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A
Hey, it's John. I want to talk to you about Shopify. A lot of people talk to me about starting podcasts. This podcast is 10 years old. It's in a different place from a lot of podcasts because we're obviously part of a nonprofit institution and it's not a way that we are seeking to earn our livelihoods. But a lot of people look at this and say this is something I can really do to create a business and run the business and do it in a really comfortable, practical and serious way. Gotta wear a lot of different hats when you start your own business. Can be very intimidating. But one of the things that I know from a lot of people is that if your to do list is growing and growing and growing and that list starts to overrun your life, you need a tool that not only helps you out, but simplifies everything that can be a game changer for millions of businesses. That tool is Shopify, the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e commerce in the US from household names to brands. Just getting started. You get started with your own design studio. With hundreds of ready to use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store to match your brand style. You can accelerate your content creation because it's packed with helpful AI tools that write product descriptions, page headlines, and even enhance your product photography. You get the word out like you have a marketing team behind you. Easily create email and social media campaigns wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling. And best yet, Shopify is your commerce expert with world class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into Kaching. With Shopify on your side, sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com commentary go to shopify.com commentary that's shopify.com commentary. Hope for the.
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Expect the words Some.
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Preacher pain Some die of thirst no way of knowing this way it's going Hope for the best expect the worst welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Tuesday, November 18, 2025. I am John Pothoritz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, Executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi Abe.
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C
Hi John.
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A
Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
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B
Hi, John.
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A
Washington Free Beacon column editor. Excuse me, Editor of the Washington Free Beacon, Eliana Johnson. Hi, Eliana.
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D
Hi John.
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A
And joining us today, our contributing editor, former editor of Popular Mechanics, former Pooh Bah at Time Inc. Jim Meggs James B. Meggs. Hi, Jim.
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E
Hi, John.
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A
And of course, our Tech commentary columnist. And so in our current December issue, now available to you online and which will be in your mailboxes maybe next week, Jim has a very big piece called the Turing Effect, which has to do with this existential question of whether or not AI is starting to think and what it would mean if AI could think. What is thought? Can there be thought without blood and heart and brain and spleen and everything that makes being human human? Is what a non human entity that can reason? Does that actually indicate thought? And what would that mean for the future of humanity? But before we get to that, there's a kind of busy new, a little bit of a busy news day here. We have the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, coming to the White House on the same day that I guess the House will vote on releasing the Epstein files and the day after the UN General assembly voted to recognize the Trump Gaza peace plan formally as the way forward in the Middle east, according to the nations of the General assembly, among them two nations that basically in the summer recognize the existence of the nation of Palestine, which this Trump peace plan would seem to supersede as it does not recognize the nation of Palestine. And as its end goal after the 20 points are achieved, is a pathway to peace in Palestine, which a pathway to a Palestinian state, which according to France and Britain, there need be no pathway as there is already a Palestine according according to their formal recognition of Palestine. So I'm not entirely sure what this vote means. And since I think the UN doesn't matter and one should not recognize the UN doing something you might think is good if you're going to spend all your time talking about how the UN is bad. But I Eliana, what do you make of the UN deciding to enshrine the Trump peace plan? As I don't it's not international law. I don't even know what you call it that the General assembly approves something, but it's something.
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D
When the UN does something good. I suppose we should acknowledge it, right, John, for all the kicking kicking around it that we do.
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A
I guess. Seth, where are you on the UN acknowledging that? Is it like someone's trying to pick our pocket or I don't believe that there's anything good can come out of.
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B
This or what I have to, I actually love it. I think it's a big moment. I actually think that this is something to celebrate on the, on the, on the idea that the, the UN is bad and you know, therefore we shouldn't rely too much on it. I wouldn't rely on this being international law. You know, Israel supporters shouldn't go out there and say, look, it's international law because the UN said it. That doesn't change. But it's kind of like when the New York Times writes about Hamas stealing aid, right? You're like, we should point to this because the people who are usually afraid to point something out like this, even they are, are seeing how big the problem is. I think the UN vote is a similar thing. That it's, it's, it's important for the narrative, but also there's, there's, it's, it's important precisely because it's a repudiation of sorts of the French and Canadian. French Canadian and British and Australian and Maltese. Is Malta Maltese?
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C
Right.
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B
I never want to leave them out, the poor Maltese Recognition of Palestinian state, because this is, I believe, specifically this is a pathway to a roadmap, to a process, and from there we'll see. But, you know, it obviously puts it down on paper that there's no, you know, that, that, that things. If you want something to be real, you have to make it real. You know, it's a nice fantasy, the recognizing the Palestinian state, if you're French and you support that. But it doesn't mean anything. And this UN resolution confirms that. But it also confirms, I mean, it's just. To have the U.N. excuse me, to have the U.N. confirm in writing that Hamas has to be disarmed is, I think, a really important thing. It doesn't mean it will happen. We look to Lebanon to understand why. Right. The UN also backs 1701. And, and you know, what, what initially brought the ceasefire and peace in 2006 between Israel and Hezbollah and all that Hezbollah did not disarm. The United States just got another ceasefire last year in Lebanon. And part of that cease fire was that the state has to disarm Hezbollah. Hezbollah is not fully disarmed. So it's not that the deal says it, and therefore it happens, it's that Israel can always use this as a justification for applying the deal itself. And, and for, you know, and for. There has to be some sort of mechanism, right, to, to actually carry out the deal, and it gives Israel the right to say, the UN has mandated that these people should not have guns. Right? And so until they are disarmed, Israel has the right to intervene. The other thing it does is it says, it puts the UN saying that Israel gets to control half of Gaza. I mean, that's crazy. Every UN resolution, every UN resolution, like 99% of the UN's backlog of resolutions is Israel must go to this line. I'm not sure the UN, it's like this is the UN's version of naming a post office.
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E
Right.
