Macron: “Free Speech Is BS”, France Riots, AI Apocalypse, Aliens & more!

Speaker 1

The so-called American free speech today, which some people have promoted, is the opposite of free speech.

Speaker 2

There is no such thing as free speech absolutism. You either believe in free speech or you do not. There's a giant global question surrounding his wife's speech, and that is entirely because of Candace Owens and our legal right to free speech. Is the world ending or is the world not ending in your worldview?

Speaker 3

What is your view?

Speaker 2

So... What's up, guys? Welcome back to the podcast. We have the fantastic Sanjana Friedman back with us today. Say hi, Sanjana. What's up, guys? And of course, Riley, who's going to be guiding us through all of our topics one by one, ever the intrepid soldier. Thank you, Riley. first up, before we get into the show, we got a packed one again today.

As always, I say that every week, but they're always packed, hence my rapid talking, to get you guys through these things. I want to thank Sam Blond, the founder of Monaco, our presenting partner. Sam had an incredible, crazy week. you guys hear about the Russian plague?

Speaker 1

Yeah.

Speaker 2

Allegedly, or possibly the Russian plague, the girl, I mean, I've heard a crazy story where this woman drops a vial in a lab and then dies. We're not going to get to that topic fully today because the details are still developing, but what we do know about that topic, we know because Sam Blond, in his free time, discovered this himself, wrote the story.

National News. Thank you, Sam. Thank you, Monaco, and thank you also to Autopilot and Eight Sleep. We're going to be getting to you guys and your segments a little bit later. Now, let's get into it. Riley.

Speaker 1

Power wise has been early to many things, folks. We, we popularized the concept of moon being the rightful territory of America before it was cool. You know, we were sounding the alarm about California's wealth tax before that was a big story. Well, this time we put out a piece about an effort to combat censorship abroad right before the president of France spewed a bunch of pro-censorship bullshit.

So late last month, Hunter on our team reported on a private event attended by Elon Musk and others where the Trump administration unveiled the Freedom Tech Excellence Program. A new initiative where private companies like Palantir and Anduril, as well as think tanks, will loan employees to the State Department for up to a year in order to help the department crack down on online surveillance and censorship, not just in America, but also around the world, since these are American platforms after all, said Elon Musk at the event, quote, What we've got in America is something that should be treasured, which is the ability to speak your mind without the fear of reprisals or

government action. In other parts of the world, they don't have that. Well, it turns out this is something that one Emmanuel Macron is apparently pretty proud of. Fast forward to this week, the president of France, whose country is currently embroiled in some pretty gnarly student protests, was speaking at a university in Madrid when he observed the so-called American free speech today, which some people have promoted, is the opposite of free speech.

There is no freedom if there is no limit to my freedom, which begins with the freedom of others and respect for a common framework, whatever that means. So outright calling for limitations on free speech there. And oh yeah, he also called for trusted third parties and fact-checking structures in order to police what's true on the internet.

I personally love that we live in a country where we're free to say things like Macron's wife may have a penis, but what did you guys make of these comments?

Speaker 2

Well, I mean, that's obviously what this is all coming from, right, on the Macron side. I will say, I mean, before we get into the French part and the European part, thank God we've got Sandin in the chat today because, you know, she's my favorite Francophile.

I think it's interesting how far this free speech conversation in America has fallen off. I think that's because we have it right now. There's generally speaking not an issue with being able to speak your mind on the internet. This was a huge, huge issue that we just sort of I think I've kind of forgotten about over the last year or two right here at home.

And obviously it's no longer a huge issue because of, to a large extent, Elon Musk. And then what he did was reflected also back at, at Facebook. So Instagram and Facebook, we have this general now, you know, ecosystem of, of freedom. If you could think back to that period in time when Americans were discussing the bounds of acceptable free speech, we were really having this censorship conversation.

Often, what we would then call safety is the trust and safety people, the pro-censorship people, would contrast their form of, free speech with something they called free speech absolutism, or the maximalist approach to free speech. I would even see people like Elon Musk describe himself in those terms. And I always recoiled from that because there is no such thing as free speech absolutism.

You either believe in free speech or you do not. And the Europeans Do not. They just simply, they simply don't. Most Americans, by the way, still don't, if you poll them on these issues. I think most. I, I, maybe we're not that bad. I think most Democrats probably don't. I think a large fraction of Republicans also don't. But, this is now, you know, this is something now that we got to figure out, with Europe, I would say just, you know, before I kick it over to you, Sanj, the reason it's important what Europeans say is because what they are arguing for are changes to really the structure of the internet that will, as we have seen historically, have an impact on the way

Americans engage with this stuff. And, and then I just think it's really fascinating that we finally have a government that is looking at this stuff correctly, as in infringement on our own freedoms, rather than just this thing these silly Europeans are doing. They're not looking the other way. I do have some concerns about their, their approach to this, but first I just want to get your, your, your general read.

Speaker 3

Yeah, I mean, I think it's lost on many Americans how distinct our concept of free speech is. Like, the First Amendment does not exist in Europe, and it is a radical... It's an articulation of, as you say, just free speech, right, which is a binary.

And Europe, European countries, the European Union, has lots of restrictions on things you can say that don't exist in the US, and hate speech laws in Europe are, you know, widely accepted and frequently enforced. I mean, you know, I remember a couple years ago we were discussing the riots in the UK, and many of the... Well, some of the precipitating factor for that was this extremely heavy-handed social media censorship of what people were saying about immigration.

and so there's a huge cultural divide here. And even having talked to, you know, European friends of mine, and sort of articulated the American conception of free speech, where like, you can say extremely offensive things, you can say slurs, you can,

you know, be very inflammatory, right? You can't directly incite violence, but, you know, short of that, basically anything goes. Many of them are like, no, that's too far. And, so that's one thing. And the other thing is, I think you're completely right that it would not surprise me if a majority of Americans don't actually believe in free speech.

I think that because we've grown up kind of hearing about the First Amendment and sort of knowing that this is part of our cultural creed, people sort of reflexively assume that like, you know, all Americans believe in free speech and, and, and the like. But actually, like, believing in free speech is a pretty radical thing in the sense of you need to be Okay with hearing extremely offensive opinions about your beliefs.

And a lot of people find that uncomfortable. And of course, you know, you and I believe in free speech, right? But like, I do think that, I don't know, I, I sort of suspect that there's a lot of people who say they're okay with free speech, but when it comes down to it and when it's really something that kind of, you know, gets them at their most deeply held belief, they will be okay with censorship.

They

Speaker 2

are. Yeah, they absolutely are. I, I think even, I would say even I myself am okay with, so there's like, there's a legal Freedom to speech, and then there's a culture of free speech. And I think you want as much of the culture of free speech as you can. You want to make room for people to disagree with you. But, you know, that having been said, if someone is in your home, your own private home, and they're a guest, and they are saying a bunch of things you find completely abhorrent and you don't want them there, you can tell them to leave, and I think that's fine.

