The Daily Zeitgeist - TDZ Top 5 Of 2023: #1 Overrated A.I. (9.26.23)

Episode Date: December 28, 2023

In episode 1553, Jack and Miles are joined by A.I. Researcher and co-host of The Good Robot, Dr. Kerry McInerney, to discuss… Ways The Future Of AI Might Look Different Big And Small, The Pause Letter, Taking The Profit Motive Out? Alternatives to the Corporate Capitalism Stuff? There’s A Bias In The Media To Make It Seem Like AI’s Plotting Against Us, Are We Overrating AI? How Movies Shape How We Picture AI, What Should We Be Reading/Watching Instead? And more! PRE-ORDER The Good Robot: Why Technology Needs Feminism NOW! LISTEN: White Science feat. ZelooperZ by John FM  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Gianna Pradenti. And I'm Jermaine Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. There's a lot to figure out when you're just starting your career. That's where we come in. Think of us as your work besties

you can turn to for advice. And if we don't know the answer, we bring in people who do, like negotiation expert Maury Tahiripour. If you start thinking about negotiations as just a conversation, then I think it sort of eases us a little bit. Listen to Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Jess Costavetto, executive producer of the hit Netflix documentary series, Dancing for the Devil, the 7M TikTok cult. And I'm Clea Gray, former member of 7M Films and Shekinah Church. And we're the host of the new podcast, Forgive Me For I Have Followed. Together, we'll be diving even deeper into the unbelievable stories behind 7M Films and Shekinah Church. Listen to Forgive Me For I Have Followed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Keri Champion, and this is season four of Naked Sports. Up first, I explore the making of a rivalry. Kaitlyn Clark versus Angel Reese. People are talking about women's basketball just because of one single game. Clark and Reese have changed the way we consume women's basketball. And on this new season, we'll cover all things sports and culture.

Listen to Naked Sports on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio apps, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Black Effect Podcast Network is sponsored by Diet Coke. Hey guys. So I've always wanted to do some sort of like top episodes of the year rundown thingy. This year, I had a little extra time before taking off for the holiday. And so kind of threw something together just based on like what the episodes were that you listened to the most in future years. I'd like to open it up for voting, get your input. But for this year, we're just going to be rerunning each of the top five episodes while we're on holiday break. And here we are.

We're up to number one. This is the most listened to episode of the year 2023 for a year where bullshit about AI dominated the headlines. Bullshit AI headlines dominated my brain like the Van Vought thing. I think it's very appropriate that the most listened to episode was about bullshit ai uh it's another one of our expert guest interview episodes uh i hope you enjoy listening back to it as much as i did and hope you're having a great holiday we'll see you in the new year thanks everyone bye hello the internet and welcome to season 306 episode 2 of the daily zeitgeist production of iheart radio this is a podcast where we take a deep dive into america's shared consciousness and it is tuesday september 26th 2023 you ready you know what this is right

you know what this is right for all my pancake what this is, right? For all my pancake lovers, it's your day. It's National Pancake Day. It's also National Shamu the Whale Day. Shout out Shamu. It's also, for all my dumpling lovers out there, or for me specifically, my gyoza lovers out there, National Dumpling Day. Okay, so, you know, celebrate however you seem fit, depending on your cultural disposition. It's also National Johnny Appleseed Day. And I only bring that up because I remember in Christian school, we were made to sing that as like a song before we went to lunch. Man, the amount of pro-Johnny Appleseed propaganda that I had to live with. Did you live with a lot of pro- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

His name was like john chapman or something originally he just really liked it really fucked with apples that guy never like children must learn yeah i bet there's some dark ass shit probably behind you know like some a story like that it's got to be a milkshake though yeah yeah for. Very problematic. But the way, like the amount of information that I consumed, like I had one of those, my family had one of those book sets where it was like important historical figures. And like right next to Lincoln was like Johnny Appleseed. And you know, they, I was prepared for Johnny Appleseed to be like one of the major figures in my life. Right.

And education. Did you know this song? No. I'm sure. Oh, the Lord is good to me. And so I thank the Lord for giving me the things I need. The sun and the rain and the apple seed. The Lord is good to me me and then we could go

eat lunch but we had to sing that shit before wow it's from the from the disney movie apparently so i wasn't even i didn't even get all of the johnny apple seed propaganda i got the christian i got the christian capitalist johnny apple seed propaganda just mainlined into my little brain. He wore a pot on his head, right? I mean, I think, who knows? Sure. Like backwards, kind of. Like dumb baby Crockett?

Yeah. Anyways, this is all dumb shit that is probably specific to American audiences. Yeah. But my name's Jack O'Brien, a.k.a. Start Spreading the News. I'm eating today. Yeah. But my name's Jack O'Brien, a.k.a. Start Spreading the News. I'm eating today. I want to eat a part of it. Pecan, pecan pie.

These chattering teeth are longing to chew. Bite through the nutty part of it. Pecan, pecan pie. That is courtesy of Maxer1216 on the Discord. A little, just real solid, right down the middle meatball of a Weird Al parody in reference to our conversation about pecan pie. For some reason, he was lobbing that meatball up to you.

Yeah. I saw that in the Discord. I was tagged in that, but you took that. Oh, so you just do other people's AKs. Okay. Interesting. All right. Well, I'm thrilled to be joined, as always, by my co-host, Mr. Miles Gray.

Okay, so you did my AK, and I heard you do this one on Friday, so allow me to do it one more time. Say, Miles and Jackie, have you seen it yet? Ooh, it's just flying around, la-la-la, losing all my jets. Yeah. Oh, there's a breeze, and it's all spaced out. Oh, Jetty, she's really neat. She's got a stealthy use.

A bomb and shoot. So fancy it can't even be seen. Oh, losing all my jets. Shout out to the Department of Defense for losing all of our multi-million dollar killer fucking spacecrafts. And shout out to Johnny Davis and Blinky Heck one more time. One more time. Maybe we can like layer those because you went high. I feel like I went a little bit lower. Maybe we could

get a little harmony. Harmony. Anyways, Miles, we're thrilled to be joined in our third seat for today's expert episode by a truly brilliant guest who I felt especially stupid singing an AKA in front of. She's a research associate at the Leverholm Center for the Future of Intelligence, where she researches AI from the perspective of gender studies, critical race theory, and Asian diaspora studies. She's also a research fellow at the AI Now Institute, the co-editor of the upcoming volume,

The Good Robot, Feminist Voices on the Future of Technology, and the co-host of the wonderful Good Robot podcast. Please welcome the brilliant, the talented Dr. Keri McInerney! Dr. Keri! Thanks so much for having me. Thank you so much for joining us. How different has this been so far from what you were expecting?

Oh my gosh, I don't have a song. I was like, how do I say I definitely don't have a song? And I also don't know who Johnny Appleseed is. I grew up in New Zealand. And so I didn't have a book of like historical figures. I had a book called, Watch Out, These Creatures Bite and Sting. And it was like all the ways you could die being killed by like a jellyfish or a snake or like an octopus. Mainly if you went to Australia.

And so it kind of like traumatized me for the good from childhood. But it does mean I didn't have the great apple seed song that you just sang. Did you guys have apples, though? Because I was under the impression that the only reason I had apples was the Johnny Appleseed. Yeah, and the Lord. And the Lord, obviously. Who provideth.

