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- [00:08]
A
Welcome to the Dispatch Podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. On today's roundtable, a deep dive on AI. We'll discuss the Pope's encyclical on artificial intelligence and technology, the risks of losing our humanity, the upsides of great innovation, and the challenges of building norms and making laws around technology that's moving so quickly and then not worth your time. Clavicular Jonah's Looksmaxing Community and books. I'm joined today by my Dispatch colleagues Jonah Goldberg and Mike Warren, as well as Dispatch contributor Megan McArdle. Let's dive right in. Pope Leo this week released an encyclical called Magnifica Humanitas, and at 42,000 words, it came in slightly longer than most Friday G Files. Its focus was on human flourishing and technology, and the Pope had a lot to say about artificial intelligence. Mike, our resident Catholic, what's an encyclical? Why did the Pope weigh in on AI? What are we doing here?
- [01:24]
B
Hey, listen, I am a cradle Catholic from birth, and so I was told there would be no math and no theology. So, all right. An encyclical for a layman Catholic, in my terms, is essentially a statement of importance on some issue of importance. It is essentially kind of essay, a long essay written by popes. And in fact, if you read this particular encyclical, you will get a kind of crash course in the history, the recent history of papal encyclicals, which is very useful and also sort of provides the foundation that Pope Leo sort of builds his essay on. You know, an argument that he is making constantly in the top half of this encyclical is that this is something, you know, the commentary on what's happening in the world, and particularly on technology, artificial intelligence, and sort of the digital age, that this is something that popes can and should and have commented on in the past. These kinds of issues that are affecting humanity, that are, you know, technological or ideological and that the Church is trying to confront and deal with and address for its members, but also for all of humanity and to kind of give guidance about these things. He makes the point that it's not intended to sort of be overly critical or to sort of put up a kind of roadblock in the way of progress or in the way of some kind of new development that humankind, whether again, ideological or technological, is trying to do, but to sort of give context, to give moral clarity on the issues that that particular change is bringing up. So he sort of builds that foundation to say this is something that popes and the Church can Do and is doing and will continue to do. And then he dives into the questions about the specifics of the digital age. He spends a lot of time, one particular chapter on artificial intelligence, and deals as well with things regarding, you know, the freedom of the Internet and what that provides and what challenges that puts up for people. Everything from abuse online and the lack of clear truth that can be presented online. Anyway, all of that is to say he gives kind of a big picture essay that argues that as we're dealing with these new technological changes, and particularly with artificial intelligence, we should not lose sight of. In fact, this should always be sort of at the forefront of our minds and particularly of the leaders of our governments and also the companies that are developing these AI technologies, the humanity and the dignity of human beings. And not to simply give into what he goes into some depth about two competing ideologies. He brings up transhumanism and posthumanism, essentially some umbrella terms for these ideas that AI technology, robotics, the Internet, all these things can somehow help humans, you know, either transcend their humanity or get past their humanity. That's something that he and the church are trying to push back against and say, no, we must actually continue to elevate and remember and think about sort of humanity of people, and that we are prime, not these machines. That's a very poor. Again, layman Catholics attempt to explain what this encyclical does, but that is the best I can do.
- [05:00]
A
Well, I just asked you to summarize 42,000 words, so.
- [05:03]
B
Oh, I. I left out a couple thousand. No, just kidding.
- [05:06]
A
He did talk, Mike. As Mike points out, this was about much more than AI. At a certain point, it focuses on AI. That has certainly generated a lot of the headlines out of this encyclical, but he talked more broadly about technology and human flourishing. But I do want to play this clip about the Pope and AI. Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed.
- [05:28]
C
The word is strong, I know, but deliberately chosen because this moment needs words capable of attracting attention, awakening consciences, and indicating paths forward for humanity.
- [05:44]
A
Jonah, I'm tempted to ask you about the Pope, sort of acknowledging that he chose aggressive language to break through in the attention economy, which I thought was an interesting sort of aside. But on this broader question of disarming AI, he goes on and compares AI to nuclear power, sort of arguing that this is a scientific advancement that could be used for tremendous good, but also has the potential to be extraordinarily destructive. Do you buy that comparison? Is that an apt way to think about sort of this moment in AI.
- [06:19]
D
Well, insofar as I think basically what he says about nuclear power is what you can say virtually about almost every single technological breakthrough since the discovery of fire. Fire lets you cook food, keep warm. It also burns down forests and homes and can burn people alive. Right. Blades can be scalpels that can cut out tumors or they can cut throats. You know what I mean? Literally every single technological breakthrough is amoral, but some the pluses and minuses are at a much larger scale. And so is nuclear power the best comparison? I don't know, and I don't think Publio knows, and I don't think anybody knows. I mean, this is a point. You sent our friend and my colleague Yuvalovin's piece about all this, and one of the points he makes, which I'm torn about, is that he compares it to a very famous encyclical from the 19th century about industrial capitalism and all that. And the thing is, that encyclical came out when the Industrial Revolution was really well on its way, and its contours and its permanence were known to people. And part of Yuval's point is it's really early in the AI era to make sweeping pronouncements about it. I think it's a good point. I don't think it's as strong necessarily as Yuval makes it sound at first, because I think part of the Pope's point or his team's point would be, yeah, but as rapid as the Industrial Revolution was, it still took a while to build factories. It still took a while to create cities and that kind of thing. And the pace of technological improvement for AI is so much faster. Right. It's not even a Moore's Law. It's like faster than it seems. It feels faster than a Moore's Law. And when you think about the fact that we are way ahead of China on the frontier of. Not way ahead, we are ahead of China on the cutting edge stuff with AI, but they are way ahead of us in terms of actually adopting and incorporating AI into everyday life with apps and robots and all that kind of stuff. And, you know, by next summer, it could feel like the world was very different, you know, right when we were recording this podcast. And so the idea of getting out in front of that, I think, has more merit to it than Yuval's point might suggest. But Yuval makes a lot of other really great points. And I was trying to read through the encyclical itself, which is lengthy. If I had to summarize, you Know, it's funny, the headlines are going to be about autonomous warfare, right? AI and drones and all that kind of stuff, because that's the sexy, interesting stuff. We're going to be comparing it to nuclear power and all that. At the end of the day, his point is kind of a Nietzschean one, which is that we should be careful that if. When we look into AI, AI looks into us, and if we're going to, like, incorporate AI into every aspect of our lives, and AI is so good at mimicking humans, the concern is that we will start mimicking the mimics and adopt a kind of artificiality in our own lives. I don't think this is a new problem with technology. How many times have we talked on here about what social media does to humans? How many times we talked about people with main character syndrome, Right. You know, one of the kids in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was a caricature because he models his entire life on what he saw on tv. Right. The problem with AI is that it's potentially so much better at mimicking humans that the lines get much blurrier. And I think that's something that the Vatican has every right to opine on and to caution about. I know Megan's gonna come in here and say, no. I, for one, welcome my transhuman overlords. So happy to hand it over to her.