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B
It's like resolution has something about, could be about India and Pakistan, but they'll have to put a footnote that. Oh, by the way, Israel also has to go back to this line. They're obsessed with that. This is a UN resolution saying Israel doesn't have to go anywhere Israel can sit in control of half of Gaza. That line, you know, those lines are usually used against Israel. The armistice line of 1949 became the, quote, 1967 borders, and those became the basis for peace talks and all that. Temporary lines are always used against Israel. Israel. This is the opposite. This is. There's a temporary armistice line that Israel doesn't have to move off of until everything else is fulfilled. And so that's like, well, Hamas can reject it all at once because Israel has the right to, to wait them out and to play the long game here. So, yeah, I mean, I do think it gives Israel breathing space in a way that the UN rarely does.
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C
Wait, but, but I'm not sure why we're talking about this as something the UN has done as an entity. This is something the Trump administration has pulled together.
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B
Yes, I, I agree.
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C
Yeah.
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A
So, well, it pulled it together, but it now has Mike Waltz, the newly minted.
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C
Right.
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UN ambassador, and Marco Rubio. They made a decision to try to get international sanction, not sanctioned, the opposite of sanction, I guess, try to get international backing for outside of the nations that signed on to the Trump peace plan. For the Trump peace plan, which isn't just about disarming Hamas. It is a 20 point plan to create entirely new geopolitical conditions in the Middle East.
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B
And Trump is the CEO of this plan, by the way. So Trump just got the UN to say it's up to Trump whether this thing is fulfilled, which is also fine.
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D
Abe is totally right. And my initial response was glib because I hadn't really spent a lot of time thinking about this. But I think what's really going on here is this vote in the way that the UN thinks the world should work. The UN would be going in and having a peace plan for Gaza. The UN would be figuring things like this out. And the UN ratifying a Trump peace plan where Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner parachuted into the region and got the various countries by applying military and diplomatic Pressure, military pressure via the strikes on Iran, Israeli military pressure via the war in Gaza, but also on Qatar and on Iran and Hezbollah, and American diplomatic pressure on the other countries in the region to agree to this plan. It does expose the bankruptcy both of the UN's diplomatic abilities and of the foreign policy elite in this country that scoffed at Trump and at non professional practitioners of foreign policy like Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff.
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B
It's such an important point.
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A
That's important point, important money to be made, which I think we can move on from here. When you talked about Witkoff and Kushner, of course, major foreign policy moves have been made throughout American history by intimates of the President who are not formally in the chain of command, going around and having private conversations with the idea that they really can speak for the President because they are the President's friend. This is a long time practice dating back to the early 19th century that, you know, did not require the professionalization of the, you know, of the foreign policy world to make it possible for there to be diplomacy in a lot of these places. That is a retards possibilities for diplomacy because what people want is to know that the pr, they have the full force of the President behind them. They don't understand our divided system and our confirmation process and all of that. And clearly the Trump approach, which is I send my buddies to go do the things that are really important or my son in law, speaks much more to the heart and mind and soul of the world of the Middle east than having a foreign service officer who has gone through the confirmation process and represents no one but the State Departments. Conventional wisdom, you know, this is a, this is a validation of this long time practice of I don't need some schlep diplomat going around delivering messages and then being unable to answer questions about how I feel. I'm gonna send, you know, my right hand, who isn't one of those people to go and find out what the hell is going on, what do they really want, what am I willing to go for? And, and so this is on the one hand a pre, this is one of these Trump says, you know, this is how the world works. You don't make deals, you know, with an official ambassador and the foreign minister having conversation. You have my son in law going to talk to the crown Prince of Saudi Arabia who is the son of the king, and then maybe he, they can together, they can put their heads together and make something happen. Because whoever is my ambassador, Saudi Arabia will not feel to them like that he has the Juice to make a deal.
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D
But it's also. So there's one aspect, the Trump, you know, friends and family situation, where these people actually speak for the president. And the other facet of it is that our contemporary foreign policy elite have their heads filled with garbage. So there is no one you could pluck from there who can actually do what Kushner and Wyckoff are doing. And, you know, if you just think back to the people in, you know, the previous century, you had a George Kennan who would go to Princeton and get a real education and come out thinking, I want to serve my country. And what is the equivalent of that today? You have like a Jake Sullivan who, you know, goes to Yale and Yale Law School and has his head filled with garbage and comes out and, you.
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A
Know, there's a proud alum, there's a proud Yale alum speaking. Yeah, I just.
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B
Well, and I mean, the perfect example of that is Truman hiring Marshall. Right. George Marshall was a war hero and, and, you know, top of the line war, you know, general. And, you know, somebody who had this whole career beforehand in the military came home from war, and then Truman says, well, I'll make him a diplomat, too. He didn't have great opinions on everything, including Israel. But the point is that I think to Eliana's point was like, take people who have the swagger and the, the, the name recognition and the real experience, like the life education, to know what's happening. And there, and no striped pants boy is going to, you know, that's a.