Who hath provideth. It's just all kiwis, right, down there? Pretty much kiwis, kiwi fruit, no apples, no songs, just no music. It's just silence is it an excuse pardon my ignorance is the kiwi is that like a a native new zealand fruit i'm hoping and so the kiwi is a native new zealand bird and then the kiwi fruit is what we call that like fuzzy brown fruit yeah yeah i feel like they kind of mix up the two or they you know they're both brown and fuzzy and sort of bulbous ignorance incarnate here folks but if you do cut the bird in half it looks exactly like the kiwi fruit right

a lot of people don't know that green with green with a little seed seed core yeah all right dr mcnerney we have you here today to talk to us about ai We've talked last week's episode about AI. We're thrilled to ask you our follow-up questions. But before we get to any of it, we do like to get to know our guests a little bit better and ask you what is something from your search history? This is pretty embarrassing. I just got a Nintendo

and I'm like finally entering my Game Ago era. I'm like, this is going ago era i'm like this is gonna be so fun but my whole search history is just me googling like very basic controls and zelda breath of the wilds it's like how do i jump like it's really awful i went and looked it's like how do i defend a dog like how do i climb a mountain and so it's not going well like i need to outsource my zelda playing to like children who will be much better than me. Wait, but is it, it's not forcing you to give up, right? You're just, you're just acclimating to the new environment, right?

I mean, the kingdom is not going to be saved or whatever I'm meant to be doing. I'm just walking in circles now for like an infinite amount of time. But I'm having fun, which I guess is the main point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And wait wait why did you were you were you like a gate did you play games in childhood and you're kind of coming back or this is completely new like this is all new territory for you i did but i was also bad in childhood like this is the story of like oh i used to be like super into games and i like fell out of

touch like how people were like amazing athletes as children and then like pick it up again like i'm consistently awful at game so the search history is not a surprise got it got it i mean you were doing you know worthwhile things like thinking about how to ethically deal with all this technology while i was laughing my ass off playing donkey kong country i'm just picturing you being like, ha ha, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha going to impact our day-to-day lives? Is that something that you think about as you're out there kind of just walking in circles in Zelda Breath of the Wild? I mean, I feel like I perform so poorly. They probably think I am like an NPC or something.

It's just like, that is not a person with free will. Like, that's a person just following a fox around for days. It just rotated 720 degrees over and over for no reason i guess so have they made games more fun for people who suck at video games that that's the innovation that i'm looking for because i i was never very good at them but i i liked playing them i like hearing about them i think i'm ready to enter my gamer girl era and come back but yeah you should i mean look jack they already know you as the switch god because you've been on nintendo so much the controllers basically fuse to your body but there are like a lot of new or like new like the new star wars game you could just set it

to like man i'm not trying to do all this like fancy shit i just want to beat people up or just mash the keypad over and over and win like that and you can you can do that because i think you know it is like it is about being able to play at different skill levels rather than being like oh you don't know how to like use the force while you know you're doing your melee attacks come on some of us of us just want to be kids. Unraveled is good for that too, of like a fun video game that is not like really requiring you to have like these sort

of highly developed video game skills and it's an easy play. Dr. McInerney, what is something you think is overrated? I feel like I'm not going to win myself any friends. I'll be like how to lose friends and stop influencing people, but all the Disney live action movies, I've hit a stage where I feel like I'm not going to win myself any friends. I'll be like, how to lose friends and stop influencing people. But all the Disney live action movies, I've hit a stage where I'm like, no more live actions.

The Little Mermaid was beautiful. I love the original Cinderella. But I don't want to see more and more of the same movies again. It makes me a bit sad. And what other stories could be told if they weren't always making these live actions? But maybe I'll be proven totally wrong and the next ones ones will be amazing but i'm ready for something else just yeah based on everyone's first like sort of reaction like oh you saw how it wasn't like yeah no one was like it was so good i'm gonna see it nine times everyone just kind of i think they're

they have to reconcile like their love for the original source material with that and not fully be like i didn't like it they're like yeah i mean it's it's yeah it's interesting you know it's like their voice just goes up yeah you know it was like i'm glad i spent my afternoon going to that i think that's right i i've never been more confident in a prediction about the future of a sub-genre of movies than in saying that they're not going to suddenly figure something out about the Disney live-action reskins of the animations. We know what the original cartoons look like and what happens in them. We know what is possible here like right i can't i can't imagine a version like what what they're gonna pull out where we're like oh no that is not did not see that one coming whoa that bear is talking and singing hold on oh they already

did that that was the best one, I think, was Jungle Book. And that was the first one they did. And ever since, I feel like, yeah, been diminishing returns. Although I didn't see The Little Mermaid. So I cannot speak to that one. What's your favorite genre of film, though, Dr. Carey? Ooh, I mean, okay. So I really have a soft spot for like old school superhero movies.

But my like most recent, most amazing film I filmed was the latest Into the Spider-Verse film. What was it? Spider-Man Across the Spider-Verse. And I just, I love animation in that film. It's so witty and the visuals are extraordinary. And it's just great films. So I waxed oracle about how much i love these films at work and everyone has to deal with me being like go watch it so anyone listening go watch it it's amazing

favorite spider character spider person in the universe oh my goodness i can't remember the name of it but the like really like the really like dark noir run for the first one he's like from like all those like 1930s kind of like dark mystery films even when black and white i kind of love that yeah yeah was it was it just spider-man noir yeah i think that's noir spider-man maybe i don't know or i'm sorry spider-man nor nor what is when you say old school superhero movies, do you mean like Christopher Reeve's Superman? Or are you talking about like the original? The first Iron Man.

The first Iron Man. I think it's almost like less like specific films. I love like almost films that have that like really cheesy, like origin coming of age story. Like, you know, it's really just about like they're discovering themselves and it's such a simple narrative and like i feel like i should crave more complexity than that and i should want it to be more nuanced stories but sometimes it's just really satisfying and you watch this clean-cut narrative of this like good guy defeating all these bad guys when i want to

relax i really enjoy that in my day job i think about lots of like complexity and nuance and like what we do with the future of society and so so, you know, sometimes I find it very relaxing just to be like Star Wars. You're like, I love a Joseph Campbell type flick. Just give me that hero's journey in every shape It's all going to be okay. Nothing's going to go wrong. Challenge your old self to become your new self. Yes! Challenge your old self to become your new self. Yes! But Doc Ock is an example of what we're facing with AI,

like in the immediate future. I think we can all agree on that, right? Spider-Man 2. In a way, you're like, it's giving me the equivalent of like eight arms, in a way. You're like, oh boy. What's something you think is underrated? Ooh, underrated.

I mean, I'm a big cozy night in person. I want to be one of those fun party people who is out raving. But realistically, at 10 p.m., I'm like, the day is over. I'm in bed. I think a cozy night in, especially autumn is coming, that's just my happy place. Me at home, my husband, life is good. Yeah. Cozy vibes. I like that my that's my whole thing especially we don't get seasons here so the second there's like just the feeling of like a chill i'm

like i i need to start nine fires and just be near them and that is a problem that miles has and he's working on his therapy with i guess legally it's called arson or something but what i say is i just want everyone to be cozy around the greater los angeles metropolitan area i'm yeah i cannot go within four miles of the angeles national forest but hey whatever they must see my light, I love coziness. I love a... Are you cozy or are you summertime, Jack? If you had to pick between, would you rather be summertime Jack or cozy Jack?

