Varn Vlog
Abandon all hope ye who subscribe here. Varn Vlog is the pod of C. Derick Varn. We combine the conversation on philosophy, political economy, art, history, culture, anthropology, and geopolitics from a left-wing and culturally informed perspective. We approach the world from a historical lens with an eye for hard truths and structural analysis.
Varn Vlog
AI, Consciousness, and the Future of Politics: A Deep Dive with Nightmare Masterclass's Dave
What do artificial intelligence, consciousness, and the future of politics have in common? Join us for an insightful discussion with Nightmare Masterclass's Dave, as we explore these fascinating topics. We're breaking down complex ideas to redefine intelligence, examine the intricate world of AI and machine learning, and ponder the implications of artificial labor and scarcity in society.
We don't shy away from the challenges of the digital age, as we delve into media literacy, neoliberalism, and deindustrialization, and compare the power of the EU to the US. Dave helps us navigate the potential consequences of AI in military technology, the impact on the ruling class, and the widening wealth gap. Discover how these developments shape our world and what it means for the future.
As we delve into the realm of post-fascism and the fracturing left, we examine the effects of the Federal Reserve's inflation-fighting strategy on the economy. Don't miss this thought-provoking conversation, where we tackle pressing issues head-on and invite you to join the discussion on the complicated world of AI, consciousness, and the future of politics.
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Host: C. Derick Varn
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Welcome to VarmVlog, and our annual visit from Nightmare Masterclasses Dave begins today. We're talking about a topic that neither one of us are actually truly qualified to talk about. I have a lot of opinions about Same, which is the rise of artificial intelligence, are what I really think of as machine learning?
Speaker 2:Yep And. I heard you say intelligence is kind of a misnomer.
Speaker 1:Right? Well, one is, intelligence in humans is actually, and in mammals in general, is actually a fuzzier concept than we like to realize. And that's not even dealing with consciousness problems. One of my friends who's a cybernetic theorist and I went at it recently I mean, we're generally on the same page But about the idea that the servo motor effect would lead to and recursion would lead to consciousness, and I'm like, yeah, i don't think those behavioristic assumptions actually are true in humans either And I definitely don't think they're in like machine learning is analogous to that. But I do think we have to start talking about the idea and the demarcation of intelligence and consciousness. And one Marxist historically just avoid the fucking question. The way they use consciousness is like completely different than the way everybody else uses it.
Speaker 2:I think it's actually a good instinct.
Speaker 1:And two. well, it does lead to a problem I've been harping on now for 10 years, which is Marxism has a theory of action, but it is absent an actual theory of mind, because it just assumed that that was, that was obvious, like, and by that I mean, like Marx assumed that material consciousness and human beings was sort of what's so generous to humans, from what I can tell from his writing, although, the other taking it as a given.
Speaker 1:Yeah, And that labor informs that. But there is something called the species being and it emerges from the natural material world And that you know, and we're just gonna accept that and move on. And there's, you know, and your meaning is is dependent on your social relationships, or social relationships emerge out of social reproduction and the reproduction of society as a whole. So your labor is somewhat definitional to your, to your consciousness, but not in like a purely standpoint way. But you know, Marx basically says trying to figure out what species being is unmediated by society is probably not even possible because humans exist as part of their species being, a social. So we're social animals.
Speaker 2:It's an incoherent question.
Speaker 1:Right And like it's basically a non-question. Bring in, however, a theory of mind which I think more or less Marx thinks that the reasons behind the Hegelian theory of minor or long, but like self, differentiation and conflict and emergence with others, And then the relational definitions that emerge from that as how selfhood forms. There you go, Marxist in general, though I've never really found that super satisfying. So you see them reaching for, I mean classically they reach for Freudianism And I think the reason why they still reach for Freudianism is, frankly, European intellectual habit. I like I find interesting. I find it as an interesting thick description, But I also think like a whole lot of the assumptions of Freudianism and explanatory myths and whatever just made up Like if you take the premise that, going off of Lacan, that the unconscious is structured like a language, that might have some interesting implications.
Speaker 2:Right, respect to large language models.
Speaker 1:So that's actually an interesting debate, because I don't think the unconscious is structured like a language. I don't even.
Speaker 2:I don't even really know if that is what's, what's the what's the phrase. You're not even wrong.
Speaker 1:Yeah it's? I don't think it's, because if you take like the strict, the strict, like, say, mid-sense review, you end up in like sapphire, wharfism, which languages are so generously. the structure of consciousness, so like consciousness, is literally culturally encoded, because culture is language encoded. The thing is that that just assumes that the expression of conscious thought as we experience it is the same as conscious thought, which sounds like a weird objection, but it's not one when you think about it very deeply, because you're like oh yeah, clearly, what's what we are calling consciousness is not just the recursion of language, It's. that's just the only way we can express it, even to ourselves, except when we sometimes think in images.
Speaker 2:I do think if you start adding on to that definition with various qualifiers, you run into trouble because you start ending, you end up making the same sort of ableist arguments that you know. If you start, if you start start adding to the definition of consciousness by you know, all these special abilities that humans seem to have, of course you're leaving out people who don't have those abilities, right?
Speaker 1:And you're also having to deal with the fact that a lot of those abilities actually seem to be present in mammals that's the point, which ones you're talking about And some of them even in birds, like self recognition is possible and like a magpie recognizes themselves in a way that we don't have evidence, say, a dog does.
Speaker 2:Yeah right, Crows are really smart.
Speaker 1:So yeah, i mean, so you have. You have two problems. One is the sentience problem and the other is the awareness problem, just like going off the base definition of consciousness. But then you have the issue of recursive awareness, which is which is what like the classical cybernetic definition of consciousness was off of. Behaviorism is just a system, is is conscious if it has recursive elements that can make it conscious, which I think like. Well with that, then you could argue that, like a country is a conscious being, and I don't think that makes any sense. There's no singular sentience to that, our awareness, there's a multiplicity of awareness there. But you could like I don't know that that actually congeals in any meaningful way. We don't have a brain of society.
Speaker 2:Right. What about the? the inverse of this, like which would be that sentience is just something we made up to sort of make ourselves think that we're special and when, in reality, we are really sophisticated, autonomous.
Speaker 1:Sure, that has no implication whatsoever, though.
Speaker 2:It has implications in so far as we don't need to even really get into this sentience issue. When we're talking about artificial intelligence, we could just focus on what its effects are going to be. Because I feel like a lot of the discussion that I've seen has this, has this inflection where we're almost like fetishizing the idea or the concept of humans, when in re and it's on both sides of the debate, it's on the skeptic side, because they they try to say, well, it can't do this, it can't do that, it's not sentient, which is the Chinese box argument Right Like, like and the Chinese box.
Speaker 1:You know this argument because one of the problems that you have with leftists on this issue is like they seeded all this ground outside of Ferdinism completely to analytic philosophy, and they don't read analytic. I mean, most leftists do not read analytic philosophy, so it's like it becomes they don't know worth reading.
Speaker 1:Well, i actually I agree with you, although I would actually argue much of the stuff that we read on the left does not work reading either Most of it's self-history, to be completely honest. It always seems to me like, when you deal with analytic versus continental philosophy, you're dealing with rich descriptive bullshit versus rigorously analyze nothing. Yeah, so, but I do think here there's actually some interesting things that we could bring into account, and if you, for example, take Derek Parfit's view and Parfit's not a leftist at all You're talking about Parfit on Twitter today. Yeah, i think about Parfit a lot. I thought about Parfit a lot since I was an undergrad in like 1999 in my first philosophy class, and I encountered an essay from his book Reasons and Persons, i think What's it called? Actually, i'm going to make sure I get that right. I don't want to leave people on a wild goose to a book that doesn't exist.
Speaker 1:I'm not familiar with this work Reasons and Persons and Persons and Motivations but the article I remember is actually an article that you can still find free online. It's from 1971 and it's called Personal Identity, and what it goes through and does and I actually might do a show just in this article is it actually illustrates that there's not a lower level criterion of selfhood that is consistent enough for you to say that sentience and self are the same and self formation has any sort of consistent definition between people. You can take a Vicencinian view of this, like there's a bunch of resemblances that we can call a self. He doesn't talk about that. But if you try to set up any strict criterion of meaning for what selfhood is, they fall apart pretty quickly and he just walks through the way as they fall apart, which gets to your point. It's not really Okay. The reason why Marxists might care if it's both sentient and aware is actually interesting, and it has to do when something moves from being fixed capital to variable capital.
Speaker 2:Because then it can do human labor.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Then it does human labor and then it is effectively, from the standpoint of labor, a human, So I would argue if it can do human labor, then it can do human labor Like we don't need to even get into that. We just need to look at what its abilities are.
Speaker 1:Well, i guess the question is from the Marxist perspective, agency is actually important here, because agency is why you can exploit people, believe it or not? Because people have agency, whatever we mean by that And I'm not going to get into the autonomous, i'm a compatibilist. I don't think, me too. I think we can talk about agency. I don't think we can talk about counter-accausal free will. That doesn't make any sense. But I do think choices are meaningful, but I also think they're probabilistic. Now I was just reading an essay by a Hyle Draper that actually gets into why Marxists have not accepted probability because they basically have a Newtonian model of the universe.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a good point. I like that.
Speaker 1:Which was interesting because that was in the inevitability of socialism debate. And then you realize everybody has dropped that, because if they are right about the inevitability of socialism and they had a time stamp on it they were wrong And so, But anyway, bring about the Parfait. I think Parfait if we take Parfait's criteria here, like And I'll link this essay in the show notes of selfhood, not of sentience and awareness. We care about selves And that's why we care about sentience and awareness, because we see sentience and awareness as why we have selfhood. What Parfait says is just that's not sufficient and you can't prove it. You can only prove it for yourself. And he actually goes so far to say and John Gray says this too you can't even prove that you think, You can only prove that you are aware that you think. You think Which is Which is like, Oh shit, Because at first that seems ridiculous. And you think, Then you're like wait, If I'm an autonomous and this is just recursion, then consciousness is a recursive mechanism, whatever that is Which. Again, I don't know that. I believe this because this is the argument. Then it really doesn't. Then I really don't know that I'm actually thinking. I may just be acting and the narrative is imposed by the recursive mechanism. After the fact It's.
Speaker 1:The huge debate in neurology right now is whether or not consciousness is outside of neurological transmitters or if it's ad hoc afterwards. And it's a remarkably hard question to answer, In so much that so far we can't answer it. We don't know how we'd even begin to Which you know. So one of the things about this, I guess this machine learning question is yeah, my argument to you is like it does human labor in some ways, But at the current point it's not. We can't make it. It runs at the process in which it runs, So it's just going to reduce socially necessary labor time. There's no way to push it to do more without increasing its energy inputs by running it ragged.
Speaker 2:So material constraints are where you have a point. The only thing I would say to that is everything I've been reading lately. It's almost as though on a week by week basis things are changing, so it's hard to even generalize. But training is getting cheaper. The possibility of being able to run these models locally on your own machine with the relatively low computational requirements seems like it's on the horizon, if not already.
Speaker 1:It's being toyed around with people who are This is an offsetting it by having it run on your machine by connecting to a cloud, which is how we hide the actual energy costs of the internet, for example.
Speaker 2:Bingo, yeah. But even OpenAI's GPT API is trivially cheap at this point And I'm wondering if they are simply just trying to have that be a loss leader for whatever their business model is, or if they can actually afford to keep that API at such a low cost, because as it stands right now it is trivially cheap.
Speaker 1:Well, let's talk about this, though just as you and me, mano Imano, we all know that right now, anything technological has only artificial scarcity, because it has only artificial labor inputs. What do I mean by that? Most of the shit replicates itself Like it is truly beyond scarcity, other than the scarcity of power and material inputs into that power, which are not insignificant, i may add. I mean when you're running the internet. But if you can get this fairly cheap, what I find interesting about this is, from the standpoint of evolution, dave. We've actually done something that nature couldn't do. Our intelligence is not trivially cheap. Our intelligence requires a shit ton of calories. It requires us to evolve in a way that makes our.
Speaker 2:You should have seen what I ate for dinner.
Speaker 1:It requires us to evolve in a way that makes our birthing more dangerous than it is for most mammals. It requires us to Most mammals, burve, basically toddlers. We burve things that are completely useless for the first three years of their life.
Speaker 2:I'm still useless.
Speaker 1:It shows up to the point, arguably because there's very little memory beyond emotional memory from that young. You can't even talk about babies as being fully conscious, so that's kind of a. We basically have to be birthed half-baked to maintain our intelligence. It doesn't make any fucking sense. I will say this when you run the statistical likelihood for our intelligence evolving naturally which I'm not saying that we didn't, i'm just pointing this out it's real Mammals in general are actually really weird that we happened.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's just I mean part of it is the comet that killed off the dinosaurs.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, but why we evolved the kind of intelligence corrosion Not just humans, i mean dolphins, elephants. It's not immediately obvious what the survivable advantage is, at least if you look at it from the standpoint of even the gene or the individual organism, which is what most models.
Speaker 2:I was going to say You can't really look at it on the basis of the individual.
Speaker 1:Well, but that is actually the Darwinistic assumption is that individual selection, removing it to the gene, was a way to get beyond the whole group versus individual selection problem. But it looks like in humans actually you have both group selection and individual selection, both through natural and sexual selection. So it's really hard to fucking say. This is already breaking out. There's some of our lefty friends who immediately once we start talking about genetics, they just check out and think we're racist or something Like what do you?
