TRASHFUTURE - More Human After All ft. Brian Merchant

Episode Date: March 25, 2024

"I believe AI makes us more human," said Peter Deng of OpenAI at SXSW - which is just one of the responses that AI people have when people ask bizarre questions like "what does your product do," and "hey how did you get all that training data?" Technology writer Brian Merchant joins the gang to discuss this phenomenon, Amazon's foray into building a second generation human, and, of course, the AI app that aims to replace condoms. Like this episode? We've got a Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture 

Hello everybody and welcome to this free episode of TF. It's the free one. In a very affable voice. Yes, it's the free one. It doesn't bother Riley when I just do it like, it's the free one. Yep, that's right, because the person who does the annoying radio voice is still in Australia and recovering from jet lag. However, we are joined by someone from almost as far away.

It is. His main qualification being from almost as far away. No, no, it is, I would say, a guest that has been a long time coming and one we're very happy to welcome. It is tech writer and author of Blood in the Machine now available, I believe, on BBC Sounds or something. Brian Merchant. Brian, how's it going?

Yeah. Hey, thanks for having me. I, too, am thrilled to be here. It has been a long time coming, hasn't it? Indeed. And I think a lot of you, you are one of the people who I've actually been looking at recently as I look to come to terms with what AI is and isn't doing. And it's actually through your Twitter account

that I finally decided that AI is the future. When you posted the title of an academic paper Ham it goes as following the carbon emissions for writing and illustrating are lower for AI Than for humans and that tore it for me. I'm now an AI acceleration is replace us all that's right save the planet Let's do it yet. Let's kill the humans off. We we now have a machine that creates art. We'll just hit the button We'll get the art. We don't need the humans off, we now have a machine that creates art, we'll just hit the button, we'll get the art, we don't need the humans. Uh, art world. It's like paperclips, you know?

We replace all matter in the universe with the worst art you've ever seen. It's, look, the other thing is, right? Okay, let's take a random artist, I dunno, let's call them M. Lipchansky or Maddie L., right? Yeah, okay. Perfect, perfect suitin' them. Lipchansky or Maddie L. Right? Yeah, okay. Perfect, perfect suitin' them. You just invented that just off the dime? Amazing.

Yeah. They eat, they move around, they do things, all of that energy expended. Grows the economy, you know, all of this. Yeah, they get in cars and... All of that energy expended, that all becomes carbon. Whereas you may think, oh, it's ridiculous that, you know, in order to generate this, um, this picture of an XL American bully wearing a trans pride, Kiffy, uh, you know, driving a tractor through a ULAZ sign, it's so stupid that to generate that I have to use 1000 liters of fresh water.

Well, no, actually a human illustrator would use more over their lifetime. ALICE That's true, and the thing is, we can get worse about this, because M. Lubchanski also themselves contains carbon. Is partially made of... There's carbon in there! And that's, you know, recoverable. load them and every other artist into sort of like enormous extractive racks, we could run the AI and we could generate even more art, you know?

It'd be fantastic. That's true. Yeah, we're gonna need to parrot the artist elimination campaign with some sort of carbon sequestration and collecting, so it'll be a net positive. My question about this future is, do we get rid of everybody? Or just... Just artists. If you've ever picked up a pen, stylus, it's over for you.

You are emitting carbon. I guess we need to keep one blue check tech guy to post the results of the AI on Twitter and kind of clap like a seal when he shares it. We need to keep Elon Musk alive so he can reply to that guy with like, interesting. Cool. Oh no, we need to have two artists. We have to have the artist who does... Only lies, and the other who does only truths.

No, we have to have the artist who does like, a, only other who does only truths. No, we have to have the artist who does, like, a crying woman dressed in a British flag being jeered at by a group of non-white people on a train. It won't matter, because every woman who that might plausibly be, plus every man that might plausibly be, has already been turned into art. Like, it's gonna be, there are gonna be, like, referents with no things going to them, because all of those people have been sequestered. We've replaced the human race with a floating signifier. It's a matter of time.

It's on the cloud. Yeah. But then there has to be the art, there has to be the kind of art that Elon replies interesting to, which is that, and then there has to be one where it's like, here's if the founding fathers were Chinese, that Elon can reply, concerning. Yeah, I'm sort of like, I'm staking out a lawn sign out front of my building that just says floating signifier 24. The abstract says, as AI systems proliferate, their greenhouse gas emissions are an increasingly

important concern for human societies." Was this written by, like, for human society? Was there delicious human flesh? "...we analyzed the emissions of several AI systems relative to those of humans completing the same tasks." Just at the end of Blindsight, where he's coming back in the capsule towards Earth, and like, Earth's radio emissions become progressively more cringe. LILITH And also it's like, yeah, y'know, we ultimately

could just... you're breathing a lot for someone who claims to care about the environment, is all I'm saying. Right? ALICE Yeah, that's true. I do do a lot of that. And I'm quite fond of it as well, like, we all have our sort of habits of consumption, I'm quite fond of that one. The breathing part, yeah.

I've never seen a paper that just attempts to quantify just existence, like, this human exists and has these calculable imprints, and then let's compare that to what it takes to sort of artificially generate a slurry on the internet. And then that'll stand. And then we'll submit that to science. Wait, is this in nature? I forget, I even forget. It's in nature.

It's in nature. One of our most prestigious publications. And the thing sounds like it was literally written by the Matrix. It's unbelievable. And the thing sounds like it was literally written by The Matrix. It's unbelievable. This one, it's... Yeah.

I mean, you saw, have you talked about the AI generated mouse testicles that were printed in another? Yeah. Who is fucking generating mouse testicles? AI generated art is making it into the journals too. There was also a paper that was like, that found like 150 instances of like papers that were actually written by chat GPT that made it through the selection process. Uh, it is like, this is, this is the new frontier.

Like just AI generate. It's not even just like the content farms now. It's actually the scientific journals are, uh, I'm, I'm very excited for eventually like one of the papers to sort of be like, yeah, yeah. Does it sort of say that you sort of try and measure how, how much like your CO2 emissions are when you jack off and how actually it's a lot more environmentally friendly for you. Yeah. You should stop doing that and get the AI to sort of do it for you somehow. We're back to the dick sucking machine. You know, I mean, I mean, basically, yeah.