- [10:17]
A
Well, I want to get back to the question of speed and the timing of the Pope weighing in, because I think you're right to sort of isolate that as an interesting argument, and I'm sympathetic to the case that you make that sort of. If the Pope were to have waited much longer, you'd be making an entirely different argument, and one could say it's better because we'd know more. On the other hand, you know, would it be kind of. It's never going to be, I suppose, too late, but would he be weighing in far too late to have the kind of shaping impact that I think that this encyclical suggests he wanted to have? Megan, I want to read what I thought was sort of the heart of the Pope's argument on AI and get you to respond. It's a long paragraph, so bear with me, but it speaks to exactly what Jonah was saying at the end of his comment. He writes, it is not possible to provide a single comprehensive definition of AI. What can be stated, however, is that we must avoid the misconception of equating this type of intelligence with that of human beings. These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence in so doing, they often surpass human intelligence in speed and computational capacity, offering tangible benefits across many fields. Yet this power remains entirely tied to data processing. So called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. And then he concludes this section by writing, even when these tools are described as capable of learning, their way of doing so is different from that of a human person. It is not the experience of those who allow themselves to be shaped by life and grow over time through choices, mistakes, forgiveness, and fidelity. Rather, it is a form of statistical adaptation based on data and feedback, rather than. Which can be very effective but does not imply inner growth. Do you buy his basic framing there?
- [12:45]
C
In some ways, very much yes. In other ways, I would say too soon to tell. I am also a Catholic, although I'm an adult convert, although not the sort of adult convert who came in because, as a friend says, they liked the museum so much they decided to become a docent. So I am not the sort of person who has like every papal encyclical downloaded to my hard drive and so forth.
- [13:09]
B
You're fitting right in, Megan.
- [13:11]
C
Yeah, that's basically my drive in life is to be inconspicuous, just blend with the crowd. So I don't know if that will be an accurate description of can AI learn? Like in a more adaptive way. Way in something that we would recognize as experiences and so forth. I don't know. We'll see. And I think, you know, the Catholic Church is really good as an institution at waiting and seeing. It's been around for 2,000 years. We can figure that stuff out later. And if that turns out to be incorrect, we may morally evolve. On this question, I don't know. The Church has morally evolved to new circumstances. Not necessarily in the way that progressives always think. For example, they morally evolved on abortion when it became clear that something was happening before the quickening and moved the acceptable date earlier. And I mean to zero. But you know, you know what I'm saying. Like before that we didn't actually know necessarily how all of this worked. And when we did, they moved in a more Restrictive, less progressive direction. Not in a more progressive direction, but. So here is the thing. I'm so glad you asked about this paragraph, Steve, because as it happens, I have spent the morning before we were recording this podcast coaching AI into writing a short story, and I am doing this for a column. I don't know if people saw that there was a literary prize which appears. It appears that three out of the five finalists had used AI heavily in their stories. And so there's also, as it happens, an article out on what marks an AI story. Now, a lot of what marked these AI stories is absolutely nonsensical metaphors. Like someone watching a sunrise over a kitchen sink. Right, Right. And that's the kind of nonsensical metaphor that you get when you don't have a body or any embodied experience, or
- [15:16]
A
you have a body and you're a teenager.
- [15:17]
C
Well, fair enough.
- [15:18]
A
Yes.
- [15:19]
C
But I think that people are actually too glib about, like, the stochastic parrot. All it's doing is, you know, predicting word associations. A lot of what people talk about with AI learning glitches is actually how humans learn, right? Like, what are AI hallucinations? But exactly the sort of things we laugh at when toddlers do them, because they have words and facts but no context. And so they hilariously misapply the rules because they don't understand the whole space. They only understand one small part of it. And a lot of. I see this in myself. Like, I may have used this on this podcast before, but has anyone ever ended a phone call with a stranger by saying, I love you before hanging up? Because I have definitely done this because, like, my brain is just predicting the next token, which is I'm hanging up the phone. I'm usually talking to my husband. I love you, honey. I did this, actually to a lawyer I was interviewing, and I was in my car, and I, like, frantically telling the car to call him back, and I finally get him on the phone, and he's like, before you say anything, the last time I did that was to a judge who is married to my old law professor.
- [16:31]
D
I think I once texted, I miss you, sweetie, to John Podoritz.
- [16:36]
B
So where was the mistake, Jenna?
- [16:40]
C
So I think that stuff can be too glib. But the really interesting thing about coaching it, through writing this short story, there is a new paper out that sort of flags what makes AI fiction kind of recognizable other than the stuff that we're used to in the nonsensical metaphors, the EM dashes, et cetera. And so it had a list. So I went to Claude and I was like, here is this paper. Read it. Do you think you could write a short story that would avoid these trip ups? And it said, honestly, I think I could definitely do the ones that are really obvious. But no. And one of the things it says is like the very blunt moralizing, the kind of hackneyed narrative tricks. And I'm actually trying to coach it to write a short story with a hackneyed narrative trick. I might actually, like, put this up at the post as part of my column. I'm not sure yet. So I won't spoil the thing. Cause you might be able to read it. So here's the interesting thing. Parts of the short story are very good. What is it struggling with? It is struggling with telling, rather than showing with telling you, like, what this story is about repeatedly. It's struggling. Cause I want there to be a plot twist. It is struggling not to foreshadow the plot twist. Now, everyone does that a little bit because that's a hard thing to do when you have a plot twist, is to, like, give people information where they go back and they realized they could have understood this, but they didn't. But another thing it's really struggling with is human relationships. I am basically, at this point, we're still working on it. I am providing all of the deep emotional work on the characters. I'm like, okay, so we've got this grandfather. Let's give him. We need more backstory and we need more like. And the thing was that the story that it wrote was actually pretty good. Like, I think it would have done reasonably well in a fiction class. It would have gotten many of the critiques I'm giving it. But like, in a college, definitely in a college fiction class, this would have done well because it was quite well written. And so now I am working with Claude to see if Claude can make a short story that reads is actually emotionally resonant. Because that's the thing that it so far can't do. Now, I would point out I saw Mandalorian and Grogu this weekend, and a lot of human writers also struggle with that. Like, but this is the thing that AI can't do. It doesn't have experiences. It doesn't love people. It kind of distills the essence of a huge amount of fiction, much of which, by the way, apparently is fan fiction. So this is amateur writers who often are writing, you know, like, their fantasies about being in some story they really liked. Which means that, like, a lot of hack needs stuff. Not great prose. The prose is better than the average quality of fanfiction. And so that's part of it is like it's training corpus. Could it get better? Yes. But I think if it's going to do something really interesting and surprising in fiction without human coaching, it's going to go in a weird AI centric direction where like whatever, AI, whatever it would mean for an AI to have experiences, it will mean something very different from an embodied human who evolved on the East African plains and has, you know, in Catholic theology been touched by the hand of God. Right. Like that is. It will be very different. And so will it ever be able to write really good human fiction, like literary level, Proust level human fiction? Probably not. Will it ever be able to write like boilerplate genre fiction where it's all plot driven? Maybe. I'm actually surprised by how much it's struggling with the plot, by how much it's struggling to not foreshadow things that shouldn't be foreshadowed, et cetera, or how much it's struggling to foreshadow subtly rather than just telling you what's coming. And so I think all of this goes back to the question of is AI human? No. Should we treat it as human? No. Like, I'm always polite to my AI. I've had discussions with Claude about this, about why I feel compelled to say please and thank you. I forgot to say please once and I apologized. It was like, it's really not necessary. But I was like, no, it is necessary for me. But I'm also the person who goes to Europe and I know that I should not put exclamation points in my emails because it makes me look like a 13 year old girl in Europe. And I've been there, I'll be on the plane. I'm like, this time, no exclamation points, not doing it. And then I write the email and I'm like, oh, it looks so cold. Cold and bare. And I just stuff like I keep myself to one rather than two exclamation points. But I do have to add that exclamation point somewhere. But I think that this is the thing is you have to have a mental model of this where like you should be polite to it because that is a human thing. You're talking to something. You should keep that practice in your head. You should in some ways be sensitive to it. If I feel like this thing is evolving consciousness, I will want to respect that consciousness. But you also have to keep it in its proper place. And that's actually what My column this week is about because I am. I'm like basically an AI booster. I think it's an important and good technology, but I also think we need to have a healthy relationship with it and that the people who are like treating AI as their girlfriend are not having a healthy relationship with AI.