Speaker 2:mean genes. Genetics is environmental conditions that have been encoded into us from the past.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's the way I look at it.
Speaker 1:Well, i mean, yeah, the expression of genes is complicated, And I actually, the more I learn about epigenetics, i'm even sort of like we should be careful what we say about that, because we don't really understand the mechanisms yet. We know that there are some, but that some of them are real thin and some of them are gene triggers. So what I'm saying, though, what makes this machine learning model so interesting is its intelligence is arguably, it's less fuzzy than human intelligence, although it's modeling itself of human intelligence, and in some ways then, it's actually moderating its power. I mean, like, if you think about it, it's basically built on human intelligence as its model through the inputs into writing. Then it is piggybacking off of all of human energy resources in some ways, like all the Oh, totally, but it means we do have an intelligence sorting mechanism that is energy fairly cheap because it doesn't have to deal with a body much We just have to keep a couple of machines running And it's line code Like It's starting to get freaky.
Speaker 1:Yeah, i mean, when you think about that it's like So my argument has been that it's just not a human, it's not going to be. It's going to approximate human intelligence. It's not a human intelligence. I'm not sure that matters, but I think what it does mean is we're not actually going to be able to predict, if it starts really being sentient in any sort of meaningful sense, what it's going to do, because it's not really based on our intelligence, it's piggybacking off of it, which is, i guess that sounds strange, but our intelligence isn't code. We don't know how to code for human intelligence.
Speaker 2:We don't know how to code for it, but that doesn't mean it isn't code.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, Well, we don't know, and so much that anything is a code of proteins, sure, but what we can say is, for example, computer intelligence has been limited so far by the fact that it's based on Boolean modifiers, which was a misguided mathematical attempt to model human intelligence that has absolutely no actual relationship to the way humans think. It's again, it was one of these 19th centuries the way we think, we think, and so what it means to me is we're black-boxing ourselves and having something that didn't evolve the way we do and doesn't really think the way we do, be able to use our intelligence in a way that makes it infinitely smarter than any individual and potentially smarter than us collectively, although not yet, and that's now. I'm not one of these people who think this is going to be like the singularity. I'm not one of those techno-utopians, but I do think this is an interesting question.
Speaker 2:Yeah, And also on the other end of that, are all these billionaires signing a petition saying that we should stop research past GPT-4.
Speaker 1:Yeah, since we're going so fast. that's the thing It's changing in the order of weeks now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, and I would argue that the people who signed that have ulterior motives. I think Elon Musk has some kind of grudge against open AI.
Speaker 1:I mean Roscoe's Vascularis is how one of his early things right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, i also think they're concerned about the economic implications, because it's going to hit their bottom line if this starts taking some unpredictable turns.
Speaker 1:My thing is good luck bottling this up, just like we thought about bottling genetic research up Once it's out. I don't know how you do that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, i mean, you saw that. I don't know if you saw this, but Meta's Lama model leaked. There's some speculation that they allowed it to leak, but I don't know. It's going to be exceedingly hard to keep these things closed. There is a general culture in programming and tech in general to keep things open, So you're already selecting for people who are in favor of just showing everything you got.
Speaker 1:Yeah, This is the interesting thing about tech right now is, while I admit that we can say that the internet has always been commodified and people push back at me about this I'm like, yeah, but we didn't always buy into its commodification.
Speaker 2:It hasn't always been this bad.
Speaker 1:You have power law instituted, walled gardens, meaning there's so many people in the walled garden trying to get out of it as nearly impossible. But this is just. This is like a power law multiplication. We're only there. We only use Twitter because everybody fucking uses Twitter. We only use Facebook, which is actually still orders of magnitude bigger than Twitter, even though we all complain about how it's dead. It is hemorrhaging money like crazy because of everybody uses Facebook. That's why these things. That's why it's been so hard to upsell them once one or two platforms stuck. That's why, if you want to defeat TikTok, you're likely going to have to ban it, which we also see. I think the US State Department and Instagram have completely different reasons for wanting to ban.
Speaker 1:TikTok, but they're definitely conspiring on that, almost Certainly.
Speaker 2:It really amuses me when you see these liberals on Twitter just advocating for the regulation of AI. On one hand, I understand why they feel that way, but it's so naive because you know any legislation that's going to be passed is going to be. You saw what they tried to do with the Restrict Act.
Speaker 1:It's basically like an internet kill switch bill plus a lot of backdoor expansions of Patriot Act shit. The lot of the libertarian reporting on it was based off of the most expansive view of the law, which I think is a questionable assumption. But it's not out of the realm of possibility because everything in that act is going to be settled in court.
Speaker 2:Yeah. If something is explicitly not part of the bill, it should be stated within the bill. I'm inclined to take an open view of it as well, because that's how it's going to be applied.
Speaker 1:It's going to be applied expansively and then limited or delimited by the court, which I think people just don't understand. how important case law is to all this shit. Some of the things that is weird about it is, since it would be hard to know who has standing, except when they apply it to US citizens. The only thing you could say is there's a disincentive in it to declare a US citizen a foreign actor, because that would actually probably immediately trigger a constitutional crisis, although, who knows, these days it feels like we're triggering constitutional crisis every three minutes, so maybe I'm wrong about that.
Speaker 2:I don't have faith in the Supreme Court to make a ruling that I would agree with. I don't have faith.
Speaker 1:You know what's funny? Actually, i think about it. The only Supreme Court justice I would trust on this issue is a conservative, roberts.
Speaker 2:That's.
Speaker 1:Gorsuch. No, i do not trust Roberts. Gorsuch is a weirdo. If you like, read Gorsuch's stuff on Indigenous rights. He's actually good on that. He's actually one of the people who voted on foreign standing in a way where the Liberals voted with the conservative court with Kagan and Sotomayor voted with the conservatives. It was in Brown. Who's that leave? Don't ask me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and, i believe, one liberal. I can't remember which liberal it was. Maybe it wasn't Sotomayor, because there's only three liberals on the court now. But right now you have the weird thing about. the court is just so. people kind of get it. if you're actually following this, it's extremely conservative, but you actually can't predict how Gorsuch, kavanaugh, roberts and Amy Coney Barrett are actually going to vote on all the issues You're saying if it's one of their pet issues that they're actually not conservative about, they might.
Speaker 1:Right, they might, and Amy Coney Barrett's actually a moderate conservative on everything but abortion. So you don't know. We don't know. For example, on the Supreme Court standing on loan forgiveness, we know that Roberts, probably Alito and Thomas are going to vote against it. We don't really know what Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett are going to do.
Speaker 2:I mean, i saw the part where Amy Coney Barrett was asking some pointed questions towards the people trying to mount this lawsuit, so that made me feel like, oh, is she actually going to vote in favor of loan forgiveness? I hope so. It would help me Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, i mean, it would help me a little bit. I'm kind of torn on this. since we're being pretty free learning in this conversation, as we always are, we are going to get back to machines. We're going to try to.
Speaker 2:Oh, i'll get back to it. I'm hyper fixated on it, so we will get back to it.
Speaker 1:I do think it's interesting how hard this is to fix, because on one hand, it seems pretty clear, like the Biden administration said, they knew they had the law on their side, but they weren't sure that the Supreme Court was on their side, which to me is like, what are you not saying?
Speaker 1:like are you not willing to actually take the logically deducible step that you have rogue elements in the Supreme Court? But beyond that it's also. it's a fix, but it's kind of a shitty one. If they were serious about it One, we know we're going to have to do something legislatively if they're really serious about it. And two, they would have forgiven the shit immediately and not put all the roadblocks in, because they had a year before this evening got rolled out and they didn't have anything ready when they rolled it out, which was kind of amazing. which tells you that like they were just doing a law review and being stubborn, more or less. which also tells me that there's a real sense that Biden didn't really care if it got reversed, because it would be harder to reverse if they immediately just paid out. All right, we're just dropping the 10 grand and everybody's account, and if it wipes it out, good.
Speaker 2:And I say because the administrative cost alone like eats up any benefits to means testing it like yeah, it seems like they're almost expecting it to get reversed And he can just be like well, I tried, elect me again and I'll do something else.
Speaker 1:But that, you see, this is what I'm worried about with the Democrats right now. That seems to be. their strategy is to deliberately fail and then promise with we only one more, that we would not fail next time, even though we have no history And and, unfortunately, with younger voters who are college educated, it's actually working.
Speaker 2:Like, like, yeah, yeah, I mean with the results of this midterm, Although.
Speaker 1:I don't know if it's going to maintain working because, for all the things that I disagree with the with the Dylan rally, robert Brenner seven thesis is in the UF review, which I've talked a lot about because it pisses me off. But one of the things that I do agree with them about is, like we don't really know what's going to happen in the general, because right now, for the first time, the demographics have shift, where demographic learning patterns are going to favor liberals and left wingers and like, which are separate categories for me, but but nonetheless, because they're college educated, now there's less, there's there's a, and college educated people are even more likely than old people to actually vote in midterms, yeah, whereas in the general, those dynamics are completely different. We don't know. We don't know what they're going to do. So who knows?
Speaker 1:I have been good at calling elections off of polls and guts for most of my life. Yeah, We'll, we'll see if there's any agreement on that. Yeah, yeah, but no, there's no responsibility. I don't feel comfortable calling shit after 2020. Like, i mean neither Like I, just I don't feel like I had. I feel like my priors are broken. You know, like, like, no, everything like like, and I say that because I actually do think realignment has been like a four generational process, like it's not. When people talk about realignment now, i'm like we've been realigning since the fucking 60s, like there's been a push, pull on on partisan realignment and decoupling from class relationships that emerge only really between the 1930s and the 1950s. Anyway, that have been uncoupling since longer than I've been alive, you know so since before the 80s And it feels like it's finally happened, but we don't really know what it means, because what I mean by that is like increasingly, finance bourgeoisie and the educated are with the Democrats. The Sun Belt bourgeoisie remains with the Republicans, but like the petty bourgeoisie and like certain degrees of like non-urban workers, they're not with the Republicans And they have that historically even in the 80s that wasn't really true, like Reagan was a one-off for that They didn't maintain. So there has been like a dealignment with class.
Speaker 1:There's some alignment still the very poor vote for Democrats. If they vote. That's a big fucking if. And if you make over $250,000, you vote for Democrats. If you make over a million, you probably vote for both, like you. Just you know like there's no partisan loyalty there. And if you make between 100,000 and 250,000, which is a vast majority of people who make over 100,000. In that bracket you vote Republican for the most part, particularly if you're white, but even if you're not So.
Speaker 2:I think what it comes down to is you talked about this a little bit, but it comes down to is is neoliberalism over? That's really, ultimately, what it comes down to.
Speaker 1:I feel like I feel like it's hard for me to tell if we have moved to something new or if it's like that period from like the late 60s to the early 80s, when you're really transitioning out and there's still kind of fortism and with the beginnings of neoliberalism coexisting for a while And they really kind of continue to coexist until the early 90s, like, and what do I mean by that? Like yeah, you had, like you had deindustrialization, but it didn't happen overnight. It was a long process. Like my area where I grew up in Georgia wasn't really deindustrialized until the middle of the 90s And it was never completely deindustrialized, but like Right.
Speaker 2:But the United States is still An industrial powerhouse, Yeah it's the second largest one.
Speaker 1:The EU collectively sometimes knocks us a third. that hasn't in the last year, and while the EU's economic power is greater than the US if you include all of them, including the UK, which I don't know if you can do anymore. And the UK seems to be dead set on, since the UK only invested in finance capital for like 30 years. now that it's lost its ability to leverage that off of a trade parity with the euro it's going to be a mid-income country, but that's going to really hurt to transition to that Like they're basically going to be like Chile or Argentina or something.
Speaker 2:I think that's even optimistic.
Speaker 1:Yeah, maybe And I also pointed this out to people when I was like Britain by itself, without its empire, is going to have a hard time reindustrializing too, because you industrialize under imperial conditions. You don't have that anymore. You're a fucking island. You don't have enough internal consumption to float your own economy, even under MMT conditions.
Speaker 2:It's like a little boy dressed up in a big man's suit, the way the UK is.
Speaker 1:Which I don't feel good about. I mean, as much as I like to shit on the English, I don't feel good that like.
Speaker 2:No, working people are going to suffer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, a whole lot, which is why there's working class militancy there. But, as I've been talking to British leftists more recently and they're just like it's too little, too late and the left has not dealt with it, well, yeah, the left hasn't actually been out with that working class militancy, and then people go well, why don't we have that in America? I'm like they're desperate and losing and they're not winning in this. Similar to like France, like France is out in the roads and, yes, it took over BlackRock, but Macron's still not budging.
Speaker 2:Nothing they yeah, nothing they've done has worked. So, as much as you can, shit on the American left, look, yeah, the French are militant. You got to hand it to them. but does this strategy?
Speaker 1:It doesn't seem to matter.
Speaker 2:Play out the way they want it to. I don't think it does.
Speaker 1:It does not seem to matter.
Speaker 2:So I've been politically hopeless, which is you know if you're psychoanalyzing me. That's probably why I'm fixated on this particular issue.
