Bill Meyer Show Podcast - Sponsored by Clouser Drilling www.ClouserDrilling.com - 08-04-25_MONDAY_6AM

Episode Date: August 4, 2025

Morning news of the day, your calls, my irritation on GOP cheering punishment of TX dems as GOP pounded by dems in Oregon...Later a talk on AI with David Eliot discusses his book Artificially Intelligent - The Very Human Story of AI, coming in Oct, 2025

The Bill Meyer Show podcast is sponsored by Clouser Drilling. They've been leading the way in Southern Oregon well drilling for over 50 years. Find out more about them at ClouserDrilling.com. Here's Bill Meyer. Welcome. It is Monday, August 4th, Barack Obama's birthday. Yay. We're going to be, no, we're not going to be celebrating Barack Obama's birthday.

Okay. But anyway, yeah, I guess happy birthday to the worst former president, at least in my lifetime that I could think of, but who is still thought of with no problems whatsoever, was just so clean and so just a great, great guy. Great great guy. He and Big Mike. But anyway, welcome to the show. Great to have you on.

7705633,770KMED. My email, Bill at Bill Myers Show.com. Lonnie Anderson passed away over the weekend. Yeah, seventy nine. She was going to turn 80 tomorrow. 80 tomorrow, of course, played on WKRP. My, of course, I've been in broadcasting, what, some forty five years years now and my early impression

of what radio was, was through that television show back when I was a kid, watching that. Baby, if you've ever wanted or wondered, right? Wondered whatever became of me, right? And it was a very fun show, great show for its time. And Jennifer played a great role in that too. Her role, rather, on that show, Lonnie Anderson, being very smart and really being the person who is able to make fun of everybody else on the sly side. I always thought that was pretty good about her. But yeah, yes, she must have had...

Actually, I'm not sure why she passed away other than the fact that, hey, anytime we get to a certain age, like, you know, even me almost 64. And you realize that there are fewer years in front of you than there are behind you. But still, it was interesting to note that over the weekend. Of course, everybody thinks about WKRP, it's always what the turkey drop, that's the one that comes to mind. But what came to my mind is how, once I actually got into broadcasting, how completely unlike WKRP most of the real world broadcasting is. Now, some of the craziness and the people that try to do a stunt, like the turkey drop, stuff like that happened. That was actually based on something that I believe like the Turkey Drop, stuff like that happened.

That was actually based on something that I believe had to actually happen, if I recall correctly. But I remember, and I would always watch, they'd have Venus Flytrap, the one DJ, and Johnny Fever and all the rest of them. They would always take the tone arm and just put it on the song or put it on the record as the records already spinning and they put it on and then you know they would instantly be playing whatever song they're supposed to be playing. I'm thinking that is just total nonsense. All I had to do was just go to radio school for a little bit to figure that out. But that's the main falsehood. Nobody would ever play a record back then. Of course now does anybody know how to play a record I guess is the bigger question. All right so anyway it's a good weekend for me. Hope it was a good weekend for you. Ended up heading out with friends Saturday night. Had a wonderful meal and

conversation over at Cishle's. That was great. And then yesterday I just kind of worked around the house a little bit and was putting up some metal shelves or putting together some of those metal shelves with the wheels on it, you know, kind of like the stainless steel warehouse kind of things. I got to get some order to that garage. I keep trying to get the garage more in order and it seems to be getting worse. So this is going to be my real goal for my 64th year is to try to get some kind of control, some kind of control in my life. And I don't know what that says about me, but it's, old radios have tended to follow me home over the years. Old broadcast equipment has tended to

follow its way to my house that nobody wanted and I just couldn't put it in the dumpster. And I'm going to have to find some way to put it in the dumpster or move it along at some point, maybe a big garage sale. Then you can come over to my house. Okay. I wanted to touch on a story that broke on Friday and my initial, my initial impression of this from the Trump administration was that Trump was shooting the messenger.

And it was easy to figure this out. This had to do with the firing of the person that ended up compiling the job statistics. And most of the time, we don't really know much about that particular person. We don't hear much about it, but you just always hear the stories. The jobs report came out. Oh, okay. And then what have I been saying now for a number of years? Well, I don't know if we should even pay attention to the jobs report because they always end up revising it one way or the other, a month or two or sometimes three months down the road. And

can you really trust the numbers? Now, it's interesting to see how two different financial outfits ended up reacting to this. I'm going to go to the Wall Street Journal first. Now the Wall Street Journal is not particularly a big fan of Donald Trump. They can be, but for the most part, Donald Trump is the wrong kind of Republican. That's the way the Wall Street Journal will tend to look at this. This is the same company that runs Fox News, which has acquiesced to Trump being president. But be that as it may, here we go.

The Wall Street Journal, the way they reacted to this, this firing, I'm reading from their stories this morning, this firing could burn your finances. Stocks are set to rebound from the 1-2 punch they got on Friday from revised tariffs at a major revision to what looked like decent US jobs growth. The Magnificent 7 wrapped up quarterly results but plenty of big companies are still due this week including Disney, McDonald's, Uber, and AMD. That's advanced micro devices. Now what they're complaining about here is Erica McIntarfer.

That's the person who was fired from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And the market's muted reaction, the Wall Street Journal says, to Friday's firing of McIntarfer, might be missing the potential gravity of the situation. Just as threats to fire Fed Reserve Chair Powell have sent the markets careening recently, her sacking and the hints over the weekend of more changes should give investors pause.