I do love a summer, especially. I'm in my swimming phase where I just, I really like getting in a body of water, running into the ocean, even when it's a little cold ocean. And yeah, so I, I think I'm like in a summer phase, but I, you know, I, I am feeling the need to, to get cozy. Yeah. I'll always take cozy over summer. That's just me. I know you, you, you, it's, it's like you fetishize winter i do yeah it's problematic like that's why i would

only date like uh like women from the northeast yeah they're like i feel like you're dating me like for this like exotic sort of life you think i would like what's it like with the snow you're appropriating minnesota like Minnesota culture. Right. Yeah. Well, hey, look, we're all trying. Hey, I heard that. You said, hey. All right.

Let's take a quick break and we'll come right back and talk about AI. We'll be right back. I'm Jess Casavetto, executive producer of the hit Netflix documentary series Dancing for the Devil, the 7M TikTok cult. And I'm Clea Gray, former member of 7M Films and Shekinah Church. And we're the host of the new podcast, Forgive Me For I Have Followed. I have followed. Together, we'll be diving even deeper into the unbelievable stories behind 7M Films and LA-based Shekinah Church, an alleged cult that has impacted members for over two decades. Jessica and I will delve into the hidden truths between high-control groups and interview dancers, church members, and others whose lives and careers have been impacted, just like mine. Through powerful, in-depth interviews with former members and new, chilling firsthand accounts, the series will illuminate untold and extremely necessary perspectives. Forgive Me For

I Have Followed will be more than an exploration. It's a vital revelation aimed at ensuring these types of abuses never happen again. Listen to Forgive Me For I Have Followed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Pradente. And I'm Jemay Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, a new podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. When you're just starting out in your career, you have a lot of questions. Like, how do I speak up when I'm feeling overwhelmed?

Or, can I negotiate a higher salary if this is my first real job? Girl, yes. Each week we answer your unfiltered work questions. Think of us as your work besties you can turn to for advice. And if we don't know the answer, we bring in experts who do like resume specialist Morgan Saner. The only difference between the person who doesn't get the job and the person who gets the job is usually who applies. Yeah, I think a lot about that quote. What is it like you miss 100 percent of the shots you never take? Yeah, rejection is scary, but it's better than you rejecting yourself. Together, we'll share what it really takes to thrive in the early years of your career without sacrificing your sanity or sleep.

Listen to Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Keri Champion, and this is season four of Naked Sports, where we live at the intersection of sports and culture. Up first, I explore the making of a rivalry.

Kaitlyn Clark versus Angel Reese. I know I'll go down in history. People are talking about women's basketball just because of one single game. Every great player needs a foil. I ain't really near them boys. I just come here to play basketball every single day, and that's what I focus on. From college to the pros, Clark and Reese have changed the way we consume women's sports. Angel Reese is a joy to watch.

She is unapologetically black. I love her. What exactly ignited this fire? Why has it been so good for the game? And can the fanfare surrounding these two supernovas be sustained? This game is only going to get better because the talent is getting better.

This new season will cover all things sports and culture. Listen to Naked Sports on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Black Effect Podcast Network is sponsored by Diet Coke. And we're back. We're back. And Dr. McInerney, as mentioned, I am an idiot on this AI stuff. I think I generally have like my version of AI up until last week, I guess, like researching for our last expert episode was what I had read in, you know, mainstream articles that went viral and films, like Hollywood films, and then like messing around with OpenAI or ChatGPT. So I had this kind of disconnect in my mind where it was like, from an outsider's perspective,

we have this C plus level, like copywriter thing like in ChatGPT, GPT-4, and then like the godfather of AI, who I4, and then like the godfather of AI, who I'm just trusting people is the godfather of AI. But that's what everyone uses that same phrase. They're like the godfather of AI just quit Google and says we're all fucked in the next couple of years. And I think it's confusing to me

because I don't know exactly, like I can't even like picture the way, how he thinks we're fucked. And there was this letter that was like, we need to pause development on AI in the near future. And I guess I'm just curious to hear your perspective on that pause letter and what the kind of dangers of AI are in the near future. Yeah, because to Jack's point, too, also, we were talking with Joao Sadoc last week at NYU about it. And like, at the end of it, we're like, okay, so it's not Skynet, right, from Terminator. And they're like, oh, great. But then we realized there's a raft of other things that come along with just not being the Terminator. So yeah, that's I'm also from a similar perspective, where I always assume Skynet.

Yeah, I mean, I think you're totally not alone in the dominance of ideas like Skynet and Terminator, because so much of our cultural framework for understanding what AI is, comes from a very narrow set of movies, like The Terminator, like The Matrix, which always positions AI as something that's going to dominate us, it's going to take over the world, and it's going to control us. And it's important to, I think, highlight that that's definitely not the only ideas that we have about AI. We've got thousands of years of thinking about our relationship with intelligent machines. And there's a lot of different cultural traditions that have really different ways of thinking about our relationship with intelligent machines. And there's a lot of different cultural traditions that have really different ways of thinking about our relationships

with AI and intelligent machines that could be much more positive, much more harmonious. And so I do think our immediacy of jumping to this idea of Skynet is reflective of very much where we are right now, right? I'm in the UK, you're in the US. These are countries that have a really long history of thinking about AI in very binary terms. So yes, I think it's important that we think about these long-term risks of AI. And you mentioned the pause later calling for a halt to generating more large language models like chat GPT until it had a bit more of a moment to think about some of the long-term consequences of these models. But I think it's really important not just to think of the long-term risks, but to think about which long-term risks we prioritize. Because I think the Skynet Terminator fantasy eats up a lot of oxygen about how we talk about AI's risks,

but there's a lot of different risks that AI poses. So another long-term risk that we don't talk about very much at all is the climate cost of AI, right? Because AI, it's hugely energy intensive. Data centers require a huge amount of water to function. And we have this massive problem of e-waste produced by a lot of electronic systems. But that long-term problem of climate crisis is much less exciting. It's really scary. It's really grounded in a lot of our experiences and so it just doesn't seem to get as much air time so that's something that i think is really important is changing the conversation a bit to say okay it's sometimes interesting sometimes scary to think about the

terminator option but what are some of the other long-term options that could really shape our lives yeah like the degree to which the deck is being stacked towards the Terminator option was surprising to me. Like we dug in last week a little bit to the two stories I had always heard that are like kind of put into the Terminator version of AI taking over a category. there's the AI that like killed a person in a military exercise that decided to like eliminate its controller. And then there's the AI that hired a task rabbit to pass the CAPTCHA test. And like in both cases, those are like the AI that killed a person in the military exercise, like that was somebody claiming that. And then when they went back, they were like, oh, I was just saying it could hypothetically do that. It was a thought experiment. Yeah, it was a thought experiment of what could what an AI could do in the right circumstances. And the TaskRabbit one was more similar to the self-driving car Elon Musk thing where it was

just there was a human prompting it to do that thing that seems creepy to us when we like start thinking about, oh, it's like scheming to get loose and get right, like overcome the things that we're using to keep it hemmed in. So it it does feel like there is an incentive structure set up for the the people in charge of some of these major ai companies to get us to believe that shit like to think to only focus on the ai v humanity like ai gets loose of its control of our controls for it and takes over and starts like killing people version of it i'm just curious like what what are your thoughts on like why why why are they incentivized to do that when it would seem like you well you don't want to make it you don't want it to seem like the this self-driving car will uh take over and start kill your family yeah start killing your family. Yeah, start killing your family. It's so powerful.

