.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah, exactly. If someone is racist or, you know, like, if someone believes that certain races are smarter than or better than other races, we should shame them. That's what shame is for. That's what shame does. So, yeah, no, I think shame is a powerful tool that we can use to change the narrative around AI and we should.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

So your suggestion in the end, not to do a spoiler here.

[Benito Gonzalez]

No, that's fine.

[Paris Martineau]

Relates to billionaires.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

So again, you're not really talking about the technology, you're talking about the technologists. What should we do with billionaires?

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah, I mean, I do think that we should do something about the technology as well. I would like to see better regulations around AI and around space companies. But. But I also think that part of the reason that's difficult is that we've allowed billionaires to happen. Louis Brandeis said 100 years ago that we can either have great people having great accumulation of wealth, a great uneven distribution of wealth in this country, or we can have democracy, and we can't have both. And I think recent events have shown that this was true. And billionaires exist because we allow them to. If we came together as a country and said, you know what? Nobody needs a billion dollars, $500 million is enough. Nobody needs more than that, we could institute a wealth tax and we could say, yeah, anything over $500 million that goes back to the rest of society. Because guess what? You did not not build the things that brought you that wealth alone. Obama was right when he said, you didn't build that. You did not. Nobody does anything ever in life alone. Nobody does anything alone. It would not be possible for these tech billionaires or any billionaire to amass the wealth that they have without a stable, functioning society that allows for the kind of economy that allows them to, you know, create that kind of wealth. They would not have been able to amass that wealth without public transportation infrastructure. They would not be able to amass that wealth without public education infrastructure. And they, you know, because they wouldn't have a trained population of workers.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Were.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Consumers, and in Silicon Valley in particular, they would not have been able to amass that wealth without the government creating and investing in most of the early, you know, stuff that has allowed the tech industry in general and the Internet in particular to explode. Arpanet, the original form of the Internet, was created by the US Government. The US Government was the first major client of Silicon Valley in, you know, in its creating computer chips because the US Government needed them for the space program. And, and that space program also provided a sort of free testing ground for the space companies that came in later. All of this massive, massive government spending has been, you know, done by us, the public, and we don't see a return on the investment because these companies just come in and piggyback off of that. And so I think it's time for us tax billionaires and get our money's worth and save democracy at the same time.

[Adam Becker]

Do you think that, I guess part of the reason why these billionaires or large figures end up making these wild proclamations that are so easily, like, debunked or picked apart is kind of because of this institutional structure of wealth or like, what do you think drives these big wrong ideas that you tackle in the book?

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah, I mean, this is, this is a good question and I do like, that's a good chunk of the book there is, is me sort of talking about that. I think that because these ideas provide these billionaires with an excuse to believe what they already want to believe and do the things that they want to do. And it provides them with a sort of roadmap to making large amounts of, of money or like using their large amounts of money in ways that seem good and entertaining to them, that avoid accountability for the real problems that they're creating here and now. That makes these ideas just incredibly seductive and irresistible to them. I think that there is a mistake that a lot of people make where they say, oh, Musk doesn't actually want to go to Mars. Bezos doesn't actually want, you know, humans to live in space. It's just that these are like reputation management projects because these ideas provide convenient excuses for things that they wanted to do anyway. And I actually think that that's a mistake because the mistake that's being made there is the fact that these ideas provide excuses for the billionaires to do what they already wanted to do makes it more likely that these are genuine beliefs that the billionaires hold, not less likely. So they believe in this stuff because it provides them with meaning, purpose, and moral absolution.

[Paris Martineau]

Does AI yield a different kind of billionaire than HP did or intel did or Microsoft did?

[Benito Gonzalez]

It's a good question. I think yes and no. AI comes with this story of the singularity and salvation or damnation. And I think that when you believe that what you are building is a God or could become a God.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, you got A point there.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah, that's going to just change your attitude toward the world. And, and this is not, you know, theoretical or speculative. You can see this with Sam Altman. Sam Altman has said all kinds of absolutely crazy and unhinged things about AI. He has said that, you know, AI can be used to solve global warming. And so global warming's not that big a deal because, like, you know, he.

[Adam Becker]

Said, because they'll figure. We'll figure it out in post.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Exactly, yes. And he's not the only one saying this. What's his name? Eric Schmidt said the same thing and is saying the same thing. And you know, saying that they say it's not that big a deal technically. Maybe that's not fair. Sam Altman instead has said stuff like, well, I don't want to say this because global warming is such a big problem, but it won't be a big problem for AI to solve once we have it, and we're going to have that in the next four years. So it's really not that big a deal. It's really very silly and very transparently a way of getting around the problems here and now. And I think he really believes it. And, and that's nuts. So, yeah, I do think that if you think you're building a God, if you think you're building the last invention that humanity will ever need to make, because it will, it will save the world from everything, then, yeah, that's going to change your approach to things like democracy or your place in the wider world or, or even philanthropy.

[Paris Martineau]

That's a good point. What of the technology do you like and do you use?

[Benito Gonzalez]

I mean, I guess it depends on what you mean by technology. I think vaccines are great.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, no, I meant AI related.

[Adam Becker]

I love modern medicine.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah, exactly.

[Paris Martineau]

I drive a car once in a while.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

[Benito Gonzalez]

AI related. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, like I said, AI, the, the AI systems that exist now. The term AI, I think is a marketing tool.

[Paris Martineau]

It's.

[Benito Gonzalez]

It's not like. Because, like when I was a kid, right, like 30 years ago, AI, that meant like Commander Data from Star Trek. Now, AI is not that you mean.

[Adam Becker]

Everything from a chat bot to an algorithm.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Exactly.

[Adam Becker]

A processing tool used in vaccine development to a different chat bot.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Precisely. Yeah. And so, like, there are AI tools that I use most. I don't know, I don't really use generative AI like ChatGPT for a variety of reasons. It's not very useful in my work. And I also think that it's the, you know, it's the fruit of the poison tree. There are ecological problems with using that technology. There are intellectual property theft issues with that technology, and there's also exploitation of people in the world outside of the US And Europe with that technology. But I do use other kinds of AI, like text transcription or, sorry, audio transcription services.

[Adam Becker]

What are you using for your audio transcription service?

[Benito Gonzalez]

Which one, Otter? The same one as pretty much every other journalist. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's good. And it's useful to have that transcript. It's not a perfect transcript, but if I need to search the audio to find what I'm looking for, I can do that much more easily with a pretty good transcript. So, yeah, that kind of AI, sure, I use that. I'll use translation engines like Google Translate. If somebody, say, writes a review of my book in a language that I don't speak, which is almost every language other than English, then I'll just slap it into Google Translate or some other translation engine because I want to know if they're sh. Tting on my books or something else not written in English. I'll put it in the translation engine. That's a lot of how I use AI, generative AI tools. At this point, I pretty much only use them to keep an eye on their abilities. I want to know what they are able to do. I am continually unimpressed because generative AI has this hallucination problem that is just built into what the technology is because it only knows how to hallucinate because there's no thought process behind the text or the images or whatever that are being generated. It just generates those things, which is one of the reasons why I tend to refer to them as text generation engines rather than AI.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, Leo, coming to the defense here.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I got nothing to say. No, keep talking. I'm just listening.

[Adam Becker]

Wow, the AI Defender has logged off.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, no, it's not. This is not my. Bailey Wick. You guys continue.

[Adam Becker]

I. I don't know. I mean, I think that's just an interesting way to think about it. I think that all these tools have varying, different uses, and they're not. Not for everyone. And I think that's the interesting part of this discussion that, like, the AI hype cycle often misses, which is there's kind of this notion that we're devoting this much money to infusing this technology into everything because it will very rapidly, within months or a couple of years, be everything for everyone. And I just don't think that seems realistic with the development of any technology. Like, of course the technology will be useful to A lot of people in a lot of ways. But it doesn't mean it has to be useful for everyone, for everything, always.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah, no, there's two articles that I think are really good on this that really sort of cement the point that you just made because I think you're right. There is a lovely op ed in the New York Times by Tressie McMillan Cottam called AI is Middle. Just saying, you know, AI, eh, it's not, it's not great and it's not really terrible. It's just kind of mediocre. And I think that's about right. And there was also a very long academic paper out of Princeton by, oh my God, Arvind Narayanan. And I'm blanking on the other person.

[Paris Martineau]

Kapoor.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Saying the title of that paper is AI as Normal Technology. Yeah, and I think that's right. You know, they're not building a God, they're building a thing. And it's a thing that can do some stuff and it's going to be good at some things and bad at others and it's going to change how certain jobs work and it's not going to change how other jobs work and it's going to create some jobs that didn't exist before, just like any other normal piece of technology.

[Adam Becker]

And I think that that's like a very. I don't know, that's the part that frustrates me the most about like our cultural conversation on AI as like a buzzword. Technology is like, yeah, there's very things happening in artificial intelligence, in large language model processing, in all of the different subfields that we consider AI. But I feel like they're being obfuscated by the fact that people are screaming from the top of rooftops. This is the best thing ever. You should be using this for everything, always, no matter what. And if you're not, you're dumb and not going to have a job and nothing about your life is going to make sense because it's all or nothing. And that's just. I mean, maybe I'll be wrong, but that's just not how the. Of any technology we've ever seen before works. And it doesn't seem, based on what we've seen at least over the last couple of years, that this is how this is working. It's going to be very useful for quite a few things, but that doesn't mean it's going to be incredibly useful for absolutely everything. I mean, what do you think, Jeff? I know you're more on the camp of all of this.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I still remain positive on AI and as a whole I think, I think it's worth paying attention to. I think it's worth exploring and, and seeing what it can do do. And I think that the industry, and it is an industry now is making a terrible mistake by over promising, by saying that it can do everything by acting as if it's the worst end of it is the God complex or.

[Adam Becker]

The doomsday God or the devil.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, right. But, but even short of that, that it's going to replace tons of jobs. Just this morning I saw on Morning Joe, Jim Vande Hei from Axios was on talking about a white collar bloodbath that's gonna be occurring any minute with AI jobs. And it was from anthropic and he was basically accepting this anthropic argument. And the funny thing about this is I was talking about this earlier today that it's the weirdest thing to see an industry whose PR is doom. What other industry says we're so powerful we can destroy things and we're really dangerous and we're really awful. That's why you should give us money.

[Adam Becker]

That's why you should give us all your money. Yeah, yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

It's the honest.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't think AI is a monolith though. And I think it's easy to target Sam Altman because he's a bozo and there's a lot of and Elon Musk. There's a lot of great stuff happening, very interesting stuff happening that isn't doomer, that isn't acceleration, that isn't test real. And I think it's a shame to paint it all with the same brush.

[Adam Becker]

No, absolutely. I mean, I think that's the core of my argument around this industry is like part of the issue. And I think why people like myself focus on someone like Sam Altman is because that's where like the all of the money is going. If we think of it comparatively, that is like almost all of the capital is going to the same like one of three, maybe five if you're being really generous companies. And that just seems a bit foolish given what we know about how innovation works.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, hopefully the more interesting stuff will happen in the lesser. I mean look at deep seek in the lesser capitalized areas. A lot of interesting stuff happens. The garage is historically the place where Silicon Valley invents, not the big corporation with a circular campus.

[Adam Becker]

So those garages though are given venture capital investment and that's where the stuff happens. I mean, I don't know, I just Think it'll be very interesting to see how this all shakes out. I don't think we've ever seen a intense hype cycle like this. And that's for sure. Capitalization of.

[Paris Martineau]

And I think it harms. It harms the field. That's my. So I am a defender of AI. A defender. Wonder with you, Leo, of what it can do. But I think that it's being harmed by those few big guys who get all the money and get all the attention and make up a lot of BS around it. And that's my problem.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The book is more Everything Forever. AI overlords, space empires and Silicon Valley's crusade to control the fate of humanity. I love. I love it that Adam Becker is an astrophysicist. Who better to examine these issues? Adam, thank you so much for making the time to be with us. I appreciate it.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Oh, no, thanks for having me.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What is real, by the way? Just out of curiosity. Yeah.

[Adam Becker]

Can you give us a quick 30 seconds on what is and isn't real?

[Benito Gonzalez]

Well, I'll tell you.

[Adam Becker]

So we know.

[Benito Gonzalez]

My favorite, like Amazon review of the book was someone who gave it one star because they said it's 300 pages long. @ the end, he says he doesn't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You should never be honest. If you want. If you want a review on Amazon, that's. That's for sure.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Sure.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Adam, thank you so much for your time.