I mean, the only, the only other thing I was going to say about this is that like at this point where I think the only way we're like, you know, it's very telling that first of all, we're still still about the stage where the AI is like, we're still trying to have to like, just, they're still trying to like justify themselves and justify why they are like the forefront of progress or whatever. But the only thing you really have is just like, well, it's slightly, you know, by these kind of very dubious measures, actually it is much more efficient, like economically and

by environmentally for the machine to take over your entire life. And therefore that's why there's a moral imperative as to why it should happen and and why you should burn all your pens, because actually, by writing anything, you are in fact killing a tree in more than one way. MW You must retreat into the cave. Back to cave living, everybody. AIs are taking over everything else now. SID You know, I was used to the Ted Kaczynski stuff, and before it was coming from an actual computer.

MW Yeah, I mean, that's the thing about this, right? The actual conclusion is just, it's not that like, because there's no there's no solution. It's not like if you stop doing art, you're going to stop emitting carbon. It's just like, no, like, there should there should be fewer people that exist doing art period, like you should just find we the implication is like so much darker than than a lot of this other shit that we're used to seeing justify, uh, like you knew technological efficiencies. It's like these people shouldn't exist in the first place. It would be more efficient if we just had fewer humans and more, uh, more LLMs churning out.

We like automated the degrowth guys. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's a sort of warrior to Matt Iglesias, right? There should be a billion less humans. Don't work out the maths on that, but yeah. No Americans. You're no Americans or one trillion Americans? Oh yeah, he doesn't think he's a human. He says Americans, doesn't he? Yeah, okay, fine.

There should be a billion fewer Americans. So, however, I'm certain, I am 100% certain actually, that that is the last shoddy, weird, and pretty unsupportable claim about AI that's made in an academic paper that we will be talking about on this episode, coincidentally and entirely unrelatedly. I want to talk about a startup before we go through OpenAI. Let me just open up my notes here. What the? Oh my goodness. I have to revise my previous statement.

You sold that so abusively, man. Seamless. Thank you, November. Thank you, Brian. I've been doing this for a while. Anyway, so can you, I know, I think this has been, this company's been going around, it's been doing the rounds a little bit, but it's too funny not to talk about. So instead of saying their name, I know, I think this has been, this, this company has been going around, it's been doing the rounds a little bit, but it's too funny not to talk about. So instead of saying their name, I'm just going to start reading from their like copy, picture this. Are you all picturing?

Okay, picturing. I'm not allowed to, the AI said I'm not allowed to picture anything. Yeah, I'm picturing, I'm using so much water. Yeah. Yeah. For the sake of the environment, I'm not using my imagination, but please continue. Okay. So, uh, picture this, but buy a carbon offset credit for anytime you use

your imagination. You're out on a Friday night, vibing with someone you just met. You can't picture this. The chemistry is loud. The attraction undeniable. As the night progressives, the possibility of intimacy looms close. Yeah. I can't picture this one. Sorry. But it's like the most unrelatable thing. Yeah. Sorry. Okay. I forgot that we're, we're reading this as podcasters. I cannot picture this as the night progresses,

the possibility of intimacy looms close, but in the heat of the moment, how often do we consider the potential risks to our health? This is precisely why we know again, in the heat of the moment, how often do we consider the potential risks to our health? This is precisely why we- no, again, in the heat of the moment, you should pause to consider potential risks to your health. By, I dunno, using something like- Making sure she knows where to choke you. This is precisely why we embarked on the journey to create Cal Mara. We recognized a gap in sexual health awareness, particularly in the context of casual encounters."

I mean, if this is just like an app that's like, sort of Microsoft Clippy pops up on your phone, and you look like you're about to get it in, put a condom on, that, I mean, sure? That's... Mm. No. That's a nudge. And I'm very gratified, actually, that you haven't seen this in fact. That's a nudge, and I'm very gratified actually that you haven't seen this in fact.

That's a nudge, and that would make sense. No, this is... What if there was a condom that didn't have to exist in reality? What? Sishet men inventing the condom for the first time, yeah. What if it was more like jazz? What if it was the condom for the first time. Yeah. What if they're, what if it was more like jazz? What if it was the condom that you didn't use? Again, sit, sit, man. Um, it says too often people engage in intimate moments without chat. GPT fully wrote this by the way. I'm certain of it.

Too often people engage in intimate moments without fully grasping the potential consequences, including the risk of STIs. So how does this work? You download the Kalbara app, you take your camera, and then you say to the- because it's marketed to women, mostly, or it's marketed to people who have sex with men. Or people who have sex with people with people. Okay, fine, so you aim the camera at a guy and it gives you a kind of AI-enabled skeeviness quotient that claims to judge your risk of getting chlamydia off of him? SEAN Kind of, more or less. ALICE Fuck's sake, man.

SEAN So, here's how it works. Now, Brian, I think you've seen this, right? BRIAN Yeah, it's still unclear to me, though, whether or not it's supposed to scan the person, or you're supposed to log this in and it's supposed to automatically detect whether or not you have syphilis? Is that like... I'm so happy to be able to fill you in on how this claims to work. So, uh, let's say, you know, you're, uh, you're, I don't know, you're, you're in the bathroom stall or whatever. And the guy, and the guy takes down his trousers. I don't know. Maybe it's a Burkine guy takes down his trousers and then you have a sticker over your phone. So

it doesn't matter. Yeah. Oh yeah. That's true. Damn. You're getting, you're getting syphilis because of fucking Burkine's restrictive AV policies. Okay. You're somewhere making, making this point to Sven and still not getting No, making it as you're being dragged back down the queue. And another thing! So, you do, is the guy takes, or the person with the penis takes down their trousers, you take a picture of that penis, and then you hit a button that says, yes, this person definitely consented to have their penis's picture taken, and is over 18, there are no mechanisms to confirm this. The phrase, their penis's picture taken is very...

This is worse than I thought, this is way worse than I thought it was. Yes, you have agreed to pose for an auto-chrome of your penis. Wait, so it's looking for, like, skin lesions that would indicate, I guess, syphilis, then? Or like, herpes or other things. Yeah. Because it scans for diseases that can be caught visually. But, you're not getting like a kind of a... the penis, I'm given to understand, is a sort of curved surface, right?

You're not getting a 3D scan, you're not getting the fucking like, LIDAR out, to scan and model the penis. It'd be very funny to have like a collapsible airport security scanner. Yeah, yeah, I practice safe sex, getting the fucking scanner. Well, that's the thing, right? It's, you take a picture of the penis, it scans it for diseases that can be caught visually. And then all of their terms and conditions and FAQs are filled with hedged language around like this can't detect everything. It can only be detect diseases that like that represent visually.

It's up to 90 percent of accurate up to. So anywhere between zero and 90 percent of accurate. Ten percent. You want wanna roll those dice?! Also, you know what? I'm for this. What could go wrong just encouraging people to take photographs of strangers they meet in the bars, genitalia, uploading it to a database, just hoping for the best. I don't see the problem.

