Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Focal Point - Navigating a Future with AI

Episode Date: December 25, 2023

In this episode of Focal Point, join hosts Mike Glover and Andy Stumpf as they delve into the emergence of Artificial Intelligence. As we stand on the cusp of a potential singularity, they explore the profound implications it holds for humanity, industry, and our day-to-day lives. From the exciting innovations to the ethical quandaries, we face a future where AI's involvement is nearly certain. Tune in for a deep dive into what the rise of AI means for society, the changing landscape of security and personal agency, and how we can prepare for the uncertainties of a technologically advanced tomorrow. The Speed of War Comic Series: ⁠https://www.thespeedofwar.com/⁠ Sign up for the new G14 newsletter here: ⁠https://www.clearedhotpodcast.com/exclusive⁠ Check out the newest Cleared Hot gear here: ⁠https://shop.clearedhotpodcast.com/⁠

Hey, what's going on guys? Welcome back to the cleared hot podcast. Not sure if you're listening to me or watching me on YouTube, but yes, I am your host for the cleared hot podcast again, except we decided, me and Andy decided, based on his medical situation, to input one of our first episodes of focal point of just me and him talking about a social issue that's important to us for the cleared hot podcast. It's his interview of me and us talking about artificial intelligence and the importance of it leading forward. especially when we're thinking about a new presidential election, which is going to be taken advantage of by foreign adversaries utilizing artificial intelligence. So that is the focal point episode.

Leading into 2024, we have our first focal point episode that is now going to be available in 2024 that you can get access to. So it's free. This isn't a paywall. You can go down to the links below, whether you're in show notes on the podcast or you're listening. this or in watching this on YouTube, you can go down to the link below and follow the YouTube channel focal point where you can see more of these episodes. This is just a gap fill for

Clear Hot podcast. I want to say thanks to our sponsor Black Rifle Coffee providing support for this podcast, Clatured Hot Podcast, and also my podcast, a Mike Force podcast without Evan support, without Black Rifle support, we wouldn't even be able to do this content. Also, Black Rifle in Calisville, Montana is open up for business. When Andy was here with Leah, his wife doing the jujitsu seminar we talked about making our way back out there in february and march doing some more interactions with you at calispo montana which is and denver's personal black rifle coffee make sure you check out the nitro cold brew and all the fieldcraft swag and gear and the montana knife company a swagon gear at the calispo montana black rifle coffee big shout out to you guys appreciate you

guys without further ado let's kick off the cleared hot podcast here we go guys of the smoke. I'm looking at danger close now. All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Focal Point. I'm here with the co-host, co-founder, co-producer, camera man, quantitative, Mike Glover. We're going to be talking about AI today. And I think we should talk a little bit. I think, first off, let's acknowledge that neither you and I are experts, but we're also probably, it's probably a little bit tougher for us when it comes to AI. Your kids are younger than mine.

My children will probably be the last generation that remembers the digital explosion. I remember when they didn't have cell phones and now all three of my children have smartphones, their social circle exists online through social media apps. They share their lives digitally. It was just in Costa Rica, with my whole family and it's FaceTime pictures,

pictures of food, pictures of what they're doing. It is what it is. It's the world that we are living into, and your kids will never have a choice. And I was probably as a parent, I could have withheld when they entered into that world, but I don't think I could have stopped it. So one, I think it's important to acknowledge

that we are a little long in the tooth for people trying to adopt AI in those things. And two, I think we're through the looking glass when it comes to having the ability ability to turn it off. I was just having a conversation for a change agents episode that'll come out. I have no idea when with an expert in cybersecurity from the UK, Professor Alan Woodward. And he was fantastic. He's 61, and he lectures about ethics and the risks associated with cybersecurity. And he agreed, it's no longer about whether or not life for human beings moving forward has these threats.

It's about how we manage these threats. So this is the world that we live in. When was the first time you heard about AI? It was recently. I mean, chat GPT was the big launch for me, and I started to get interested in it because I'm surrounded by Asians at Phil Krasse Rival and my media team.

