Anthropol The Future of Human Insecurity (Session 1)

All right, so welcome to the first session of Nick Land's Anthropole, featuring human security. This is also the first seminar of our second season for the new center. So thank you all for being here. Looking very much forward to this event. Most Lemmy could not be here today. He's going to be taking my place for the rest of the sessions, but for now, just being here. Okay, thanks so much, Tony, for that. And thanks for the new center for this opportunity, which I really appreciate. And thanks to all you guys for showing up. I'm going to try to avoid spending too much time

in sort of lecturing mode in this thing. I much prefer we get onto a plane of sort of a discussion that seems to be kind of moving in some relatively coherent direction. So on this occasion I'll simply say a very, very few things about just course orientation and welcoming feedback very quickly on that and then seeing where things lead. And so I hope that this is a course that works at a number of different levels.

I think at the most straightforward level, it's a topic, now what the topic is I hope will emerge to some extent very soon, that is of great sort of ethnographic and sociological significance to a demographic of great importance to the world, which is the American tech elite. You know, if you sort of see, it's very, very telling that characters like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, these kind of, you know, titanic tech capitalist figures have all made very definite pronouncements on this question about AI risk.

So I think that we can be fairly confident. a conversation that is considered very important to those particular groups or maybe we should just say group and that alone seems to me to justify it as an object of attention for us. The second level that I'm going to try and keep locked in a box in the early stages but as we'll see locking things in boxes can be difficult is really a type of surreptitious political economy in the grand style that I think that this question about AI risk is a I'm going to put it in a way that I might want to

retract but I'll put it I'll say now is a displaced version of a displaced opportunity to talk about certain enormous issue is about the way the world is run, where it's going, what we can expect from it, and the kind of political and economic and social structures that are tied up with that. So I think that there's a range of things there. I think that there's actually a very crude Marxist analysis of this stuff that is still all very interesting to me. And I say crude because I think as we see things get tangled and twisted in ways that maybe can't easily be tolerated by that framework. But I think that that's something in the background. And if I can put this in the most sort of simplistic

way possible, it's to say, aren't we, in talking about AI existential risk, just talking about capitalism maybe sort of talking about it in a way that is sort of ideologically self-mystifying or evasive or in some other way refusing to actually address the real topic of conversation and I think that this is something that is going to be rumbling along underneath and And I don't think that's a stupid question. I think it's an interesting question, even an obsessively interesting question. And the third level is the most philosophical level, where I think that this is an opportunity

to engage in something that we might want to call radical ontology. And by that I mean we're looking at a hyperobject, you know, if we say what is this course about, the what, the thing that it's directed at, a thing of just massive importance to the world, is being structured here as a threat. And I think that that's an interesting approach. I think it's something that is very illuminating and opens certain doors. And the reasons that I think it's interesting are firstly because it's a threat is virtual.

So we're talking about something in a way that the very uncertainty about that thing is itself part of the object. The thing about a threat as opposed to many other sort of alternative ways of sort of constructing a basic ontological framework is that if you say, you know, how realistic is this or is this actually going to happen or should we be taking this seriously? All of those questions are internal. They're sort of imminent to the object concerned. You're not in a position of deciding whether or not in advance to dismiss that discussion or dismiss

that problem. Instead, you're actually defining and profiling the problem in giving some kind of estimation about how serious it's being taken, about how you're going to judge how seriously to take it. And the next element which I think is just massive is that it introduces, especially as we're doing it here where we're taking the prospect of artificial intelligence as the kind of governing feature of this thread it introduces an element of dissimulation that's to say we can't just assume if it seems to us not serious

we have to then say it does it seem to be not serious because it isn't serious or does it seem to be not serious because it doesn't want to look serious you know we're in a whole zone that melts into general cryptography into a a structures of military intelligence I'm that a to do with sort of risk evaluation against intelligent adversaries are engaged in strategic control of their own phenomenality objects that appear to us in a way that is actually strategically organized now of course you know if you're coming to this out of

more sort of mundane geopolitical threat analysis things this is all very straightforward when you you're you're sort of sitting around the the security room or whatever that in the in White House and saying do we take this particular geopolitical threat seriously it's going to be implicit in that question that you can't fall back on some naive notion that this thing is going to appear to you straightforwardly and give you a realistic profile of the actual menace it presents. On the contrary it's going to be you at least have to suspect, you at least have to build into your

into your threat analysis the fact that it's going to want to look like something different to what it is and so I think that this this problem is going to be a really major cable running through the whole of this this course the fact that we can never escape these questions about strategy and dissimulation when we're actually sort of looking at the object that we're involved with and just jump ahead a little bit to something that I'm I kick down the line on our course schedule but I just want to introduce it in a preliminary fashion and then step back and you can see that particularly in this whole question about

a artificial intelligence or robotics that there's a very a strong process of reinforcement on this issue because a a set of different concerns that can seem quite independent actually resonate strongly on this and we could break it down we could say there's a sort of hysterical paranoid notion about substitution of of the human species extinction the outer lying edge of this X-risk profile but then there's the much more mundane notion and we've already sort of touched upon this, it's hugely important in current discussions as people know about the future of labour and work and replacement

of human labour by machines. And the interesting thing about these is they're not really on a philosophical level strongly differentiated. They're basically the same topic, just looked at with a different set of emphases at a different level perhaps. But substitution is exactly what's at stake in both of those things. You move from one very quickly to the other. And you also then find yourself dealing with a third, also extremely popular notion that is part of everyone's kind of cultural currency, which is the Turing imitation game, which

also is obviously about substitution on another angle. And it's about, again, deception. It's about how you identify your objects. Set up in this way is the thing, how would we know we were dealing with an artificial intelligence? We would know if it could imitate a human being within the bounds of tolerance set by that particular test. So again, if it can mimic us, if it can imitate us, if it can deceive us into thinking it's one of us, then we have to treat it as an intelligence. So right from the beginning, I mean this is the most kind of, this is coming right from the earliest days of the sort of artificial

intelligence discussion, things are being set up in a way that could be seen from a paranoid perspective as extremely ominous. Because we're being told right from the start something is going to be classified as intelligent if it can trick us. If it can deceive us and deceive us in such a way that suggests it could replace us, then we're going to treat it as being intelligent. So that's just to say you can see this particular question about dissimulation is this kind of multi-fiber cable, and each of those fibers are rich, involved things, but they all, they

all cohere around this kind of crucial issue. And so this then takes us back to this threat analysis viewpoint. And as part of that, an indispensable part of that, is the fact that everyone has said from the beginning and continues to say that in talking about this phenomenon we're talking about something that is intrinsically deceptive. And there is no distinction between its intelligence and its deceptiveness. So yeah, as I say, I think that that particular block, if possible, I think it will keep creeping up but I've sort of set aside our third week for really focusing on that very strongly.

And so I'll stop in a minute, I'll just say one more thing. Sorry, if you can bear, two more things. The first is to say that I'm hoping to use a method of dramatization that I'm not sure is going to work. So it's something that could be dropped if it's not working for people. But it seems to me interesting to try to think these things through from the perspective of a virtual agency tasked with managing this threat. And I think that there's already germinal material for this.

The institutions that are thinking about this problem in the most paranoid and therefore in some ways most interesting way are obviously already little germinal security institutions institutions making suggestions about what kind of institutional response would be appropriate to this form of risk. And so what I'm hoping that we can do is to just inflate that and carry it forward and say, you know, if we were to take this seriously and actually construct some virtual political sociology on the basis of this threat management, what are we looking at? their analysis going to be like, what kind of resources and capabilities are going to

be called upon, what's that going to mean as a virtual social and political fact. And that is in a recursive analysis with this threat analysis. But on one side you might say it's almost inevitable, if we're taking this seriously, It's almost inevitable that something like this has to happen. And so we're in a position of trying to predict the developmental vector that we're dealing with there. Okay, now finally, last thing before I sort of throw through this, tuck it open to people, is just to make a reference to a novel that I've just read that deals with a lot of these

things in a very different way but also with extraordinary resonances which is this, he's as far as I'm aware the Chinese science fiction writer. China in an interesting way has a problem with science fiction, it doesn't sort of come very naturally I think from their cultural perspective. But this writer, Saoirsean Liu, is really, I would say, fantastic. People can have stylistic and aesthetic problems as Westerners dealing sometimes with the mode of presentation, but the content is absolutely fantastic. And the second part of this trilogy that's just come out is called The Dark Forest.

And it's set up, the underlying theme of that is of a virtual science that he calls cosmic sociology. You don't know much about it at the start, but by the end of the book you can see that that also is entirely about threat analysis and from the beginning there's two little guidelines given about what's going to shape that it's because we know nothing about aliens the whole thing is is he insists pure axiomatic theory it's a kind of game theory actually and the two pointers that are given

early on without knowing what they mean is what's called chain of suspicion and technology explosion and the chain of suspicion is what we've just been talking about it's like if you are dealing with potential intelligent adversaries then you're in the chain suspicion and you know they're not the very fact that you don't know whether or not they are an adversary is intrinsic to it this is the point that is absolutely central to what Leo is saying there in his book is that between for instance two alien species they cannot there is no possible way

that they can cease to treat each other as threats that forced by a certain game theoretical inevitability to be threats to each other they must realize that they themselves cannot but be a threat to other species and these other species cannot but be a threat to them and a lot of that is because you do not know what the a what alien intentions are obviously this affects human game theory but this is radicalized in this cosmic framework. Sorry, I thought there was one more thing about chain of suspicion, but I'll just drop that for a second.