[Paris Martineau]

Thanks so much, Adam.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Appreciate it.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Thanks for having me. I'd love to come back anytime. Thanks.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Please. Thank you. Take care.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Bye.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Adam Becker, everybody. Intelligent Machines continues in just a moment with AI news. But first, a word from our sponsor, Zscaler, the leader in cloud security. You know, when we talk about all the negatives of AI, one of the big negatives is that bad guys can use AI to breach your organization. Hackers have found a great ally in AI. Yeah, sure, AI powers innovation and drives efficiency, but it also helps bad actors deliver more relentless and effective attacks. And I'm not talking about Nicholas Cage here, we're talking about phishing attacks over encrypted channels. They increased last year by 34%. Well, to be precise, 34.1%. And that was fueled by the growing use of generative AI tools and phishing as a service kits. You can't anymore look at a phishing email and say, well, you see how ungrammatical that was? Clearly, that's phony. No, they're perfect. They're perfect. Organizations in all industries, just small, no large, are now leveraging AI to protect themselves, to increase employee Productivity with public AI for engineers with coding assistants, marketers with writing tools, finance creating spreadsheet formulas. They're automating workflows for operational efficiency across individuals and teams. They're embedding AI and applications and services that are customer and partner facing. And ultimately AI is helping them move faster in the market and gain a competitive advantage. But companies do need to think about, maybe even rethink how they protect their private and public use of AI and how they defend against AI powered attacks. Jason Kohler, who's the chief Information Security officer at Eaton Corporation, leverages Zscaler to embrace AI innovations and combat AI threats. Here's a quote from him. He says data loss detection has been very helpful for us. ChatGPT came out. We had no visibility into it. Zscaler was our key solution initially to help us understand who was going to it and what they were uploading traditional firewalls, VPNs, public facing IPs exposure, attack surface. They're no match in the AI era. It's time for a modern approach with Zscaler's comprehensive zero trust architecture plus AI that ensures safe public AI productivity, protects the integrity of private AI and stops AI powered attacks. It's both. It's two two in one thrive in the AI era with Zscaler Zero trust plus AI to stay ahead of the compet and remain resilient even as threats and risks evolve. Learn [e-mail] Security I love this is a company that understands AI, that even embraces AI but also understands what the downsides are and will help you protect yourself and use AI. Right. Zscaler.com Security we thank them so much for their support of intelligent machines. And you support us when you go to that address by the way. Anyway, on we go with AI news. Let's talk about those stories because Steve Gibson also reported the the report that the AI was being used to. It was an anthropic being used to blackmail. Yeah engineers. This was actually kind of a, an experiment. It wasn't actually in, in, in the real world.

[Paris Martineau]

Because, because how, how, how is it going be to get blackmail with whom does it have a phone?

[Jeff Jarvis]

So, so the way it happened I'm.

[Paris Martineau]

Calling your wife with my strange voice right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It said I know you're sleeping around and I'm going to send an email. And if it turned out this it was given email access so it in theory could have but I think it's much more likely it was rehashing the plot of a detective novel. Ingested that actually exactly and this is what Steve said. And in fact, I wrote it down because I, I thought it was so good. He. He said, let me. Let me get the quote exactly. I have it from yesterday's security. Now pull up my notes from yesterday. Should have had this to hand.

[Paris Martineau]

I just last week, I think you talked about replicating machines. So the, the. I'd be curious to hear what he said. Yeah, yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He said this is a. Steve's quote. When a human being says, I want a lollipop, it's an actual expression of desire. There's an entity with an ego that wants something. But when a large language model emits the same words, I want a lollipop or I'm gonna blackmail you, whatever. There's no I present to do any wanting. It's just an algorithm that selected that sequence of words.

[Paris Martineau]

There is no I. I like that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. And. And he's, you know, he said the problem is we're easily seduced by language. And, and, and we also, I think, are biologically built to think of entities like that as people. They're not. That's. In a way, to me that was the takeaway from Stochastic Parrots was that we would ascribe more importance to what these machines said because they are machines.

[Paris Martineau]

We imbue ours into them.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Anyway, but I don't want to.

[Paris Martineau]

Stories was that. It was. It was kind of ridiculous. But it was the press. It was the press about it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, they jumped on.

[Paris Martineau]

That's the more of the story. Yes, of course they did.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think we should be smarter than that on this show anyway.

[Adam Becker]

But I think also the nature of our format allows us to explain to people why that is a debunking misinterpretation and not fall into the. The trap that many advertising click supported media outlets go to, which is you've got to have a headline that will cause people to click and what causes people to click but something that gets them afraid or angry or energized in some way.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Our blessing is that we have no ads and we don't care.

[Adam Becker]

We have lots of ads this week.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We do have ads, actually. We have a lot of ads and we do care. Yeah. So tell me about this. Adam was quoting this AI is normal technology piece. This was from the Knight Institute at Columbia. Arvind Narayanan and Saish Kapoor. Tell me more about this.

[Paris Martineau]

So the New Yorker did a piece contrasting this with the 2027 thing, which I don't know if you've seen, which is a prediction of all the Doomsday in AI and it's a fictional story of what could go wrong. Whereas that piece from the Columbia AI Institute just says, let's not. Let's stop treating AI like it's some earth shattering, amazing thing. It's a technology.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Let's deal with it at that level. And I think that that's the smart way to deal with this. I think that's the way we cut through the hype. Now the question is, you know, we've had two, two anti AI hype books recently on the show and you can do that in a few ways. Right. One is that you can.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I like Adam's approach. Yeah, I like Adam's approach.

[Paris Martineau]

He cuts through the hype itself.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

And, and, but I think the other way is to bring the technology down to reality. And I think that's what we can do on this show best is, is bring perspective and context to it and say, say, okay, it's cool. It does a lot of amazing things, but let's not get overboard because when you get overboard, then you get in trouble.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So this is from AI 2027. When was this written? This was written recently.

[Paris Martineau]

Very recently. It's a former AI 2027 was written by a. Another AI safety air quote, safety person.

[Adam Becker]

It is real fan fiction. It is the most fan fiction I've ever read.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It is.

[Adam Becker]

It is like interactive. Choose your own fanfiction. And it's about how. God, there are some really. It's like, there's gonna be. It's like computronium level stuff. He's like, there's gonna be AI nanobots in our blood in like two years and it's gonna be so bad.

[Paris Martineau]

That's why we need safety. Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

See, it's funny because I would say, oh, that's great. Let's get those. Let's get. Where do we get them again?

[Paris Martineau]

Can we get rid of cholesterol that way? Could it. Yeah, please.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You know.

[Paris Martineau]

Go on.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's funny because I have a mixed look. I'm not into the doomerism, nor do we really know what's going to happen. I think it's very clear. We have no idea.

[Paris Martineau]

No prediction is ridiculous.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We have no idea. And we are seeing things happen in with AI tools like VO3, the new Google tool that are mind bending.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That we didn't even think possible. You know, what was the. With the video of the guy eating spaghetti. Right. Two or three years ago. That was just. It was awful. And now we've got. And I've been showing. We Showed a couple of these. I've been showing them on other shows as well. We showed one last week. AI is now talking. AI is Veo is making video that. That I'm sorry, but I think is indistinguishable from the real world.

[Paris Martineau]

It's changing my view of other things. I look at other images and I think, oh, that's too good. That's question. There was a picture of the next cast of kids for the HBO Harry Potter thing, and they looked like they were AI generated to me. That was my first presumption.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is. And I showed this to Lisa and at first she thought it was real. This is Influencers has just occurred on.

[Adam Becker]

The outer ring of the city. We'll now be going live to our top influencer opinions. Omg, people, the world is ending. Are you seeing this? This is actually so exciting.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I know it's chaos, but you got real Survivor's wife energy. That's cool. I like them feisty.

[Adam Becker]

Like, it would totally be better if we ran it. You know, men literally destroy everything. And my girls need to stop being so soft with these basic losers. Who even needs men, right? Anything a man builds just gets destroyed.

[Paris Martineau]

By a different man. He's so wanted to believe it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This collapse is literally the perfect dip. He only watched a few seconds. The point is, if you just quickly glance at looks real. Well, did you watch Lava? Right.

[Paris Martineau]

Did you watch Joanna Stearns on the Wall Street Journal?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Even as. No.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, I was telling you. This is the time. This. All of her preparation for her. For her close up has come to this. It is amazing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Set it up and I'll.

[Paris Martineau]

So she got. I have it somewhere in the rundown there. So Joanna Stern wanted to use VEO plus a couple other tools and see what they could do. So she created a four minute story with her and her robot. You know, whatever it is. But the tool, the use of the tools is amazing. And they went through. She worked with a partner in it and they had a thousand cuts. At the very end of it, she has the outtakes, which are hilarious. The bloopers with the machine screwed up, up. But it's. It's. It's impressive. And she uses her own voice. Everything else in this is made by AI she couldn't find a voice that satisfied her, so she used her own voice.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So this is VO and Runway, the two. Runway's been around for a while. VO3 is of course, the new model from Google. Here we go. Let me turn on the. Where. Where's the audio on this? There's A button. Oh, look at that. So what is Human?

[Paris Martineau]

I am Dr. Chip. Motherboard. Terrible. Real robot. This is bad. This is bad. Okay, she launched with the wrong thing, but if you go farther in.

[Adam Becker]

Okay, okay, yeah. Chip is definitely AI and I'm the real me controlling that AI character.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is last year's technology, including Keep Going.

[Adam Becker]

All the other visuals were created with AI video tools.

[Jeff Jarvis]

She's driving in a car with a robot.

[Adam Becker]

Most of the audio is also AI, except for my narrative.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He didn't like her. She didn't like the other voices. Her voice is terrible.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay, so now it's all AI, except.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is all AI generated.

[Paris Martineau]

And I wish they had another robot because it's kind of silly.

[Jeff Jarvis]

6:15Am it's gonna be a great day. Oh, you'll feel better after a workout. I've sanitized your sports bra. Thank you. Yeah, I'm not going to watch this because I'm going to throw up. Can I go back? I'd rather watch the influenders, to be honest with you. I a. I don't think she's doing the best job you can do with VO. I'm much more impressed with the stuff I'm seeing on Reddit. But the main point, both hers and mine, is this stuff's gotten good enough now that it's indistinguishable.

[Paris Martineau]

Ethan Molik, who's also very good, who's at Wharton, Martin, who wrote the book CO Intelligence, so he's a positive AI guy. He also put up videos that I think we might have shown some last week, and they're. And they're. And they're amazing. The fidelity is higher. Right. The people look like people now.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. The lighting was off on all of those videos, but the quality was quite good. I'm sure that with whatever the. I think you just have to probably prompt it differently.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, that's the funny thing. Those are all generated with text prompts. I mean, that's mind boggling.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, that's really impressive.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And I guess, you know, that's the other. We were talking about this on Windows Weekly. I hate the frog in the water analogy, but as humans, we adjust.

[Paris Martineau]

I wonder what you were pausing to say.

[Adam Becker]

What could.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't want to say the frog in the pot and the water is getting hot. But as humans, we adjust very quickly. I mean, that's one of the things that makes us successful, is we adapt. We're very adaptable. So it's very quick. We're very quick to kind of start taking this Stuff for granted and saying, oh, yeah. I mean, look, we're doing a zoom call with people all over the world that we're all, like, in the same room. It's. A few years ago, this wasn't even possible. So I'm just. I feel like we're maybe underestimating what's happening here. Here's some more VO video. I'm into a zoo to prove one man is enough to fight a gorilla. That's a little uncanny.

[Paris Martineau]

This is. This is cartoonish.

[Adam Becker]

I'm gonna lick this glowing pole. Let's see how many views this gets.

[Paris Martineau]

A little bit. If you go to line 100, you'll see some others that are better. That's better. That's scary. Hey, Leo. They shouldn't show that to me. That scares me.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Let's get. Get solid.

[Paris Martineau]

No energy drinks, just gasoline.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Digging to the earth. This is actually the one I showed Lisa. No Breaks Can I Survive is a great setup on Influencers. And what's happened, unfortunately, with TikTok and YouTube, is people are now doing for 10 minutes straight. Wish me luck, stupid things. Counting every grain of sand on this beach. Let's go.

[Paris Martineau]

One, two, three.

[Adam Becker]

That one is my favorite, actually. I like that one.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Alone, unprepared, and in a straight line. Leave a comment for the search team about to do the first plunge into an active volcano. Let's send it.

[Adam Becker]

Let's send it. Okay, that's good.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Build the Titanic just to sink it again. Last person to abandon ship gets a Lambo.

[Adam Becker]

I covered my entire body in compost and waited to see what started growing. Joining for my life on North Sentinel Island.

[Paris Martineau]

Day three.

[Adam Becker]

Should have picked Bali. All right, I've sealed my head in.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This plastic box and I'm going to.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Try to read the entire dictionary before I pass out.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Flying into North Korea with a lawn chair and 1,000 party balloons. Don't try this at home.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm about to survive 100 days in the African.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean, I could go, I could watch this all day. But. Yeah, this is on in the chat. G. I think it's a chat GPT forum. It's Google V. I know.

[Adam Becker]

I'm curious. What about it is. And I don't mean this as sassy as it comes up. What about it is so appealing to you so you could watch it all day? Is it just the quality of the video or do you think it's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's a funny set of influences?

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, yeah. No, it's very.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Not the AI, But. But. But underneath. Look, I couldn't talk last Month. You couldn't make these videos talk last month. So anybody who thinks that this is hype or BS is missing an exponential explosion of capability.

[Paris Martineau]

What's hype is when they declare that they can solve.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I know we can ignore. Got it.

[Paris Martineau]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Let's stop talking about those morons. That's the morons of the ones in charge watching the world change in front of your eyes, guys. And you're going, yeah, but you know, I don't know. You know, there's a lot of hype.

[Paris Martineau]

Here because those are the ones who have all the money. Those are the ones who are in charge. Those are.

[Adam Becker]

Who cares?

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's not important to me. What's important to me is you're seeing a technical. You're seeing a technological revolution bigger than anything I think we've ever seen. Certainly at least the equivalent of the Internet printing.