A loss of confidence in America's economic statistics could have surprising effects on trillions in assets and payments. It has long been a bipartisan article of faith that America's bean counters were honest and competent. Okay? Contrast that with China, where economic growth is thought to be routinely overstated for political reasons. A possible reputational hit to U.S. jobs numbers is only one of the issues to watch from shooting the messenger. Due to staffing shortages, the BLS recently – this is Bureau of Labor and Statistics where the numbers come out, folks – recently spurred alarm in some circles and questions from Congress about inflation data. You don't

have to be a policy wonk to be alarmed. If inflation figures are less accurate or if investors suspect they're subject to political influence, it could chill the $2 trillion market for Treasury inflation-protected securities or tips. Less reliable inflation data could also raise suspicion among tens of millions of retired and disabled people whose social security checks are indexed to inflation. Ditto for taxpayers. Okay, well, as far as the social security, everybody knows that the government has always tried to understate and always has understated inflation.

Just go to John Williams, folks, over at shadowstats.com. ShadowStats has indicated that inflation is way beyond what the federal government has said, because they're always, yeah, the last thing they want to do is give senior citizens a raise, okay? All right? Let's just be honest, it's been this way for as long as I've been alive. They always tamp this down. But the Wall Street Journal worried about, oh, my goodness,

what would happen if the statistics weren't trusted and people thought that we were politicizing it? Now, it was easy, like I said, for me when I first heard about the firing of this person from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, I'm thinking, ah, did Trump just shoot the messenger and could this cause problems? I mean, it's a natural thing to say. You come out with jobs numbers and the jobs numbers say the wrong thing, right? You're talking about it about the greatest economy ever

We're in the golden age and then all of a sudden You only have 73,000 jobs less than half of what you said everybody figured you were gonna have right? And so you thinking okay Trump just to cut the head off So then I ended up going to Sean ring now Sean ring is one of my favorite money guys over at daily reckoning Now, Sean Ring is one of my favorite money guys over at Daily Reckoning, and his article is Trump Decapitates the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And if you're shocked that Donald Trump fired this commissioner, Erica McIntarfer, you haven't been paying attention. The real scandal isn't that Trump pulled the trigger, it's that he waited so long. Because if there's

any institution that deserves a live streamed administrative beheading, it's the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Now, this really piqued my interest, so I'm going further into this one. For years now, this formerly gold standard government statistics agency has been quietly bleeding out, falling response rates, crumbling methodologies, a lack of oversight, and outright indifference to being accurate. These weren't isolated glitches. They were systemic.

And Erica McIntarfer? She has been there for about a year and a half, but she didn't fix any of it. She's presided over the decline. Worse, McIntosh became the poster child for the kind of technocratic gas lighting that has corroded public trust in government statistics altogether. So let's be crystal clear. Sean Ring says this isn't about Trump politicizing the numbers, it's about finally firing someone who should have been frog- marched out of her office the moment she started treating a number like plus or minus

300,000 jobs as a rounding error So that's how much wiggle room that she would give the Bureau of Labor Statistics plus or minus 300,000 jobs. Whoa Why even have a BLS with those kind of numbers? Now Sean Ring continues, on August 2nd, McIntarfer was fired abruptly and unceremoniously after the July payroll report landed with a loud wet thud. Only 73,000 jobs were added, with 258,000 jobs quietly erased from the prior two months in downward revisions. In Trump's words, the biggest miscalculations in over 50 years. And for once, he's not exaggerating, says Sean. The revisions were massive, embarrassing, and most importantly, predictable. You see, this wasn't a one-off fluke, Sean writes.

Since at least 2022, the BLS's job numbers have been behaving like a crypto chart on bath salts lurching up, crashing down, then getting revised months later with no one's paying attention. I forget who I was talking to. Just a number of, what was it, last week? Who was I talking to? It was always the guy from Institute for Policy Innovation, the president over there, Tom Giovinetti. And we were talking about these job statistics and things coming in. And I said, well, why don't they just wait until they have the real numbers? You can't do that. It's like everyone would look at you like you have two heads because they always revise it so badly and no one could trust it. So Tom and I were talking about that a day

before the jobs numbers came out and then they fired the person who was in charge of coming out with the numbers. In conclusion, Sean Ring writes, the BLS doesn't just miss the numbers, it creates an alternate reality, lets Wall Street trade on the alternate reality, allows the White House to spin it, and then whispers, oops, once the damage is done. And McIntarfer, she provided over this disaster like Marie Antoinette with a spreadsheet shrugging off criticism while her house burned down. I think that's a great takeaway from Sean Ring over at Daily Reckoning.