But it seems like with AI, they're more willing to buy into that fantasy and have that fantasy projected to people who are not as closely tied to the ins and outs of the industry. Yeah, I mean, I think that's such an important point because it's a weird thing about the AI industry, right?

Like you would never have this kind of hype wave around something like broccoli where you say, oh, the broccoli, if you eat it, could kill you or it could like

transform the world and then you wouldn't expect that to somehow get people to buy a lot more broccoli and just be like, oh, I don't want to eat broccoli now. But if they were like,

it's so fucking good and powerful that it'll make you explode, like maybe? Like maybe that's what it is. The broccoli can make an even worse broccoli that you can then also eat. I don't know what the broccoli would be doing. But I do think that we see this real cultivation of hype around AI and that a lot of firms explicitly use that to sell their products. It gets people interested in it because on the one hand people are really scared about the long-term and short-term impacts of ai on the other hand they're also scared then though of getting left behind so you see more and more

firms saying well now i've got to buy the latest generative ai tool so that i look really tech savvy and i look tech forward and i look futuristic and so it's part of this bigger hype cycle i think to draw a lot of attention towards their products but also to make them seem like this really edgy, desirable thing. But I think what's also interesting about both the stories that you raised is when you looked under the hood, there was human labor involved, right? There were people who were really central to something that was attributed to an AI. And I think that's a really common story we see with a lot of the type around AI is often the way we tell those stories erases the very real human labor that drives those products,

whether it's the artists who originally made the images that trained the generative AI through to data labelers, all sorts of people who are really central to those processes. Right. And I know like in your episode of episode of the good route robot, when you're discussing the pause letter, you know, I think that the I think the version that we see as like sort of the short term threats, at least in the most immediate way is like for me working in and around entertainment and people who work in advertising and seeing like an uptake in that section, I go, Okay, that's easy. Like I can see how a company immediately goes, yeah, it's a tool. And then suddenly it's like, and now you're on

your ass because we'll just use the tool now. And we don't even need a person to prompt it, or we need many, we just need fewer people to operate it. So to me, I'm like, okay, that's an obvious sort of thing I can see like on the horizon. And you did talk about, well, there was a lot of talk of these sort of long term existential or quote unquote existential threats, that there were a lot of things in the short term that we're actually ignoring. What are those sort of things that we need to bring a little bit more awareness to? Like, I know you mentioned the climate. And I look at it from my perspective, I see like the just massive job loss that could happen. But what are sort of like the more short term things that kind of maybe are less sexy or

interesting to the people who just want to write about killer terminators and things? Yeah, I mean, I think less sexy is exactly the right phrase for this, which is a lot of the short term issues are very much about entrenching existing forms of inequality and making them worse. And that's often something people don't really want to hear about because they don't want to acknowledge these inequalities or because it takes away from the shiny newness of AI. It makes it very much like a lot of other technological revolutions that we've already seen. And that's super boring. You don't want to hear about how the wheel somehow brought about some kind of inequality.

The wheel is racist and we all know it. The big hot take from today. But yeah, I mean, something that I look at, for example, are like very mundane but important technologies like technologies used in recruitment and hiring. So I look at AI powered video interview tools and look at how that affects people's particular, you know, likelihood of being employed and how they go through the workforce. And yeah, it's less exciting seeming than the Terminator. But again, when you look under the hood and dig into them, you're like, oh, wow, this could actually really, really compound inequalities

that we see in the workforce under the guise of the idea that these tools are going to make hiring more fair. And that's a massive problem. Right. So because like the idea with those hiring tools, like it will actually take away these sort of like demographic cues that someone might use to like, you know, they'll apply their own biases to. So in fact, it is the most equitable way to hire. But is it because of just the kinds of people that are creating these sort of systems because they tend to be a bit one note that that's inherently where like sort of that like it begins to wobble a bit it's a mixture so of course yes the lack of diversity in the ai industry is like very stark it's also sadly in the uk an industry where for example women's representation is actually getting worse not better so that's a sad slap in the face for a lot of the progress narrative that we want to see um but sometimes it's not even necessarily that the people creating these tools have bad intentions.

Maybe not even that they're using faulty data sets or biased data sets. These are two of the really big problems that are flagged. But sometimes the underlying idea behind a product is just bogus. Like it's just a really bad concept and yet somehow it gets brought to market again because of all this hype around AI. So with the video interview tools that we look at, for example, they basically claim

that they can discern a candidate's personality from their face and from their words. So how they talk, how they move, they can decide how extroverted you are or how open you are, how neurotic you are, how conscientious you are, all these different markers of personality. you are how neurotic you are how conscientious you are all these different markers of personality to which i would say firstly no there's absolutely no way an ai can do that this is just a very old kind of racial pseudoscience making its way back into the mainstream saying okay we can totally guess your personality from your face like it's like your friends looking at someone's profile picture on like tinder or whatever and being like they look like they'd be really fun at a party. It's about that level of accuracy.

And then second, is that even a good way of judging if someone's going to be good for a job? How extroverted do you want a person in a job to be? Maybe in your job, that's really, really helpful. In my job, I don't know how helpful it is. So there's just kind of a lot of flaws at the very, you know, bottom of these products that we should be worried about. Just like a C minus level job hiring process. Like that's what I feel like so many of the things,

like when you get down to them and see them in action, they're like not that good. Like it does feel like the whole thing is being hyped to a large degree. And like, that's something I heard from somebody I know who like works in, you know, like all of my friends who work in finance or like any of those things, like my brain shuts off when he starts talking about what he does. But he was saying, like, he pays attention to the market and he was saying there's a big thing

propping up the stock market right now is AI. And it really is. That's where so much of people's wealth is tied up is in the stock market. And it's just tied to what you can get people excited about in a lot of cases. So it really like that from that

perspective, the incentive structure makes sense. Like you want people talking about how your AI technology can do all these amazing things because that literally makes you have more money than you would have if they knew the truth about your product. Without being like yeah how many seven-fingered trump pictures can we create and right be like yeah man fucking millions into this yeah yeah i mean that's kind of something that's really come out of the last few years is how many firms just use the label of ai to get funding like i think there was a study a couple of years ago that said like 40% of European AI startups

didn't use AI, to which point you're like, well, what are you doing? Well, we could, though. This podcast is actually an AI podcast because eventually it could use AI. And before we were recording, Miles was actually putting in,

he asked an AI to pitch him an episode of Friends in which the cast and, you know, the people on the Friends on the show deal with the fallout from the events of 9-11. And it wouldn't do it. So we can't quite claim that we are an AI podcast yet. But it did do it when I said, pitch me an episode where Joey and Monica drive Uber. Oh, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it did.