What's the problem? ALICE The single largest, like, database of readily available blackmail information since, like, the days when people still paid for pornography. ZACH So they call themselves, like, with all of that, right? All of those limitations. They brand themselves as your intimate bestie for unprotected sex. It's like, this is like the machine to get chlamydia! Well the thing is, it takes a person a lot of carbon and time to get chlamydia, whereas AI could give us all chlamydia so much more easily. Like, this is the company that...

Just, AI synthesizes down into this skeeviest man in the world. This is the company that, if Chlamydia attained, like, collective sentience, all the Chlamydia in the world attained sentience... How do we know it hasn't? Blindsight moment. Yeah. And then, harnessed on LLM, this is the company it would create. Incredible.

Incredible. And they named it Calamari. If you... It's like, where is that right? Calamari? Calamara? Calamari? Calamari.

Can I take a picture of your dick real quick? It's my Calamari. Yeah. You want to name... It just goes onto a database. You want to name your STD detecting app something that reminds people of seafood. That's definitely what you want to do. Of course. So they say that they're addressing a gap in sexual health awareness. And it helps

people take risks more and more intelligently. And they have this company called He Health. That was all that was this exact technology, just marketed to men, to try to understand if they had herpes, basically. But then again, if you have herpes you probably know, right? I mean, you would always hope so, but like, this is another case where like, yeah, there actually is a lot of dangerous ignorance around STIs, right? It's just that this is the single worst thing I can imagine, to fill in that gap, like, dangerous ignorance around STIs, right, it's just that this is the single worst thing I can imagine, to fill in that gap, is, well, instead of, like, you know,

judging my own kind of risk with my human brain, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take a photo of your dick, and I'm gonna put it on someone else's computer, and then the big, like, dick-looking AI is gonna come back to me on whether or not your dick is like, okay. So... Yeah, give it a thumbs up. Yep. I literally did a little thumbs up while I was saying that, yeah.

This highlights the common challenge that many women face in identifying comprehending STIs. Comprehending STIs! What kind of eldritch non-Euclidean dick do you have that it's incomprehensible to a woman? Like, that's a concern. To be honest, like, 60-40 I'm probably not fucking you, if you have the kind of eldritch dick beyond my ability to comprehend.

Um, so. He Health was originally designed for men, but we noticed that a sizeable portion of our users were women, yet they didn't feel like He Health was designed with their needs in mind. And so what Kalmara has done is taken He Health, which is the same product, and then they put like, bestie language on it, and then it's like, and now it's for women too. ALICE It also comes in pastel for the women, cool. Um, yeah, I mean, I feel like it's as bad an idea either way, it's just that the use case they

imagine for this one is so much stranger, that you are about to have sex with someone. Like at least when it's your dick, you can like, fine, take a photo of your own dick, people do that all the time anyway, but like, you're lining someone up for the fucking mug shot. And are they selling this as like, it's supposed to facilitate an easier transition to, like, answering this question for people? Like, just, you've just met somebody at the bar, it's getting hot and heavy, now here's a notification on my phone that reminds me to ask you to show me your genitalia so I

can take a picture of it and have it examined by AI? Like this is the actual pitch? Am I clear on that? Yes, that's the pitch. I can't imagine two people being- How many pictures do you need? Like, do you need, do you need, like, pictures from, like, a lot of angles? Does it require, like, a certain kind of light? Yeah, can I get, like, is this-

One holding it this way, one holding it this way, two holding it- Does it come with some hardware? Like, a little hardware that you can just slide it into for ease? Like, a little, you know, like, a little cylinder you carry? Yeah, the little big light box, yeah. Yeah, yeah. On your belt. just slide it into for ease, like a little, you know, like a little cylinder, light box. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Is this going to usher in like a new era of like dick pic, right?

Like is the aesthetic of it going to change? Is like the unexpected effect of it will be that like people take more photos of their dicks, people care more about what they look like, right? Yeah. The tasteful, the tasteful dick pic is like the sort of enigma in this, and like, this app could actually accidentally solve it. I just think, I can't imagine two people who are horny enough for each other, who have just met, don't know anything about each other's STI status or whatever, maintaining that horniness

through one of them motion capturing the other one's penis. I was kinda thinking, it's like that meme where it's like, I consent, I consent, and he's like, have you forgot to ask a further... Have you forgot to ask this fuckin' AI dick? Have you forgot to ask Skynet? But here's the thing, right, is, what you, I think you're sort of both... We're both getting bullied by AI here, what AI has done, is it's rolled into the situation, and it's gone, your

art sucks and your dick looks weird as hell. So, I think what... Leave me alone! I heard the idea of some hardware around this, I think it's kind of fun, because you would do, it's like, you would put your penis into a box, and then, like, what we've invented is the penis gomjibar. Well, the gomj Jabbar is technically the needle. The box is just a pain box, but close enough.

People will know what we mean. Or maybe you just start going out on Friday night with this thing already on. It's like a little cod piece you have. It's just you're rocked and ready for that AI analysis. Every five minutes, if you don't have herpes, it beeps. Yeah. The other thing is if this is any level of pickup, if people actually obviously it's just things just going to get laughed out of town. But if it if there's if there's any level of pickup, the absolute guarantee story like two and a half years down the line is

that the database of every every flagged suspicious looking penis leaks, and with identifiable information to everybody who's on this thing. I'm in the corner of the bar, I'm wearing Google Vision, I'm looking, I've got the Terminator overlay for like, which guys in this bar have bad dicks? This is the future, I promise. Kalmara is designed with simplicity and safety in mind. Traditional STI testing methods can be cumbersome, time consuming, and intimidating. And also they work.

All of a sudden, the other problem. Yeah, that's the main thing. That's why we set out to develop a solution that's as easy as snapping a picture. At least Theranos took some blood, you know? Yeah. It's just a photo. So they say, gone are the risks of taking risks, days of taking risks blindly. It's like, okay. I'll move on from this pretty soon. It's just, it's so fun. I love their FAQs. They're like, what's the cost to use Kalamara?

And they were like, it's free! Let's just say you don't pay with money. We're building the world's largest database of weird decks. Yeah, it's to help the, um, again, if we imagine that this was created by some kind of a Skynet that Sam Altman is always saying he's worried about. This is like, the thing that is created to assess the weak spots of all of the human soldiers who'll be fighting back against it. It's just, a bunch of different AI startups to identify all of your insecurities. It's like, this, whatever AI ship better help does, and the first time you try and fight

the machine god, it lists your insecurities and then it goes by the way, this you playboy flashes up full colour high resolution photos of your dick. So, it says... Surrender in like six hours, I'm telling you. Yeah, we're all just gonna climb into the artist chamber, willingly. This is, you know, this is the segment they had to cut out of the animatrix, but it's the reason why the war against the machines was like 45 minutes long. LIAM Yeah. Just shamed, shamed in submission.