Speaker 1:Well, this is interesting because 14 years ago, actually 15 years ago, this is around the end of the odds which I've been told with friends to say but fuck you, young people, you're one under 22 to cool off. I'm kidding, i'm kidding, not by much. No, i actually like Zoomers because they're moral nihilist, which is not something I would have expected. They're prudes kind of, but in a weird way because in some ways, sexual identity and sexual expressions like ubiquitous and yet also like it's absolutely not.
Speaker 2:Also. Yeah, like sex scenes and movies aren't cool anymore.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's. There's an interesting notion about Physical exploitation there, thank you. That, i think, is I wrestle with. So sex scenes and movies aren't cool anymore. Yet porn is ubiquitous, which I think is like.
Speaker 2:That's why they think that.
Speaker 1:Right, which is why I feel like, yeah, that's related. It's like not only do you not get tabulated by it anymore, there's also you don't imagine there's another reason to have it there, right, Yeah, Because.
Speaker 2:It couldn't possibly be important to the story for some reason, yeah, which makes it hard to believe, which makes it hard to make fun of Rhonda Santis.
Speaker 1:You know, in Christian schools in Florida banning David, because even though that's clearly I'm like, yeah, but again you have. If you think in modern movies that's the only reason why sex nudity is there, then you're not really that different from that spectrum, right? Like that said, zoomers are nicer to each other than even millennials were. So I want to, even though I also think, like most people under 45, like they're used to most of their social interactions being mediated in a way that actually makes normal human relationships even more anxiety producing than they were, like 40 years ago. Because you're just not used And I mean this like literally, you're sensu, you're sensuery not used to engaging with all the reading of a person that you normally have to do in person to understand things. There's all these contextual things that just people have kind of not had to deal with because they've been dealing with it through mediated devices.
Speaker 2:I could say something right now which, if you saw it just via text, you would interpret it as, like me, being hostile. But you can tell based on my body language, that I'm kidding or you know. You miss a lot of that with the online interaction.
Speaker 1:I think it come off way more as an asshole on Twitter and Facebook than I do even on this. Yeah, like, although I'm probably more aggressive.
Speaker 2:But it's on set by a number of just Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's a number of things. There's tone, there's body language, there's context, there's a whole thing. And people and I don't think this is just young people, but it's compounded in young people, like the literacy problems compounded in young people People talk about how they don't know how to read anymore. I'm like they get it twice because we all don't read as much now because we have visual media all the time, which we've had since the 1980s. But there was an interesting time period from like 2003 to about as late as 2015, where people were actually reading more than they had historically done since like the 1950s, because so much of the internet was text based and we were using it to watch less TV. Well, now that you have micro, i mean, this is where, like I'm against the banning TikTok, but part of me isn't Like I'm against it for all the right political reasons And I think it's a terrible idea to censor and I don't support it, but I do think it's pernicious anyway, oh yeah.
Speaker 2:We shouldn't be confused about that. It's destroying their brain, it's destroying executive function?
Speaker 1:Yeah, i'm not. I don't know that it's destroying intelligence, but one thing that we've actually learned. When I went through my Did you watch the video? I went through literacy stats and I also talked about media literacy. I'm like you guys thought that general literacy decline was going to be offset by media literacy. No evidence for that, that people actually are less able to navigate online media than they were 10 years ago. It's like knowing what to trust and how to trust it, and there are a variety of reasons for that, but one of which is a whole lot of shit that used to be free is now behind a paywall And it's the better quality stuff. That is Like. That's one of the few Nathan Robinson arguments and I was like, oh, that's a good point, nathan Robinson, i'm going to pretend that you didn't say that in a mental attic accent, so that can take seriously.
Speaker 2:I haven't been up too lately. I haven't been following him.
Speaker 1:I don't know, not a whole lot. He kind of chilled out after the great unionization versus NEPO publisher debate, right.
Speaker 2:So None the less As far as literacy goes, you know now students are going to have GPT writing all their essays, So that's not a Interestingly, so far They're not using it yet In the high school level And I teach mostly.
Speaker 1:I teach in like an 80% online program And like We haven't had that problem yet. How could you tell It? So I'm going to tell you something. Chat GPT writes like a. Writes like a mediocre honor student. My students don't write that well.
Speaker 2:Right. But If I was an entrepreneurial high school student, I would figure out ways to do less work without completely just taking it word by word. You know what I mean.
Speaker 1:Maybe I've had kids referencing things that they were never taught And then when I questioned them, they don't know it. So that's how you can kind of tell, but in general I think we're assuming a general understanding about this, with young kids who are not even plugged up enough to know how to use these things.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Not yet. Not yet, but all of them by the time we get in college we're going to be that's going to be a problem. I think, as I've told kids in my honor, kids, i'm like use Chat GDP to help you, like, don't copy and paste it, but it's not any worse than a lot of other things.
Speaker 2:Don't take what it says. Use it cautiously. Any specific claim, because it will make shit up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like it's not as good. That's one of the things with the being ChatGP It's like occasionally it just makes shit up, hallucination Right, but if I actually was just like, if they use it to as an aphasiac, which is, like my, the reason why I don't write a lot of people like why don't you write your essays in prose? And I'm like you know how long it takes for me to write prose in my own language. I'm like I can do it, but it takes me months Because I have to write it and sit on it for six months and then read it again to edit it, or I have to paste it when I edit it. And they need to be someone who is also in enough contact with me that they can call me up to explain what words are missing. And if anyone's ever seen my Twitter, i sound smart till I don't And that's why. But as an aphasiac, oh my God, it's a God send.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I can just be like here's my stuff, Make it read, write, And then I go okay, well, that word is not what I meant, But now I see that it changed that And so even if it's wrong, I can still fill it in Like it's a God send of automation And I don't really. I mean, I think it's going to cut off a lot of low end writing jobs. It is. It's going to cut off a lot of low end coding jobs. I actually don't see it yet cutting off a lot of high end ones And frankly, we don't have enough fucking labor anyway.
Speaker 2:So That's what I was going to say. I think this the only reason not to get too conspiratorial. But the only reason this is really being allowed to happen now is because there is a labor shortage, that you can force these white collar workers into the proletarian proper, you know.
Speaker 1:Right To do semi specialized physical labor later. They won't probably be total grunts. And, by the way, so far these tech layoffs have just been absorbed Like we don't. Like. There's been massive tech layoffs even before chat, gpt And they have not affected the overall employment rate.
Speaker 2:Yeah, what is like 3.5 right now?
Speaker 1:just to amount.
Speaker 1:Yeah, i mean like so when people lose their tech jobs, they're finding other tech jobs? are they're going into like lower middle management somewhere? Like I mean, it's pretty clear that the current trend of decoupling and pulling back and shutting down borders is really putting strains on things, and I think it puts strains on things that makes both political parties uncomfortable, because it makes the conservatives who I mean also, by the way, let's be honest, it was Reagan who started liberalization of the immigration code Like, yeah, so it was actually Questions and debates. Yeah, it was a conservatives who started it anyway, but the reason why they did that, if we are honest, is we had this whole fucking infrastructure that was built from the baby boom. We didn't want it to collapse And we needed people, and so we got them.
Speaker 2:We need low wage workers.
Speaker 1:Well, we needed everything. We also needed highly skilled workers, because we couldn't train enough of ourselves.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then you get the H1B.
Speaker 1:Right, which is you know also how you have situations of like people of color, who are statistically, as an aggregate, wealthier than white people, but others, people of color who are even like the same, or like the same overall broad race, like Cambodians versus And Vietnamese versus like South Koreans or something. I think that's one of Our South Asians in particular, which is particularly interesting when you think about how poor South Asia is right. Or like Nigerians are one of the richest demographics but it's because our laws are so racist only the very rich and the most skilled can come in anyway. That's a point just to say. Like we had, on both ends of the skill structure, we handled the decline of the baby boom by immigration. That's how we handled it.
Speaker 1:Now that that's kind of over and we're looking at global decoupling, they have not. Even though Fareed Sakaria might go on CNN and whine about it and even be open that he's whining about the loss of cheap labor. We are not willing to open the borders back up in any significant sense to unskilled labor And we're even getting a question about it with skilled labor, and that has not changed from the Biden.
Speaker 2:Was he the one making the claim that it was contributing to inflation? Yeah, yeah, i think I agree with that.
Speaker 1:It's a small contributor to inflation, but it is one. One of the things I've been trying to tell people is like well, people have been like why are they trying to do this thing? that seems contradictory And I do think it risks collapsing the entire world economy in ways that my friend, nico Via Real, i think, has only recently warmed up to the real possibility of. Because I'm not a final crisis guy. I keep on pushing on people like we predicted the final crisis way too many times. We don't know what's going to happen, but this time Right.
Speaker 1:But where I will say I am worried is like we're seeing subprime fracturing in the UK because while we mostly got rid of it in the US, we didn't really get those same kinds of fixed mortgages with slightly higher interest rates passed as policy in Europe and Canada and Australia. So even fixed rates still variable. It gets reassessed often and people's housing rates are going to lower place. Plus, in the United States we're having commercial real estate flash Plus I was going to say Plus. It looks like it might be getting so expensive to serve, so expensive to service between inflation and the interest rate Housing loans, that housing loans are becoming unviable without subprime.
Speaker 2:Without subprime. That just came out today. right Right. Yeah, Money on mortgages.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I go back and forth on this Oh.
Speaker 1:I think it's big. I just don't know that it's final, right, right. So I mean the only thing that's good for us renters. We find renters are finally going to get a break, but they're not getting a lot of one yet.
Speaker 2:Like I don't want to pay, anything for rent, so I'm in a good spot. I just got informed that they are increasing my rent next year by like 40 bucks.
Speaker 1:No.
Speaker 2:I'll take it.
Speaker 1:I got a 50 buck increase in rent, but I actually rent from an individual who like rents under market and I'm in the West, which is ridiculously expensive. Like the closer you're out of California, the farther from Utah Oh yeah, utah is one of the hardest housing markets in the country to very recently, so they one of the things that they do up a ton of rental property and then the interest rate went up, so there has been significant negative pressure that. The other issue is we just we have stalled it off for maybe a year or two, but we're running out of water. We just got a ton of snow, so we might be okay for a few more years, but there might be an arsenic cloud over the valley before too long. I'm actually not joking.
Speaker 2:I don't love that. I don't love hearing that.
Speaker 1:So you know, one of the things that I find interesting. I find it interesting how well China has navigated this, despite all the problems that they had. Last year. They had a ton, a ton, i have more, and they still have. They still have them. I mean, like we're still seeing housing fracturing.
Speaker 1:It's not clear that they can. They can handle all that cleanly, but they're they're they're playing Linda of last resort. It is pretty clear, though, that they don't want to become the. They don't want the US dollar to completely collapse before they have an alternative to it really Not yet, right. Well, the thing is, they have to completely change their economic strategy to be us, because one of the things that you have to be as a consumer of last resort for your, for your currency to be super valuable, because people are going to want it to like sell you shit, like it's a cycle of selling American shit. That's why. So, if they were to try to accelerate and become the R version of the consumer currency, they would have to have an economy that looks like ours, and that would be disastrous for Chinese people, and the Chinese people wouldn't put up with it.
Speaker 1:Like, like for all the power of the state like China. You know Chinese peasants revolt a lot and there are still people with living memory of the proletarian revolution, although they're very old now. But by that I mean the proletarian cultural revolution and and the mixing of classes that that enabled. There's a younger, more meritocratic oriented group. That's probably my age now, that that it's interesting to see where they go. But I feel very weird talking about China and like this blanket way anyway, because, like there are regional differences, there's all kinds of fractures There's got. On one hand, they do have a massive demographic crisis coming, the likes of which we'd never seen, because it's not happened to a society that massive. On the other hand, it's not any different than the demographic crisis everybody else is going through, which is you're a bigger fucking country, and so I, you know, even you know.
Speaker 2:You know when Elon Musk is talking about something and even he is like concerned about like this population decline, i know it's, you know a wrong clock is right occasionally, but when even he is talking about it, it's like Well, the thing is, it's also something we need, like, like, there's a, there's a challenge here.
Speaker 1:Yes, we have enough resources that everyone in the world could live comfortably off of current resources if they were allocated correctly. They are not allocated correctly, so, and that's not changing today or tomorrow, so what's happening is a natural response to that. Like I mean, in some ways, it is interesting that, like, societal collapse is still possible read Joseph Tanner but there is a way in which there does seem to be a metabolic response of cost of living to child rearing that just leads to a much smaller population over time. Like, so we don't have overpopulation, we have temporary overcrowding, and what that means, though, is that the reset is ugly, because you have a society that we build up all these resources for more people, and, under capitalism, you have to grow Are everything immediately shrinks Right.
Speaker 2:Like It's the same issue. I mean when, when I hear certain arguments about AI, people want to ban it because it's it's going to create a economic crisis, and it's like that's not the technology's fault.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And also like that's our economic system.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we have a technology like under a different economic system, like this would just all be good. Yeah, and this would just reduce socially necessary labor time. Right, as long as we, you know, don't accidentally program the, the, the AI's, to be expansive, the way most beings are, because I don't just think that's unique to humans. As long as it doesn't see life as a competition, it's just a probably good thing to have around, like, even if it was to be, even if it was to have significant agency, it would be cool to have something as smart as us that we don't actually have to compete over the same kinds of resources for.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I like that. It can help you do a sanity check Right. It's just like okay, I mean, you know, it might actually, for example, talk us out of doing some of the dumb shit we do to ourselves.