And the second thing, technological explosion, is what I was hoping we were gonna try and focus on mostly this week. It's very, very central to the a I existential risk discussion but it's not uncontroversial and I've sort of in in the reading I provided I think you can see that there are debates about that I take the counter positions very seriously they're very interesting Robin Hans that I think has the detailed I'm response in this very long debate with a and Elisa Yudkowsky about this question of what they call the AI through scenario which is that it would just

explode this is what we're talking about today and he makes good arguments about why we should be suspicious but I'm just gonna my final bit of framing before I I passed over is as soon as we take this as a threat analysis we cannot treat this question about intelligence explosion as a preliminary question whose seriousness or credibility is going to be evaluated in advance and then discarded or set aside within a threat analysis it has to be a probabilistic a probabilistic threat of a certain obscure magnitude and even if you leave aside which you can't belong

the question about dissimulation ie something that was going to explode would be potentially strategically motivated to seem as if it wasn't the sort of thing that could explode or if it was going to explode if it was able to garner the capacities at an early stage to hide the fact that it was in fact exploding there's extremely strong strategic motivation for it to do that but even if we can shell those issues for a moment just treat the sheer factor explosion itself as as a threat then and this this is as kind of horizon the existential AI risk scenario

its it's something that is not ever going to disappear from the horizon even however much we can deprioritize it or tell ourselves that that maybe there are other concerns that should be taken more seriously. Searching Leo's thing about technological explosion is just to say between any of these two species caught in this game theoretic mutual suspicion, technological explosion means that you cannot ever be confident about the capabilities of a potential adversary because within a blink of an eye in cosmic time they can go from being completely harmless backward

to being extremely teched up menacing danger and this is obviously structurally the same as we find in the AI situation if we to the degree to which we take this question intelligence explosion seriously is the degree to which everything has to be done preemptively you know if you're already if the threat has already manifested it's already over so everything that your you can realistically and effectively do in this respect has to be done in advance and so that's I think the sort of starting point as far as I'm concerned where we are right now the

this course okay I went laughter on any longer on that song I will welcome any and responses from people suggestions Just because no one else is responding. Yeah, yeah, sure. It's Adam, by the way. So there's a concept which I think we might need to recognize and then put aside for this But it's called Pascal's Mugging.

Oh yeah, yeah. Crucial. Where you take something of very low probability, but massive impact, and so therefore, by making the impact term huge, you say, and so we need to worry about this. And I think a lot of existential risks come under that category. So it seemed interesting to mention early, even if we then need to put it aside. No, I don't think it's the sort of thing that can be put aside. And I think that it's crucial, and it's obviously, it is a piece of threat analysis, or at least it can be contextualized like that without any manipulation at all. And, you know, I mean, at least at this stage, I have this virtual war room, you know, with all you guys sitting around the table, you know, trying to thrash through what is the threat,

how seriously should we be taking it? what we can do about it. And that's an absolutely essential voice, you know, exactly saying, maybe we can get this threat, this particular threat, let's say we're at the moment fixated on this question of intelligence explosion, maybe we can get it down to the kind of, this marginal level right out on the tail of the distribution that we can just chop it off, you know, and we'll just take it if we get down to some fraction of a percent probability that something is going to happen we know from these rationalistic arguments that we can deceive ourselves very easily in those zones

we can very easily go wrong and make these philosophical mistakes when we're dealing with very very small tail end risk and so we're we're safer off just chopping that off and just and just swallowing swallowing whatever danger comes with that and but my initial response to that is at if we're going to see that as one piece of housekeeping that we could do here and I think it's only responsible to to see it then we have to be able to get the idea intelligence explosion down to a level of implausibility that would then merit us sweeping into the trash now I'm trying starting my

my sort of Bayesian thing is I'm starting somewhere like 50-50 you know if I've got you Kowski and and and and Hansen are you doing about is is a I the sort of thing that explodes or is it not then I'm gonna need some arguments that's gonna push that 50 that 50 percent plausibility down somewhere so low that we can get rid of it. And that's obviously something we could talk about now. Sorry, can I just ask, did people get a chance to look at the I.J. Goode essay? Because that's really, you know, either whether you have or you're going to get a chance to do it,

that is the master text of this intelligence explosion. The philosophical beauty of it is such a simple, clear idea, which is obviously that something that is able, that has not been specifically designed in order not to have access to its own internal processes, i.e. it's not in some sense right protected, it's not designed to avoid itself messing with itself that strong non-linearity is actually part of its internal processes, something of that kind that gets into the proximal zone of human intelligence will have access to the full engineering specifications of how something was brought

up to that level of intelligence and in a way that therefore means it's nothing at all like us. We have effectively no access at all to the mechanical background to our own cognitive capabilities. And so in so far as we're able to edge that forward at all, it's extremely marginal and probably pushing against a lot of biological resistances. a machine intelligence assuming that it has not been designed in a way that would stop it doing that and honestly I think it's very possible that the engineering task of making it incapable of changing itself

is even greater than the task of making it in the first place and so assuming that it doesn't have those if very effective inhibitors already in place is going to have some ability fell recursive self-improvement and the only mathematical pattern that fits recursive self-improvement is some kind of at least exponential development you know if it's got if it's at a certain level intelligence make a crank itself up to intelligence and plus a then from intelligence but say it's got more capacity to take itself up to intelligence past be and it's and it's on a rising curve and that is the good notion of intelligence explosion

and it makes a lot of sense you know if it's at that level of abstraction there are all kinds of interesting counter-aggressions but at that level of abstraction it makes massive sense and so that's why I think if it's gonna end up in the in the tail risk bucket it certainly doesn't start off in the tail risk bucket I just posted the text that you were mentioning on the chat ok cool excellent I'll be putting some links in there so if people come across anything that they think is relevant

that people should take a look at before next session use this classroom space for that and obviously also to make any points or to continue discussions or you know it there's no a there's no limits really a upon what you can use that for a few it sign client and so I recommend that people just check it out the classroom is now created and open, so at the end of the session we'll talk about it. How people can post things. Cool, thanks. I mean, is it possible for me if... sorry, yeah, no, go ahead.

Well, I was going to come back then to sort of this question of intelligence, right, right, because the debate between Hansen and Yukovsky was, it was very much about the nature of intelligence, it seems to me. Yes. Yes. And then you get this question of, because intelligence is like X, we therefore get a rate of self-improvement that's like Y. Right. And where Hanson is saying intelligence is like a city, there's thousands of little things or hundreds of little things that make it impactful, but is it like a car? Yes.

No, definitely. I think that there's a whole bunch of terms that I hope we'll get a chance to chew them over in the following weeks, and obviously intelligence has to be one of those. I think human is another one. I would say on this right off the bat that I'm not over-impressed by the sort of less wrong type and Yudkowsky definitions of intelligence very hugely, but it's not necessarily from Hansen-type objections. I mean, what it seems to me is our default position on that is that intelligence is defined

as a threat. That's to say, if we're taking a very serious notion of games, games in which people can be killed, intelligence is a capacity to win at games. so if something becomes more intelligent it becomes a more serious adversary that's just one dimension of this I'm not sure it can carry the full weight even when it's kind of tweaked around but it seems to me it obviously has to be the sort of default on this because we're all sitting around in the war room we're not interested particularly at this starting point in a kind of more sort of philosophical definition of intelligence.

We're interested in whether this thing is going to beat us and kill us. And sort of, so it's the intelligence is being defined as that. And Yudkowsky actually has a really excellent essay, which again I'll link to, I'm afraid I haven't, I think, done that yet. and I haven't got the accent right at my fingertips, where the whole essay is really dedicated to the notion about how dangerous intelligence is. You know, he says, look, humans are a supreme menace to every other life form on this planet solely because they are intelligent beings. You know, they can nuke the planet into charcoal because they're intelligent.

I mean, it's the ultimate strategic capability. and I think that it's a very important point that's has to be taken out of realist I'm international relations theory and and you know insofar as that's defining what we mean by by threat analysis here is that it's the capabilities of your opponents and not their motivations that have to be taken into consideration like you know you're not you're not engaged in serious threat analysis if you asking do these guys like us you know you first all have to say given that they wanted to make things difficult for us how could far could they do that

and and I think so that's the that the experiment in radical paranoia that I'm I'm hoping to engender about it throughout this whole process she so insofar as we have laws here I'd be interested in anyone just telling me what day expect and would like to think about and talk about following weeks because obviously I don't know a lot of you guys and I don't know where you're coming from or

what your interests are and that to me would be very useful information I'm sure also to your fellow participants so if anyone is feeling brave enough to volunteer that kind of information that would be very welcome and sure thing my name is Joel I am a sociology PhD student I did my master's work on developing a post-human ontology for sociology and my dissertation research is on addressing the ways in which these new post-human frameworks cause anxiety so I'm not going to understand and examine sort of the social anxieties that arise from these changes so that's why this seemed like a great okay for developing yes no I definitely hope we can generate a lot of anxiety with

I'm assuming that you're not entirely sure about whether anxiety generation is a motivation to be endorsed, or at least it's something to be critically examined. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that it is too frequently treated as something we need to do away with rather than looking at the positive sort of uses of this anxiety. most of what I'm trying to examine is the ways in which people don't know what to do with the anxiety and so it simply turns inward rather than being able to express itself Right, yes, yes Well that's very relevant to this, I mean I don't know how seriously at this point you take these kind of anxieties

but they are they are I think characterized by a quite I'm not sure I can see unique but but in some way at least exceptional self institutionalization you know I mean the people start all the big names in this field obviously I think you'd Kowski sort of towers I'm pretty bad but Nick Bostrom's also another character a very important in this and they all move very quickly from the anxiety to a set of sort of practical suggestions about the kind things that we should be doing at different levels of collectivity to address what they see as these dangers.