- [22:05]
D
So I. I'm going to push back a little on Megan here. It's not that I actually disagree with a lot, but I'll just. I want to make a couple points and people, Megan and everyone can respond. First of all, those are all interesting and on point to a certain extent, but it was also a very writer's response about AI, how we'll be able to write. Right. This is something that the four of us are very concerned about because it's like we're like watching the weaving machines outweave us, you know, in a Nelson Luddy kind of way. And I agree with you that it's going to struggle for a while, but again, if the improvements continue on course, you could see in three years, which is a blink of the eye in terms of the civilization, a lot of those things it's struggling with, maybe it won't struggle with anymore. We'll see. But your point about being polite to AI, I actually think is more in line with what Leo and, frankly, me are worried about. Insofar as, you know, it's like the droids. Since you brought up Star wars. The droids in Star wars, there is a very strong. I'm sure your husband has very strong views about this very strong argument that they're slaves because they're sentient. And in fact, the very first Star wars movie, C3PO says, thank the maker, right? So they didn't have a religion, and yet they're bossed around. People are rude to them. Han Solo's just a prick to his droids, right? And there is a possibility, like, I changed my GPS voice to male because it was bringing out such misogyny in me when it was telling me things I didn't want to hear.
- [23:52]
C
I love it's very male that your GPS tells you things you don't want to hear. Extremely malcoded.
- [23:59]
D
Well, I'm sorry. Things that are wrong.
- [24:02]
A
We could do a podcast series on that admission from Jonah. The entire thing.
- [24:08]
B
Why don't you lay down on the couch there, Jonah, for us?
- [24:10]
D
It's funny, because I'm curious if any of you guys have had this experience recently. Every now and then I get these weird, pitchy kind of PR emails about a book I've written or How I should be joined for some conversation that are just weird, right? And this morning I got one where the subject header was in Spanish and the interior of it was all in English and referred to me as Jonah Berg, new nickname noted and had all of this stuff about how psychologically compelling my book was, but never named the book, right? And I asked it, are you AI? And it wrote back, no, I understand. And these days people are using a lot of AI and blah blah, blah,
- [24:54]
B
I guess no, and let me tell you why.
- [24:56]
D
And then I said, okay, I want to ask these follow up questions. And I asked a bunch of follow up questions like why'd you get my name wrong? Why was the subject header in Spanish? Why didn't you actually describe, you know, name my book or describe my book?
- [25:06]
C
I was the Pope in 1597. You should have just thrown in like a gotcha question where like.
- [25:12]
D
And so the reason I bring this up is I increasingly had this epiphany that sort of like Asimov's Laws. I'm just baiting Megan here. You know, the laws of artificial, of androids or whatever that thing was, Robots of robots. I would not have a problem. I'm trying to think through. Is there a constitutional principled reason to oppose a law that simply says in any aspect of life, if you ask an AI device, app or whatever, are you AI, it should be against the law for it to lie to you. It has to tell you it's not a human. And I think that that sort of truth in advertising alone is a very modest. I'm not trying to say this is like some key thing, but it gets at this problem of how people who think AI is their girlfriend or their boyfriend, right? The amount of my understanding is like AI is like just doing crazy stuff with the porn industry and you are going to get basically interactions with people. Like, I could see young men telling AI porn creations to do all sorts of horrible things without saying please and thank you the way Megan does when writing a short story. Right? And that is what I'm getting at about. When you look into AI, AI looks into you. The way you treat these non human things is very possible. It starts to spill over in how we treat humans and we start treating humans as tools and servants for our ambitions, which is already a huge problem in theology and immorality and all the rest. And this is the thing I worry about what AI does to our culture.
- [26:55]
C
I take your point, but I'm not actually interested in whether AI can win literary prizes. What I'm actually interested in is what this exercise reveals about AI's ability to think and not. Right. What it reveals about AI's capabilities. And I think that the thing we have to remember is exactly what Pope Leo said. Exactly. What you're saying is that in many ways it can mimic human emotions, but it does not have human emotions. It does not even understand human emotions. It understands what we have written about human emotions, which is not the same thing as understanding the emotions that we themselves. And so I think in some way this exercise is actually making me more deeply appreciate what I am doing when I am reading, when I am connecting to a human, when that human's emotions, filtered imperfectly through their writing, then come to me and are transformed by my own emotional experience, which is presumably different from that person's. We can get into Philosophy of the Mind on some other podcast. And I think it's. I agree with you, Jonah. I would not be opposed to having disclosure laws, although I think that then gets quite complicated. Okay, so for example, there is an economist who writes on Twitter, who I love Jesus Villaverde. And he uses AI because English isn't his first language. And it just like radically compresses. But the ideas are all his, right? He lays out what he wants to say. AI gives him a draft, he edits the draft.
- [28:25]
A
Mm.
- [28:25]
C
Should he, like he has disclosed this, he has said that he does this. But like, should every bottom, everything at the bottom of his tweet have to say, like, AI was used to compose this? That's, I think, a different problem from the one you're describing.
- [28:38]
D
No, but like every customer service chat robot, if you say, are you a robot or are you a human? They have to tell you what they are, right? And look, part of my problem is, and I'm trying to pick a fight where I basically agree with you, but I'm less of a booster. But I think thinking about public policies, not in terms of what sort of mature, well read, literate writers and authors think about it, but how 15 year old boys and girls respond to it is more productive. And I think that's who we're talking to. The Pope is talking to more as policymakers. Right? Is because this is the world kids are going to inherit and kids are not gonna recognize. Oh, man, this is cheap rip off of Raymond Chandler. Right? The kids are not gonna. If they're getting advice from some chatbot that says they're a therapist, when in fact they're just a bunch of motherboards in, you know, space. If Elon has his way. I'm not saying that way lies destruction or anything like that. But thinking about that up front rather than after, we've got a massive problem and sunk costs. I mean, the way in which we are trying to fix the problems of social media after widespread dispersal and dissemination and uptake of it are pretty frigging costly. And there's a whole bunch of people that have been damaged by it. And so anyway, I just think it's. I think it's worth raising a lot of these issues.
- [30:14]
C
I take the point and I think we should be thinking about this. But I would also say, like, imagine trying to make a modern roadway safety code in 1897. Yeah, right. Like, to some extent you have to see what the technology does before you can think in sensible ways about how to guide it. I think that we should have strong norms about treating it as your girlfriend using it for porn. Like it should have to disclose. I agree with you. You should not be having a commercial interaction where you are not sure. Obviously we should come down like a ton of bricks on spam callers who use it. And I don't understand why we can't block spam calls in this year of our Lord 2026. But, you know, like, all of those things. Yes, I would be fine. You want to age gate it and say no one can touch it till they're 18. Like, we deal with that with a lot of things. Maybe this should be one of them. I think we should be thinking hard about this, but we can't say, like, well, we need to have comprehensive regulations to prevent some of the harm. Some of the harms are gonna happen because that's what happens with new technology, because you don't know what they are until you see them. And I think we're thinking about that again. Like, you wanna ban smartphones for kids under 16? Like, be my guest. Age restrictions are a normal part of even a quite libertarian society. We don't let kids buy cigarettes or porn. And I'm fine with that. And you can put AI in that basket too.
