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'd 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 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, what the topic is I hope will emerged 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 Bill Gates, these kind of 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 it's 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. And 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 say now – is a displaced version, a displaced opportunity to talk about certain enormous issues 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 I think that it there's a range of things there I think that there's actually very crude Marxist analysis stuff that is still very interesting to me and I say crude because I think as we see things get tangled and twisted in ways that maybe a 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 a in in the most sort of simplistic way possible it's to say all we in talking about a I existential risk just talking about capitalism maybe sort of I'm talking about it in a way that is sort of ideologically self mystifying or face a for it some other way a refusing to actually addressed its real topic a conversation and I think that this is something that is going to be rumbling along underneath and I don't think that's a stupid question I think it's a an interesting question even obsessively interesting question
and 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 are looking at a hyper object, you know, if we say what is this course about, the what, thing that it's directed at a thing of just massive importance to the world it 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 happen or are you know should we be taking this seriously all of those questions are internal they're sort of imminent to the object concerned you're not that 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 in giving some kind of estimation about how serious it's being taken about how you can judge how seriously to take it and the that next element which I think is just massive I'm
is that introduces especially as we're doing here where we're taking a prospect of artificial intelligence as the kind of governing a feature this thread and 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 so 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 its 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, 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 Leo 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 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 shelve those issues for a moment and just treat the sheer factor explosion itself as a threat, then this is as kind of horizon of the existential AI risk scenario. It's something that is not ever going to disappear from that horizon, even however much we can deprioritize it or tell ourselves 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 of 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 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 of where we are right now at the beginning of this course. Okay, I won't blather on for any longer on this. I will welcome any responses from people or 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 course. 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 you mentioned 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 can we 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. 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 risks. And so we're safer of just chopping that off and just swallowing whatever danger comes with that. But my initial response to that is, 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 see it like that, then we have to be able to get the idea of intelligence explosion down to a level of implausibility that would then merit us sweeping it into the trash now I'm starting my sort of Bayesian thing here is I'm starting somewhere more like 50-50 If I've got Yudkowsky and Hansen arguing about is AI the sort of thing that explodes or is it not, then I'm going to need some arguments that's going to push that 50% 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. Good essay? Because that's really, you know, either whether you have or you're going to get a chance to do, that is the master text of this intelligence explosion. The philosophical view of it is such a simple, clear idea which is obviously that something and that is able that has not been specifically designed in order not to have access to its its own internal processes i.e. it's not in some sense right protected it's not 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 gets into the proximal zone of human intelligence will have access to the full engineering specifications house things brought up to that level intelligence and in a way that therefore means it's nothing at all like us you know we have effectively no access at all to the mechanical background to our own cognitive capabilities and so insofar as we're able to edge that forward at all it it's extremely marginal and
and probably pushing against a lot of sort of biological resistances a machine intelligence assuming that it has not been designed in a way that would stop it and honestly I think it's very possible that the engineering task making it in 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 and crank itself up to intelligence and plus I then from intelligence by say it's got more capacity to take itself up to intelligence us be and its and its on a a rising curve and that is the good notion all intelligence explosion and it makes a lot of sense you know if it's lit that level of abstraction there are all kinds of interesting counter-aggressive 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 okay
I just posted the the text that you mentioned all okay cool excellent extent I I'll be putting some links in it so if people and 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 if you get psyched client and so I recommend that people check it out the classroom is now
created an open so at the end of the session talk about it are people going those cool thanks I mean is it possible for me if sorry yet no go ahead yeah although I was gonna come back and you arm so this question of intelligence right because are the the debate between Hanson and Kofsky was some it was very much about the nature of intelligence it seems yes yes and and and then you get this question because intelligence is like X we therefore get a right all
self-improvement that's like why right and where Hanson is saying intelligence is like a city as most thousands of little things are hundreds of little things to write in powerful is it like a yes a call yes no definitely I think that that there's a whole bunch of terms that I hope will get 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 is another one and I would say on this right off the bat that I'm not
over impressed by the sort of less wrong tight and you'd Kowski definitions of intelligence by 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 I'm if where taking a very serious notion 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's obvious 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 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 it right at my fingertips, where the whole essay is really dedicated to the notion about how dangerous intelligence is. 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 has to be taken out of realist international relations theory, and, you know, insofar as that's defining what we mean 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 engaged in serious threat analysis if you're asking, do these guys like us? You know, you first of all have to say, given that they wanted to make things difficult for us, how 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 and
