Technology Utopia or Dystopia? Eric Weinstein, Laila Mickelwait & James Poulos

Summary

The Rubin Report: Technology Utopia or Dystopia? Featuring Eric Weinstein, Laila Mickelwait & James Poulos

Release Date: March 15, 2025

In this compelling episode of The Rubin Report, host Dave Rubin engages in a thought-provoking discussion with prominent guests Eric Weinstein, Laila Mickelwait, and James Poulos. The conversation delves into the dual-edged nature of technological advancements, particularly artificial intelligence (AI), examining whether we are on the cusp of a technological utopia or teetering towards a dystopian future. The guests bring diverse perspectives, addressing critical issues such as child protection in the digital age, free speech, the role of art and culture, generational impacts, and the resilience of our institutions amidst rapid technological change.

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1. Introduction: Navigating the Technological Crossroads

Dave Rubin sets the stage by highlighting the unprecedented moment we find ourselves in—an era where technology permeates every aspect of our lives. With over two decades of ubiquitous internet access and the imminent rise of AI, Rubin frames the discussion around whether these advancements will lead to a utopian or dystopian society. He emphasizes the need to explore both the optimistic potentials and the significant risks associated with these technologies.

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2. Protecting Children in the Digital Age: Laila Mickelwait’s Insights

Laila Mickelwait passionately addresses the alarming prevalence of child trafficking and pornography on the internet, a topic often overshadowed by more mainstream discussions on technology. She underscores the gravity of the situation with alarming statistics and personal insights.

"Over 90% of 12-year-olds have smartphones. That means in a few clicks they can be accessing free user-generated porn that is unregulated. That is, yes, it's hardcore, yes it's violent, but much of it is actual real sexual crime." (B, 00:28)

Mickelwait traces the evolution of pornography distribution from physical media to the vast, unregulated digital landscape dominated by platforms like Pornhub. She reveals the shocking extent of user-generated content—170 million visits per day at its peak in 2020—and the subsequent crackdown that reduced the site’s content by 91%.

"We must continue to work together to hold the big porn kings, the pimps, and those corporate traffickers accountable to the full extent of the law to protect our children for generations to come." (B, 00:28)

Her advocacy highlights the urgent need for collective action to safeguard children from the rampant sexual exploitation perpetuated online.

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3. Free Speech and Technology: James Poulos’s Perspective

James Poulos shifts the conversation to the intersection of free speech and technology. Reflecting on recent government collaborations with big tech to restrict online discourse during the COVID-19 pandemic, Poulos expresses concern over renewed attempts to censor speech under the guise of protecting societies.

"We're at a crossroads now... specifically related to the protection of children." (A, 00:03)

He emphasizes the delicate balance between ensuring free expression and regulating harmful content. Poulos argues that outright censorship undermines the very fabric of free societies, advocating for solutions that respect individual liberties while addressing legitimate concerns.

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4. The Role of Art and Culture: A Call for Human-Centric Creativity

James Poulos delves deeper into the cultural implications of technological advancement, particularly the role of art in shaping and reflecting societal values. He critiques the current state of Hollywood and the broader artistic community for losing touch with authentic human experiences.

"We need artists who can tell us who we are in a utopia. We need artists who can do what Tarkovsky said about the artist, which is to come together with the audience and share the misery and joy of bringing an image into being." (C, 04:05)

Poulos argues that true art must resonate on a spiritual level, addressing fundamental questions about humanity's relationship with technology. He points out the failure of contemporary institutions to engage meaningfully with these themes, suggesting that a resurgence of genuine artistic expression is crucial for navigating the technological future.

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5. The Future of AI and Human Collaboration: Eric Weinstein’s Insights

Eric Weinstein introduces the concept of the "golden age of AI complementarity," where human intelligence and machine capabilities synergize to achieve greater outcomes.

"My wife has called this the golden age of AI complementarity, where you get more out of a human and a machine together." (D, 08:43)

Weinstein critiques the current use of AI, particularly large language models like ChatGPT, for lacking true human general intelligence (HGI). He suggests that the AI's ability to pass the Turing test stems more from mimicking human conversation rather than exhibiting genuine understanding or creativity.