22 minutes after 6, so like I said, my initial reaction was kind of like, boy, it looks like he's shooting the messenger, but it looks like the messenger needed to have been shot quite some time ago. This is the Bill Meyers Show. We'll go into some other headlines here in just a moment too. Pancakes certified by a committee of grandmas. Try a stack at diner 62. For reliable well water services look no further than SisQ pump service and rotary drilling company. From well drilling and water testing to well pump installations,

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40% off your first year with a promo code Beckett LifeLock.com. Terms play. Hi, I'm Mark with Oregon Truck and Auto Authority and I'm on KMED. 24 minutes after 6, join in at 7705633, 770KMED. We had a fire overnight Saturday over at Roseburg Plywood. Went into a two alarm. Nobody heard, fortunately, and it did appear that it was some sort of accident. Nobody heard. I'm just happy about that. Everything is just fine. It's good. Could have been a lot worse. Two alarm, but they got that figured out Saturday night into Sunday morning. Fire was accidental. Everything is good. All right. Other numbers going on here. Interesting national story. First time in 50 years,

United States may have had negative net migration in 2025. More people left than came in. Numbers down from 2.8 million in 2024. Rapid Response reporting. We may be dealing with negative net migration to the United States in 2025. That would be the first time that there is a negative net migration in the country for at least 50 years. We're talking about down from 2.8 million in 2024, and they're talking about President Trump on this one. Promises made and promises kept.

So we have that story. I'm intrigued by another story I've been reading. I've been keeping an eye on this Texas Democrats story because it reminds me very much of what has been, well, what I have hoped would happen here in the state of Oregon that Republicans would grow a spine. But in Texas, they have the same kind of situation that Oregon has with a supermajority and then a minority party. And they also have a quorum requirement. You have to have a certain number of the Democrats, the Texas Democrats, present in Oregon, just

like you have to have, and sorry, in Texas rather, just like you have to have a certain amount of Republicans in the state of Oregon present in order to conduct business, to provide quorum. It's a constitutional party and power. It's a constitutional power, the quorum power, which is part of making sure that there is... it's a protection for the minority party. In fact, that's the whole idea of Representative Republic, is that the minority has rights too, and the minority just doesn't have to sit there and take it. Well, in Texas, it is that the minority has rights too and the minority just doesn't have to sit there and take it. Well, in Texas, it is exactly the opposite as Oregon.

And of course, I'm listening to the talk radio callers to Christa Gull this morning and they're saying, yeah, those Democrats, they should be dragged dead and shot and well, they didn't say that, but all that kind of stuff. And I'm thinking, oh, you morons, you don't understand what the quorum power is all about. It's about protection for the minority. And sometimes you can be in the minority too, as we beleaguered Republicans are quite often in the state of Oregon because of Democrats supermajority. Like I said, our voters are so non- I shouldn't say not all, but well-meaning people, they

fell sway to this whole deal about the, you know, Republicans need to be in Salem to do their job as if being there to allow bloodthirsty Marxists to just have their way with Republican constituents here in Southern Oregon is somehow representing you, right? Well, the shoe is on the other foot over in Texas. And this has to do over redistricting. Now, ironically, the Democrats in the state of Oregon denied quorum when there was a redistricting deal going on. I want to say this was 20, 25 years ago. This was back when Oregon was more sensible.

It was not controlled by by Marxists. And at that point, Republicans controlled the situation the last time that Quorum was denied by the Democrats here in the United States, or in Oregon rather, and the Democrats walked out and we weren't able to do a redistricting. And then the Democrats came back into Oregon once the GOP did a compromise and did something to protect them too. Remember quorum denial is not just about the majority party just being able to say, screw you, we have one vote more than 50%, you're dead, and you're off to the

gulag. There is a reason why we've had these quorum requirements in constitutions. It's to protect minorities. The state legislature is just not for the majority to roll over. Now in Texas, it's exactly flipped. You have arrogant, jackass Republicans. Here we have arrogant, jackass Democrats, you know, in charge. But in Texas, it's arrogant, jackass Republicans. Now, we're supposed to be okay for that because Republicans good, Democrats bad in our talk radio. But I'm looking at this situation and I'm thinking,

gosh, try to look at what the Democrats do here. The Texas Democrats have taken off. In fact, they've gone to Chicago, from what I understand. They're in Illinois now in an effort to stave off the vote over the new House map. The Texas House map would plausibly allow the Republicans to pick up five more seats in the midterms, and the Democrats are crying foul. But it is hardball politics. They would do the same themselves if the tables were turned. Of course, this is Republicans explaining, you know, Republican media going, well, of course, you know. It's not that I'm sympathetic to Democrats, but I am sympathetic

to the power in the need for the quorum and the compromise which will tend to come if the majority party would even listen to the minority party that they're squishing. And you know, you got the governor of Texas that's going, we're gonna find them $500 a day, we're gonna drag them in by their toenails, we're going to whip them. And you know, even the quorum, this whole idea that we're going to haul people in, whether they're Democrats in Texas or Republicans in Oregon, kind of remind me, wait a minute, are you trying to tell me that if you're a state representative or state senator that you are a slave to the system, to the

majority party, to drag you in by your feet or, you know, arrest you by the Marshals or the National Guard or whatever the case might be. You want to talk about tyranny, right? Now I have no doubt that the Republicans are wanting to do this and play hardball because they're going, hey we got the majority, the Democrats are in the minority, let's screw them to the wall, right? It's no different than what the one Kate Brown, not Kate Brown, Tina Koteck does with her supermajority here, revenge is a dish best served cold, isn't that what she told her Herman Bärtschiger at one point, and that's what they do here. What a difference though is that the Democrats in Texas united and they left.

Our current Republicans in Oregon, they had all these threats thrown at them and all the rest of them, and they stayed. And our leaders in the Republican Party are negotiating to provide quorum for the screwing of the gas taxes and the motor vehicle cost and everything else. They're just going to be screwing of the gas taxes and the the motor vehicle cost and everything else. They're just gonna be screwing us royal the end of this month. And our particular leaders are negotiating to provide quorum. It just astounds me. The differences between Republicans in Oregon and Democrats in Texas. Democrats in Texas at least fight.