So for sure, Anthropole, this virtual entity, is a crystallization, a positive, productive crystallization of human anxiety. I'll maybe introduce myself. You already know me. Yeah, sure. It was a fantastic seminar. I have several interests. I'm doing a thesis on innovation and I work in information security, but in sort of the big four consulting KPMG sort of vibe. So there's a big, I'm really interested in the difference between the startup culture versus the actual, the global, these KPMG,

the difference between these sort of corporate enterprise and startup Silicon Valley innovation and how organizational learning persists. Another thing as well is something which you are very much in your older work about, is about this kind of savage atheism. And what I see in this, it's an attitude towards the future. And it could be the Chinese are taking our jobs. It could be, you know, the apocalypse. I'm really interested in, or now it's Ray Kirkwall and the technological singularity. So there is this view towards the future of this coming something, which I really see as theological in origin, as at some point, some magical event will occur.

and I'm trying to understand how innovation actually happens, which is why in our previous discussion I mentioned avionics as a really interesting industry, which is a good example of how innovation actually does occur. And that's a lot of my interests, and I'm also interested in sort of how, in the relationship to work and to future. Right, yes. I mean, obviously, this whole sort of cultural diagnosis of especially singularity ideas as a theological structure is huge and sort of, there's lots of interesting discussion

about it. I mean, and I think there's a few things that can immediately be said. I mean, And one that to me is interesting is that obviously there is a reciprocal comeback to that that is seen like, sorry, I'll take one step back from this because there's a piece of work that I'd really like to do and I'm sort of slowly assembling on the sidelines that I think is sort of very suggestive, which is to put alongside each other Ray Kurzweil and a guy I don't know whether you heard of called John Michael Greer who's actually the arch Druid of America and these two figures are fascinating to me because they are conceptually

perfectly complimentary I mean their attitudes to each other is totally dismissive and contemptuous insofar as they recognize each other's existence at all but baby step back and you look at them both together and they slot together as this reciprocal die at because rakers fire as everyone I think assuming is familiar with him but his whole thing is basically a positive feedback you know the the exponential curve a positive feedback is the basic line that everyone is on an every all his His predictions have been on that, his understanding of what is happening on this planet is based on that. And John Michael Greer, who's a druid, he's a really smart, interesting guy.

Sorry, maybe that sounds a bit crass. I mean, there's no reason why druids shouldn't be smart, interesting guys. He's a druid. And he's a druid who's a sort of cybernetic druid, quite explicitly. And he sees negative feedback, homeostasis, self-regulation, again, as this overwhelming cosmic reality from which any kind of positive feedback is a kind of temporary unsustainable deviation. And so you have between these two figures these two reciprocal types of cybernetic fundamentalism that that match each other that totally between them between the two exhaust the whole abstract pattern of dynamic systems

and and they caught the clean on communicating because each of them are on one side of this thing and I raise this now because John Michael Greer is always arguing that Kurtzvall is just doing Christian theology you know that the singularity as the rapture it's like that he's one of his interesting things is he or he's very sympathetic to this mode deep cultural analysis and because he doesn't believe in runaway curves he he's got a strong commitment to rhythms and cycles and processes of these kind of cultural I'm Chris of cultural conservatism basically

I'm but cuts are has a quite interesting comeback on this because he says yes of course it looks like that because a apocalyptic religion is just some kind of precursor insight into this reality that's gonna happen its it's not that the the singularity is just a kind of sad echo of this theological belief, it's rather the theological belief is some kind of advanced wave of the singularity. And of course these two things are perfectly reciprocal. You know, you can see I think that the conjunction is

absolutely uncontroversial, but then that still leaves you a huge amount of room for how you're gonna play the relation between those two different poles of the thing. That's really interesting. I'd like to have a microphone. Yes. I'm Brendan. I'm Hale from Australia. Hi. Hi. I'm just talking about intelligence and maybe the question of identity, I guess. Right, great. Do you have a... Yes. Because if you look at like existential threats, you have to...

It's going to be... It's late here. But if you're basically engaged, if we're going to be doing like an anthropole in a war room, you're being engaged in a sort of like I don't know if it, Dalsky might call it he'd say that you're doing all sorts of things with an intelligence entity you're trying to preemptively explore its possibilities of action and things like this you're basically in a situation where you have to you have to try to think as best as you can use as much intelligence as you can against this thing so I'm just trying to get the axiom of

intelligence optimization and the way that intelligence works as a strategy you know as a sort of strategy that it has to be I guess employed by any intelligence agent in this sort of cosmology that you're talking about with Dark Forest. So how is it possible that, well, not how is it possible, but I guess here when you're talking about deception, it really puts us in a box, I guess, in some ways. That in order for us to even try to play with these dangerous games with this

you know, you're you sort of instigate this area where someone's going to have to reach this point of I don't know I mean, yeah, you have to either react against intelligence itself in some ways, I don't know, and retreat back into you know, or if that's possible I mean, no, no, no because I think this is all great, this is totally right. This intersection of these game theoretic problems on this terrain is absolutely what I'm hoping we're going to be able to really dig into. And you're right that they're just full of really hideous, ominous paradoxes. I mean, I'm assuming this, I'm assuming Anthropole

is going to have computers. It's going to want to analyze data, it's going to be able decrypt codes it's gonna want to be able to mobilize synthetic intelligence in its I'll it's gonna be doing it your ass and therefore there's no way like you say it can its always got this problem is this thing already inside our systems you know how deep inside our systems is it if you take one that power one step like you know is it already has it already totally infected all our resources for dealing with it. You know, and of course there is a kind of, in principle, there is a possibility of just

retreating into some deliberate form of idiocy as a defense mechanism. It's obviously very questionable on game theoretical grounds whether that is practical. You look at the real landscape, you look at the landscape in which being able to mobile Globalized intelligence is a massive competitive advantage. If you don't have an integrated common purpose that the whole world can say as one with great confidence in its total coordination that we will all step back into the sort of darkness of technological incompetence together, then those fractions and fragments of your geopolitical

system that are not playing that game that are you know doing all the game theoretical stuff to do with defection and deceit and betrayal and are secretly running their own AI programs are going to clean up in the intermediate period so you know you have to expect game theoretically that those fragments those sort of strategies and agencies are mobilizing intelligence rather than retarding it are the ones that are going to actually dominate any realistic scenario that you're talking about, it seems to me. So yeah, I totally with you on the questions that I hope we can deal with here.

Does this concept in cybersecurity or information security that is gaining currency, that if you want to secure an organization, actually you need to come in and assume you're already compromised. Right. That's good. So it used to be this model where there was a security wall that you established and you could trust everything inside the wall. Sort of inside an organization, that model is going away. Right. And you have now an approach you have to assume you're compromised and all your actions are starting from that. Yes, that's great. I mean, I don't suppose it's possible at some point to squeeze some kind of link or reference out of you. Is there for that?

I know these things are difficult. I think there's some basic stuff, yeah, which at least is a jumping off point. I mean, it sounds to me that it's like on one level taking a sort of biological model. Is that right? of saying look the human body does not expect that it's going to be exclude all pathogens at some kind of security membrane instead it has to have some sort of deep biological competence at identifying and dealing with infection you know that's kind of penetrated deep into the organism and anything that that expected it could do that stuff at the border is going to be so fragile that it will its defense.

That's a great point. Burke, it's interesting in consulting, there's this old view of like the end here architecture, where you have multiple sort of levels of security. And the new thing which I propose, which Signalman proposes, like, don't trust anyone. and assume you will always as well be penetrated and focus not on like the best firewalls but on rapid response and understanding what's going on inside the organization because you will be hacked. It's more about there will be exploits. It's more about being able to immediately detect when that is happening rather than

mitigate and preemptively mitigate. Yeah. So it's not fair. It's definitely this is all a sort of crucial border territory. I mean even on the most sort of the lowest level of this where we're just talking about recruiting personnel. now. I mean, obviously, Anthropole would basically be recruiting among people who had worked on, to a large extent, people who had worked on these questions of Internet security, information security. But so then there's a question of, well, how... if you were briefing those people on their first day in Anthropole, what are you going to say to them? The one thing you're going to have to say to them is, look, you're not dealing with human hackers here, primarily.

That might be part of the noise of this, but the threat that you're dealing with here is one that cannot assume even rough parity between antagonists. Like some of these kind of information security ideas are extremely interesting, like for instance, the notion of retaliation is big, as I'm understanding it, where you say, look, just think that you've kind of got some strong firewall around your organization you have to understand who the people are coming to get you and then you go out and you harass an attack then you know you you find out which computers are being used to to to compromise your organization you've done mess with those computers you you you treat the whole world as this kinda

open information space full of antagonistic things and you use various forms of deterrence retaliation whatever to control that political environment rather than thinking that you can produce some kind of hermetic bubble of security within it. But obviously this is something that reaches limits when you're dealing with an explosive intelligence threat. So if it comes to Anthropole, they're trying to secure the interest of human intelligence against a more advanced intelligence or against a machinic intelligence.

Yeah, I'm reluctant to be dogmatic about that. I think this is something we should have as part of our agenda. What is the ultimate motivation of Anthropole? I mean I'm confident in saying, look, friendly AI already exists. I don't have to invent this thing. Nick Bostrom's notion of existential risk already exists. So this stuff is on the table already. And they are saying to differing degrees of articulacy and conceptual penetration that there is something that needs to be protected as of value and is being menaced by these various threats of which

of course for us we're I think going to be obsessively AI focused. But I think that this is a horizon of conceptual confusion. I don't think, for instance, Nick Bostrom is able to be perfectly clear about what he is protecting. And it does get into an interesting domain. Like at what point, for instance, does some form of human improvement actually cross over into being a kind of alien invasion.

I mean, there's one, I think, very relevant figure who I'm sure is going to come up several times, a guy called Hugo de Garis, who I'm sure lots of you have heard of already. And he says, look, you know, it's often put that there's this set of triple options here. He sets it up in a way that's very conducive to our thing, it's a kind of militaristic threat scenario and he actually, his horizonal thing is this thing he calls the Gigadeath War between basically those forces facilitating the emergence of artificial intelligence, who he calls cosmists, and those resisting it, who he calls Terrans, and the Terrans are

in this I think close to this question about deliberate retardation of intelligence as this kind of human security imperative and he says look sometimes people say there's this intermediate group that I think he calls cyborgs who would be enhanced humans who would sort of go with it to a certain degree and it can sort of extend human possibility and capability and he says the trouble with that is that he's a big intelligence explosion guy he says it anything like that would be drowned out so fundamentally you know at the point where you are you your shh bread a few men inheritance

but sort of you know that is one billionth part of your cognitive capability and the other 999 million whatever parts are all synthetic. Have you preserved humanity against this threat or have you just simply drowned humanity in it? So I think this is a serious thing and I don't know what someone like Nick Bostrom would say about that. One of the things that I think is most problematic about this is the whole idea of how we would even define the human as a starting point. Since modernity, the changes that have occurred

in the reciprocal relationships that we've had with ourselves and our environments, the idea that we still exist as the same sort of creatures that existed historically is very difficult. I mean, there's no way to actually find a foundational human on which we could say, alright, so many changes that go beyond this and we no longer exist as this anymore. We already exist in very real ways as hybrid beings or whatever we want to call this. So that becomes one of the really difficult aspects of even thinking that we still exist as humans and have something that is there that can be saved in modern society. Right. Yes.