"We are not using HGI. There's no way you can look at chat GPT2 in a debugger... we're more or less large language models riffing off of each other." (D, 08:43)

He calls for a reevaluation of AI development, emphasizing the need for systems that reflect authentic human thought and creativity. Weinstein also touches on the importance of art in maintaining the "scent of the human experience," advocating for a collaborative future where AI enhances rather than diminishes human creativity.

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6. Generational Perspectives: Impact on Younger Generations and Gen X

The discussion turns to the profound impact of technology on younger generations, particularly those under 35 who have never experienced a pre-internet world. Laila Mickelwait expresses concern over the psychological and social ramifications of growing up in an entirely connected environment.

"I'm very concerned, obviously, for a generation that's growing up connected, that is growing up on porn, that is growing up on real sexual crime... hijacking their sexuality." (B, 10:43)

She highlights the rise in child sexual abuse and the concerning trend of porn-induced erectile dysfunction among young males, underscoring the urgent need for protective measures.

Eric Weinstein adds a generational layer, identifying Gen X as the crucial bridge between pre-internet and post-internet societies. He emphasizes the unique role Gen X plays in preserving reality-based perspectives amidst the rapid technological surge.

"Gen X is the reality generation... we were neglected. The latchkey kid phenomena came out of no fault divorce... and clearly the silent generation and the boomers lied to us. Please tell us what reality is." (D, 14:43)

Weinstein calls for Gen X to take a leading role in guiding younger generations, ensuring they have a grounded understanding of reality in the face of overwhelming digital influence.

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7. Institutions in the Age of AI: Resilience and Reform

As the conversation nears its conclusion, Eric Weinstein addresses the future of societal institutions in the AI era. He poses a critical question about whether existing institutions will withstand the pressures of technological change or require significant overhaul.

"What do you think our institutions fit into this as we enter this AI age?" (A, 14:22)

Weinstein points to the importance of consulting Gen X in this transformation, leveraging their unique perspective to bridge the gap between older and younger generations. He underscores the necessity of evolving institutions to remain relevant and effective amidst the rapid advancements in AI and other technologies.

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8. Conclusion: Navigating Towards a Balanced Future

In wrapping up the episode, Dave Rubin synthesizes the key insights shared by his guests. The central theme revolves around the necessity of balancing technological advancement with ethical considerations, protecting vulnerable populations, and preserving the essence of human creativity and free expression. The guests collectively advocate for a proactive approach in shaping the future, emphasizing collaboration across generations and disciplines to harness technology’s potential while mitigating its risks.

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Key Takeaways:

• Child Protection: The unregulated distribution of pornography online poses severe risks to children, necessitating robust regulatory frameworks and collective advocacy to hold exploitative industries accountable.

• Free Speech: Maintaining free speech in the digital age requires vigilance against censorship efforts that may undermine democratic values, balancing expression with necessary protections.

• Role of Art: Genuine artistic expression is vital for reflecting and shaping societal values, especially in an era where technology can both enhance and obscure the human experience.

• AI Complementarity: Emphasizing the synergy between human intelligence and AI can lead to greater achievements, but requires AI systems that genuinely understand and augment human creativity.

• Generational Insights: Gen X holds a pivotal role in bridging the pre and post-internet eras, providing grounded perspectives to guide younger generations through technological complexities.

• Institutional Resilience: Existing institutions must adapt and evolve to remain effective in the face of rapid technological changes, ensuring they serve society's needs in the AI age.

This episode of The Rubin Report offers a comprehensive examination of the multifaceted impacts of technology, urging listeners to engage thoughtfully with the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.

Transcript

[A]

So we're talking about obviously this incredible moment that we are in. We've all been walking around with the world in our pocket for 20 years. And as Louis was just talking about, we're about to enter this age of AI. You come at much of this from child trafficking and pornography. It's part of the Internet that we don't talk about that often. But what do you make of this strange moment that we're in?