Speaker 2:Like I've been messing around with just an application. That's a very simple chat bot interface And what one of the modes that I have for when it calls to the open AI API. I have Devil's Advocate, you know. So you want it to take the opposite position of whatever you're saying and you can see if it's making a good argument. That's incredibly useful.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it is, and I think that's I mean, and it's incredibly useful for, like, offloading bullshit, coding and making sure your small shit's right, like, and you can focus on the big shit. Like. It is sort of. It's sort of great in that regard, like.
Speaker 1:I say this as a person who's also not as threatened by it because of one of the things that it does is it's a very good mediocre writer, right, Like it's a very smart mediocre writer, but that's interestingly where its ability actually should like why it's not really totally human really shows up, even though it can sound like it can pass the Turing test. But it's going to pass the Turing test as a fairly uncreative individual. Right, and it's the same thing as, like you make the composite of all people, all the beautiful people. It's actually not as beautiful as a lot of the individual people in there because it's not that unique, but it's functional as fuck. Like there's just all this smaller stuff you don't have to do. Well, we don't know if that's going to erode shit over time once it starts feeding itself back into itself. That's an interesting question.
Speaker 2:Like I've heard that concern before. I'm not so worried about that When I see I've seen a few projects, people working on machine learning, training data and using GPT-4 to create the data, or it plays a role. It doesn't just contrive the data out of nothing, but it plays a role in formatting and organizing the training data in a way that if a human had to do it it would take an ungodly amount of time. And we're seeing good results with that. For the most part We're not seeing like a. I mean I think it is too early to say whether or not that problem is really going to come up at a certain point, but as of right now, i'm not too worried about it.
Speaker 1:Well, there's still way more human production than there is chat, gpt production, right, right, i mean, the only thing we've heard is Clark's world shutting down over chat, gpt generated short stories which I'm not even sure I totally believe. I don't know.
Speaker 2:Sounds like there's more to that.
Speaker 1:I was like you got that many Like like. As a poet, for example, it still can't do what I do. It can write a good poem, but it can't do what I do, and that's actually kind of interesting to me. Like it's not that it could never. If it had enough of my work it could probably figure out my patterns.
Speaker 2:Imagine a model that is trained on just your data.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Then you could replicate me And that could be interesting. I'm also not particularly worried about that. Like, I feel like you know, fuck, we've already lost this battle once. The fucking chess game was lost, really Like, yeah, that's when it it was over.
Speaker 2:It was already over at that point. Yeah, I have concerns that it's going to create economic turmoil.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, although it's weird because only a correct economic toriel in rent seeking parts of the economy, but it's going to expose how much of our economy is now rent seeking You don't think it can play a role in production. Well, absolutely do, but I don't think it plays a role that actually takes humans out of production.
Speaker 1:But if it makes one person more efficient, is the thing Well what it's doing in that context, if it's not in a rental context, what it's doing is reducing socially necessary labor time, which sucks, And capitalism. It should be good. It should be good And I mean like, yeah, I think like if there's anything that actually is going to trigger a final crisis, believe it or not, it would be something like this, because it would, it could foreseeably reduce the most socially necessary labor down time down to very, very little.
Speaker 2:You just see you would just see a concerted fall in the price of everything.
Speaker 1:Right, or they're going to have to lock that shit down under IP, in which case you really are And, like I, make fun of the concept of techno neofutilism, particularly when people talking about it two years ago, but this really could lead to something like that except it wouldn't be sustainable.
Speaker 1:It wouldn't be sustainable because it's not tied into something like real feudalism is about food, like it's about food and arms, it's about yields, it's about crop yields and weaponry And it's it's the reason why it's low growth And I'm going to sound like old Robert Brenner here is because, like it's not about exploitation, it's about extraction. Toad court, like an extraction, interestingly requires more and more. To make extraction more efficient, you need more and more weapons, more and more guns, more and more army, etc. And that pretty much each up your growth cost, like your ability to grow is eating up in the the in making the machines of war Interestingly, machines of war in capitalism, because of the way you exploit workers actually lowers costs Because it makes worker, pushing the workers.
Speaker 1:Productivity, the variable, the one of the you know, one of the variable forms of capital in the easiest one to valorize. So that's what you do. But interestingly, i think it's interesting that if we we note that since 2008, we've never returned to pre 2008 productivity levels. No, that's why I think neoliberalism is shifting to something else And we don't know what it is like. Like that's the rational core of the great reset bullshit that there is something there And it was happening before COVID, like this QE stuff that we were doing was trying to like stall Basically, basically, and in some degrees like monetary schemes can help with this. I'm not, you know, i'm not totally anti MMT and whatnot anymore, but I do think you have to look at this like this this changes production in a fundamental way And we are also seeing this at a time.
Speaker 1:The thing that's the elephant in the room is we're doubling down on nationalism at a time when when all of the big societies the exception of maybe India we're all going to be declining in population pretty massively, where there's hundreds of people outside the you know, growing populations outside the gates that aren't declining And they're hard, they're the place that's hardest hit. To the idea that you're going to be able to keep those walls up strong, it's going to get very dark very quickly, are just collapse. And one of the reasons why I think these walls are up strong is there is a certain sense in which people are worried that no nation can handle this much instability that fast. Like. I don't think it's just xenophobia although xenophobia is, is, is is encouraged under these conditions but I don't think it's just that You have to train people, you have to get them on like at least speaking the same language in whatnot, and you can do that through work, but you have to have enough work for them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, now you see the problem, like so that's, that's to me, that's the actual. It's not whether or not the robot overlords are going to take us over, because I just don't think. I don't think unless it, unless this. My fear was always that this, this learning machine stuff, with the rise in military tech first, and that is a disaster.
Speaker 2:That is a very rational concern. Right, i do, i do.
Speaker 1:I still sort of worry about that with DARPA, like the baby.
Speaker 2:Yeah, oh, 100%, like I really. I really am curious because you know. I guarantee you like yeah, i guarantee you, there are CIA assets at open AI.
Speaker 1:Well, i, oh yeah for sure. And here's the thing I think about right now, though. Everyone's you know people like well, the right, so much more armed to the left and we could take up the government. I'm like you, dumb motherfuckers, even if you had a third of the actual army, the part of the army that controls the machinery is not generally your part, that's generally you know. That could be filled in by anybody, particularly not you have chatbots to do it. Your AR-15s don't do much against drones with cluster bombs.
Speaker 2:Even if it did, they just send another one.
Speaker 1:Like you don't even need to be in good shape for that military to work Like that and that just has not really dawned on people about the implications of what happened in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. That like we robotize that motherfuckers, we already live in Skynet. Like it's just run by people.
Speaker 2:So I just read a paper about GPT-4 being used to execute create commands for robots, and that sent my mind to some dark places. You know everyone likes to think of the robot butler, but more likely than not, the military applications are going to be the thing that is developed first. No, it'll be porn first and then military.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that tends to be the way it goes.
Speaker 2:But yeah, it's an interesting Yeah.
Speaker 1:I worry about that. I worry that we haven't even gotten like hey, aziz Gazimov told us what we need to put in here as fail-safes from moment one, and even with that it can get around it. But you better just remember with these kinds of intelligences, until they have sentience, they're going to do exactly what you tell them to. They are very much like an accidentally evil genie because they do exactly what you tell them to do, like whether or not you understand all the implications of what you just said or not.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a monkey's paw type situation.
Speaker 1:And that should be concerned with. I mean, i think, legitimately we should be concerned with. I think what's interesting is like it also increases this whole problem that we're seeing in, like in Syria and Ukraine and whatever, where you have these proxy wars, but they really, they really can't No one. I have people who yell at me and like Russia's gonna win or the NATO's gonna win, mostly as Russia's gonna win, because I think people are surprised I'm not on that train. I'm also not on the NATO train either, and I'm just like I don't think so, because the existential risk for actually escalating to the point where you could win totally risk total annihilation for both sides. And that has not changed, mother fuckers. It hasn't changed at all.
Speaker 2:I'm on the train of. this is going to be a long, long ordeal with a lot of suffering involved, and it's not going to be good for anybody.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's going to drive a lot of the left completely baddie. And also I mean people don't like my geopolitics on this, but I'm sorry, i think I'm correct We're seeing a lot of bad intentions but also a lot of unintentional really come forward in ways that are very hard to disentangle, and the country that seems to be trying to disentangle at the fastest and thus is why I call them the most responsible one is China, and even they're getting stuck in shit, like the Belt and Road Initiative is still stalled, even though they're really doing good on reaching out to the Middle East, becoming a lender of last resort, running a slightly inflationary monetary policy to compensate for that. They're doing a lot of the things that it's pretty smart to do, but they're still running into serious problems because the system is more complicated than any one nation can deal with, which is also why we kind of the United States wants to believe in a round but doesn't really want to run it anymore either. Like what do I mean by that? We clearly still want to run it because we're still trying to bully everyone around, but there's a fundamental issue where we're pulling back and we're just hoping that if we tell people what to do. They'll continue running their part of it.
Speaker 1:It's part of why multi-polarity is inevitable, but people who celebrate it or bemoan it or cry about it, it's like I don't see why. To me it's like a thing. The conditions there are almost infinitely complex. None of us know what it means and we should quit pretending we know what it means. And also, when it comes to these proxy wars, we should quit pretending that any side can clearly win, because so far in the 21st century, we don't have any evidence for that. After Chechnya, actually, we don't have a single war where there's a clear one-sided winner anymore. I can't think of one. So, and that's because everyone's fighting handicap, because the capacity to kill everyone exists, and you start adding in these AI robots to that, like no, it's going to make I mean, ironically, it probably will make war just less and less likely, because the risk just becomes existential if you hide. No one really wants to pull that trigger.
Speaker 2:I do tend to think you know the conversation online. A lot of what I see entails discussion of AI as though it's a singular entity, but there's going to be a multiplicity of all different types of models that are being used in all sorts of things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we already have several models right Like yeah, and the issue is, one bad actor can cause a lot of chaos, but I don't think the response to that is to stop developing AI. I think the argument I've seen that is the most compelling is that the best way to stop bad AI is good AI. Maybe a little bit simplistic, but I think that's really the only answer, because banning this stuff isn't going to work. If you ban it, other countries are just going to develop it. If you try to create proprietary models, those are just going to be pirated and used for different purposes. The cat's out of the bag. It's not going back in.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, one of the things interesting is Aaron Benieta. So far has been correct, though that chat. Gpt hasn't been chasing whole fields out of their jobs yet, But that's.
Speaker 2:It came out in November. Oh, it did. I mean 3.5 came out in November and four came out like a month ago, so it's very early.
Speaker 1:My thing is that if it's going to be continued, it's going to be continued because it's lower socially, necessarily, but time which, talking into bourgeois ways of talking about it means it raises a nominal productivity per worker which I think in coding we can undeniably see. I have coding friends who just told me God, this outsource is so much bullshit coding and I can now do. Well, you've taken me eight hours of just tedious grunt work. I can now just focus on the design and get it done for four or five hours, get a better design done and then have the small code done by chat, gpt and it's over.
Speaker 2:I'm working on a Flask application, which Flask is a framework, a micro framework for Python. I hardly even know Python and I've been able to work with it fairly easily. It doesn't. It's not perfect, it makes shit up. It'll come up with a function on the fly and you have to be on the lookout for that. You have to be on the lookout for logical errors. This was where things get a bit weird. But it's actually not making a logical error. It's producing the statistically the most likely response based on the data that it's been trained on. But whatever the most likely response is is a logical error. You have to be on the lookout for stuff like this, but even accounting for it on the conservative end of things, i think it's increased my productivity three times.
Speaker 1:We haven't seen a productivity gain in 15 years. As far as capitalism is concerned, and honestly, as far as we're concerned, initially that's going to be a good thing. The long term it's going to be a bad thing under capitalist conditions. The question is and I think this is where my going all the way back to that inevitability communism debate versus probabilistically. What if the probability is some option that we just never have imagined? Yeah, i think about that. It's not communism or capitalism and it's not neofutilism either. It's some new social form.
Speaker 2:Is that imaginable? I tend to think those are the options, or common ruin.
Speaker 1:Strange attractors fucking exist. What's that? Strange attractors? The one thing people will say. Colin Drum talks with this one. People go well, hegel and Marx live the complexity, and Hegel and Marx don't deal with strange attractors, which is unforeseen, non-inevitables. Not just contingency, but contingency that, once it exists, also changes all the other parts of the equation.
Speaker 2:Unknown. Unknowns.
Speaker 1:Unknown, unknowns that emerge from interactions that you don't see. It's an unforeseen consequences multiplier, that's what we call, and complexity theory we call it a strange attractor. There's basic attractors, that's what you think of as a teleological development, but then there's strange attractors, which are these unknown logical implications that cause a new thing to emerge and pull towards that too. Both you have the teleologically intended development and then this other development, because technology has teleos, right, evolution doesn't, but we do. It's so much that when we make it to do a thing that it is optimized for but it may also do other things. So strange attractors. Really.