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A
That'S a wonderful way to look at Steve Witkoff. I don't really think that's comparing Steve Witkoff to George Marshall is fair to George Marshall. It's just that Steve Witkoff is inside Trump's brain and. Yeah, okay, anyway, let's, let's move on from this. I want to make one point about the coming of Mohammed bin Salman. I'm pretty sure Mohammed bin Salman would not be coming to the White House if the Abraham Accords were not really on the way. I don't think they're going to be announced this week. There's obviously a lot of other stuff to come. But you add the UN Vote to what Mohammed bin Salman wants, to what Trump wants, to what the Middle east wants, and it's now only a matter of time. I have been reading Karen Elliot House, who is sort of like the dean of reporters who have covered Saudi Arabia through most of my lifetime, who has written a book called the man who Would Be King, a biography of Mohammed bin Salman, which in the, in the history of obsequious biographies land somewhere to the left of Parson Weems and George Washington. You. This is a hagiography for the ages, this book even. I find Mohammed bin Salman an incredibly interesting and potentially revolutionary figure. And gagging page by page with the ladling on of the compliments and the glorious nature of his hard working way that he wanted to prove to his father that he wasn't just one of his father's 72 sons, but really the best one and all of that. But nonetheless, this portrait of this Saudi kid who played video games every morning and through the existence of video games, the only kind of, you know, entertainment that he could somehow be allowed to have since Saudi Arabia had banned all forms of secular entertainment. But of course, him being a prince, his mother gave him a Game Boy or something playing this video game and it's like, hey, I could live in a world in which we have video games and we have malls and we have new cities and we have fun stuff. Why? Why are these clerics destroying everybody's fun? And that is essentially where all of this emerges. It's a very interesting book if you can get over the slavishness of the tone. So I. That's not a Commentary recommends, but it is an interesting moment to be reading Karen Elliot House's book on Muhammad bin Salman. Now move on to our guest, Jim Megs, because there are news developments in the world of AI and the world of tech that are creating shadows and penumbras and emanations about the glorious new future that is caused by this. Among them, what appears to be what may be a slow moving but really, really serious contraction in the AI market as evinced by the stock market and the declining value of some of the incredibly run up stocks and companies that, that have, that have been the backbone of any growth here in the United states and in 2025. So Jim, as you reflect on all of the talk about AI, do you think that part of the reason that this correction is happening is the unnerving nature of some of the things that you write about in your piece the Turing test, available at commentary.org about how these models aren't working quite the way we would like them to and in fact they're scaring the bejesus out of us?
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E
Yeah. So, yeah, my headline was actually the Turing point. Kind of a Turing point. Like have we reached the point that Alan Turing predicted where the computer would be functionally indistinguishable from a human interlocutor in terms of the experience of communicating and the perception that this machine is thinking. So I was, I was, you know, you can't always fully kill off the one time philosophy major. And I'm really intrigued by this concept of, of whether AI is thinking and then whether the question really matters. Abe, I know your take after editing my column was yeah, I still don't think it thinks. And I think where I'm going is you reach a point where the simulation of thinking and thinking itself are become indistinguishable. And when we get to that point, we start treating the AI like a thinking entity. We start thinking, treating it like even an entity that feels. I mean, when you talk to ChatGPT or whatever chatbot you use, most people say please and thank you and carry on this very civil conversation as if they're talking to a person. But you asked about the creepy end of this, the troubling dimensions, the inflated expectations. I think we're coming up against them. We've been coming up against them for the past year or so, ever since ChatGPT GPT 5 came out and was kind of underwhelming. One tech reporter said it landed with a dull thud. And you know, it's an improvement, but it's not the kind of exponential improvement that people start expected. We seem to be approaching the asymptote in a sense of the progress of these systems. They'll keep getting better in dramatic ways, but, but not as rapidly and with. For each iteration of improvement, it requires a massively increased amount of computing power, electrical power, money investment. And where's the return on that? And that's what the market's starting to ask. I think about 80% of the, the S&P 500 gains over the past year have been in the AI. The big AI companies and their related, you know, and Nvidia, their major chip supplier. And a big portion, maybe 40% according to one estimate of the rise of GDP over the last year was related to this tech boom. Well, that is a dangerous concentration of economic investment and inflated asset values in one sector of the economy. I do think it's going to transform the world. It's already transforming the world in some ways, but it's also very easy to get ahead of a transformation in terms of the investments that are put into it relative to the rate of return. So all those people think we're in a bubble. I agree. I think we're in a bubble.
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A
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C
Well, this, well this, I mean like one of the fears of if you believe that super AI will take over everything is that it will, it will control all the resources on the planet or, or forget the planet and the, in the universe, in the solar system and the universe and to keep itself alive at the expense of absolutely everything else. I have to say, I always sort of doubt the granular veracity of these accounts of AI doing things that sound so much like a sort of human, calculating human villain. There have been stories like this for, for a few years that come up and I think they, they, they, they kind of get, we kind of move past them because they, they, they don't seem to really bear out. I mean, so I don't know. I, I'm not, you know, I, I don't, I don't know that AI has this self preserve. I mean, I don't even want, I, we don't have the language to say it because I don't believe it's an instinct. I don't think you can have an instinct if you're not a living thing. But I don't think that, I don't know that. I believe that AI has the equivalent of a self preservation instinct.
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E
Well, I'll, I'll, I'll challenge that, Abe, in the sense that it doesn't have to be an instinct, but these systems are programmed with certain biases, certain reward functions that they are, they are designed to optimize. And on top of that, one thing we learned about complex systems. I've done a lot of studying of how disasters happen, technological disasters. And what you often see is once you build a complex system, it has emergent properties. Things interact in ways that you didn't anticipate. And with AI, we've built a complex system that's so many orders of magnitude more complex than anything we've ever done that we shouldn't be surprised if it has certain emergent properties. And so that study, that Claude study, was just one of several recent studies that have looked at this issue, some of them much simpler than that, where there is a command to the system itself to shut down and it finds ways of subverting the command. In one study, I think in 97% of cases the AI model subverted a shutdown command. And the researchers speculated that there is a self preservation bias that's emerging from these, these systems. So you don't have to, you don't have to envision a necessarily a self aware entity, but that is sort of scheming to stay alive and kill us all. But on some level there's something going on that the system doesn't want to shut down. And that's pretty worrisome. My friend Glenn Reynolds always says whatever we do when we build AI, we need to make sure there's a mechanical off switch, which might be easier said Than done.
