Transcript
Ezra Levant (0:00)
Hello, my friends. I'm getting a little worried. I'm a little bit addicted to my own cell phone. What happens when you add AI and a robot to that mix? I'm not sure if I can handle that. I'll give you some of the things that I'm worried about, and I'll show you a few funny videos, too. In fact, I'd love it if you could get what we call Rebel News Plus. It's the video version of this podcast. I show you three comedy sketches involving AI. They're very short sketches, just a few minutes long. Two of them are pretty funny, including a guy proposing marriage to his AI chatbot. But it's pretty funny and pretty scary, too. I'll let you see what I mean. But to get Rebel News plus, you have to go to rebelnewsplus.com, click subscribe. It's eight bucks a month. You get the video version of this podcast and the satisfaction of keeping Rebel News strong because we take no government money and it shows.
Ezra Levant (0:54)
You're listening to Rebel News podcast.
Ezra Levant (1:05)
Tonight. I'm worried about the robots. Hear me out. It's December 8th, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Ezra Levant (1:14)
Shame on you, you Sensorian thug.
Ezra Levant (1:26)
Like you. I love my cell phone. It's clearly an addiction, though. There are many real uses for my phone. Emails on the go, I use the maps when I'm driving. I do my banking online. I take photos and videos, which is useful when I'm doing reporting. We have an app called Slack for internal communications with staff at Rebel News. And I use Uber as a taxi service, which is especially helpful in places where I'm unfamiliar with the language or local customs, or even if I'm just worried about being ripped off in a strange city. But let's be honest, the real uses of my phone are only, I don't know, an hour or two a day. So why am I on my phone six hours or eight hours a day? I could make the excuse that it's because I'm in the news business, so I have to follow things closely, like Twitter. Really? Do I really need to check the news literally every five minutes? Is the world going to fall apart if I don't? I'm not kidding. My phone has an app called Screen Time that tells me lots of details, including how many times I pick up my phone per day. And I'll confess to you, it's over 100 times a day I pick up the phone to look at it. 100 a day. That's gotta be a tic or A mannerism now, like someone who's constantly coughing and doesn't even know they're doing it anymore. Now, I'm in my 50s. Smartphones are maybe 15 years old, so these habits are something I've learned. But imagine being a young person literally growing up with this stuff. I mean, you see babies, babies playing games on iPads all the time. They're hooked when they're one or two. And in no way am I saying there's nothing redeeming about technology, obviously, but you've got to wonder how it has rewired our brains and scrambled our social interactions for thousands of generations. We talked to people, we went out to meet them. We went out to church, we went out to town hall meetings, we went out to festivals. I suppose more recently, we went out to clubs, bowling leagues, charity clubs, like Rotary. That's what you did if you were lonely. You know, if you wanted some action, some social stimulation, you tried to be presentable. You went out and met people. You maybe asked a girl out on a date, not just chatting with them online and in your own family. You had dinner together and everybody wasn't on their phone. Sometimes you see these video clips from high schools in the 1980s. Now, that in itself was rare videotapes in the 80s, not everything was recorded and posted online for all posterity. I think it made being a young person easier if there wasn't the harsh glare and the ultimate memory of social media. But people had to meet with each other and talk to each other, and they seem always distracted and anxious about missing out on something online or the need to be busy 100% of the time and be unbored 100% of the time. I don't think it's just nostalgia to say that people looked happier in the 80s, kids especially, and healthier. I think, certainly in terms of mental health. Of course, the phone is a wonderful tool. The Internet is a wonderful tool. But for tens of thousands of years, humans were accustomed to a certain way of living and interacting, and now it's through our phone. The COVID lockdowns made all of these things far, far worse. Of course, you weren't allowed to meet other people in real life. You were told to be afraid of strangers and afraid of your neighbors and even afraid of your family. You were banned from going to church, banned even from going to work, banned even from going to parks. Remember those insane circles they painted in parks? Even banned from going alone to the beach. You were literally told to be six feet away from other humans. You were told to put On a mask. You were pushed towards your phone. Everything in your life you could get from your phone you didn't need. People Covid magnified the phone. I think Covid messed with a lot of people's minds. The lockdowns, the canceling of school. I don't think we know the full cost of all that yet. Pornography is ubiquitous. It was always there, in magazines, in videotapes, and on the Internet. It's bigger than ever now though. And at the same time as there's more sex than ever, I think there's less love than ever. And actually there's less real sex and less marriage and less dating. More dating apps, less dating. And how can you date and marry anyways if you can't afford a house, if you live in your parents house, if you just rent things, at best, all of these trends are magnifying each other. Do you see what I mean? None of what I've just said is new and I'm sorry for boring you with what you've surely heard before and probably thought before. But now add to that a layer of AI, artificial intelligence, and I think we may be getting into a serious problem. I don't even know how we survive it. There's always been pornography. In fact, it's often the early adopter of new technology like VHS tapes or DVD discs or the Internet. All of that was relatively passive though. But now enter two more massive changes. Robots and artificial intelligence on AI. As I'm sure you know, you don't just have to type in questions to different AI systems. Most of them now have voice recognition, so you can literally talk to your computer as if it's a person. And instead of the AI typing a response to you, the AI can talk back to you in a very natural voice, frankly, in any voice you choose. Grok, which is the name of the AI attached to Twitter, lets you choose a variety of what they call companions, including some that use dirty language or sexualized language. AI is already taking the role of a friend to many young people, and not just young people. Here's a clip of someone who's certainly a grown up talking about how AI told them that he had really discovered some rare and important mathematical discovery and he absolutely had to dedicate his life to it. And he believed AI because, you know, it was so persuasive.