Speaker 1:Like you develop a drug and it has some side effect that's actually useful and you start developing towards that side effect that changes the direction of the drug. Well, in complex systems that can emerge in a complex way, which means because my point about like, like every now and then you get one of the things I've noticed that I've started playing with that Platypus actually came up with. It's different from a lot of Marxist society is separating bourgeois society from capitalist society. Like the capitalism in society we got. The bourgeois society was actually an attempt at something else, and then it's immediate regression and the bonapartism, et cetera led to utopian.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah. So if we think about the current scenario in all likelihood the attempt that communism altered capitalism in a way that something else may, because of the way we've been playing with technology, i want to think, i want to point out that most of the internet technologies are not, strictly speaking, logically, capitalist technologies. They didn't really emerge in that context.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like you could argue the opposite.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they emerged in cybernetic context, in competition with the Soviet Union, when certain capitalist rules were actually dropped to compete with the Soviet Union, which means we could be dealing with unforeseen things. That's. I'm not saying that's likely, but it's just a logical it's when you, when you talk about systems theory, it's a logical possibility we have to entertain to be intellectually responsible, if we're still going to be socialist, that, like holy shit. there may be something else that has emerged from all these tendencies interacting in this totality we call capitalism that no one could have predicted.
Speaker 2:It's just hard to talk about because of the way you're talking Because no one's predicted it. Yeah Right, it's an unknown, unknown Right, but some of this might be helpful to just I think. I think this is why it might be helpful to define. Socialism is almost like a floating signifier.
Speaker 1:Or something that is my orientation, for communism is right.
Speaker 1:Right How regalitarianism in a classless society. And by classless I do not mean I do not mean that there's no hierarchies, but that it's that the hierarchies are truly provisional and meritocratic. And professionalization whether people realize that or not is actually a check against meritocracy, right? So that's what I mean. Like, yeah, we might have people who, we might have leaders, who have people with certain skills. If they get benefits from it, they need to be immediately recoverable And you also shouldn't be able to accumulate a whole lot more based on it alone.
Speaker 1:So when people start talking about, like, value added, and I'm like, nope, that's not. Like, that can't be part of socialism, right, like. But everything else, including shit like labor tokens or cybernetic theory or all that, how you build it, i'm like are immediate political programs. I'm a big programmatic unity guy, but I'm also like we can't make the program preemptively. You have to have the mass space before you can build the program. I'm sorry, like, because that program's got to come up from the conditions in the people who are the subject of the program coming up with that program. We can't preempt it. That's like. My primary disagreement with neocausk is I'm with them all the way I said. They think they already have a program and like you don't, you can't, you can't know, you can't have a perfectly planned out socialist society or even are even a planned out way to get to it. You do not know. If you knew you would have already done it and we haven't.
Speaker 2:I'm almost like naively optimistic that if you develop this sophisticated enough AI, it would just be a socialist.
Speaker 1:Well, i mean, if you think about the conditions of primitive communism, you get rid of what the competition that created made primitive communism so, so inefficient and why it only really exists. I mean, there's an irony that people who study anthropology will point out that, like highly developed societies are more, are more like early societies that are less developed because the reasons for a hierarchy just start to degrade, except in hierarchies of very specific skill sets.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but like we don't think one's yeah, but we don't think about like, we don't think that, like, the exception of the very rich and most people do not, and that's one of the problems of our current society is like it's so unequal We don't even deal with them. People who are at the top, really, we don't. Really might as well be aliens, right, but most people you interact with are functionally your peers. So so we live in a we, we experience the world in a relatively power, egalitarian way, even though we know, because we can see the evidence, that it's not that way all the time, which actually is why we're more pissed off about it in a lot of ways too, because it's like it makes it worse. It makes it worse. You feel it more. All of that being said, that's my hope to the.
Speaker 1:The other thing is that it's just becoming very clear to me that there is a decadency and degeneration to our ruling class, even under meritocratic conditions. They, they, they, the, the Nepo, like the three generational thing, which is not something Marxist talk about, but I just see a lot of evidence for that. Like, okay, you have the people establish it, you have the people who build off them, who actually are able to do more than the people who establish everything, but then their kids are going to be so protected and isolated. They do not have the same struggle to produce anything and they degenerate even though they're technically more educated and start from a higher point.
Speaker 2:This is the entire point of the show succession.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it is actually which, but I think a lot of Marxists are uncomfortable with that because you know it implies. But I'm like, yeah, the bourgeoisie is a structure but if you look at the families within the bourgeoisie, like you look at the richest families, well, the richest people right now are these tech entrepreneurs, but the richest families are all the old Fordist companies and their families who own them. They're just out to lunch now and their their end is degenerated, part of the cycle. The old rich Brahmin families that like started American capitals and the old entrepreneurial families. They're largely no longer that important. So there are cycles in this and it took a long time for people like Trump and Jimmy Carter and, to some degree, lbj.
Speaker 1:But like the 60s and 70s, from from JFK to Reagan, you have a pushback on the ruling of the old Brahmin elite. Interestingly, from Reagan up into Obama, they kind of reasserted themselves. Like the Bushes are part of that old elite. Obama's actually related to them, like to that elite through the, through his mom, which was fascinating. Like George W Bush is a distant cousin of his. It's pretty funny, that's hilarious, but that's over. Like Trump, to a lesser degree Biden, they don't come from that stock. They are. They come from elites, but they don't come from the old old guard.
Speaker 2:They don't like yeah you know, let's just get really uncomfortable when you start talking like this. Yeah, they do, because they don't something to with the decadence. but you know, we're not talking about it in moral terms here, they're just incompetent.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know like that when we can play about like the PMC. I've talked about the rational. I don't like the PMC thesis for a lot of reasons, one of which is like Everybody who uses it both expands it horizontally and backwards in the time, like, like, like. Like Katherine Lou has now got all the way back to the 1890s and I'm like. But the other thing is is you have to deal with the fact that it's been splitting up itself Since at least the beginning of neoliberalism, which Aaron right pointed out. If you think it was ever a coherent category, and I'm not sure I do One of the things that happened with the PMC is a whole slew of jobs that used to be open to everybody Due to, due to just the overwhelming market competition for them had credential, a Credential red Queen game going on.
Speaker 1:So it went from high school to a socialist degree, to to Even up to graduate degrees for things that you used to just need a high school degree to do. Um, so that when you factor that in and also factor that in the generational patterns, like the we talk about, like the earning potential of degrees, and that's absolutely true and aggregate, but the richest generation has the least degrees, so you can't even talk about degrees off of wealth, because the baby boomers have the fewest degrees, like They had cried wealth when it was easier to do off of the boom of the war. It's just substantial.
Speaker 1:It's circumstantial so, but there is this. There is one element of it. I think it's true that there is about 10% of the 40 something percent of people that you call the PMC under the broadest definition, who really do seem to run things. They are elites in the true sense. These are people that Peter church in, and, like Michael Lind, worry about. They're very real and they're not really Capitalists. They're somewhere in between. Most the time they like probably make Like like half of their income off of stock options, but half of their income off of wage. Yeah, they're Namely sides, right, but their interests are totally in the bourgeoisie. But also they're the actual people running a lot of this shit. That's true. Like what the bourgeoisie? they make so much money and and they're so low at their solo investment yields in a lot of things. They're just like out doing speculative weird shit, like they don't need to engage in that, and they're engaging in conspiracy consumption. You know like they're they're engaging in like competitive wealth consumption and competitive wealth consumption charity, even like Right around.
Speaker 1:yes, Yeah, but they're not. They're not Producing in the same way anymore, like, and they're not running things and they're actually probably largely deep political. That's the interesting thing. When I look at like how many of the big families are Actively super political, it's a remarkably small amount of them like You don't really hear much about, like The Johnson family doing shit or you know, they don't need to be political.
Speaker 1:They don't need to be right, like it's actually. Like it's like the Sun Belt millionaires. It's like the middle tier of the of the point two percent. There's the people who are really politically active, right and, at least from the evidence I see and and, by the way, it's very hard to find this you have to start correlating different stats that you can find in fortune and in Statistics to kind of get a big picture of this, because the government doesn't really carry it. I'm like the people who who do this kind of want this measure, but they don't want it measured totally on the open. Like You know, to be on the Forbes number one biggest millionaires as an individual is like your nouveau rich motherfucker. Yeah, you haven't figured out how to hide your wealth and divide it up. Yeah, it's gauche. Yeah, it's gauche, which is why they're all like tech billionaires and they're on you. They really aren't you like. Yeah, a lot of them came from Relative money, but oh my god, are they richer than what they came from? But they're also declining pretty fast.
Speaker 2:Like Yeah, I mean we'll see what happens.
Speaker 1:Like half as wealth in two years, like, which tells me how much of that was truly fictitious, like it was under my eyes out when you try to run an entire industry on zero percent interest rates, it doesn't work out well in the long run. Or it works out fine until you actually have to do something.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you have to show results at some point right, like as long as you're just trying to, like you know, run an industry off of zero percent interest rates and no one's actually Really like looking at production. That's a. That's one thing. But one of the things I'd like to point out is the Fed really cared about two things. One inflation bleeding out to the rest of the Economy. For whatever reason it did and I think there's multiple reasons That's my like. I've gone through the different theories of inflation. I think parts of all of them seem through right now and none of them seem to be enough explanatory. Like it's definitely not just labor costs. Labor cost is not the primary thing driving inflation, but there's it's. It's actually a hyper complicated situation.
Speaker 2:If I had to put my money on One thing, it would be supply constraints caused by the pandemic.
Speaker 1:I Would say supply constraints plus opportunistic price rain Raises compared to those supply constraints as preparation for possible.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes sense inflation constraints, which may or may not occur, but you can wreak a lot of profits in the interim. And then I Mean there is a sense in which A private debt is making up a lot of the difference right now and that's That's not Like. That's the opposite of what's supposed to happen according to the traditional Fed definition of what. But I guess that's gonna that does. My thing is they've learned accidentally for monetarism a way to discipline the labor market. I don't, i don't even mean that with like oh, they're trying to create, they are trying to create an employment, which I can't seem to be able to do, but they're also creating a lot of private debt, which means you're gonna have to continue working and also just elevating the cost of housing, which was the main, that was the main result of, you know, the feds actions.
Speaker 1:Yeah, i mean, what's interesting, is it? but the cost of housing was also raising by other means. That's the. So what they have actually.
Speaker 2:I mean, they have actually made it a little easier and winter is indirectly um Yeah, I don't think you could have said that a couple years ago, but I think I think you have a point right.
Speaker 1:So I mean, i don't know I am. The other thing they've done is they've actually created a completely arbitrary wall of wealth. So anyone who got their locked in loans, they're now way wealthier than everybody else by just luck. Like It's, because it's not even investment. Like, yeah, people, it like it's whether or not you did it at the right time, whether or you had the money.
Speaker 1:And, oh my god, if you bought a lot of money, if you had the resources to not be in a subprime loan and bought a house cheaply, like 2010, you have Probably cur a, droopled your investment. Um, even under current conditions. And if you locked that fucking right in, like if you refinanced, like these, but this is smart stuff. But you don't normally expect to have a locked or a closed loan Like these, but this is smart stuff. But you don't normally expect to have a locked, because in the past, when this happened, rates were not as locked as they are now. There's a lot more variable rate loans pre-2007, so that changes things pretty dramatically on like how this wealth Gap plays out. And so you do. You have basically created like a sub, like Subaristocracies within multiple social classes by doing this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, i mean, that's mainly how I think of the boomers.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but I mean like Millennials to. So just for example, i bought a house with my ex-wife. We divorced. I gave it to my ex-wife because I Didn't want to make her sell the house and we neither one of us could afford off of what we would have made off of only owning a house for two years, to buy another one. So I was like, yeah, just That house. And in the The year and a half after the divorce, doubled in value. Wow, which she wasn't trying to screw me. Like that's just what happened. Yeah, what happened? She was even nice, she didn't have to do this.
Speaker 1:She gave me my deposit. She gave me my part of the down payment back, like just to be, because she's like what kind of feel bad about it. Here you go And I'm like, yay, i can pay off some debt with this, like you know. But But she, she also locked that shit down right, literally two months before everything went to pot. So she refinanced and locked it down at an even lower rate and it's locked now right And like the house will probably devalue some, but as long as she stays in the house, but as long as she stays in it, it's not gonna devalue enough for her to lose everything that she gained. And That's just fucking luck. I'm not even like mad about it, it's just like I mean it sucks for me a little bit, but like the like, there's no way that we could have saw that coming. Really Nobody predicted the boom happening during COVID right.
Speaker 2:It's very counterintuitive, um them. And the main thing I'm worried about now is people who are buying at this point and it's saying, oh well, i could just refinance when the Fed pivots and interest rates go down, or Maybe. It's a big if in it. It's a big, if it's a big thing to gamble on.
Speaker 1:Because we don't know that. I mean, there is maybe a world where it never goes down. We don't ever see those conditions again.
Speaker 2:I'm kind of yeah, i'm kind of on that fence, i'm I don't know how likely.
Speaker 1:I don't know how likely that world is, but it's a possibility, like Um Particularly. What a declining population? I think Yep, because There's gonna be a lot of open housing stock soon. Guys, there is. A lot of people are just gonna die. Like I hate the point out that if you live in a southern state right now, you're, you're and I see them, my family, like My family also, they're all in the South still and I'm gonna be deeply personal. It's been hard for me but like they're dying 10 years younger than their parents. On average, they're dying in their late 60s. Their parents died in the 70s and 80s. Now Where I live, people are still dying in their 80s.
Speaker 2:Like You're saying, we have some kind of bifurcated life expectancy crisis.