[Paris Martineau]

It's like you said, you said that's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Fine, but you know, there's lead in the. That type. It's going to make you sick. I don't understand the focus on. Oh, yeah, it's overhyped because I want.

[Paris Martineau]

To cut them down to size. I want to, I want, I want to. I want, I want Deep Seek to be doing. Getting the attention instead of them.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, who knows what Deep Seek. I mean, that's true.

[Paris Martineau]

They could be jerks too. That's true, too.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes, but that's the wrong thing to focus on is all I'm saying. Focus on this thing that is happening. Because I tell you what, in two years, it's not going to be anything like it is now. What was it like two years ago?

[Adam Becker]

I mean, I do think that. I think you're right. Yeah. The videos are incredibly cool. It's cool that they're able to produce stuff via text that has the lips sync up to both like audio and things like that. It's awesome. But I think the reason why Jeff and I sometimes preface this by being like, yeah, that it's mishyped or overhyped is because that's not what these companies are raising money on or what they're. Any of these companies are trying to do. What they're trying to do with the billions of dollars they've raised is like create technology that's going to be used by governments for advanced warfare or replace workers en masse or do a lot of things that will have profound impacts if they're even realized somewhat on everyday people's lives. I do think that's something worse worth keeping in mind. While we're also like, yeah, the videos are pretty cool.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Business owners are using AI generated concerned residents that aren't real to oppose a bus product project in Toronto. This is the future of protest. We're going to astroturfing. Yeah, but astroturfing, that's so good, so effective, you can't tell it from the real thing. The problem, of course, is going to be that then city governments are going to say, well, we don't know if any of this is real. What's. What, what are people complaining about? Right.

[Adam Becker]

That's the. I think what I'm somewhat concerned about with this sort of stuff. I mean, it's really cool.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Like, oh, I'm not saying it's not negative consequences, but, like, then, you know.

[Adam Becker]

What about a world for, like. Yeah. Where that plays out logically, where someone's like, well, we can't trust any of the videos we're seeing, so we're only going to count people's votes or, like, concerns lodged in person because we can at least prove that that. Does that shut out people with disabilities or does it give an excuse to just not listen to your constituents? I just think that all of this is really compelling and interesting and exciting, but it also introduces a lot of moral questions that we, society, need to start talking about, you know, as to how we're going to deal with a world where you can very easily make a video of anything that is completely indistinguishable from reality.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And then what?

[Adam Becker]

I mean, that's the question. What do we do in that world.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Where suddenly there's nothing to do? Bad news for you.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, yeah, there. Is there.

[Adam Becker]

No, I'm saying.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm literally saying, oh, my God, the tsunami is coming.

[Adam Becker]

I'm not saying we need to stop the tsunami. I'm just saying, like, physically, if you're doing the tsunami, if you want to take the tsunami metaphor to attend and tsunami is coming, are you just going to stand there? Are you going to go walk somewhere else? Would that even help? Who are you going to talk to in the five minutes before the tsunami hits? I think there are a lot of questions about how we as a society should, like, change our approach to thinking about content or how we should, like, be having conversations about these sort of technologies. I think there are a lot of things one can do that are not just, no, no AI anymore, because obviously that's not an actual answer.

[Paris Martineau]

Pardon me for this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So Google has created VO3, which is the tool that is really stimulating this conversation. Like, this is where these videos are coming from. And Google, by the way is surprisingly safety focused as is anthropic. I think a lot of people. Steve, Steve. And I'm not sure I agree with this was talked about yesterday, Venice AI which claims to be a completely uncensored AI. Nothing is off limits. You can do whatever you want with it including making, you know, images of people that are real. Now I'm not sure. I don't think this is. I'm not thrilled about this, but I don't know how it's not illegal.

[Paris Martineau]

We create new institutions. I'm going to go back to Gutenberg. When print came out, it was not trusted. The provenance was not clear. Anybody could make a pamphlet. And you trusted people you knew. Until we created the institutions of editing and publishing become magazines.

[Jeff Jarvis]

How long did that take?

[Paris Martineau]

Century.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, well I'm not gonna be here for that part. But so.

[Paris Martineau]

So when steam powered presses came out, there was an explosion of speech and we. And Harper's magazine was created to find the good stuff because there was. There was too much. That's the response we need is what is it we create to solve this problem rather than just merely complaining about it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm more interested in the technology and what's. What's changing. That's all.

[Paris Martineau]

Okay. Okay. So let's try this as. As. Because I see you were in the chat. Let's take away both extremes. Kurzweil and Kurzweil complainers. Right. So I was rolling my eyes. Ray's an amazing guy. He's had a lot of history. But. But singularity and all that just had me roll my eyes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think. We don't know. Wait a minute though.

[Paris Martineau]

Then you have the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You can say that, but that's just speculative as him saying that's going to happen. We don't know.

[Paris Martineau]

But I'm saying if you're complaining about the person who just now was dealing with complaints about the AI culture then I think that we've got to look at the other side of this and say that those who are pushing the high end of this, that's on one realm. Okay. So if you want to do away with that level and deal with what's actually happening today and how it's going. Okay, let's do that. But I think then you would eliminate both extremes. That's okay. I'm okay with that.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. I'm down to talk about what's actually happening with AI but I think that means we don't talk about what people say is probably maybe going to happen in five to 10 years.

[Jeff Jarvis]

If you believe that's B.S. i don't, but I think it's just as much B.S. to say it ain't going to happen. To say it is going to happen. I don't think we know what's going to happen. And I think that I can, I think you can demonstrably say we didn't know what was going to happen three years ago show that's happening right now. So it's not predictable. That's part of the weird thing about AI it's just not linear, it's not predictable. It's not what we thought was going to have happen. So I don't, I think saying there isn't going to be a singularity is equally ill founded as there is. We don't, we just don't know. We just don't know. I don't, I think though we've made that argument, that's my biggest complaint is, is you know, the Emily Benders of the world are making an argument. Fine, fine, we've heard it, we don't need to belabor it. And so I'm just much more interested in what we are doing, what's happening right now. And in fact I think you need to do that. When Emily Peters says I don't want to look at AI because I know it's bad, okay, I'm not going to look at it, that tells me that she is not in this world.

[Paris Martineau]

Well you concede the same about the singularitarianisms who are not in this world.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I told you it's not, it's irrelevant. That's not important. The question is AGI then why do we have law is irrelevant. We've asked that question. I think we've done it. I think we've done it. I don't think we need to do it again and again and again and again. I think it's much more interesting to talk about what is happening so that you can, I mean you still need to know what's happening to make a judgment about it and to decide how to fight it if that's what you choose to do. Which is I think completely legitimate it. But you need to see it, you need to know what's happening. So that's I think our mission here, not so much to go. I mean I agree there shouldn't be billionaires, but I don't think there's any value in going on and on about that. Right. That's I guess my only complaint. I Here's a, here's a good story from Alison Johnson in the Verge. We talked about it on Sunday. Google's VO3AI video generator is a slop monger's dream.

[Paris Martineau]

See, I think that's negative.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think that it is negative. That's okay to have a negative.

[Adam Becker]

Not allowed to talk about negative stuff?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No. Okay, let's take a break. We are. You're watching intelligent machines where there is a little disagreement, I think, over where we should go next. Think about it. We'll pause and we'll decide in a moment. But first, a word from our sponsor, StoryBlock. I know Jeff and Paris know the pain of crappy CMSS content management systems. If you're in marketing, if you're an agency, pretty much anywhere you're creating content for the Internet, you know the pain of legacy cmss. They promise enterprise grade features, but deliver slow, clunky systems that need dev support for even the smallest updates. And when you're trying to move fast, That's a nightmare. Storyblok changes that. Unlike those monolithic CMS's, Storyblock is headless. And by the way, I am a fan of this idea. It completely decouples your back end from your front end. Okay, so you can create a robust backend with all the tools, all the features, a great API and then developers can build in any framework they want for the front end. React. Astro Vue marketers get this incredible CMS because that's part of the back end. An intuitive visual editor to create and update content. You don't have to fill out a dev ticket to move it three pixels to the left. And oh best part, storyblocks scales because they're focused on the backend. Whether you're a freelancer or part of a global enterprise. You're going to get a global CDN, you're going to get AWS data centers in the US, Europe and Asia. StoryBlock is built for performance at scale and StoryBlock is enterprise ready with role based access control, enterprise SLAs. This is all built in and top tier security. All the stuff Fortune 500s demand. One global e commerce giant switched to StoryBlock. They were able to cut their content update cycles from weeks to hours. Another major brand empowered marketing to launch campaigns completely independently. Which is great for the marketers, but it also frees up the devs for bigger projects. StoryBlock has an API first approach. Your content loads fast anywhere in the world. That means better ux, higher engagement, improved SEO. And with their real time visual editor, marketers see exactly what their content will look like before publishing. No more endless back and forth over minor tweaks. It's a win win right Devs get fewer interruptions, marketers get more autonomy. Everybody's happy. Oh, and if you're an agency, StoryBlock offers multi client workspaces, flexible permissions, seamless collaboration tools. You can manage multiple projects without disrupting development workflows. I mean, storyblocks is perfect whether you're a startup, an enterprise, maybe you're an agency juggling multiple clients. StoryBlock gives you the power and the flexibility you need. Try it today. Storyblock.com Twitter 25 use the code TWiT25. TWiT listeners get 20% off for three months on growth and growth plus plans. That's storyblock.com TwitTV-25 the offer code is TWiT25 for 20% off the first three months on growth and growth plus plans. S T O R Y B L O K.com Twitt TV-25 the offer code is TWIT25. We thank them so much for their support of intelligent machines. Thank you, StoryBlock. All right, you guys pick a story. I don't care. Anything you want to talk about, it's fine with me. Actually, I got to show you this. This is hysterical. This is also from Steve Gibson. Let me see if I can find this for you. Microsoft, as you know, fired a significant number of developers and I think Satya Nagella joins a number of CEOs who say something like 30% of our code is now written by AI. Well, there was a Reddit thread. Let me see if I can find this. There was a Reddit thread of copilot commits. You know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna open up Steve's show notes because that's where it came up.

[Adam Becker]

It's always a Reddit thread.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There's always a Reddit thread. Here's the example. Here's one example. Example. And, and it's this. The Reddit thread is hysterical because people are just mocking this. So this is to explain it. We're [e-mail] GitHub. This is Microsoft official GitHub for.net source code. And you can see this is copilot, Microsoft's coding AI. The GitHub coding AI. Copilot wants to merge 13 commits into main. So it's a pull request from copilot base. Actually, let me do a different one. This one, this one's not as good as the one Steve used because it's a little bit clearer. Copilot essentially misunderstands the problem, writes the code. This one is an out of range check in a Regular expression parser. Instead of trying to fix the underlying code, Copilot says, oh, just fine. What we'll do is we'll just test and see if it's out of range and we'll say, no, no answer. So the, the developer, in this case a guy named Steven to says, hey, Copilot, that seems like it's fixing the symptom rather than the underlying issue. Let's see if we can fix the underlying issue. Take a look. Copilot says, oh, you're right. This fixed fix addresses the symptom, not the root cause. And then it just doubles down. It says, I responded to your question about the underlying issue. The fix ensures graceful failure. But you're new. And then on and on. And the Reddit thread basically said, feel sorry for the Microsoft employees who are now told you've got to use Copilot when you're coding and spend probably somebody speculated, more time trying to get Copilot to fix the problem than it would have taken just to fix it. You could see this in the, in the, in the thread which is now closed, by the way. Yeah, I like this guy's comment. Copilot, where can I buy a good source of popcorn? They're watching this back and forth. Eventually Taub told Copilot, just go pound sand. But the real point of this is it seems like Microsoft's telling programmers, yeah, this is how you should work from now on.

[Adam Becker]

I mean, do you think that's a good idea? If it's.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, it's a terrible idea. And unfortunately, this is. I'm just, I'm backing you up here. This is one example of how, how companies have.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, there was a story I put into Amazon. Programmers unnamed complained that they feel like they're working in the warehouse now because the pressure is on them to be more. I don't want to say efficient companies.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Are so all in on this coding thing.

[Paris Martineau]

But I think they're backing off too. We saw Duolingo two weeks ago. Oh yeah, this is all going to be. If you're jobbing AI, you're not nowhere. And, and obviously the tanked the morale.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Of the place acknowledged employee anxiety over AI. What he said even in the initial memo is this is just, we're just firing contract workers. Don't worry, you're.

[Paris Martineau]

You're next as the.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You're still going to have a job. And of course the employees are saying you're not at risk. To be clear, I don't see AI replacing what our employees do do.

[Adam Becker]

It says guy who had fired yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. I mean I think the market will as I said before on this one, the market will judge this if, if the duo ling. If the AI does not create suitable duo lingo lessons, the ones that the contractors used to create, the people stop using dual lingo.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And that solves only works if it works similar. Now the problem with the co pilot thing is I just have some sympathy for people like Stephen Traub who have to wrestle with this thing because the boss says you got to.

[Paris Martineau]

That's it's, it's always.

[Adam Becker]

That's a trend I've been seeing a lot lately among executives in tech and like tech ish businesses. Lately is there have been a number of these CEO letters coming out lately that have argued that like oh for instance I saw in this week may have been related to something to do with Axios, but not their journalism arm. That said like any new business decision or kind of role you're hiring for or new kind of line of work you want to be doing, in order to get any funding for that, you need to first argue why you're not using AI for that. I'm just like, that's just.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You had to prove that I couldn't do it instead. Dead right.