So that's where I would say, like, on the culture of free speech,

you know, I'm not a maximalist. On the person's legal right to say whatever they want, you have to, I'm there all day. Like, you just have to allow that for American citizens. I will also say, maybe my other caveat is I don't think that I necessarily need to invite new people to live here who are expressing a hatred of us and a desire to subvert everything that we believe in.

some would say that that is itself also a violation of free speech. I would say that's more Gray, and, I just disagree. I don't think so. I think that's just wise. I think that's just, if you want to maintain a freedom of speech, you should not allow people to immigrate here who don't believe in the concept or who adhere to some other political idea, which is, I would call, I would refer to as a, I think Islam is also a political idea, it's not just a religion.

I see that in conflict with, with a lot of our, with a lot of our values. I will just say also, it's not just the freedom of speech really that we're disagreeing with between America and Europe. Their concept of freedom is different. When they talk about something like healthcare, for example, you have a legal right to it. Their idea, I think, is that you're not really free, you can't really be free if you can't afford healthcare.

There is something about freedom that they see as, you know, your, your freedom to live a healthy and happy life, and that if you can't, if there's some material inhibition to that, then you're not free. So if someone is calling you a racial slur and that is really hurting your feelings, then they're infringing on your freedom. Whereas Americans have a super, super different view of this, which is, as long as you're not hurting someone, you have a right to yourself and your property, and no one can tell you what to do with it, and that's freedom.

It's like more centering of the individual, I would say, rather than

some nebulous perspective on What other people are feeling, which I don't even know how you would begin to police, but I do think that they see it that way because I've heard them, I've heard them since my earliest libertarian days talking about like things like healthcare, for example, this idea, this conflict really between our conceptions of freedom would come up.

Have you noticed this at all with your, your fresh friends?

Speaker 3

Yeah, I mean, I think that they, and again, there, there are these deep cultural differences that you're pointing to where like, I think a lot of Europeans are just completely habituated to the idea of an extremely muscular state that is very involved in all aspects of their lives. I mean, in France,

there is a national curriculum that everyone,

learns and it is completely determined in Paris and then just kind of flows down to the provinces, whereas in the US, obviously, every state has considerable latitude, for better or for worse, to determine what it teaches, its students, often for worse in California. but yeah, and, and so I think that, With that comes this kind of, I think, expectation in a lot of people that like the state will just provide all these services for you and that it will kind of, yeah, I mean, healthcare is one of them, this, you know, education all the way through college is another one of them.

All of these things are kind of prerequisites for living and for your freedom. And so I think, yeah, a lot of it just comes down to the way their institutions are built.

Speaker 2

I mean, really what we're looking at is an effort from the administration to maximize free speech abroad. So we're not really talking now about America. Just as I think the Europeans previously were not really talking about Europe, they were talking about the world and specifically Americans, right? It's not lost on me that Macron, as Riley mentioned, is super animated by this issue right now because there's a giant global question surrounding his wife's penis.

And that is entirely because of Candace Owens and our legal right to free speech. Though, I guess, I mean, she's being sued, so we'll see. We'll see what the case looks like and how it all breaks down. But that's what he's mad about. And he's saying, you know, my wife can't be free if this crazy lunatic in America is reminding everybody that she used to be a man who taught me in a class and blah, blah, blah, reminding.

I mean, you know, allegedly, allegedly she has a penis. We actually, by the way, shout out Pirate Wires. We did a whole, Harris did a whole deep dive on the question of Macron's penis, Bridget Macron's penis. It was inconclusive,

siding on probably not, you know, but never say never. And also, I don't know. I don't want to shame him for whatever he happens to be into. I'm talking about Emanuel right now, not Bridget. It's interesting to see the Americans at least saying they're going to act a little bit more like Europeans in this way, which is, I think, if perhaps not like what I want from my government, I think it's what you have to do to shift the debate somewhat.

We can't always be on the defensive on the free speech question. We can't always be in this conversation where like we want it, the Europeans don't, and so we compromise somewhere, we compromise somewhere in the middle for all of us. I think it's much better for both sides to be, like Europe is like, you know, we don't want it at all for anybody.

Americans are like, we want free speech for everybody. You have no right, but we're never going to let you not have free speech. Then maybe we compromise on everybody just doing their own thing and we find some way to thread that needle. However, I don't, I'm not convinced that they're going about this the right way. So there's this interesting piece of, of this new policy, which is not just about free speech, but also protecting kids on the internet.

You know, it's a strange, that's a strange combination of things. What Sarah Rogers says, we have to make the internet a place where kids can be protected and your credit card doesn't get stolen, Rogers continued, but also keep it an open and free place where that kind of innovation is possible. Like, yes, of course, love the idea, you know, who, who doesn't love Kids being okay and fewer Indian scammers, robbing mom and grandma.

However, as we saw in the UK, children are used as an excuse to destroy anonymity on the internet and to curb free speech. It is like the idea of child safety is used as a weapon against free speech. I think that they're in a tough place politically where they, they, it's just a bipartisan, it's a seventy, maybe probably like an eighty-twenty issue.

Everyone wants kids to be safer on the internet. You can't, it's political suicide to say free speech is the most important thing and parents should just take care of their kids, which is actually correct. Parents should just take care of their kids and maybe if they can't be on the internet, they shouldn't be on the internet. But she can't say that.

And so the question is, to what extent will her commitment to protecting children have an impact on us the way it is having on adults in the UK right now? have you, did you pick up on any of this stuff at all? Or what do you think about maybe the kid issue? Even just that balance, what do you think about that balance yourself between, I guess, what we're talking about is, you know, the same thing we're always talking about, security and freedom, the balance of those two things, you know, what do you sacrifice, which one do you want more of?

Speaker 3

Yeah, I mean, I think you guys had a great piece

about kind of these calls to ban anonymity on the internet and how this is really central to free speech online because, you know, you can't have any kind of, like all these sort of laws that would have age verification or ID verification,

you know, would completely ban anonymity essentially. And so then you would have,

You'd really get rid of this like kind of thriving culture of people sort of pseudonymously or anonymously expressing opinions that, you know, leads to a lot of, I think, really fruitful conversation and people sort of feel unfettered. And of course, there's bad, there's negative extra balances out, right? People say crazy things when they're, when they're anonymous, but it does seem like it is kind of a cornerstone of free discourse online.