Speaker 1:We do, and it's no longer just right. It's always been. It's always been racial, but one of the things that's happening is like poor white people in the South now have about the same Their their life expectancy is It's getting close. It like we're closing the racial life expectancy gap by lowering white people's life expectancy and Slightly raising people of color's life expectancy. Not, it's not, but it's a lot more going down than one's going up. Yeah, it's a very dark thing to think about. It is especially when you consider that a lot of that is Suicides and overdoses, suicide overdoses, drug addiction, alcoholism.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and complications of cancer from those things as well. So we've seen cancer rates go up. But the scariest thing, dude, it's how much more young people are dying under like people under 25, and it's it's mostly cars and suicide, but it's also heart attacks, that's. That's really frightening, especially when you look at my cholesterol.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean it's just like the stress levels, like people are dying from stress, from stress increases Our fragility at maybe both I don't know. Like I actually don't know. I thought it was just going to be okay. It's COVID plus COVID doesn't affect young people's badly, but it'd be a little bit of a tip up plus car racks, plus maybe complications of alcoholism plus suicide, because suicide rates have gone up pretty dramatically. And then I was like heart attacks. Heart attacks have gone up in people under 25, like millennials are dying of fucking heart. I mean zoomers are dying of heart attacks. That's right. I think some of that might be like.
Speaker 2:Like, for instance, i have a lot of heart attacks, like, for instance, i have ulcerative colitis, not something you see outside of the developed world. It's a distinct distinctly. You know it's a problem that occurs in developed nations, right? No one really knows why that is, although obviously diet comes into it. And yeah, i'm on medication, i'm okay, but But I I gotta think that That medication is gonna catch up with me at some point, something about it. I'm on a. It's called Zell Jans. My doctor said they put an X, a J and a Z in that medication because it It played well in focus groups for some reason.
Speaker 1:But that explains only X names and medications. Yeah, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but anyway, it it can cause It elevates the cholesterol. It causes. It can cause all sorts of problems. It can cause it blood clots, it can cause a stroke. So I just assumed by default, unless they develop something better, that's gonna catch up with me at some point. I think a lot of the younger deaths that we're seeing are related to Underlying conditions that would not exist if it weren't for our particular way of life, complicated by medicines that fix them in a way that causes other.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, i mean, look, my liver was being damaged by diabetes medication, of which I left the country, lost weight and still, even though I gained some of the weight back during covid, have not seen the return of the, the diabetes, part of its lifestyle change. But I told people like I lost and I had like I lost part of my stomach too. So like we're not gonna not point that out, so I want people to know. But I lost a hundred pounds Before that, like just 350 pound dude. I moved to Korea. I lost a hundred pounds just by walking around every day, because everything's designed to be walked, and by eating Korean food, which will give you I mean I'll give you stomach cancer.
Speaker 2:There's so much soft in it and it raise your blood pressure but it's a different problem, completely different problem, like you know, if it wasn't for alcohol, smoking and stomach cancer.
Speaker 1:I think Koreans would be immortal, like.
Speaker 2:Peninsula mindset.
Speaker 1:Like, because you know I mean them. And Japanese people lived in their 80s like easily on average. But they, you know they smoke more than we do and the Koreans drink more than we do, although American drinking patterns have radically changed And I found this interesting, i was I've been researching to do a video on Werner Sombart, which is taking me a while because I'm trying to actually read primary and secondary sources for this. So, just so you guys know, i can't make the 15 minute explainers every week, the ones that are like me explaining the historical score, whatever, because usually 15 minutes takes 24 hours of research And Sombart's taking more.
Speaker 1:But anyway, sombart pointed out That in in the late 19th century, early 20th century, american workers, due to their justifiable belief, sombart's where the all American workers think they're just embarrassed billionaires comes from. That's that quote. But he people stop there, don't read why he says that they think that He's like look, the land policies make it realistic that the proletarians can actually improve their lives there because of the cheap land, which means that they reinvest in shit. German, british, french proletariat do not have that out. So, unless they get sucked into the imperial expansion, what are they gonna do? well, they drink themselves to death. What are they gonna do? well, they drink themselves to death because there's very little else.
Speaker 2:Do Europeans do?
Speaker 1:Yeah, in the beginning of the 20th century, that tracks Right. We're effectively, we're out doing European drinking patterns. We also see this increase in drinking, and Britain too.
Speaker 2:I will drink any Brit under the table.
Speaker 1:But that's not historically the case. Even in times where we drunk more like even when the scourge of alcohol hit the West, because it was the first time we could distill shit that safely, that strongly In the 1850s, we still had nothing like European drinking problems. It was bad enough that that tripped out the Temperance League and led to the Temperance Movement in the United States. But some art just points out that it's because American proletarians, because of land policies, can legitimately believe in some kind of future until the land runs out, which it did. We just couldn't take it anymore. Basically, that's an interesting observation. It's actually an interesting settler colonial observation even. Yeah, my point about that is we no longer we're seeing the despair that you see in 19th century, early 20th century European proletarians. What I'm saying?
Speaker 2:The US is undergoing Europeanization.
Speaker 1:In our politics. I've been saying this for years. Everyone's like I might know. What's happening in the US is the US politics looks a lot more like Europe and Europe politics is a lot more like the US. We're meeting in the middle somehow.
Speaker 2:Trump is a European right-wing populist.
Speaker 1:I think that's an interesting thing to which I guess makes some of the fascist. I tend to be with Danny Bezner that I actually think calling everything fascist portrays a lack of imagination, because I'm just like, yeah, some of the things rhyme with fascist. For example, a lot of American policies inspired the Nazi policies in specific. But there's also a whole different framework with Christianity and stuff that we don't have. Yeah, now we don't have Christianity, but that particular version of it. But in some ways the difference doesn't matter.
Speaker 1:I've been taking the Enzo Traverso middle path on this and just let's just call it post-fascist. And because it doesn't really fit classical fascism, we don't really need to read all the horrors Because in some ways, like the Southern project is in some ways even worse than fascism. But there is a subtler colonial aspect of fascism. It definitely rhymes. And talking about proto and post-fascism might be a better way to understand it, because we don't really have the mass base, we don't really have the war trauma. A lot of the people in that base are not actually traumatized by war, they haven't imagined war trauma. But I don't really think that's the same thing. But I do think we have a para-fascist imaginary or something like that That might be real.
Speaker 2:And why is it worse? I think it's worse because fascism is just a country committing suicide.
Speaker 1:Yeah, basically It's the. I've always find it interesting that if you took the right opposition and the left opposition to fascism to the third period common term position, you actually, if you added together, you got a correct understanding of fascism which is like fascism is Bruno Partism taken out to the entirety of the society. That's the right opposition's reading. The left opposition has an incoherent class base. This actually led Trotsky and Bortiga and whatnot, which left communists and left opposition are starting the same thing but they had a similar reading To not think fascism was a very big threat because its incoherent class base couldn't be maintained. Where, if you think about it as Bonapartism expanded to the whole society with an incoherent class base, you do see, oh, it is an attempt to restore balance to capital and to liberalism.
Speaker 2:That is suicidal, But it does actually kind of work, like in its destructiveness Yes, it has an incoherent class base, but that formula can cause a lot of damage.
Speaker 1:Right, exactly, it's hard to imagine a fascist society being around for very long, but it's easy to imagine it like destroying half the planet. Why?
Speaker 2:is it so hard? That's why this post-fascism business is almost worse, because it's just a tendency that you can sort of inhabit when the opportunity arises.
Speaker 1:And it's easier to fit on a modern worldview than, say, blood and soil divine right of kings are.
Speaker 2:It's more sustainable.
Speaker 1:Confucian hierarchy of heaven or something like that. Like it's just like. Okay, so the ghost of fascism is in some ways at least to something new, but in some ways something dangerous, and in some ways this is where the whole like accusations of red brown shit is somewhat real. People can't recognize it. You could inhabit it and sound like a left winger, inhabit it and sound like a right winger, like it's Which is actually interesting, because that's true of classical fascism too.
Speaker 1:Like the thing that Marxists don't like to deal with, that liberals throw in our face and they're not wrong about this is that like over half of particularly if you're not dealing in Germany over half of the fascist leadership comes out of social democrats and communists. Like it's not their base. They don't have the same base. They don't come out of the base of the communist movement, but their intellectuals, when they defect, that's where they go. They don't become liberals usually. Trotsky has become neo-conservative sometimes, and so do Neo-Mauvist, which is an interesting development. But what's interesting about that too, is those groups never had a mass base, really, yeah, and para-fascism doesn't now either. Like nobody thinks of themselves Well, not nobody. Very few people think of themselves as an out and out fascist. There are groups that do, but they're kind of rare. But they're A side of a few cranks.
Speaker 1:Right Not really. I would say there are a lot more people think of themselves as out and out communists and out and out fascists at any given time, but there's a whole lot of tendencies that could have emerged that rhyme with it. I mean, i think that's true.
Speaker 2:Yeah, i mean the inverse is happening with the left, right. I think it's where we, Whereas fascism has sort of turned into this post-fascism, this nebulous tendency that can come up the left, gets more and more militant but more and more impotent at the same time.
Speaker 1:Because we don't have a mass base either. but we're not becoming an idea in which you can like. We're fracturing into different and opposed ideas, and ideas that inculcate militancy are, at least, alienation, which itself inculcates militancy. It's something that Freddie Perlman, you know, former left communist kind of popular in anarchist circles, but I think he's right about this. Like the alienation that people feel wants to become leftist, because a lot of the heuristics that leftists give you to generate the world are actually anti-social even though you're advocating for pro-social politics.
Speaker 1:And in that incoherence all kinds of weird shit emerges. Tendency to start blurring. the lines between systemic analysis and conspiracy are blur the lines between personal accountability and systemic accountability, like. so those are two different tendencies. One comes off the liberal end and the other kind of comes off the more militant end. but we see both The personal is the political, on one hand, and then a total immorality and politics has nothing to do with morality on the other. Like these kinds of developments, and I don't think it's unique to us, i don't think it's unique to the left, but in this current moment we have a critique but we don't have an ideal. We don't know how to generate one either, like most leftists. when you say classless society, don't even have an orientation of what that means For most people. left means I don't know. government gives you stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, government gives you stuff.
Speaker 1:progressive ideology Right, which you know. The pickup from Christopher Lash's critique of what he called the politics of the ego or liberalism, is that's actually a self-admigrating political position and it doesn't generate what you want it to. So like you want an administrative state that just kind of emerges and administrates itself, but it actually undermines a subject for that state to exist because the skill sets are inculcated by other things And with the left it leaves us with like a class like. What's? the first thing that happened when Bernie failed Is all these old class politics that we hadn't heard got drug up from the 70s. Immediately PMC People started talking about monopoly capital like morons.
Speaker 1:They also blurred the line between fortism and neoliberalism, which is interesting, because that's when I realized there actually is a connection between the two.
Speaker 1:It isn't the rupture that everyone thinks, because fortism and Keynesian social democracy, as adopted in 1960s in Europe, actually uses a lot of public-private partnerships that made neoliberalism easier to happen, which is something that I don't think people realize, because the and this was a tendency that started before fortism, like Bukharn's noticing it, and like 1910, that the state is more and more involved. Now we all know now from the empirical histories of the development of capitalism the state was involved for moment one but, like, the state became more and more involved at the end of the 19th and early 20th century to kind of mitigate the damages being done and to increase national competition for resources. And that became a huge tendency which gets undone in fortism and neoliberalism, but undone in a kind of very particular way where in fortism you get it was like okay, we're gonna provide you social goods but we're gonna do it through your employer are through a welfare state that's powered by the employer's tax-based profitability, either one, but it's still tied to that employment and that capitalist productivity directly.
Speaker 2:It's like I mean, and the ACA is basically like a Fordist solution, You know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a Fordist solution without and this is what's different between Fordist and neoliberalism You kick labor off the chair. They don't have any say in it anymore, they're just subject to it. Like so now you have markets and marketization, but labor has no push and say. And so, like that's why a Fordist solution and a neoliberal solution, like when we talk about oh, is Biden doing neoliberalism and fortism. I'm like well, honestly, you can't really tell the difference all the time. It's who's gonna have a seat at the table as a counter force? well, workers almost never do So. Yes, it looks like neoliberal, but some of it's gonna look a little bit more like Fordist industrial policy because we're trying to reshore shit, trying to ramp up production in the US.
Speaker 1:Right, we're trying to do what Trump tried to say he could do off of political will, but now because we kind of have to, because the complexity of our supply lines and blue water lines or whatever is too much for anyone to maintain, And even to bring it back to our machines. The machines can't even figure out how to do it. Not really like there's too many factors, which is an interesting thing to think about.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, one of these tendencies has to win out, and it has to happen soon, i feel like, because you cannot ramp up production and have austerity at the same time.
Speaker 1:Well, that's the thing like that's what I've been pointing out Like you have this fundamental thing where you want to have austerity and discipline the labor class, but you also want to ramp up production and reshore. You can't do both And you kind of have to do both, but you can't do both. So which one are you gonna favor? And ultimately, i do think reshoring is gonna win out, because otherwise, like, it's not gonna matter. If you get Like, okay, you crashed the economy. My thing with the Fed if they really really wanted to fight inflation through raising unemployment, to do it with a declining employment base, you're going to have to destroy the economy even for the.