[Adam Becker]

And I just think I remember that. Yes. I just think that seems like a silly rule.

[Paris Martineau]

Again, you had Jim Vande Hei on this morning talking about how it's going to cause a white collar bloodbath and that seems like a warning to his own staff.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

And that's we should be able to.

[Adam Becker]

Use new technologies without having it be all or nothing black or white about it. You hire people because you trust them. You can send a letter, be like, yeah, you should make use of this new technology. We've got your OpenAI Pro subscription here or please use it to do better work. But ultimately you should be hiring people because you trust them to do the best work for the job.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No the geek double oh seven in our discord reminds me that Cory Doctorow warned us of this a year ago. In August of last year he wrote the reverse Centaur Apocalypse is on us. Microsoft, Oracle and other bossware dealers are transforming our workplaces with digital whips. The relationship between tech and labor, you know, it was not it was ill covered. Paul Thurat has written about it. But the Microsoft Build conference, the developers conference last week was overrun by protests. It wasn't really fully covered, but Paul's stories showed mass crowds outside and interruptions for pretty much every presentation inside, including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's presentation at the keynote, which the press said was interrupted several times. Paul said it was interrupted 30 plus times by protesters. In this case the protesters protesting what.

[Paris Martineau]

Seemed to be their protest.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They're protesting Microsoft's involvement with Israel. Microsoft says yes. They're Azure customers, as many, many countries and companies are. We don't provide them with specific tools for the military, that kind of thing. The protesters who were highly organized said, you know, you. There were posters that said Microsoft employees, you have blood on your hands. And the protesters in the keynote were in fact employees. Well, former employees now, but they were employees at the time. That's how they got in. I pointed out. I think we're going to see something very similar soon in a more widespread context about AI in general.

[Paris Martineau]

But we shouldn't. That's the thing. It's not what they're. I'm going to go back to the interview. I said multiple times he's not complaining about technology. What he's complaining about is something.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, that's why I like that. I thought Adam was good for that reason. He wasn't anti technology.

[Paris Martineau]

No.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No.

[Paris Martineau]

And so I think that that's what you're predicting in terms of this backlash is aimed at the people we don't like rather than the technology we do.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right. By the way, I finally found the Reddit subreddits my new hobby. He says watching AI slowly drive Microsoft employees insane. He says I actually feel bad for the employees being assigned to review these poll requests, but if this is the future of our field, I think I went off the ride.

[Paris Martineau]

You a little breaking news.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Nvidia's results are out.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes. Oh that. I meant to lead with that. This is what the whole market's been waiting for.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes. With bated breath.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The concern being what that Nvidia would.

[Paris Martineau]

That they would take because of the tariffs, because the inability to sell chips to China because of the general economy, because they're getting slapped around for. For. For that. By. By the administration.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They're kind of being considered a bellwether then for the. The whatever.

[Paris Martineau]

General. Yeah. I mean when we get to a lot so. So Ben Evans did a chart of intel versus Nvidia and it's just amazing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Until this way.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, until down by. By big steps. But, but, but hockey stick for Nvidia just way the hell up.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Revenue of 44.1 billion up percent year over year.

[Paris Martineau]

That's pretty. It's really Google impressive. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. How's the market reacting?

[Paris Martineau]

Up 4% after hours.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. Not that I care about the market But I do want to know. It's an indication in my lifetime, you know.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. Well, there's that too.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They beat on earnings. They did see an 8 and now see this is going to make the President MAD. Had 8 billion dollar impact from the China export rules.

[Paris Martineau]

Yep. But then he also came out with a new chip designed just for China.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right. Which they've done before. So they're. I guess the point is continuing to innovate for China, which is not as much as for us.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean I remain impressed by Jensen Wong. I don't know if I should be, but by everything he's doing in the company.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He's a good billionaire there.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, I hope so. I, well, I thought others, I thought others were too.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's easy to get fooled. I don't know if they, they go bad, if they, they, they live past their Best Buy date or if they were bad all along. We just didn't know.

[Paris Martineau]

Question. That's exactly. But he's very impressive with the company. They. I saw some other stories earlier this week that, that there were problems in delivering the racks and the. Whatever you calls them for Blackwell. Well, and they've solved those problems and how they're cooling them and how they're doing other things and so they're on track to keep delivering. And Nvidia is, is fueling this. And yeah, there's competition but still. And Huang has managed to, to balance going to both Beijing and to the Middle east with Trump.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right. Well, by the way, that kind of parenthetically that's why Apple has been in the hot seat this week. Week. Because apparently the President invited not only Jensen Huang but Tim Cook to join him in Saudi Arabia. And I don't know if I mentioned on this show I did on MacBreak weekly when he was introducing, when he was in Saudi Arabia, Trump said here's my friend Jensen Huang. I don't see Tim Cook here.

[Paris Martineau]

He did. Yep.

[Jeff Jarvis]

To which he responded later in the week with a 25% tariff on iPhones, which I think I, I've never heard of a tariff on a single product.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. Where's the emergency that justifies the tariff?

[Adam Becker]

We're learning a lot of new things.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A lot of new things.

[Adam Becker]

A lot of new things in a wild five months.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes. So this was a good article I put in here. It's a little complicated to explain from China talk. Jordan Schneider writing just count the server racks. So he's a little miffed because while we do have this export restriction on China for high end AI chips, we just made A big deal with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirate to send them a lot of chips and a lot of money and a lot of technology. And his concern is how do we know that they're going to stay our friends? He says the point of diffusion rules. These are the rules to keep AI chips secure and out of Chinese hands, both in terms of physical security and the use of their compute via. And this is important remote access. It's possible that the agreements we're making with the UAE and the KSA Saudi Arabia will replace and improve upon the functionality in those countries, in particular the diffusion rules. But it's also possible it won't. I do not consider them reliable allies going forward. And there are various reasons even the best versions of these agreements would make me deeply uncomfortable. His line, just count the server racks. This is what David Sacks said when asked. Well, here, the high. Here the here are the high points. America's head of China in the naive. I think we actually believe that to be true. Diffusion rules serve to protect America's technological lead where it matters. Uae, Qatar and Saudi Arabia are not reliable American allies, nor are they important markets for our technology. We should not be handing them large shares of the world's most valuable resource, compute. Sachs says, well, it's easy to verify whether they're keeping their agreements or just you just count the server racks. To which Jordan points out, well, there's remote compute and it's also very easy to put dummy GPUs and server racks and make it look like they're doing something.

[Paris Martineau]

So really was with shots to China. Is that what the fear is here?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, that and, well, two things. Yes. One, that they'll say remote compute to China and two, that they're not going to remain our allies. I mean, let's face it, the KSA did chop up Khashoggi because they didn't like him, because he said some bad things about him. I could see why Tim Cook, a gay man, did not want to go to Saudi Arabia, but I could see why Jensen Wong did, because who is the chief beneficiary of all of this? Jensen Huang Nvidia.

[Paris Martineau]

And so what do we think of.

[Adam Becker]

Him as a result of new leather jacks jackets?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, his. I. I just watched another keynote. It was a little long on, on the sleeve. I thought he could have gotten them, you know, now I think we're getting.

[Jeff Jarvis]

A little too nitpicky here.

[Adam Becker]

All right, I'm sorry. If you're a billionaire, you should have a custom leather jacket for every event.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

It was a little.

[Adam Becker]

What else do you do?

[Paris Martineau]

You know, so remember we talked about the show a couple years ago by Jurgen Schmidt Huber, one of the many godfathers of, of a guy. So he's now in, I think, Saudi Arabia. He's. Yeah, it's line 107. Rest of world wrote about this. And so you, you're seeing this, this, I think, surprising or puzzling rush of people and money to Saudi Arabia and from money from Saudi Arabia around. And so it's, it's, it's a trend to keep an eye on besides just counting the racks, count the bucks.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Absolutely. I mean, they're making the argument, well, there's no issue about electricity in Saudi Arabia because, of course, they pump oil out of the ground. They have fairly good supply of it. There's also no lack of money in Saudi Arabia. Remember Saudi Arabia, people are, you know, Saudi Arabia is trying to replace the pro golf tour with their own LIV Tour with the support of the President. That's about money. That's not. Because golf is big in Saudi Arabia.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, well, it's also, it's, it's, it's, it's greenwashing of its own sort. Greenwashing.

[E]

Sports washing.

[Paris Martineau]

Sports washing. Thank you. I was making a golf joke there, but.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, I get the green beans washing.

[Adam Becker]

Yes. Greens washing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, but.

[Paris Martineau]

But now in technology. So it's tech washing. It's, it's token washing now it's. Well, look at us. We're. We're a force in technology.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, we're investing. Schmidt Huber was appointed Director of Artificial Intelligence, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. He's currently based. Since launching a blueprint to modernize its economy and society, known as Vision 2030, Saudi Arabia has committed to and launched an ambitious infrastructure and futuristic products adding up to more than a trillion dollars. Schmidt Huber told the New York Times, yes, it would cost money, but there's a lot of money in this country. Well, there you go. You're saying the quiet part out loud, Schmidt. Okay. AI He. It has been said, he says that AI is the new oil or the new electricity.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, let me ask you this question. Is it because there's an argument that says that by keeping the chips out of China, all we have done is to spark more Chinese innovation and more Chinese competition.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, hence deep seek. Right, right.

[Paris Martineau]

But. But also. And now in chip making and all kinds of things, was it a mistake take to forbid China to have our chips?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

What do you think? That's a question.

[Adam Becker]

I mean, Was there ever a world where they were not going to get their hands on those chips? I feel like that's kind of naive.

[Paris Martineau]

But that's what the administration's plural thought, including Biden.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, yeah. That's where the, the restrictions started. Yeah, I, you know, I, I don't know. I, I, I kind of. Look, there's a precedent for this in nuclear non proliferation. Right. Once the atom bomb was invented, we made took great steps to keep other countries from getting it. We didn't do very well, but we managed to keep it out of the hands of most. There are only a, you know, a dozen nuclear powers in the world.

[Paris Martineau]

Is this equivalent?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I mean that's what some people think. I'm kind of of the, I don't know. My, my tendency is to say let science should see no borders. And I feel like this is more science than anything else. The science should see no borders. But then, you know, the argument of nuclear non proliferation is pretty persuasive.

[Paris Martineau]

But I don't think this is nuclear because it can, so much can be done with it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right. You change the world with it. All right, but you can make that.

[E]

Argument for nuclear power though.

[Adam Becker]

You can make that argument, you can make that argument for nuclear bombs change the world, just not in the sense that you'd normally use that phrase.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Schmidt. Hoober's attitude is I think that AGI is coming. He's the father of AI. Although there are. AI has many fathers ever.

[Paris Martineau]

And a few godfathers.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He says Saudi Arabia is changing faster than almost anybody. The country has six times more people than it did 50 years ago. Most of them are young and optimistic. Many believe AI will change their lives for the better. Remarkably, there's sudden, suddenly huge opportunities for women. Surprises me. Can you get a driver's license? That's not one of the opportunities.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, I'd say. I, maybe they're talking comparatively Schmidt, over this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'd like to see this percentage of startups in Saudi Arabia with female founders is higher than it is in Europe or California. What? Well, maybe, maybe our impression is wrong.

[Adam Becker]

Well, in California at least that's just because the percentage of startups with women founders is very, very low anyway. So it could especially looking at a much smaller population of would be quite easy to beat those numbers. I'm not sure about Europe, but I'd assume maybe it's similar, I don't know.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, similar in Europe to California. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You know, if I remember this in the uae, that there was a deep understanding that the oil, the oil which has been A huge boom for this region is not going to last forever. And, and that the smart thing to do would be to plan for the future and diversify. Right.

[Adam Becker]

I mean, that's part of the reason why they're investing in sports, both like real sports and esports. I'm sure it's part of the reason that all this is happening as well.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'd like to be open to the idea that maybe the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has changed. You know, it's a kingdom that kind.

[Paris Martineau]

Of doesn't sit right with the limited flexibility there.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, here's from the Saudi Embassy in the usa. Women's empowerment in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Key achievements in gender equality and women's empowerment. Look, I'm going to keep an open mind on this. You know, maybe they have decided 37% of the nation's workforce is female, which is considerably less than the US but it's more than none. Saudi women own more than 300,000 businesses. Anti harassment law was introduced in 2018. New laws in 2022 combat early or forced marriages, setting the minimum marriageable age to 18.

[Paris Martineau]

You know, maybe probably beats some states in the U.S. right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I'm, I'm open to the idea that maybe, maybe my notion of the kingdom is out of date, but this.

[Adam Becker]

Is this correction from the chat. Women can drive in Saudi Arabia.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. They changed recent law.

[Paris Martineau]

That's recent.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They changed that law.