I, I do, I, I guess I share your misgivings about, or I share your suspicions that the child safety stuff, which is obviously, as you say, everyone agrees with it. No one wants kids to be, you know, abused on the internet or exposed to things they shouldn't be on the internet.

but that kind of, you know, morally righteous cause is often used to like Trojan horse in these things like, you know, identity verification on the internet. That are really antithetical to,

a free internet where people say lots of things and, you know, aren't getting knocks on their door from, the Metropolitan Police or whatever, because they've said something that runs afoul of, you know, the, the speech codes du jour. I empathize with, parents who feel very out of control of what their kids are consuming online. I mean, I think of like, I guess when I was a teenager, like my parents had no idea what we were doing on the internet, and it was kind of, I think early days where this was like before Jonathan Haidt told everyone that, you know, hey, your kids who are spending 20 hours a day on their phones are like, that's why they're anxious, right? and like

depressed and have eating disorders and all this kind of stuff.

Speaker 2

Have you followed the French riots at all? What is the, what is the truth of what's going on there right now?

Speaker 3

Okay, I, I haven't followed them that closely. I do, I've been kind of amused by them. I mean, okay, the French riots, for those who don't know, they, they broke out at the end of September. I think they began in like the Paris suburbs with a kind of, like there was a teacher walkout and students joined them. They were protesting bad, conditions in schools.

And French people are always protesting, also as an aside. this is just like a cultural thing. And then I guess this put on social media and it became this movement and then students all over the country began like walking out of their schools and protesting. And this led to confrontations with the police and so, and there've been like tens of thousands of students on the street who are protesting.

With a mixed set of grievances, I found it very funny looking at their signs, because a lot of them, by the way, have, like grammatical errors, which I'm like, okay, maybe you should be in, in your, you know, 12-hour school day.

Speaker 2

yeah,

Speaker 3

it's, it's a mix of like, Our schools aren't, you know, the, the conditions of the classrooms aren't great, or like the hours are really long, which in their defense, European school hours are crazy and they are quite long. but then there are also things like they're upset that the college admission system is so rigid, like, you know, you have to take this kind of one test and it determines a lot of where you go to university.

and, and then there's just like a bevy of like social concerns, where they're, they're also really upset that they're trying to ban their phones in, in class, which I'm completely for. I don't think you should have your phone in school. but... But

Speaker 2

they're, they're riots. It doesn't look like protests, right? It looks... Oh, they've, yeah, they've,

Speaker 3

they've turned into riots. Yeah. I mean, I think it began as kind of like, look, it's the start of the school year and kids don't want to be in school, and so they're joining like the fashionable protest. But as with any like mass agglomeration of people who feel empowered and are in the streets, it like inevitably devolved into

into riots. Yeah. What

Speaker 2

is the reason it's also being associated with immigration stuff? Is that just because so many of the people that we see rioting don't look French? What is the, like, what, what is that dynamic online that I'm reading?

Speaker 3

Yeah, I think that the immigration stuff in my read, part of it is it probably began, like, I think these, these riots began in the Paris suburbs, which are extremely heavily populated by immigrants. and I think lots of the students participating were, like, children of immigrants or immigrants themselves. The optics of trashing the streets in Paris and across France and having, like, a majority of the people involved be either immigrant, like, or I don't know if the majority are, are of, are of themselves immigrants or of, you know, Non-French descent.

But I think it kind of rhymes in people's heads with the riots that you saw. For example, after PSG won the Champions League in...

Speaker 2

Right, after the sports victory.

Speaker 3

After a sports game, yeah. And it's like, oh, why after... You know, and I'm saying this as someone from Philadelphia, where like when we win a game, there is always a little bit of, you know, ethnic disorder.

Speaker 2

But,

Speaker 3

you know, in Paris, it's like, wow, you guys just completely trashed the city after your sports team won. And you look at a lot of people doing it, and they don't look French, as you say. And so I think that, yeah, there is something here where the, like, extremely violent riots, again, this is, you know, writing is part of French DNA, but like there is something, I think, in the

demographics of the students involved that Rhymes again with these like very violent protests that we've seen or like minor incidents in the past couple of years.

Speaker 2

Well, then of course we saw in the UK, you have this, there were, there was the rioting of mostly, I think, English people over,

the, I think, was it the, almost the beheading of a person in the street? Then you had all the rape inquiry, rape gang inquiry stuff. You've had an endless discussion about what to do with the boat, the boat migrants. And every single time these conversations come up, there's a question of what should and should not be allowed to be discussed online, as if being allowed to discuss these things is contributing to something, itself nefarious, rather than like, maybe we actually have to discuss these things.

Maybe someone's views on immigration are just their views on immigration, and they're allowed to have them. I don't think we can save Europe. I don't think we can, I don't think, no, I don't think you and I are going to save Europe. I don't think Ryle is going to save Europe. I think, I don't know that America could save Europe again. We certainly couldn't agree on whether or not we should save Europe.

if the opportunity, we can't agree right now, right? I guess that was the question about Russia and Ukraine, like, do we got to go over there and save them again? And we said, no, we are like, I mean, some of us said yes, some said no, we're not going to solve it right now. it would not be rational to try.

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The battle of the rationalists. This one Brought to you by Autopilot. Thank you, Autopilot. Riley, let's tee up this next topic.

Speaker 1

amidst the ongoing discussion in the rationalist community about whether AI is going to destroy humanity as we know it, we must first grapple with the question of whether the rationalists won't just wipe each other out, because right now they're out here trying to duel each other. so this all started when Steven Pinker, the psychologist and self-described rationalist, shared a piece from Claire Lehmann calling hypothetical AI doom scenarios preposterous.

This didn't sit well with another self-described rationalist, Scott Alexander, who took a break from comparing AI safetyists to Jesus to challenge Pinker to a debate anywhere, anytime, even wagering thousands of dollars for whoever wins said debate. Pinker declined this offer in a piece titled, An Open Letter to Scott Alexander, which prompted Scott to write, An Open Letter to Steven Pinker, within which he clarified his debate offer, saying, I didn't propose a debate in order to seek truth.

I proposed it because under California penal code, it's illegal for me to challenge you to a duel. Cool. So several folks on the timeline weren't loving these personal attacks from Scott. The writer Sarah Hader wrote, Never lost respect for someone so fast. I can't believe this is the person I looked up to as a model of clear thinking. Meanwhile, Solana, you raised the question about whether or not these people are truly behaving like someone who thinks the world is about to end.

So I'll, I'll go ahead and kick it to you here.

Speaker 2

Yeah, I want to start by saying I, I also criticize the Scott Alexander thing. it seems to me this is, his ego is bruised and he is centering his ego right now in a conversation presumed, I thought, about the end of the world and trying to get people on board with preventing the end of the world, literally all human extinction. I was accused of not understanding that he was joking, about the duel.

I would hope that he was joking. My assumption was that he was joking. My assumption was that he did not actually want to kill Steven Pinker because that would be fucking crazy. my assumption was that he was just offended by the way that Steven Pinker had disagreed, he perceives to, as dishonest, but,

This is, in the conversation of Doomers now, which we've brought up a bunch of times on this podcast, and we're going to have to keep bringing up because it's so, it is so shaping technology industry culture right now and the perception of the technology industry by the rest of the country, which is going to shape the future of technology and the future of our industry.