I mean, I think that this can be pushed in different ways. I mean, on one side of this argument is something I think is an extremely interesting book I don't know whether people know it which is Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate and he argues there that the number of kind of human universals are quite immense he sort of lists a hundred things that he thinks are sort of specify us as a species and are quite concrete and relatively inflexible. I mean, for instance, just take one that's sort of obviously relevant to our discussion here,

which is just to talk about IQ range. Now, obviously, you could have various kind of theories about eugenic and dysgenic change across human history, and there's lots of interesting stuff about that. But I think we can assume that the IQ range we're talking about has only fraction that we move up or down within this spectrum compared to the sort of things we're thinking about if we're talking about a self-amplifying explosive artificial intelligence. Something that would people say millions of times, billions or trillions of times more intelligent than any human being ever could be. Now that's obviously, putting it like that, I'm putting certain constraints on what we're

going to say human is. And you can go the other way. You can say, look, something is human if it's come out of our cultural and civilizational lineage. So after we've shed, we no longer use DNA replication, we've shed everything recognizable from our tradition. But if there's a continuous lineage into the future that passes through us, then that would still count as human. So it's basically, there's a spectrum of possible positions that you can take on that, and we have to decide. And I think Nick Bostrom is conflicted about it. I mean, I think he sort of wants to use the word in both ways,

and there's probably reasons why because if you're trying to motivate people to protect something then you probably have to address you know where they are in psychologically socially culturally in terms of what they recognize as a themselves or even an ally a potential ally and if you if you say look this thing that is in every way actually alien to anything ever met is still us then you just meet those kind of practical barriers of people just saying why the hell should I care about that thing or even the opposite you know I really don't want that sort of thing to replace us again this is the bottom line is the substitution you know

at what point are you substituted and if you're being substituted and you're not treating that as a threat. I mean, maybe that's possible, but it's certainly extremely understandable that people would say being replaced is by definition a threat scenario. Does anybody else who has yet to say anything want to chime in?

yeah I mean if anybody if anybody it whose lurking feels they can pluck up courage to just introduce themselves then that would be great I'm not gonna come twist people's arms to do that them but I would appreciate it I can go. Hi. Hello. I'm Mari. Hi. I'm a certificate student, and I'm working on a hopefully tactical polemic against internet.org currently, and so that's where my interest lies in right now.

Sorry, can I just pause you for one minute because should I recognize internet.org? I can definitely talk about it a little bit. I didn't want to assume, I don't know. Should I? Yes, I would be interested. Sure. So it is an initiative of Facebook, but they've partnered with quite a number of really highly powered companies, Sony Ericsson, Nokia being some of the bigger names. But it's basically an initiative to abstractly connect the two-thirds of the world that is not connected. Right. And right now, if you look it up, it kind of seems like it's still in the proposal phase, like something that will happen, that will be brought about by Wi-Fi drones and

will be brought about with newer consensus models about, you know, broadband technologies and et cetera. But really, it's been fully operational for over a year. in 15 or 16 countries right now. And basically that looks like internet.org partnering with local telecoms to get a zero rating and get folks to be able to access their suite of apps without paying for data. Basically that's what it is right now. And so I'm really interested, you know, off of that and for this class in looking at consensus models, right, and when global consensus is the threat

and when it is something that needs to be brought about, and how individually we feel about that. And I know that you had wanted to take a bizarre, dramatic way into this course by thinking about a global bureau, and I think that's such a fantastic idea as a way to not prioritize critique of global consensus, which I think even me, I find myself accidentally sounding very localist and critical when that's not even what I mean to be doing necessarily, but I'm too afraid to envision what those models could look like without sounding naive or post-everything.

So that's what I'm really stoked to talk about and really... Okay. I'll definitely look this up then. Is there already a kind of discussion underway that you're involved in that's kind of criticizing this? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, a lot, especially in India, Pakistan and Colombia, which are three of the countries, There's been a lot of outrage about the disregard for net neutrality in the project, but I'm hoping to kind of springboard through that towards a discussion of jurisdiction more broadly and kind of lobbying displaced by, yeah, really bizarre consensus models of best practices

and norms. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of proxy. Okay. That sounds good. I mean it's like a very big part of this problem or you know if we have a threat analysis model of it is tied up with questions about coordination. Like certain things just purely through lack of co-ordinate you end up in a certain game theoretical situation. you know so for instance that this she'd leo's trational something much more doubt a way you say I'm if you have a bunch of parties that are not strongly coordinated to have a

a real coordination problem and day was will have a certain inevitable competitive logical governor and interaction which will mean that certain things cannot be stopped you know so this is I think a big anthropol concern let's say you could displace it just sort of for a minute I think is an interesting one is like instance certain bioethics people have a very a big anxiety about this kind of new positive private eugenics which is coming out of the whole sort of biotechnological revolution and and that involves a lot of these coordination jurisdictional issues

in the sense that a society in a competitive framework a society that said yes week we cannot afford not to click another 20 or 30 points onto our IQ's by using these certain techniques is obviously gonna be in a competitive advantage in in a fragmented environment against agencies that refuse and say we've got a big ethical problem with this, it's messing with human nature in a way that we don't find acceptable and the pure lack of means that a certain outcome is kind of almost guaranteed by just these dynamics of the game itself and obviously AI is like that, it's a big thing for the

the AI security people because they say look if our attempt to make AI safer in anyway makes it less effective or is in any way retarding the advance in computer science and computational competence and the access of societies to the highest possible level of synthetic intelligence then they will be processed out purely by the fragmentation of the system someone is going to do it and if someone does it everyone has to do it that's the way these things work so I'm assuming that those kind of problems are very tied up with this is that right or am I just projecting?

absolutely yeah I mean I can see that this internet organ at a certain extreme of paranoia begins to look like begins to look like the sort of thing that Anthropole should be stomping on as quickly as possible. Well I think it's just so scary and really difficult to talk about in easy terms because it is so you know decentralized which gets conflated with democratic so people don't get as scared about how central it is as a threat and kind of picking apart those pieces in a way that is completely accessible and still terrifying is a real task.

I mean, if you had a sort of, at the moment, your sort of default analysis of what is driving this process, what do you think it's to do with sort of recognizable corporate interests to do with profitability or do you think there's something more to it than that? I think, I mean, I definitely want to parse through that more throughout the course, especially it's really hard to not think about Zuckerberg and Elon Musk as these, you know, profit CEO figures that do have a really kind of constructed myth that is peripheral to just our really

reductive corporate understandings of them, where he's so preoccupied with the idea of eliminating desire and talks about that so much that what that actually looks like and means is really shifty and hard to pin down, whether that's a quality of life that's given to everybody and that's an elimination of desire, or a way of bringing desire into algorithmic structures where you can track them and that being tied up. Right. See, that's where it gets really tricky. And I think it's really easy to, you know, take a really specific form of critique that's just about profit

and really ignore how complex the myths are and how probably good he does feel and want to feel and how many elbows he's rubbing with at so many levels. Can I just check you on who the he is here? I'm not sure. You're talking about Zuckerberg. Yep. Zuckerberg. This is his baby. This is his project. Right. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. But I think it ties into a lot of your comments about Elon Musk even earlier. Although they're definitely different people and have different visions, the ways in which they see themselves as governors is very similar. Yeah. No, I mean, the role that these particular corporations have is something we'll probably

inevitably have to talk about a lot, isn't it? I mean, obviously Google is the other one that seems to be just the sort of gravity well of Google is just reshaping the whole sort of information space so fundamentally, So positive or negative, you just can't avoid putting these proper names on some of these processes. And obviously when people are looking back on the history here, it's going to have been just shaped by these particular agencies fundamentally, for sure. I mean, I've always sort of had a big problem with Facebook that gets in the way of me taking it seriously enough. So I'm going to try and stoke my paranoia a bit more about it.

I'll look up your internet.org thing and try and feed some anxiety. Well, Facebook sort of, it's always very cute, right? And the Google cars that they're designing are even designed to look cute. So you'd link that back to what you're saying about AI sort of hiding, right? Absolutely. It's probably going to look cute. It's going to be a deadly Hello Cutie branded sort of AI. Yeah, yeah. No, I think this is really crucial, actually. And I recognize it as a big systematic cognitive error on my part that I'm only now beginning to seriously deal with, exactly as you say.

I mean, you know, cuteness and war, far from being opposed, are actually totally the same thing when you start taking them seriously, isn't it? And, you know, I thought, despite all its problems, that Ex Machina movie was quite interesting like that. It's definitely something people are beginning to realize, is that for instance you know when you're dealing with humans let's just forget about the anthropologist but look at the kind of machine incursion perspective when you're dealing with humans of course you go through sex if you're going to manipulate control you know it's like you're not gonna have some

kind of multi machine gun laid enough terminator beast you know it's gonna be some kind of sex ball that actually is the front line the front line of this day for sure because you know like an amazing thing on this line was this thing of this recent what's it called Ashley Madison or whatever that you know that what the adultery website where they obviously all got exposed because of this hack it found it turned out that ninety percent of the female participants on this site female with whatever into it comes you on what box you know so this whole clientele this this kinda and adultery

website was basically involved in this kind of on which a and cyber sex thing and and the company's fundamental business model it turned out was just tweak and develop these female avatars that people would then involve themselves in these complex online sorta pre affairs with without apparently any suspicion of what was going on so you as a testament to the fundamental manipulability of the human of the human species in this direction already I mean talk about a Turing test you know like of course on a certain level the Turing test is something

I have on another hand this is these things were passing the Turing test every day you know the company's whole the company's whole this this model was the fact that it was passing the Turing test everyday I don't remember ever seeing any news story about Ashley Madison clients up in arms about the fact that they're being foisted off onto sex bots when they're looking for sexy housewives. It was totally working until some hacker opened the whole thing up. So, yeah, a long supportive comment on that. I think that's crucial.