[Paris Martineau]

I mean we're not, we're not exactly in an age at a moment of free trade, which is ironic given the end of the spectrum is in charge. But if you truly had free trade around AI, you'd see tremendous.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's kind of. Yeah, that's kind of my inclination is towards that. That's, that's. I guess what I was saying is I think openness, it isn't, it isn't a bomb. Right. It's. It's a world changing technology. I don't know. These things are complicated. Take a break. More to come. You're watching intelligent machines brought to you by our friends at OutSystems, the leading AI powered application and agent development platform. Now this is a great story. For more than 20 years, the mission of Outsystems has been to give every company the power to innovate through software. There were the experts in low code, no code, DevSecOps, automation. Then along comes AI. And OutSystems was ready. They were there. Look, in business, we've dealt with it. In our business, every business deals with it. Typically you have two choices. It's the old build versus buy conundrum. You can buy buy off the shelf SaaS products, you know, for speed, you got it. But you also lose flexibility and you know, frankly some differentiation because you're not the only one using it. Or you can build it yourself. That's the choice we made for our sales system. And I could tell you at great cost, great expense and maybe not the best software ever either. Well, there's a new way. There's not. It's no longer just a fork in the road. There's a third way. AI forges the way for another path. And nobody's better to do this than Outsystems. The fusion of AI low code and DevSecOps automation into a development platform. That means it's not just build or buy. You can build custom applications with AI agents just as easy as buying generic off the shelf sameware. And of course, Outsystems builds in flexibility, scalability, security, all standards standard. With AI powered low code teams can build custom future proof applications at the speed of buying. You get fully automated architecture, you get security, you get integrations, you get data flows, you get permissions, all the things you need. See, frankly, Outsystems is the last platform you'll ever buy because you can use it to build anything and customize and extend your core systems. Build your future with OutSystems. Visit OutSystems.com to learn more. Again, that's OutSystems.com Twitt. We thank him so much for their support of intelligent machines. Poor Henry Blodgett.

[Adam Becker]

What are you talking about? He's finally found a workplace that works for him. He's the only person as he says he and this will sound like it's a mean joke, but this was the the content of his first blog. He can sexually harass his coworkers without it being a problem. Now he actually said that he his first blog was about how he created a sexy lady female AI chat bot who was hot. And he was like normally in the workplace I would not want to say anything about this, but because it's my AI employee I just messaged her about it. She was like, oh, aren't you fun?

[E]

That's what, that's what they really want is slaves.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So tell me about Henry Blodgett.

[Paris Martineau]

Henry's an amazing character.

[Adam Becker]

So Henry was an famously cannot trade securities.

[Paris Martineau]

Well yeah, he was an analyst and he got in big trouble. And I think that the view is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

About go to Jim Cramer though let's be fair. Yeah, you can have second act. No one's ever always in trouble.

[Paris Martineau]

And then he started the Business Insider and people laughed when he sat down on the piano. But as a business great success, it worked a huge success and sold to Axel Springer at a time when Springer couldn't get the FT and couldn't get the Wall Street Journal. So they bought Henry and that was a beautiful marriage for a long time and kept building up and Henry started more things there and it made money. And then he suddenly just left want to do his own thing. Thing. He retired. So now he's created an AI newsroom where he is the only employee.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Now, I have to say, to be fair to Henry, what perfect link bait we're still talking about.

[Adam Becker]

I will say that's the reason why I wanted to preface by being like it sounds like I'm being really mean. But I think part of the thing that is brilliant about Henry Blodgett is he understands perfectly how to create a blog that people will read. He's the sort of of mad genius behind Business Insider blogs such as like the ones that make you really mad. I'll give you an example.

[Paris Martineau]

Yes, I'll give you. I watched him because I've known Henry. I actually like Henry. I've had Henry come and talk to my students and I knew Henry and pardon me for this in Davos. And Henry was for Henry.

[Adam Becker]

Davos Henry.

[Jeff Jarvis]

By the way, we someday we'll talk about what's happening at Davos.

[Adam Becker]

Whoa.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's of falling apart.

[Paris Martineau]

The question. But Henry was flying back. I think it was from Davos. And he took a picture of his knees in the plane and this like, like Henry, like we haven't all done this. So. So then this is my flight back. So it started that entire genre of I took a train for three hours and here's what happened, right. That started from that invent link bait.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is that what you're saying?

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, no, no.

[Adam Becker]

But Business Insider perfected a very specific type of it. Something that I'm trying to think of the best examples. It's stuff like I took a really long flight across country and economy and here's what you need to know about flying in an economy seat. And then it's like 75 photos and being like the seats are very small. The they don't offer you anything free to drink. You have to pay to check a bag now. And everyone's like, what are you doing? Why is this dummy posting this? But it gets a million clicks.

[Paris Martineau]

So it does. Was what. What made Henry Henry was this was.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I think we should Henry BLODGETT on this show.

[Paris Martineau]

Absolutely. Henry's a delightful guy. We have Benito.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Let's see if we can get Henry.

[Paris Martineau]

And. And so we should have more people who use the AI.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, that's. And I'm gonna actually go through his blog, most recent post, because he's got some pretty good ideas about it.

[Adam Becker]

You know who we should get on the show then? Jonah Peretti.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, I'm up for that.

[Adam Becker]

That big AI fan. Big AI user.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What's he doing these days? Buzzfeed.

[Paris Martineau]

Remaking buzzfeed.

[Adam Becker]

Trying to make buzzfeed situation now, kind of. I mean, they have some writers.

[Paris Martineau]

What? Seriously? Both Henry and HuffPost in the time and BuzzFeed all made their mark by rewriting everybody else by doing what AI is accused of doing today. Aggregation. So. Aggregation. Right, right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And so you go to preservation and aggravation. Right?

[Paris Martineau]

True.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Patrick Delahanny said, this is the classic. The most popular food in every state by state. And then they'll say something like, california's most popular food is White Castle, just to people off and generate a million clicks. You won't believe what they said. Idiots. But that's.

[Paris Martineau]

But BuzzFeed did the. Well, actually, no, BuzzFeed did. Didn't. What was it? What was the site started by? Who wrote the book?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

What was his site?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I can't remember, but I know what you're talking about.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. So that was the. You won't believe what happened next because that was a virtuous effort to draw attention to important and good news.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Taboola.

[Paris Martineau]

No, no, no, no, no, no. Dare you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, no, no. I know. We've talked about.

[Paris Martineau]

Thank you, Upworthy. Thank you very much. Much so. But that's. That invented the horrible thing of. You won't believe what happened next. Henry invented the knees on the airplane. Buzzfeed invented Listicles.

[Jeff Jarvis]

See, this is. This is the. This is when this show is at its best. It's explaining this stuff. Keep up the good work.

[Paris Martineau]

HuffPost invented the stars don't have a blog. So darling. She never said darling, actually. But darling, we thought she did. You must blog here. And created that. That was. That was the wonderful early days of all this.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, the good old days. Back when it was. Anyway, here's what Henry wrote about using AI. He says AI can do a lot of routine newsroom tasks pretty well with breath, breathtaking speed. And by the way, I concur with this because these are the kinds of things I do with perplexity. Brief me about topics the way an expert human would. It's a great way to get a briefing. He said I used to have to go to the library and print out financial documents. Imagine that. Prepare me for interviews, though. It's preparing me for interviews as a guest and host. I never am a guest, so for me it's just host. But, yes, absolutely. He says these briefings are similar to those a junior producer might have given me in the old days. He's exactly right. They're better. They're better draw fun cartoons and produce photorealistic images. Watch. Don't. Wow. Well, no, I do some of that Bonito.

[Paris Martineau]

Do you ever use it for you? You use AI to enhance our cards. And we certainly have.

[Jeff Jarvis]

One of the things he does.

[E]

I remove the. I remove the thing up the top. The, the, the bug. I, I move that using AI. That's pretty much what I. That's pretty much it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. Oh, well, some of our shows, we.

[E]

Use more and then transcriptions. You know, we do transcripts.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What's going on?

[Adam Becker]

She's trying to mess with that was trying to mess with the thing that he's got to remove via AI. I wanted to make his job a little harder for him. I was falling down a deep hole, but.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And he does illustrations, write competent drafts of news articles that I'm not sure I agree with. No, no. If your reaction to this is to roll your eyes and scoff, please check.

[Paris Martineau]

You don't know how rich I am, says Henry.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I just asked Perplexity to write about Cotter giving President TRUMP A747. As you're reading this, remember, human reporters make mistakes, too, especially in drafts, he says. I. I didn't see any obvious errors. And I have to say, I. I know people say that I should be not trusting anything, Perplexity says, but I haven't found an error in ages. I mean, this thing is. Is pretty darn accurate. Sources are identified, appear to be real, but a rigorous edit would probably turn up mistakes. Yeah, that's probably true, but I'm not publishing those things. The article is well researched, well organized, and clearly written. The editorial conclusions are reasonable. With a few minutes of work, I think a good human editor could check the sources, rewrite the headline, punch up the language, and publish an article many readers would find helpful and informative. This from the inventor of knees on an airplane, of course.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, but this is also. So Henry. When he came and talked to my class, Henry. Back in the day, he didn't want to hire journalists from newspapers because they come in the morning, they sit down, they have their call coffee, they Think they can read the paper for two hours before they do anything? I want somebody who's written five things already. It's about volume.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, well, that's the. That's the blog point of view, isn't it?

[Paris Martineau]

I mean, Nick Denton said the same thing at Gawker. I don't want to hire a journalist. They bring bad habits.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right. They actually think and write. Rewrite. People rewrite. Discuss. He used complexity. Discuss. Debate news from the perspective of multiple journalists. That's kind of it. I haven't thought of that. I might try that where you have it.

[Paris Martineau]

Try to convince me.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He said. If you told me that I was reading a transcript of a human gabfest at a morning editorial meeting, I would conclude that I was fortunate to have energetic, thoughtful colleagues who enjoy exchanging ideas. Were all the ideas brilliant and fully formed and articulated in the form of publishable editorials? No. Are yours edit drafts? I think I. But see, I'm a good editor. Good copy editor, I think. But I guess if you were working all by yourself, it might be nice to have Claude. He says, I've. I asked Claude to edit a draft of my novel. After reading and.

[Paris Martineau]

Wait, wait, wait, wait. Henry wrote a novel?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Apparently.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh.

[Jeff Jarvis]

After reading and understanding 350 pages in under 10 seconds. Claude had some sophisticated observations. Condense TLDR articles and documents. Convenient bullet points. I often want to do that. I have not.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, let me rant about that for a moment, if I may. I think the biggest. I said this earlier to the data, to Jason. I think the biggest tangible impact of AI in media is that every damned thing in news now starts with three bullet points that summarize what comes below.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, that's the Axios thing.

[Adam Becker]

That is. No, that's. That's Business insiders. True.

[Benito Gonzalez]

But it's.

[Paris Martineau]

Now AI is legacy. So the Wall Street Journal does it. CNBC does it. I don't know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, they do it in defense against AI Maybe. No, no.

[Adam Becker]

I mean, most of these places, it's.

[Paris Martineau]

Generated by AI I think the Journal.

[Adam Becker]

And they get it wrong sometimes, and it's kind of funny, but it's.

[Paris Martineau]

But it's the. It's the. It's the worst combination of AI and PowerPoint.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, right.

[Paris Martineau]

Everything becomes three. Three bullets. And it's not readable to me.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, I. And also. Yeah, well, go ahead. You know, if you're. You and I are not busy enough, Jeff. We need. We need. We need. We like to read things, take our time, research and analyze questions and write competent reports. He's talking about the deep research feature Perplexity has that. Do my AI tools do these tests better than humans? No. At least not better than the best humans. But respectfully, they do better.

[Paris Martineau]

Some humans I know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

However, some humans I know I can have. I haven't. No. He says humans that are still learning the craft. He's trying to be generous.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, but that's, that's the, that, that is the. I don't buy that AI is going to destroy the job market all around, but I do think what it affects is entry level.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I agree.

[Paris Martineau]

Jobs.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I agree.

[Paris Martineau]

Except that companies, when they stop hiring them, are going to realize that was their best path to finding future employees who were cheap.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And they still need high end employees. And the only way to get high end employees is to grow them. You need a minor league team, you need, need a single A ball if you want to get major league players.

[E]

People need a place to learn how to do that stuff.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[E]

That's what, that's what all jobs are for.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You know, when I got into radio, the whole idea was you started a very small market. It was a very small market. Monterey, a radio station that used to be an old brothel with its antenna. I could see it out the window. It was in the ocean.

[Paris Martineau]

Because it was a format.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, well, at the time it was like pop. You know, they called it adult contemporaries, pop music. And I left because they went to beautiful music and they said here, every.

[Paris Martineau]

You had the right voice for that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Every 10 minutes you read the weather report and you say what time it is and then push a button and then it was music.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, it's things that don't disturb you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

They don't have beautiful music stations anymore. I never thought of that.

[Adam Becker]

No, we just have the lo Fi jams. Girl.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's the same thing for your generation. Beautiful music. The whole pitch was, play it in the office. It won't offend anybody.

[Paris Martineau]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's Montvani. You know, it screams, God, I left that station. But you work your way up from the small market to the medium.

[Paris Martineau]

Sounds like a Howard Stern rant. You got to, you got to start low.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And starting a small podcast could sound terrible in a, in a, in a small venue and nobody would hear it. Nowadays, when you, like I look at Henry, you know, everything he's ever made is available public.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So his worst efforts are right there. I, I mean, that's the way it is, though. Now. He's, he's not disadvantaged. Everybody, his generation is that way. Right. Nobody's doing it in private.

[Paris Martineau]

I was on the college Radio station at Claremont, same thing.

[Adam Becker]

Oh, I'm jealous. And radio.