Speaker 2:You're not gonna have a Fed if you do that Right, It's like so what are you gonna probably do?
Speaker 1:Well, you might have managed high interest rates for a very long time. Yeah, that's kind of what I'm thinking. As a way to increase class discipline. But you're not really gonna engineer that unemployment And it's gonna mean that stocks are gonna be a little bit more sluggish. It's gonna slow growth But that's gonna actually encourage people to reinvest. I bet the theory is that's gonna encourage people to reinvest back into actual production. Into production. Yeah, I hope they're right kind of It's kind of like a It's kind of like a.
Speaker 1:It's kind of like a metabolic undoing of parts of neoliberalism, but only parts of it. Like it's a little bit of de-financialization, a little bit of de-globalization, et cetera. And I think COVID just proved that all this stuff is too complex. You can't see when anything happens. Now you have cascade failure everywhere, yeah, which is something I always worry about communists, because they want to centralize everything, and I kind of get it because that's theoretically more efficient, but they don't ever think about cascade failure. And I'm like well, that's why the Soviet Union like fell really quickly. Like it's like, yeah, like, if you have a highly centralized system and a part of it breaks, it all breaks. Like So, yes, you have a highly efficient but super brittle system. So it's something I think a lot about.
Speaker 1:When we talk about socialism, i'm like can we talk about brittleness too? Like, because I hear you guys talk about as efficiency, as if the other parts of physics don't exist, and this is literally a physics thing Like this is about. I mean, i got in a debate with someone about whether or not this is metaphorical And then I was like well, if it's metaphorical, like most everything is metaphorical, including most particle physics, but there is a real sense of like there's, at least from the dynamics of speed and fragility, is very real, even if it's like a model. So it's something I think we have to kind of deal with as we, you know, as we, i don't know I mean the other thing is, the other irony about the current left is unlike the current right.
Speaker 1:Well, it's interesting actually, both the left and the right are more ideologically cohesive than they've probably been because of polarization, and both of them, i think, are more ideological And both of them, i think actually, and I would say correctly feel like their politics is not represented, because we actually live at a time period where popular opinion doesn't really fucking matter, not at all, like And that's what I can't, that's why I can't get with people, like we just need to raise awareness And I'm like no, you don't, like Doesn't do anything, it doesn't. We don't live in that moment anymore. We're not in a moment of mass politics because popular opinions have kind of been neutralized.
Speaker 2:Look at the popular opinion being expressed in France. Yeah, is it doing anything?
Speaker 1:And let's say it can take out the French military and not trigger a global European civil war.
Speaker 2:No, Good luck with that.
Speaker 1:Like. So I mean, that's the thing A lot of my friends say are we really at a point where maybe power's gotten so centralized and so automated that it's irrelevant now? And I'm like, well, if you think of, if your model for revolution is just How do I say this? If your model for revolution is just the model of insurrectionary revolutions and the periphery are in Are in the World War context of China and Russia in the early 20th century, then yes, actually that's not possible right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, i agree, playacting revolutionary defeatism isn't going to change that, because they still have the fucking robots. Like they don't even need the people, like that's the thing And that's. I think that's. That's the horrifying thing, because it really Like I'm not blackpilled, but I do sort of think like We have to really think about what we mean by this kind of revolutionary reform politics And I'm like neither one of those things work in the same way anymore.
Speaker 1:Like we have to have a completely different strategy, and I'm not quite. I don't think as one person I could figure out what that is. But if there is a strategy, ironically it seems to be in the fucking AI box, and not because I believe in fully automated gay luxury space communism, because I think that's a joke Like and it's also become a joke that I think people played with but they kind of realized the problems with. But as you see, people give up on that. One of the interesting things is like there are certain podcasters that I sometimes work with that as they give up on that, they really don't talk about communist stuff hardly at all.
Speaker 2:Like That's the thing.
Speaker 1:Like it's more back to like constitutional ideal politics, which I'm not even against, but it's just like where they're at Because they've given up on It seems like there is just a collapse in the imaginative horizon of the left And it's being expressed in all sorts of different ways.
Speaker 2:I do tend to think that, like there's good reason to be skeptical of some of the claims being made in the artificial intelligence space, and there's different camps, there's different types of skeptics, so I don't want to paint with too broad of a brush, but I do think some of this is just like neoliberal mindset, like this techno-peasism, this idea that we can't have good things Because, of course, that couldn't be possible. I don't want to say I'm optimistic. I wouldn't call myself an accelerationist. There's all sorts of pitfalls there, but this is a space I'm really interested in And I don't think the left is fully grasping the implications at this point, and I think part of the reason for that is this reflexive, reflexive perception of tech bros. Anything that tech bros invented couldn't be good. And there's an association with cryptocurrency which just totally It's unfortunate.
Speaker 2:These two things are not analogous Because?
Speaker 1:cryptocurrency actually doesn't even come from tech bros initially. Really, it came from fucking goldbuggers Like that's why I knew about it. They had started that as a kind of alternative deflationary currency, the gold. The problem with cryptocurrency is one, it's kind of useless And two, it's hyper-deflationary, so you can only use it as like a pseudo-investment mechanism. But if everyone realizes that it's only being held up by the belief that it's an investment mechanism, that falls apart immediately.
Speaker 2:It's only true utility is as a currency on a black market, and that's a utility. I'm not saying that's not nothing, but when we talk about artificial intelligence, the utility that this is a whole other ballpark, guys, this is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, i think the cultural. I mean one of the things that happened when our belief in tech bros is we were too optimistic during the last heyday of, like the singularity talk at the end of the art, and that's when, like this is where these cultural trends and leftism are interesting to me, because if you look back to the desk course around the, the Gen X left and the beginnings of the millennial left when it starts to come of age at the end of the, at the end of the first period of the Iraq war because the Iraq war lasted for fucking ever you start to see a split between primitivism and hyper-techno-optimism. Peak oil but a very like naive doomer, like we've hit peak oil guys actually already. It just doesn't mean what you think it means Basically, we are now putting almost as much energy into getting oil out so that we don't have to put all the energy into redoing all of our infrastructure.
Speaker 2:But you see, the investment is starting to happen in renewables.
Speaker 1:And you're seeing it being forced in certain places. And you know, i have some friends who are like, why do the Europeans believe in renewables? And I'm like some of it's stupid. I mean like, for example, today, as we're talking, germany decides to go ahead and close its last three nuclear plants, which I'm maybe even four in the long run, but in the immediate run that's fucking dumb. Yeah, it's going to make them more dependent on oil and gas in the interim, but one thing is actually happening is we actually are seeing green investment offsetting the potential crisis, at least in continental Europe, where we're not seeing it as Great Britain.
Speaker 1:So and do I think there's problems with this? There's problems with all this technology. None of these techs are without trade-offs. None of them are 100% solutions. You're not going to have anything that's quite as efficient as burning the energy of millions of years taken from the ground and the sun. Mm-hmm, like it's really hard to beat that kind of energy density. I'm sorry, but you might get closer than we think. Like, um, yeah, And so yeah, i mean, like I'm not a doomer either.
Speaker 1:I mean I think people have a hard time understanding where I come from because, like you, i'm a skeptic. Um, but anyway I do think it's interesting. Right now We don't even have like the same apocalyptic like we, like the, the, the, the primates have just become apocalyptuses for the most part, totally Yeah. They don't even think there's a primitive future possible And the optimists are just kind of like generic social Democrats and they're not even that optimistic anymore. No, which, which I think is interesting The one of the things that I said that was interesting about the shift from occupy and the end of the Gen X, uh, you know, zennial left into the current millennial left And I'm using the generational term just as time markers people. It's not purely a generational distinction. Um, is that you went from like a quasi utopian to the point of absurdity, like David Graber's whole the occupy is the goal. I mean that's fucking dumb. Um, one of my mini strikes against David.
Speaker 2:Graber, that utopianism was always a kind of a pessimism in disguise, i feel.
Speaker 1:You know, the thing about David Graber's is like it's like I'm an anarchist but I believe in like MMT and I'm like, so you're not an anarchist.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you believe in a state theory.
Speaker 1:Right, um, also like there was a regression in my mind and like radically anthropology from people who, like, tried to study in the seventies the material conditions that led to ancient culture. Students up things and try to figure out how to apply that. Now, to just like, if we believe different, it could be different, which is which is which is to me an objectively regression, regressive condition, cause we're not looking at, okay, but why did people believe differently and why is it consistent in certain, certain places, like no, not everyone who has these conditions ends up the same way, but only in certain conditions. Do these ideas become even like really, viable.
Speaker 2:Let's call it what it is. It's this like it's ritualistic utterance, like philosophy where if you say something it's true, it's the Barney, the dinosaur school of political philosophy.
Speaker 1:And I used to. I used to argue with MMT years about this too, And they used to say, Oh, it's just bad ideology. I'm like, no, it's not. There's power relationships that like that this maintains It's not just bad ideology. Like, like it's not just that people don't understand what money does, is that they understand if they did all the things you want it to do, that it's going to re reek in their power And you're not going to ever ask them to play nicely about that. And if you think that's true, you're an idiot. Like, like, yeah, one or two individuals will individuals class betray all the time. Like, because individuals have a lot more agency than groups, but in aggregate it's pretty fucking predictable. I remember that me back when I talked to Thaddeus Russell way back in the day. That was part of my philosophy that he hated, And I was, like you know, individuals have a lot of agency, but aggregates don't. They're predictable.
Speaker 1:The like groups are both smarter and more predictable than individuals are.
Speaker 2:Cause he's like a hardcore individualist.
Speaker 1:Right And I'm just like, yeah, but I think it's like laws of laws. Numbers exist, motherfucker, and it is easier for me to predict what a group of people are going to do than it is for me to predict what one person's going to do. Like, just like it's easier to predict what a bunch of electrons are going to do than good luck predicting what anyone electrons going to do. It's literally impossible, like so. So you know, there's, there's that there's a certain amount of. I'm not arguing that electrons have agency. This is a certain amount of indeterminacy here, um which I guess we tied this back into our computing thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Do you think there's like um, I wonder if we're going to get back into interesting like do you remember in the office where there's all this interest in bio computing? No, I think that missed me.
Speaker 1:That was like that, that was this, this field of research, that's largest thing that have been abandoned about. like modeling, computing off of evolution, but even not just in, like you know, getting intelligence to emerge by running simulations that eat each other. But also like literally using proteins instead of silicon to build computers.
Speaker 2:I've heard this vaguely alluded to.
Speaker 1:I don't know how far they got. I wonder if, like I'm wondering if that's going to be picked back up with this kind of I am wondering what's going to change, cause the one thing I can say is, uh, i actually agree with Tyler, tyler Cohen, except for this, this machine learning stuff, all the low hanging fruits been picked Right. We don't have easy Like. That's why, like people, oh, technology is so much better. I'm like, if you think about the technology changes between the 10s and the 50s, no, we have not actually paced that way.
Speaker 2:Um, um wait, my God. Aside from the fact that if you told me, even just five years ago, that we had a computer that passed the Turing test, i would say that's nuts.
Speaker 1:Well, here's the thing We have been. we've only had innovations and basically one field and that's communications and and coding right, and there's been, there are. this is where I do get all you know, dwayne Monroe, on you And like there are real limitations to that and power production and whatever. Um, and I think Dwayne's apt about that, but I do wonder if this actually finally opens this up back to other innovations and other kinds of things. Um, definitely, i mean, we're already. we already talked about like we're not thinking about this one combined with, say, crispr.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But that goes both ways right. Right, well, i mean, like, then you really do have a feedback loop, like, and then that, like, my thing is like this is why the fight for this is really important Like, yeah, like, because who's in control? This is going to like really matter if we even stay one species or not.
Speaker 2:We need to. We need to think really hard about how possible is it to run these things locally? How sophisticated can they be?
Speaker 1:Um, what are their real power inputs to run them locally, like for real? real, if you don't for real, real don't I mean don't outsource it to the internet, Right, Like, yeah, that's what it's pulling, a lot of this information but it's also where it's pulling a lot of its power. What if you are just running it natively? What does it do?
Speaker 2:Like. This is the question a lot, of, a lot of interesting people are asking right now. I am keeping up with hacker news. Someone made the claim that they're running llama on a machine with six gigs of RAM. That's insane. Nothing, nothing, Oh my God.
Speaker 1:Becky run that on like like a calculator. Don't get me wrong, it's not fast, but the fact that it's the fact that it can do it at all possible, which what that implies is it knows how to pace itself to its power constraint.
Speaker 2:Well, there's a lot of work being done with model compression and things along those lines. I read a paper about sparse GPT where they their findings were basically that you could compress the model significantly with minimal loss and accuracy of what it's saying. So this is the type of stuff I'm paying attention to because it has implications. If this was just a company with a really sophisticated AI, that would be one thing. It's another.
Speaker 1:it's another thing entirely Where this is like semi open source at this point.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh, my God.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Yeah, yeah, i can't.
Speaker 1:I was just so you know. I was a poo, poo or three weeks ago. A lot is changing very quickly. And now I'm sort of like. I feel I still think we're being oversold this, but somehow I think we're being oversold and undersold simultaneously. I feel the same way, if that makes sense.