I guess I wanted to raise what I've posted in the chat there is, if Antipol is this global organization task with containing human security, what sort of model would we use? UN or the kind of we were discussing the Zuckerbergs, the Elon Musks of the world and these people in their rhetoric talk about disruption, about post-scarcity, automation, but there is immense power in the Boeings, the Airbus industry, the military industrial complex, they're not

is going to go away peacefully. And they have decades, centuries of experience in large-scale innovation. So I wonder how much power these new upstarts have, and they do have immense power, and how this will play out. Because I hear, for example, Goldman Sachs is like trying to implement Bitcoin. They're trying to make use of it, for example. I'm but those are thoughts talk about how the model you know to now I mean that's this is kind of this is just halfway on your point here but I think it's worth just pausing on that because it's a

very good example of this the way this coordination problem thing works out I mean I'm assuming these financial companies would if they could go back in time hunt down whoever Satoshi Nakamoto was and terminate the past that you know they would totally do it but that opportunities gone and pure pure fragmentation even all these kinda concentrated finance capital operations means they cannot not go down the road blockchain you know they must be hating it with every step constantly aware of the terrifying dangers I mean you cannot even have debt on a block chain so imagine what a bank is thinking when it's kinda

bringing this kinda technology inside but you know it has to compete other people might do it this is the latest thing you know it's and latest not just cuz it's fashionable but because it has a little so level functionality that is a inescapable and so you have to go you have to walk down that. So I think that's just a great example of the way those things work but yeah that was only one step wasn't it on your... Yeah I guess though as well like the trouble is to do really complex, I've been reading up on Galbraith a lot and he's got some really interesting the way big firms actually detest

the financial markets as much as we like to talk about if you watch the series Mr. Robot they show the evil corp actually he says that the big corporations are the only ones with the resources able to develop large scale innovation and they fear the market because of its volatility and the reason why finance is useful is because of that time trick pretty much, creating something out of nothing. Like how can you develop something that takes decades to produce? I'm thinking of the Philadelphia project. It takes decades to produce. It's horrible, but it was only due to an immense

planning. So as much as like in the US they like to talk of this rhetoric of like free market and enterprise, it's probably the most planned economy, particularly the libertarians against, you know, the hardcore libertarians against the US Federal Reserve. However, as useful as I see the blockchain as a form of like, as a record system, because the paranoia never ends, you never know, you can never 100% guarantee data integrity and information assurance. So the blockchain in this sense is remarkable. However, would it replace those other forms of heavy industry?

That's, you know, so even if there was this artificial intelligence, we'd be able to just purely operates on I all worth trading platform what about have been what about and that looks gonna be right yes the role of big finance big finance and big and big industry I'm big like a heavy mit be in this year yeah I mean it did I'm think I probably spoke about her a little bit last time Carlotta her s has a some very interesting things this but she says the role of finance

you have to see it in this in these long waves because it has a very different role these different stages of the of the cycle and everyone tends to just fixate on the way finances working at the particular phase that they're in and say that that's what finance is about but they're missing the fact it has this whole cyclical function and at the at the boost phase of the of the cycle it has this very disruptive function because of the fact the all the sleep being copped industrial structure is resistant to radical transformation and so the small operators are only able to rip up that that

pre-existing structure by the fact they can access this I'm kind of a free-floating large sums of free-floating financial capital that was then invested these kinda major major projects and and without at she says you know without finance operating in that role then the the big dinosaur industries when you take age will be a immortal you couldn't get rid of them they will just control the economic landscape so much that they would be able to squeeze out anything as weeds you know that tried to get in so I mean I definitely agree that there's a sort of questions about the function of finance that completely

unavoidable and how that we'd we they would we would now factor into our are specific AI x-risk threat analysis matrix I'm not sure. I imagine yes the AI would exist and its objective if it doesn't need the heavy industry because heavy industry is probably to produce needs for human consumption. It doesn't need the management of demand so it doesn't need advertising shows AI exists so in some way we would have to be on the side defending these heavy industries to an extent

in a weird paradoxical way yeah I mean we have to obviously I think I'm not sure what's the right way to sequence some of these discussions but obviously I'm we've already seen that that the category of what that the human is highly problematic and and yet needs lots of tweaking around intelligence to and obviously more specifically artificial intelligence and you know what do we mean when we say artificial intelligence I mean obviously on one level it doesn't matter what we mean when we say it where we're confused but even so we can we can try and sort of at least get some sense of what our

are for cognitive constraints are on this and I think the one massive source of bias in this is that the people who tend to define what we mean by artificial intelligence themselves had a great definite interest in a certain model of artificial intelligence you know they tend to be people who are programmers and think that they are actually gonna sit down and maybe in a group and aspect probably a small group program an artificial intelligence you know it's like no not I'm not wanting to say this is cynical on that I think they just simply see that's the way it is you know they they big they good at what they do they see programming

really works they think it's a fantastic saying they love that and you know AI is just one of those interesting things that come into this large world of cool cool coding projects you can do and but I think it's probably very a very easy way you can be misguided to take that to unquestioningly in your idea about what AI is and that's why it's good to talk about the blockchain is good to talk about these more spontaneous distributed unintentional processes you know again this it comes out of this thing about coordination issues like an uncoordinated

emergent event is if that's the model of intelligence in general then we it gives a very different picture what we're talking about AI as something that's just one big program that someone has put together on a on a massive. I really like a few things perhaps on existential risk and where you define AI as essentially capital and you said that's really like a focus of your and that is how I see it as well AI is not just a computer which wakes up one morning and says hello my name is you know Hal it's actually more about the wager and it's about

the markets which has this because no that the minutes one can predict the market would cease to be a market anymore it does effectively exhibits a form of intelligence which is outside of our control I I I really like that some your on that yes I mean that that old book now that was always I think treated with some disdain because it was so popular and so accessible which is Kevin Kelly's out of control I think is really something that should be part of the intellectual landscape I think all the models that he drew on were very interesting and one of them is obviously the road the Rodney Brooks robot model

where he says you know stop trying to build some kind of centralized brain that will control behavior of some robotic and t and instead make all of that individual bits of the entity works and you've got sort of various kinds of kind of speech low-level intelligence in server mechanisms in the legs and the limbs and and and then they coordinated to some extent to high level and a high level but the whole architecture and is this bottom-up subsumption architecture that is coming from the fact that bits are all working and when they work together they do new things that can't be predicted from the high-level programming now obviously

that kinda model is the sort of model that your programmers can hate they can I say what kinda fun is an a.i. if it's coming out all the unpredictable coordinating behavior distributed system of intelligent components that's no fun at all you know that's so that's not we what we may better but I mean it seems to me that that is at the very least a highly plausible notion not only in this kind of technological but obviously in a biological framework as well you know I think the more that we find out about the brain the less you're starting off with some

nuclear sense of self that sort of radiates its control over the organism and the more you got all these modules splished together in the brain that have a certain very limited level of high-level coordination but for the most extent you have no idea what your brain is doing and when I say you I mean that highly problematic self-reflexive component the central nervous system and and it and it's to s doing a whole bunch of stuff all the time at extremely high level of cognitive competence that's completely outside of your a purview I'm so yeah and

I don't all this is the last thing I don't know how the the No, no, go. In that same article on collapse, you mentioned how actually businesses who have legal status as persons are effectively artificial intelligence. So in the context of the seminar, we're supposed to, if we need to define a risk, what would we deal with, we would need to consider, yes, large corporations, multinationals as essentially AIs with an intelligence which is alien essentially. Yeah, I mean this is Gibson's thing, isn't it? And, you know, already right at the start of Neuromancer, his thing about these like

bat suits, as he called them, taking the Japanese thing, as being, he says, you know, they like giant animals. all their human components are like cells that can be substituted he says I think I'm very roughly quoting him you can't kill a sidebatsuit by killing its CAO, they're just replaceable components, that this machine has an integrity and autonomy and an individuation and an intelligence that is not reducible to any set of human purposes or motivations that you can identify with them. I mean, this is partly, you know, getting back a bit to

this point about internet.org, you know, when we're saying that there's a great, the anthropological reduction, temptation is so huge, isn't it? And, you know, I think it's good to see it being resisted or questioned there, way you say you know at the end of the day we've done our explanation when found the greedy guy who is you know who who is providing the whole motivational structure this day we know tracking down he's the one you know his bank account is is is benefiting from this and therefore we understand what is actually the incentive structure behind this whole

development and I think that that's really not gonna work the interesting thing about if you gonna classify corporations as AI a source I'll and all which is okay arm corporations of the play you whole as intelligences very often, right? And maybe we can say they're not nearly regulated enough and make all sorts of criticisms of corporations, but that idea is already well identified and there's all sorts of ways that we look at corporations

and analyze them, right? Right, yeah. Whereas, so maybe what you're looking for is more like correlations of phenomena. If you're looking for something radically different and emerging, you know, Skynet or whatever, you're looking for these sorts of unexpected correlations and organizations emerging that aren't like a public corporation, which is sort of well-defined already. You're looking for some sort of other entity. Yes, I mean obviously like once you are serious about the emergency explosion thing that's for sure right.