So yeah, we're not going to stop talking about, the Doomer, Doomer philosophy. I've mostly, in the beginning, tried to stay quiet and learned. I, I wanted to kind of really understand where everyone was coming from. I did not want to marginalize any sort of like doomsayers who possibly had some important ideas, which I think many of them do, actually.

I just wrote a piece called Doom Analysis, where, I mean, it's a 5,000 word, very long piece. You can go check it out on Pirate Wires. It's, half of it's a reading list. It's, you know, here is what these people think. Here are what the doomers think. Here are what, this is, you have rationalists and effective altruists. Rationalists, in the words of Eliezer Yudkowsky, rationalism Is, the employment of reason in systematically improving your beliefs and then systematically achieving your values, then you have effective altruism, which is the rationalist's approach to charity.

Both groups of people, there's a lot of overlap between both, believe the end of the world is very likely if we don't stop the, advance of superintelligence. I gave you all their lists. I, I sort of hear, hear the big core texts. Here are their assumptions. I pushed back. I wanted to engage as thoughtfully as I could. But my impulse always in my writing and in the way that I look at the world is I'm always super curious about people.

I'm always super curious about what is really motivating a person. Why are they behaving in the way they're behaving? You know, what, who, who is thinking here? Who's group thinking here? You know, what is the meaning behind what they're saying? What are people really arguing for? Who is, perhaps conflicted and biased and all of these kinds of things.

That's just interesting to me. That's, I'm, I'm a writer interested in people and I wanted out of respect

to keep that away for a minute and to focus on the arguments and to be as rationalist as I possibly could. What these people really are grading on my nerves. And I think now it's time maybe to talk a little bit about the fact that I don't trust, I don't trust them. I don't trust where they're coming from. I think that their concerns are basically reasonable.

I think there's like something worth discussing here, for sure. But if you are a rationalist and your goal is, is, as Eliezer says, to systematically improve your beliefs, then, and to be clear, I think Eliezer is actually pretty good at this. I think Eliezer really does walk the walk. People think he's a freak and a weirdo, and I think he is those things, but he also is really a rationalist.

the, a lot of the others are not. So from Scott's perspective, you know, if your goal here is really to make sure that your beliefs are correct, Why on this topic of artificial intelligence would you pick a big, huge public fight with someone like Steven Pinker and Claire Lehman, who really, they don't know much about artificial intelligence at all.

They never even really talk about it. Meanwhile, there are plenty of other people online who are fantastic on this issue. So straight away, I don't really believe, I don't believe it. I'm like, this is not to me someone who wants to make sure that he understands the views really well. This is someone who wants to fight someone who he knows he can crush publicly, so he can convince a lot of people who aren't really well aware of this topic that the world is about to end.

That's his goal. That's not the goal of someone interested in the truth. That is the goal of an evangelical preacher, okay? Do I believe that Scott doesn't believe what he's saying? Not really. But now let's talk about his, his, his congregants.

We've... In my piece, I kind of went through the heuristics a bit. These are people who almost invariably, when asked about effective altruism or their beliefs in AI safety, will refer back to their smart friends. Well, you know, a lot of my smart friends, most of my... All of my smartest friends are effective altruists. All of my smartest friends are afraid of the AI apocalypse.

When people push back, I've heard again and again, and I have a whole list of these people actually in my piece. I'm not just speaking out of my ass here. You can go look at the citations. The response, well, you just haven't read enough, or you haven't read anything. You have to go and read, you know, this library of blog posts to get to some sense of what the real true danger is.

Meanwhile, these are all just assumptions, and anyone can navigate them in a conversation like this even. And I just... I don't think this is... I don't think this is the behavior of a group of people interested in the truth. I think this is a behavior, this is the behavior, of a group of people who go, who are going to church to listen to someone who, who maybe himself once used his reason to arrive at a conclusion, but is no longer interested in having that, any of his assumptions challenged.

And, I, I just, I think it's like a really toxic environment for anything even close to, intellectualism. Sasha, have you followed this at all?

Speaker 3

Yeah, I mean, I have a little bit, and I guess I should say I'm a little bit more sympathetic, I think, to Scott Alexander than you might be, in, in part because my, I'm always, I, I think he's a great writer, and I really enjoy his writing, and actually I thought the, the intro of his response to Steven Pinker was hilarious because he basically apologizes to Steven Pinker for challenging him to a debate because he says, you know, I didn't realize that this was basically setting the new media sharks on you, who are now, like, hounding you day and night to put the debate on, you know, their podcasts and stuff.

but, and, and we can get into kind of their, their substantive disagreements.

but I do think, I, I was very interested in, there's a part in, in Scott's response to Steven where he's like, yeah, upset about Claire Lehman's, Steven retweeting this Claire Lehman piece, and he's like, you know, Claire Lehman is this culture warrior, he's pivoted to AI because it's fashionable. And I was thinking, Everyone is pivoting to AI because the AI researchers have come out and said this thing might kill us all.

Speaker 2

And like,

Speaker 3

it is completely rational, for every, you know, human being, educated or not on the topic, you know, having read the, the rationalist, canon or not, to come out and, and now start examining the evidence for themselves and coming to conclusions, you know, some of which might not be, very compelling. But like, I think that the basic point that, we are now going to see a lot more opinions about the AI safety conversation and AI doom and all this thing, all this stuff is like, It's, that's completely normal.

It would be weird if this argument, if this, this conversation was completely gatekept by the kind of like San Francisco, you know, intelligentsia that has been thinking about this for twenty years. And, I think it's like completely healthy, actually, for these arguments to finally escape from their parochial, you know, online salons and less wrong and be discussed by the, the general public.

so that's like a kind of meta point. but yeah, I mean, I think the,

the Steven Pinker, I mean, they, they, I guess they have like kind of a long running back and forth is what I gathered and like, you know. Well, it seems

Speaker 2

like. Scott Alexander has thought about Steven Pinker for a really long time.

Speaker 3

Right, I don't, I don't know. He thinks

Speaker 2

very much like Boston.

Speaker 1

It's like the Red Sox and the Yankees is what it feels like to me.

Speaker 2

Right. Are, are, is the implication of that how much are the Yankees thinking about the Red Sox or?

Speaker 1

Like not as much, but they're, they are like quietly aware of it and they like to pretend that they're not. But it seems like, it seems like Scott's very worked up about Steven Pinker. I don't like, by the way, I think Steven Pinker's a loser. but,

I still, I don't know. My, my points on Scott are maybe they still stand and they're more animating to me because I think this issue is so interesting. Sorry, I don't want to cut you off here.

Speaker 2

Yeah, I think that like, so I, I, I'm, I'm very interested in their like, first of all, I really enjoyed reading their disagreement. I actually think we need more of this kind of outright disagreement, like written disagreement between two people. Maybe Steven Pinker. I, I agree with you that like, it's bizarre that Steven Pinker is taken, is the sort of Representative of the skeptical of AI doom position on here.