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. Sure thing. My name's Joel. I'm 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 trying to understand and examine sort of the social anxieties that arise from these changes. So that's why this seemed like a great format for developing some of that. Yes. No, I definitely hope we can generate a lot of anxiety. 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. No, 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, I think, characterized by a quite, I'm not sure I can say unique, but in some way at least exceptional self-institutionalization. you know I mean the people started 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 a you know at different levels of collectivity to to to address what they see as these a dangers up so for sure anthropo this virtual entity is a a crystallization a positive productive crystallization or of human anxiety I'm
I'll maybe introduce myself. You already know me. Yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah. It's good to see you, Ben. Yeah, it was a fantastic seminar. And 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 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 and I think there's a few
things that can immediately be said one that to me is interesting is that obviously there is a reciprocal there's 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've 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 complementary
I mean their attitudes to each other is totally dismissive and contemptuous insofar as they recognize each other's existence at all. But if you step back and you look at them both together and they slot together as this reciprocal dyad because Ray Kurzweil, as everyone I think I'm assuming is familiar with him, but his whole thing is basically positive feedback. You know the exponential curve of positive feedback is the basic line that everyone is on and all his predictions have been on that, his understanding of what is happening on this planet is based on that. And John Michael Greer who is 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 to 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 human 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 and 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 a cultural conservators and basically and but cuts are has a quite interesting come back on this because he says yes of
course it looks like that because apocalyptic religion is just some kind of precursor insight into this reality that's going to happen it's 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 the conjunction is absolutely uncontroversial but then that still leaves you a huge amount
of room for how you're going to play the relation between those two different poles of the thing That's really interesting. I'd like to have a... Yes. I'm Brendan. I'm Hale from Australia. Hi. I'm just talking about intelligence and maybe the question of identity, I guess. Right, great. because if you look at like existential threats yet the can be a
like yeah but yeah if you make the engage if we're gonna do like an enter all you know warm room you're being engaged in a sort of what I don't know if you ask him I call it yeah he'd say that you'd be 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 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 at the axiom of intelligence optimization and the way that intelligence works as a strategy,
as a sort of strategy that has to be, I guess, employed by any intelligence agent in this sort of cosmology that you're talking about with the dark forest. So how is it possible that, well, how is it possible? I guess here when you're talking about deception and things, it really puts us in a box, I guess, in some ways. That in order for us to even try to play with this 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 if that's possible 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 gonna be able to really dig into and and and you're right that they're just full up
really hideous ominous paradoxes I mean I'm assuming this this I'm assuming anthropo is gonna have computers you know it it's gonna it's going to want to analyze data is one can be a decrypt codes it's gonna want to be able to mobilize synthetic intelligence in its own bureaucratic and therefore there's no way like you say it can it's always got this problem of is this thing already inside our systems you know how deep inside our systems is it if you take one that paranoia one step further 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 in you know as a defense mechanism about it but it's obviously very questionable on game theoretical grounds whether that is practical you know you look at the real landscape you look at the landscape in which a bit being able to mobilize intelligence is a massive competitive advantage and 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 gonna clean up in the intermediate period so you know you have to expect and theoretically that those fragments that's sort of strategies and agencies that 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
I totally with you on the questions that I hope we can deal with here. Does this concept in cyber security information security game currency that you want to secure an organization actually need to come in and assume you're already compromised right used to be as a good this model where there was a security wall that you established you could trust everything inside the wall on so then inside an organization that model is going away on I how now approach up to assume you're compromised and all your eyes are starting from them yes that's great as a I mean I don't suppose it's possible
at some points squeeze some kind of link or reference out a few is that for that for that and I know these things are difficult that they are stop yeah arm which at least jumping off point so I mean it sounds to me that it's like a one level and taking a sort of biological model is that right of saying look the human body does not expect that it's going to be fixed glued 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 kinda 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 is a good point on for I'm it's it's interesting in in consulting there's this old view of like I'm the NT architecture where you have multiple so that levels of security and the new thing which I present signal management poses 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 and immediately detect when that is happening rather than mitigate, preemptively mitigate. Yeah. So it's not fair to use that. 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. 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, extremely interesting, like for instance, the notion of retaliation is big as I'm understanding it, where you say, look, don't 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 kind of open information space full of antagonistic things and you use various ones 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 machinic intelligence. Yeah, I'm reluctant to be dogmatic about that. I think this is something we should have as part of our agenda. 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 that is 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 I mean, 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 gigadef war between basically those forces facilitating the emergence of artificial intelligence with 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. here. 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 anything like that would be drowned out so fundamentally you know at the point where you are you're a sort of spread of human 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 you know 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 cyborgs, however. 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, 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. You know, something
that would people say, you know, 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 sort of I'm defying 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 you know so after we've shared we no longer use DNA replication we've shared everything recognizable from our tradition but if there's a continuous lineage into the future that 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 recognized as themselves or even an ally a potential ally and if you if you say look this thing that is in every way utterly alien to anything we've 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, it's 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.