So clearly, because you can see where these guardrails are. They're like, don't do 9-11 stuff, though. That's... Right. No. Don't do that. So, yeah, I think there's two things we're talking about here. Like, from one perspective, like, yes, you could put it in the category of, yeah, I think there's two things we're talking about here. Like from one perspective, like, yes, you could put it in the category of like, well, yes, the wheel makes racism or colonialism more frictionless is a word that gets used a lot of technology is designed to make groups of people and our interactions and the things that make people money more frictionless. And that's something that you guys have talked about on recent episodes of Good Robot.

most recent episode, or at least the one that's up most recently right now as we're recording this, where you guys were talking about a company that asked a regulating body to make an exception to a law around a high-risk use of AI. And the law said that people had to supervise the use of AI just because it seemed dangerous. And the company appealed to the regulating body by saying, well, that would cost too much and we would never be able to scale this and make a profit. And it feels to me like our answer

as a civilization to that complaint needs to be, that's not our problem. Then you shouldn't be doing it. But instead, it seems like the answer too often, not just in AI, but just across the board, especially in the US, is like, okay, well, we have to make an exception so that they can make a profit around this technology or else the technology won't get developed because the only thing that drives technological progress is like the profit motive but that's you know as i think you guys talked about in that episode that's never been the best way to develop technology like it's it's been a

good way sometimes to democratize existing technology but like that's i don't know i feel like that idea of you you have to make it profitable you have to make it easy on these companies to keep trying different things for ai to become profitable is baked in at a like cellular level at this point and how a lot of you know western colonial civilizations operate yeah i mean I think too often a lot of the technologies that shape our daily lives are made by a very narrow set of people who ultimately aren't beholden to us. They're beholden to their shareholders or to their boss.

So they don't really have our best interests at heart. For example, take this whole rebranding of Twitter to X by Musk. I remember waking up and finding my little Twitter bird replaced with this huge X and just being like, oh, firstly, because it was part of, you know, Twitter's low decline. But secondly, it made me feel pretty disappointed or really aware of the fact that one guy can have such a huge impact on how literally millions of people use a social networking platform that's actually super important to their daily lives and has played a huge role in activist movements and fostering different

communities. And I think that's a story we see time and time again with some of these big tech companies, which is not only do they have their own profit motive at heart, they're not beholden in any way to the public and they're not being compelled by regulation to make good decisions that necessarily benefit the public. So I think a really important question going forward is, how do we support kinds of technology development that are very much based in the communities that the technology is for? I think one really big part of that is recognizing that so many AI models, as you mentioned, they're designed to be scalable, and that's how they make money, this idea that you can apply them globally and universally.

And I think that's a big problem, partly because it often is really homogenizing. It can involve like exploiting a model from the US, usually out to the rest of the world. It's probably not actually appropriate to use in those contexts. But also a lot of really exciting and good uses of technology i think come from these really localized specific community-based levels so sometimes i think it can be about thinking smaller rather than bigger yeah yeah i that was like another thing that struck me about like just all the warnings and even in that pause letter is sort of like the presumption that it's like well all you motherfuckers are gonna use this so we gotta talk about it where it's like, well, all you motherfuckers are going to use this. So we got to talk about it.

Or it's like, I don't know. I don't even fucking know what it is. Like a second ago, I thought it was Skynet. And now like, you know, you have your company being like, yeah, we now have enterprise AI tools, like welcome. You're like, but what am I? Huh? Like what? And I think that's what's in it. Really interesting thing about this as like a sort of technological advancement is before people even really understand what it is, there is like from the higher, the powers that be sort of going into it being like, well, this is it, like everyone's using it, but I'm still not sure how. And I guess that probably feeds into this whole model of generating as much, you know, excitement, market excitement about AI is by taking the angle of like, everything's different because everyone

is going to be using AI. Most of y'all don't know what that is, but get ready. And I think that's what also makes it very confusing for me as it's like a lay person outside of the tech sphere to just be like, wait, so are we all using it? And even now I really, I still can't see what that is and how that benefits me. And I think that's a big part of I'm sure your work, too, or even like any ethicist is to understand, like, well, who does it benefit? Like, first, we're making this because it benefits who and how? Yeah. And I think, yeah, I mean, right now it benefits the companies that are making it.

It sort of feels like that's the way it's being presented or slightly being like, yeah, you guys are going to love this, but really it's, we're going to benefit from the adoption of this technology. Yeah. I mean, I think that's this crucial question is this stepping back and saying, actually,

is this inevitable? And do we even want this in the first place? And I think that's what really frustrated me about the pause letter and about a number of kind of big tech figures signing onto it is that they're very much pushing this narrative of like, oh, this is like unstoppable and it's inevitable and it's happening. We've got to find ways to deal with it.

And it's like, you're making it. Like you're the people literally making these technologies in a lot of cases. So if you really think it's an existential risk to humanity, stop. It honestly could even be that simple, but that, you know, what makes me really then question their motives and sort of coming forward with a lot of this kind of very doom and gloom language. I think it's also interesting if you look at, for example,

countries' national AI strategies. So if you look at, say, like China and the UK and the US and these countries that are now thinking about what their national long-term AI strategy is going to be. They also very much frame it around the idea that AI is completely inevitable, that this is going to be the transformative technology for imagining the future, for geopolitical dominance, for economic supremacy. And again, I think as an ethicist, what I really want people to do is step back and say, I think we're actually at a crossroads where we can decide whether or not we think these technologies are good for us and whether they are sustainable, whether they are a useful long-term thing for our society, or actually whether the benefits of these technologies are going to be experienced by very few people and

the costs are going to be borne by many. Right. We talked last week about the scientific application that used deep learning to figure out the shapes of proteins, the structures of proteins, and that that could have some beneficial uses, will probably have some beneficial uses for how we understand disease and medicine and how we treat that. But there are ways to probably differentiate beneficial uses for, you know, how we understand disease and medicine and how we treat that. But

there are ways to probably differentiate and think about these things. Like it's not, you don't just have to be either Luddite or like AI pedal to the floor, you know, let's just get out of the way of the big companies. You know, it feels like. But it is such a complicated technology that I think there's going to be inherent cloudiness around how people understand it and also manufactured cloudiness because it is in the overall system being like capitalism it's in their benefit to generate like market excitement where there shouldn't be any basically yeah i mean i think it's easy to generate this kind of nebulousness around ai because to some extent we still don't really know like what it is it's still more of a concept than anything else because the term ai is like stretch and you describe so many applications Like I spent two years interviewing engineers and data scientists in a big tech firm, and they would sort of grumble, well, 15 or 20 years ago,

we didn't even call this AI and we were already doing it. It's just a decision tree. Again, it's kind of part of that branding. But also we have these, again, thousands of years of stories and thinking about what an intelligent machine is. And that means we can get super invested and super cloudy very, very quickly. And yeah, I don't want people to feel bad for being scared or being cloudy about these technologies. It is dense and confusing, but at the same time, I do think that it is really important to come back to that question of what

does this do for us? So the question of Ludddism or being a luddite i think is really interesting because i you know personally i do use ai applications there's certain things about these technologies that really excite me but i'm really sympathetic to some of the kind of old school luddites who weren't necessarily anti-technology but were really against the kind of impacts that technology were having on their societies so the way that new technology is like, I think it would be things like spinning and weaving were causing mass unemployment and the kind of broader ramifications that was having for people in the UK socially. And that kind of has quite a scary parallel to today in terms of thinking about maybe what AI will bring about for the rest of us who maybe aren't researchers in a lab, but who maybe might be replaced by some of these algorithms in terms of our work

and our outlook. Yeah. Can you talk at all about open source models? Because when we talk about this idea that corporations have all this power and are incentivized to do whatever is going to make the most money, which in a lot of cases is going to be the thing that removes the friction from consumption decisions and, you know, just how people interact and do these things, which, as you guys talked about in your episode, like, removing the friction, like, friction can be really good sometimes. Sometimes your system needs friction to stop and correct itself and recognize when bad shit, when things are going wrong. But, you know, there's also a history in, even in the U.S., where corporations are racing to get to a development and ultimately are beat by open source models of technological organizing