Like he actually retweeted the piece from Mustafa Suleiman, the Microsoft AI guy, who I presume is like a much better representative of, you know, the sort of like... Mustafa's piece was about AI consciousness and against AI consciousness.

But so I agree that, that like, yeah, Steven Pinker is not an AI expert, but it's still really useful to read these disagreements.

And yeah, there is... I mean, I, I think that like

Scott, from what I gathered from his piece, the real crux of it is what you say. It's like he's, he's upset that Steven Pinker has repeatedly used language like preposterous or whatever to dismiss, you know, the, the like AI

doom arguments. But I do think, you know, if you're confronted with these kind of Extremely alarmist views, about the potentially, I mean, I guess, yeah, Scott would say it's evitable, it's not inevitable, but the potential extinction of, of humanity, I think it's reasonable to have like a strong response to that, right? And so,

yeah, I don't know if we want to get into the kind of the substance of their disagreements, which is also sort of interesting.

Speaker 1

You know, I'm not critiquing him for going at, after Steven Pinker because Steven Pinker's not an AI expert. I don't think Scott's an AI expert either. The, he's a person who's thought a lot about these ideas for many, many, many years, over ten years. He's, he's thought about these ideas. but there are lots of people who have thought about these ideas for many, many, many, many years.

there are lots of people in tech who've thought about them. There are lots of people who disagree with him who have, who have thought about them. they

At this moment, when so many people are tuning in, obviously we have the Jacob Coxon thing, and now the whole country is like, hey, are we about to die? What is actually... Double click on that. What is going on there? He chooses this moment to go after Steven Pinker and to center Steven Pinker in the debate and to be like, this is the guy who represents the other side.

And that's just not... That's just not the behavior to me. Also, I mean, the idea of a debate, which my immediate instinct or impulse here was to attack that. I was like, a debate... When has a debate ever been... ever been a way to understand anything? It's not that. It's a place where you go and your monkeys clap for you every time you make a sick burn on the other person, which is really what's happening with their writing now.

I mean, that's what everyone is like quote tweeting Scott's piece, like, oh, he eviscerated Steven Pinker.

That's just not what you would do if you were interested in, in interrogating truth. I will say, though, didn't Scott say in his piece he wasn't interested in truth-seeking? That was the thing that, that, that he was like, I'm not interested in truth-seeking here. I'm mad, I'm aggrieved by what you've done. And this is where they're like, oh, no, he's, he's kidding.

He's kidding about killing him, but he's not kidding about the reason that he's going after Steven Pinker. He's going after Steven Pinker because he's mad. And that kind of egotistic reaction is similar to what I've seen. I criticized it weeks ago, when someone like Ayla, who I actually, I like a lot, so I don't want to, you know, be too hard on her.

I think she's really brave with her ideas, which is always a value that I like in someone. doesn't, she doesn't really care what other people think, no matter how crazy it is what they think that she's saying or how much they attack her, she still is going to say what she thinks is true. but she was bummed out that people were being mean to her.

And I was like, I'm s- the world is, is the world ending or is the world not ending in your worldview? Like, are we within a couple of years, are we, are we a couple of years out from the apocalypse or not? And if we are, then like, let's just reverse engineer this. What would your approach be? If you had some knowledge You believed that nobody else had.

You had some perspective that the great majority of the world did not have. Your goal now is to appeal to as many people as possible, to persuade them to your side. Like, what would your approach be? How would you go about this? And I have some ideas, okay? Like, I would, I would go to all my allies first, and I would try to get them on board what they've already done.

Then what I would do, especially if this thing started to become contentious, whatever the debate I was having publicly would, would be, I would go to them privately. Twitter is a place, the public forum is a place where, you know, when you challenge somebody, their impulse is to defend themselves. It is war now. It is the, it is a battle.

Both of your egos are involved. We know this. it doesn't matter that that's not the rational approach. None of these people are behaving rationally if they actually think that these are high stakes enough to, you know, maybe humanity's fate is on the line. you go, you go behind the scenes and you try and persuade these people To your side, okay? you certainly publicly then would be as charitable seeming as possible, you would be as open as possible, you would be relentlessly answering questions for normies who are only just for the first time ever being introduced to these ideas.

Like, you would not be frustrated that people, you know, have the same reaction that everybody has ever had when first entertaining the idea that maybe we were all going to die at the hands of malevolent god AI.

you would be, you would be teaching people right now, and they're not doing that, and so that leads me to believe that either the, one, not very rational for the most part, or two, they don't really, they don't really believe in this, for the most part. I think there's a chance perhaps that They've just done the calculations, or some of these people have, and I mean calculations, which by which I mean it's like they're doing calculator.

It's like a series of assumptions that they apply numbers to. They've decided that, you know, the moment for coalition building is over and, the most rational thing to do now is attack mercilessly. but I don't see it working. Do you, I mean, I don't know if you got, do you see it working? Are like the number of, of, of smart doomers with lots of influence like increasing? I don't think so.

It seems like people are kind of locked on both sides right now, and I don't see them achieving what they want. Certainly what's happening in the White House doesn't seem to indicate that they're achieving what they want. Certainly, if you thought that for the next two years, the thing really that you needed to do was convince Republicans specifically, because Trump is in the White House, of coming to your side, I just don't think this would be your behavior.

Like, I just don't think it would be. I don't think it's rational. I don't understand how it's rational.

Speaker 2

Yeah, okay, I guess, I have a couple thoughts on this. I sort of disagree that this is not Going to be effective for their goals. By this, I mean being extremely alarmist in public. I mean, I think this is probably part of the Jacob Coxon approach, right? And like, you know, this was a sort of effort to raise as much alarm as possible, push this thing that was like the concern of random people in the Bay Area on internet forums for 20 years into the public consciousness.

And the effects of it, I think, have already been set in motion. I mean, the fact that you have I think like the average person at this point has heard of the possibility of AI killing them. And like, I would not be surprised if this becomes a major kind of hinge political issue in, you know, over the next two years, which I think is what many of these people wanted.

It remains to be seen whether that will result in the kind of political action they want, and it also remains to be seen whether that will be beneficial for humanity, for,

you know, I don't know, people with agency. Like, there's all these kind of open questions about, you know, will this... Like, I can see a lot of ways that government involvement in regulating AI goes very, very wrong. but, but on the kind of question of

their approach, I think in some ways it makes sense. I do completely agree with you, though, that, I mean, this has always been my issue with the rationalist kind of posture, is that, I mean, it's just, it's just hilarious that the entire rationalist community,

and, and like the AI safety community and AI more broadly is the subject of these endless Shakespearean psychodramas, right? Like, even the kind of foundational

Animus between Elon Sam Dario, and like... Yeah, they're so messy. They're so

Speaker 1

messy.