anybody else was yet to say wanna or turn 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 can go hi hello I'm my I'm a certificate student and and I'm working on a and with a tactical polemic against
internet.org currently and so that's where my interest lies in right now I 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. They're 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 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. Right. 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, 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. Right. And kind of law being displaced by, yeah, really bizarre consensus models of best practices and norms.
and yeah yeah okay that sounds that sounds good I mean it's like I'm because a very big part of this as this problem or all you know if we have a threat analysis what love it is tied up with questions about coordination like certain things just purely through in lack of quarter and you end up in a certain game theoretical situation you know so for instance the this she'd leo's creation or something much more doubt a where 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 and you know so this is I think a big anthropol concern let's say you could displace it just so that for a minute I think is an interesting one is like instance said said by a fixed people have a very a big anxiety about him 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 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 I'm the AI security people because they say look if are kept to make I safer in anyway makes it less effective or is in any way retarded the advance in computers clients and computational competence and their 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?
No absolutely yeah I mean I can see that this internet organ at a certain extreme of paranoia 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 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, 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. 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 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. So can I just check you on who the he is here? I'm not sure. You're talking about Zuckerberg. Yep. Zuckerberg yes 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 have different visions the 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 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 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 and for instance you know when you're dealing with humans let's just forget about that's all perspective but look at the kind of machine incursion perspective when you're dealing with humans course you go through sex if you're gonna manipulate my control you know it's like and you're not gonna have some
kind of multi machine gun later not 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 which 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 the 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? So even if there was this artificial intelligence, would be able to just purely operate on an algorithmic trading platform? What about heavy industry? What about that? That's kind of, yeah. Right. Yeah. The role of big finance. Big finance and big industry. And big, like, heavy industry, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean it did I'm think I probably spoke about her a a little bit last time Carlotta Perez has a
some very interesting things about this but she says the role of finance you have to see in this in these long waves because it has a very different role these different stages well for 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 that it has this whole cyclical function. And at the boost phase of the cycle, it has this very disruptive function because of the fact that obviously the incumbent 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 kind of free-floating large sums of free-floating financial capital that will then invest in these kind of major major projects and without that she says you know without finance operating in that role then the big dinosaur industries of any particular age would be immortal you couldn't get rid of them they would 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 sort of questions about the function of finance that are completely unavoidable and how that we would they would we would
now factor into our specific AI x-risk threat analysis matrix, I'm not sure. I imagine yes, the AI would exist and it's objective if it doesn't need the heavy industry because the heavy industry is probably to produce needs for human consumption. It doesn't need the management of demand, so it doesn't need advertising, so this AI exists, so in some way we would have to be on the side of 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 our 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 so to at least get some sense of what are for cognitive constraints are on this and I think the one massive source
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 about intelligence you know they tend to be people who are programmers and think that they are actually gonna sit down and maybe a group and aspect probably a small group program an artificial intelligence you know it's like now 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 larger world of cool coding
projects that you can do. But I think it's probably a very easy way you can be misguided to take that too unquestioningly in your idea about what AI is. That's why it's good to talk about the blockchain. It's good to talk about these more spontaneous, distributed, unintentional processes. You know, again, this comes out of this thing about coordination issues, like an uncoordinated emergent event is, if that's the model of intelligence in general, then it gives us a very different picture of what we're talking about when we're talking about AI as something
that's just one big program that someone has put together on a massive... I really like your thinking perhaps on existential risk and where you define AI as essentially capital and you've 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 Hal. It's actually more about the wager and it's about the market which has this, because the minute one can predict the market it would cease to be a market anymore. It does effectively exhibit a form of intelligence which is outside of our control.