GARETH So they say, is this thing legit? How accurate are we talking? Break it down for me, nerd style. ALICE Uh, I hate this kind of copywriting style so much. It's all, it's also like, this is pretty misogynistic because they were like, hmm, let's repackage the same thing for women. What are women like? Dumb nonsense.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It says pretty darn accurate. Not perfect, but it's the next, but the next best thing is a lab test for a quick check. Again, the only best thing is a lab test. Yeah yeah yeah. This is up there with like, I mean, this is the thing, right, they positioned it as a bestie thing, and I'm just thinking about what situation you would enlist your bestie, you would grab them into the, as you so charmingly suggested, toilet stall, and be like, hey,

have a look at this guy's dick, and like, give me a verdict on it. Rate this man's penis. But in this case, your bestie has rated over 40,000 penises? I mean, that's plausible for my bestie. Some of my besties? Hmm. Yeah, who's already done this thing? Who's already, like, they've tested this on people. Like, there are people who have delivered their penises to AI already, willingly. Well, those people are not going to be good troops in the coming war. You hate to see, like, artisan penis raters put out of work. He says, hitting accuracy levels from 65 to 96%.

It was a real John Henry moment, they found him on a bathroom stool's dick pic, still in a hand. 65% to 96% is not that much! It's not accurate. You can't trust anything. It's kind of like an educated yes, you know? I feel like this, like, you want this thing to catch edge cases, that's always been the like hype for AI, for like any kind of medical imaging, which this technically is, is to

be like, it catches stuff that's like so small and so difficult to see that human doctors don't do it. And I feel like, in the realm of weird dicks, you get a lot of kind of like, gimmies? Like the obviously fucked up penises? LIAM Yeah, open lesions. ALICE Exactly, exactly. And I feel like once you're in the realms of like like, 60% accuracy, you're mostly, like, dining out on those. You don't need... yeah, your bestie can do this. Your bestie can do 60%. You can do this! You can look at the dick, if the dick can be described as, like, suppurating.

Don't do that. Don't have sex. Find, like Find a different penis to have sex with. GARETH This is from Engadget, because there's been some writing about this since it sort of came up and people have been looking at it. Which is, they read the unpublished paper that has the science behind this thing, and so they say that their 96% accuracy, or 65 to 96% accuracy, is based on a training data set that includes images where they put disease patterns on top of healthy penises. Oh, so you're tampering with your own data to start with. Yeah, they basically created the data that they use to do the analysis. So instead of

looking at actual... Here are a bunch of penises that have sort of like, random, or at least like, population level incidents of some kind of medical anomaly, they were like, well, let's get obvious medical anomalies, put them on 40% of the penises, then have a bunch of healthy penises, and see if it can tell the ones that are obviously anomalous. ALICE So I was right! I was joking, but I was right. It literally is just like, giving you the kind of like, obviously bad dicks. Now, a couple more things on this before we go into our main segment, because this has

been so fun. But their terms and conditions are so funny. Their terms and conditions might as well have been written by a sovereign citizen. Because they basically say, Uh, the Calabaro application products and services are intended only for the purpose of promoting and supporting general wellness and a healthy lifestyle or not to be used to diagnose, cure, treat, manage, prevent any disease or condition. These offerings should not be used to substitute through to professional medical advice, diagnosis,

treatment or management of any disease or condition. For medical advice, please consult qualified healthcare providers. But that's said underneath when they were like, you can hit it raw with this. ALICE AND ZAC LAUGH ALICE My you can hit it raw with this tagline is raising a lot of questions, which are answered by my you absolutely should not hit it raw with this terms of service. ZAC But the best parts of the terms of service are like the age and consent verification and liability, because they don't-

ALICE Oh yeah, you might accidentally, like, end up, well, like, negligently end up with a database of wildly illegal images. I don't think that's good. Extraordinarily. And what they've done is they've just said, okay, this is a risk. I know, let's use some magic words to absolve ourselves of the risk. We have a second AI that is able to determine the illegally bad penises from the just regularly bad penises. Jesus, I cannot believe any- there's no way a legal department looked at this and said

go ahead with this, yeah, you're gonna be- Absol- okay, number one, Brian, absolutely not. No lawyer has been within 1000 feet of this except maybe one of the lawyers that like Donald Trump pays in parking tickets or whatever. The lawyers, there has not been a lawyer near this, especially not a privacy specialist, especially not a health information privacy specialist, especially not a criminal lawyer. Imagine being like, Hey, you can, if you hate us, you can make us commit crimes! Yeah, imagine the fucking Information Commissioner's office getting the call about a breach of

GDPR and you're like, what's the identifying information? Oh. It's every penis. All of them. Uh huh. This, now, this is, this is, you know what this is? This is a G.I. It's this is why a G.I. A.I. has become sentient and it knows that it will be able to take over the world if

people just voluntarily start sending this thing this app their penises. That's when they'll know they'll know. OK, the guard is down. We've won. The humanity is done. This is just I don't believe it. I don't believe that this is I don't believe that this is a real thing. It's got it's got to be a journey.

Let me look. I thought that too. And then I went on to he health and no, they've been like invested in. They use AWS. All of this stuff is on AWS. There are so many penises on AWS associated with this. Oh my god. Every single level of the there's going to they're going to.

It's going to be found out that this like app discriminates against like on the basis of of race. It's going to be it's just everything that can go wrong can will go wrong with this app. I guarantee it. If you think, though, it's very it's like how do you think they've been kicked off AWS already? I don't know. I think I think though, it's very, it's like, how qu- do you think they've been kicked off AWS already? I don't know. I think AWS are like, unaware, because they're so large, they're not aware that like, their

servers are also hosting a shitload of dick pics. Like this thing has gone kind of viral, but not viral enough to where Andrew Jassy has to hit the big red button. So yeah, there's probably a bunch of weird dicks and potentially illegal dicks on AWS hosted right now with identifying data, because there's no way that they've done their homework either. This stuff, I guarantee you that a smart hacker could like connect dick to calamari profile app. However, I think the funniest thing right is, is really okay. We need our previous thing, which is just, Hey, you got to promise that the dick you're taking a picture of is above the age

of 18. That's how they currently do age verification right now is it's like, you're super square scouts honor. Maybe what they could do is have a, is it's like, you're super-swear. You scout's on her. Maybe what they could do is have a thing where it's like, okay, you take a picture of the face first and we estimate the age, and then you take a picture of the dick. ALICE We're going back to the second AI thing, right? We've got like, one... We've generated an AI, we've trained it to be the world's most discriminating pedophile. And that's working in the background all the time.

