https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=bZ9HJ_qQJuU
Welcome everybody to another voices with for Vicky. I’m really really happy to be here with the wonderful Chloe Valdry We’ve talked many times we talk regularly when we can when our schedules permit I’ve been she’s been on voice of the Reveki Reveki and I’ve been recorded for her Theory of imagination and a theory of enchantment And so it’s just been wonderful to get to know Chloe and I wanted to have Chloe on again to talk about Things that are on her mind and for us to get into a genuine dialogue Chloe is part of The board for the Reveki Foundation and we’re very happy about that. Um, and so Chloe is there anything more I should say by way of introduction for you or I think that’s good We’re definitely working together to Solve for the great problem. That is the meaning crisis both in our own corners, but also doing a lot of crossover work and collaboration a lot of would you call it opponent processing or My other my other fave of yours is like I think you called it courtyard. Yeah courtyard rather than courtroom. Yeah Which I just find so delightful. So yes, I’m happy to be back. I love my conversations with you They are so generative and I’m happy to be recording another one of these with you excellent So I thought I’d just turn things over to you about topics you’d like to discuss and we can just engage in some serious play with those topics So one of the things that’s really alive for me is the work of David Graeber Specifically his book debt the last 5,000 years. I was introduced to this book I came across this book actually after watching a conversation between you and Jordan Hall About the importance of mourning Mourning our past gods, right? Mourning the gods that we used to believe in and realizing that they no longer are sufficient or appropriate for the world in which we live and In the context of that conversation the book debt came up because Jordan Hall’s talking about economic systems and things like that So I read that got a big download on Patriarchy and the origins of patriarchy and how they came out of a Situation in Bronze Age Mesopotamia Samar and modern-day Iraq where you had Men specifically poor men Who were being forced into debt slavery by the aristocracy and who started to have to sell their wives and their daughters into Slavery into sex slavery selling them into sex work, etc to appease the aristocracy And how among among that class of men there began to be this Oh Your honor is based upon whether or not you can protect your wives and daughters from being sold into sex slavery so that is actually the origin of patriarchy and That in of itself just blew up so many things for me the relationship between men and women The way in which men relate to wealth accumulation in terms of their sense of self-worth The wounds that many men carry In this very, you know Conspicuous consumptive way why we see conspicuous consumption is such a theme in our culture, especially, you know, I think of hip-hop for example It’s such a prominent theme. So that is one thing that’s alive for me And the other thing that’s alive for me is your AI video the video that you read about I think it’s a very popular theme And the other thing that’s alive for me is your AI video the video that you recently released I was just at a talk At a prominent institution where there were thinkers who came together to try to think through the problems that AI can Produce and how we might preempt them. I emailed you while out. I was at this talk. Like what are you doing about AI? And you told me that you had a video coming out soon I watched that video I was blown away it was both Serious and hopeful and I’m really beautiful. So we can talk about both of those things and I think that there is an intersection Yes, actually between these two things because one of the questions that was asked at this forum that I attended was write a headline where you are imagining a future Or that imagines a future where AI produces something positive and I said after having read debt I said AI basically takes over so much production that Countries now have enough money to subsidize a universal basic income. So I was already thinking about this history of patriarchy and wealth and all these entanglements that David Graber talked about and how AI could actually Potentially solve for some of those problems So those are two things that are very much alive for me and I I kicked the school ball over to you Well, I want to talk about the first one First because I have not read the book I vaguely remember Jordan and I talking about that and we’ve had a recent video series on governance where we’ve been wrestling with these issues But I want to I want to pause on the first thing you said because that’s very interesting So I may have picked up on something but I may have misread it it sounds like originally patriarchy is an attempt to solve a Horrible condition and in that sense, it’s initially a positive response an adaptive response so patriarchy is you’re a good man if you can Support your wives and kids so that they do not have to be sold into sex slavery Was I am I understanding that correctly Yes, so page so patriarchy starts out as a protective Adaptive response to social conditions that are terrible. It’s simultaneously though. Yeah Creates or perpetuates the notion that women can be commodified or that women are commodities. Sure. Sure. Okay, so Yeah, excellent. Okay. So so okay I often try to find out how something is compelling by finding out how it was originally adaptive Right. So it’s it’s originally adaptive Because it’s protective but it it also insinuates the shared presupposition that women are are Ultimately the are ultimately commodities That’s powerful and this is because you get the rise of Well, literally of civilization you get the rise of cities and you get the rise of The military elite is and they and because of the military elite they can just command what they want and demand what they want By force, that’s right by power So if that’s the case If the shared presupposition So there’s a there’s two shared presuppositions that I get it here One is women can be commodified and the other one is the pervasive presence of power as a threat Because right Because that’s powering both the aristocrats You know, this is a Gillian argument that the aristocrat is also bound and totally dependent on the system or his and I it’s right to say his in this circumstance his Sense of self and self-worth So is there is there is there also sort of an arms race in that the aristocrat has to Show his capacity to exercise power or at least threat over The peasant tree or whatever we’ll call the opposite and then the peasantry is trying to constantly come up with ways of being sufficient Self-sufficient so and then the women are basically getting sort of jockeyed back and forth about whether they’re going to be exploitative commodities Or protected commodities, but it’s all still vectored around men’s self-worth and self-understanding. Is that is that a good way of putting it? I think that is a good way of putting it I know less about whether or not that creates an arms race among the aristocracy to