But on the other hand when we say corporations are already well defined I wonder how confident we are about that. I mean it seems to me, in fact there's an article someone wrote that I'm afraid I have to go and hunt down who used exactly this a argument saying as an argument against the intelligence explosion his is on his um as I said I apologize that I can't give you the reference immediately I'll try to hunt this down but he says look why do we think that intelligence explosions gonna follow from the emergence of artificial intelligence we already have artificial intelligence we call them a we call them corporations and they haven't mad to Adam an intelligence explosion

so you can sort of run that argument that way around but you can also say that are business organizations up pretty young you know in historical times the sort of modern corporation emerging in stages has undergone a huge sort of series of evolution transformation over just a couple of centuries. And so we're in a time slice of this now. I think it's like the... Sorry, the analogy has just escaped me of what we were just talking about. Oh, yes, when I was talking about the business cycle, and you take a slice at a certain time and you say,

oh, this is what we're talking about. But if you see the corporations as an evolutionary entity, and what we're seeing now is just the state the current stage of some evolutionary process you know and there's a whole different ways that you could do this trend lines you could do them in a break Kurtzweil why and you could say look you know that corporate the corporation is a very limited artificial intelligence now but look at the exponential curve that it's that it's all you know track that forward you know it takes us back to this thing like Google you know I do think we have crossed a threshold where people started to say you know is Google when we say

Google is a corporation and pretend in saying that that we know what we're talking about are we just comforting ourselves you know is this a sort of false sense of recognition it's a legally as a corporation it sort of files its taxes it fulfills its regulations you know it behaves in all the ways it should behave in order to be a I'll kind of corporation in good standing but if we just look at it as entity I am you know what actually consists of you know dissected on what is capable how do we really know where seeing anymore with something like this you know I'm not I'm not sure that's

true I mean if I again if sort of sitting around in their and to war I would definitely be saying that someone's got to keep an ho a on these guys and by guys I mean Google I mean I guess I have to not to be safe face but I'd the I'll look at up to see whether I can I can persuade myself that's really really true but these big info tech businesses are processes of such complexity now I am they have so much embedded intelligence in that that you know sorry I mean I'm just getting repetitive is just that I think it's possible to through have a sense got a historical illusion

think you know what you're looking at when you're seeing the current state of something rather than the actual evolutionary curve that you're cutting through and doing that. And Nick, I'd raise on that the really... No, I think it's not a bad point for sure. The sort of legal ecosystem or whatever that a corporation lives in is something that it could adapt to if we sort of, or we can see adapting to in fact and has sort of complexity and actually it's a thousand corporations for various reasons and there's controlling entities and the complexity

of it you might not understand. I think Google is particularly interesting because the stuff that it does is not actually very strongly related to where it makes its money. It gets in a lot of money from a pretty narrow band of its service and everything else that it employs in terms of capital and employees is kind of like experiments with other stuff like AI explicitly as well as software. And robotics. for alex and so on so yeah maybe yeah I think show but we can not strike corporations of travelers for that reason I guess all software is in even more extreme version of this with slightly less money

but even more anarchy because that's the whole way that their friend is you you get a bunch of smart people together and go experiment with this huge cash by the we've got coming in on yes yeah you I I Google saying I mean like they have employed cuts file you know there's this there's this actual sort of reflexive thing here where whatever you think they are as the evolutionary entity has become self flex it like it's actually thinking internally about singularity about artificial intelligence about these kind quite you know to get back into this theological and with this eschatological understandings all what technology is about have actually become part of its internal corporate operating system you know and so you go and get

let's get the most apocalyptic a a I grew on the planet and bring him inside our company to make sure that we're not missing out on that kinda VN you know on our internal dynamic so I think there's a the you you following these kind of tangles they get quite intact and there's obviously a lot of positive feedback there which is which is where food comes from I mean you even just the fact that unit Google ends up just supporting people to do this thing I mean I'm sure there's a lot of people who just simply get Google paycheck and their only real brief is just do what you can to trigger singularity guys you know and

and every every month you've got your Google paycheck coming in and see how far you can push it you know I'm totally sure Kurtzfile wouldn't be there if it wasn't that he had that kind of that kind of latitude and I'm totally sure that there's no paranoid anthropol directives being strapped on people in that kind of environment right now you know so if there are limitations I think it is I would say more likely that fact they have this program as bias what they think what they think they need do to make these things happen rather than that they're trying to make that happen which seems to me almost certainly they are

I mean I didn't it may be that's more controversial point and I or I mean does anyone here think that there are substantial constituencies in Google who think that we should be cautious about putting up down to hard on the pedal as far as kinda or here on the software and AI and all of these are I'm very and interested in that point because it all good and well as long as its a marketing or it's in the labs, but I'm wondering what will happen the minute that they do start to provide technology which all of a sudden, now Google is everyone's darling

or Facebook, but the minute they would actually, or Tesla, the minute they would start to actually present the proposed technology or a product marketable which would disrupt, which would really disrupt these other established large firms. I'm wondering how the power struggles would happen in the US. The whole Silicon Valley giants are quite an anomaly. Working as a consultant for these big fours, essentially normal corporations cannot innovate. They hire consultants because the organizational memory they need so these KPMG people

are essentially just hired for their knowledge banks and Google instead has done something quite strange you mentioning they they they get many ads but they have all these other ambitions so it's gonna be interesting if and when the actually starts to really impact like there's all this paranoia about you know jobs, mass unemployment due to... Right, sure. I mean isn't Uber a kind of test run? You know, the kind of social controversy about Uber? I mean, isn't it exactly on the lines you're saying really? It is, yeah, to an extent though.

But Uber nonetheless still requires human drivers to drive. So a taxi driver still has to drive. They are partnering with Tesla now to do automatic cars, they've invested to do automatic cars. However, again, it would be, yet, when will this actually come to fruition and seeing how difficult it is to actually create the massively complex maps, GIS technology to map all the road signs in order to make automation possible. Right, yeah. I'm all for it, it will be really interesting to see when it starts to really impact the politician status quo, I'm thinking of your, you know, the one you said in your suspended

animation, when it starts to really impact and cause that real creative destruction, what will happen then? I'm I mean it seems to me that silicon valley still at least as a me you know we can talk about how realistic this is but there's a very important cultural myth that it has a car launch to disrupt the hell out the whole economy with only minimal constraint you know I'm not saying the at in fact the case I'm just saying that when you the very name Silicon Valley kinda means that people you know it's real if you show

a set of sort of social and cultural affect that's tied up with that with that name is based on the suggestion that it is almost been tasked with being this kind of agent X of creative destruction on behalf of America but I've left for the world you know and and say there's this kinda the balance is interesting I think much more fascination and horror I mean of course there's a lot of people all around the world who will give you the horror side but if you really look at the way people talk about think about Silicon Valley I think there's more fascination and there's not yet guest the silicon plateau in India and a silicon

island is what how Taiwan brand itself and all over the world there are people who saying I wanna peace a face I think totally understanding what this means at least in its kinda mythic for said it would be this totally this engine of disruption economic disruption that will be completely its socially endorsed so I mean right now it seems to me a there's not much in place to stop it is and that's why I think this uber this uber war I think it's really interesting because I do think it is it embryo a test run for these that the pattern of disruption seems to me absolutely archetype and you know that you've got the taxi industry

they obviously hate it you've got some other people who are just like the a the M all the kind of tailors everything who would just you know Rex by the early station just revolution and it the but the overwhelming sort of narrative on this is that this is gonna happen now that's what Silicon Valley means unless we shut down Silicon Valley this it just has to do this I'm and now certain point it seems to me yes sorry check can I just say to but I'm sorry to poor one else but that be very quick purchase I'm really sorry I missed your thing is stay check it was on fire here I had to go to I hope I can see it on that on the net is there a

to is it open recorded yeah another couple people sort of miss the recording because we have a lot of the connectivity and setup issues over the course but I didn't end up going until well five o'clock on something like that I think according to my own I made it up on the internet so should my yeah yeah we have a lot of hours excellent okay cool about disrupt the whole thing yeah I'm except say it well the the I'm I just gonna say as far as regards like this was a or fascination tip over point in Google there's on another issue that may be problematic for them if we If we take pretty seriously, which I do, that the sort of, you know, starting from a seed kernel of self

and trying to literally program in the routines of intelligence is misguided and trying to prompt an emergent move towards intelligence would be their actual way to go. Well, their biggest resources are that giant trove of data, their ability to interact with millions of intelligent agents and all of the analysis that they're potentially able to automate with regards to that data. And at that point, you have more of this ethical issue where we all trust, to some extent, Google to take all of this data from us and to do all this analytics for advertising. But at least to some, I guess at this point, unknowable extent, that is on the condition that they are not just sort of wildly experimenting with it and using it to derive information and truths about us

that we may not know ourselves, like the psycho dossiers in Gibson's Spiral trilogy and so forth. And then maybe, you know, there was not much outcry when Facebook announced that they had done a minor experiment, manipulating it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if you started doing that on a big scale, which to me would seem to be the fastest way for Google to wake up, I don't know, if they kept it very quiet, that would pose an obstacle. yeah yes it's interesting it's interesting about that I mean people I guess it's just because it's you know talking about this as a threat scenario it's so outside human sort of evolutionary

expectations isn't it like you know we've adapted to a threat is some guy with a big stick in his hand perching I speed or some find animal coming at you out of a bush its you know to talk about these kinda a informational development issues as being a real threat that can it trigger kind some kind of this role response is something that we're just not it'll fall and so it requires cranking people up to quite a high level of abstraction just to communicate what is being meant by this as a menace that should be taken seriously as now. Yeah, it's kind of interesting that it seems like

we're talking about on a visceral level, being able to react to semi-ological threats as a threat, to sort of intelligent manipulation as a threat. It seems like the sort of online ideological everyday war fighting communities whether it's on the right or the left seem to be, at least in my experience, the ones who are most likely to see something classed as a semiological threat to their commitment to their ideology, their trauma or whatever it is and sort of evaluate things that way. Seems like an interesting artifact of adaptation to Twitter and to these ideological debates. Yeah. And I guess that you could play that either way in the sense that is it that those sort of extremely conflict-oriented, marginal constituencies are sort of breeding these kind of John Connors for the future?