So he started going on the rabbit hole, but that's the first time I heard about this. I mean, AI as a, you know, you read popular mechanics decades ago, and they're talking about artificial intelligence. But as far as like an adapt. user interface that you could blend into your life and take advantage of, it was chat GPT for me. I think that's what I heard it as well. And there is some debate, and I'm basing this off of what I've

read in the conversation with the professor, chat GPT is not considered to necessarily be true AI. It is a, it has access and billions of nodes. He said that the creators of chat GPT likely don't even have a true understanding of how it works and the, and the reach that it has, but it is aggregating information and providing that information back. It hasn't made that leap, which they call the singularity, the moment at which artificial intelligence actually becomes self-aware, which sounds a lot like the movies we used to watch growing up with Sarah Connor and The Terminator. So, and it was interesting that he is part of a group of people who are ethically trying to figure out a way to put boundaries on AI that would not allow it to get

to a place where it could not be turned off. But he is the first to admit that there are nation states or individuals who are actors who don't care about the ethics because it's the newest and latest and greatest arms race. Because once the atomic bomb has been created to go backwards in history, other people want to have that ability as well, so it can't be held over the top of them. So for every ethical group, there's probably a 5 to 10x group of people who are going in the other direction who are launching forward. at a breakneck pace.

And nobody really knows what that's going to look like. And nor do we know, I asked him, you know, what kind of timeline he thought that that would be on. He didn't really feel comfortable giving an answer because of the velocity of the change in technology and the differences between, say, chat GPT 1 and I think 4.5 that we have access to now. When I first got into chat GPT, which was not long ago, it had a two-year backlog of informational operating history that it could pull into. I think 4.5 now has the ability to surf the Internet. in real time. So that's, I mean, you want to talk about a data set, a leap forward in intelligence.

And then to roll this back to what we're looking for in 2024, because we heard a lot about in 2020 election manipulation through social media. And 2024 is literally right around the corner for us. Now, this is mid-December. What are your thoughts about AI and its ability to manipulate and communicate with people when it comes to an election? Where do you think the threats are there? Yeah, you know, you opened up with the position that we're not experts on AI specifically, but we're certainly experts on I.O. Information operations and how it affects the battlefield. And then, you know, strategically and tactically, how you plan and mitigate risk in those environments.

You know, I had I.O. reps as an operation sergeant of an ODA when we were planning operations to give me very specific intel for specific operations in his field in I.O. we're talking like, you know, newspapers, you know, pamphlets, leaflets. But the idea of this going into every user's phone and creating disinformation campaigns, I mean, we're just talking to John offline about this. The concern is not the deep fake Biden saying something that's not true, right? Because right now. Yeah, well, yeah.

Maybe he's a little bit more coherent. But like when you see politicians communicate. and and anybody talks now that's known people are speculative at best they're just like i'm i'm not sure if this is real or i need a fact check it and so that's that's a natural curiosity that exists but when you slide into the dms and you're a a person who represents a political party because you know you're managing the ballots or you know you're creating disinformation that's associated with distrust in political parties and systems. The goal might not just be to sway a vote.

It might just to keep people at home. It might be keeping people at home so divisive that they hit the streets. We saw it with Civil and Rust under Obama. In Baltimore, a lot of this stuff that was tweeted out and the information that was pushed out, we saw was Russian and disinformation campaigns that were literally campaigning, creating toxic one-sidedness and getting people to hit the streets, throwing bricks through windows of small businesses. And so it's not hard because we're so easily influenced because we're consumers.

I mean, we're the highest consumer in the country, sorry, the highest consumer in the world as compared to our peers, even in China. They're even limiting people, children's access to TikTok. And it's their app. while we're just full bore, free market, freedom, and then we're just getting propagated. And I think when it comes to the election cycle, that is my biggest fear.

Because if you get a person that you think half of the country thinks that that person who got in charge got there for the wrong reasons, we have issues. We're going to have and continue to have social issues for four more additional years, just like we had the last three and a half. How do you think it's going to unfocus?

because it seems like it's the lead-up of a perfect recipe for disaster. So the way it was described to me by Professor Woodward is, because I asked the question, the ransomware cyber attack market in 2023 was $6 trillion, which is insane. And that's one of the types of attacks that people are using this technology for. And I asked him, wait, like they use $6 trillion.