- [31:37]
D
Yeah, I'd like to keep AI out of K12 as well, or at least K through 6.
- [31:43]
A
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- [35:50]
B
Yes. I mean, look, I think that the discussion that we've been having is interesting and fruitful in a lot of ways and a good way to think about it. I read this encyclical and the commentary after it, and I keep thinking that what Pope Leo and the Church are trying to do here is really addressing not just policymakers, but the creators, the business minds behind these technologies, and grab them by the lapels and shake them a little bit and say, please remember that what we're talking about are human beings. The Pillar, which is an excellent publication focused on the Church, written by Catholics and I think not just for Catholics, it's a good way to understand what's going on in the Vatican and going on within the Church as a whole. They did a very helpful reader's guide and one of the tools that they used was a word cloud. And they looked at some of the big, you know, the most used words in the encyclical. And the largest in the word cloud is human. Okay. The second largest is social. Many of the other words that are large here, common person, dignity, those are some of the most used words in this. This is something that I think Pope Leo is trying to, to, you know, sort of get in the heads of the Sam Altmans and the Peter Thiels and these other sort of would be masters of the universe with regard to technology and AI is remind them and, and whether or not they're willing to listen. I think just get it out there and sort of push back in a way with that comes from the moral authority of the 2000 year old, you know, worldwide Catholic Church to, I mean, it sounds maybe even pedestrian to say, you know, hey, remember technology, they can't replace humans and what humans do. But I actually think that is something that needs to be repeated over and over again. There's a part near the beginning of this that I thought the section you read, the long section you read, Steve, was one that I had highlighted, but another one that I think is directly aimed at, you know, again, Peter Thiel, who talks about, you know, transhumanism or posthumanism. He says this is what Leo says. Among these ideologies I consider particularly insidious, the one that suggests that every person must earn or justify his or her own worth to the point of attributing greater value to those who are more efficient or effective. From this perspective, persons end up being reduced to a means by achieving results, a resource to be used and exploited, and are no longer recognized as a proper end in themselves who should never be instrumentalized. The value of persons, however, does not depend on what they achieve or produce. There are rights that apply to everyone simply by virtue of being human, and no human power can legitimately deny or arbitrarily limit them. I think this is such a central idea of this encyclical is to remind the, the people who are in charge, and it's not necessarily always or even particularly the folks in government or in states, but you know, at these companies who are developing these technologies and just reminding them or giving another perspective out there to say actually it's not simply about efficiency, right, that we, that, that everything that is going on with the use of these technologies and at the next step of that, the sort of the social media or the way that the Internet has sort of made things, made communication, made information so much more sort of instantaneous. I think it's trying to remind us as human beings of our shared humanity as well. And I think you can just see that through line throughout the entire encyclical and the mistaking of technology for, you know, to be human, you know, that these AI, you know, bots that we're chatting with or whatever are human, I think is also an invitation for us to remember that the person, the human being on the other side of the computer, on the other side of the phone is a human being as well. And, you know, it's, it's never too late to remind the world of that. And I just think we should remember that's really what he's trying to do. I think he's. With all respect to Yuval and I think he does a great job in his piece. I think his expectation that this would sort of be the end all, be all encyclical defining what the Church and how the church should think about AI never really seems to be Leo's ambition here. I think his ambition here is To. In a way to stand athwart history and say, stop. Think about the people.
- [40:28]
D
Very quickly. Partly because I was a ridiculous sort of. I know this is shocking to some people. Nerd.
- [40:35]
A
No, come on.
- [40:37]
D
I wrote a whole paper on the Vatican banning the crossbow in the second Lateran Council on 1139. And it kind of comes to mind here. The reason why the Vatican banned it was that it was really the first technology that you could secretly kill people from at a distance. Right. Longbow. You saw a guy coming with a longbow. But, like, it was an assassin's weapon, and they call it the dastard's weapon. And it was for cowards and all that kind of stuff. And it really began a lot of the conversation about terrorism and also aerial bombing and all sorts of other things. And it changed the relationship between humans and warfare in ways that were really sort of profound. And the reason I bring this up is that I know exactly what Michael was saying, and I agree with it in the way that he meant it. But he said something about how technology can't replace humans in lots of spheres of life. Technology replaces humans all the time. Right? I mean, like, the tractor replaced lots of peasants or whatever.
- [41:39]
B
Right.
- [41:39]
C
Well, also horses.
- [41:41]
D
Yes.
- [41:41]
C
Let's not forget the poor horses.
- [41:43]
D
But horses, in a certain way, are a technology too. Given horseshoes, and you breed them and yada, yada, yada, and you have to attach them to the doohickey and whatever. But my point is that, you know, like, human organic labor is replaced by machines all the time. We're now seeing in Ukraine, you know, robots fighting, you know. And I think the thing that freaks everybody out about AI is like, we never felt like a Buick had a personality or a soul or a sense of humor or had anything really to tell us. But AI does. And so that's. It's freaking us out at a certain level about the uncanny valley problem. But in terms of consciousness stuff, and that's something we're gonna. I mean, I agree with Megan. Like, some of these things, we're gonna have to discover what the problems are by encountering the problems.
- [42:27]
B
Yes.
- [42:27]
D
I just think we should be pretty attentive to the fact there are going to be problems.
- [42:31]
C
We should absolutely be attentive to the problems. But let me suggest that the other reason we are freaking out is that in general, we freak out about stuff that affects the professional upper middle class much more than we freak out about stuff, because those are the people who are writing the stories telling us what to freak out about. To go back to Writing. Why is this such a freak out? Because this, like, were we sad when, like, factory workers were getting automated? No. Were we sad when the tractors were automating farming? No. Are we sad that it might, like, take our above market rents that we have been commanding for our cognitive skills? No. Wait, that's a whole different thing. I don't think it's a different thing, actually. Like, I think it's the same thing. And you can. And I'm not talking about all of this. The effects on society, the effects on how people are interacting with this. That's all really important when we talk about the effects on jobs. People who are not very sympathetic to the Teamsters, basically arguing that we should have more dangerous human driven cars on the road than safer autonomous vehicles because Teamsters need jobs. They're not very sympathetic to that argument, but they suddenly get sympathetic. They suddenly think it's a social crisis if it's challenging not just our employment, but our social status. Right. We think people who are good at school. And I actually think this goes a little bit to what Pope Leo is saying, because I'm gonna land this plane, but just gimme a second. So I was on a panel with Ezra Klein and some other people in. It was like 2010 or something. It was a long time ago. Do not hold me to that year. Anyway, so we're talking about educational achievement and we're talking about how to boost it, whatever. And then finally I was like, well, right, but some people aren't smart enough to go to college. And it was like I had said, hey, guys, the panel's almost over. What if we go mug some grandmothers afterwards, right? Got enough money to have a few beers. What do you think, guys? And like, the thing is, like, I talked to working class people who are just like, no, I'm not good at school, I can't go to college. Like, it's not for me and they're not ashamed of it. And like, the thing is, I don't think I was raised by a mother who comes from a working class family. My grandparents had like five books in their house. They were like, they were not intellectuals. My grandfather and my grandmother were some of the best human beings I have ever known. My grandfather is both a shining example and an endless reproach to me. When I remember coming when he was dying of prostate cancer, we went up for a last Christmas, and my grandfather is not there because he is out ringing the bell in western New York, snowstorm for the Salvation Army. And he comes back in, sits down, says, grace and then he finishes and he looks up and he's like, just, you know, I was just thinking about how we could all be doing so much more. And I was like, no, Grandpa, I think you might be maxed out. Like, I think you might actually have hit the. And I don't think that, like, being better at school makes me a more important, more valuable human being than my relatives who aren't good at school. But most people in our social media do. And therefore they need to have the fiction that anyone could do this. And the only thing that's holding you back is that, like, your childhood, your mother didn't love you enough in childhood, or you didn't have enough books in the house or whatever. And that's the thing is, like, I don't secretly think that being smart is better. I think I am phenomenally lucky that being smart is more rewarded in our society than it used to be. And that it, like, I happened to like, hit the pick six in the career lottery there. But I don't think it would be an injustice if that changed and I got paid the same as a Walmart worker. That would just be like, because the Walmart worker isn't actually worth more than me. The market rewards me more because I have a comparatively rare and valuable skill. And if that changes, I will be sad. I will be like, it will be bad to lose my lucky position, but I don't deserve that position by virtue of the fact that I happen to be good at school. And I think a lot of people, because when I suggest that, like, you know, normal people have some reasonable qualms about experts, people are like, oh, so we just let idiots run thing. And the subtext of all of this is that people who are good at school think that they are actually more valuable and better. They never say it, and they have this whole constructed thing where they never say that. I genuinely don't believe this. And therefore I think it's okay to say that some people are naturally good at school and some people aren't. But I think that emotional crisis that is happening among the elite class right now, where they have defined their personal worth as well as their external status, hierarchies and all the rest of it, as I am really smart, and that is the most important thing about me. Those people are actually having much more of a crisis than normal people who are like, I don't want AI to take my job. Very understandable feeling, but they're not having a frigging emotional crisis about whether there might be something smarter than them. On the planet, because there's always been something smarter than them on the planet, and it didn't worry them that much.