around getting a specific solution. Do you have any hope for open source in the future of AI? Yeah, I think I'm really interested in community forms of development. And I think open source is a really interesting example. I think we've seen other interesting examples around things like collective data labeling. And I think that these kinds of collective movements, on the one hand, seem like a really exciting community-based alternative to the concentration of power in a very, very narrow segment of tech companies. of power in a very, very narrow segment of tech companies. On the other hand, though, I think community work is really hard work. We had Dr. David Adelani on our podcast, who's a very important figure in Masakana, which is a grassroots organization that aims to bring some of the over 4,000 African languages into natural language processing or NLP systems. And he talks a lot about how the work he does with Marta Kana is

so valuable and so important, but it's also really, really hard because when you're working in that kind of collective decentralized environment, it can be much slower. And as you said, there can be a lot more friction in that process, but counter to this move fast, break things kind of culture, sometimes that friction can be really productive and it can help us slow down and think about you know the decisions that we're making very intentionally rather than just kind of racing as fast as we can to make the next newest shiniest product i was i'm also like in your work too you know you talk about how you know like looking at these technologies especially through a lens of like feminism and intersectionality and you know bipoc communities and things like that and then like broadly in

science there's like you know there's an issue of like language hegemony in scientific research where if things aren't written in english a lot sometimes studies just get fucking ignored because like i don't speak spanish or i can't read chinese therefore i don't know if this research is being done and therefore it just doesn't exist because the larger community is like we all just think in english like so how do you like you know specifically because you know when hearing the description of your work help me understand like and the listeners too like of how we should be looking at these things from that also from that perspective too because i think right now we're all caught up in like it's fucking sky dad and it's not you know what hold on like there are other subtleties that actually we should really

think deeply about because to your point i feel like those are the dimensions of an emerging technology or trend or something that gets ignored because to your point it's like the thing we of course it's in it it, it's unequal, of course, it's racist or whatever. But what are those ways that people need to really be thinking about this technology? Yeah. I mean, I think English language hegemony is a really good example of this broader problem of the more subtle kinds of exclusions that get built into these technologies. Because I think we've all probably seen the cases of AI systems that have been really horrifically and explicitly racist or really horrifically sexist

from Tay, the chatbot that started spouting horrific right-wing racist propaganda and had to get taken down through to Amazon hiring tool that systemically discriminated against female candidates. These are really, I think, overt depictions of the kinds of harms AI can do. But I think things like English language hegemony are also incredibly important for showing how existing kinds of exclusions and patterns of power get replicated in these tools. Because to an English language speaker, very crucially, they might use chat GPT and think, this is great. This is what my whole world looks like

if they only speak English. Obviously, anyone who is not a native English speaker or who doesn't only speak English, it's going to be an incredibly different experience. And that's where I think we see the benefits of these tools being really unequally distributed. I think it's also important because there's such exclusions in which kinds of languages and forms of communication can get translated into these systems. So for example, I work with a linguist at the University of Newcastle, and she talks about the fact that there's so many languages, like signed languages and languages that don't have a written language, but they're never going to be translated into these tools and never going to

benefit from them. You might think, okay, well, do these communities want those languages translated into an AI tool? Maybe, maybe not. I'd argue, of course, it's up to them. But those communities are still going to experience the negative effects of AI, like the climate cost of these tools. And so I think it's just really important, like you said, to think about what kinds of hegemony are getting further entrenched by AI-powered technologies. All right, great. Let's take a quick break and we'll come back and finish up with a few questions. We'll be right back. I'm Jess Casavetto, executive producer

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The Black Effect Podcast Network is sponsored by Diet Coke. And we're back. We're back. And, all right. at Coke. And we're back. And all right. So, I mean, one thing that I want myself to just, like, get out of this conversation is just a sense of, like, ways that we,

like, what we think AI might look, like, how it might impact what the world around us looks like in the not too distant future. And we've, we've already talked about like some ways that AI is being overrated as like a autonomous kill bot, like on one of the episodes of your podcast, an AI expert talks about getting an AI enhanced cancer scan and assuming the scan was like taking 3D video and doing like 3D modeling. And it was just putting a box on a 2D image. And I believe the guest like admits that they were influenced by Hollywood movies. And it seems like that's what people who are trying to make money off of this want. So we're going to have this steady push to make us overrate, misunderstand what the actual promise

of AI is going to look like, what tools are going to be given to us in the near future, and what are those tools actually able to do? So I'd just be curious to hear from you, what do you think ways that AI might intervene in our lives in the near future might already be intervening in our lives? What are those things that we're underrating? And what are the things that you think are probably taking up too much of our bandwidth in terms of how we're picturing AI? Oh, that's a great question. I think to start with the second half, to start with what I think is maybe a little

bit overrated, or maybe you'll take a bit longer to pan out. I would say some of these really high tech applications, things like AI and medicine, for example, I think that we might not see them expand beyond a very narrow set of controlled circumstances. hospital will have this tool or say AI in education that every classroom is going to have access to this tool I think is unfortunately just really grossly overestimating the kinds of resources certainly in this country that schools and hospitals have I was talking to a friend who's a doctor here and she was saying oh well what do you think about AI in medicine and then she kind of stopped for a moment and just laughed and said well I don't know why I'm asking you that because my hospital uses paper notes. And I said, what? And she said, yeah, our whole hospital is not computerized. And that was a good reality check for me because it made me realize like, wow, actually some of the stuff that I'm thinking about is so far away from the reality of what people like my friend,

the doctor is having to deal with on the ground. And same with schools, you know, here, a whole hundreds of schools, I think have had to be closed because there's some kind of issue with the concrete that they might collapse, which is, A, horrific. But B, it's such a different level of infrastructural problem that thinking about AI in the classroom is really not on the radar in that scenario. Yeah. Let's work on walls first. Exactly. Yeah. Think about autonomous AI Socrates. Yeah. It's like on walls first. Exactly. Think about autonomous AI Socrates. Yeah, it's like a low bar.

People are like, what if students cheat? And you're like, look. What if the building crushes them? Exactly. Yeah. So those are things that I think are maybe a little bit on the overrated side. I think in ways things are underrated. I'm really interested in how AI can change

how we see the world and how we see ourselves. Like I think, you know, take for example, something like TikTok. You know, I have to confess, I'm a big TikTok user. I love scrolling a lot of mindless garbage. It brings me a lot of joy and peace. But even things like AI powered beauty filters, right? Like I think that has such a

profound effect on how you just understand and see yourself and your own face. They're often really imbued with gendered and racist kinds of assumptions as well. I often look a lot whiter when I use a beauty filter, even though I'm multiracial. All of those assumptions, I think, they get baked in, that seep into our lives in like really subtle ways i think collectively can have quite a big impact yeah i was talking i was talking about the i i don't know if this is technically ai but then again i don't know what ai is or if there's like a specific argument but like the the way that like iphones take 40 pictures like consecutively and then like choose the best one from the 40 and like the

live photo setting like feels like a thing and like it's really good at it and it's something that i had like just it happened on my phone with like an update and i was like yeah this is just how you take pictures now and like pictures are way better than they used to be i think i saw somebody speculate that like some of the software, like Photoshop and other things that have traditionally had sort of a difficult learning curve will suddenly get much easier of easy to use and like very simple, straightforward. We know what the goal is here and we're able to use these enhanced kind of programs to to achieve that goal. Like that feels more possible to me and like something that we we might see in the not too distant future. We might see in the not too distant future. Totally. That's like a pitch you can understand. Like this will make it easier for you to Photoshop a friend out and just put someone else in.