Speaker 2

And they're messy in ways that are completely legible to... Like, these are just like kind of great man squabbles, right? In some ways, and of course, you know, this is not to dismiss entirely concerns about AI, but I do think that the kind of petty drama of it all is always going to be there. And the, like, the rationalist posture is like, no, we are like being completely rational and we're just calculating our probabilities and presenting them to you and you can present yours and then we will have, you know, this very measured conversation about it.

And it's like, no, like if you just, It's, it's just like this incredible hubris, and I do, I, it is funny that, you know, the Scott piece ends with this like 15, enumerating like 15 examples of, of Steven Pinker, you know,

being out of line. It's just like, I mean, I mean, I think he would probably admit it's petty, but it is just,

it's hilarious that people are trying to project this kind of, you know, rationalist, unemotional thing, and then of course, like, you know, in some ways chimping out in the most,

Speaker 1

you know,

Speaker 2

classically human way imaginable. So.

Speaker 1

What is your, what's your P doom?

Speaker 2

I just don't, I mean, we're all gonna die eventually.

Speaker 1

I

Speaker 2

don't, I, I think humanity will figure it out. I think that it is like, I've never found P dooms or even like general probabilities about,

catastrophic events to be particularly useful. I mean, I think that there's, I guess I'm kind of hedging around your question. I don't have a P doom. I, it's, it's like we could all, there could be nuclear war. I don't know. Like there, there, there are lots of ways that humanity could, could end itself.

and I just don't think that the, I, I do think the thing I take from Steven Pinker is very useful is his insistence that like, you should just approach, we should approach AI risk as kind of an engineering problem that like can be tractable. And,

you know, I think a lot of the people in the labs, this is potentially how they're approaching it.

yeah, I don't know. I don't, I don't, I don't know if P doom is a helpful Framework in all of this. what is your pedoom?

Speaker 1

So I resist the idea of applying a number to it. I think there's something,

you know, people naturally apply a number to everything. People are like, oh, I think there's like a thirty percent chance of, of, you know, I get into this school or whatever. And that's a way of, sharing some kind of,

sense of the maybe Your feeling to someone about like your, you know, how confident you, you are in something. but the way that it's used in this conversation with so many self-described rationalists, and I understand there's a huge long culture of this, and they talk about super forecasting and how they measure it and all of these, I under, I understand the background.

but the way that it reads to the average person who's not steeped in their culture is this is scientific. And so I resist giving that number because it's not scientific. It is not a science, and, it can't be measured, and these are your, opinions, and you're calculating, like, your assumptions times your assumptions times your assumptions times your assumptions, that having been said, in the spirit of this conversation, sub one percent, sub, sub, sub a tenth of one percent.

Which I think is a lot, actually. I think that's really, really high. And I would say that, you know, among optimists, I'm probably on the doomier side of things. I think it's like a really big deal if there's a one in a thousand chance of things going badly enough with artificial intelligence that the whole world ends. I guess the more that I've considered the potential danger here, you know, the core assumption that makes the danger work is that you believe in the likelihood of our creating something that can do so much, to the point where, you know, in all of the malevolent god stories, these AIs are doing extraordinary things with biology, which is usually how it

kills us. But just the other day, I was in the car, and I was driving, thinking about this stuff, and was thinking about, you know, my future kids. And how I wish I were a little bit younger when I had kids, that way I could be, alive when they were having, you know,

kids themselves and, like all of this. I thought, wait a minute, if we don't all die at the hands of an, malevolent AI, I think probably there's a pretty good chance that we live a lot longer. Because I really, in the process of wondering how I think about the end of the world, I have come to the belief that,

the technology is going to take us to places that were previously unfathomable. And what I realized in this moment was, I mean, I've thought, I've thought about longevity for a really long time. I've written about it at Pirate Wires, podcasted about it years ago, a decade ago.

it was a topic I've always been super interested in. Peter Thiel, introduced this to me, himself. He was a huge, huge, huge, hugely interested in this topic like 20 years ago, plus his whole life, but I was introduced like 20 years ago, through him. I realized that this artificial intelligence conversation has changed my own sense of, I don't know, P-utopia.

I suddenly realized that, well, if we could just figure out the apocalypse stuff, I think there's a really good chance that we live a really long time. I think that we're entering a period of incredible technological breakthroughs that, we really don't often talk about in public anymore, which is crazy. You know, as we're cracking all these crazy math problems that we never thought we would be able to crack, and we're just at the very beginning of this conversation,

I've just become, I've become more excited about that. I kind of am holding both, maybe. I am a little bit nervous about risks. I am nervous about risks. So certainly much more nervous about obvious risks, like superficial things that they would maybe say, like internet security and, you know, bad actors and war and things like this. Humans using AI, that is to say, for terrible things, or even mistakes in the lab that lead to terrible things, but don't necessarily kill us all.

That I'm pretty, like, we need to really think about this. But yeah, I would say, yeah, I gave you my PDUM, but also I have this other thing that goes along with it, which is I think we might be living to, like, 500. Or a thousand. I asked ChatGPT, if you could get rid of all natural causes of death. And we're just thinking about accidents now.

death, death from falling down a ladder or, or off a ladder or getting shot by, a terrorist, you know, what is your life expectancy? And Chat says, we might be living till 1700, which is pretty cool. I don't know.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Speaker 1

Have you, but has this happened to you at all? I mean, what, if you're taking, I feel like it's the other side of the coin. If you're taking seriously these concerns, then in a weird way, also you might be among the most optimistic people in the world.

Speaker 2

Yeah, I mean, I think this is kind of, and people sort of,

dismiss this sometimes when it comes from people at the labs who are like, oh, we're building this thing that could kill us all, but like also it could cure all diseases and like it could be really good. And, and people are like, well, you know, Just stop doing the thing that could kill us all. But I agree. I think that, I guess the thing I think will inevitably lead to turmoil, and that is,

scary, is really rapid change. Like, I think that that is just kind of something that historically has caused massive upheaval, and I don't think it's necessarily, like, an objectively bad thing. I just think that typically humans metabolize very rapid change poorly, and that there are, like, lots of bad things that can happen. But I am personally very, very excited for all of the bio breakthroughs that are going to come through, with AI, the possibility of curing disease, curing Alzheimer's, eventually curing aging, potentially.

I mean, I don't even know, like, if we live to 1700, everything about How we think about our lives would change because you could have, I mean, what would a career be? Like, you could be like 20 different people over the course of your life if you, like, if we get kind of radical, you know, physically transformative technology with AI, we are going to have to like completely change how we think of

ourselves as humans. And there's like all these kind of sacred cows that we're going to have to relitigate. And I do, I do think that

I mean, I am by nature optimistic because I think the alternative is just like not productive. Like, I just don't think it's productive to be pessimistic in your head all day about everything that could go wrong.