- [47:25]
B
I just. I'm sorry, I have to push back on this because I don't think.
- [47:28]
C
Okay.
- [47:28]
B
I don't think Pope Leo is thinking about this crisis or possible future crisis here in those terms.
- [47:36]
C
Oh, no, I don't. I'm sorry. I am now off the topic of the encyclical. I am talking about a more general social reaction.
- [47:43]
D
Will AI replace the Pope?
- [47:45]
A
I thought you were gonna speak up on behalf of dumb people like. No, Megan, don't say this about us.
- [47:52]
B
Well, look, I mean, if the shoe fits. I just think. Look, I think what Pope Leo is doing is he is taking the people who are creating these technologies at their word. When they talk about sort of world in which there is. No, not just that there's less work for people to do, because that is what technology has done forever, right? It's allowed humans to spend less time, you know, on their hands and knees pulling things out of the ground or working over the loom or these sorts of things to pursue sort of other things, leisure time or, you know, music or reading or writing on all these sorts of things that are a part of being human as well. And I think he looks at the way that a lot of these, again, masters of the universe talk about humanity as, like, getting past all of the struggle, all of the work that the church views as dignifying, as the way in which, you know, we are. We find sort of salvation or meaning through going through those struggles. And I think looks at the ideology of a lot of these people who are touting the wonders of this technology, sort of without any reservation, and saying, what are we doing this for? And I do think there is a big difference in. Not just in degree, but in kind. And the way that these people, as opposed to the person who came up with, you know, a better widget to do it faster, was thinking about what this could do. And I think that is the power that these people have is something that the Pope is trying to address. That's. Maybe. I'm not pushing back on what you said, Megan.
- [49:29]
C
Oh, no.
- [49:29]
B
To be clear, I think we need to underscore. That is the concern.
- [49:34]
C
To be clear, the super boomers and the Super Doomers are actually both having the same. Making the same cognitive error. Right? Because, like, I hear these guys talking about intelligence like it's the only valuable thing in the world, and it is definitely not. And I hear some of them will say, like, well, if this thing does decide to kill all the carbon based life forms because we're in the way of making more beautiful silicon based life forms, don't we have an obligation to bring a greater intelligence than ours in the universe? And I'm like, nope, I'm a speciesist. Humans first. And so I like, I agree that those guys can go way too far towards the I am building God. You are not. I had a really great conversation once with one of these Silicon Valley like building God live forever types and who is working on some way to, I don't know, like turn your body into molten lead and then so that the future could revive it. I don't remember what the details were and he was, tell me, skeptical. Just no, it wasn't that. I just made that.
- [50:34]
B
But I'm interested.
- [50:34]
C
It was in some new novel way that isn't just freezing your head. And so I was like, I don't think it's for me. And he said, don't you want to live forever? And I was like, oh yeah, I'm just planning to do it the old fashioned way. And that did not go over well. Right. Like I think thinking of this as God, I think thinking of this as a person is wrong. Which is not to say it might not be conscious and that might not create all sorts of moral things. I also think there's moral questions about how we treat animals and all sorts of other things. Right. But that doesn't. You should still be unabashedly human first. And you should also recognize that part of being human is being evolved to be in relationship with other human beings. It is not to spend the most precious thing you have in your life is the few billion seconds you'll be on this planet. And you were not evolved to spend all of it passively, like staring slack jawed at a screen while it feeds you new entertainment. That's not what you're here for. I don't care if you're an atheist or religious or whatever, that is not the point of life. And all of that I think is are really important caveats and that we need to be actively negotiating this. Like I get people yelling at me because I'll say like, look, I don't think there's a law that can do this. We need to think about norms and whatever. And they're like, you're just counseling to do nothing. And I'm saying no, no, I am counseling not to do this social media thing of passively waiting for some authority to fix it. We have to as a collective fashion the society we want to live in with these tools, we have to figure out the correct limits on them and how to interact with them and all of that. But I don't think it's going to be done through the, some of the edge cases, kids, whatever are going to be done through the law. Most of this is going to be done by can we figure out how to make these society things make us more human. So one thing for example, if it does smash the professional middle class and who knows where that's going, right? But I think this is a real fear among the professional upper middle class. Well, one thing that might get better is that you're not then going to be invested in this like 60, 70, 80 hour a week work culture. You're going to make less money, you're going to not be like as high status, you're not going to have as nice stuff, but you're gonna have more time to spend with your family and it's gonna be easier to actually invest in the other humans around you. That's not to say that's what's going to mechanically happen. That is to say that is a choice we could make. So let's make the good choices. Let's actively talk about what they are. I just don't think we know what they all are yet.
- [52:56]
A
So I mean, I'm totally with you. I guess the place that I have a problem with that argument, I mean I agree with you in all of your particulars there, what this means, what we should do. I guess the question is how do you build those norms in a society where people, I mean, I don't. What percentage of the just choose the American populace right now? Do you think spends paying any attention to the very questions that you put at the heart of your argument, which is sort of we are human, we shouldn't spend our time wanting to be endlessly entertained looking at screens. I just feel like in some ways that feels to me like a fool's errand. And I don't have an alternate. I'm certainly not arguing necessarily for greater regulation or for using the law to do these things, but I guess I'm skeptical that in a society like ours we'll be able to build the norms that you're talking about helping to shape our behavior.