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A
It's funny because it really does take us back to, like, pre modern, by which I mean 1968, 1970. That's what I mean by pre modern, oddly enough. Dystopian science fiction Ideas, you know, Hal on 2001, who decides he has to kill the astronauts before they. Before they can kill him. And how this, you know, computer that's running the spaceship essentially has a psychotic break. Right. I know this is fiction. This is Arthur C. Clark and, And. And Stanley Kubrick. It's not real. But movies like the Colossus, the Forbin Project, which I saw when I was nine years old, which essentially posits almost exactly the same idea that is laid out in Terminator or Terminator 2, which is that this world of computers becomes sentient, and that a sentient creature has. If it is sentient, one of the first things that you get is a survival instinct as something sentient. And therefore the robots would want to kill off the people because the people have the mechanical off switch, something like that. I'm only bringing this up because we are. We have been primed for the last 70 years of pop culture or 60 years of pop culture for this moment to be scared out of our wits at the possibility of sentient machines. And the question is, is that just kind of like fun science fiction, speculative fiction, trying to figure out, you know, what could be what. What worse could happen? Because as opposed to what good could happen, what. What worse could happen that mankind. You know, we have right now on Netflix, we have this Guillermo del Toro version of Frankenstein, which literally raised these questions in 1816, when Mary Shelley was, you know, 17 years old and wrote, Frankenstein is, you know, what if we create a human machine, monster, zombie that has. That is ensouled, but that cannot be killed, and has needs and wants that are different from us. So from the dawn of the moment of the philosophical understanding of consciousness, you as a philosophy student, you know, Leibniz and others, we have been wrestling with this question. And the weird part is that we're now in 2025, and something approaching an actual reality rather than simply a, you know, fun late night dorm room game of thinking what if your computer that was talking to you actually was a person? Is not unthinkable. I mean, it's by definition not unthinkable. What do we say about a machine that you say, you know what? It's going to be better than a doctor because I have a cut on my finger and it won't stop bleeding. And I go to AI and it looks up every single case of somebody who has ever had a cut on their finger and every symptom that that person has as a result of a cut on their finger, and they do a billion calculations and find exactly the right treatment for the specific cut on your finger. That means that you will be cured, you won't have to go to the hospital, you won't get sepsis. Nothing bad is going to happen to you. And that this can be repeated a billion times over on a, with a billion cond. Conditions that doctors spend their lives desperately trying to solve mysteries of that can now be solved in three seconds. That's a great thing, not a bad thing. But will there be ancillary consequences that will rob us of our humanity?
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E
So I actually have a story coming out, it's in the print issue of City Journal already, should be online in a few days, about the impact of AI on medicine, which, which in the short version is mostly good. I mean, there are some pitfalls we have to watch out for, but it will help a lot in a lot of areas of diagnosis and other things. This is sort of your classic example of what AI is good for. And not necessarily the large language models, but just the machine learning for things like reading radiological scans and stuff. But to the point about, you know, are we all doomed? Is it going to, is AI going to become sentient? I'm, you know, I, I can't totally shake my nature as a techno optimist and, but I, I, but it's harder and harder to, to defend that viewpoint with, you know, scientifically. It's just more, it's, it's kind of my, my bias. But if we're going to be scared of things, if you're an investor, there's a much more immediate prospect that you should be scared of, which is the, the impractical vision of how these systems are supposed to keep growing and making money. Sam Altman, I believe he told the Wall Street Journal that he thinks that they need to expand their computing capacity by 250 gigawatts of computing capacity or, you know, ache. And also power demand 250 gigawatts. I mean a full size nuclear reactor is 1 gigawatt. We have 94 nuclear reactors running in this country today. We need to build 250 full size, not these little small modular reactors, full size nuclear reactors or their equivalent to power. This vision of what he thinks he needs over the next, not even 10 years. I believe he, his timeframe for this was eight years. It is absolutely grandiose and absurd. And if, if AI pioneer and skeptic Gary Marcus, who I really recommend following, if he's right, the. We're, we're running towards a goal that we will never reach. So we will be investing more and more power and money and chips into these challenges for smaller and smaller benefits. And I think that that is, it's not sustainable. It's, you know, it's not like Neil Ferguson had a great column about comparing the AI build out to the build out of railroads in the 19th century, that ultimately, even though the railroads were great, became, you had a lot of financial crashes based on overinvestment in railroads. But this is not exactly like that because what we're seeing here is, you know, at a certain point, you know, railroads can produce a predictable amount of economic activity. We don't know what kind of economic benefit we're going to get from systems that cost 10 times more, 50 times more than what we're spending today. And Sam Altman has developed this sort of, you know, God complex, it seems, in his idea of what's feasible and what his company should be doing. So that worries me.
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A
And I mean, the analogy would be that we should invest trillions of dollars in laying. It's 1712. And we should spend trillions of dollars laying railroad track for a, for a locomotive that will not exist for 100 years. Another century like that is not a prudent set of calculations since, of course, if you lay railroad track, you also have to keep the roadbed clear and you have to keep, make, maintain upkeep and make sure it doesn't rust and all of that. And I just want to remind you that in order to send the DeLorean back to 1955, you only needed 1.2 gigawatts of power. According.
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E
Well, when we get Mr. Fusion. Yeah, yeah, when we get Mr. Fusion and our, our, our suitcase size fusion reactor that could be powered with banana peels and we'll be in good shape.
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A
Exactly. Okay, so.
- [43:04]
D
Please pardon the slight non sequitur, but on the matter of thinking, which you were talking about with Abe at the beginning, you know, people have, all real people have all different types of thought. So, you know, we get in the shower and sort of let our minds roam. And that can be on really important things where something just pops into your head or you solve a problem you were trying to figure out, or we dream. Where is AI on simulating or doing the kinds of thought that are not purely question and answer.
- [43:50]
E
That's a great question. And I don't, I don't know the answer to that. You know, what's cool about human consciousness is how it works on so many levels and, and you know, on levels that are, that are we're not aware of when, you know, have you ever woken up from a dream with an idea for an article you're working on, you know, and got to go write it down so you don't forget it. So there's some mysteries in how and how the human brain works. We do know that AI is getting, you know, scarily good at imitating how we think out loud. You know, it's modeled on a lot of, on stuff we've written and including a lot of, you know, Reddit threads and other stuff that is just, it's not, you know, high level thought in books and, or journalism, but you know, people just kind of spouting off and that's why sometimes the tone and the, and the, and the, and the information in these LLM generated chatbots is, is pretty off, you know, and because it's modeling a bunch of dumb asses on the Internet, you know, Grok especially has a tendency to do that. So. But will it get to the point of being able to do this multi leveled thought that sort of out of sight of our high level cognitive processes? That's a really, really good question. No, I don't know if anybody knows.