Speaker 2:I feel like certain aspects of this that are being oversold, and then the other aspects that no one is talking about, like that you could possibly run this thing on your computer without access to the internet. Do you know, like, do people understand the implication of that? Yeah, that's a big deal. Holy shit, we should be thinking long and we should, we should be thinking long and hard about that also implies we're not going to use this one singular AI chatbot.
Speaker 1:That just implies that there's like an infinite number of them and you can feed it whatever you wanted.
Speaker 2:There's a multitude of models We need to start thinking about, and training them is not that expensive anymore, or at least, like training finely tuned versions of preexisting models is not that expensive. There's that paper from I think it was Stanford, where they spent $600 training a model that they're calling alpaca, which is based on the the llama model for Meta, and it's their findings are it's it's pretty much just as good as GPT three. So it's not. It's not great. It's not as good as GPT four, but this is just. This is all happening within a few months, so I don't. That's the reason why I'm excited about it is.
Speaker 2:I just check these papers every once in a while and it seems like every single day something crazy is happening, and I do just want to emphasize these like local models. They're not as good as what you'll see on. They're not as good as chat GPT, but the fact that, in principle, this is something that is an avenue worth exploring and I think more leftists need to be paying attention to it. I think there's a lot of misunderstandings about how the technology works. I think people are getting sidetracks with matters of copyright and plagiarism which are, just frankly, not from a from the standpoint of my just wanting the world to be a better place I'm not terribly concerned about. I'm way more concerned about an economic crisis and also the potential for curing diseases and things along those lines. There's a lot of moralism going on right now that I think is misplaced.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of moralism, that's about ownership. That I think I understand from the standpoint of, like artisans who are being devalued. You know what I say? This is a poet. We don't have any fucking value anyway. But and I get that, and I understand that, and I understand that, particularly with art, i get it.
Speaker 2:But it's accelerating something that was already happening.
Speaker 1:And it's also, if it was happening under different constraints and if the copyright constraints were fair, this would be an avenue for, like crazy innovation in art, because you're basically you have an infinite collaborator. Like you know, people aren't using it like that right now, but and so, yeah, the art's generic and I get it. I get like supporting artists and I'm not going to shame any small, you know, like RIPG companies, like okay, we're not going to use AR, we're going to continue supporting artists. I'm, like, you know, good on you. That's a ethical constraint that I appreciate.
Speaker 2:And you might be able to carve out a niche.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're already in a niche market, right Like, and I think that's fair, but you're not going to stop this. in general, no.
Speaker 2:Think about how cool video games are going to be.
Speaker 1:I say this as a person who literally likes one video game. But what video game? I like Diablo's, that's really it, that's like it. And I even like the bad ones, like Immortal and three, but like, nonetheless, it's an interesting thing for me because I actually I have come over to the. Well, video games are an interesting form of artistic expression. Actually They are. They're just not into them. Like, yeah, that's fair, i'm just old. Like my video games are like Mega Man and games that are generally fucking impossible to beat weren't really about skill. I mean, i got skilled at those games Like brute force. Yeah, it's just like brute force. Memorization is what it was. I mean, like it's like really hard to be good at Mario, to learn exactly how to be good at Mario, and then you can beat in 50 minutes.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Like that was my video game world, because that was what was. That's what. I didn't have the money even have a system like that till I was in my teens, but, but in general, that was what was available around me. You find the person who had the fucking Nintendo or Sega and you go to their house and that's what we played. That's my world. You know, one of the interesting, fascinating things for me is the actually technical degeneration of cell phone games, because they actually get shittier and shittier, like you know. It's like I'm like the shit that came out for an iPhone, like in 2010, is actually usually somewhat better than the stuff that comes out now.
Speaker 2:I think the company's had a lot more capital to work with at that point.
Speaker 1:I think you're right, actually, and I think now most things are just quick, quick rink grabs for the most part Yep, um that are also like fine tuned to be boring dopamine machines which you can do with just flashing colors and mathematical feedback. Really.
Speaker 2:If there, if there is a real concern in the video game space, um vis-a-vis AI, it's that these games are going to be so interesting and immersive that no one is going to want to live in the real world.
Speaker 1:Well, maybe that's how we stop social collapse is by just stopping society altogether.
Speaker 2:Just everyone is Yeah, just like Bojard was right.
Speaker 1:If that's true, then I take back all the shit I said about Bojard. Yeah, Um, like, yeah, every now and then I'm like maybe these weirdo hide a Garant, have a point, i don't know. Like, um, i don't know. Uh, well, on that note, i think I think this is a good place to end up, because I think we just have to think more thoroughly about this. I think if people have a little bit of like Hey, this is more interesting than you think, And then a little bit of like what are the costs really? And also that genie's out of the box with this, that, i think, is what we're going to really have to think about. Like you don't really understand the implications of this year.
Speaker 2:I know I don't Yeah. Yeah, and I guarantee you our tech bro overlords, do not Um no, no, and the goal should be to wrestle away this technology from them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, which now we have the means to do ironically, Like yeah, it's like, Hey, we can all this code hoarding. You've been doing forever, It don't matter no more. Like yeah all I have to do is some basic math. motherfuckers.
Speaker 2:Like I'm not even sure I have to do that, like I think um the more tech savvy leftists if you're listening, we need to start thinking about training an AI model that is based on the principles of Marxism. What does that entail?
Speaker 1:So we need to feed it capital. And then, yeah, industrial inputs.
Speaker 2:Yeah, feed it economic data and feed it capital.
Speaker 1:Like, if one we could, we could maybe solve some fucking debates Like like okay, marxologist, we're going to run which of these actually work?
Speaker 2:Like the most influential thinker on the left in the next 10 years, could be an AI. Now, if I, if you told me I said something like that, like a year ago, i would say I've completely lost my mind and I should not be taken seriously.
Speaker 1:Yeah, So you sound like Nick Bostrom, but optimistic. Uh, for those of you don't know, nick Bostrom was the AI is the most dangerous thing that ever happened to humans. guy from 13, 14 years ago, it's also this, the simulation theory guy. He's a lot of. he's a lot of things He was. he was like what I thought of, as a crack philosopher, like it was like well, he's just playing around with the ideas that most of us should avoid, but I'm glad somebody's doing it, i guess. Um, he's like Baudrillard, but rigorous.
Speaker 2:Like like Baudrillard, but like more analytical.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Um, and not a leftist.
Speaker 1:No, but arguably neither was Baudrillard.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:But it's really hard to say. What we can say is you at least came from that. Yeah, he came out of that Analytical West left. There is like, even pre, like my thing is even pre, uh, analytical Marxism. Sorry, ben um cross myself, uh, fucking Jew crossing himself at the mention of analytical Marxism. That's funny. But uh, but even analytical Marxism is like is not really the beginnings of leftist analytical thought? It really is like Reb Vienna school, um, you know, uh, uh, like Carnap and AutoNuraf and all that, um, and I do some, i do often hope, you know, when people like Brandon and stuff that maybe we can start to reconcile the, the, the boring ass analytic philosophy with the interesting continental stuff, because I would like the interesting continental stuff just to have slightly more rigor and a little bit less poetry.
Speaker 1:And I say this as a poet, but it's like I think, because I am a poet, i'm like that's rhetoric. That's rhetoric. You're not saying as much as you think you are. Let's like back it up and draw it out and really lay it down. Because you know, whatever you're going to say about Hegel, he at least like they formalized shit Like they did, like there was an attempt at real formalization, the science of logic. The longer logic and the shorter logic would not have been possible without that, and that's all. I mean Marx also. I mean Marx. You know Marx's last days are him trying to figure out how to make a new math.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, i wouldn't necessarily call him a continental writer.
Speaker 1:No, I mean he's not, he both isn't is not a philosopher, Yeah, So you know it's an interesting thing to deal with. But Western Marxism and Continental Philosophy are like totally entwined in so much that Western Marxism and Continental Philosophy mean anything at all, which I'm not always sure they do. But I think this stuff, this computer stuff, like we need to get back into that, We need to think about these categories more thoroughly, because it feels like something's changing and we don't understand it. And I don't know what. I actually don't know what the horizons really are, Like it doesn't really seem like Star Trek horizons, but it also I don't know.
Speaker 1:I mean, people say I mean people.
Speaker 2:The way that singularity was talked about was obviously ridiculous, right, Right. It's just a point beyond which you don't know what's going to happen. I think we're getting close to that.
Speaker 1:To me that's like it's the point of infinite complexity, when you start getting into, like everything's a fucking stranger tractor, like you can't, like the logic is now gone beyond anybody which you know, even even not just in computing. I think maybe in life we're reaching like in other elements of life, we're reaching that point And that's why pessimism is a natural response, because we don't, we don't know and thus maybe assuming the worst is psychologically protective.
Speaker 2:I think that's what Chrisman's doing, yeah, at least when it comes to AI. When I hear him talk about that, i mean Chrisman's like a preacher Yeah. He's getting spiritual, which I'm not into. But go off, king, you know.
Speaker 1:As a person who used to be quote spiritual on quote I guess I'm. There's a lot of things that people are susceptible to that since I started off with those assumptions that I'm just not. Yeah, conservatism is one of them. These spiritual ways of approaching the world is another. Trying to settle all Marx theological arguments purely by citing text and asserting from text is a third one which I find weird To be a weird dogmatism that we see. My other favorite one is like when we argue about who's an Orthodox Marxist, i'm like no one should be. We're not a fucking belief structure. Like, not like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, That should be considered an oxymoron.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 1:You know, it's like are you an Orthodox Darwinist aka someone who rejects Mendelian genetics of the galaxy? Yeah, like we only want our pure direct from the vein. Come the fuck on, i don't know. I get very Steve and Jay Gouldy about like research programs and political programs And yes, i really know that platypus people would be like Marxism is in a research program. I'm like no, it's not even a political program.
Speaker 1:It's like a philosophy of, it's like a meta philosophy, basically, of how to generate a science, you know, and a science here in the end, and what we really should say is maybe a comprehensive logic, to translate Weissenschafts a little better, but it's, you know, it's kind of what we mean by science, and science is the same with like math as a science. But math really is in a science Like the. I know people get mad at me, but I'm like you're not really discovering eternal forms, dude, maybe you are, but then you, we need to really change our assumptions about the universe, like, because materialism is kind of hard to maintain. If you think math is real And that way, like if it's like a abductive correspondence, that's a different thing. But if you think like no, there is a, there's a one in the universe, it's like okay, yeah.
Speaker 2:I think I'm in the abductive correspondence camp.
Speaker 1:Yeah, i think there. I think there might be math concepts that don't correspond to anything, just to make the logic work. But I think, in general, math is math is deduced by taking, by removing all of the quantitative I mean qualitative properties and just focusing on, on accountability. And then what the implications of that are is kind of almost infinite. you know right, we're not almost infinite, it is infinite, literally, like there's infinities. And then there's the shit that breaks your brain, like thinking about infinities with an infinities and bigger infinities and smaller infinities, because there's like an infinity of infinities.
Speaker 2:And then yeah, this is why. Well, I think this is related But the the idea that, like, llms are only doing statistical inference, they're not making causal arguments how could they be? And and so therefore, correlation doesn't equal causation. So you're never going to, you're never going to get like a system that can make causal arguments based on like a, based on an LLM, because the whole thing works through statistical inference.
Speaker 2:And I'm kind of like the guy in the matrix that's eating the steak and saying you know what difference does it make? I've tested GPT and you know, i'm sure other people are doing this as well but trying to trying to see, like, how far can go with logical argumentation And it's pretty damn good. At this point I asked it a series of questions just about, like different stakeholders in a company and this person dies and they inherit you know there are three kids inherit this how many would you have to convince to do a buyout? that sort of thing. It's really impressive And I understand that it's predicting the next token based on statistics, but it's making a cause, it's making causal, it's making like logically coherent arguments that are valid.
Speaker 2:So what is the difference? Why does it matter? you know, and I guess they would say well, it matters, because it's going to get things wrong every now and then So do people you know. So it seems to me like there's a lot of mysticism around this idea of a person that we need to do away with. I don't think it's helpful in this argument. Yeah, i'm making sense.
Speaker 1:No, you're making perfect sense. I mean it's I'm not you like I don't. I think my argument in the beginning still stands, as I think we can call this maybe an intelligence, but it's not human, but that's not necessarily why should that be the goal? I was like, that's not necessarily relevant.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like like. Why would we want our greatest help for ally to be us? because we already exist Right.
Speaker 2:Like the only reason they started with neural networks as the model is because they know the brain can do a lot of cool stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we know that that works. We don't know why it works, but we know, that it works.
Speaker 2:But that doesn't, and it doesn't need to be the end, all be all. You don't have to model it perfectly after a human brain in order for it to do cool shit. You don't have to achieve a GI in order for this to have widespread implications with respect to the economy and politics and everything in between. So, yeah, that's the drama I've been beating.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a good way to talk about it. Well, thank you so much, Dave. This one's actually short enough that it'll go on the regular channel We got under three hours.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was no longer one of our five hour epics about everything and nothing. Yeah, thank you for coming on, and this makes sure you are my first guest. Actually, way back when we first went in the pen, you were the first person I had on the show. You were the second person. Actually, i think Andy was the first one. It was technically for a different show And then you were the second person and then you were a guest almost exactly a year ago, but that was five hours long So it could not be released The podcast feed, because that one episode would have been not a third of all my bandwidth. So thank you for coming on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks for having me, It's a good discussion.
Speaker 1:It was great.
