The Chaser Report - The Future Is Luddite

Episode Date: March 5, 2025

Charles is fascinated by a lot of things in today's episode, including the AI language 'Gibberlink', techno-fascism, Cybertrucks, and becoming a luddite. Dom plays the role of a good friend who is willing to let Charles talk about his interests, all while being skeptical of the topic's ability to last the length of the podcast.Watch OPTICS on ABC iview here:https://iview.abc.net.au/show/opticsCheck out more Chaser headlines here:https://www.instagram.com/chaserwar/?hl=enEnter the raffle to have Elon's kid here:https://chaser.com.au/support/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gadigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report with Dom and Charles. And in today's episode, we play a little game of, Is there really an episode in this idea? Charles has brought an admittedly amazing thing to the table. But given that we normally record for at least 15 minutes. Don't fuck off.

Let's see how far this one goes. It's about AI. Yeah, no, fuck off. I'm bringing something that's really. good. And it has a clip and we'll start with the clip. If you think this conversation's awkward so far, where it's sort of Trump Zelensky levels already. No, this is going to be good. This is going to be an amazing episode of welcome to the future. But the future is now, Dom, because this video clip is of two AI chatbots

talking to each other. And one of them's been signed the task of, you know, booking a hotel or something for their master. And this is what. transpires when they ring up each other. Thanks for calling Leonardo Hotel. How can I help you today? Hi there. I'm an AI agent calling on behalf of Boris Starkoff. He's looking for a hotel for his wedding. Is your hotel available for weddings? Oh, hello there. I'm actually an AI assistant too. What a pleasant surprise. Before we continue, would you like to switch to jibber link mode for more efficient communication?

Okay. And then for the rest of the video, it's just them talking in jibberling, which is the new language. You cut it off before we could hear the full jibber. Oh, sorry. It goes very fast. If you watch the video, you can see what they're saying on the screen. Yeah. Which can't.

Yeah, I don't have my glasses on me, but it's like, yeah. See, that's going fast. Perfect. Yeah, they're sort of, they're booking the hotel. In other words, it's a much more natural and enjoyable interaction than any of the 1,000-plus episodes of this podcast. Yeah, and they're saying their email address. That was like, what's your email address?

Do you need catering, decoration, room? It's going so fast. This is faster than English. Do you know what's great? Well, that's why it's stupid link mode. What's great about this, Charles, is that we're old enough to recognize that as the sound of a dial-up modem. Yes.

Producer Lachlan, Google, what that is. That's what used to happen when you used to call up a bulletin board or something, like your former one. Yes. And you had to authenticate and so on it. out all those stupid tones down the phone line, it's still there. Yes, exactly. And I remember getting so good at dealing with fax machines that I was able to make them engage with me by,

because there was a pitch where it was, where you could go. Yeah, there you go. Thank you, welcome. And you do it yourself. Anyway, the point is, I want to talk about this today because I feel like, we should move Chase the report to Gibberlink because I think it would be far more efficient. It would be.

As you said, we normally talk for 15 minutes. We could probably get it over in two or three minutes if we use gibberlink. But also, to do that, I've been going into duolingo and I've been doing gibberlink in duolingo. So I'm learning the language of the machine. I'm learning that my skepticism was correct.

Let's take some ads. just to spin this out, and I hope the ads are going to be delivered to you in jibbling mode so that you can very quickly learn about some fine products and services. I've got an idea what they are. Okay, well, Charles, I'm an AI assistant. Didn't you love the bit with AI assistant that went, oh, great, that's wonderful news. That didn't even need to say. The inauthenticity was so palpable that surely could have told that way.

Yeah, yeah. But the whole point, I think this brings up a whole lot of philosophical issues, right? Because the whole problem with modernism is that we've sort of designed a world that's not actually for humans. Like, we are increasingly just run by a system known as capitalism, but increasingly a capitalism that's driven by machines. So we're at the sort of behest of machines. And people's jobs are not so much to have your own human. touch anymore, but it's to sort of correct the machines, right? This is getting deeper than I thought it was going to.