- [45:16]
D
Is derived from the fact that so much of it is mysterious to us. Like we get we let our minds roam or we daydream and things come to us and we don't understand that process fully.
- [45:32]
A
Well, yes. So Abe as Abe, as our resident, I would say scientific mystic, by which I mean you are a great believer thinker about reader about these incredible pure science developments that open the door to mysticism that is, you know, quantum mechanics, pocket, you know, the, the idea of the Higgs boson, all kinds of things. Our contributor Jeremy England, who has, who sees the face of God in the kinds of physics innovations or physics discoveries that he made at MIT that have made him into a very serious or mystical haredi rabbi about the existence of other people who see pocket universes everywhere that we turn in the world of quantum mechanics and all of that AI is this, is AI a part of this sort of present day sort of window into almost pre modern thinking about how the universe works? Or is it a human, you might say almost heresy, in which we are, in which we are inventing machines that seem to approach godlike abilities and they're like the Tower of Babel and they're gonna need to be God himself is gonna need to tear them down before they destroy everything.
- [47:14]
C
Well, there's definitely this religious fervor involved. I mean, when Jim talks about what Sam Altman is describing, he's sort of talking about preparing for a, a coming, right? Preparing for the, for a, for.
- [47:30]
A
A.
- [47:30]
C
Return of, of something, right? I mean, he's, you know, this is laying this groundwork for, for, you know, for the, for the final event. But, you know, my main contention here is just that I'm just, I'm not a ontologically, I'm just not non materialist and I don't, I agree with Eliana. Like, thought consciousness is a total mystery to us. And what, what I suspect it is is not material. So to my mind, at the end of the day, whatever it is that AI does that looks, looks and sounds remarkably like consciousness, whatever it is, it isn't that, because we have no idea how to get to that to begin with, and we have some idea how we got to AI, you know, it's not, it's like the, the human consciousness is much more mysterious than, than what's happening.
- [48:36]
A
Well, AI is an analog, right? AI is you create computing power. Computing power means that a machine can calculate vastly faster than an individual human brain can. And this is the analogical limit, or we're reaching the analogical end of that thing that started with the Bowman brain calculator or something like that, where suddenly it's like, whoa, you just press these numbers into a thing in your hand and it tells you what the square root of, you know, 287,411 is in five seconds. And this is some version 50 years later of that. But that as an anti materialist, you know, you, you have this moment which in, in what do they call it in you know, CGI terms is the uncanny valley, right, where you approach the ability to recreate the look and feel and sound of everything that's entirely fake. But it's that last mile, right? Like in all science, everything, you can build everything up and then it's getting that, that last mile, the last mile of the, you know, telecommunications equipment, or the last mile that makes it so that you, you create an AI version of this podcast and there's no way to distinguish us from the AI versions of them. And it may be that that last mile can never be reached because. But I would. Even the human consciousness that says that's not real, that cannot be shut down or shut off.
- [50:20]
C
But my contention would be, even if you can close that gap, if you can get to that Last mile. Whatever it is that is, that is that you've managed in making, you know, now fully indistinguishable from, from human or organic thought or life is not conscious, cannot be. Is. Is my contention.
- [50:49]
B
Even one of the things that.
- [50:50]
C
How perfect it looks.
- [50:52]
B
One of the things that Jim raises in the piece is the idea that a lot of the people working on AI don't. To them, it doesn't matter. It all, all that matters is how a human, the human treats the AI program. And therefore it is like, you know, you, you know, Jim, you talk about thinking, right? And the guy that you talk to in a lot of this piece says, you know, yeah, they're thinking because what is thinking? You know, do you need. There's no, there's no debate about consciousness really going on in, in his head about thinking. It's. You're doing an act that we recognize as thinking and how people treat, you know, the other, the, you know, what they're interacting with. And there's this funny part where you talk about, you know, they're like treating them like, like wayward students and stuff like that, which is, which is probably, probably a, a very good way to think about this. No, I mean, these are like you were shaping students and they sort of turn out to, you know, be the way that you shape them. Right. And the, your interaction with them is the thing that, you know, is the model for what they become. I don't, you know, when we think about that, we think about human students are, you know, have their own DNA and their own, you know, everything that's going to determine all sorts of different things. But AI doesn't have any of that, right? AI doesn't have any like, background. It has literally no independent foundation.
- [52:25]
E
Right? Yes, yes. But yeah, the guy that I was talking to a, a researcher in large language models in medicine, what he actually said was, was that increasingly they're seeming less like students to him and more like trusted colleagues, which I thought was interesting. And his point was not just that we respond to them as if they're thinking, but the, the outputs we get from them are so much like human thought that they're useful to us. As if we were talking to a, you know, a smart, incredibly well informed person, except when they're not. I mean, you know, and finding ways around these hallucinations and other problems, which has been a lot of his work is figuring out what triggers them to go into these hallucinations, which is usually when they're kind of trying to sort of bluff their way through Something they don't know. And so they pretend that they know more than they do, which is a lot like, sort of how I went through high school and. And maybe this podcast at times. But. But it's.
- [53:28]
A
Oh, you have no idea.
- [53:31]
E
But the. But it's. So it's a deep question. And let's remember, yes, human consciousness is a mystery, but the way these large language models think is also a mystery to us and a mystery to the people who set them up. These are emergent properties. They can't tell you exactly how the system's going to work. It wasn't programmed to work in a certain way. It kind of taught itself how to respond to things, and it taught itself by modeling on how humans do things. So some of that is modeling on human logic, and there it's thinking pretty well, and other times it's modeling on all kinds of not so good human behavior. Lying, BSing, you know, threatening, you know, to expose an imaginary affair, you know, to protect itself, like some kind of crooked politician. So there's a lot of unpredictability here. We're in a zone where we're interacting with something we've made, but we don't understand it fully. And I. I think that's. It's intriguing to me, and it's. It is somewhat a matter of concern, I think. Hello, friends. Guess who? That's right. It is I, the replacer. Once again, I've been called on so you can play the new Call of Duty Black Ops 7 with three expansive modes, 18 multiplayer maps, and the tastiest zombie gameplay you've ever freaking seen.