[B]

Sure. Well, I mean we're at a crossroads now. We're at an inflection point and we have to make some really important decisions specifically related to the protection of children. There's been an evolution in the way that pornography is distributed from VHS tapes and magazines back in the day to the evolution of Internet generated, user generated pornography that is being distributed on the YouTubes of porn for free. You know, we heard yesterday from Sophie who I really appreciated what she had to say and she shockingly told us that over 90% of 12 year olds have smartphones. That means in a few clicks they can be accessing free user generated porn that is unregulated. That is, yes, it's hardcore, yes it's violent, but much of it is actual real sexual crime. And my work for the last five years in the context of over 15 years in this fight, has been to hold the big porn industry fully accountable for the mass distribution of sexual crime, including child abuse, rape and trafficking, and also for the exploitation of children in front of the screen because they're being sexually abused in front of the screen and behind the screen. And I would just, you know, encourage us. Nobody in this room needs convincing that we should hold the big porn industry accountable. But we need encouragement that we can hold the big porn industry accountable. And as a quick example and some encouragement to you, thanks to the help of many people, in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, Pornhub was the fifth most visited website across the entire Internet. Not porn site, website. With 170 million visits per day, 62 billion visits per day per year, and enough content uploaded every year, it would take 169 years to watch if we put those videos back to back. This is user generated porn. They were not verifying age or consent to make sure these weren't children or trafficking victims. The site became infested with child abuse, rape and trafficking. And we sounded the alarm together. We did that. Many of you who are in this room today, and today they have been forced to take down 91% of that entire website. They went from 56 million pieces of content in 2020 to 5.2 million today. They lost Visa, MasterCard, Discover. They were criminally charged by the US government, and they're being sued. They're getting the literal hell sued out of them by hundreds of victims in 25 lawsuits, including class actions, on behalf of tens of thousands of child victims. So I would just say, listen, we're not done yet. But we must continue to work together to hold the big porn kings, the pimps, and those corporate traffickers accountable to the full extent of the law to protect our children for generations to come.

[A]

James on the free speech side of this, we're coming out of a couple years of COVID where we now know that governments all over the world were colluding with big tech to silence us, and now we're out of that. And yet seemingly, and JD referenced this in his speech, there's a whole bunch of people that once again want to censor us online that somehow think that free speech is in conflict with free societies. What do we do about that?

[C]