suppress The peasants sort of so to speak but it does Lead to further suppression of the wives of the elite Who now have to be from the perspective of the aristocratic male? sequestered in the home prior to this time you had a situation where men and women were very much At parity in a sense of women being out and about women in the house At parity in a sense of women being out and about women and being represented in many different roles and many different governing roles across samarian civilization But when this debt crisis Takes root you see men in the aristocracy start to sequester their wives From public life and the wives of the elite find it harder to get divorces For example, and I think that’s a way in which the accumulation of not just wealth but power manifests within the same class you also I mean I think an example of this that I’ve I’ve seen portrayed in one of my favorite films dangerous beauty which is about Veronica Franco true story the court is on 16th century venice Uh at that time court is on which was essentially an elite glorified prostitute Only the courtesans had access. They were the only women who had access to the libraries The wives of the elite could not get access to an education. They were not allowed to be educated so that’s an example of Um a way in which even across the same class Women were sequestered and sort of hidden and something else is interesting You this is also when you start to see going back to mesopotamia you start to see uh women in the elite classes being veiled to make a distinction between Uh the classes the different classes because many of the poor women were being sold into sex slavery You had a rule across the society that actually Poor women and the prostitutes could not wear veils. Oh, I see I see isn’t that fascinating? Yeah so what like Obviously the book is not just a uh, or maybe it is but it sounds like it’s not just a history book It’s trying to understand the origin of something to try and understand sort of its structural functional organization its fundamental grammar What like what does that say about us today? Like how how does it help? Explicate and elucidate what’s going on today in a way that could be helpful because I presume you’re making those kinds of connections Yeah, so one of the reasons why I end up very early on in my conclusions about universal basic income so one of the reasons why i’ve started thinking seriously about the idea of universal basic income is because I am seeing the ways in which this system of patriarchy Has adapted over time such that we in our society today If you’re on the right you assume that it has been this innate thing that has existed for all time And if you’re on the left, you assume that it’s just this thing that was instituted by cruel men Right who didn’t care at all about their the the women in their lives and neither Of those are actually true. Right. I see that. Yes, right. So that’s that’s one thing That’s one implication. The other implication is that or as a question, which is how How has then debt because when these men who were you know farmers peasants shepherds, etc Would get into debt first. It was their land that would go and then it was their wives and then there was their daughters And so on and so forth. So how do we? How does our sense of self? Been how has our sense of self been constructed by this thing called debt? How’s our sense of self-worth been? Mangled and Upended by debt and it’s and this has happened whether you’re in the so-called You know 1% or whether you’re on the night in the 99% it has transformed and Deformed in a way our capacity to relate to each other and here’s a fun fact that also comes from the book the word freedom etymologically Is connected to the freedom of the mind Is connected to the root word of friend So the word friend and freedom come from the same germanic root. Oh, wow and Yeah, and so Originally what it meant to be free Was to be bounded in a society where you had rights and responsibilities to your family to your friends to your community That’s what it meant to be free. Yes. Yes over time, right? So over time because of This crazy thing called debt and the way that it works What it meant to be free became the opposite But it means to be free with someone without obligation Without yeah maximal choice, right without any sense of duty or responsibility or rights, right? Or are all rights and no responsibilities rather and what’s interesting about this is that In the ancient world what it meant to be a slave A slave was someone who was kidnapped stripped of all context, right all sense of belonging and so therefore had no No sense of right and responsibility In the way that was meant to define a free person, right? This is what made a slave a slave and now we have this curious thing where parts of what defined a slave Right stripped of all context no obligation Uh in terms of a obligation to your friend and family because you were kidnapped and removed from the long sense of belonging with your friend and family that has come to Mean freedom in our contemporary world. This is wild Well, I didn’t know that etymology I I have been critical of the current conception of freedom as sort of Maximal choice and lack of constraint whatsoever I’ve been deeply influenced my friend Dan Cieppi and I were reading Brandom’s reason in philosophy were being reintroduced to the Hegelian notion of freedom where freedom is As you said freedom is your capacity to take on Responsibilities because you rationally apprehend The normative good of those responsibilities, so it’s the it’s the opposite it’s so The free person is the one who ratio religio who proportionally binds themselves in in a good way for the optimal kind of good life Very different than the person who goes into the market the supermarket and it’s confronted by a hundred different flavors of ice cream but Is probably Well the demographic show has fewer and fewer genuine friends and the relationships they do have Are much more superficial much more fragile Uh much less long-lasting And so that connectedness has been lost which of course is ultimately if you if you buy the argument that Agency is what we’re trying to enhance in freedom and that agency means being bound to An environment that you are Co-create the environment and you are co-creating your agent arena This notion of freedom is one that actually undermines agency in a paradoxical fashion um And you know and some people have even noticed that in sort of one way they’ve talked they’ve talked about the the paradox of choice that we actually seem to be experiencing ourselves as less free as we More and more maximize choice because we are overriding the capacity to rationally bind ourselves Uh to normative standards that we mutually make each other each other accountable for instead we have let’s have highly individualized Choice and that’s the model of freedom and it’s a ridiculous model of freedom because it undermines agency I don’t know why you would want that freedom. Um But um, I I I hadn’t done the Genealogy of it. I didn’t realize it was bound into this I mean I could see this right there. Yeah, there’s this yeah, there’s this commodification There’s the arbitrariness