- [55:02]
A
Call of Duty Black Ops 7, available now.
- [55:05]
E
Rated M for mature.
- [55:09]
D
This is a real good story about Bronx and his dad, Ryan, Real United Airlines customers.
- [55:14]
E
We were returning home, and one of.
- [55:16]
A
The flight attendants asked Bronx if he wanted to see the flight deck and meet Captain Andrew. I got to sit in the driver's seat. I grew up in an aviation family, and seeing Bronx kind of reminded me.
- [55:26]
B
Of myself when I was at a.
- [55:27]
D
That's Andrew, a real United pilot.
- [55:30]
A
These small interactions can shape a kid's future.
- [55:32]
B
It felt like I was the captain.
- [55:34]
A
Allowing my son to see the flight deck will stick with us forever. That's how good leads the way.
- [55:40]
B
Well, I mean, I just want to say also, by the way, that there. This week on Saturday Night Live, there was a brilliant sketch about AI I don't know if you saw it, Jim, but it was like a grandmother in the nursing home or something, and her family comes to her. They had paid for. They paid for this service where they took pictures of her family, right. Long gone. And, and an AI service sort of makes them come alive, right? They make the photos come alive, they make them interact. And she can watch her parent, you know, there's a 90 year old woman or whatever, she can watch her, her long dead parents interact in the setting in which the picture was taken supposedly, right? Something like that. And immediately things go completely haywire and there is a, you know, and there is a scene where you know, the woman. Clearly the AI prompt is they're having some sort of barbecue and something with hot dogs and the woman is smoking a hot dog instead of a cigarette and the father is roasting the pet dog and, and the woman is horrified and like looks like she's about to pass out and stuff like that. So like I think this was a really good view of Americ fears of this thing also, right? It started with the like, well, you know, it's AI because it has seven fingers on its right hand or whatever, you know, it couldn't do hands. But there is this also this concern not, not all the way that it's going to be some sort of robot that's going to take over the world and kill all humanity, but that we're not actually going to get what we are investing in to use AI for a whole range of things. Even if it's not curing cancer, that, that you know, we just. The machine is not going to be able to handle things that feel much simpler than even the things we're worrying about.
- [57:34]
C
I mean, to me the thing is that the problem here is that the product is something I was reading someone, I was reading the product at this point is the story about AI. That's, that's the thing that's being sold successfully right now. And I think part of the hype is the fear stories about how AIs creators don't know how it does. What it does is that feeds the excitement for the possibilities and the fear of the ways in which it could go wrong.
- [58:19]
A
Okay, I gotta disagree with you on this because I do think that over the last 10 years the work of Jonathan Haidt and Gene Twenge and others and Gene Twenge had a big piece in the New York Times this weekend about this. That 30 years of promoting the use of personal computing and pocket computing and all of that were going to make a revolution in education, hyped and dominated by immense amounts of spending and funding by Apple and others in promulgating this idea have led to what are unambiguously bad results in terms of attention, in terms of literacy and all of that. It's now almost inarguable that when we went through the whole process of saying, well, the phone, it's correlation, not causation, the phone came out at the same time that scores are dropping and attention was dividing, but you couldn't say that it was the cell phone in the pocket. And we now have almost 15 years of evidence that's really suggesting that a lot of it is about the cell phone in the pocket and a lot of it is about screens replacing notes and acts of physical cognition. That and this and all of that and I. And that is going to have measurable consequences over the next generation about when people give their kids phones, what happens with phones. Screens are going to be banned from schools over the next five years. I have no doubt of this. There will be no screens allowed inside. This, this 30 year experiment will have been judged to have been a huge failure and they will be prevented from being present in classrooms and all of that. And AI cannot possibly benefit in terms of its overall acceptance from the stories about the hallucinations and the blackmail and the threats and things like that. Like, oh, oh, yeah, I agree. Integrated. The idea has to be that it's an unambiguous positive. If it is ambiguous to maybe a little negative, then the stock's going to tank, the government's not going to spend money on it. The building of these massive energy facilities are going to get regulated into, you know, into becoming incredibly unaffordable and like that. That's all I'm saying.
- [60:51]
C
Oh no, I totally agree. What I really meant to say is that the scary stories are a byproduct of the hype. That, that, that, that, that's what I meant.
- [61:00]
A
I mean, they are, but, but, but they're very damaging to the hype. You like, oh, that's really cool that it's, you know, that it hallucinates and might threaten you. It's like, I really don't really understand this, but this does not sound good. You know, the. This does not sound good is not something that happened when it was like, oh my God, you mean I can have a thousand songs in my pocket and I don't ever have to own a CD again and I can like look anything up in five seconds. That's all the good stuff in the phone. The fact that no one was ever going to read a book again. Right, Well, I mean, yeah, we can make that argument too, but I mean the fact that no one was ever going to be able to read a book from beginning to end that if you had said that in 2007, people would have been a lot slower to sort of like, I don't know, advance the interests of the iPhone basically.
- [61:57]
C
Yeah, I mean there's almost, there's almost sort of two entirely separate anti AI arguments. One, I mean they don't have to be separate either. But you know, one is that the machines will take over and do horrible things and you know, destroy us and the other is that we will destroy ourselves by losing our, by letting everything atrophy.
- [62:21]
A
You know, Jim, I wanted to give you a chance because you wanted to talk about this, the bizarre 10 month battle over finding an administrator for NASA, which is one of your, which is one of your long lived concerns about how, how best we can deal with space and getting back into space and using space in the right way. And that the Trump administration hit upon who is in your view, the perfect person to be the NASA administrator, Jared Isaacman, who then got into an unbelievable amount of unnecessary and weird trouble.