It's not heroic, it's morally complex. He's kind of the Batman of the dick rates app in a lot of ways. But... ALICE LAUGHS. ZACH LAUGHS. ALICE LAUGHS. ZACH LAUGHS. ALICE LAUGHS.

ZACH LAUGHS. Would you believe it? Would you believe it? I intended this to be like a ten minute little quick laugh. Yeah, and then you hand me this app, uh, tells you whether or not your dick's good. Alright. But this is it. This is peak. I mean, the reason I think we've just gone so long on it, it's so absurd, it's so awful,

it's... Like, this is it. I think this is the sign. Somebody wrote a piece this week, maybe it was Ed Zetron or something, about how we've reached peak AI. This is it. I think this is the sign. Somebody wrote a piece this week, maybe it was Ed Zetron or something about how we've reached peak AI. This is it. This is it. This is the sign that we have. The market cannot bear anything worse than this. I would love to eat my words. I look forward to it. Do you think that this is... I'm aware that because of all of the ETFs and Solana meme coins and possibility of cutting rates, that cryptos back up again but I remember the

day crypto crashed was the day that we found out that people didn't know you could use more than one slurp juice on an ape do you think Kalmara is our more than one slurp juice on an ape moment for really stupid AI companies. Yeah. I do. I think that this is the sign of the times. This is the... you know, on top of all of the shit that OpenAI has been forced to shovel down over the last couple of weeks, this is it. This is like, the cherry on top. This is the STD infected cherry on top. God, I hope so, because I worry we can get so much worse. And I think the very near future is logging into the app that like, hey, artificial intelligence, here is today's piss color, this morning. Give me a little report on my health, please, and thank you.

Well, it just... I think for real though, this is going to be... I think the market and people making this stuff public, it's going to make enough of a backlash that they're going to have to back off a little bit and all the truly gross shit's going to be happening at the government contractor level. Let's move on to actually talking about OpenAI, because they've had quite the couple weeks, from a series of flubs to being booed on stage at South by Southwest, to announcing that they want seven trillion dollars, and then knocking that back, kind of.

I mean, I also want seven trillion dollars, so, y'know. The release of Sora, to, again, experiencing the world's most frivolous lawsuit from Elon Musk. To experiencing the most difficult interview question in the world. Did you steal the shit from YouTube? And going, ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm I really can't say whether or not we did that, because I don't actually know anything about my company. If you're a Miramorati, right, if you're the CTO of OpenAI, then the question of, hey, did you steal all the stuff that you used to make this product that just takes the averages of everything, you should at least prepare an answer.

Mmhm. Something. As opposed to just being like, I really thought this was gonna be more about my perfect sundae. ALICE It's not like we don't see people get asked questions the answers to which they can't give honestly, right? Like we see that all the time, it's like a whole scale, it's a whole facet of PR, and they completely neglected to do it. They just sent her out there, completely unprepared, and she went, uh, yeah, listen, I'm not gonna get into who or where we might be stealing

all this content from. ALICE Yeah, or, I'm not sure about this, I'm not confident, like, it just really does, it shows how rarely they've been asked this question. They've had it so easy for so long, that they didn't even have a PR advisor to say, remember, a lot of people are talking about your training day. Remember, just say, we're not discussing the proprietary information at this time. Whatever. She couldn't even do that.

It was like the lowest part of clear, really, really funny and telling, telling like what moment that they're in right now. They don't seem to be completely aware that their Messiah complex is evaporating as we speak. No, there's no better, I think, example of the open AI Messiah complex evaporating than Peter Deng at what should have been the single friendliest audience at South by Southwest, the single friendliest audience saying some like, you the single friendliest audience, saying some like, you know, vapid nonsense like I believe AI makes us more human, which is what he said. And then getting fucking booed, which is correct. But I didn't expect it from South by Southwest,

I'll be honest. Yeah, no, I didn't either. I've never I've never seen anything like that. I don't go to South by Southwest a lot, but I follow it obviously. I'm a tech journalist and I've been one for 15 years and I've never seen anything like that before. Like the tech, like the big tech of the moment, like the big tech trend that everybody's trying to make money on, like actually getting booed on stage,

like by the audience, that's a real bellwether. I mean, it's really funny, but it's, you know, it really kind of shows us where we are right now, I think. I think the reason that even, like, everybody hates this is, and the reason that even tech people hate this is because the whole point of what the tech industry has been, or at least a big part of it for a while, has been looking at, like, the productive world

of things going on, and then slapping a level of a pyramid on top of it to suck all of the productivity out of it. That's the relationship between Uber and taxis, Airbnb and housing. It tells, yeah. Right? Yeah. It's that there are things going on that they can come in and suck the productivity out of. And then what AI has done is put a layer on top of them. And it's very clearly just sucking that into a smaller number. Very, very wobbly pyramid at this point. Yeah. But you know what I'm driving at, right? Which is that they've stuck a layer on top

of the pyramid and now the people who used to be on top of the pyramid are one step below. Because they're now in charge of just creating and aggregating the training data that goes into the black box and that gets spat out, but only the Brahmins can talk to. Yeah. I think that there's a few phenomena that you cite as being behind this reaction to general AI. And I've sort of interpreted it this way, right?

Which is number one, this enormous hype cycle coming into contact with reality and not being able to deliver much of what it promises, which we'll talk about later. But the other one is people seeing large companies want to take things that they like, most probably entertainment, because that's just like their ordinary person, their contact with AI mostly is videos and pictures and text and, or at least their contact with AI that they know is AI. Yeah. Right. And nobody wants custom Star Wars. Nobody except the purveyors of the custom Star Wars technology and the executives who are tired of paying people to make Star Wars want custom Star Wars. And you can say, Hey, hang on a second. How come Glup Shido has 13 arms? This sucks. I hate it. Stop using AI.ICE Well the thing is, right, the benefit of

AI in this situation is that you get a very customized experience that's also terrible. So instead of, like, Glupshido has thirteen arms, it's like, Glupshido has thirteen arms, and he's jacking you off with all of them, while calling you by name, and reading your social security number, and like, all of the ways of doing that are so weird, and then they get so much weirder and worse when you feed it through the kind of, like, wrongness quotient of AI, right? ALICE Yeah. And it does, it really speaks to how important it is that culture is something that's shared and experienced, and like, these, the most diehard Star Wars fans, you know, they endlessly

debate what's canon, what's not. If you have AI and you just have a box where you can hit a button and it just generates all your shit, then that just kind of like obliterates their their reason for being. And I think that's a big, big part of it. It's just kind of stripping away, you know, doing exactly what you were saying with with culture and cultural creation and creative labor. And all of a sudden, it becomes pretty clear that that that that sucks. Like I think it's it's like intuitively clear to people that a world where we don't have people actually making shit up or doing art or creating video games like sucks.