Republicans in Oregon, with the exception of the occasional people like Dwayne Younger, are all sitting around there going, oh, I wouldn't be able to run for reelection. They're actually working to provide quorum for this special session. Can you believe it? So not that I'm a fan of the Democrats in Texas, but I'm a fan of the fact that they actually show that they're actually able to use the constitutional power of quorum to at least have their voice heard. And we're told by the spineless Republicans in Oregon, well, we have to be present in order for our voices to be heard.

No, you're present and they just steamroll over you. The Democrats' voices are really being heard in Texas, aren't they? Yeah, you got the governor fulminating and wanting to send out the marshals, get them arrested and drag them back in, all the rest of it. Yeah, their voices are being heard at that point for sure. What a difference. What a difference between the minority party status in Oregon versus Texas right now. I admire their fight, their fight and fire that's in the Democrats. And we could use a little bit more of that and

and not wanting to be, well not really caring what you think about them. This whole idea, we're not able to do business in Texas. Yeah, because you're screwing the minority party to the wall. You're playing hardball politics. They're a minority party. It's the only party they have is to stop you from playing hardball politics. That's the way it goes. And in Oregon, our minority party, the Republicans, won't use the same party. They won't use the same power, rather. Okay? And so I admire the Texas Democrats for at least having fight, not that I agree in their principles and their legislation, what

they would want to do. See what I'm getting at here? We could use a little bit more of a Texas Democrat in the Oregon Republican for sure. This is the Bill Myers show. It's another beautiful day at the ballpark. Um, hey, this is a grocery store parking lot. Great. I need to grab a soda and some popcorn. Um, oh, okay. Looks like we've got a runner.

Oh, it's going. Going. Oh, that was a grand slam if I ever saw one. That's gonna leave a mark. Whether the damage is minor or major league, Lithia Body and Paint is the right call. Service. Speed. Accuracy. That's Lithia Body and Paint is the right call. Service, speed, accuracy. That's Lithia Body and Paint.

For reliable well water services, look no further than SisQ Pump Service and Rotary Drilling Company. From well drilling and water testing to well pump installations, holding tanks and water filtration, you'll get complete service without juggling multiple contractors and multiple phone calls. Just one call, one company, one complete trusted solution. You're a partner for well water system installation and maintenance from field to faucet is SisQ Pump Service and Rotary Drilling Company. Rest easy knowing your well water is in expert hands. From the KMED News Center, here's what's going on. Big cuts are coming for Southern Oregon University. President Rick Bailey announced cuts Friday responding to a structural

deficit. The draft plan would cut ten and a half million dollars over the next three and a half years, reduce staff by 64 positions, and also cut the university's 38 academic majors to 23 and axe the athletic department by more than a million dollars. Departments with the biggest cuts at over a million dollars each include the College of Arts and Humanities and the College of Natural and Social Science. Two men were killed in a late-night crash in Prospect. Jax investigators believe Arthur Roden and Gary Tate were outside of their disabled vehicle in the eastbound lane of Mill Creek Road with its lights off when it was struck by an SUV

driven by an 18-year-old. Both men died. The teen driver cooperated with deputies. No charges have been filed. Lightning moved through Central Oregon over the weekend touching off 18 wildfires. 11 were contained at less than an acre in size. The Stevens fire outside of Sisters was fully contained Sunday at 8 acres. Bill Lunden, KMED. rated for high wind and impact and concrete or clay tile roofing for a sophisticated look with superior thermal efficiency. Call today to get your estimate tomorrow. 541-9401-3736. License CCB 250730. Hi, this is Bill Meyer and I'm not the only one saving money with Skypark Insurance. Here's Rick from Medford. When buying a house, I was referred to Skypark by my lender for home insurance. I was

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Call Steve for a quote, 261-5444 or visit skyparkins.com. At Skypark, we make insurance easy. You're hearing the Bill Meyers show on 1063 KMED streamed on KMED.com 637 we're gonna talk a little bit about AI this morning and I've been intrigued by this and I've had an interesting experience in which all the people I've talked to about artificial intelligence they've almost fallen into one of two camps. One of them is that it's going to be the absolute finest thing that has ever occurred in humanity,

it's just going to be the golden age, etc., etc., and nothing to worry about. Embrace it, bring it on, and if you don't, you're a Luddite toad. And then there's the other side of it, which says, oh my gosh, it is Satan made of silicon. And I thought, well, I'll talk with David Elliott about this. He has a book coming out a little bit more than a month from now. And he's kind of has a foot in both camps, I think. I don't know. Well, I'll talk with him here in just a minute. He's a PhD candidate at the University of Iowa of Ottawa, where he researches social and political effects of artificial intelligence. He's a member of the Critical Surveillance Studies Lab, and his work on AI recognized with many awards, including the 2022 Pierre Trudeau Foundation

PhD scholarship. David's here to talk about his new book coming out a little more than a month. It's Artificially Intelligent, the very human story of AI, and that will publish October 21st. So I guess it's a couple of months from now that it's coming out. And good morning, David. It's a pleasure having you on. Thank you so much for having me on here, Bill, and for such a warm introduction. Yeah, well, thank you. Now, did you start out with studying AI? Is this something you've been doing for a long time or was it something where you went in one direction and then all of a sudden, you know, flipped figuring it out that, hey, this is a big deal, so to speak?