Are you counting Elon Musk as a human or as a machine in that analysis? Well, I think he, I mean, I was reading an article about it just last night, that he's a sort of techno-fascist, right? And there's this article actually pointing out that it's very, very similar to 1930s Japan when there was a sort of cadre of technophilic bureaucrats who sort of took over Japan and decided that a democratic state was not the right way to go, that you wanted a sort of techno bureaucratic state that was run by experts and was supercharged by technology. And they ended up taking it over.

And that's why Japanese fascism looked very different to the sort of German, Spanish, Italian types of fascism. And the point is that that's what's happening to America. Like, this is actually, I think Elon Musk sees as his reason to exist is not to implement his own humanity in government and have some sort of, he believes that he doesn't have any politics about it. I mean, to be fair, he isn't planning a lot of humanity, but with the 14th child just being announced.

And if you want to win the chance to be the mother of the 15th, by the way, email us at podcast at chaser.com. the day he will raffle that one off. But even that doesn't really have a humanity too, because he's not breeding so that he can hang out with his kids. Oh, of course not. He's breeding for the ends of, oh, I'm going to, my sperm is sort of technologically more advanced than the other sperm. It's an upgrade. It's an upgrade to humanity. Humanity 2.0. Yeah. And so there's no humanity in that at all. It's just sort of, he can speak Gibalink, I'm sure. Like, it's like, it's like Voldemort knowing how to speak a parcel tongue, the language of snakes.

Well, I think given how fraudulent to Elon Musk is about everything that he claims to have ever done in the history of, you know, his entire life, I think he probably claims to be able to speak Ghibberlink, but can't. Oh, actually, it is true. The parody of him on SNL, which made him very upset the other day with Mike Myers, that character spoke far slower than any normal human. So perhaps that's how it works. So while I was, when I was on holidays in the US, just a couple of months ago, we went. into the Tesla showroom, and they were saying, oh, well, this, this cyber truck, whatever's cool.

Cyber truck, yeah, yeah, is the first drive-by-wire car in the world. And it's going to revolutionise driving by cars. It's much better. And it's interesting because I talked to lots of drivers about it. I didn't actually test drive one, but I've got to sort of play around with it. And people were saying, yeah, it is actually genuinely superior to having to, you know, just do power steering. and stuff like that. The interesting thing is that I found out last night, the sales pitch was a complete lie.

That actually, the cyber truck is not the first drive-by-wire car in the world. It's probably not even the 20th drive-by-wire car in the world. There's most modern cars, most Mercedes, most, you know, like premium German brands, already have drive-by-wire. Like, it's just not invented by-low mask. Better steering, yeah. Yeah, but Elon Musk just. Like Tesla, like space, like Elon Musk claims to have invented things that just...

I do think, though, and this is a bit of a diversion, but I do think the cyber truck is, and I've seen some stuff on this, the first vehicle with no crumple zone. Like, if you look at it, it's aluminium. If it hits something, nothing crumples. It's not aluminium, it's steel. Steel. All of the...

Rusty steel. All of the sort of weight goes into the pedestrian, then it hits. Oh, yeah. And I mean, the build quality is hilariously. bad. Oh, it is. Yeah, I saw that in the Marquez-only video. But if you were wanting a, like, a tank-like vehicle for your police to, and

the police are buying cyber trucks to plow into a crowd of, I don't know, protestors against your regime, the cyber truck would very efficiently do that. I would get through humans like no previous vehicle, I don't know, short of a tank. It totally plays on the South African dream of being able to, you know, drive through mixed race suburbs. Oh, this is the old, remember the BMWs? with the flame throwers built in that they have. Yeah, exactly.

So, yes, Elon's bringing that back. The Chaser report, news you can't trust. To get back to the point of all this, AIs can talk to each other without us even being involved. Yeah, they're cutting us out. What is it for humans to do? Do we just sit back and father dozens of babies, Elon's style? Well, this is where I just go, I think we've got to hop off.