of power there’s right And this starts to create an ethos right, yeah where Yeah, where freedom is just Pure choice arbitrary choice backed by arbitrary power. Yeah that’s Go ahead also the the proper monetization of What was Previously a social relationship. Oh, well, yeah This is and this is jordan’s whole argument about we’ve lost the commons and therefore we’ve lost access to common law and the common law model is the is sort of a really good model of uh rationality in in the hegelian framework, uh, which can be integrated I think with the platonic but part of the hegelian framework is to be rational is To bind yourself to make yourself accountable to the precedents that have been set by common law But also to try and make precedent that will be accepted as common law by those in the future. And so this bidirectional retrospective and prospective seeking of uh of recognition and and uh, and the taking on of responsibilities actually what makes you Uh somebody who participates in the commons Which of course is where? Um The collective intelligence of distributed cognition is allowed to properly show up and regulate things and give an authority over individual uh rationality um is there a Is there a possible situation? in which distributed cognition Goes off the rails. Oh totally there are many I mean, um and part of what? Needs to be done right now is to get clearer about um These kinds of mistakes I addressed this a little bit when I was gave the talk at prog on democracy as The way in which we try to optimize distributed cognition because we try to we try to encode a prioritization of opponent processing um, etc Yeah, I think uh Group dynamics. Well, there’s one when opponent processing is replaced with adversarial processing Collective intelligence can just degenerate um that often overlaps with the falling into polarization or falling into populism Um, there’s also group think there’s diffusion of responsibility So there’s lots of ways in which collective intelligence can be very very foolish um, and and then there’s you know, the one that jordan and i’ve been recently talking about There’s the project of creating complicated totalization uh in which you try this is the the bureaucratization problem in which the group will Will maintain its authority over the individuals through a bureaucracy and then the bureaucracy falls into Uh general systems failure without being able to recognize that it has so there are lots of errors And those I think are sort of the prominent ones that need to be Uh reliably addressed if we’re going to start invoking More explicitly, um collective intelligence, especially we try to educate it into collective wisdom hmm Is there a Well Trying to see what I want to ask okay at this juncture I’m very interested in The intersection of this conversation about patriarchy Where the push well, I guess it’s not a push it is what it is where the presence of ai And is coming from like what is the what is the deep yearning for? And what is the deep yearning for? And is coming from like what is the what is the deep yearning behind the Emergence of ai on the part of human beings like what are we yearning for? um Yeah, I think I think that’s a good question Do we want to just pause on that one because I think that’s a good question just just to open up on Uh, so one important, um Motivation behind this is the enlightenment motivation Not what I was talking about but from the enlightenment the promethean spirit as ohara calls it that we will steal fire from the gods And we will make ourselves into gods thereby um and that if we just give in to the momentum of science and and technology we will men will men and women and people People will be gods. I remember when I was a kid. There was a book By hg wells called men like gods and right and it’s like that’s the promethean spirit Um, I will sometimes recite that title when i’m in an airplane and it’s taking off because i’m trying to get a sense Of what remember what’s going on? What’s behind this really? you know It used to be a wonder-filled Technology, right? Yeah So there’s the promethean spirit. That’s what I was trying to get out in the ai talk when I said there’s a sense of betrayal Uh, we’ve been told by kant and hagel and perhaps kojev’s reading of hagel that we are the the greatest discovery Is that we are the authors of history not the gods. We are the authors Of history not the gods and the telos of history is us and our freedom and that’s what it’s all been for And it gets like oh actually, no, we’re not the gods Uh, we’re not the gods Uh, these machines are and we’re not the telos They could potentially eradicate us and replace us and there has been no great culmination um, so um Part I think of what we need to properly grieve is the fact that Uh the success of this project and it’s like I say it’s showing up in individual lives like the way I think it’s hit hit jeff hinton um Is the betrayal of we’ve actually been portrayed by the promethean spirit Um in a very powerful way. We’re not The authors or the telos we’re not the gods and we are not the the telos and um So I just wanted to note that I think that’s a powerful motivation, but it has culminated in something that has completely undermined Uh the motivation another one is That there’s a kind of Myopia in which People get very enthusiastic and obsessed with their particular speciality Uh to the exclusion of stepping back and seeing The larger whole that it should belong in and we have various social tropes around this We have the mad scientist we have the social trope of the nerd We have the social trope and of course the big bang theory made a lot off of that trope in Uh a very powerful way, but you know, we have the frankensteinian version of it with the mad scientist Who’s you know, i’m going to create life and that’s where that particular Thing and the promethean come together. They come together in the frankensteinian. I i’ve got to do this, right? Right, there’s the obsession with doing it and you know, uh frankenstein is just obsessed with it But then when he triumphs he proclaims that he now he knows what it’s like to be a god And so the promethean spirit and this I don’t know what to call it this particular spirit of being obsessed With the trees at the expense of the forest is also a powerful driver those two can interact with Um The fact that people can find a way to leap very quickly up um the social Hierarchy people who are working in relative obscurity within academia can suddenly be sought after by mega corporations This is a project that offers that particular temptation and we’ve there’s been other projects like that. There’s being a rock star Uh, which is also the same The same thing and we and we know interesting We know what that does right? We know all of these all of these come with really strong warnings Right. The promethean one is like the betrayal um A mad scientist obviously carries with it. You’re going to produce the mantra monstrous. Um um We’re more ambivalent around the nerd trope. Uh, we’re we’re sort of critical of it But we sort of we sort of have also opened up and been more loving big bang theory is a prototypical example but Right, but there’s also still some