Tell me about your story. I had a bit of a weird journey here. I come from a family of computer scientists. My mother actually worked on AI in the 80s. And I am the black sheep who refused to work in computer science and decided to go into sociology and did everything I could not to touch computers. But in 2018, 2019, I was doing some work on Canadian politics, completely un-computer related.

And I stumbled across a demo of GPT-2, well before it was available to the public. Got to see a demo of it. And I think I just saw the same thing everybody else saw three years later when ChatGPT came out to the public. And I said, this is going to change everything. And overnight changed my research and I've been working on AI now since about, yeah, that would be late 2018, early 2019, I think. And yeah, just a complete change and it's been quite the journey to be on, to be honest.

Is it fair to say that you have a foot in both camps of what I was talking about? One is Silicon Satan, the other one is like, oh my gosh, just had to worry about bring it on baby, no guardrails needed, oh my gosh, just let me worry about bringing on baby, no guardrails needed, that kind of thing. Where are you? I think it's a very fair analysis of where I am, but I think where I kind of stand is more on the side that we get to decide how this affects our society.

And I think it could go either way. And I use the example a lot of the industrial revolution. When we think about the Industrial Revolution, I think AI is very similar. It's something like this dimension that changes everything we do. It changes how we do our work. It changes how we interact with the world. It is going to touch every single industry. And you can look at the Industrial Revolution from the side of all these amazing things we have in our life right now come from the Industrial Revolution. Our economy comes from the Industrial Revolution. They're just luxuries that I have an espresso

machine in my kitchen right now. That is something that was unthinkable before the Industrial Revolution. However, on the other side, for about 100 years, children worked in factories 18 hours a day. Your average person worked a full day, seven days a week, barely able to survive. Most of the wealth in America was in the robber baron's pocket. And that's the society that we had to go through because of the Industrial Revolution to get here. So my opinion is that we can have this amazing AI society at the end of the day. What concerns me is the path we take to get there. The decisions we make now, like we are very privileged, you and me, we are at the beginning of this.

We get to make the decisions that will define the next two generations' lives here. So I'm really interested with my book. It's really about trying to give power to the people to understand what's going on with AI. What are the decisions we're having to make right now? You can become involved in the conversation and advocate for AI to be implemented in a way that will guide us towards a better future. Because it really could go either way here. I don't think the doom and gloom, no Terminator style robots are going to take over, we're all going to lose our jobs.

I don't think that's realistic, but there's a lot of bad things that could happen. On the other side, there's a lot of bad things that could happen. On the other side, there's a lot of amazing things that could happen. And AI just has such a potential power to allow humans to innovate, to lift us up, to give us the powers to imagine, the powers to be able to actualize on our dreams. And I think that's a really powerful narrative if we handle this transition right. I wanted to talk about maybe at least a negative aspect of artificial intelligence which has bothered me. I can see how artificial intelligence to people who are already educated and are already quite

effective at cognitive thinking, how it can be a wonderful additional tool, brought into someone's life, into someone's working life. I can understand that and see the use of it. Here is the issue that I have though for the future of society. And I don't know if you're going to address this in your book, Artificially Intelligent, the very human story of AI, but when you have somebody growing up in a totally artificial,

intelligent kind of world, isn't there an incredible risk of just relying on AI and to never really develop the cognitive and the the bones, you know, the nuts and bolts behind the knowledge that we have right now. And I remember the same sort of situation that happened back when we were introducing the Apple computer back in my high school in 1976 and bringing in of the scientific calculator. We were told told well, you know, you're going to you know No a lot more and you're gonna let the machine do the work for you But yet I can guarantee you that that generation my even my generation does not do as much Mathematics on the own without machine without machine or electronic help better as perhaps an earlier slide rule or

Different kind of generation is there a case to be made for that issue? machine or electronic help better as perhaps an earlier slide rule or a different kind of generation. Is there a case to be made for that issue? Yeah, Bill, you've absolutely hit the nail on the head with a major issue here. And I think it would have been about four weeks ago a major research paper came out which is cited to me, I think every second day now when I have conversations, that they did a study on students in university who are using AI and people in the workforce were using

it, and they were doing brain scans. And they actually found that the students who were using ChatGPT had less active brain activity, weren't learning, weren't having active memory storage, which is a really kind of terrifying discovery there. We need to replicate it to make sure that's true, but that's the beginning of this actual scientific evidence that using AI for these tasks can make you stop thinking, which is really scary. But then, what you're adding on here, which I think is really important, is that foundational knowledge. You brought up the scientific calculator. I'll even bring in a regular calculator, the calculator on your phone, because now

when I talk to teachers, they talk about having students who ask, why do I have to learn what two plus two is? Why do I have to learn how to do multiplication? I can do it on my phone and don't realize the importance of understanding why do we do that? Like what's actually happening when do we do that? What's actually happening when my phone does that? For critical thinking, I'm terrified. That's a question of when I was helping to teach a course, I was a teaching assistant at the University of Ottawa and we were getting chat GPT essays.