Well, thanks, Dave. I mean, it's absolutely true. There are all manner of things to be afraid of, and we're accustomed to being fearful. We've seen over the past 20 years, society pulled forcefully in a direction that many of us don't like, not just as a matter of preference, but as something that goes deeper than preference, maybe even all the way down to the level of spirituality or religion. A profound problem with the way that human beings are reacting to the increase in technology, to the acceleration of technology. And so I like to think of myself as a good toquevillian. Alexis de Tocqueville said, I don't try to see better than my colleagues. I try to see farther than them. And so what I've been thinking about lately is we all sort of know what to do if there's a catastrophe. We know what to do in a dystopia. We've seen all the movies, We've read the novels. We know what Orwellianism is. There's a script. We've seen the movie. We know how it ends. Even at a deeper level than knowing what to do. We know who we are in a disaster, in a dystopia. But do we know who we are in a utopia? Do we know what to do? What script do we turn to if actually, instead of everything going horribly wrong because of technology, everything goes wonderfully right? What happens if the dog actually catches the car? And here I think many priests I know there's at least one priest in the audience would say, well, you know, technology raises these fundamental questions about who we are, identity in a digital age. And historically, people who are confused at a personal level of their own experience would turn to their priest, and they say, you know, Father, you know me, you know, what my strengths are, what my weaknesses are, how do I deal with this in my life? And many people who would be inclined to ask that kind of question of their priest about their relationship with their technology, either they don't have that kind of priest, or in many cases, their priest or their church just isn't prepared to answer those kinds of questions. And so I think, you know, I'm thinking of one priest in particular. He might say, I can do it. Well, yes, and that's very good. But even if we get the politics right, even if we get the technology right, even if we get the religious theological chunk right, even if we get all those things, three things right at the same time, which is a huge ask for a society, a society that gets all those things right, yet doesn't have any art in it, is not a recognizably human society. And we find ourselves at a moment when we need artists who can tell us who we are in a utopia. We need artists who can do what Tarkovsky said about the artist, which is to come together with the audience and share the misery and joy of bringing an image into being. That is what art does. If we're looking to tell better stories, we need artists, and we need artists who can reach down to the spiritual fundaments of human life to answer those ultimate questions for us about our relationship to our technology in a way where, you know, in many cases, religion is struggling to come up and join that conversation. It might take a minute. I'm convinced that religion is a place where people all over the world are turning for spiritual authority they can trust about how to live with their technology, whether it's questions of free speech, questions of biotech, questions of how much time you should spend staring at a screen. But if artists aren't a part of that conversation, we can't tell those better stories, and we can't reach and meet people where they are in their lives, looking for a voice that's coming from outside of their head. That's why I followed up my big tech book, Human Forever, which is all about technology, with a novel about the Jeffrey Epstein era and the experience of growing up and coming of age in that dark timeline. That's why I'm making a movie with my talented and beautiful wife, who's somewhere out there tackling the world of LA and pedophilia and Hollywood and all that sort of thing. These are real issues that ordinary people are experiencing right now. And you look at Hollywood and you ask why it isn't working. It's because the specific people in charge of Hollywood, in charge of that industry, don't understand this present moment. They don't understand why free speech is important. They don't understand what's going on in the hearts of ordinary Americans. And they're unable to bring stories to bear on those audiences in a way that resonates deeply and powerfully with them. That's what I'm thinking about. I think that's where technology is taking to us. Let the golden age begin. But when we do get there, we're going to need to be able to speak to one another and commune as creators and as audiences from the heart.

[A]

Well, you gave me about 10 avenues to go down there. So, Eric, we've been having these public conversations for about a decade now, and I usually credit you for being about five years right on most things. So what is it that perhaps we're not seeing about this moment that we're in right now? We can all think to the dystopian movies and we can extrapolate some ideas from that. But what are we maybe not thinking about that we should either be worried about or hopeful for?

[D]

Well, we should be both. My wife has called this the golden age of AI complementarity, where you get more out of a human and a machine together. The age of cyborg chess more or less died off. Humans just are like an albatross around the neck of the computer. The key problem is what we found out when a piece of linear algebra passed the Turing test completely unexpectedly, and that was that we are not using HGI. There's no way you can look at chat GPT2 in a debugger, which you can run locally. You can watch the thing think and come up with sentences, and you realize if I say it's really great to be right. So mostly what we're doing is we're not exhibiting this conversation is probably not actually human general intelligence. We're more or less large language models riffing off of each other. And the only way that the AI was able to do as well as it has done against most of these things passing the Turing test is that we have very few original thoughts and that we've been flattering ourselves that we have been engaging in intelligent conversation, banter and exploration. I think there's almost no art that actually reflects. Well, you don't know what I'm gonna say next, do you? You know, I've called great art the reflection of our time in real time, for all time. And essentially artists have to understand the time that they're living in. And clearly they have lost the scent. So we're in this very bizarre era in which what we just found out was not about computers, it was about us. And the fact is that we exhibit almost no human general intelligence, or this thing would not be able to pass the Turing test.

[A]

Lila, let me ask you. I think we're all roughly Gen X, which is the last generation that will ever be known before we were walking around with all of the world's information in our pocket. How concerned are you that young people growing up, I mean, basically everyone under probably 35 will never remember that world that we grew up in?