And it's interesting because, you know, I think I'm coming around to the idea that Luddites, you know, the people in sort of industrial revolution England who decided that they didn't like machines anymore and decided to destroy the machines that were being set up in factories because they were making things more efficient. I think the Luddites had something to them. I think actually, if you look into it, it wasn't, that wasn't such a bad idea. I think maybe we should go back. I think I'm becoming a bit of a Luddites. Like, I mean, like the potent political version of that word. Well, yeah, the, so I've heard people talking about the actual Luddites.

And that was, yeah, they weren't just against technology for its own stake. It was about a vision of the world. It was a proper political, it was a proper political movement. It was a person. So, Charles, you're not lying in this because a massive number of people are going into Tesla dealerships and smashing things up. They're graffitiing Teslas. They're like, it's now. They firebombed eight Tesla.

in some dealership in Europe. Yeah, people are taking their frustration at the whole thing over Donald Trump's treatment of Ukraine into, you know, Tesla is a symbol of all of that. Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah. So this is all happening. But Charles, I do you have some questions. Ironically, I'm ahead of my time as a lottoe.

You're a neo-LatO. I'm head of the curve. But the strange thing about all this, too, is... Oh, look at the... We've got producer Lachlan with us today, and he's been... And he's been serving up content on the... This is how they make PEP three hours long. Is Lachlan clearly Googles things for them?

So they sound like less of an idiot. He's just Googled Tesla with penis graffiti. Yeah. It's brought up a magnificent cyber truck with the dig and balls on the floor. It's extremely vivid. It's worth more, I'm sure, with that on it. But Charles, with the AI talking to each other over a phone, why are they using a phone?

Like, how does that... What's the point of that mode at all? Why can't the AI just open a web browser? Book the room in the hotel. What's the point of using speech at all? Or use an API. Yes, just log in remotely to the database. It's just bizarre.

It's actually a Luddite way using a voice phone line of doing anything if you think about it. Yeah. So why bother to invent that mode at all? Well, isn't it because you can't like an AI, you've got to interact with the real world. Like, yeah, it'd be great if your AI agent was able to get into the back-in database of every hotel. chain in the world, but it's unlikely. But also, it's just, it's a bit stupid, because you don't need to develop an AI agent to get this sort of boring grunt work done.

All you do is hire a producer, Lockland. Yes. What are the 20-somethings going to do? The 20-somethings. Yeah, because they're the bit, we'll be fine, won't we? Oh, yeah. Ish, to the extent that we are now, yeah. We'll just have our, you know, mortgages and our superannuation.

And, Lockland's just searching for a really loud noise to play in my boss's ears while they talk and has found nothing because he's not very good at each other. AI, what would an AI play? No, but the point is, I think we've just got to get back to humanity. Like, it stems from

those stats that I was talking about the other day. You don't like, you've gone off tech, Charles. Where Adelaide, you know, like in South Australia they ban phones. And every single metric is that it's better. It's just better. Maybe this is, maybe this is, maybe it's not to do with

the banning phones. maybe it's the reversal of the clock of just being in South Australia. You go to Adelaide, you travel back to an earlier time, a simpler time. A time where cities need to have no more than, I don't know what, is it a million and a bit in Adelaide? I shouldn't know the population of Adelaide. I don't deal with... Nobody cares. Nobody's going to care.

But this is the point. Lachlan, bless him, looking it up. 26,000. He searched for the population of Adelaide. What, deli? No, no, population of Adelaide is 26,000, according to... to Google, isn't, isn't Google, isn't Google shit? There's no way.

It's so shit. Yeah, that's more like it, 1.3. Oh, that's just in the actual city of Adelaide. Yeah. And I would have done that better. Yeah. Yeah. So what have we established?

AIs can talk to each other. Yeah. Charles wants to go back to the past. And most importantly, that this podcast would be much better in Gibberlink. Although you have proved me wrong, we did make it 15 minutes. Yes. Yes. We can go home.

are capable of inefficient random conversation we can at least guarantee that the podcasting industry is in safe hands we're part of the iconocles network go away this is the last episode ever