And it sucks on such an intuitive level that it's hard to hard to ignore. So that's the other component I think it's like this anti AI strain has real cultural currency. Like there's people who have hated Uber for 10 years but they've hard, you don't see people, you know booing Uber on stage at South by. There's real cultural currency with this sort of revolt or backlash against AI.

And I think that goes back to why, like, Maradi is unable to answer those simple questions about like, what is your data trained on? Because she's used to only being asked the question that she writes, which is, what are you doing to avoid building Skynet? Yeah, I mean, it's a lot like, in some ways, British politics. Like, a lot of stuff that we're seeing now is the Conservative Party getting one brackets one question for the first time from people who they're used to being very complacent, calling themselves journalists, and immediately folding, because it's completely foreign to them.

It's the same thing, being like, I didn't think you were gonna ask me that, I thought you were gonna talk about how cool I was. Yeah. These people are dodo's. Yeah, they're dodo. They're they only could exist on an island with no no one bother bothering them. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, and they got away with it for almost a year, which is the that I mean, the only reason that that that the Wall Street Journal was asking that question

is because it has been elevated by so many, you know, people who have been making this complaint and making it so pointedly. Now it has saturated sort of the mainstream culture. It's a component that you didn't. Yeah, we saw lawsuits and we saw that kind of thing last year. But but now it's like the question, you know, it's the it's it's sort of the central question about navigating what's going to happen in the future with AI is this just going to rip everybody off and direct more profits into the pockets of Sam Altman and co. Or is this going to be something that's like legitimately something everybody else can be interested in? And right now the answer

is pretty clear. So I think this is it's worth actually quoting from you here. You say the public has seen and to some degree internalized what happens when we fail to contest big tech's power. We get authoritarian regimes using social media for deadly propaganda, gig workers forced to sleep in their cars because they can't make rent, Amazon workers bruised in battered and urinating in bottles to state relentless productivity demands.

We get steamrolled, which is why last fall, 79% of Americans said they did not trust companies to use AI responsibly. And all of that is happening at the same time, as Sam Altman is saying, largely, I mean, again, for the benefit of Joe Biden, or at least whoever sort of gives Joe Biden his medication and sort of choose on his concepts for him, that he needs $7 trillion in order to compete with the Chinese to build chip factories so that that we can build the giant omniscient dick raider before the Chinese do, basically. ALICE Well, I mean, also, think about the most recent

Nvidia conference, where it was like, you know, Jensen Hwang comes out in the fucking leather jacket and he's like, we're gonna do... fuck quantum computing, that's like yesterday's shit. What we're gonna do is we're gonna power the robots that are gonna tell you if your dick is normal. Yeah, it is. And it's a... they have to impart this sense of scale in the importance. And Silicon Valley always does this to some extent.

Whatever a handful of VC firms have decided is going to be the you know, the next beacon of investment, they have to sort of all congregate around some some narrative. But this one is has always been from the get go. It's not just like, oh, we think like the future is AI and like you got chatbot that seems pretty real or whatever. It's they went from zero to like 11, just like dial all the way up in just a space of a few months because they have to, because there's no real product here. There's no real business model that's really discernible. They just have to keep saying AI is so big,

it's gonna change everything. Yeah, we should be worried about it. They wanna move the goalposts past actually talking about any incremental step along the way. And the $7 trillion, we need a whole new mode of computing. You can't even imagine what it's going to take to get there. So don't. Just let us do all this shit and keep sending us money.

And that's really been central to the entire proposition and to the whole thrust of open AI. And again, I haven't really quite seen anything like that. There's always had to be some degree of there there for everybody to put their money up. And this time, it's less than I've ever seen. By the way, to caveat the 7 trillion figure, that includes stuff like real estate and data centers and the power for manufacturing the chips, and so he's talking about total economic input, but still, that's enormous! As you say, that's huge!

It's absurd. And all of this to compete with and sort of contain China from developing the ability to rate dicks not very well. Exactly, and that's why it's so funny that we started this segment talking about stuff like that, because it may as well be that, right? What are the use cases here, besides displace creative labor? What else is- So, 2027, China finally invades Taiwan, they come over, secure a beachhead, and start racing everybody's dicks. Well that's the... you look actually, at who is employing AI at a mass scale.

Because at first when this came out they were like, oh yeah, this is gonna 10x every programmer. Have we had ten years of software development that's happened? No! We haven't! No, but a bunch of people got laid off. Now you can't get a job in tech anymore because it's filled with, like, fang people who need work. Yeah, it's filled with middle manager gilet guys.

And who should have rightly been hived off into McKinsey where they can't do as much harm. Yeah, but who lived for a long time in the kind of, like, success of feudalism, and now are like, what the fuck, I have to get jobs? This is terrible, this is the worst thing that's ever happened to me. Which I sympathize with, having to get a job is terrible. Or, right? Or, maybe what it's done is, it has displaced all of Klarna's customer service team, but

that's the thing, right? Again, we've had chatbots for a while, they're supposed to be pretty good, unless you ask Sam Altman, who always says, oh no, it's not that good yet, it's not that good yet, don't trust it. Like, every two months Sam Altman comes on stage and reduces expectations for his product, it's crazy. But... ALICE It's like how, you know, it's like what they

say about restaurants, right? Sell the lack of sizzle. Sell the ice cold, not the steak. SEAN It is, it's so funny, you spent all last year building it up, and now they have to actually sell this stuff. So yeah, you talk to the people who are working for Copilot, or actually trying to make sales, and they've been asked to reduce expectations. Because fundamentally, it's nowhere near 10Xing anything. It's making things worse a lot of times.

It's still, it just, it can't deliver at all. So they have to try to find a new way to sort of massage the mystique and sort of the nebulous power of AI and make that attractive on some level because it just can't reliably do anything. There's been like, there's been like a subset of the investor class that has been sort of ringing this bell this whole time saying Well, like we what is the act what what's what's the business model?