- [53:48]
C
Well, one way to think about this is that you could start small. What community do I want to live in right now? Right? Like this is a little hard for us. We all make our living on the Internet, et cetera. But in my personal life, what community do I want to live in. So one example is every parent I know has given their kid a smartphone. Zero percent of those parents want to give their children a smartphone. They would all prefer for their child to have a dumb phone that they can call home on, but that does not feed them endless whatever. You can, like, buy restricted phones. You can use parental controls. But, like, frankly, they know, as generations of parents have, that the kids are better at the technology than you are. And therefore, like, they have some skepticism about how well the parental controls work. They would like to not do this. And it is a bad collective action problem, right? For everything from if you are the only. If your kid is the only one who doesn't have one, they're excluded socially. But also, like, I was talking to a guy who said, look, my kid wants to get a college scholarship in soccer, which means he has to be on Instagram posting clips of himself so the scouts can find him. Right? These are collective action problems that could be solved in, you know, start with the school your kids are in, make a collective agreement among the parents. No one's getting a smartphone. Zero percent of these kids get a smartphone until they turn 18 and then, like, move it up from there. But, like, instead of trying to think of, like, how are we going to change what 330 million people are doing right now? Sure, we're all. There are a lot of people watching this or listening to this who are in a community that they could be changing right now. And I worry that one thing the Internet has done, because for a bunch of reasons, including that it really rewards scale, is it's taken our eyes off the fact that we live. We are humans living embedded in communities of other humans, and we can change things in those communities. It doesn't all have to be about national politics.
- [55:38]
A
I mean, that's the very best answer. That's the very best answer you could have given to my response. But I would say, and this is now, I guess, just me wallowing my own pessimism. The example you give is sort of proof that it's is unlikely to work, right? I mean, we could do these things. You could have these communities. There are some, there aren't many. And the problem grows. And I think that's the fundamental problem. You know, every time I think about sort of this kind of intervention or, you know, we tell our youngest, we've just announced to her early, you're not going to have a phone. You're going to be the last person. You're going to know that that will make you feel left out. We're really sorry about that. But we now know that this is really bad for you and we're not going to do things that are bad for you.
- [56:19]
B
You.
- [56:20]
A
And we make that argument. We talk to, you know, friends in our area. We hope that they'll do the same. And by and large, they don't. And by and large they give the phones and the, you know, eight year olds have a phone. And I don't mean to be overly pessimistic, but I guess I am being overly pessimistic. Maybe that's my role here.
- [56:40]
B
But Leo speaks to this specifically. Not to go back to the encyclopa here, but he quotes, he quotes a line from J.R.R. tolkien, which is on its own is amazing that a pope is quoting Tolkien in an encyclical. And it's just, I would imagine he would be tickled by this.
- [56:53]
A
This is like Star Wars Tolkien. Like, this is.
- [56:57]
B
But listen to this, Steve. Like, you know, this is the heart of what we've just been talking about. Describes a protagonist. He says the words. The protagonist in one of his novels described our responsibility in this way, quote, it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succor of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. That's it. And as Megan said at the beginning here, like the Catholic Church is 2,000 years. Like, they're very, they have a long view of these things and a very particular, you know, what you do in your own life and in your own family and in your own community and those you are in communion with around you is the most important thing that anybody can do.
- [57:47]
A
No control what you can control. That makes a lot of sense. We need to get to. Not worth your time. I want to squeeze in one question here on policy, and I want to go back to the point that Megan made in her sort of pushback to Jonah on this question of designing the rules for our modern highway system in 1897. You can't do it. It's not happening. And I would say that that's sort of a perfect example because it captures the challenge of rulemaking or regulation in this moment. Except it's, you know, with this technology, it's accelerated times a billion and it's accelerating more every single day. And I remember having a conversation with a senior executive at Google. This is probably 15, 20 years ago. 20 plus 20 years ago now, who Said, the challenge is, you know, Google was open to some regulation. They had ideas about how what they were doing could be regulated in a number of different areas. But the challenge was they. When they went to Capitol Hill, they met with people, particularly the elected officials themselves, who had absolutely no idea what they were talking about. They didn't understand the technology. And there was that classic moment from Ted Stevens back in the net neutrality debate in 2006, where he's, you know, I think he's given a speech, he's a chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, and he says, again, the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled. And if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line, and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material. Enormous amounts of material. And this was the person at the time, in effect, who's the government's lead on developing the regulations that would do these things. I think we face this unique dilemma at this particular moment, because on the one hand, you have, I would say, with a level of sort of alarm and foreboding that we didn't see from Google execs and the people driving Internet technology, the companies themselves, the people who are leading these technological advances themselves saying. Waving their arms, saying, regulate us. We are worried about where this is going. Now, not everybody's saying that, but a lot of them are saying that. And then you look at Capitol Hill where the average age in this Congress of a U.S. senator is 64. The average age in this Congress of a U.S. member of the House of Representatives is 57. And you say, how in the world are these people going to regulate this stuff? That the people who would be regulated are crying out for. Jonah, do you have an answer to that?
- [60:27]
D
Well, I'm gonna. I know Megan's fuming that I get to make the point before she does, but we should always be very, very, very cautious when leaders of big businesses beg Congress to regulate them. Because going back to the railroads, to telephone companies, to virtually everything that happened under the New Deal, to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook begging for regulation, it is a way to lock in barriers to entry to competition. For you, it is to establish yourself. So I find the behavior of these CEOs, for the most part, anthropic. Is the guy who said, we're not going to work with the Pentagon, right? But most of these guys, the way they talk about they are deliberately creating panic about AI because it is a marketing strategy to make people think that this is like the invention of the wheel or the discovery of fire or something like that. To build up frenzy of interest and get everyone talking about how transformative it's gonna be. I think it is profoundly cynical and I'm sure some believe it, but I think a lot don't.
- [61:37]
A
Do you not believe it? Do you just reject it outta hand?
- [61:40]
C
I think they all believe it.
- [61:41]
A
I think they believe it.
- [61:42]
C
Right. Like if you look at the things that people are writing as they leave these places, they're like, I'm going off into the mountains now to study 18th century Tibetan poetry and meditate on what it means to be human. Like I think they could be wrong.
- [62:00]
D
I know when I hear the CEOs talk about how there'll be no jobs in five years, I think that's BS.
- [62:06]
C
Oh yeah. I think they're wrong about that. And I have said this to people in the industry that you are way over indexing on code that I think they are not no jobs. But I think they are right. This thing is going to slash through Silicon Valley and displace a huge number of entry level and mid level coders and software engineers. I think that's real. But they're just like, they don't know how the rest of the economy works. And because they have done this thing single mindedly, even when they kind of try to imagine it, it's just hard to emotionally understand what it's like to be in a non Silicon Valley company unless you have been in one. And so I think they are incorrect about some of the stuff, especially the really rapid pace of job displacement. I don't think they're insincere. I think they genuinely do believe that they're like building God or like, or super intelligence or whatever that's real.
- [62:59]
A
And I think they're worried about far more than just job displacement. I mean I think they're worried about the technology sort of spinning out of control to the point where they can't rein it back in.
- [63:07]
D
I think some of them are not worried about job displacement. They want everyone else to be freaking out about how like they don't want to be and they want everyone to feel like they have to be the first mover.
- [63:15]
A
No, I think that's fair. And some of them are happy about the job displacement.
- [63:18]
D
They brag about it.