I really like that, your article on that. Yes. that old book now that was always I think treated with a certain 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 Rodney Brooks robot model, where he says, you know, stop trying to build some kind of centralized brain that will control the behavior of some robotic entity.
and instead make all of the individual bits of the entity work. So you've got sort of various kinds of kind of low-level intelligence in servo mechanisms, in the legs and the limbs, and then they coordinated to some extent at a higher level. But the whole architecture is this bottom-up subsumption architecture that is coming from the fact that the bits are all working and when they work together they do new things that can't be predicted from the higher level programming. Now obviously that kind of model is the sort of model that your programmers are going to hate. They're going to say what kind of fun is an AI if it's coming out of the unpredictable coordinating behavioural distributed system of intelligent components.
That's no fun at all, you know, so that's not what we mean. 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 framework, 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've 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 CEO, 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 the 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 of all and all which is okay on corporations of
the the whole look as intelligences very often, right? And maybe we can say they're not nearly regulated enough and make all sorts of criticisms of a corporation, 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 a 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 I 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 of 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 some 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
it's 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, yeah, 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 mean it seems to me that the Silicon Valley still at least as a myth 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 now I'm not saying the other act 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 ops creative destruction on behalf or America but I've left for the world matter and and say there's this kind of 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 kind of mythic for said it would be this totally this engine of disruption economic disruption that will be completely 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 in 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 the M all the kind of a tailors and everything who would just you know wrecks by the early station just revolution and it the but the overwhelming sort of narrative on this is that this is gonna happen no that's what silicon valley means unless we shut down silicon valley this
it just has to do that I'm and I'll certain point it seems to me yes sorry check can I just say to I'm sorry to poor one else but that be very quick purchase I'm really sorry I missed your thing is a 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 record it yeah another couple people sort of miss the recording because we have a lot of the connectivity and set up issues over the course but I didn't end up going until well 5 o'clock or something like that but I think according to my own I made it up on the internet so you should be my yeah yeah we have a case excellent okay cool I won't disrupt the whole thing
yeah I'm upset say it well I'm I just gonna say as far as regards like this was a horror fascination tip over point in Google There's another issue that's maybe problematic for them. If we take pretty seriously, which I do, that the sort of 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 this sort of online, ideological, everyday warfighting 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. Yeah. 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 a capacity for threat response is a kind of manipulable sport type activity a kind of tribal conflict
that once you're analysing at the appropriate level it's absolutely non-threatening that it's easily manipulable that it's a set of kind of primate responses that any intelligent antagonist would be able to predict and root around and manipulate without any serious difficulty. Because, I mean, for instance, and I hope in saying this doesn't sound like I'm just being one-sided on it, because I think it tends to be a one-sided, discursive thing. But this whole language of triggers, which I think is actually totally bipartisan. I mean, everyone has their triggers, you know, and they're kind of highly
politically motivated, definitely are all triggerable, and they just have a different set of triggers. But as soon as you call it a trigger, you're really saying it's been pre-enveloped by some behavioral analysis in which it is at least virtually manipulable. 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, you're placing yourself into the lab almost deliberately. You're pushing your buttons, you know, your trauma types are your easiest interface to access. And it's interesting that, I don't know, this makes me think of 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 from anywhere and that disappeared to somewhere and what was the guy's name. Yeah, yeah. extraordinary that in a matter of weeks a really simple semi-ological warfare package blew up for two countries. Yeah. Well, yeah, if that's the way around it works. The other way around it works is
just that these responses have become so predictable that they become these narrative building blocks retrospectively. So something's going on and then you can just plant, you can just insert your narrative straight away 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 what we need as a story because I'm assuming this goes down the rabbit hole quite a lot but if we're talking about the Libyan issue where I think retrospectively people know was 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 with both directions and everyone gets triggered to a point to be rationality and no one can see what is actually being done there. Which would kinda lead back into the issue of unethical experimentation as well because the way to get better at that to test this and to turn it into non-ex post science would be to well experiment on people. Totally, totally. I mean it's like interesting is it really imaginable
that isn't happening you know like I mean so let me 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 you know they've got this mass squabbles happening you know and trillions of bites data every day about about what is triggering who upsetting who and causing certain process a factionalization and alliance they get protests coming in saying that people should be and all thrown up that what me this is a massive amount all data about human political behavior and manipulability