You're like, OK, rather than right now, it's like this shit will end the world. And you're like, well, what is it? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. But it will fuck you up. And you're like, huh? And I guess that's such a different proposition up front. you up and you're like, huh? And I guess that's such a different proposition up front. And earlier,

Dr. Carey, you're saying like, there are things that genuinely excite you about like this sort of like these emerging technologies from, and I, and I would love to hear from your vantage point, because you are looking at this and like, like what is ethical and what is going to bring meaningful value to people? Like, what are those things that I can feel like, oh yeah, yeah, I can get down with that future. Yeah. I mean mean i recognize that i sound very doom and gloom a lot of the time that i speak and all my friends have to deal with my sort of constant existential anxiety about technologies but at the same time you know i'm an active user of a lot of them like i use a lot of voice dictation software voice editing software you know for when we record our podcasts and these sort of things that genuinely make my life so much better and easier. I love being able to transcribe, you know, what I'm saying and have it appear on the screen and not have to type out my emails and have them appear.

I recognize these are like all very boring. I should have said something like, I DJ. No, not at all. I write emails using voice dictation software. It's very, you know, but I think kind of, you know, extrapolating out from that, you know, there's really amazing applications when it comes to accessibility. And when it comes to the kinds of access people can now have online because of advancements in AI powered tools. tools and so i think though you know what's really central there is kind of that broader vision of yeah what is the kind of benefit this is meaningfully bringing to society what problem is being solved and other people who are like most affected by that problem the ones leading

the conversation and saying what they need because too often i think we see tech developers creating stuff that actually no one really asked for i I'm sure you have all seen that thing on Amazon when you're like, who asked for that banana holder or avocado peeler or something? And too often, I think tech add-ons can be a little bit like that. Whereas I think when we have really interesting conscious development of, say, for example, feminist tools that are designed to encourage good conversations, things like like that that really makes me excited about the kinds of futures we could have with technology right yeah it almost feels like the danger here is when someone has like a technology and go and this is going to be in every home and you're like this is a sales pitch actually yeah because if you're not saying this is how we will work less and have more time to frolic to enjoy our human existence to connect with our

families then then like miss me with that because it reminds me of crypto it reminds me of the metaverse and reminds me of zuckerberg being like every worker will have this fucking headset on no no but nice fucking try asshole and i feel like this is kind of like it has a similar tone of like, get ready, folks, for this thing. And granted, they have a shiny toy in the form of these large language models that are fun to do. And really, they're just skimming the Internet and just giving it to you in a nice, tidy sentence. But yeah, like I feel like that is just kind of like i'm seeing that dimension when you see the hype around it which feels a little more like y'all are talking about this to make money whereas the other things that you're talking about like accessibility and trying to democratize

certain applications or things like that less there's less uh less scale involved with something like that so maybe it isn't talked about exactly And I just think it's really important to recognize that, you know, I'm not saying that, say, things like smart home technology is like Amazon. Alexa and things are like inherently bad products. I'm sure heaps of people like love having those technologies in their home. They find them useful. But I just think whenever you bring in a new technology, you also bring in new vulnerabilities and you bring in new costs. And sometimes the hype wave means we focus on the benefits. You know, oh, if you bring this to every home, everyone's life will be easier. Everyone will have a more seamless home experience,

when actually that's not the case. There's real costs to bringing those tools into a lot of people's homes. Everything from, for example, the way that certain kinds of elder care is getting replaced by technological tools in the UK care system, through to the fact that those tools can really easily be used for the purposes of domestic abuse, intimate partner violence. It can be used to control or trap someone in their home. And these are really ugly truths about those technologies. And they're often not the ones that are put at the heart of technology development. And so that's a lot of my job, I guess, is just to say, how do we put those

vulnerabilities and those costs at the forefront and then judge holistically whether or not we really want this product to exist? Yeah, but here's the thing. I got a lot of my stock portfolio tied up in these companies. I need these fucking things to moon, if you know what I mean. So I want to end the episode just doing something that you guys do on the good robot which is talk talk about some like books that are recommended or you know what works you recommend you know you talk on an episode earlier i think it was in the summer about how a lot of the ideas and fears and hopes that we have currently are very similar to what we've seen in movies and like those like when you look at elon musk's 10 favorite books they're all like

fed by this same like isaac asimov like i robot thing i'd add a lot of Kubrick's ideas are around AI are go back to this very specific version of technology where it inevitably turns into a mean psychopath who is set on dominating all of humanity. because we do like to talk about, you know, the importance of expanding our imagination. Like, you know, with regards to climate, a lot of it is like either, it's either apocalypse or business as usual capitalism. There's not like, people have a hard time imagining the alternative.

On AI, on the subject of AI, like what are, is there, first of all, is there any like mainstream kind of popular movie that you feel like actually like that example of AI, like got it right? And then are there other kind of more obscure works that you would send people to in order to sort of feed their imagination of like what a world with AI technology could look like. Yeah, I mean, that question of the imagination and how our current imagination of AI is really narrow is super key.

And I think it's fascinating that, yes, Musk and these folks have a very narrow set of stories that they refer to. And in those stories, it's always like, oh, this hyper-masculine tech pro makes an AI and then it looks like him. And then it takes over the world. And you're like, oh, this hyper-masculine tech bro makes an AI and then it looks like him. And then it takes over the world. And you're like, are you okay?

It's like your bedtime story. The mean sociopath bent on world domination thinks that all AI is going to be a mean sociopath bent on world domination. That's so weird. Right. Yeah. Who would have guessed that? Yeah. But yeah, I mean, and something that i really like are

stories particularly science fiction stories i love sci-fi and fantasy i'm like a huge believer in like the way that it can help us imagine different worlds um in terms of like mainstream films i guess the one that like comes to the top of my head is big hero six so the disney pixar film where you have an AI-powered kind of robot healthcare buddy called Baymax. And I think that's a really interesting example of an AI that, you know, at one point in the film, he gets dressed up in armor

and, you know, the kid, Hiro, starts to try and use him as a kind of weapon. But, like, this is an AI that so hasn't been designed to be a weapon that kind of resists being weaponized a lot of ways. And in that sense, it'sists being weaponized a lot of ways and in that sense it's really countercultural to a lot of the ai we see in western film and cinema which is often very weaponized it's often either this like kind of sexy cyborg figure or it's this hyper masculine

terminator figure yeah um so i find baymax is kind of genderless and like just a big cloud puffy balloon person but that's also so accurate of what a young boy would do immediately with that is like a weapon it's like the the tweet i can tell you me and my friends would have killed et with hammers it's like little little boys are monsters but that that's a great example yeah Yeah. In terms of some alternative stories and ideas, I tried to do a really shameless self-plug, but we have a book coming out called The Good Robot, Why Technology Needs Feminism. And I'm plugging it because it's really beautiful.