critique in there um And and all all all of them end up married to women and they build they start to build lives outside um Uh, so there’s a warning there about isolation and alienation and possibly resentment Which is possible there is the rock star phenomena, which is people who otherwise would be majorly disenfranchised they find an occupation or perhaps even a vocation that can rapidly uh Cause them to go up to social hierarchy, but we then we have the rock star trope, uh, and the and the warning they’re in I think there’s also in addition to all of those a legitimate scientific interest, which is I think one of the ways we should try to understand intelligence is by trying to make it the cogsci strong ai um Design stance and it has enormous Advantages you don’t have to worry at least until very recently with the ethics of the machine You can just build it take it apart do what you want with it um Uh the machines unlike again until recently unlike human beings aren’t trying to please us or deceive us machines are now But until recently they didn’t do that um And because we make it we can just do an engineering in run and run over having to gather all the empirical data about what? Intelligence is so it gives you this This powerful new method for trying to get at Intelligence and consciousness it gets us out of behaviorism. It also comes with powerful warnings, too Um, which is yeah, but you you know you you you hit the simulation problem You have to you have to balance that engineering and run with genuine scientific experimentation and the two have to act in opponent processing with each other, which is Well, i’m biased but this is one of the things that cogsci argues for and advocates Um, so there’s there there. I think those are some of the major Uh motivations for and then of course once there is actual technological success There’s the usual molok motivations of you know game theoretic uh competition and massive, uh property Property and power and you know greed and all those kinds of things that would be at least my best initial take Oh, that’s a lot to contend with um I’m struck by how the with the promethean motivation. There’s this poetic Irony, it’s like the book of genesis where adam and eve eat the apple and their eyes are open and god says You know they start to cover themselves because they’re like we’re naked and god says who told you you were naked This represents a period where god is like who told you you were gods Yes, right and and now once again, we are being banished or thrown out of the garden of even the proverbial garden of even um Yes, and you also you’ve got the tower of babel where we will build a tower and we will like into the heavens we will challenge the gods and god comes down and Uh enters the language. Yeah Creates confusion and incomprehensibility between people Yes, wow what a What a perfect Metaphor because that is precisely what is happening right now. I mean, yes in a lot of different arenas political arena I would argue even the cultural arena there’s been a lot of confusion has been I don’t know if you’re familiar with the so-called red peeled community It’s how would I describe it generously? It’s basically run by a lot of young men who are Afflicted by the patriarchy they wouldn’t put it this way, but they’re afflicted by the patriarchy and they are creating videos on youtube primarily to um tell other young men that this is how you game The system you game the system by trying to accumulate as much wealth as possible You treat women like objects to be commodified and not actually as human beings to be in relationship with um, and A lot of these videos include men debating young women who are often ignorant of this entire You know history, etc and sort of very adversarial Processing. Yes. Yes, I see get in debates and then they destroy the women in the debates and then you know The clicks and the legs follow but that You know for all of that toxicity For all the toxicity that’s present in those conversations. There’s also like a real wound that of course, yeah, right and it’s like And it’s like how can we Address it who can address it because obviously it’s compelling to a lot of young men, right? Because a lot of young men are searching for meaning and searching for sense of worthiness And this is the system in which they live and so it’s like how can we create? the necessary dialectic dialogue Such that something else can be compelling This is a systems problem because you know, the algorithms are designed to do what they do, right and oftentimes that presupposes adversarial So there’s a lot of different complexities that i’m Just awakening to for in the first time for the first time and also wanting to play with and open up and Approach in the spirit of play open Approach in the spirit of play ultimately in order to come up Yeah, I mean I it’s It’s important to not I mean in what a q a I got a little bit I got very frustrated recent q a about uh, not with the people asking the question but with you know I think and maybe uh, Jeff Jeff Hinton and I maybe we shared this I had hoped I had hoped that the science would lead us into The ai right we would we would get a generalized theory Generalizable theory of intelligence and rationality and consciousness and how they’re all interrelated Um, and and then that science could in turn and this is maybe specific to me and not with jeff but I think that that science could be bound to wisdom cultivation. That’s what i’ve been trying to do that had been my great hope My great hope is well, this is going to happen But what we can do is we can do cog sci and we can get We can really develop the science and we can keep using that science to understand and cultivate and promote rationality and wisdom my great fear and Some of my students at uft could tell you this my great fear was what we would find some way to hack our way Into a.t.i Which is what we primarily have done here um, at least that’s what I argue in the video and um, so in the I got very um I was asked a question about people liked the video but they were said, you know, but you’ve got You’ve got molok and you’ve got all these systems and all this running and how can you possibly? and given Given the failure my hope was dashed and my fear was realized. Um, um, Yeah, I got very uh, I got very emotionally involved Um, and it was anger and frustration at these people. I do think they should be criticized I do think they should be criticized for promethean spirit And you know for my being myopic and for all the other things we’ve talked about but I think um Uh, I think I don’t think we should demonize them. I I do think what we need to do is to realize I think we should also not deify them. They are not the people to go to to ask how we should Go about wisely right responding to this because they Have no answers about this because they are technical experts and I take one of playdoh’s greatest Themes running through many of his arguments is that wisdom is not a techne. It is not a kind of technical expertise And therefore turning to an expert Techne for example can’t tell you what the right use of the techne is. It is morally and ethically neutral Um, so it it doesn’t contain the