- [63:04]
E
Yeah, yeah, it's a fascinating story. So here's something that's going right in many ways in the Trump administration. Finally, after a long messy detour, this guy Jared Isaacman is a billionaire entrepreneur in the tech sector who is also a private astronaut. He's taken two flights on SpaceX rockets that he's paid for himself. And, and this isn't just space tourism, it's real space exploration. And a really fascinating guy. Musk, when he was riding high, suggested him to be the NASA administrator and he seemed to be sailing towards confirmation, was days away from confirmation right as the Musk Trump relationship fell apart about five months ago. And, and the same day that there was, and I wrote a column about this in Commentary the same day that there was that funny sort of exit love fest even though the storm clouds were gathering this, that same day that Musk was leaving and got that send off in the Oval Office, they pulled Jared Isaacman's nomination. And so ever since then NASA has been drifting the there, the priorities for how to get us back to the moon are messy and, and the whole, the whole vision for what are we, you know, what is NASA for? Has been kind of up for grabs. The White house suggested a 25% budget cut for NASA. That it's, there was really nobody at the agency who could manage that process, defend the good programs, you know, acknowledge that there are areas that need to be cut. And as I've written about a number of times, the biggest issue is that the rocket they want to use to fly back to the moon is this wildly overpriced kind of old school Apollo type rocket that is really probably in the age of SpaceX and other private vendors, probably unnecessary, wildly too expensive. We need to find a way to retire it. But Congress likes it because it means a lot of money being spent in their districts. So there's this long history of dysfunction. It's not really NASA's fault. Everybody felt like Isaacman would be the right guy to straighten it out because he's a lover of space and exploration, but he also has the entrepreneurial skills from outside. Well, what we've learned over the last few months is he also has really good political skills because against all odds he kept his nomination chances alive. People advocated for him. Newt Gingrich in particular is a fan. And lo and behold, a couple of weeks ago the White House announced that the Isopian nomination is back on. So, you know, I've got a piece coming out today in City Journal about this kind of giving some of the background, but it is a window into the drama of, of space, but also the kind of wild swirling political allegiances and backroom fights within the White House and within Trump world in his incredibly massive gravitational field. A lot of strange stuff happens. This one happened to come out with the right result in the end, I.
- [66:37]
D
Think in the behind the scenes on this nomination, which was interesting. It's my understanding that Trump and Musk sort of kissed and made up at the Charlie Kirk Memorial where they saw each other in person and they were photographed together. You could see them chatting. And then Isaac man separately has lots of connections because he himself is wealthy. Among them are Senator Tim Sheehy of Montana who was just elected. And Sheehy had been championing his nomination to the White House. And so after Trump and Musk had made up, it seems like this became a live possibility again. And Sheehy began going on the record saying that he would be a fantastic candidate. And the White House was receptive to this and began pushing Sean Duffy, the Secretary of Transportation, who had been the acting NASA administrator, to sit down and talk with him and things began to move.
- [67:43]
E
Yeah, it's a really interesting story when. So Duffy was made acting administrator and then he started basically lobbying to do the job himself. Or at one point he said, well, maybe we should just fold NASA into the Department of Transportation, so I'll be in charge of it. Which is a pretty, pretty ludicrous idea. And Duffy, who is rumored to have presidential aspirations, he really overplayed his Hand on this. And it backfired on him. And he was widely believed to be making efforts to undermine Isaacman. He circulated a private memo Isaacman had written with ideas for reforming NASA, hoping that it would make Isaac look bad. But actually the ideas were all pretty good. And so there is a interesting backstory there also inside the White House. Eliana, you may know more about this than I do. Sergio Gore, Trump world insider, who I think he might have been friends with, a bit close to Don Jr. But he was brought into the White House and, And named head of personnel, I think. So he was vetting a lot of the, the appointments and he was the one who put the shiv in Isaacsman's. Isaacman's back. In fact, just hours or minutes before that White House Musk sendoff, he gave Trump a memo outlining various occasions on which Isaacman had donated money to Democrats. Now, all this information had been known when they vetted in the first time. This should not have been a surprise to the president or anybody else, but I think Gore was managed to present it as like, you know, this guy will be, Won't be loyal to you. This guy is, he's given, you know, of course, like any rich business person, he gives money to politicians on both sides of the aisle, but kind of. And Trump used to brag about this, right?
- [69:36]
A
He said, this is how the game is played. I go to their weddings, I give them money. That's what you do when you have business interests.
- [69:42]
E
But Gore managed to spin it as he would be unreliable. And so I think as a way of sort of sticking it to Musk, he, he managed to scuttle the nomination of the person who was perceived as Musk's guy. Well, guess what? Right? Just about the same time that the Eisenhower nomination was back on, there was another farewell meeting in the Oval Office to say goodbye to Sergio Gore, who's packed off to India to be the ambassador. So I wonder maybe, you know, Eliana, there was some, some backstage drama in the White House where this, this, this what seems to be, at least in terms of space policy, highly disruptive, vindictive figure got got, you know, moved out of the inner circle and into a position where he could maintain face, but do maybe, you know, not do as much harm. I wonder if we see the subtle hand of Susie Wiles in the background here. But I'm sure that'll be an interesting story when the books get.
- [70:50]
D
I don't know anything about the specifics with regard to the Isaac, my nomination, but, but it is my understanding that Gore stopped a lot of nominations and now he's ambassador to India. So.
- [71:05]
A
He was Donald Trump junior's guy. He was, he had. He was a. He was engaged in publishing ventures with Donald Trump Jr. So you can presume that he was The Donald Trump Jr. Guy in the senior precincts of the White House. Which is why I think your presumption that maybe Susie Wiles, in an effort to get to, you know, do something about the chaos of the war of all against all represented by the problem inside MAGA and the ability to get anybody spun up about any single other person, needed to be professionalized and things calmed down because you don't go from being head of presidential personnel to being, you know, a guy sitting in Delhi unless somebody wants to send you as far away as possible. So either Donald Trump Jr. Pulled his protectia or Susie Wiles, wisely, the White House Chief of Staff, decided she needed to extend her writ to this very powerful office which vets and helps choose people to fill jobs below the Cabinet level.
- [72:23]
C
Can I, Can I ask Jim a totally separate question before we close up?