now is it really that no law the is seeing that as a kind of resource I mean we know you know from these other cases we've been talking about the whole Facebook thing everyone that of course people when this data is there there's someone who says hey look what we've got here we got to systematize that and use it and try and evaluate it and monetize it I mean its it's hard for me to believe that you could half 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 and I'm experiences of persecution and and I suppose certain sort of negative that reliable systematic production negative affect is probably an interesting commercial challenge like if you had a lot information how would you try make money out there and you could you could try selling people safe spaces of various kinds and then prod them into them 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 in those arms. 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 you sort of vaguely rock yes because of the predictable dynamic area 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 its 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 say that scientific socialism is committed to the protection of human interests against strategically competent capital? Is that what you're saying? 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 we're sort of actually talking about exactly this issue when 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 if you say so okay we're sitting around a 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 the responses to corporations the responses to these catalytic automatic emergent processes that the the unexpected sort of well I think if I say it productions of intelligence that and maybe sort of making things too easy for myself there. But in 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 corporations you're basically I you have a tradition of trying to control all some extremely competent intelligent a entity and harness it to your definitions all human or collective interest I'm so that's one way that you can run this the other way as I say that you'd run it is to say that coming from a certain quite fundy Marxist but you just say isn't all this scare about artificial intelligence
just people being freaked out by kind of ultra capitalism at its at its horizon of of creativity and unexpected weirdness and instead of using that vocabulary which has been sort of ideologically discredited it instead it is 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 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 Anthropal, 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 I was 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 and so I put it on there and it's played a big role in these conversations because of the fact 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 for this week which is Bill Joy's very famous essay the future doesn't need us and that I think is one of the kinda absolutely a 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 it's what Bill Joyce's and obviously the unabomber's is as a completely uncritical I'm I'm naive Silicon Valley booster is a mobile technological possibility and billjoy himself does this kinda a G and I think actually I'm take brave commendable move of saying look you should take this unabomber manifesto seriously I mean
the guys tactics are obviously absurd I mean I don't think anyone anywhere thinks that whatever cause he was he was serving actually benefited from the fact that he ran the steps and met a bomb strip you from a few technologists and so that seems to me I people can argue but it seems to me uncontroversial that tactically I was a but in terms of his theory it's interesting you know and it's interesting because it's so highly integrated and synthetic he's not saying oh there are certain technologies or certain sort of high-end possibilities of certain these things
that are a problem he says you've got to get down to the fundamental core industrial civilization and see that this technological process has an integrity in individuality even a teleology that has to be seen as a whole you can't sort of make these piecemeal sort of criticisms of little pieces you have to understand as fundamental unity and and so that's yeah that's why I put it on there I think I think lots of senior anthropol people are going to be secret unabomberied 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 So, you know, I think what I'll do is I'll put that on my reading list, you know, as 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. is that 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 in this is the store spread Texans key 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 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 Surzan hadn't had some sort of exchange some so be interesting to see what about it greer's 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 kind of drama that you get with this with the Unabomber stuff who the Unabomber in a way is on a Kurtzvall's side in the sense that he thinks this stuff is winning and it's not just gonna die of its own 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 Echo Praxis, which I don't know if anybody has read yet. Peter Watts' sequel to Black Pite. the beginning 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 right, right, right, yeah. If we look at all these uncoordinated corporate
and market elements of doing something vaguely comparable and see that as a sign of superintelligence, 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 a lot of coordination. 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? 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 know, see as indices of the threat at all. And what you haven't said is this convergent way that, as you say, you're only, the only cognitive apparatus we have for dealing with that at the moment is coincidence, which is hopeless. You know, it's like by its very nature your brain is telling you not to see it at the very moment. To disregard it. It triggers total horror.
Like you said, you can't get rid of the coincidence cognitive scheebans, but all you're left with is gods and demons, basically. I think that scene at the beginning of Ecopraxis, 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 I know I think that is the that's the answer all nightmare absolutely I mean that the top the cultural and political talks about Paul is to take that inchoate 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 take it from that sort of just locked in nightmare scenario it's totally in this way I'm just going to sort of push us into this dramatic, almost cinematic mode at this stage, but it's like the way that would play out in the movie you know, with the your lone, few heroic isolated, anthropol people who are seeing this there and are completely incapable of socially communicating what it is that they're talking about. They're being laughed at. They're being dismissed. This is, I'm sure, what the friendly AI people are seeing.