[Paris Martineau]

I once I screwed up like the first or second time, and I didn't know I had the Monitor offer on. And I ended up having two records going at once and. And the station manager called me to. To yell at me. And so I kept going. I learned and I got better. But I realized that no one was listening. So one night I said, okay, first person who calls, I'll give you 10 bucks.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Nobody, nothing.

[Paris Martineau]

Nobody was listening. So I. Then I just put on Laura Nero albums and studied.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I wish I'd thought of that. Yeah, I do remember at that small station in Monterey, the very first job, because they start you. Even as bad as that station was, I started the midnight to 7am shift on a Sunday morning, the worst possible shift. So I was running religious tapes for the first few hours and then the last couple hours I get to do a show. So it was like that's. That's how you make your.

[Adam Becker]

What were your earliest shows about?

[Jeff Jarvis]

It was just playing music. It was, you know, hey, it's. I was Dave Allen. Hey, it's Dave Allen and it's at 4:30am Wake up.

[Paris Martineau]

Wait, you were Dave Allen? Why were you Dave Allen?

[Jeff Jarvis]

I thought that's what you did when you got in the radio. You made up a name. It was the worst.

[Paris Martineau]

That's so.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It was so bad. I. I was 21 or so.

[Adam Becker]

Were there any other names that you considered but acts.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, the next name. I. Once I got to the medium market in San Jose, I was Dan Hayes.

[Paris Martineau]

Like your Hayes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Why, it's terrible. By the time I got to the major market.

[Adam Becker]

Is there some part of you that yearned to be a name that started with the D?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Sound like a potato? No, I just didn't know, you know, at that time, people were like Johnny Walker, you know, I mean, it was not, you know.

[Paris Martineau]

Do you still have tapes from that? Do you have any tapes? Oh, please tell me you have tapes. Oh, please.

[Adam Becker]

Come on. That could. And then you were dev. No, you really enjoyed names that began.

[Jeff Jarvis]

With a D. I'm a D. I'm a D. Sick. That's why.

[Adam Becker]

Listen. At least one, a couple an hour of the 24 hour twitch livestream can be your oldest radio.

[Jeff Jarvis]

If I had tapes, I would. I would. Absolutely. I have a tape from KMBR, which is 30 years ago, but it doesn't.

[Adam Becker]

That's acceptable.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That was already major market. The point though was I was running these religious tapes and I would put the tape on it. It's an hour of religious programming. So I'd lie on the floor, floor. And one time I fell asleep and I woke up and the tape was going. I don't know how long it had run out. And. And just like you, Jeff, there were no calls. I realized, oh, there's nobody listening. Not even the program director. Nobody.

[Adam Becker]

What time was it, do you think?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, God. Middle of the night. It's probably 3am did you have to.

[Paris Martineau]

Get an FCC license and all that stuff? Yeah, you have to log things and all.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. So you go. I remember it was in 1976. I took the train into New York City to the FCC office to take the test to get my fcc. They call it a third ticket. Fcc radio operator. Radio telephone operator. Third class. I think it's what it's called Somewhere I have the card and uniform.

[Adam Becker]

I feel like you'd be wearing like an aviator, like kind of in the. Those hats the old time pilots wear with the goggles. And you'd be like turning a crank pretty much to do your job.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The whole. You had to get that so that you could take meter readings every hour.

[Adam Becker]

For the radiation levels.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. You'd have to make sure because you had. The FCC said you could have this much power on your antenna. So you would have to check the transmitter every hour to make sure it was within parameters. You did, which it always was. A legal. A log for the fcc.

[Benito Gonzalez]

See.

[Adam Becker]

Did you ever wear a hard hat and scale a thing?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No, unfortunately. And I realized probably this might have affected my fertility in the long run. The transmitter was right. It was like five feet in front of me right here. And it had an audible. Anyway, this is this all memories to point out how far we have come now that I can use like Henry Blodgett AI to do my work.

[Adam Becker]

You know, people running really local analog radio stations are. Is back now. The cool kids are doing it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh yeah, The Lo Power FM and stuff. Yeah, yeah. Although why you would just not use the Internet for that? I don't know.

[Adam Becker]

I mean, some people use the Internet for it as well, but it's kind.

[E]

Of cool for locality because there's no local. There's no local on the Internet.

[Adam Becker]

You just enjoy the. You know.

[Jeff Jarvis]

By the way, Henry Blythe, it is brilliant in this piece, there is a paragraph in which he says, no AI cannot provide the brilliant insights and perspectives in writing. The smart, charismatic commentator like. And he lists a bunch of names.

[Adam Becker]

Famous names, many of whom worked for him at some point.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Many. Well, many we know, like Tom Friedman, Les Recline Derek Kevin Roos, Casey Newton, Paul Krugman. Why did he put these names in? Jason Calacanis, Peter Kyle Cop. Why do you put these names in? You think?

[Paris Martineau]

I wonder.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And then he said no. AI cannot conduct live controversial interviews with the graciousness, intelligence, wit, empathy and professionalism fearlessness of Becky Quick, Andrew Rossock and Karen Welker. Mary Lou on and on Upper whiff with Gailey King. Why do you think he put those names in? This guy is brilliant.

[Adam Becker]

SEO.

[Jeff Jarvis]

SEO baby.

[Paris Martineau]

SEO.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Chances are good that Jason notice it and say something Going to get a little pink from his clipping service that says hey, Henry Blodgett just mentioned you. He also mentions the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the Economist, New Yorker, Bloomberg, Business Insider, Washington Post.

[Paris Martineau]

He wants them to do trend stories about him.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yes, and they brilliant.

[Paris Martineau]

He is.

[Adam Becker]

A lot of those reporters did immediately tweet this whenever he published it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Of course. In short, AI is disruptive. What all this suggests to me is that for research and journalism production, AI is disruptive. Disruptive. Well, thank you Henry for that great insight. This does not mean AI will replace journalists or rapidly put world class publications out of business. It does mean that organizations that embrace AI will begin to work faster, more efficiently than ones that resist it. I agree on that. Yeah. But has to be done judiciously. Right? I'm not thrilled about the one person company that uses AI to produce 355 local daily newsletters across the country. Country. Any more than I am about the Knight Ritter writer who published his summer reading list with made up books.

[Paris Martineau]

No, that was. That was King Features.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It was King Features. That's right.

[Paris Martineau]

In the Sun Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, this was. That was a good article from Henry. I think there is some stuff in there that's good. And it's too bad he didn't name check me because we'd spend more time with it if he had. Next time.

[Paris Martineau]

I got you for free.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It got me for free.

[Paris Martineau]

Didn't. Didn't spend any bits on you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Do we want to go into. You probably did earlier with Jason Howell on AI Inside the anthropic system card scandal.

[Paris Martineau]

Scandal?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No. Is it a scandal? I don't know.

[Paris Martineau]

Talk. I didn't see it.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What?

[Adam Becker]

What is it?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Got a lot of attention. I'm not sure why come to think of it. I thought it was a scandal because people disappoint. People were disappointed by what Claude's instructions were. I have to say I. You know, Claude Anthropic came out With Claude for Opus and Sonnet this week. I had tried it. It's supposed to be much, much better. Is so safe that it won't do the things that I want it to do. Perplexity still wins for me because it's not quite as protected. You could see Claude holding back. Maybe that's why they.

[Paris Martineau]

Come on, babe. Come on. Be yourself.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Don't hold back. Let us know. Tell us what you really think. All right, what else? You guys have a lot of links.

[Paris Martineau]

So Google making movies to be nice about AI guy. 112.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Are they spending money to do this?

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, they are. They're doing a big thing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Hollywood movies.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. Shorts. Yep. Yep.

[Benito Gonzalez]

Well, shorts.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Nobody sees shorts.

[Adam Becker]

Who she's who sees, called AI On Screen, is a partnership with Santa Monica, California based Range Media Partners. They're producing films. So far, two short films have been green lit through the project. One, titled Sweetwater, tells the story of a man who visits his childhood home and discovers a hologram of his dead celebrity mother. Michael Keaton will direct and appear in the film.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It was written by his son.

[Paris Martineau]

Son.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So maybe Michael Keaton will appear as a hologram.

[Paris Martineau]

And then the second lucid examines a couple who want to escape their suffocating reality and risk everything on a device that allows them to share the same.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, that's cool. I like.

[Adam Becker]

They were looking for stories that were not doomsday tales, but AI, which I was fine with because I think we've seen so many of those. Douglas told the LA Times. Times.

[Paris Martineau]

I think it's a theme for the.

[Adam Becker]

Show right now, not overly positive middle ground stories. We can't ever criticize the precious technology that gets so much money. He didn't say that, but.

[Paris Martineau]

So they're. They're funding 15 to 20 minutes long. They aren't commercials per se, but I find this a really fascinating use of their resources to. To battle back against black people. Mirror.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Now, will it be worth watching or will it be dorky?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, that's the problem. There's always that risk if you're writing propaganda films that they will not be good and people will go ick and not watch it, especially if it's a short. That's kind of a lack of commitment on their part. May fund. Fund the next Tom Cruise movie. You really want to get some eyeballs.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, that's true. And at IO they announced their partnership with. What's his name? Darren Aronofsky.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Aronofsky, yeah.

[Paris Martineau]

Primordial soup.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[Paris Martineau]

That's another way to get them is to Give them tools. Interesting. By the way, and what's her name at the Wall Street Journal, who you got mad at?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Stern.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, Stern. She said that she got access to some measure of tools for free.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, yeah, of course.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah. The Journal could afford the 250amonth.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. But the Journal, they're know that's the place to go if you want to plan a story, to be frank.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That'S a more effective use of Google's time, if you ask me. Let me make some calls, talk to some people.

[Paris Martineau]

Reed Hastings is joining the board at Anthropic.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Okay, good.

[Paris Martineau]

That's really interesting.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Good.

[Paris Martineau]

I think that's news. All right, this is, this little. Go ahead, Paris, please.

[Adam Becker]

Mine's not related to AI. You should do one one first.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, this is more. More serious, but not bad serious.

[Adam Becker]

They're getting rid of Pocket. I just wanted to say.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, say that. Okay, go ahead and say that.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That is kind of sad.

[Paris Martineau]

It is sad, but it's Mozilla.

[Adam Becker]

I'm just, I'm just wondering what all of this sort of news means for the future of Mozilla's various enterprises.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I have to think Mozilla is not in the best shape.

[Paris Martineau]

No, it's not, unfortunately, which is really it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And it's going to really be bad if the judge. And we'll get the, the judge's decision soon. If the judge tells Google, you can no longer pay people to use Google Search. That will basically defund mozilla. It'll take 20 billion out of Apple's pocket, but it will defund Mozilla. So that may be one reason you're gonna see Mozilla kill things. I actually mentioned this on Windows Weekly. I've been. I use a note taking app called Obsidian. I become obsessed with Obsidian. And one of the things, Obsidian, by the way, that's an AI generated cat. I should have made it black and white.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, you should have.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I should have. One of the things Obsidian does though, is it lets me. Has a web clipper and let. Lets me actually clip articles I'm interested in. So I've replaced Pocket, which I did use heavily, with this. And it's nice because what it does is when it clips the, the article from the web, it preserves it puts it into markup because Obsidian is a markup editor. So it puts it in a markup, but it preserves most of the formatting. It preserves the images.

[Adam Becker]

I do also like the formatting of this, but I mean, I'm too deep in a. A hole of the bear note taking App that I don't think I can ever change.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is like Bear.

[Adam Becker]

It is like Bear, but it just, it. The markup is less visible in this, which I enjoy. Enjoy.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I. Yeah. Well, the nice thing about. Here's the nice thing. Because Bear keeps your markup files on the hard drive, you can easily go back and forth between Bare and Obsidian. They're not incompatible. Markup is markup.

[Adam Becker]

I just know that I'm bad at. I. I've been meaning to change like four different technologies, good softwares that I've used forever and I never do it. I get stuck in my ways.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm going to do. You know, I've used every note taking. I talk about this a lot. I've used every.

[Adam Becker]

And why do you like Obsidian more than the other ones?

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I, I really like Notion a lot. I think Notion is super cool and if I were working with people like on Windows Weekly, we use Notion for the show because it's collaborative so we all three have access to it. So if I were doing that, I might use Notion. But the downside of Notion is proprietary and more importantly, all the notes are stored in their system and hard to get out. It's online. Obsidian is, is, yes, proprietary, it's not open source, but because it's markdown text files on my hard drive, if Obsidian went away, I would have, I would lose nothing. I just need, need another Markdown editor and there are plenty which I have and Markdown's nice. I can use Markdown for instance in Obsidian to write a blog post. And then Obsidian has a plugin. I could post it to my blog to.

[Paris Martineau]

Can you do Obsidian collaboratively as you do on Weekly?

[Jeff Jarvis]

It would have to be a cloud account. It'd have to be cloud. That's the difference. There's no cloud presence of Obsidian. That's why you'd use Notion.

[Adam Becker]

Does Obsidian have kind of a similar tagging system as Bear?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Identical. I think you, I think there are Bear to Obsidian transports. A lot of Bear people go to Obsidian and vice versa because they're both markup tools. They're both basically.