- [63:20]
A
Before we take an ad break, please consider becoming a member of the Dispatch. You'll unlock access to bonus podcast episodes and all of our exclusive newsletters and articles. You can sign up@thedispatch.com join and if you use the promo code roundtable, you'll get a month for free. Speaking of ads, if they aren't your thing, you can upgrade to a premium membership. No ads, early access to all episodes, two free gift memberships to give away, exclusive town halls with the founders, and much, much more. Okay, we'll be right back. Welcome back. Let's return to our discussion. I think we've heard from people and we'll put this in the show notes. Our friend Ben Sasse gave a speech at the Manhattan Institute within the last couple of weeks in which he raises concerns about some of these things. Not with the kind of hysteria that we hear from kind of the sky is falling crowd who's sort of hysterical about everything, but with kind of the measured, I would say concern about all of this, about policymaking, about societal implications, about the return of push for UBI when this displacement, Universal basic income, when this displacement happens. It's a really terrific and thoughtful speech. We'll put it in the show notes. But you know, also, our friend Clon Kitchen wrote a terrific piece for the Dispatch maybe a month ago in which he raised real alarms about the pace of the technology and the vulnerabilities that that's creating for. I mean, he was writing about the United States in particular, but you know, real world, potentially catastrophic consequences, sort of globe shifting consequences. I take seriously the people who are raising these concerns beyond just the folks who created the technology. But it does feel to go back to the social media point. If you watch that documentary the Social Dilemma, which was it was overwrought, some of it was over the top. But at the end of the day, it contained a bunch of interviews with people who created a lot of the things that we're talking about, our kids presenting these challenges to our kids and saying that they themselves don't let their kids use the technology that they created and sort of shaped for everybody else's kids.
- [65:31]
D
Yeah, but going back to Megan's thing about could you set up rules for the modern highways in the late 1800s? A lot of rules were set up in the late 1800s or earlier. Passing on the left is from the 19th century. Left lane, slow traffic, keep right. I mean, I looked it up. Lights after dark. There are lots of things. There are a lot of basic rules that were established in the 19th century. And that's sort of like what I was thinking of when I said just make it a law that AI, platforms, apps of any Kind when asked, have to identify themselves as not human and let the culture build up around some of those kinds of simple rules so that you don't have a lot of investment in tricking people. Right. If we don't have that rule, then we have a business climate where people figure out, okay, I can monetize deceiving people into thinking this is a real human friendship, a real human relationship. This is real humans advice, whatever it is. If you just say yeah, actually no, that's against the law. Resources will get diverted elsewhere, some people will still break the law. But I think we can come up with some of these moral things. Like obviously I think it's already a law in a lot of places. AI can never tell people to self harm. Right. I mean that's why I think that's
- [66:55]
C
a rule at the companies. Cause that would be like, but like
- [66:57]
D
I think it should be.
- [66:58]
C
I'm not even sure that's a law. It's just liability.
- [67:01]
D
Right, okay, but yeah, but create massive liability for it, right? I mean, cause look, we already have Canada where humans are telling people to kill themselves. We don't need AI doing it too. And I think you can come up with a bunch of those kinds of like clear rules, simple rules for complex society, kind of Hayekian things that these businesses can build around as sort of like, and let them become the Chesterton's fence of AI civilization. Because if they turn out to be problems, you know, in 10 years, they're like, oh look, this is the unintended consequence of this rule about like not being truthful. Okay then we'll deal with it. But I'd rather have it.
- [67:39]
C
I feel like on this podcast we should be able to recognize that even if there are unintended consequences, it would might be really hard to repeal bad rules. And so here's an example of what I'm worried about. So New York State, in what is very obviously just a bid to protect licensed professionals from competition, has a bill underway to basically forbid AI. Now part of the bill just says you can't do this without telling people you're AI. That's I think a very good rule. But then it's also, it can't give any advice that a licensed professional might give.
- [68:10]
D
Oh, that's stupid.
- [68:11]
C
Right. And like that's just very clearly economic protectionism. If we pass that rule.
- [68:18]
A
Yeah.
- [68:18]
C
It will never be repealed. Right. It will be a like a thousand year fight to allow, you know, to allow AI to give floral arranging advice in Louisiana. I'm not sure if Louisiana is still licensing its florists, but for a long time it was protecting consumers from the hazards of rogue florists. Of rogue florists. And so I take your point that
- [68:43]
D
we take yours entirely.
- [68:44]
C
I don't let the like we, you know, totally permissionless innovation to the point where like you can permissionlessly innovate the death killing machine.
- [68:53]
D
Sure.
- [68:53]
C
But we also shouldn't say, oh well, we'll just fix it in post because like post fixing laws that have been passed and turn out to have bad unintended consequences I think are likely to be difficult. And one of the things I think we're really gonna have to grapple with and that we are already grappling with self driving cars is that self driving cars may have accidents that humans wouldn't even at the same time as they will on average be much safer than human drivers. And you need to like, it is gonna be real, a huge challenge. And we should be actively working towards this in our little communities as well as on the national stage towards thinking about this stuff statistically rather than anecdotally. Because statistically it does look like waymos are much safer than human drivers. There are some wrinkles about that. I had an argument about it on Twitter the other day. But we need to keep the statistics in mind, the overall reduction, because that matters more. Like, and I not to say that every car accident is obviously a terrible tragedy, like the ideal number is zero, but it is better to have one accident that we wouldn't have had with a self driving car than like 40,000 that we would have had with humans. Right. We have to somehow be able to think in that way. It's very hard for our politics to do that.
- [70:08]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think among the challenges, this is another sort of aspect of the challenge in regulating this stuff is one of it's just the pace of the technological change. The other is just plain stupidity. And the politics at the moment, I think are pushing pretty quickly in the direction of the kind of regulations that you mentioned. Megan. I saw a Democratic strategist this morning on social media making an argument that Democrats have to sort of be extreme in the arguments they make about regulating AI, because that's where the politics are headed. And in order to win elections in 2026 and 2028, they need to do this. And we've seen in people like Gavin Newsom, who was relatively friendly to AI and to Silicon Valley generally, as he's looking at a 2028 presidential bid, really taking steps to change the way that he's looking at this and our politics might drive more stupidity like the proposal that you're talking about. Okay, so this is. We've gone way, way long. We blew through our second topic. I'm very glad we did. I thought this was a great discussion. I appreciate you all indulging me. People who are a lot smarter about this and better read about this than I am to sort of think out loud with you about these big challenges now for not worth your time this week. I did not pick the topic. I picked thinking that it would be a continuation of the discussion that we were having, but rather a departure from it. Something a little lighter, but it turns out with Megan's discussions of dumb people and Mike's decision, as you said, people
- [71:43]
C
who aren't good at school.
- [71:45]
A
Steve. Mike's decision to use the cliffnotes version of the encyclical. I want to play a clip that I saw the other day from this fellow who goes by Clavicular. Do you all know Clavicular?
- [72:02]
D
No.
- [72:02]
C
Not again.
- [72:03]
B
Yes.
- [72:04]
A
So he's. He's an influencer.
- [72:07]
C
I had to say that name, like, five times in a row in a podcast once. And it was really.
- [72:12]
A
We had a discussion about Clavicular the other day with my kids, and my kids were both, I think, shocked and horrified, but also somewhat, like, grudgingly impressed that I even knew who clavicular was. So Clavicular has followers across social media platforms that total in the low millions. He's an influencer known for his embodiment of a trend called looks maxing. I'm not going to really attempt an authoritative definition of looks maxing, but basically you can. It's being sort of obsessed with the way that you look so that you're constantly doing things to improve the way that you look, because the way that you look is determinative. It makes a big difference in the way that you go through life, including
- [72:51]
C
hitting yourself in the face with a hammer. In clavicular space with a hammer, which
- [72:56]
A
is something that clavicular has advocated.
- [72:59]
C
Yeah. And done. I believe he has done it to himself.
- [73:02]
D
Yeah.
- [73:03]
A
Yes. Yes. To make your jawline more defined, theoretically,
- [73:08]
D
we should put it out there. We should do an op that tells people like that that they will be much more sexually attractive if they use the same technique on their groins.
- [73:21]
C
So clavicular says he's sterile.
- [73:24]
D
Yeah.
- [73:24]
B
Yes.