That's the value. of money that they were either, you know, personal data breaches, selling information back to people, locking people out of their business account. That was exploited, six trillion. Six trillion dollars. And he said the number of people that are doing this is actually decreasing because the ability and accessibility. And by that, I mean not the ease of getting it, but the ease of the interface for this technology keeps getting, not to use a non-technical term, easier and easier and easier, or more approachable for somebody who's not a technical expert. So you no longer have to be a world-class coder

to create and develop or even use these things that is allowing you to hold massive corporations hostage. And most of the time, it never makes the news because they either just pay or depending on what information they have access to, they just kind of move on. So the ability for people to create these destructive tools is just not only is the volume of them increasing,

but the complexity is increasing. And I worry about, you know, there are, if you are on, let's use Instagram as an example, it's probably the social media platform that I am the most active on. These companies who do marketing have behavioral scientists looking at human behavior. What words or images could I put into this that will elicit a response? And let's just say that for a brand, the response that they're looking for is a further engagement with a click to buy, right? Like, that's what they want.

They want, like, shit, that was a compelling ad. I want people to click on this button because I want to terminate in a sale. So we had behavioral therapists who are working with brands, and let's just say that that's just the most transparent above-board usage of that type of behavior. Well, what's to say that you can't take behavioral therapists who are working with, and I would say at this point

when it comes to election manipulation, we're probably talking about nation-states. And the way that Professor Woodward described it to me is, If you are being attacked like a cybersecurity attack and what they are looking for is money that is an individual or a crime-based organization because they want something tangible back. If it's an app like TikTok that has a direct tie to the communist government in China, what they're doing is they're gathering information. And they're not actually asking you for anything.

They're quietly collecting data, personal information on people. So if you're not being ransomed in one way or another, and you're just being surveilled, that's probably a nation state. And the question is, well, why would a nation state want to do that? Well, they have behavioral therapists as well, too. And they can take all of that data, and they can look at what drives emotion and action in people.

And then they can throw that into these complicated AI systems, and through things like TikTok, which has, I think, one billion monthly users, 20% of the human population, and you start in a very intelligent manner, just dropping, you know, use a river as an analogy, really far upstream, you just drop in a little bit of dye here and there, right? You're not trying to go get somebody to smash, since we're talking about an election. We're not getting somebody to go try to smash a ballot box, but we're just consistently over time nudging them when finding the things that they would respond to, or

things that it could get them to argue with their neighbor or isolate from their neighbor or isolate from their desire to actually be involved in the electoral process. It's a it's a microscopic upstream manipulation at a super high volume and really all they need to do is move the needle a little bit downstream which would be at the ballot box. And when you're talking about this technological sophistication you know I were just talking about there's there is an Instagram page of a AI model. And it says that, who has an AI only fans. And the pictures are largely indistinguishable from something that is real. I don't think that the human brain can evolve at the pace that technology and this type of information is bombarding us with. So then you have a team of people.

And again, the way that it was described to me, it doesn't need to be a large team because these tools are so powerful. And you can teach the AI. And by that I mean you're putting in the data set that it's supposed to work with, it's just gonna spit these things out with the desired end state that you're pointing it towards. And then people are receiving all of their news through their phone on social media apps, and they're starting to get into arguments,

and then they start wondering, but what is true and what isn't true, I don't wanna participate in this at all because it's all a lie. That's that downstream manipulation. And it's so, I mean, it's so insidious because it's that micro-nudge, but at the same time, if you think about it, just from the ability to do that.

I mean, what a, what a beautiful way to manipulate people. And because they're choosing to interface with the app that way, they're actually participating in their own manipulation. But I don't know how you recognize that or control it. And that is the fear that I have about AI. If we can't agree on what is real and what isn't real, I don't know how human beings can continue to have an effective society. Yeah, it's the biggest fear, right?