And yeah, I am very excited about what could happen in the future. And I sort of hope that, I do dislike the sort of like humans will just seed Control to the machines and, you know, we will kind of slowly be phased out. We are like biologically obsolescent and will be phased out. I am a, I am a human exceptionalist, which, you know, maybe isn't, maybe the rationalist would say this is like an irrationally held belief.

I do think that we have a very important place to play in this whole drama,

and...

Speaker 1

We've got a,

Speaker 2

we've got a... Yeah, would, would, would the AIs be rioting outside of, you know, their French, high school with poorly written signs, about how they want their phones? You know, I don't, like, there's some kind of,

we, we, in, in our irrationality, we kind of, provide a nice spice to the universe. Not, not spice in the technical term, not, not the dune spice, but...

Speaker 1

We're going to be getting actually to aliens, at the end of this, at the end of this pod, but, that's enough for now, for the, for the rationalist on rationalist crime.

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All right, super, super fun, exciting, can't wait. We've got Nicole in the chat with us. Say hi, Nicole.

Speaker 3

I'm so happy to be here. Been a huge fan of PirateWires, and now I'm on the PirateWires pod and work for PirateWires, so

Speaker 1

life is good. Welcome, you've been killing it. Nicole is a writer at PirateWires, a fellow at PirateWires. She's been doing some incredible reporting, on the state of California, in Los Angeles specifically. one of our other, team members, Hunter, has done a little bit of it, with her as well, but Nicole has been, you know, on, on the, on the ground running.

It's funny to have you in the chat today with Sanjana, who used to be running Dolores Park, at PirateWires. We've got a stacked, and, and Riley lives in Los Angeles, so we've got a stacked, a stacked cast here today to talk about,

The state of California. Riley, why don't you tee this one up?

Speaker 4

Yeah, so it was a big week for California this week, after Gavin Newsom interpreted some comments from President Trump as a call for Iran to nuke the cities of Los Angeles and San Diego. But this raised the question, does the state perhaps deserve to be nuked? I'm just kidding. But it does have some problems, which Sanji, like you mentioned, helped spotlight during her time at Power Wires with several, fantastic pieces.

And we also have a few new employees on that beat as well. Nicole joins the show, to talk about some not-so-golden attributes of the Golden State, namely that dogs are being abused on Skid Row, women are being abused in homeless shelters, and gubernatorial frontrunner Xavier Becerra may have sent a few kids to trafficking rings, classic mix-up.

So, Nicole, feel free to, tell us about, you know, your, experience covering the California clown world.

Speaker 3

I mean, yeah, so my first week at Power Wires, I kind of just Skedaddled all the way over to Skid Row. spent like six, seven hours there, then went back the next week. And like now I'm on a basis where I'm like hugging people in their tents. So that's one thing I, that there's definitely dog abuse happening on Skid Row. We saw, a dog that was like, had been, they had been, it had been breeded for like multiple times and one, like in the span of a year.

and its vagina was like ripping out. It was a whole situation. We saw litters of puppies like everywhere that were being sold to people on Skid Row for drugs. it was not fun. There's also a really big problem with security guards on Skid Row, which isn't being published or, or, or reported on. There's rape happening, there's abuse from these security guards on, on these women in these shelters, which is probably a reason why you see so many people on the streets.

I've talked to a few of them that said that they would prefer the streets over, these shelters, and now I'm reporting a bit more. I mean, Becerra was one thing. I cannot believe that California is letting this happen. He's literally a dummy, and not only is he a dummy, but he let such horrible things happen to these migrant children coming across the border.

And like, it's just insane. And now we have like a housing crisis. The ULA mansion tax has proven that it doesn't work, which is the mansion tax on all these homes in LA, and it's kind of spreading past LA. And everyone in the Bay Area is leaving. So yeah, that's what I've been reporting on, and maybe California should get nuked. I'm kidding, but yeah.

Speaker 1

No one here believes that. I know that we're in the realm of, Okay, we would

Speaker 2

all... San Francisco, Solana, we would all be,

Speaker 1

We'd be done. I'd be... I'm in this ass up right now. We'd be done. I'm... But we might be anyway. I mean, this is where... I just read... Bunch of rationalist doom literature, and it's like, this is where the virus starts. Like, I mean, who knows? I will say, like, just straight up before we get into this one, I think there are differences.

There are maybe three different dimensions here. We've got one, the city of Los Angeles. We have two, the city of San Francisco, and then we have three, the state of California. And I think that they're all dysfunctional in different ways.

San Francisco is the best of them by far at this point. You know, there are problems that we're not going to get into, we don't have time to get into today. For example, the many, when one of the supervisors running was just run out of town, and he was like the same one, and we're going to have a board that's a little bit less sane potentially than it could have been, but our mayor seems pretty committed to addressing the actual problems in the city.

Whether or not he's succeeding is an interesting question. It seems like maybe Less so now than he was a little while ago. I, there, I still walk around, I see all sorts of problems, but things are, things feel better. Even just the discourse surrounding local politics in San Francisco, the priorities are discussed differently. Los Angeles feels like a bizarro world where rather than go right, the city went left and, and wound up doing more of what wasn't working.

and then you have the state of California, which given the Democratic Party's support of recent ballot proposition, seems to be doing everything that it can to hemorrhage as many of the most productive people, in the state out as possible. so like the, the meta envi, or the, maybe let's say the, the higher level environment is not helping a city like either San Francisco or LA, but it's really, really bad in LA, where next dimension, we would back in the early days of my own discussion of San Francisco local politics.

I started in like 2020 going really, really, really hard, and dragging tech into that conversation. My idea was that this Our city, actually, local politics in San Francisco is a tech industry, topic, and it matters what happens here. It affects the entire technology industry.

there was a concern people would say, oh, is San Francisco, is it going to become like a new Detroit? You know, if it loses the industry, what happens to the city? And the truth is San Francisco was popular before the industry, it'll be popular after. I don't know that the same is true of Los Angeles. I think that Los Angeles has a much more, has a much better chance of, of without the, without the film industry, and having these crazy politics really, really, really decaying.

so yeah.

Speaker 3

San Francisco, I mean, there was just a poll that came out that said that forty-six percent of people in the Bay Area see themselves leaving SF. Out of the region completely, within the next few years, and I think that's probably because it's getting really expensive, and then you have this wealth tax on top of everything that is, yes, like you said, hemorrhaging people out of the state, so jobs and all these repercussions from this wealth tax.

and I think you're right, LA serves as this I don't know, like shorthand for everything wrong with the Democratic Party, and what the worst could happen. And so I kind of equate the ULA mansion tax and every, and I mean, if you want to talk about Hollywood leaving, there, if you look up how many, sound stages are open now in Hollywood, I think it's down, there's only 64% of them are open.