You'd get these amazing essays and you talk to the students and they knew none of the material. That's really difficult because you're getting that degree saying, I know these things, but you've just offloaded that cognitive work onto something else. And I think the answer to that is that, and it's one of the big things I try and talk about in this book, the problems are amplified by the technology, but they're inherently human problems. They're inherently social problems about the culture of education, the business of education, how we express to our children why they are getting an education. Because if the point of getting an education as I'm Canadian and in Canada, a lot of students

at university go to school just to get a job. They take on debt. They want that piece of paper so they can go and get the job. And if we say that's the point of education and that's how we set it up, then these kind of shortcuts make sense. But if we say the point of education is to build these foundational skills, if we set to build these critical thinking skills, if we really enforce that, we make that our cultural understanding of why we're doing this and we embed the system of values and practices that actually help the students do this, I think we'll be okay.

But that's a much larger cultural conversation we need to have. And that's what I was concerned about that maybe, you know, the educational system really shouldn't be delving much with or using AI much. You get the foundational aspects of knowledge first and then you end up being introduced to AI as the tool later on in order to be able to leverage your already innate knowledge that you have the nuts and bolts, the basic structure of knowledge and just to be a good, relatively smart citizen too at that point, kind of where we were going. What about that?

What about that? Yeah. I 100% agree with you there. I think that's a great way to look at it and really at the end of the day, yeah, AI is a tool and you don't give a kid in a wood chopping class a band saw until you teach them about the dangers of a band saw until you teach them about the dangers of a band saw, right? Or like how it works, how would you use it?

And again, to add onto that, I pulled up AI and we talked about it along the book. I tried to make the technical aspect of large language models like chat PPT more accessible to the everyday public. I think that's one of the things we miss when we give it, when we just throw it out there and say it's okay to use is how is this working? How is it actually producing the product that we're seeing at the end of the day? It is not the same as a Google search. It is a completely different system. And when you understand how it works, you understand where its flaws are. And I use ChatGTT every day in my work, but I'm very skeptical of everything it puts out because I understand like what is the statistical formula

it's using to predict this, and I understand where it could be wrong. I understand what its potential faults are, and I think we need to teach everybody that before we give them the tool. Okay, I don't want to get too much off into the weeds, but you talked about large language model, and that's usually what we hear about

when it comes time for Getting involved with a chat box whether it's a grok or a chat GPT, etc Are there different models of artificial intelligence that are not large language models or there are other variations on a theme? How does this work? I'm sorry to be a little ignorant on this one. Help me out No worries I think this is one of the most important things we need to talk about in AI. And I think it's not talked about enough. And that's the fault of people like me in academia. So I think that the large language model is a subset of a type of AI called deep

learning. And deep learning is the type of AI that, for all intents and purposes, was discovered to be viable in 2012. When we talk about the AI boom, that's what we talk about. There's lots of deep learning systems that are not language models. Basically what deep learning is, is we have this really complicated neural network. And it's a computer program that is designed to work like a human brain. What we do is we give it a bunch of data. We don't tell it what to do with the data.

We don't tell it how to analyze it. And then we let it figure out how to analyze it. So for an example, if I want to train a deep learning system to recognize photos of cats and dogs, I would give it a million photos of cats and dogs and I would label them on the back. This one's a cat, this one's a dog. I would then let it go and try and guess which one's a cat, which one's a dog. Every time it guesses on a photo, it flips it over, sees what the answer actually is, and then changes its approach a little bit. Just like a kid. If you were to take a kid to a kennel, show it a cat, say, what

is this? And it says, it's a dog. You say, no, that's a cat. And the kid would realize, okay, cats are small. The machine, just like that kid, will learn trial and error and changes its structure, which is why we call it artificially intelligent, because it's changing its behavior. That's an intelligent action. After millions of times looking at these photos, it will be able to predict with amazing accuracy which photo is of a cat, which one is of a dog. We then freeze that system and send it out to you, put it on your phone for your cat-dog detector app. We can do that. Yeah, like we need to do that. But yeah, we inherently know this with our human trial and error.

But yeah, getting a computer to recognize that or a neural network, as the case might be, has been a big challenge. But I can see how it ends up doing what we naturally do. But here's where I'm going then with this. I understand this is how this goes, but what are the other models that are not large language? What could you give me an example of one which is not large language to it because there I didn't realize there were many different Types of artificial intelligence models there. So yeah, I'll give you quickly to here in that category So large language basically take the example I just gave you and rammed English language into it or any language you want into it.

But if we take medical scans of cancer screening and we put it through that exact process I just told you, we can use that to detect cancer screening. So we use that in radiology. That's not a large language model. That's a deep learning model. That's an image recognition model. Probably the most popular other form is what we call computer vision, which is used to do image recognition.

If we then step outside completely of this type of model deep learning, we have a completely other path of AI called symbolic AI. And that instead of using this neural network system, we teach the machine logical rules about society or about the world and then we, for all intents and purposes, ran a situation through this logical rule set and let it make a decision based on that. Not used very often right now, it was really popular before neural networks came around, but there's a bunch of different architecture models for neural networks that don't use language.

So it's a bit of a minefield right now. And I think we're hitting a point too, where we're starting to combine different model types together to do some really interesting things. I think Facebook has some really interesting projects with that right now. Yeah, by the way, I'm speaking with David Elliott once again, and he is the author of the upcoming book.

It's going to be out in a couple of months, Artificially Intelligent, the Very Human Story of AI. Why did you use that subtitle, the very human? Because I know that almost the last thing we think about artificial intelligence is any kind of humanity in it whatsoever. It seems to be force-fed humanities product and then seems to be designed to... Well, I can understand why people would say it's designed to replace us in some ways, in some form or another, right? What do you think?