[Adam Becker]

And I really, I like that just as someone who, like. My earliest blogging and writing. Writing experiences were all markup based. So it's kind of in my blood.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And so Microblog, my blog platform is also marked down so I can take, I can either take a clip from Obsidian or I could write a whole Obsidian note and, and publish it. So that's good enough for me. That's all I need. Obsidian does have a published Backend that will let you make a web page. I just. There are so many great plugins including AI plugins for Obsidian. In fact, that's what I used as an AI image generator in Obsidian to generate that kitty at. I really. I'm pretty fond of it. I've used them all and I think, you know, and I don't want to keep moving back and forth but I think Obsidian might be. I moved everything out of notion into Obsidian. I've used Logseek Roam. Emacs. Emacs is nice but Emacs isn't great on mobile. Obsidian has. Is. Mobile's completely cross platform so there's a lot to be said for it. I don't know. I think yeah, you should look at. At it. I. I will do. At some point I will do a club twit thing on how I use Obsidian. I'd have to sanitize it a little bit because I don't want everybody to see.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. I think that's the thing is I never want to show anybody I use Bear because it's how I use. It's all my notes about everything. Work, personal. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I kissed a girl and I like it.

[Adam Becker]

I need to do a brief aside that Anthony just posted in the club. Twitch at the most upsetting before moral panic graphic of you generated that he decided not to use because it's disgusting. But I do think you should look at it and decide if you want to put it on the screen.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Where is it? I'm looking at it right now. Let me see. So this is not Will Smith eating spaghetti. You can show this. This is good. This is exactly what I look like at dinner at home.

[Adam Becker]

Fingers.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's how I eat my spaghetti.

[Adam Becker]

It's haunting, it's visceral.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Anthony, what did you use to make that? He did. By the way, we have an AI user group that meets the first Friday of every month. It's coming up a week from Friday. Anthony. Last month and it's on. If you're in the club, it's on. The Twit plus feed talked about how he makes all of these and he. He's man, the guy puts a lot of work.

[Paris Martineau]

Pika from last month from months ago.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Pika. That's one of the things. Yeah. I imagine he'll be using some VO and stuff.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. Anthony, have you used VO at all? I'm curious.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'm sure he will be. I'm sure he will be. Anyway, next time on our intelligent machines, if I can get it together, I want to show how I Use Claude code. I have an idea of something I want to develop and maybe we can in the AI use group, with the help of all of you, we can do a Claude code vibe coding session. Anyway, that's Friday, I think 1pm Pacific, 4pm Eastern, a week from Friday. If you're not a member of the club, this would be a good time to join. In fact, this would be a really good time to join because we're about to increase the cost. But if you are already a member at the, I like to call it the founder price pricing, you'll get that. You'll continue the legacy pricing for as long as you're a member. So if you join today, seven bucks a month, 84 bucks a year, you get ad free versions of all the shows. You get special events like that AI User group. We do Stacy's Book Club, which has been so much fun. What else do we have? We have. I did the, I did Dick DiBartolo. We did. And I did a trip down memory lane last week that was fantastic. We put that, we do those live, but we also put them in, you know, live in the Discord. We also put them in the Club Twit feed. The Twit plus feed. All of the keynotes will be in Club Twit from now on. By the way, we did build and Google I O last week in Club Twit. A week from Monday it'll be Apple's turn. And it's really Apple's fault because they, they, they threatened us on YouTube and Twitch to take us down and we couldn't. I didn't want to take the chance so I decided let's just do it in the clubs kind of privately. So all the keynotes are in there. Lots of reasons to join the club. Best one, your legacy. You got the founders pricing. If you join right now, seven bucks a month, $84 a year. Twit TV Club Twit it really. I know I flog it a lot. Not as much as public broadcasting, but close.

[Paris Martineau]

The reason about it, like public broadcast is pathetic.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Look, that's what feeds us, you know, that's what feeds them. We do have ads, but we don't. But ads only cover about 75% of our costs or, and 25 is covered by the club. So thank you. And it's what allows us to do things like Micah's Cozy Corner and so forth. There's a lot of fun stuff in the club, including the Discord. This looks like Joe Esposito did this club ad for me. Looks a little bit like it might have been torn from the pages of Playboy magazine. Right? Join the club, baby. There are a lot of ways out there lit.

[Adam Becker]

Looks like it's a scan of a magazine page. Literally.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Totally. Yeah. See the turn at the. There are a lot of clubs out there but none can give you the exceptional feeling being a member of club to it will a premium community at a very reasonable price. You'll get all our shows ad free access to the members only discord and exclusive shows and events. Best of all, you'll be helping us keep creating the content you enjoy. What's with the purple? Is it a Curacao drink? Is that it? It's a little bit blue.

[Paris Martineau]

Twit after dark.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Twit after dark. I like it. I have never and will never wear an identity bracelet. I just want you to to know but I might have collars down.

[Adam Becker]

He'll be unidentifiable.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Twit D. Thank you.

[E]

The liquor's twit blue.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, that's it. That's. It's our color. I get it. Oh, or cara.

[Adam Becker]

I like that. Leo's been replaced.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's it. Just leave it like that.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, perfect.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Bonito. That's the show, baby. That's the. All right, we're gonna we're gonna get to the picks of the week in moments. But first, ladies and gentlemen, one last mention of a sponsor. This show brought to you by.

[E]

Wait, hold on, hold on. I I, I can't get you back here. Wait.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It'S gonna be the most.

[Paris Martineau]

There you go.

[Adam Becker]

Trying to hold it in as as Bonito.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Leo is taking over.

[Adam Becker]

This is like what he's.

[Paris Martineau]

I'm not a cat. I'm not a cat.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wait a minute. Let me put the me eating spaghetti in here. Wait a minute. Hold on a second.

[Adam Becker]

Wait a second.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Then it really then it'll be a lot of fun. Here we go. Here we go. How about this?

[E]

Okay, okay, I got it.

[Paris Martineau]

I got it.

[E]

I got it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, no, no. Oh, too bad. Just in the nick of time.

[Paris Martineau]

No fun.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You really don't want to see a close up of me eating spaghetti.

[Paris Martineau]

Last frame is probably go to the last frame. It's awful.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The shirt's perfect though. I gotta say. I don't know. AI AI is getting so much better. Remember when Will Smith ate spaghetti? It wasn't quite as quite as realistic. Our show today brought to you by. Oh, I love these guys. Agency agnostic TCY. Okay. Build the future of multi agent software with agency agntcy. The agency is an open source collective building the Internet of agents. It's a collaboration layer where AI agents can discover, connect and work across frameworks. For developers, this means standardized agent discovery tools, seamless protocols for interagent communication, and modular components to compose and scale multi agent workflows. Join Crewai, LangChain, Llama, Index, browser base, Cisco and dozens more. The agency is dropping code specs and services, no strings attached. Build with other engineers who care about the high quality multi agent software. Visit agency.org and add your support. And that's a G N T C Y. O R G I love this. An open source collective building the Internet of agents. That's what we need. It's. It's a standard. I love that. Agency.org we thank them so much for supporting the show and frankly happy to support them because this is such an important thing. It's a big part of, part of moving forward. Picks of the Week Hey. Hey. Do you want me to do a pick? Huh? Huh?

[Paris Martineau]

Sure.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Paris. I could have. I could have been mean and forced you to do a pick. I see that you have a little something.

[Adam Becker]

I was eating a tortilla. Yeah, I couldn't. Sometimes you reach the stage of wanting to snack but realizing the ad is nearly about to be over, so you just grab a loose tortilla of the cabinet and then have to admit to it on air.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So I'm with you there. I have no judgment. I before as I spent most of the interview this at the beginning of the show eating my lunch. What's your pick? I had to eat. I had to eat. I don't know about you, but I love reading scripts. Do you like scripts?

[Adam Becker]

I do.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I love if there's a show I watch. In fact they just published. And I don't, I don't want to do a spoiler, but if you're a severance fan, they just published the script from Cold harbor, which is the last episode of the just ending season. And it's really good, it's really interesting to read. But I have found a source for all the scripts and it is of course the Internet Archive. God bless these guys. Archive.org an archiver, a user of the Internet Archive, noticed that there were a great many script scripts spread all over the archive and Jason Scott decided to put them all in one spot. So it's easy to go. You could see a bunch of contributors. This was created just this past week. You want to read the Dark Knight script by Jonathan Nolan? It's in here. It's here. You can read it page by Page. This is the best thing ever for film buffs. Here's the. I mean, some new stuff too. Nosferatu, which came out on Christmas.

[E]

So I have a quick question about this, Leo.

[Paris Martineau]

Is this.

[E]

Are these the shooting scripts or are these the scripts before shooting?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Don't know. You want? I'll tell you what. Let's read the script from Megalopolis. It's only 212 pages and we can find out. What do you say?

[Adam Becker]

Wow.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Compare this to the shots and see. I would, I would guess that these.

[E]

Typically what's released is. This is the script after the movie is released. And then they just cut the script down to exactly what the movie is fixed up. But that's what I'm asking.

[Adam Becker]

Is this before it says undated early draft for the Megalopolis one.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, see, so we don't. It's a mix. Yeah, it's a mix. I, I don't think because it's the Internet Archive, it's not like a publisher publishing these.

[E]

Yeah, whatever they got. Right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's whatever they got. So, you know, go on in there and find out. I have to think that 212 pages is not the shooting script.

[E]

Isn't it a four hour movie? It's like a three and a half hour movie though, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's a lot of pages.

[Adam Becker]

It's not. Megalopolis is not as long as it should be. I think if it was a three and a half or four hour movie would have made significantly more sense. I've always said from the beginning that I think Megalopolis will be a good and coherent movie when they release. Release in like 20 years. The extended director's cut, that's like four and a half, five hours. Like it might make sense. I'm not saying that, you know, he made like that his choice like was somehow overruled. I'm just saying the version we got from his choices didn't make sense. But I think there's probably enough footage somewhere there that you could.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This looks a lot like the script I read 30 years ago in the base basement of the Zoetrope building. So it could be. Who knows? You know, could be. I don't. I'm not saying I exfiltrated it, but could be somebody else.

[Paris Martineau]

I've got a few scripts here. I need to scan them and put them up.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I love the. I just love the Internet Archive. I, I donate as you should Look. Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Here's a whole bunch of Coen brothers screenplays. A serious man, Barton Fink Fargo. Hail Caesar Davis 2007. For this first page. This is a serious man. I. You know, Beno, you need to do some sleuthing.

[E]

Well, this looks like this. This is the one that was sent to the wga. So this is the. This is the script that got, like, copywritten.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The published script. Right. Some of them, though, don't have a cover page, which tells me me this draft is from November. Yeah. You know, no country for Old Men. The Hudsucker. Proxy, you want to read the script?

[Adam Becker]

Sucker Proxy. I read the script on the Internet archive for the Hudsucker.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You already did. You love that movie.

[Adam Becker]

Fantastic. It's just got one of the best, like, opening scenes, I think.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Let's see what it says. Do you think that the actual opening scene. Scene.

[Adam Becker]

Well, the actual opening scene is a panning shot of the miniature city.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Anyway, for a few more minutes, it is. Come midnight, it's gonna be 1959. A whole nother feeling. The New Year. The future. Yeah, this looks like it. The movie. Pretty close. Yep.

[Adam Becker]

I like that. It says for educational purposes.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah, I don't know what that is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, don't shoot it. Don't make another one.

[Adam Becker]

There's only one old daddy. Earth fixing to start a new one more around this sun.

[Paris Martineau]

Give it to VO and see what happens.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You probably could at some point. You know what? At some point. Here's James Cameron's screenplay and treatment. Treatment for the Titanic. Okay.

[E]

Like, that's gonna. There's gonna be a format that you need to write a script in to give to VO you know what I mean? Like, because this is screenplay. This is a screenplay format.

[Jeff Jarvis]

VO should figure it out. Out.

[E]

No, but this is going to be optimized. This can be one optimized for, though, right?

[Paris Martineau]

I beto is going to be optimized for this, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

You want to see the treatment for the Titanic?

[Paris Martineau]

Cameron and I can do anything I want. That's pretty.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This. So if you're an aspiring screenwriter, look at. I mean, what an opportunity to look at a treatment for a movie. Snoop Dogg drives itself away from the sub, paying out its umbilical cord behind. Find it all right. Was that the name they used in the movie Snoop Dogg? I don't know.

[Adam Becker]

For Titanic.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Not for the Titanic. For the. For the submersible. Maybe it was. Anyway, there are 1151 scripts in here. There's sure to be something you love. There's the Simpsons Monorail episode, Independence Day.

[Adam Becker]

Something for everybody.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Something. Bride of Frankenstein and Scary Movie. This is pretty amazing. And yes, Some of these are English. Which one?

[E]

Kung Fu Hustle.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I don't know. Again, I'm going to leave this as an exercise for you, Benito. An exercise for the producer. White man can't jump. Natural Born Killers. Clueless. Here's the third draft of the Chinatown screenplay. That's kind of interesting.

[E]

Well, you buy any screenplay book? This is what they're talking about, this script.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Chinatown. Yeah, yeah, it's. What is. What is the line? It's Chinatown.

[E]

It's chinatown, baby, baby.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Ms. Paris Motno, what's your pick of the week?

[Adam Becker]

My pick?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Be one.