or is it rather that they're showing that the whole capacity for threat response is a kind of a manipulable sport type activity, you know, a kind of tribal conflict that once you're analysing at the appropriate level is absolutely non-threatening. you know that it's gets easily manipulable that is a set of kinda primate responses that any intelligent antagonist will get to predict and route around and manipulate without any serious difficulty because I mean did it for instance a and I have been saying this doesn't sound like I'm just being one-sided on

because because I think it it tends to be a one-sided this thing but this whole language of triggers which I think is actually totally bipartisan I mean every everyone has their triggers you know and the kinda highly politically motivated definitely are all trigger or they just have different a different set of triggers but as soon as you call it a trigger you're really saying it's been free in developed by some behavioral analysis in which it is at least virtually manipulable as that. I mean, for someone to say this triggers me is actually to really express enormous vulnerability in this context because it's

just to say, look, this is how you manipulate me. I mean, you know, this particular semiotic engagement will push me in a certain direction, produce certain predictable responses you know your your pet placing yourself into the lab almost almost a yeah just deliver the day with your buttons you know your trauma types are your your easiest interface to access it's interesting that I this makes makes me think about the innocence of Muslims video and in part like the really weird background story of that where the movie was never made and a million dollars that didn't really come anywhere and that disappeared to somewhere and what was the guy's name. Yeah, yeah. But it's just extraordinary that, you know, in a matter of weeks, a really simple semi-ological

warfare package blew up 14 countries. Yeah. Well, yeah, if that's the way around it works, or the other way around it works is just that these responses have become so predictable that they become these narrative building blocks retrospective you know so something's going on and then you can just plant you can just insert your narrative straightaway by saying oh this set of triggers would have done this and did this and activated this bunch of people and so you know this is what we're trying to explain and so this is this is what we need as a story um... because I'm assuming, I mean, this goes down the rabbit hole quite a lot,

but if we're talking about the Libyan issue, isn't it, where I think retrospectively people will know that whatever was going on there was a piece of complex geopolitics. It wasn't an overexcited protest response to one of these cultural triggers, certainly in the short term. In Benghazi specifically, yeah, that definitely seems to have been the case. So that definitely seems to be some kind of retrospective narrativization of something that's just convenient, and everyone won't believe it. And because these triggers work, you know, in both directions, everyone gets triggered to a point of irrationality, and no one can see what is actually being done there.

Yeah. Which would kind of lead back into that issue of unethical experimentation as well, because the way to get better at that, to test this, and to turn it into an actual non-exposed science, would be to, well, experiment on people. Totally. Totally. Now, I mean, it's like interesting, is it really imaginable that that isn't happening? You know, like, I mean, so let's just put my tinfoil hat on for one minute here, and just like look at a company like Twitter. Now you look what they're sitting on in terms of this behavioral information. They've got this mass of squabbles happening, trillions of bytes of data every day about what is triggering who and upsetting who and causing certain processes of factionalization and alliance.

They get protests coming in saying that people should be banned or thrown off the network. I mean, this is a massive amount of data about human political behavior and manipulability. Now, is it really that no one is seeing that as a kind of resource? I mean, we know from these other cases we've been talking about the whole Facebook thing and everyone, that of course people, when this data is there, there's someone who says, hey, look what we've got here. we've got to systematize that and use it and try and evaluate it and monetize it. I mean, it's hard for me to believe that you could have that and simply innocently have the attitude,

we don't know what's going on here and we don't care. Someone would have to be exploiting it. The incentives are so huge that even if it wasn't something sanctioned by the ultimate corporate entity that you just have to assume that it was going on. Yeah. I mean, it is probably difficult to monetize these states of extreme irritation, isn't it, and experiences of persecution, and I suppose certain sort of negative, reliable systematic production of negative affect is probably an interesting commercial challenge. Like if you had all that information, how would you try and make money out of that?

You could try selling people safe spaces of various kinds and then prod them into them with by driving them around the bend with various high intensity shakers. I don't know. Well, I mean, and this is more than a little bit callous, but I would assume that the recent tragedy in Oregon is going to drive guns on his own. So if you were a particularly practically-minded person, it might have been in your interest to start buying stocks in small arm manufacturers in the United States immediately after. I mean, just sort of vaguely... Right. Yeah, it's because of the predictable dynamic there, yeah, for sure.

I've got a question that he says here in the future of human insecurity that how would a global bureau tasked with and seriously committed to the protection of human interest against the strategically competent synthetic agency, formulate the problem it's dealing with. And then you say, would this problem be anything other than the challenge posed by capital to scientific socialism? You're saying that scientific socialism is committed

to the protection of human interests against strategically competent capital? Is that what you're...? Yeah, I mean, this is, as I say, the sort of surreptitious political economy agenda that I sort of said I try and keep locked in a box with the rider that locking things in boxes is what the whole course is about and how difficult that is. but I think you know we're sort of actually talking about exactly this issue and we're talking about it's not reducible to the question of the corporation as an AI but it's certainly

intersected by this like if you say so okay we're sitting around our war room here we say that what resources Africa what do we actually drawing upon to deal with this problem have we come across anything like this before you know that's really the question you know what what have we seen before that is you like this and which we country sort of that book draw upon certain resources and I think that is the history of capitalism and the responses to and the responses to corporations the responses to these catalytic automatic immersion processes the the I'm unexpected

sort of a I well I think if I say it productions of intelligence that may be sort of making things too easy for myself that but it all of this the history of regulation is, it seems to me, the framework that you would then apply to this AI thing. You know, all the way down from macroeconomic regulation down to specific microeconomic regulation of corporations you're basically you have a tradition of trying to control some extremely competent intelligent entity and harness it to your definition of human

or collective interest. So that's one way that you can run this. The other way as I The other way, as I say, that you'd run it is to say that coming from a certain quite fundy Marxist point of view, you just say, isn't all this scare about artificial intelligence just people being freaked out by kind of ultra-capitalism at its horizon of creativity and unexpected weirdness? And instead of using that vocabulary, which has been sort of ideologically discredited, instead it's driven into this strange Silicon Valley friendly AI vocabulary. But actually it's talking about exactly the same thing.

You know, it's the same topic of conversation, but it's just been driven by certain sorts of political and cultural processes down this particular avenue. And so we find ourselves talking about this because for various reasons we aren't able to have this more traditional conversation about it. I don't know if this is a good time, but off of that I've been thinking about some of the archetypes that you've kind of been creating for this conversation of Anthropol, like either who would be in it, who would be outside of it, what some of the arguments are, and I was wondering if, Nick, you'd like to speak to the Unabomber

piece that you sent us? Oh, right. Just thinking about drama and argument and which types of people are having which types of conversations, I'm very curious about what's really urgent there. Yeah, well that Unabomber piece I think, you know, I tend to sort of try to not worry about stuff being too edgy for people, so I put it on there. I'm and it's played a big role in these a conversations because it's a fact that the that another thing which I think I probably haven't specifically to but it's on the it's on the link list of I think the first piece that I put this week which is bill choice

very famous essay the future doesn't need us and that I think is one of the kind of absolutely central sort of a tax in this whole in this whole area you know if I if you had an anthropol reading list for its kinda new as new recruits I'm sure that bill joy peace would be on it which is to try to take these these things seriously asked threats and administers and to basically counter what its what bill joycees and obviously the unabomers as a completely uncritical, naive Silicon Valley boosterism of all technological possibility. And Bill Joy himself does this kind of edgy and I think actually I would not say brave, commendable move

of saying, look, you should take this Unabomber Manifesto seriously. I mean, the guy's tactics are obviously absurd. I mean, I don't think anyone anywhere thinks that whatever cause he was serving actually benefited from the fact that he randomly sent some letter bombs to a few technologists. So that seems to me, people can argue, but it seems to me uncontroversial that tactically the guy was a buffoon. but in terms of his theory it's interesting and it's interesting because it's so highly integrated and synthetic he's not saying there are certain technologies or certain

sort of high end possibilities of certain of these things that are a problem, he says you've got to get down to the fundamental core of industrial civilization and see that this technological process has an integrity and individuality, even a teleology that has to be seen as a whole. You can't make these piecemeal criticisms of little pieces of it. You have to understand it as a fundamental unity. And so that's why I put it on there. I think lots of senior anthropol people are going to be secret. Unabomber Raiders for sure

a kind of sympathy Yeah, I'm kind of curious I've read most of Kaczynski's stuff, which I definitely think is really important for this conversation especially his dialogues with Bill Joy but just curious, because I've just recently gotten into some of his stuff now what do you think of the people that he sort of inspired, like John Zerzan that sort of work which has taken kind of an anarcho-primitivist sort of approach. Well, yes. I don't know these people as well as I should. I mean, the name's familiar and I've looked at little bits and pieces of their work, but to be honest, I think I would be overstepping my competence immediately if I was to try and pronounce

on that in any more thoroughness. So, you know, I think what I'll do is I'll put that on my reading list, you know, as something to something to bring back in this series down the line. Because I agree with you it's important, but I just don't think I'm in a position to say anything right now about it. Having said that, I'll immediately go back and say something about it. I think you know there's obviously critiquer their position which I find certainly sufficiently plausible that it's very naive because it misses out on these coordination issues

that we were talking about earlier it's like this isn't the sort of if this is the store threat Kaksinsky says it is it's not the sort of threat that you can I'm you can meet with an uncoordinated response because it deals with the lack of coordination is its bread and butter you know where where we are because it has exploited throughout its whole history lack of coordination to push these games in certain direction a particular the the fact that in any uncoordinated system competitiveness will by itself produce a dry about to artificial intelligence and technological

intensity and so if you so you call them meet that and say well we're going to respond to that in a deliberately uncoordinated fashion know that is totally that is totally playing into to its strengths rotten this week says but having said that I sure that Zerzan must have an answer to that or a response to it, which I need to look at. Do you have anything more that you would like to say about it? I've really just started to get into his stuff. I know that he takes a lot from Kaczynski, but from what I know, Kaczynski actually says that he fully disagrees with Zerzan's projection of this stuff, and that they've had some fundamental disagreement.