Yeah, I used that title because my approach to this book, I want it to be accessible. I want it to be anybody can pick it up and read it and not just have the ability to Read it but actually enjoy reading it and I need to do that We needed to use story and I'm a storyteller at heart so I end up starting the stories of the people who made AI and Very quickly. I realized the story of AI's creation the story of all the important things about it that create problems, that create its beauty, come from the stories of its creators, the stories of Alan Turing, the stories of Ada Lovelace, the stories of these people that went through extraordinary life circumstances.

And out of those circumstances came little pieces of them, pieces of their soul, which is embedded in the system of artificial intelligence. So I realized that by telling these very human stories, we can actually come to learn a lot more about AI, the way it functions, and how we should respond to it. And that's where the name eventually came about, that this is a story about something that feels so alien and in many ways is, I mean it is a machine, but it is born out of human grief, it is born out of human curiosity, out of human desires

and I found that to be such a fascinating and amazing journey to follow as I wrote this book. Where do you think that AI, as we know it, will be best used? And what kind of economic impact do you think it will have? Ooh, well, I'll tell you right now. Anybody who tells me they know how this may go is either lying or trying to tell you something, or tell you something.

You know something, David? David, that's very refreshing to hear, OK? To hear someone say, I'm not exactly sure where this is going to go. And if everybody does think they know where it's going to go, then they're lying to you. I like that. I like that. I'm going to give you kudos for that. All right?

Well, thank you very much. But yeah, if I'm just going to throw out these places where I think it could have the biggest impact, oh, a great one, education. We've already talked about education here, but in a way that you might not expect. I just looked into a podcast where they were talking about a new system, I think it was IBM who made it, where for training teachers,

they basically made this database of, we call them artificial kids. So they're basically large language model systems that mimic a kid that you might have in your classroom. And the teacher gets an experience trying to teach this kid with a new learning style that they've learned to try and help this kid. And basically, if you think about it in football terms, right, like you need to run a play hundreds of times in practice before you get it right and you're good.

And if you have a practice alone, you show up in a game, you're going to get hit. What we're seeing here is teachers usually don't get much practical practice in school. They walk into a classroom, they're expected to be good teachers. But now, because of this AI system, they can get all the practice they need in the simulated environment. The stimulated kids, it's not the same as a real kid, but it will help them a lot. And I think that's a great example of where AI isn't replacing someone. It's being used to heighten their abilities, to heighten the human experience and to hone our skills. I think that's huge. And I think, I don't think we're going the right way

on this, but I think we have the ability to see the same thing in the world of art. Right now it's really controversial using AI to help create art. I think there's a future if we follow the right path where the ambition shouldn't be to automate artists. The ambition should be to create more artists, give more people the ability to create art and create beauty. And I think one of my favorite stories with that is the invention of the paint tube. For most of you in history, if you wanted to paint, you had to make paint by hand. And then this guy invented the paint tube.

And suddenly you could pre-mix paints in a factory, take them out into the field. Artists hated. They thought it was the end of the world. Oh, we've ruined art. Now people aren't going to understand how to make paint. They aren't going to understand why you do something. And it's going to be an amateur profession. And you know what? We made a lot of bad art because of that. However, Van Gogh and Monet would have been impossible without the paint tube. Their style of art, their way of being, the colors they used

was only possible because of the paint too. What do you think, David, will be done with copyright and intellectual property? Because I know, I can understand why many authors and artists and musical folks right now get really, or look askance rather, at having everything they've ever done fed into an artificial intelligence to a large language model. Because you can see where essentially, well, listen to half of the videos you have on Facebook and YouTube. It's artificially intelligence created music, which was done by feeding human created music

to it. And how do these artists get paid in the future? You have to wonder, don't you? Yeah, no, I think it's a huge problem. And I'm going to throw, just for you, a very hot take. And I think this is the first time I've gone on record and saying this. But I am an artist. I worked as an artist for most of my life before I went into this field. And I'm a pro artist.

I believe we need to be conversative for our work. I think the path we're following is wrong. I think making an appeal to copyright is wrong because when I lead the legal cases, I am not convinced that copyright is the angle to tackle this on. You don't. I think AI has created a new problem.

Copyright was meant to deal with a certain set of problems. And I feel like we're trying to use it to solve a completely different problem right now is that there is an easy, like the cats of the bag. We cannot close the bag on AI. Even if we say that like artists need to be paid for their work being put into a machine because it is copyrightable, What are we going to get? ChatGPT is going to pay me 20 bucks for everything I've ever created, 50 bucks for all my books, for the licensing rights for that. Maybe I get a thousand dollars if my books sell as well. That doesn't really seem like the solution

here. I think we need to, in the European system, have something called artist rights, which is a completely different conception of the protection you should have on your intellectual property. And I think the more resources, like I still think we should fight the copyright fight, I think the more resources we put into that fight, the big tech companies are kind of happy because they can fight that fight all day long. They have the money to do that. And I think they realize that, you know, this fight should be fought on a different terrain and that maybe we need to sit down and realize that AI is different. AI has changed the foundations of our society and we as artists and we as people need to think about what