I mean, the biggest fear for me is, you know, socially, social degradation takes decades. And if, you know, we talk about before, you know, the potential of embedding Marxism and institutions in academia in the 60s and 70s in the Cold War experience, and there was an end objective, all these foreign powers play the long game. They're all in it for the long haul. They've existed some for thousands of years. When it comes to America and our behavioral patterns, it's not that difficult of a illustration for us to imagine us falling apart very soon. I want to get your perspective on this, just leave the world behind.

I know I've talked about it a couple times with you. Yeah, because it's your fantasy. It is my fantasy movie. It is your fantasy movie. EMP, people are filling up bathtubs with water. You're like, you're damn right, your power's out. Your Wi-Fi's off. What are you going to do?

Also, I wrote this book called Prepared that you could help prepare yourself for this situation, you know? It was great. I do, look, one of the things I will do, because there's always a, you know, you'd look at these kind of movies. This one's a more realistic approach to some of the catastrophic and apocalyptic issues that we would face, because it has to do with the cybersecurity and foreign powers, you know, destroying our infrastructure. that with an EMP balloon that comes across the country as an ops test isn't too far gone. I mean, we, in the 50s and 60s, we tested electromagnetic pulse in the upper atmosphere testing what electromagnetic waves would do during nuclear explosions.

Since the 60s, we haven't done anything, at least advertised. My fear is because we are the big consumer and because the foreign powers know this, that all they have to do is likely what they're already doing is get together. China, Russia, Iran, they just have a little summit. They talk about how they do it. And then it's a campaign, a phase campaign. Let's say we're in phase one, where we're creating divisiveness in the society and destroying the society from the inside.

China's role in it is deploying fentanyl through the cartel through all the drugs that we're already addicted to. now we kill a percentage 110,000 people a year because of it, as the leading cause of death for males between 18 and 45. It's like, it's not hard to do. It only takes a little bit of effort, especially for a country that's highly consumable. The biggest fear I have is like what you said,

these slight nudges. You know, I thought about this because me and you, for example, we're social drinkers. We're not alcoholics. We know alcoholics because we've seen alcoholics. operate with alcoholics, but we see what it does to people's lives. Every once in a while, we'll have a beverage, but that's the limit of it, and we won't get tanked or wasted. How easy would it be, because I know a lot of people with addictive personalities, to slightly nudge in the

algorithm and upticking their content with people drinking in cool places. And then they're like, man, I'm craving that drink. I'm not a drinker, and I want to drink. And they go out and they get the drink. We are so easily manipulated that way, but what does it lead to? Like you said, it doesn't have to be the non-vote or the hitting the streets in civil unrest. It could be alcoholism. It could be alcoholism. It could be adultery. It could be an argument with your spouse. It could be burning it down and going out and conducting an act of shooting. It could be shaping the impression of young men and women about the appropriate way to dress. I mean, the way that my daughter, quite frankly, and her peers dress is shocking to me. It is not the way that young women dressed when I was

their age, and I look at the content that they are consuming and what is being positioned to them as role models and influential. And I'm not a scientist by any stretch, but I also don't think it's that hard to connect the dots on some of these things. And that is the micro-nudge that over time, it can have an immense real world impact. And I, you know, I think a more interesting question is it's easy to sit and talk about Russia and China targeting us. What do you think the odds are of the United States is doing the exact same thing in the reverse direction? I guarantee we are. Yeah. You know what I mean? That's kind of forgotten and lost in some of these conversations. Yeah. Is this actually the next battlefield as opposed to lining tanks up? I mean, I think the days of

trench warfare. I mean, I say that and then look what's going on fucking Ukraine, but for most of the world, I think the days of trench warfare is over. Is this what the new battlefield is? Is it micro adjustments and behavior and thought process and influence that takes decades, if not centuries, but can change the course of what civilization look like? Yeah, I got, when I was finishing my team start time, this is 13, 14 years ago. After I finished my team, team start time, I was asked to go to potentially take over a non-commissioned officer in charge position at Belvoir leading a cyber ops unit that was basically, they had the cyber component, but they were missing the operations component. So they wanted you to do like coding?