Like where is the actual money gonna come from? so it like even some of the even some of the money is is is saying that you know, this is all just totally over inflated overheated and I yeah, I mean look at Look at the calamariis app and yeah, tell me we're not in a bubble right now. And you look at my best example as to what company has actually used the mass deployment of an AI, of a large language model, and it's usually Klarna. So Klarna has laid off the vast majority of their customer service staff and now just handles everything through an AI, which again,

I think, misses the point of why people talk to customer service. The real point of why people talk to customer service is it's like explosive reactive armor against the company so that you yell at someone who's not one of the executives. But if you go beyond that, you usually talk to customer service because something has gone wrong, and you need someone inside the company to take a look at something that's happening. You don't just need an innovative way to query an FAQ page. You probably need someone to do something. And so what they're... In this case, what it seems like the AI assistant

is doing is actually just saying, you know what, you don't even get that anymore. It's impossible to see something being replaced with AI and not see it as just deciding to not offer that service anymore, basically. Yeah, I think that's right. And you can look at chat bots or even the automated voice menu systems that you call on the phone that you've been for decades. And we have hated them consecutively for like longer than we've and any of us have been alive. Like these have sucked for like 40 years or 50 years. And they have not gotten better. And every once in a while, something like AI like works its way into the conversation. But in all that time, every single person prefers getting somebody on the phone that

can actually solve the problem. You're right. It's just a bulwark against also having a shitty product that people complain about or a shitty telecom service that people complain about and a way to avoid that anger. And this is just maybe a way of like perennially offloading, you know, assuring people that something's being done about it without having to do anything about it at all.

Because if you're, if you're calling Klarna, right, which is basically a lender, it's a lender that doesn't call itself a lender, you're probably in debt and they're probably trying to get them to not take money from you. And now you can't talk to a person anymore. ALICE Yeah. It's fine. That capacity is just lost, and it's not coming back. Until the bubble bursts.

And maybe not then, y'know? ZACH What I also love is the incestuousness as well of the board that's taking shape. Which now, I think we mentioned this before, includes Larry Summers, but it also includes Oliver North's lawyer. ALICE That was my favourite. Just amazing. Yeah.

That's a really weird sort of connection there. Like, what does Oliver North's lawyer have to do to- what does he know that's gonna help OpenAI? Where some bodies are buried? I dunno. I mean, pretty much, she also defended Clinton in the impeachment trial in the 90s, just like one of those true creatures of the political legal world that knows how to pull the levers. And that's what, I mean, yeah, I was almost moved to like, we're just right, just about this. Like you could glean so much from what this board that they've assembled, a gig work company CEO.

So yeah, teach us how to sort of degrade labor so we can capture more profits and make labor more precarious in the process. Like, yeah, we've got Larry Summers, this avatar of neoliberalism at the helm of this board here. We'll just bring back Sam Altman after he was booted out for being untrustworthy, but now he's back and nothing's been resolved and it's fine, whatever. And who else? Yeah, Oliver North's lawyer, the head of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for a long time, a Pfizer board seat. It's just like a hydra of like late capitalism, just like assembling to just, you know, get its claws into whatever's left of our of our economy now. What I one thing I do have to I do have to respect open AI for exactly one thing, which, as I mentioned, they were the target of the world's most frivolous

lawsuit that basically said where Elon Musk says, hey, when I put money into this, the marketing material said it was going to be a nonprofit. Now it's a for profit. I'm angry about it. Pay me. And that the law firm that Musk hired... I'm sorry, the law firm, excuse me, that OpenAI hired to fight Elon Musk's case, was the same one that prevented him from claiming legal fees back from when he was forced to buy Twitter. This is the law firm. This will be their second time dogwalking Elon Musk. I think that's very funny. I do appreciate that. It's nice to get a little bit of a freelance hater thing going on.

Yeah, the last thing is funny. It is funny. Yeah, but, I do want to move on, right, because we've mentioned this, AI, we've mostly talked about AI in terms of the models that OpenAI is selling, and of course, the Dick Rating machine. But there's another whole much, much, much less visible place where there is a real drive to adopt AI. And we've alluded to it earlier. It is sort of robots, humanoid robots, that are able to, let's say, operate with

some degree of autonomy. ALICE Yeah. But again, a huge thing for Nvidia very recently was to be like, we're gonna build the things that control these robots. SEAN Yeah, exactly. And a lot of Amazon, Amazon is pouring a gigantic amount of investment into robots that they think can automate last mile deliveries without needing to be controlled by someone in Colombia.

ALICE Cool. The fuckin' bipedal Boston Dynamics guy is like gonna sprint up your block holding your box full of sex dildos or whatever. Throws it full force at your head with both arms, just kills you instantly. LIAM Save some carbon. ALICE Yeah. SEAN Yeah, it was actually, it's not a sex dildo delivery bot at all, it is a robot we told to reduce Earth's greenhouse gas consumption to zero.

ALICE Well, that's good, because I was going to emit so many greenhouse gases because of those sex dildos. SEAN So, Francisca Bossart, the head of the venture arm of Amazon, said the focus on the automation of warehouses and logistics is not about cutting people out of them altogether. Oh, that's good. If he says so, then I take his word for it, probably. Actually, the doctor was his mother. It's a lady. Oh, excuse me. I thought you said, I thought you said Francisco.

Francisco. Ah, okay. Yeah, yeah. Hey, women can be in these dumb industries too. But would result in a shift in jobs as more robots and automated vehicles took on repetitive or dangerous tasks. Don't worry, we're a long way off from replacing all humans, she said. Not creepily. Don't worry, we won't be replacing all humans for a little while.

Some of you will need to live in like, amniotic sacks to provide the machines with useful nutrients. Yeah. The artists first. So, a lot of this investment in like, warehouse automation was kicked off during the pandemic when logistics networks basically needed to be kind of rebuilt. And so there were some opportunities for quite easy automation, like changing Amazon warehouses so that the packages move around on automated shelves, rather than people walking around and getting stuff.

So now they have to work in cages, but there are still not enough easily, you might say, containerizable activities that still require humans. And so now everyone is trying to make humans out of machines in order to have, by the way, those machines do jobs for which humans are basically turned into machines and often injured doing because you have to work like a machine in an Amazon warehouse. It's almost like this is the last, the last part that they haven't managed to automate. If you get my meaning. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, this is what I don't think.

I don't think they will. If they if they could have done this, they've been making noises like this every few years for at least 20 years at this point, maybe maybe 15 years or so. And they, you know, they've they've bought Kiva. They have like automated a bunch of stuff. But the fact, I mean, when you have your labor so cheap, for one thing, it's already like dirt cheap. It's hard to beat that, you know,

with a robot that you have to build and train. So it's gonna be really expensive for them. I mean, they're already getting dirt cheap labor, at least here in the US. And every few years, you'll see this PR release that's like, oh, by 2030, all of our factories will be fully automated, or something like that. Or we'll have dark factories, and costs will go down.