normative development, which is why I was emphasizing that so much by the way in my talk Um, and so these people have nothing to offer us Um in terms of What should we do now? Their expertise is not relevant but what I found is um I I was I’ll be honest and hopefully self-critical I was I got a little bit angry. Although people really liked it in the q a I got a little bit angry. I got quite um emotional and pathé is always dangerous, but Um, I got a little bit angry because These people were still They were still putting themselves forth as experts on this question But then sort of I think maybe half consciously realizing they had nothing To say um And and but and then I was also frustrated with the molokian, uh problematic Um, but I’ve now upon reflection I would say We should definitely criticize the behavior Uh, but we should neither deify nor demonize these people. Uh, we should allow them into uh, the discourse Of course, I’m not proposing any kind of censorship or prohibition, but I think they should not have any special status. I think um We need to pay attention to people Whose work has been to deal with um normative Components of cognition like at least normal normatively inflected um like rationality um and wisdom um, and that’s a much broader And a more integrated field of people we need to bring into this discussion so, um I just wanted to say that Because I think it’s right for doing what we’re doing To try and get at the motivation and and and and also rightly to criticize a lot of these motivations as Having a lot of self-deceptive and a lot of self-destruction and potentially a lot of other and even world destruction capacity in them I think that’s all legitimate, but I I want to prevent idolizing or demonizing uh the individuals like this, um, I was moved by jeff hinton’s Act of integrity and to think yes Okay, um the tree to which these people want to step out of That myopic promethean spirit and enter into serious reflection. Uh, we should Um welcome them. So sorry that was a bit of a speech, but I I felt it was important to make it No, that’s okay. Um, i’m curious. Well one of the things I wrote down in my notepad when I was at this event on ai was that I wrote something like this is an emergency level situation and one of the uh responses needs to be that the engineers and the builders of these technologies need to be Encouraged to adopt a wisdom practice. Yes, they have to they have to Yes, that’s what I that’s what I that’s what I argued Uh, we we we need to provide readily available, um, uh templates of rationality and wisdom Um, and we also need more rationality in the platonic sense and the hegelian sense And wisdom in order to properly try and foresee how we should go forward um Yeah, I totally agree with that I am The things that concern me Are And I and I see the corporate world doing this so maybe you bumped into this it was like How can we best use this new tool to improve our share of the market and to uh, Beat our competitors and it’s like You don’t understand this isn’t the closest analog I can come to is atomic the atomic bomb um and like this isn’t It’s kind of a tool but turning it into a tool has actually turned out to be tremendously Difficult. It was actually a uh a world changing technology by the way um That is I hold that out as a as a clear instance of something that is at least possible You had a bunch of people Scientists and some of them who were interested in a wider framing other than their own expertise Einstein among them who foresaw that the generation of a chain reaction implied the real possibility of the atomic bomb and there was a threshold that they foresaw And then there was the marshaling of the resources Um, right the manhattan project to try and at least make sure that this did not fall into the hands of the nazis right, um, and so There is we do have that capacity Where we are confronting a world changing perhaps world extinguishing technology for seeing it and trying to marshal a coordinated project Such that it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. So just to give an example of where we Had some success around this. Um I do wonder if we have the will or the perception That it is on the level of the atomic bomb Well the the one thing I want to challenge and I want to encourage everybody to challenge challenge to people who just say this Is just another tool and another technology. It’s not It’s not that is to misunderstand Right. This is a this is a technology that carries the possibility of autonomy and also ultimately conflict with us Autonomously driven conflict with us and that’s a different kind of thing. We haven’t had that before um, so we don’t we just genuinely need to um Acknowledge this and we also so i’m going to quote vladimir lennon Which I find a terrifically ironic thing to be doing here right now, but I like this quote from lennon and this doesn’t make me a marxist. I’m clearly not if you think I am Okay, but lennon said when it comes time to hang the capitalist they will sell you the rope And I fear you think that’s true Because this is back to debt and wealth creation and well, you know Is it I don’t think it’s teleologically true. I don’t think like it’s an inevitability. Is it a real possibility? Yes um, I think it’s possible that Yes, because I I I because of hyperbolic discounting and because of the fact that although I don’t think this will be Um exponential forever and I gave reasons for that. Um, it could be exponential for a while And remind me sorry. Can you remind me what hyperbolic discounting is and this is again an adaptive thing Is we prioritize a current stimulus? Over a future stimulus, even though even if the future stimulus is much more valued by us Is this like the marshmallow test the marshmallow test or you want five dollars now or a hundred dollars a year from now? I’ll take the five dollars now, right kind of thing. Um, right. Um And it’s adaptive But the problem is it also makes us procrastinate. It makes us very bad Doing things especially if they’re taking off very rapidly because right now for many people Like when I was first doing the research and and on on the gpt machines, especially when gpt4 came out um His gpt3 was sort of easy to trick Um, and it was it was like uh, right But then gpt4 still deep problems in it and I go through those in detail as you know in the in the video essay But when that came out I was walking around like for the first week Here let me give you an analogy the only book the only book that truly Horrified me and terrified me What either when the stand did but only when I was reading it, right? It was 1984 because when it was done, I thought you were gonna say this Yeah, and it was like I was like, but what defense do we have against? Right big brother and like and I was just waiting for Right, and then I was walking around for the first week or so and it was like I was trying to convey to everybody everything is about to change and everybody’s sort of looking at me like and they’re like even my my partner and she’s like and she’s like She’s a rational Forsightful deep person right and she got it over time But initially it was like I couldn’t point to anything in her life that was