[B]

Well, I'm glad that I grew up in that world that just was introduced to the Internet. And I'm very concerned, obviously, for a generation that's growing up connected, that is growing up on porn, that is growing up on real sexual crime, that is actually creating a sexual template for them that is hijacking their sexuality, which is an important part of their humanity, which is such an important part of their identity. So we have an industry that's actually hijacking the identity of our children. And it's this great social experiment that we have yet to see the repercussions of what that will fully look like if we don't apprehend it. Now we have inklings of what that could mean. We see a rise on child. On child sexual abuse in our world, where we've seen the greatest age for offenders on other children is 14 year old males, where half of those who are being abused as children are not only being abused by adults, but actually other children who are viewing porn and acting out what they see. We also have a rise in actual the physical inability to engage in sexual intimacy, where, you know, the Journal of Sexual Medicine in Canada found that a third of 16 to 21 year old males was experiencing porn induced erectile dysfunction. So these are serious issues that we're going to have to grapple with. And I just think that there's such an urgency for us to act on this issue of protecting children from access to this kind of harmful content.

[A]

James, you mentioned art. You know, it seems to me that we're going to come in conflict between true, pure human generated art and AI art. I can go on Grok and put myself on the set of Seinfeld, which I've done Way too many times on Grok. What do you make of that sort of internal battle? Because AI is going to come up with things that artists will not come up with or that they will come up with. It will just be much faster and able to scale very quickly, but it will not have that human piece.

[D]

Sure.

[C]

I mean, let a thousand flowers bloom. One of the reasons why Gen X is so important is because, you know, we're not just a generation that was present before the creation of the Internet and everything after, but we were present back at a time that, you know, the younger people are calling the good timeline. And we know what life was like when art had not lost the scent of the human experience. And coming from the standpoint of right now, you look around and you say, well, can't AI just wash everything away? And the answer is yes, if we wanted to end it all right now, we could do so. But why would we want to do that? And Gen X still remembers why. So, you know, I. Some of my best friends are intellectuals. I love the life of the mind. We do not have a deficit of intellectuals, not in this room, not in the West. What we need is artists who have that scent and who know how to bring the scent back. And I think Gen X is going to be a big part of that in this movement. On this stage, at this event, we've got so many good people who are accustomed to spotting talent in tech. Money bombing it stars result. Spotting talent in politics Money bombing it starves the result. Art spot, talent money bomb. It starves the result. Some people are very tentative. Oh, no, we can't do that. We're dissidents. We're losers. We're the beautiful losers. You know, this is what conservatism is. It doesn't have to be this way, friends. We can do the same thing with art that we've done with tech and with politics. And we can start right now.

[A]

Unfortunately, we only have about two more minutes. So I think, Eric, you're going to get the last word on this. My question to you would be, obviously, much of what we're talking about at AHRQ is about our institutions. Will they stand the test of time? Do we need to burn them down? Is there some combination of keeping some and getting rid of others? Where do you think our institutions fit into this as we enter this AI age?

[D]

It depends whether we're going to consult Gen X. I mean, let's be honest. What Gen X is, is the flow flyover country. To steal an analogy of generations, I keep hearing that it's time for the boomers to retire so that the millennials can take over. And I'm like, wtf? I've been waiting here for like my whole life to use the bathroom. And you've been in there for a long time. What is Gen X? We are the reality generation. I'm just gonna be a chauvinist for Gen X. This is where you go for Elon Musk and Joe Rogan and Dave Rubin and the entire, like, IDW is basically founded around Gen X. What do young people come to me and talk and ask me about? They say, can you please explain what it is that came before? Because this makes no sense. And in a certain sense, we were neglected. The latchkey kid phenomena came out of no fault divorce, which Ronald Reagan inked around the end of the 60s, beginning of the 70s. People were chasing Mr. Goodbar while we were trying to grow up. And as a result, you know, we skinned our knees. I broke into zoos. You know, we did all sorts of crazy stuff. Sacramento Zoo. And what we don't recognize is that the millennials in Gen Z are desperate to know. Clearly the silent generation and the boomers lied to us. Please tell us what reality is. And that's in some sense, become our job.

[A]

I wish we had more time. I've thoroughly enjoyed this. Please, everyone give a round of applause to Eric, to James, and especially Delilah. Thank you, guys.