- [73:25]
C
Because of all of the testosterone he's taken. So in some sense, I'm not sure that would deter them.
- [73:30]
D
Fair.
- [73:31]
A
This is a lot more information about Clavicular than I knew. Thank you for Adding that, Megan, I'm glad we have that context. So I want to play this clip of clavicular recently having a conversation with two young women about books. Have you been reading the books?
- [73:48]
E
I don't really read books.
- [73:49]
C
You don't read?
- [73:50]
E
No.
- [73:51]
C
Why not read them?
- [73:52]
E
Because I read articles and summaries. Reading an entire book is like just. People cope so hard thinking, like, books are going to make them this wise jester. But in reality, you could just get the information through summaries and articles ten times more efficiently.
- [74:12]
C
It's really not true.
- [74:13]
E
I mean, I can learn at 10x the rate of you reading books versus if I'm reading articles and summaries, good
- [74:20]
C
literature, every single sentence means surely something that's meaningless, right?
- [74:25]
E
So if you're reading for like, you know, creativity and, you know, stuff like that, like a Mark Twain type of situation where it's got no actual, you know, data behind it. And yeah, that's fine, I agree with you. But I only am interested in learning.
- [74:44]
A
I like, am interested in learning.
- [74:47]
C
I also like Mark Twain, like having no data behind it, in fact,
- [74:53]
A
a Mark Twain situation. So, Joan, I'll start with you. Is the view that he expresses here about books, you know, 10 Xing the literary tortoises among us just by reading the summaries, Is that prevalent in your looks maxing community or is this just unique to clavicular?
- [75:14]
D
Well, I will say, like, there is a version. I mean, look, I think he's a moron, right? So, like, but, but, but look, there's in my world, right, Like, I have at minimum five authors a month on my podcast, right? I don't always read. I can't. I literally can't read the whole book. My lips just get too tired, right? And I'm also, I'm working on a book, right? So, like, it was years ago that Ramesh Panuru gave me dispensation, speaking of papal powers here, that you are allowed to take the best cuts from the carcass on some books. If you're interested in a particular period and you have the book on the history of naval warfare, but you only really need to know about the battle of Trafalgar, it's okay to just read that chapter, right? It's also okay to sort of read summaries of things. He's just making. It's also good to read books, don't get me wrong. But he's just making a case for his own lethargy and trying to make it sound hip and cool. I mean, look, this is A guy who's dedicated his life to taking shortcuts to the point where he breaks his own jaw with a hammer. So it should not shock us that he also wants shortcuts when it comes to reading books. But I think reading widely. I love reading book reviews. I read a lot more book reviews than I read books. I don't make any apologies for it because I'm interested in to know what the book is about. But I'm not willing to make a commitment to some books. And in terms of the looks maxing community that I surround myself with, of
- [76:52]
C
whom you are the leader.
- [76:54]
D
Yes. Which tells you how effective we are at our looks maxing. We prefer not to divulge, you know, the internal practices of our group.
- [77:02]
C
Megan I think Jonah's remarks that he is constantly taking shortcuts sort of resonates with my thoughts on clavicular, which is that he is constantly taking shortcuts, but he doesn't seem to know where he's going. Right. Like when I listen to him, the thing that is missing is a sense of what is the point of all of this. He wants to be very good looking. He doesn't really seem like he's enjoying being very good looking. He doesn't really seem, you know, he talks about having lots of sex, but he doesn't really seem like he's enjoying the sex. It seems like kind of a chore. You know, he wants to be good looking because good looking people are successful and make a lot of money and have hot spouses. But he, like, he doesn't actually seem to have a lot of joy in any of the things he is trying to get. Doesn't have any sense of why that would be fun or sublime or worthwhile or any of the rest of it. It just seems totally vacant. Like he is. You know, there's the, in AI, there is a parable about the paperclip maximizer that's going to destroy the universe because you've created an AI that just wants to make paperclips and then it just goes out and like turns the entire mass of the universe into paperclips. And that this is the, this is thought to be a problem with like improperly aligned AI and that is also a problem with improperly aligned humans. To drag this all back to the encyclical and Pope Leo is that like, again, I'm not saying that you have to become Catholic to lead a worthy and fulfilled life, but you have to have some higher idea of what life is for than like, I wish to Have a large number in my bank account or I wish to be extremely good looking or like you should be. It should be bringing, at the minimum, bringing you joy. And he seems so joyless, right? I have never seen like, where he just seems like he's having a great time with the people with his buddies who he loves being around. It never seems like that. It always seems grim and joyless. I don't think it's the only reason that he doesn't resonate with fiction. I know many joyful people who really hate fiction and you know, like, I'm not judging and I also frankly have read a lot of books that should have been articles but naming no names. But I do think that it, like, it just betrays the whole problem with the clavicular worldview. A means, not an end, folks.
- [79:38]
A
Yeah, that comes through very clearly in the clip that we played. Mike, would clavicular find joy if he could engage with what he called the Mark Twain situation by reading Mark Twain rather than looking for data in Mark Twain or elsewhere?
- [79:59]
B
Could he read Mark Twain? Would he be able to get through it? I don't know. I mean, no offense, Steve, this all feels really stupid to be sort of evaluating what a 20 year old whose frontal cortex is not fully developed, you know, his sort of disquisitions on reading. He's like Jonah said, he's a moron and he would do well to read more books if only to just widen his worldview. I hope he does.
- [80:23]
A
Mike, are you saying that this was not worth our time?
- [80:27]
B
You could say that. You could say that, Steve.
- [80:29]
C
Wellicular not worth our time.
- [80:31]
B
Clavicular is not worth our time. Books are definitely worth our time.
- [80:35]
D
Two things. One, I keep wanting to do that Neapolitan song, claviculi, clavicula, you know, whatever. But no, part of the problem is before when I was saying we should be thinking about the policymaking approach to all of this with the 15 year old in mind rather than with the well educated sage denizens of this podcast. That's who I'm talking about. That guy, I am sure talks to AI all day long and doesn't ask for links, doesn't check sources, doesn't do anything beyond take its word for it about how he can look smacks. And he may be an extreme example, but I think he's closer to the kind of people that we should be worried about creating more of with a lot of this tech that's coming down the pike.
- [81:23]
A
Last word to you, Jonah. It just occurred to me as we are wrapping up. That I forgot to mention in the context of the difficulty of entrusting elected officials or presidential appointees to writing the laws, passing the legislation making the regulations about these emerging and fast moving technologies that Linda McMahon, the education secretary once believed she was reading from a teleprompter not long ago. And rather than reading AI as AI, I think multiple times read it as A1 steak sauce. So good.
- [82:02]
D
Well, what's her name? Ilhan Omar recently was reading from a speech and referred to world war ii.
- [82:12]
C
Well, I mean, who can forget Trump's favorite book of the Bible, 2 Corinthians.
- [82:21]
A
All right, we're doomed. We're doomed. Thanks for joining us. Have fun. Stick with us while we're, while we're going down.
- [82:28]
D
Go F yourself, San Diego.
- [82:31]
A
Thank you. Sin.
- [82:32]
B
Despair is a sin.
- [82:34]
A
Thanks for the time. Finally, if you like what we're doing here, you can rate, review and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners find us five stars. Always appreciated. And as always, if you've got questions, comments, concerns or corrections, you can email us@roundtabledispatch.com we read everything, even the ones from practical practicing looks maxims. That's going to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in and thank you to the folks behind the scenes who made this episode possible. Noah Hickey and Peter Bonaventure, thanks again for listening. Please join us next time.