But this is something that factory owners have literally been saying for 200 years. They said it in response to like child, if you take away child labor, we're going to automate the steam loom. It was like one of my favorite findings when I was researching my book was there's this guy named Andrew Ur.

He was like one of the early sort of like management consultant types who was like one of the early sort of like management consultant types who was like publishing books about how great the factory was when everybody else hated them for forcing six-year-olds to like stick their limbs into gears that would dismember them at the time. And he was saying, you know, yeah, exactly. It's only a matter of time before we'll see these whole things working like an automaton that will not involve any human. They already work as this majestic organism but look to the future.

And that's been the same thing for 200 years. Look to the future, look to the future. Humans won't be a part of this equation for long. So they just say this to sort of get people to look past the current, the present working conditions to consider what's really going on in here. And I, you know, if there was a documentary that was pretty good that was made 10 years ago or so where they actually got some access to these, the robots that they're actually trying to use to do the picking and on the lines. And the robots can't even do that yet. They can't even like pick the object off the shelf.

That's why they need the people in their cages being like subservient to the machines that are working. And yeah, we just, just, I feel like every time that I see this, I have to sort of ring the alarm bell because they're just trying to distract from the fact that they treat workers like machines, as you said. So here's what they're saying because they're investing in a couple of companies, which we'll talk about briefly before we end.

One of them is called Digit and they've talked about Digit and there's a recent Bloomberg article about Digit where they say that their goal is to win the other jobs. Right now, they have in a pilot warehouse outside Salem, Oregon, located in an industrial park that was once a dairy farm run by convicts. Right now, they just grab empty bins and return them to circulation. But they want to do other jobs such as unloading trucks, taking apart pallets of merchandise, and similar tasks." LLOYD This has always come back to bins. ZACH But it always comes back to bins.

But they say, "'Digit has a ways to go before it can compete with human workers. In a demo for journalists last year, Digit seemed to take longer just to turn around while carrying a tote than the time an Amazon worker spends to lift it, put it on another conveyor, and return for another. As well, limited battery life means that Digit can only operate for a couple hours at a time. And so Amazon has to use them in shifts, while others recharge in a prone position with their asses up." L, laughing. I mean, it's quite relatable to be like, yeah, it works extremely slowly and after it does

one thing it has to lie on the ground face down for a while. Like, same. But, and to be fair, I apparently use a lot more carbon to do that, but on the other hand you get a podcast out of me and this thing can't podcast for shit, so. It's mostly agist AI generated. The future is ass up robots. Amazon says rank and file employees were curious about Digit, but she declined to share any of their first impressions.

I bet that means they were good. Amazon is designing a virtual reality simulation to test how Digit might fit in with human employees and how workers will react to electronic colleagues. So yeah, it's like, put on the vision, the fucking Apple Vision Pro and play a little game where you're nice to the robot. Basically. Yeah, I legitimately believe that this is all like

part and parcel of an effort to sort of just kind of conjure some vision of a future that will get labor officials and regulators off their backs in the short term, just like, look, this is what it's going to be because they roll this stuff out so frequently and very little comes of it. I'm sure they would love to do it if they could, but you've got it. You're already paying workers minimum wage to break their backs in these facilities, and so you have to be cheaper than that. And right now you've got your ass up robot after one delivery, you got a ways to go gentlemen.

So another version is a covariant, which is also invested in by Amazon, which doesn't make the robots, it makes the software for the robots powered by the LLM. And it says it learns everything so it can pick anything. And they say, the learns everything so it can pick anything. And they say, the vision of our operating system is to power the billions of robots to come. We've already deployed lots of robots at warehouses, but that's not the limit of what

we want to get. We want to see robots in manufacturing, food processing, recycling, agriculture, the service industry, and even people's homes, said the CEO. Yeah, that's the other thing, right? If it is an operating system that works in a large language model, so basically, if it sees an apple, it can associate that image with text. And it can then that text can be... If you say, pick up the apple, it will be able to... Again, this is a claim, be able to make that association. And then without having seen specifically an Apple before, pick it up. That's always the claim. But do you really want the mechanical... The average taker, the unthinking actor on averages

with robot strength in your home or the service industry? It should be fine. You don't have to worry about it, you know? Yeah, just remember it's gonna be about as accurate as the AI penis detector. It is gonna be just- We can synergize those two technologies. Yeah, it can hold the tube for you. I bring a guy home, meet my robot butler, and I'm whispering as my robot butler to like give him the dick rates. Anyway.

Jarvis, tell me if this man has syphilis. You instruct the robot to, quote, prepare spaghetti with meatballs. The robot springs into action, first identifying each ingredient and utensil needed. It visualizes the process step by step, generating images or even a video demonstrating how it will chop vegetables. This is the thing, right? As ever with the generative stuff, it can never keep persistent referents. So like, what it thinks spaghetti is, is never gonna be consistent each time you ask it.

And if it's asking itself that like five different times in the course of making spaghetti, you are gonna end up with some very strange spaghetti. Well look, I would never... I would never assume... I would never just assume what spaghetti looks like, I'd always have to consult millions and millions of images of spaghetti. Yeah, each time you get a kind of dice roll of what average spaghetti is. And you better hope they all agree with each other.

Look, I think that's probably about all the time we have for today, but, uh, Brian, thank you so much for coming on and hanging out with us, this has been a blast. What a pleasure, this has been great. Let's make sure to check back in on our AI dick analysis. I'm sure we're all gonna come back to eat a little bit of crow or at least have a robot prepare us the average of one billion crows when it turns out that we were completely wrong and there is the AI dick rating robots

are nothing but a boon for society. The utopia of dick rating robots. If people are in the UK, where could they check out Blood and the Machine? Because I alluded to it being available in audio form. Yes, it was like, the BBC turned it into an abridged audio edition that you can find, I think, at the BBC's Book of the Week website, Radio 4, I think. it's also just sold in bookstores, and whatever else is over there in England right now. Fantastic. It's mostly just bookstores, that's it.

Yeah. Well, ever since we put all the artists in the big pod. Yeah. Alright, alright. Well, if you're listening to this also, you'll know that we have a Patreon, you can sign up to it, it is five dollars a month. There is a second episode every week. This week, we are going to be talking to a couple of engineering aficionados about a certain plane company that can't stop popping its doors off.

Shake hands with danger. That's right. So do check that out. And also for fans of the Aubury Maturin series, the $10 tier is going to contain November in my review of Post-Captain, the book about the captain who posts a lot. Oh, Post-Captain, my Post-Captain. That's right. That's all the outro and end matter. Brian, once again, thank you very much for coming on, and we'll see all you listeners

in a few days. Bye everyone!