They wanted me to, yeah. Like theoretical. The last human being you want to code. Theoretical math? Yeah. Negative. Okay. They wanted me to help the nerds kind of take their theory and all their coding and come to reality.

but it's like the defense department across the spectrum, including with computers, usually led in the development, all of the things. The difference now is with those endeavors, we needed the investment from the government and the coin, you know, what does it call it in the coin? In the tune of billions of dollars to get that kick started. Well, now you have private money coming in, pulling in billions of dollars to elevate and evolve this. Here's what I say. Certainly, despite all the thing, the doom and gloom of it, it's very interesting. John showed me a video yesterday of a script-prompted video AI interface software,

where you could literally say the thing that you wanted, typing it out, and then it creates the video with the imagery and all the characters, and then you could go clip to clip. So you could make a whole movie that's literally script prompted. And that's awesome. Well, and then look at what, again, as a non-expert, if it's able to do that for video and for scripted prompt, I would hope that there are people out there who are throwing these supercomputers at things like cancer,

Parkinson's, Alzheimer's. You know, and you can take it a step further, like a better way to design an airplane that would reduce stress on an aircraft and therefore safety of travel, efficiencies of economic systems. I think that there are, I mean, it's an amazing tool, right? It's the same thing, I mean, to make a rough analogy, but one I think a lot of people would understand.

If there is a gun on a table, I have the choice as a person that I could pick that up and go do indescribable amount of destruction to my local community and families, or I could pick up the same tool, and I could protect that community and families from somebody trying to destroy them. It's a matter, I think, of how we wield it

because I do believe that as a species, we are through the looking glass on the argument of whether or not we should do this. I think we have done it. And now the bigger question for me is, how do we do it ethically? Yeah, that's a good question. And I don't have the answer for it.

Neither do I. And I'd be curious for people listening to this or watching this. What is your concern with AI? Because the deep fake thing, that's very real, but I also suspect we could probably use AI to develop a tool that could help us watermark or stamp. And I know that's a very simplistic approach to this.

Point being, I think there's a solution to that. But I'm curious what other people's major concerns are with AI. Because if we can understand where people's friction points on that, I think that we can dive into the subject matters as well, and then find some experts to talk about what is being done in that area. Yeah.

Some guys are like, how many OnlyFans am I going to subscribe to now? Like, I'm completely out of money. That's my biggest problem. I subscribe to her just for research purposes because I wanted to see

is it how real... What do people get out of that? I mean, this is obviously off topic, but what do people get out of that? I'll show you later. I'll show you later. Yeah, but like, what do you get out of that picture? Other than, you know what I mean?

It's video and pictures. I mean, I don't know. I'm not subscribed to OnlyFans. fans. Yes, you do. You know what? I actually thought about it because there's... You 100% have only fans. Yes, you do. You know why I won't? Because I don't want to give my personal information into somebody who's like a micro celebrity and then puts me on blast. I feel like you'd be into like midget butt holes.

Have you seen a midget's butthole? No. You should. I mean, it's it's it's where did you see one? Google. AI? All right. on the next episode of Talking Point. No, it's, you know, what I don't want to have happen is people throw their hands up and say, well, this is just the way that it's going to be and there's nothing that I can do about it. I think we first have to identify what the problems are, which I would hope is the value of having conversations like this,

so then people can engage with that and we can go farther down the rabbit hole. All I really want to avoid is people just throwing their arms up and just saying, fuck it. This is the way that it's going to be. Yeah. They have to stay proactive in it. You have to stay proactive, and I think you have to stay aware of the potential for manipulation. And tools are an amazing thing, but you need to understand the capability of those tools, so you can at least have your radar up for potential misuse.

Hope you enjoy that episode of Focal Point. Current events, giving you perspective, that's the value that we want to provide. If you're interested in all the things you heard, especially at the roundtable with a lot of perspective from experts in their field and people we want to talk to, make sure you subscribe to the links down below. focal point coming to you in 2024 thanks guys