evidence for what I was saying I was saying well, you know this and this and this and this and it’s like And it’s like and it’s like As long and and it’s like oh, right It’s like that We don’t really see it And then by the time it’s invading our lives, it might be too late. That’s the kind of thing i’m worried about that’s why I mean um why we might be Sort of wow, let’s really pour money into these corporations Because of all the For the next three months i’ll just be making so much more money on the stock market and then six months thereafter. Oh I’ve been replaced by machines who can do the stock market way better than I ever could and are owned by the corporations and um, i’ve just been shut out by Overwhelming competition and I didn’t realize i’d be made irrelevant. I thought I would always have access It’s like right. Why did you think that competition if I could if I I didn’t realize that if I put competition as my highest value On the value of hierarchies that I hold that it would eventually lead to me being obsolete Yes, yes But in it but in a way that interacts with this hyperbolic discounting so you can’t foresee it well enough That’s why I was trying to get people out of a certain framework the tool How can I use this to make more money and advance my social status and blah blah blah? That is the framing that will blind us myopically and put us into grave Danger so that when it comes time to hang us the capitalist will sell us the rope. I’m sorry, right? So yeah I was trying to reframe it as take your don’t think of them that don’t think of these machines that way Let’s think about them as the potentials they have the thresholds and each one of these thresholds moves them towards being Autonomous rational self-directing self-correcting self-trend sending beings and those thresholds is where we can make choices about how we can steer that project and wrap it into an enculturation project such that we have a chance Of well a hopeful future rather than a dystopian one and do you think something like jeff’s departure is going to And do more than pinprick Uh, the the community that is that is past or building these these Things like do you think that these are these warning signs are being heeded? Yes, and no, I mean yes in that there’s the proposal that has gained quite a bit of steam Uh of you know, uh a moratorium for six months the six months pause Um, but notice it’s framed in this interesting way We can pause for six months because we’re that far ahead of china who we’re competing with That’s why we can pause for six months, right? Because if we if if china wasn’t that far behind we go like and so there’s that weird Right the the tragedy of the commons and competition thing. So there’s that but there there’s again These people and again, i’m trying to be fair, right there is a There’s an Over interpretation of intelligence as a phenomena at the expense of rationality and wisdom that is not being awoken to And and both both both the utopians and the dystopians Treat intelligence like a magic wand that will make all limitations and all problems go away We have no reason to believe that Right Um, and I gave a lot of arguments why we shouldn’t believe that we have no reason to believe that these machines will all just naturally Cooperate together. We will have no reason to believe that they won’t be faced internally by Subpersonalities and massive, you know the internal like conflict like we don’t know and we genuinely don’t know But one of the things I think it’s reasonable is that we can understand that like all other phenomena Intelligence exists precisely because it is inherently internally constrained in some fashion. That’s what makes it Yes, right and that and that therefore there are things it can’t do that have to be done with by rationality and by wisdom Um, and so yes the pause the pause is good, but it’s only a quant they’re still framing everything quantitatively Right rather than qualitatively it’s not just a quantity of intelligence we’re talking about here It’s the quality of the cognitive processes at work um uh, and so Yes, and no, I think is the answer to your question. Do you think that some of our more? Adversarial processing oriented ways of being whether it’s let’s say the algorithm on Social media, let’s say youtube although youtube is a bit more uh Youtube lends itself to more than just adversarial process, but let’s take youtube for a second. Do you think that that can be? Zend I like that verb. That’s great. Okay. So let’s first of all problematize the question It’s an open question and i’ll take it that way, but I first want to make it problematic okay, um I’m not going to redo the all the argument, but the main idea is there are inherent trade-offs right, uh, there’s inherent trade-offs between coherency And completeness or consistency and completeness. I should have said there’s inherent trade-off between worrying about bias and worrying about variance um Many heuristic have trade-off relationships and you can capitalize this and I argue that intelligence capitalizes on this by creating opponent processing to capitalize on these trade-offs, but Everything adaptive carries with it a propensity to self-deceptive self-destructive behavior Once you once you get that there’s a kind of inevitability between trade-offs and opponent processing you then realize a weight opponent processing always carries with it the possibility that it can be gamed in a sort of Uh game theoretic fashion by a short-term improvement by shifting to adversarial processing Think of american politics opponent processing democracy great idea, but wait Although we’ll in the end undermine democracy if we short term go to adversarial processing and demonize and try to destroy the opposition For a short term period. This is the hyperbolic discounting we can get elected and so um Part of the zen would have to be right building The internalized Commitment to resisting the short-term gains Of adversarial processing that undermine opponent processing in a profound way and i’ve also argued that These machines are not going to be uh homogeneous. They can’t be because intelligence can’t be uh, first of all If there’s if if as these machines are now demonstrating if there’s real emergence, there’s real uncertainty There’s real novelty things where we can’t calculate the risk. That’s also going to be true for them I take it that that’s a feature of Of reality and these limitations and these trade-offs these trade-offs can’t be decided a priori They have to be decided in an environmentally relative fashion in this environment worrying more about bias is more important than variance But in this environment is the exact opposite and as these as these machines go into the complexity the complex Digitated nature of reality they will also write have to adopt Different perspectives because they take a different stand on different environments and different problem sets, etc So they are going to also have to deal with this problem not only within themselves, but between themselves and so the temptation for Intelligent opponent processing to be rationally self-corrected being supplanted by short-term Adversarial processing unless they have become