When they're in front of their computers, they are that person. They are that lonely hero who sees and cannot get other people to understand this absolute terrible threat. I've no doubt that's happening. I'm not saying I've no doubt the threat is happening. There's no doubt that that's going on in certain minds. Right. The Sarah Connor thing. And that's why I say, you know, coming back to this whole thing about the kind of relation to political economy, because this is why there is this gothic horror element to capitalism
that has always been picked up by people, is exactly these convergent waves. You can't really pin it down. It's why all those sort of comforting anthropomorphic sort of target acquisition moments are so pathetic and so inadequate and everyone knows it's not really satisfying because that's not what you really are against. It's not the guy with the big cigar. That's just what you tell yourself because the other thing is just too horrific to deal with. And the other thing is the convergent wave. It's the uncoordinated, uncentralized, systemic, coherent, uncoordinated process of overwhelming
power. And that is defining super intelligence, 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, like collective super intelligence examples. Like once the internet is involved in things and you're suddenly able to see like 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, get 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, yeah. and it's like if it's 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 are going wrong for reasons that seem completely local and specific to that particular region you know this thing you're trying to do fails this type of thing you're trying to do fails this fails, this fails, this fails and they are all, there's 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 call grasp it's only the only thing that you'll use actually getting these concrete that you can put your finger on is the fact that all these things are happening seemingly separate happening together and I know your attempts to stop something yeah I think we have like
we have seven to ten minutes left from our two and a half hour break, or two and a half hour limit, 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'll 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, update, post texts. I'll post all this conversation we've had in the right side
BARUCH LABUNSKI- 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. BARUCH LABUNSKI- Yeah, and I can see lots of interesting points and links and stuff there. So that would be fantastic. Right. And then I think I posted all the preliminary readings. So Nick, can I post any of the 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 on the classroom. yeah okay cool I
so I think that they were in this sort of time thing that it's one of those lost lost dramatic comments that I mean does anyone does anyone have anything to sort of just a or last week with that 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. That particular hideous vision a lot.
I obviously a I probably said it's a 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 just like broken glass on the ground and then as it stores out it all sort of starts assembling together you know from everywhere I mean this is that that model of this liquid metal all day is it totally attuned today so it's not there's no place on sent to organizing thing that's
grabbing itself together it's simultaneously from everywhere coming together and I think it that moment cinema captures this kinda techno horror absolutely definitively and you know so it's a perfect convergent way and it's like the fact that that human brain is just designed not to cope with it's like we we live in a world of divergent waves you know you throw the pebble into the pond the ripples go out your home in the universe everything makes sense you know when the ripples come in from the edge of the pond
head towards the center that is that is the horror and you know those waves are I think we can't talk about it we can't talk about this threat without it looking abstractly like you know if it isn't behaving like a convert way that'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 it depicts the time loops that have characterized the whole series. 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... 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, you know, usable, I think.
There's a sort of surprising amount of insight in it, and humour 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 you know I think is like that same mentality as I mean like you know just sort of that you take the lottery ticket on this on this event that's completely uncontrollable in a strict it we could sense catastrophic a
net pushes you through a threshold that you have to have no idea what's on the other side and and makes a mockery of your sense of agency and because it's 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 a according to a lot of metrics this bizarre level of acceleration manage to find their way back to this state of a tedium
I mean it's quite interesting and it's a great resource I mean for obviously for winter me for that thing out there for the threat that human psychological disposition is golden s I mean it just finds a few highly intelligent techno competent people with that on we you know that makes them willing to do a deal with the devil and gets our I definitely antropos gonna hate those people's so you're probably already on the list actually actually entertain the possibility where I was reading the description of this
that you were just down this is a honeypot that you're just collecting names of people to watch and sort of I'll I'll be about doing this yeah when we get the basilisk which week I think we're totally in this territory, that's for sure. Yeah. Is that a seminar on the security? Like security that should be... Yes, I noticed that actually. It looks interesting, doesn't it? I don't think we should know about that. 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 last declarations moment. I'd like to say really, truly appreciate you guys. I 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