do we want to see? When we talk about we can all, as you said, recognize there's a problem here. What is that problem? And then, what should we demand from our elected representatives? What should we ask for them to do? Is it something we should be fighting in court with a law that was designed originally for books on printing presses by, I think, Benjamin Franklin, who first really proposed the idea? Or should we be saying that AI and AI training is something completely different and we need to demand that our elected representatives come up with a new system to protect artists, to protect working people and make sure we are compensated for our work while still allowing AI, this amazing technology, to be trained and to help innovate in our economy? That's very interesting. And I wonder if they can go there because I was concerned when in the United States

that a law was passed recently that has prohibited any kind of state regulation of AI for at least the next 10 years and I was looking at okay I know they want to try to get it booted and and running really fast but I could see how a lot of little people end up getting crushed in that in that process. Would you agree with get it booted and running really fast. But I could see how a lot of little people end up getting crushed in that process. Would you agree with me on that or not? Oh, a hundred percent. So I think it's one of the most difficult systems that we have to deal with right now. And I think the approach in the United States from the federal government overall right now, yeah, has really been one

of let's let it go. Let's, we have a, we have an advantage here of having Silicon Valley. Let's let them go and try and make sure that we get ahead of the European Union, try and make sure we get ahead of China on this. And I have a buddy who calls it technoanarchism. And yeah, it makes me nervous because in those situations it's really easy for the little guy to get stepped on and it's really easy just to put this power in the hands of Zuckerberg, of Bezos, of Musk. No matter

what you think of those people, I think that's a lot of power for any individual to have. I think it's a very interesting... I'm looking forward to this book coming out. It's artificially intelligent, the very human story of AI by David Elliott. You can pre-order it anywhere that you get books, whether it's your local bookstore, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, all the rest of them here. And we've had an individual on hold here for the last few minutes. I have a feeling they want to ask a question here, David. I'm just gonna toss them on and hopefully they're on topic. Hi, good morning. Who's this? Welcome. Yeah, Bill. It's Wild Salmon.

What do you think about that, David? Do you have a question for him or comment? Go ahead. I think these are all very interesting comments. My son works for a very large engineering manufacturing company and he does simulation software. and it's gotten so complex that you need a person to help you set up what experiment you're going to do and they were trying to develop an AI model to do this very complex stuff and you know there's a lot of inputs and a lot of outputs and they need you know pretty accurate information to come out of it well they'd put a lot of inputs and a lot of outputs and they need, you know, pretty accurate information to come out of it. Well, they'd put a lot of money into developing this thing and it got

erratic to the point that they couldn't use it because it never came up with the same answer. So they decided to do a reboot and start again. And when they did that, the computer or the AI built a partition and tried to save itself. Ah, that's pretty interesting about the AI kind of working to protect itself. It's kind of like that HAL computer thing from 2001. Absolutely. That's a real thing. Yeah. Let me, what would you say to that, David, what Steve's experience was with his son there?

Yeah. I think that's really interesting. I think the story speaks to two specific problems with AI. The one is a deep learning model we talked about before. Yeah, it can be erratic. That's one of the biggest problems for using it for things we need specificity for. And I think it's one of the things that kind of scares me is in engineering firms, right, you can't get something wrong.

When you get something wrong, you see it. So we see them pull back on it, as you said, and it's great to hear that your company realized that maybe they shouldn't use that. Yeah, it needs to be perfect. And it also like the experiment needs to be repeatable, right? We need to be able to demonstrate this. It can't be based on just the whim of an algorithm. Yes, and I think that's a great lesson to learn for other groups because in policing we're seeing AI used a lot right now and it has some serious problems and has serious effects on people's lives.

And every policing conference, I'm in a criminology department right now. We see the pictures. Police departments are buying AI systems that they do not understand, and it's having serious effects on the lives of people because it's not an engineering firm. We treat those things differently. We treat social engineering a bit differently. So I think that's a great warning. I'm glad to hear that your son's company handled that right. On the partition side of it, of the AI creating something, I've heard lots of stories of similar things. I'm interested to actually know what the code did. Can you tend to hear these stories take on interesting sides?

But this alignment problem is a real issue and it's a real fear of that. When we're giving a device an instruction, a machine and instruction, we assume it understands like a human. We assume it has all the context, but it doesn't. It's built in a box. And if it has a goal, it can do something to try and achieve that goal, which isn't good. So the famous example is we give an AI system access to all of our material and we say, solve climate change or solve world peace. And it thinks about it and it defines world peace as, you know, there is no more war. If I can make it so there is no more war, then I have achieved my

goal. And it comes to the decision, well, if there's no more humans, there's no more war. Exactly. If it wasn't for humans, my job would be to... Be careful of what you ask for. I really appreciate a very thought-provoking talk here, there's no more war. And my God wasn't the result of humans. My God was too. Exactly. Be careful of what you ask for. I really appreciate a very thought-provoking talk here, David. Great having you on. I'm looking forward to finding out more about this book because, like I said, you see amazing

gifts and amazing danger in there too. A little bit of both that have to be concerned. And I appreciate that. Once again, the book is Artificially Intelligent, The Very Human Story of AI, coming out in October by David Elliott. And David, we appreciate you being on. Ran a little bit. Hey, thanks for staying on longer than I thought we were going to have you. Don't worry. Thanks for having me, Bill. And thanks to your caller for telling such an amazing story and asking such a great question. Happy to. And we'll get you back on when we get a little bit

closer to the book's release, okay? You'll be well. Thanks again. That'll be great. Thank you very much again.