We worked with a science fiction illustrator, Kwasi Ndun Lee, and there was myself and Dr. Eleanor Drage, my co-host. And the whole thing is these 2,000-word essays. They're really short and really punchy by lots of different guests we've had on the podcast. And they all respond to this idea of good technology, dot, dot, dot. So it might be good technology is free or good technology challenges power. And the idea is you can just dip in, read one that was illustrated and then just dip out when you need a break or a moment. But yeah, I really would encourage you to pick that up because it just contains the most

incredible feminist philosophers, technologists, inventors, activists who are really pushing forward different ideas of the kinds of technological futures we could have. I mean, apart from that, I read a lot of Chinese diasporic, Asian American sci-fi as well, particularly sci-fi that's like thinking a lot about the climate crisis and AI and the intersections of that. And so I think a lot of those stories have really interesting and different perspectives on what AI is or can be from like Aliette de Bodard's work, which explores, you know,

the relationships between like humans and sentient mindships in the space opera universe, through like lyricalized saltfish girl which is like a very dystopian imagining of like a future society based on labor from clones like all of these novels i think just deserve a lot more love and a lot more kudos they're just absolutely interesting and imagine having gorgeous ideas about the future amazing well this has been such a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for taking the time at what I have to assume is midnight where you are right now. It's almost nine. Almost nine. Okay. Yeah, that's too late. Well, thank you, Dr. McNerney,

for doing the show. Where can people find you, follow you, hear you, all that good stuff? Yeah, thanks so much for having me on it's been a blast yeah check out the good robot we're on youtube apple spotify and then keep an eye out for the book coming in february 2024 amazing yeah we'll have to have you back for that yeah yeah absolutely and is there a work of media that you've been enjoying oh media in terms of like a show like a podcast a tweet oh i feel like i should choose something really intellectual but i actually just sent my husband a tweet that really got me because it was very me which is um it was it's actually a bit dark but it was this news headline about this hiker who'd been missing and the rescuers couldn't get in contact with them and they didn't get

rescued for 24 hours because they wouldn't answer their phone because it was an unknown number and this is just exactly me like my husband was like please pick up the phone and i'm like you know what i'm like i will not i will not answer an unknown number and so that brought me a little bit of joy today amazing and i feel like that's a great way that a great example of how technology has marched forward and completely ruined like something that

used to work phone communication. But we can't answer our phones anymore because the fucking bots. Miles, where can people

find you? What's the work media you've been enjoying? Yeah. At miles of gray wherever they got at. I'm there.

Soon to blue sky. Shout out. It will. Christie wherever they got at. I'm there. Soon to Blue Sky. Shout out Ill Will. Oh, you got it? Yeah, you and I, we're hopping in. We got codes. We got the invite to check out the Blue Sky. So, yeah, they're shortly.

Also, check Jack and I out on our basketball podcast, Miles and Jack Out Mad Booskies. Check me out on my 90-Day F 420 day fiance uh and also uh the true crime show the good thief which has all episode eight episodes out so please stream those uh binge those uh talking about the greek robin hood the man who legitimately was kidnapping millionaires and doing some old-fashioned wealth redistribution in the in a positive way never hurting people either. Never hurting people. Like, again, an ethical criminal, if there is such a thing. Some tweets I like. First one is from, you know,

shout out to the WGA and all the negotiators because it looks like the WGA strike is, they're close to getting something ratified. So we like that. This tweet is from Jeff Yang at Original Spin tweeted, just underscoring how WGA negotiators told the studios the union wouldn't go back to work until SAG also has a deal. Because if the last five months proved anything, it's in together, win together. And there's this snippet from, it

might be a deadline, but it says, quote, the studios also inquired if once a tentative agreement is ratified by the scribes, if the writers would pick up their pens and hit their keyboards again very soon afterwards. The Guild, from what we understand, made it clear that they would not be going back to work until SAG-AFTRA also had a new agreement with the AMPTP, reflective of the WGA's feeling of solidarity between the two unions that has characterized their first mutual strike since 1960. Love the solidarity. And I know IATSE is also going to have a contract that is going to need to be renegotiated next year. And it looks like, guess what, folks?

They did it once. They only listened to one thing. Yeah. Putting the tools down. Put the tools down and pick them other tools up, which is getting in your solidarity back. So we'd love to see that. And another tweet I like is from T-Pain. At T-Pain. down put the tools down and pick them other tools up which is getting in your solidarity back uh so we'd love to see that and another tweet i like is from t-pain at t-pain uh just put bartender just

doing her job me just this photo of kevin james the photo of kevin james that's going going viral but it is trying to be like hey hey, Hey, can I get your eye contact? Yeah. Just a, just a ginger beer if you can. Those are my two. Uh, tweet.

I've been enjoying at BRN BNE. I don't know how to pronounce that. Uh, but their display name is BBBBBBB space BBBBBBB, which I have to assume stands for bone, bone, bone, bone,

bone, bone, bone, bone, bone, bone, bone, bone, bone, bone. But the tweet I usually don't use for my tweet, the ones that things that I've retweeted. But this one got me so much I had to reshare it. The tweet is, what if you went to E.T.'s planet and all of the other E.T.'s were wearing clothes? That really, really fucked up how i thought about et yeah yo what's good oh damn all right et you can find me on twitter at jack underscore o'brien and on threads at jack underscore o underscore Brian. And on Blueski, I'll have a username there eventually soon.

And you can find us on Twitter at Daily Zeitgeist. We're at The Daily Zeitgeist. On Instagram, we have a Facebook fan page. On our website, DailyZeitgeist.com, where we post our episodes and our footnotes. Footnotes. Where we link off to the information that we talked about in today's episode, as well as a song that we think you might enjoy. Miles, what's the song people might enjoy? This is an artist uh detroit's very own john fm and i just figured

what an appropriate title it's called white science uh and the track is like very it feels like if like like i don't know like if prince was making shit in like the late night it has like a princey vibe like it's fancy and it's kind of got this like vocal modulator on it that feels a little bit Prince-y. And also it's just a really good track. So this is John FM with White Silence. That's what Jack FM's mom calls him when he's in trouble. John FM, get in here now. The Daily Zeitgeist is a production of iHeartRadio.

For more podcasts from iHeartRadio visit the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows That is going to do it for us This morning back this afternoon to tell you What is trending and we'll talk to you all then Bye I'm Jess Casavetto executive producer Of the hit Netflix documentary series

Dancing for the Devil the 7M TikTok cult and I'm Jess Casavetto, executive producer of the hit Netflix documentary series, Dancing for the Devil, the 7M TikTok cult. And I'm Clea Gray, former member of 7M Films and Shekinah Church. And we're the host of the new podcast, Forgive Me for I Have Followed. Together, we'll be diving even deeper into the unbelievable stories behind 7M Films and Shekinah Church. Listen to Forgive Me for I Have Followed on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Pradenti. And I'm Jemay Jackson-Gadson. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. There's a lot to figure out when you're just

starting your career. That's where we come in. Think of us as your work besties you can turn to for advice. And if we don't know the answer, we bring in people who do, like negotiation expert Maury Tahiripour. If you start thinking about negotiations as just a conversation, then I think it sort of eases us a little bit. Listen to Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Keri Champion, and this is season four of Naked Sports.

Up first, I explore the making of a rivalry. Kaitlyn Clark versus Angel Reese. People are talking about women's basketball just because of one single game. Clark and Reese have changed the way we consume women's basketball. And on this new season, we'll cover all things sports and culture. Listen to Naked Sports on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio apps, or wherever you get

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