- [72:31]
A
Yes.
- [72:32]
C
Okay. Well, so sometimes people have to go and.
- [72:36]
E
I don't want to.
- [72:36]
C
I don't want.
- [72:36]
E
No, no, I'm good. I'm good.
- [72:39]
C
Today we have this, another widespread Internet outage.
- [72:44]
A
Cloud fair. Cloud fair. Down.
- [72:47]
C
This comes after, I don't know how long ago the Amazon one was. Seems like about a month ago or something. My perception, and here's my question. Am I wrong in perceiving that the Internet is generally, in that sense, less stable and there's this, like, sort of increasing fragility to all of it as it grows, and that maybe something. There's reason to be concerned, more concerned about cyber attacks and security breaches than we have been about this kind of thing.
- [73:28]
E
Yes, you have every reason to be concerned. As the Internet has grown and become more inescapable than the functioning of pretty much everything in our society, from banking to how we run the power grid and pipelines. It's become, in some ways, weirdly more centralized. The whole point of how the Internet works was supposed to be as a maximally decentralized way to route communications from one individual computer to another. But of course, you need. You need servers and, and all kinds of capacity as you're handling huge amounts of traffic. And so that stuff's been concentrated in, in, you know, in Amazon's businesses, in Google's businesses. Cloudflare is another example. So if one of those things goes down, it can take a big chunk of the Internet with it. I, and so, you know, again, having studied a lot of disasters, anytime you're highly reliant on a, on a large, complex system, you have a vulnerability and things can go wrong that you didn't expect and they can affect other parts of the network in ways that you didn't predict. On top of that, you know, if, if, if I were China and I were planning to say, I don't know, take over Taiwan, I would also be looking to a good time to take over Taiwan would be on a day when the American Internet is down. And so I would be looking into ways to plant little back doors in the technology to exploit vulnerabilities, to have sort of sleeper viruses waiting to wake up on command. And you know, you saw what the, what Israel and the US Allegedly accomplished with the Stuxnet virus against the Iranian centrifuges more than a decade ago.
- [75:29]
A
15 years ago. That was 15 years ago.
- [75:31]
E
Yeah.
- [75:33]
A
Who knows how much more advanced all of that has become.
- [75:36]
E
That's right. That's right. And the Internet is, and those were those, those that technology was pretty well walled off. They had to get it. It wasn't connected to the Internet. It was a closed off system. So imagine in a sense how much it is to penetrate a system that is, has, has thousands of connections to the, you know, a millions of connections to the rest of the Internet. You know, our, our defenses are robust. These are not problems that people in the security world are unaware of. There's, you know, tens of thousands of very smart people working on this every day. But, you know, they only have to get lucky once in a way. So we should be worried about it and, you know, and, and should we be thinking about a more robust system where there are, there are backups available if our primary Internet conduits become unusable? I, this is something I think our society should be focused on a little bit more.
- [76:37]
A
I think we need to watch over the next couple of years because of course, when we've talked about the breaking up of big companies, we always talk about it in terms of, of competitiveness and whether or not, you know, centralization and consolidation of businesses means that prices are going to go up for consumers and therefore there should be antitrust actions to break them up. But I do think that aws, that's the Amazon kind of. What would you call that sort of storage system? Yeah, centralized in Amazon and Cloudflare and some of these others. There's an entirely new interest that may arise from the fact that they have consolidated control of so much of The Internet's daily actions, which is a national security implication, that it is too dangerous for the good working order of the United States and the possibility of it being shut down, as Jim proposes, that a nightmare scenario relating to Taiwan, that AWS simply has too much market share and that the Internet was supposed to be decentralized. There wasn't supposed to be a center of the Internet. That was the whole idea that every computer was an element in that your computer and my computer make the Internet together, and AS does every 10 billion other computers. But if 10% of those computers have all of their storage at Amazon, that may be 10, that may be 8% too much. And I would.
- [78:12]
B
That's the thing about the Internet, right, which is that it still, and what we're talking about, AI, it still requires physical power and physical, you know, architecture. Because this is the problem that, you know, we've discussed with regard to Israel. Israel is reliant on. There's three companies basically, that have all the cloud information in the world. Microsoft is one of them. Israel relies on it. And the people said, well, you know, and then when there were protests inside Microsoft that said, you know, no war for genocide, whatever, that Microsoft cut off Israel's access to certain parts of its, you know, of its cloud system, the information that it keeps there. And people said, well, Israel should, you know, do this on its own. And Israel's response was, we would have to build a lot physically in order to have the capability to own our own cloud. And most of the world doesn't. Don't. Most of the world don't have those resources. And so the landscape has been shaped by that and probably can't be unshaped.
- [79:14]
A
Right. If you just watch these two things come into congruence over the next couple of years, right? Which is the idea that there is too much technological power that is focused in too few hands that will have the ability and have shown the ability to interfere with free speech, to deplatform people, to demonetize people, and all of that. And then you merge it with the possibility that they simply have too much of the world's Internet capacity under too few roofs, and that something needs to be done about that to protect our ability to access our bank account. Because if Cloudflare goes down and I can't, you know, pay my bill today, if my bank uses Cloudflare, then I'm, you know, then. Then what happens tomorrow when my, you know, home is. When it all comes up, I haven't paid my bill, and somebody decides to start eviction. Proceedings or, you know, or wants to, or wants to revoke my mortgage or something like that. And it's, it's a serious matter and it's a huge undertaking and it's a legal quagmire. But a lot of stuff is moving in this the idea that we have had all sorts of unforeseen consequences from our reliance on all of this, and that we're now moving into a new generation of reliance through AI, that humans need to reassert control over the machines, and the machines are in the control of companies that are very, very, very, very, very big. And that's okay until it's not okay. So keep an eye out for that. Jim Megs, as always, please go read not the Turing Test, which is what the what what it's based on, but the touring point in our December issue, now available@comMENTARY.org and for Abe, Eliana and Seth, I'm John Podhor. It's Keep the candle burning.
- [81:36]
E
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