internally committed to virtue they will fall prey to it Why wouldn’t they? Oh because they’ll be so much more intelligent. That’s precisely the problem right? Right. Yeah Yeah, that’s a very good response. I was thinking Because the problem is how do we get How do we inspire how might we inspire people? To aspire to wisdom quick enough Yes To get ahead of the problem. And so if there’s existing algorithms that already utilize Adversarial processing that gives turns people into polarized, you know Beings and how might we? position Something as adversarial let’s say to get someone to click on something only to only to find out Oh, you’ve fallen down an opponent processing rabbit hole And you didn’t and you thought you were going to get adversarial processing but you actually got opponent processing like might that be a way to zen What’s going on? Yeah, it’s kind of a zen Jujitsu move kind of thing. Yes Um, and it’s it’s kind of socratic seduction in that sense um, yeah, um See my concern Let’s let’s again problematize it and then try to answer it again. My concern is One of the things that’s going to be rapidly accelerated By these machines is the meaning crisis is it’s going to exacerbate it tremendously in many ways people are going to be disenfranchised not only economically and politically but also culturally Um, like for example a whole industries are on the verge of being wiped out The amount of people will need to be models just to choose an easy example Oh, we have human beings and what they do is they model for us and we take pictures of them We don’t need those people anymore They’re gone. Well this drive of demand for beauty though beauty in the higher sense it could or it could also as I worried it could be taken up by Pornography and making it making it we can now easily because there’s no think about it Think about it chloe. There’s no real human beings involved. So portraying these pictures Like we could show whatever pornographic dark fantasy we want and where’s the immorality in that because nobody’s been commodified There’s no real person here and we’ve made it perfect and you know, and we know how to like you That’s a real possibility Too, right? So there’s going to be lots of people disenfranchised and and by the way that sets up revolution massive disenfranchised of all people that were previously um considered at least middle or higher than middle class That’s going to be problematic Didn’t you make this point about louis the 14th? Yeah, that’s exactly what louis the 14th did He he disenfranchised most of the nobility and then that weakened their ability Uh to hold down, uh the peasantry and it also opened up um The competition amongst the nobility for um I won’t go into that. Um, yeah, so there’s that There’s also that Um, you know our sense of and I talked a lot about this in in the video What is it to be a human being? Um our identity what makes us unique what makes us worthwhile? What really matters to us? What if the protestant? dream collapses and we find that Life isn’t about work That being a good person is not about being a good worker being a dedicated obedient work. What like what what is it? So there’s lots of ways in which this is going to massively exacerbate the meaning crisis and I think That will cause Um an initial ramping up Of adversarial processing as people scramble to the last of the light of boats Uh, the humanity lifeboats as the titanic the promethean titanic is sinking. I I I can i’m concerned about that now the other thing we can do and this is sort of um More like azimuth’s foundation and it’s funny how a lot of science fiction has become immediately relevant. Um We could build the counterculture we can steal the culture we can and ramp it up and we can um, and the increase in the in the meaning crisis could Draw more and more people into this project and more and more people also seeing that I think this is really The only game in town for us to try and Deal with this so that’s my answer Okay Two very different options um Strikingly different well, we’re in a kairos and so and we talked about this earlier. This isn’t freedom feel how this is not freedom We’re in a kairos of options. Do you feel free now? Do you feel liberated or do you feel overwhelmingly burdened? I’m talking to the people who’s listening Do you feel overwhelmingly burdened by this because you do not know how to take on this responsibility properly exactly? Right, and I just saw interstellar for the first time Yeah, two weeks ago. So i’m also sitting with that That archetypal simultaneously promethean, but actually weirdly grounded in a love agapic ethos Well, it’s it’s a weird movie, uh, because yeah initially I thought this movie I’ve seen the movie twice and I liked it better the second time the first time. Um, because the originally I thought this movie was You know reminding us of That we’re not gods in a profound way and only gods can move through the cosmos and we’re not we’re human beings We can’t deal with relativity Relativistic facts like like oh you were gone for eight minutes and it turned out to be 33 years Like we just can’t we can’t handle that um But then it said oh, but don’t worry. You’re going to be gods and I thought that was a little bit Right, but yeah, you’re right. The The relationship between the father and the daughter is um It’s a very powerful one And it it’s holding out the theme about intergenerational agapic love as being really centrally important It didn’t quite know how to do what to do with that theme, but it was at least holding that out Yeah, yeah, and then hathaway’s character says Just like time is real and space is a force love is also a force. Yes Yes, yes to convince them to go in a different route Um, it is a kairos moment. It is a very Exciting moment. I mean at least from the perspectives that i’m sitting at you know We’re standing from like given that the work that I do and given the work that we do in your study of The dawning of christianity was there a similar kairos in the sense that you know For your reading of it was there like a This is obviously where we don’t want to go And this is obviously where we do want to go With saint aug and all these people were talking about still in the culture. Is that your read or was it a bit more? uh Well, I mean it’s it’s hard. It’s hard to um Because of course many of them thought the world was ending very quickly Um, and so there’s ways in which their ethos doesn’t transfer Uh didn’t transfer to us until maybe now Which is really interesting. Um But if you if you take a look there is a kairos moment um And it’s a really interesting one Uh, which is how bound To judaism is this emergent thing going to be and there’s a tension, uh between um There’s a tension between uh Let’s call it the jesus movement just try using who sees jesus primarily as squarely within And the fulfillment of jewish tradition and that maybe was epitomized by people like peter and james It’s hard to talk about any of these people as historical because it’s so Somebody who is definitely historical who is definitely opposed to it is paul and paul makes the sort of uh The makes the decision that christianity should be severed Uh from judaism and then sets up