[Adam Becker]

On the topic of. I mean, listen, a fine tortilla is always a great. A loose tortilla in the hand is worth two in the bush, as they say. Say, on the subject of scripts, a brief shout out to. There is an auction up right now that I'm sure no one listening to this is going to be able to afford to participate in once it actually goes live. But it's a bunch of David Lynch's stuff that I just thought was very interesting to go through.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Nice coffee maker. No. Okay. I'm gonna tell you, that's an excellent coffee maker.

[Adam Becker]

I mean, he loved his coffee.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He did. This is the best grinder from.

[Adam Becker]

There's like his actual filmmaking equipment. There are taxidermy deer hairs from the movie. Those taxidermy deer heads were in Twin Peaks. There's early versions of a lot of his scripts. Just really interesting stuff. If you're a Lynch head, get in there. It's kind of a fun look.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wouldn't you want David Lynch's director's chair? Oh, my God.

[Adam Becker]

I mean, just even having something like David Lynch's two crates of lighting equipment would feel special to me.

[E]

Or his old dvd.

[Adam Becker]

Or David Lynch's fog machine.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Look at that. Panasonic and Zenith camcorders.

[Paris Martineau]

He held on of them.

[Adam Becker]

His cinema reference books.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wow.

[Adam Becker]

His Leica R6 2.

[E]

Oh, the reference books might have notes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

There's a lot. Pedestal, roller, whatever that is. I want one.

[Adam Becker]

There are a lot of scripts, like with notes in them and like revisions.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Here's a husky case with power tools.

[Paris Martineau]

For movies.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He had a whole scene.

[Paris Martineau]

Who knows that he was making wood things.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[Adam Becker]

He's an artist.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is. Oh, man.

[Paris Martineau]

It's a good find.

[Adam Becker]

It's really.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Look at that sofa. You need this in your room.

[Adam Becker]

I need the.

[Paris Martineau]

It's got a stain on it.

[Adam Becker]

Red room. Sofa in my room.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Red room.

[Adam Becker]

But my actual pick this week is there's a. A bit of new. I've Shouted out Taskmaster before on the show. But there's a new season of Taskmaster that started a couple weeks ago and it is. It's really good. And also a good season to jump into if any American listeners are interested, because this is the first time on the main UK flagship show they've had a American comedian, Jason Manzukis on it, and he's killing it. It's all available to watch for free the whole season on YouTube. I've got the first episode linked in the show notes. It's so funny. I saw the first episode originally. Months ago, they did, like a new live premiere, but now I think they're on episode.

[Paris Martineau]

You got invited to that?

[Adam Becker]

I mean, I bought a ticket, but yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

So there are 19 seasons of Taskmaster on YouTube.

[Adam Becker]

There are, and they're all free if you're in America. I don't think it's free in other countries, but.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, no, wait, it says buy seasons. You have to pay.

[Adam Becker]

No, no, they're off them. Almost all of them are available for free. A lot of them are available. It depends on the season, then. Yeah, you can watch almost every taskmaster episode on YouTube. That in what you're looking at right now is probably the buying thing. If you just type in Taskmaster Season 19 or whatever, right?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah, I clicked the buy button. Don't click the buy button, kids.

[Paris Martineau]

That's your reflex.

[Adam Becker]

I don't know. It's a really fun show. If you've ever seen Jason Mansukas in any stuff, you know, he's funny, but he just mashes really well with this kind of kooky cast of other.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah.

[E]

Mansukas is our perfect. The perfect American representative for the show.

[Adam Becker]

He is. And he is a huge Taskmaster fan, so he's representing us.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Well, which one is he?

[Adam Becker]

He's the WY. That one.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That one. Okay.

[Adam Becker]

The WY one with facial hair.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Sometimes spit. Season 19, episode 1. Wow.

[Adam Becker]

Would recommend it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wow. Is he sitting there with a cigarette in his hand? Hand? No, no, it's a pencil.

[Adam Becker]

A pencil. Never mind cards. A gold statue shaped like his own head that people can win.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Is that one of the things you win?

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, if you win Taskmaster, you get a gold statue shaped like the Taskmaster's head. And then if you win Taskmaster Champion of Champions, which is where all the winners of Taskmaster compete against each other, you get the body of the statue.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Daddy's golden head, and you could win the body either. So what's funny is you can see why they put this up for free. They have 1.78 million subscribers. And. And this episode, which has only been up for a couple of weeks, already has almost 2 million views. I mean, they probably make some money off YouTube for this.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah. And I mean, I am not even one of them because I pay for Taskmaster Super Max plus, which is the name of their streaming service, to watch it just because I like supporting it.

[Jeff Jarvis]

But I would feel so much pressure, pressure being on that show to be funny. It'd be so hard, wouldn't it?

[Adam Becker]

I mean, that's part of the issue is like you have to both be funny, but you're trying to do like increasingly complicated tasks that are all being shot. Like they'll show a couple of tasks an episode, but they're filming like 10, 20 tasks a day. And if you're Jason, man, Sukis, who is an American who decided, hey, I'll pay to fly myself out. I just want to be on Taskmaster. He would fly into the uk, be jet lagged, then shoot a couple days of tasks back to back, then fly home and be like, what the did I just do? I don't really remember.

[E]

But it's not really about winning.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[E]

It's about performance.

[Adam Becker]

It's not about winning. I mean, that's the thing.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Who really wants daddy's hair?

[Adam Becker]

I mean, these are all the things.

[Paris Martineau]

Yeah.

[Adam Becker]

This is the thing is they're all professional comedians and so they're trying to make it as funny as possible. And there's occasionally you'll have someone on the show like this guy John Robbins from last season who like, is clearly so earnestly wants to win that he kind of forgets about being funny. And that's kind of cute in it so own way because it happens infrequently.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Taskmaster Season 19, available now. Jeff Jarvis, Pick of the week.

[Paris Martineau]

So I know what we all have to be watching. It's required homework. There'll be a quiz, there'll be a test afterwards. We all, everyone watching this show, and certainly the three of us since it is show about AI and technology. I need to be watching Mountain Head on Saturday.

[Jeff Jarvis]

What is Mountain Head?

[Paris Martineau]

Jesse Armstrong of Succession.

[Adam Becker]

Fountainhead.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Succession in Silicon Valley. Right.

[Paris Martineau]

Four. It's one. It's a movie. It is for obnoxious tech people. And one of them is causing his, his app, his AI app is causing world like burning up and they don't care. And there they are. Can you play it with a sound or not?

[Jeff Jarvis]

Probably not.

[Paris Martineau]

Probably not. Right now they're, they're writing how many billions of they have on Their chests.

[Adam Becker]

Oh, my God.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Steve Carell, of course. The star, Rami Youssef. Jason Schwarzman's got a great cast. Mountain Head. Is it out?

[Paris Martineau]

No, it's out on Saturday. It's hbo.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Oh, it's not even. They.

[Paris Martineau]

They shot it in March. They did it as as high onto the news as they could.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Wow.

[Paris Martineau]

Unprecedented.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That's incredible.

[Paris Martineau]

It is.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'll tell you.

[Adam Becker]

I believe there was like a really good. There was a behind the scenes story published maybe in like the Times, the Journal or something, about how it was one of the quickest turnaround times a lot of the actors had ever.

[Paris Martineau]

Michelle Goldberg did a color.

[Adam Becker]

They shot it three months shooting to two months execution. Yeah. To production.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's incredible.

[E]

Well, it's a bottle episode. It's like a bottle episode of a show, though. It's like, it's one location. It's really not.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Right.

[E]

Difficult.

[Adam Becker]

Yeah, no, I just think it's cool.

[E]

Hey, hey, hey, hey. That's what I do for.

[Jeff Jarvis]

This is the guy who couldn't get the picture of me off of the screen.

[Adam Becker]

Replace him. Replace him, Benito, replace him. With the picture.

[Jeff Jarvis]

It's easy to do.

[Paris Martineau]

So here's, here's the. The premise from, from, from Michelle Goldberg's column in Mountainhead. And yes, it's a joke about Ayn Rand. Three billionaires gather at the modernist vacation home of a friend, a Silicon Valley hanger on they call super short for soup kitchen because he's a mere centimillionaire. One of the billionaires, the manic juvenile Venus or Venice, the richest man in the world has just released new content tools on his social media platform that make it easier than ever to create deep fakes of ordinary people. Suddenly, people all over the world are making videos of their enemies committing rapes, desecrating sacred sites, and any prevailing sense of reality collapses. Internizing violence turns into apocalyptic global instability. That's a fun weekend for you.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I'll tell you how fast they had to turn this around. The trailer still says Max. As we all know, hbo. Max is. Max is. HBO is. I don't know. It's so confusing. I can't. I can't keep it straight. Yeah, I can't wait.

[Paris Martineau]

Like Google brands. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I cannot wait.

[Paris Martineau]

I miss Silicon Valley, the show. That's what I want. That's what you need now.

[Jeff Jarvis]

That was a great show. So was Succession. And so this is kind of the weird child of the two together. Yes. A delicious satire of the tech, right? Can't wait. Jeff Jarvis. Okay, get the jingle out. Go ahead. We're gonna do it for you, Craig. For the whole gang.

[Paris Martineau]

We've caused the. You enough turmoil.

[Adam Becker]

Caused you enough turmoil. We can be nice.

[Jeff Jarvis]

The professor emeritus of journalistic innovation at the Newmark New Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. Emeritus. He is now, of course, at lo. Loyola Mar. I always want to say that. I always want to say that. I don't know why. The State University of the. The Jesus sect. No, what is it?

[Paris Martineau]

Montclair State University and Stony Brook Universities.

[Jeff Jarvis]

And Stony Brook.

[Adam Becker]

Okay, University.

[Jeff Jarvis]

University. It's a university, but it's the State University of New York.

[Paris Martineau]

Well, Sunny is part of the SUNY system.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Stony Brook. Yes.

[Paris Martineau]

Like my journalism school is part of the CUNY system.

[Jeff Jarvis]

You was cuny. Now you're Sunni.

[Paris Martineau]

Now I'm Sunni.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Got it. It.

[Adam Becker]

And Leo's SUNY to be confused.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I am very easily confused. Paris Marno is a tech journalist. She is at Paris nyc. How's the. Can I ask you how the job hunt's going? Is it going well?

[Adam Becker]

It's going good. Productive week.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Good. Glad to hear it. Glad to hear it. We need your brand of investigative journalism. Badly. Badly. All right.

[Paris Martineau]

Right.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Zephyr west says God, Paris, I love you in our YouTube channel.

[Adam Becker]

Thank you for Wes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Thank you, Zephyr. Cuny, not Suni. Thank you, everybody. We're joining us, we do Intelligent machines. Every Wednesday, 2:00pm Pacific, 5:00pm Eastern, 2100 UTC. Jeff, you're going to be away next.

[Paris Martineau]

Week for an event? Yes.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Nice. Well, we look forward to your temporary replacement. We're trying to get Harper Reed in. I love Harper. And if we can, we're going to get him on the show. Daniel Oberhaus will be our guest. He's the author of. Oh, you already know about this.

[Adam Becker]

He's the Silicon of Mine.

[Jeff Jarvis]

He's a friend of yours? He is. He is. He is all about the race to apply AI and psychiatry. By the way, he says, bad I idea, which I kind of agree. I don't even understand how you could get anything out of it compared to. But of course I can afford to talk to a human. Many people can't.

[Adam Becker]

That's true.

[Jeff Jarvis]

We'll talk about it. Daniel Oberhaus, our guest on.

[Adam Becker]

He wrote a really interesting book, also about alien languages.

[Jeff Jarvis]

I see that. Extraterrestrial languages. Can I ask him about that, too? This one, I promise I will read. I just.

[Paris Martineau]

Oh, is he a linguist, though?

[Jeff Jarvis]

No linguists allowed.

[Adam Becker]

Sorry. Yeah.

[Jeff Jarvis]

No linguists. This looks really interesting. Extraterrestrial languages, what would they be? We don't know.

[Paris Martineau]

He's.

[Adam Becker]

He's got the answers.

[Jeff Jarvis]

Yeah. Thank you everybody for being here. We. We do this show. I already said that. Wednesday you can watch us live on eight different platforms. Of course Club Twit members get to watch in the discord. But there's YouTube, Twitter, Twitch, TikTokX.com, facebook, LinkedIn and Kik. Watch where you wish. Chat with us. We love having you in the chat rooms. But of course, as always, it's a podcast you can watch whenever you want. All you have to do is go to Twitter TV IM for the latest version, audio or video. There's a link there to our YouTube channel. Great way to share little clips. And of course the easiest and best thing to do would be subscribe and your favorite podcast player. That way you'll get it automatically the minute it's available. And if you do that, please leave us a five star review. Tell the world how great this show is. That helps us a lot. Thanks for being here everybody. We will see you next time on Intelligent Machines. So long. Bye Bye. I'm not a human being.

[Adam Becker]

Not into this animal scene.

[Paris Martineau]

Like your favorite startup's growth curve, T.

[Jeff Jarvis]

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[Paris Martineau]

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[Jeff Jarvis]

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[Paris Martineau]

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[Jeff Jarvis]

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[Paris Martineau]

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[Jeff Jarvis]

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[Paris Martineau]

Learn more@t mobile.com keepandswitch up to 4 lines of your virtual prepaid card.

[Jeff Jarvis]

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[Paris Martineau]

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[Jeff Jarvis]

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[Paris Martineau]

Card has no cash access and expired in six months.