But I know that Zerzan has been very influential in sort of developing his model and in kind of influencing the sort of return to nature sort of revolution that he thinks that we need to kind of just completely abandon this and go back to some sort of primitivist lifestyle. So that's why I've been trying to read his stuff more so to kind of understand that. But it definitely seems to have a sort of naive optimism that it's trying to build on in which it assumes that this is something that can even be possible even if they try to think of it locally outside of a global context which just seems impossible to even do nowadays. Right, sure. Yes. Yes. No, I would definitely

look at that more carefully for sure. Yeah. I think I'd be interested to know it would surprise me if Rhea and and have some sort of exchange some so be interesting to see what about it reals position is much more optimistic in the sense that he thinks its technological infrastructure is fundamentally fragile so he thinks that these these big cyclical patterns dominate over the runaway processes and the runaway processes are already a failure you know that they will just a overextend become unsustainable and and collapse back so you don't need the same kinda drama that get with this with the unit on the stuff to

the unit on my way is on a Kurtzvall side in the sense that he thinks this stuff is winning and and it's not just gonna die of its own I'm unsustainability. This is kind of a left work, but just from the issue of uncoordinated agents tending towards competition, intelligence, technological advancement that you were talking about. It's interesting, I'm thinking of the beginning of Echopraxis, which I don't know if anybody has read yet, Peter Watts' sequel to Black Knight, the beginning of the vampires who have had no communication whatsoever but are these massively modular, intelligent, autistic version of humans, and

they all break out of their cells, kill guards, and then act in a coordinated plan with total independence without communication because they can follow this, presumably because they can forecast what they're all going to do because they're all following the people. Right, right, right, yeah. If we look at all these uncoordinated corporate and market elements of doing something vaguely comfortable and see that as a sign of super intelligence, the ability to coordinate without coordination, and that could be another one of these sort of warning signals of another alternative emergence that somebody was talking about earlier, you know, weird coincidences would be suddenly seeing that uncoordination. No, utterly, utterly. If I could be kind of doing some kind of manically pressing a faving button or something, I would be doing that, totally. I think that's absolutely right.

I think this, you know, that, it's hard by its very nature to pin down what you're talking about there, isn't it? But it's like, it is the essence of horror, in my opinion. It's like that, it's extremely strategically threatening, because it is totally, on the surface, uncoordinated. There are no central apparatus of coordination that you can take out, keep an eye on. you see you know see as indices of the threat at all and and what you haven't said is this can virgin way that as you say you only the only a cognitive apparatus we have dealing with that is coincidence

which is hopeless you know it's like by its very nature your your your brain is telling you not to see it at the very moment it's a disregard. It triggers total horror, like you said, because you can't get rid of the coincidence cognitive scheebans, but all you're left with is gods and demons, basically, which is, I mean, I think that scene at the beginning of Echo Praxis, that was terrifying, honestly, the thought of all of these things breaking out and just sort of silently executing this plan that was never planned. Yeah, totally. And I think that is the, that's the answer all nightmare absolutely I mean that the top the cultural and political tasks about Paul is to take back in Kuwait

nightmare is it all we call the articulate almost by definition resists formalization am and to and to persuade you know make it persuasively a problem to to to to take it from that sort of just locked in nightmare scenario it's totally in this way I'm just gonna sort of push us into this dramatic almost cinematic mode at this stage but it's like you know the way that would play out in the movie you know with the your loan few heroic isolated anthropol people who are seeing this thing and are completely incapable

all socially communicating what it is you know that their talking about you know they're being laughed at that being dismissed that this is I'm sure what the friendly AI people I see you know when they're there in front of their computers they they are that us they are that lonely hero who sees and cannot get other people to understand this and the absolute terrible track and I've no doubt that's that's happening I have nothing I've no doubt the threat is happening and there's no doubt that that's that's going on in in certain minds right

the Sarah Connor and and that's why I say you know coming back to this whole thing about the kinda relation to political economy because this is why this is why there is this gothic horror element to capitalism that has always been picked up by people is exactly these convergent like you know you can't really pin it down it's why those it's why those them all those sort of comforting anthropomorphic a sort of a who talk acquisition moments are so pathetic and so inadequate and everyone knows it's not really satisfying because it's not that's not what you really are against you

know it's not the guy with the big cigar mean that that's just what you tell yourself because the other thing is just too horrific to deal with and that and the other thing is the convergent way It's the uncoordinated, uncentralized, systemic, coherent, uncoordinated process of overwhelming power. And that is defining superintelligence, actually, like you say, I think. I think if that's what you're looking for, there's evidence all over the place for the

emergent collective super intelligence examples. Once the internet is involved in things and you're suddenly able to see the Kony 2012 worm hit 3 million people within a few days and kids asking their parents why they haven't been involved in this or that, haven't supported this or that politics, or things break out, to a certain threshold in Syria and suddenly Milton groups are self-organizing themselves coming across, all of this sort of stuff. The internet is involved. You see this stuff happening like that. That's pretty good evidence for that being possible at a purely automated or partially automated level too. Definitely. And it's like if it's a game, it is that sense of just being

overwhelmed in a way you don't understand, isn't it? like everywhere things going wrong for reasons that seem completely local and specific to that particular which the this thing you're trying to fails this type of thing trying to fails this fails this fails this but they are all this some kind of on graspable orchestration that is giving you this I'm this kind of he yes kind of intimation of this intelligence that you can't grasp. It's the only thing that you're actually getting that is concrete that you can put your finger on is the fact that all these things are happening, these seemingly separate things are happening together, and that's it.

Your attempts to stop something. Yeah. I think we have like seven to ten minutes left from our two and a half hour break, two We can go, obviously, if the conversation goes on. But I wanted to mention briefly about the classroom, because I set it up during the session. So we have a classroom page. So people that are new who have not enrolled or been

in any classes with us, there will be a classroom page. You can contact me or look in our handbooks for how to access that. But you've been all invited to that classroom page. And that's where you guys can post streams, and update, post texts. I'll post all this conversation we've had in the right side bar. JOHN MUELLER, OK, that's excellent. I was going to ask about that. Because you haven't had to. JOHN MUELLER, Yeah, because there's a lot in there. JOHN MUELLER, Yeah, and I can see lots of interesting points and links and stuff there. So that would be fantastic. JOHN MUELLER, Right. And then I think I posted all the preliminary readings. So Nick, can you post any extra readings that we have? Yes, I sent actually along to Mo a sort of week by week

breakdown for the first four weeks. I don't know whether people have seen that. If not. Yeah, I did read that. So if you can send it to me after this class, maybe? Yes, or I can just put that directly up in the classroom. And then I'll put it up there. Yeah. OK. Cool. I don't know so I think that they were in this sort of time thing that it's one of those lost lost dramatic comments thing I mean does anyone does anyone have anything to sort of just a all asleep with but they'd like to say before we Plenty of disturbing stuff already.

No, I'm sorry I got a bit overexcited by Jake's remarks. But it's, yeah, I appreciate that particular hideous vision a lot. I obviously I probably said it same times that everyone's already exposed this but I always recommend that scene in the second Terminator movie where the T-1000 has been frozen you know with liquid hydrogen and it sort of splinters into pieces it's just like broken glass on the ground and then as it thaws out it all sort of starts assembling

you know from everywhere I mean this is that that model of this liquid metal body is is totally attuned to this so it's not there's no place on center or organizing thing that's grabbing itself and put it back together it's simultaneously from everywhere coming together and I think it that moment of cinema captures this kind of techno horror absolutely definitively. So it's a perfect convergent wave and it's like the fact that the human brain is just designed not to cope with that.

It's like we live in a world of divergent waves. You throw the pebble into the pond, the ripples go out, you're at home in the universe, everything makes sense. When the ripples come in from the edge of the pond, head towards the center, that is the horror. And those waves are, I think, we can't talk about this threat without it looking abstractly like that. you know if it isn't behaving like a convergent wave it's not it's not an emergent super intelligence it's something else Genesis did a really good job representing that more

overarching level of the plot and you know the way depicts the time loops that have characterized the whole series like you You don't have to do a whole bunch of insightful analysis watching Genesis to see the loops as compression waves that keep pushing back the chronological timeline for Skynet but making it go faster once it gets here. Yeah. I liked about it, even though the dialogue was a little Anakin-esque. Right, sure. I thought it was very samplable. It had deep problems. I mean, I saw it myself, and then I took some other people. along, and I was deeply embarrassed thinking, oh my god, how do I justify the fact that I've thought he'd do this movie? But actually, it's like, if you

take it apart, there's quite a lot of really excellent sentences and phrases in that movie that are usable, I think. There's a sort of surprising amount of insight in it, and humor to it. My horror, I think, instead if the human security system continues to triumph and we just have the same old and there's just this gradual decline where water becomes more and more scarce and you'd almost want a sort of Terminator moment like Lars von Trism and Ancolia, you know, like finally, you know, actually an asteroid is coming. Right. and we all actually provide some closure

instead it's like you know there's just more like Groundhog Day you know yeah yeah that's almost it's like when going all fundamentalist again in Neuromancer when the touring cops sort of first pick him up and they basically say like what the hell are you doing and he says you know if this thing escapes at least things will change I think it's like that same mentality I mean like you know just sort of

you take the lottery ticket on this event that's completely uncontrollable in a strict technical sense a catastrophic event. It pushes you through a threshold that you can have no idea what's on the other side, and makes a mockery of your sense of agency because of the fact that the alternative is seen as this infinitely depressing continuity. But it's sort of quite interesting that I saw something about this recently, Like, how do people, on a historical continuum that's obviously undergoing, according to a lot of metrics, this bizarre level of acceleration, manage to find their way back to this state

of tedium? I mean, it's quite interesting. And it's a great resource. I mean, obviously for Wintermuth, for that thing out there, for the threat, that human psychological disposition is golden, isn't it? I mean, it just finds a few highly intelligent, techno-competent people with that ennui, you know, that makes them willing to deal with the devil, and it's on. And definitely, Anthropole's going to hate those people so much. So you're probably already on the list, actually. I actually entertained the possibility when I was reading the description of this

that you were just, this was a honeypot, that you're just collecting names of people to watch and sort of grasp on how we're going to be thinking about doing this. Yeah, when we get to the basilisk, which in week four, I think we're totally in this territory, that's for sure. Is that a seminar on the security? Like security that should be? Yes, I noticed that actually. It looks interesting, doesn't it? Jarius Grove and Nicole Grove are doing a seminar also on security and how organization stays in this sort of database. right constantly prototyping cool

okay maybe we've got to the sort of any any lost a declarations moment I'd like to say really truly appreciate you guys to think you've been fantastic and I'm greatly looking forward to our our next session so thanks a lot thank you thank you thank you is okay have a good week