a very problematic relation which is gonna you know, it’s gonna It’s gonna release christianity into the world and and that enables it to to capture Uh to steal the culture from the greco-roman But Like all kairos there’s a dark side to that and you and I briefly talked about this, you know There’s the the the creation of anti-semitism and the laying in of anti-semitism also within that history Exactly. I got the book. Yes. Yes, exactly. Yeah Yeah so, um, I think there was that um There’s They had more time they had Once they realized that jesus was not coming back at least not imminently um They had two or three centuries and they were often very conflicted centuries in which they were trying to work out all of these things generating these doctrines that were trying like the doctrine of the trinity to try and Get the opponent processing in place one way of understanding uh the trinity is a Philosophical and then religious but a philosophical solution to how do we embed opponent processing into the into the sacred? Well, we make the sacred simultaneously multiple and but integrated bound together uh in Biologically, uh, but yet sharing an identity and and then right and then and and jesus takes into himself all these typically conflicting relationships of prophet priest and king because all three of those groups are in And so you’ve got all of this. Let’s let’s make it let’s make this opponent processing thing And so there’s I think that gives Christianity especially christian neoplatonism a really powerful generative engine for a long time and then it sort of ossifies and solidifies in a dangerous way, so There was I don’t know if anybody said oh like they do they they knew they were in a kairos. They were trying to change the world Um, they didn’t foresee some of the dark side the anti-semitism But they also did this really interesting thing. They collectively no individual did it They used distributed cognition to build this opponent processing Into their notion of the sacred in a profound way that gave them a a very powerful Way of making a self-correcting institution and culture for quite a while. I would argue How did they What what is one example of how they built? opponent processing into distributed cognition Well, I I mean so Unless you mean like the trinity for example, yeah, so jesus is is both fully human and fully divine Right, and we are supposed to emulate him. Well, what does that do for us? Why do we need that opponent processing and this is the great platonic insight and then christianity? Sticks the incarnation onto it. The great platonic insight is we are finite transcendence We are capable of transcendence But we always remain finite. We will never become gods. We will always be Right finite, but we we should never give in to Our finitude because we just think we are just finite Then we we give into despair and servitude and we make ourselves vulnerable to being enslaved Well, we identify with our transcendence. We are godlike men like gods And right and of course Then there’s the hubris and then we fall prey to becoming tyrants and becoming self-destructive So what you want you want to I don’t like the english word tension So I use the greek word tonos you want this creative tension like the tension of a bow The tonos that makes the bow work. You want this tonos between finitude and transcendence. Well, the incarnation is like boom Yeah, follow that and it’s like but I can’t but I should but I can I can because he’s fully man I can’t fully human I can’t because he’s fully god, right? But I can and I can’t and I like he God became human so humans can become gods and you and then you say oh Now, can you explain to me the incarnation then how it actually works and every attempt to interpret the incarnation is declared a heresy So you can’t resolve it and it’s constantly doing this to you and pushing you to constantly explore Your transcendence, but also acknowledge in humility your finitude Hmm That’s a that’s a very profound and powerful response to the Yes, and it’s brilliant also it’s sophisticated. It’s yes it is I was yeah, it’s we take it for granted. But yeah, and it’s produced by collective intelligence There’s no one person that is the author of the doctrine of the trinity right Now you see that’s a really interesting thing because of course And rightly rightly Muslims and jews are saying but the trinity is a philosophical monster and it’s like right, and so that has to be kept in balance with the profound functionality Of the trinity for doing this kind of work in a powerful way It seems to me that the move now is to remember our finitude But until very recently The move right in the whole ai project was to aspire to godhood right Right. So there’s the there’s the absence of a of a humility right, which is why something like the platonic And neoplatonic corpus could be very valuable to us right now in place of just a technical laying out of our limits and the growth of the machine And the growth of the machines Yeah It’s very elegant how it maps on to the elements and what I mean by that is, you know What interstellar being an example you have this theme this trope of us trying to? Reach the heavens right? Yes. Yes tower of babel the motto of the city of new york is excelsior ever upward I see this when I go into um, you know a big new york building and I I used to be so Uh moved by that and now I think oh how utterly foolish And how how absolutely terrible actually? um, and i’m thinking again also of the of the etymology of the word Humility humility comes from whom must meet the of the earth of the earth. Yes Yes, right and adam adam means clay of the earth as well of the earth, right? And so there’s a there’s a forgetfulness there’s a forgetting of what it means to be human Yes, this quest to simply reach the heavens without remembering that you are of the earth There’s a turkish proverb that I came across a few years ago that says um Be humble for you were made of you were made of earth. Excuse me And be noble for you were made of stars. Yes. Yes, and both are true, right? Are actually made of both stardust and earth and it’s this It’s this remembering that we have to start doing now more than ever at the present moment. I agree That’s a good proverb. Um, I have been quoting from Moby dick um Where so where the uh, the preacher gives the sermon before they set sail Um, and there’s a line he utters in there and he says what is man that he should live out the lifetime of his god Right. The desire to be godlike is both ennobling and this is what moby dick is all about Right and ahab is the prototypical figure. There’s something noble And admirable about ahab, but there’s also something deep his lack Right of humility. Um right His hubris Well chloe i’ve got to i’ve got to go but this has been really wonderful i’ve really Uh, I I really enjoyed how this just unfolded and took on a life of its own Likewise, this was awesome Yeah, and I think it’s right to bring these two conversations into deep contact with each other the way we did and I encourage people To keep doing that. I really think this is Fantastic stuff. So thank you so very much Thank you, john. Take care. I hope to see you soon. Yeah me too