They're mostly empty. And that means that there's not enough below the line people working in SF, so, or sorry, in LA. So that means makeup artists, electricians, florists, and they all need jobs that aren't in LA anymore. So you have this middle class which is leaving, and you can tell because also there's a condo crisis. Nobody's, it's impossible to develop a condo anymore because of stupid state regulation on condos, saying that, like, the developer has to be, is liable for damages on the condos for 10 years, which is, imagine you sell a house and then for 10 years, which, and there's They're bound to happen, like small cracks in the wall, like you have, you are

responsible for that for 10 years. So this whole middle class is leaving and condos are like a stepping stone to like build a family and afford and own an asset and stuff, and they're leaving. You have this ULA mansion tax, which is a problem for these, for wealthier owners. You saw like Aaron Paul, I think his name is, the Breaking Bad actor leave LA for France, which arguably has their own fires to put out.

yeah. and then you have, and then I'm seeing kind of a similar from the state level onto SF. a similar kind of, it's really expensive, middle class can't afford so much, and now you have a wealth tax, which is going to hemorrhage people out. It's just a, a recipe for a huge disaster.

SF is definitely doing better. Businesses are, small businesses are actually doing pretty well. And I think you have more of a capitalist environment there, but California is not safe, I don't think. So... There's only much, there's

Speaker 1

only so much you can do if the state itself is, is

broken.

Speaker 3

Yeah, it

Speaker 1

is. It's been broken for a while. I wonder these days if it's irreparably broken. I worry about the wealth tax. It seems like it's not pulling so well. A lot of money on the other side of it. we will see what, what will happen there. But if it fails, it's not the last time that it's going to be on the ballot. It's going to be on the ballot the very next chance that people have, and probably with more union support.

Right now it has just the healthcare union support. But Sanj, what are you making of, I don't know, is it, maybe even just the difference between SF and, and, and LA?

Speaker 2

Yeah, I mean, it is this kind of conundrum that people have been,

scratching their heads about, which is why does LA have this extremely,

Resurgent, powerful DSA faction when the city of San Francisco really doesn't. I mean, we had Dean Preston, obviously,

for years, and then he was voted out. We have Jackie Fielder, who's kind of just, you know, not serious.

and, and, and like, so, you know, New York, Los Angeles, both have these very powerful DSA factions. The LA mayoral race is somehow between Karen Bass and Nithya Raman, like, you know, bad candidates on both sides.

and I don't know, I guess my general take, I think San Francisco was basically inoculated against the DSA by having Dean Preston in office. And, I mean, also like the demographics of San Francisco are different, right? It's a, it's a much wealthier, city and, you know, arguably the kind of like downwardly mobile elites who flock to the DSA.

I don't know, maybe they don't live in San Francisco, maybe they're in Oakland or whatever in the East Bay.

So I think, I think that's part of it. I think LA,

yeah, I mean it is, it's this weird, it is a kind of strange city because the film industry, I mean, of course, like, I guess, Nicole, you probably know this better than I do, but like my general,

like read on the situation is that like this, the studios are still in Los Angeles, but almost all the filming happens outside of California. It's just prohibitively expensive. Actually, a lot of it's happening in Jersey.

Speaker 3

Yeah. Have you noticed there's a lot happening in England and Ireland and all these Victorian movies are coming out because they're all filming over there and they have the infrastructure. So that's an interesting little thing that I've noticed. I don't know.

Speaker 2

It's kind of depressing to think that England would have more permissive, lower, lower costs of, of labor and stuff in California. But yeah, I mean, I agree with you, Solana, that there is San Francisco

It is, I mean, first of all, it's an extremely attractive environment just from a kind of like weather standpoint. It's a beautiful city, one of the most architecturally stunning cities in the world, and certainly in the country.

and so there's, San Francisco just has like a lot going for it. Maybe it's in some ways kind of resource-cursed in that sense. Los Angeles doesn't entirely, I mean, I love, I love the allure of Los Angeles. I love the kind of like the, the, the historical glamour of it. but downtown LA is like not, has not that much going for it. And obviously Skid Row has been an issue for decades at this point.

but...

Speaker 1

Downtown LA is, that was the first time that I Really became blackmailed on California because up until that point, whenever people had tried to gentrify something, it just seemed like it happened. I, I, I mean, that was my perspective, even coming from New York. I mean, you, you would go into these, into these neighborhoods that were blighted, the artists would enter, they would rebuild, and then the place would be really, really expensive.

You know, this is the story of everything from Soho in the eighties to Williamsburg, when I was living there. And then suddenly in, in downtown LA, after this huge, huge, huge attempt to, to, to revitalize it, you had all these celebrity parties, you had the Soho House, and like everyone's like, yay, the Ace Hotel was down there. all of this happening like, what, 15, 20 years ago, it just didn't work.

And it's like a really shitty place to, to, to be, and it, you could not revive it, and I thought, wow, there is a limit to what, what the gentry can do.

Speaker 3

I was just going to say, my, my one theory on that is maybe that just LA is not really a fundamentally walkable city, and I kind of wonder if, like, the fact that people cannot, like, the fact that you can kind of just have Skid Row happening and live in, I mean, maybe you don't even live in Los Angeles, but you'd kind of consider yourself culturally from Los Angeles, but you're in, like, you know, Calabasas or Malibu or something.

and you, like, never really have to see it, right? Like, you can kind of just drive around and,

like, I, I, I sort of wonder if the walkability part of it is, is part of the equation, because in San Francisco, Even if you don't live in the Tenderloin or Soma, you still will inevitably come across it. It's a very small city, seven by seven miles.

Speaker 2

When we were going through Skid Row, They, there were cops patrolling the entire, like, scene. It was like a five block radius, and people were shooting, there were gangsters on the street, and the police would just move by. And I asked, like, why is nobody doing anything about this? And they said, because it's a containment strategy, nobody's coming here anyways, so let's just contain it to these five corner, or these four corners and move on.

And one time I was getting, I, I went to go get, coffee with Riley, and I said, oh, let's go to downtown. He was like, no, let's not die. so, I mean, there are repercussions. There is no, they built all this office space in downtown that are, that is now being converted into affordable housing, which is a huge problem. and I mean, maybe it's just better to work from home.

I don't know. It's just really not a safe place, you're right.

Speaker 1

Have you seen any response from the government or the people that you've even interviewed?

Speaker 2

I mean, I, I mean, Nithya Raman was the head of the Housing and Homelessness Committee. we wrote to her about her a bit earlier on. she's actually leading in the polls, by the way, eleven percent. Oh

Speaker 1

yeah, she's going to win.

Speaker 2

Yeah, she might win, which is extremely concerning. The response is, let's not talk about it. and all, everything that's happening to better the situation is happening by nonprofits that are very grassroots. I've met with a bunch of them that are going onto the streets and like, there's a whole kids section of Skid Row where kids are barefoot next to needles.

And these kids are just roaming the streets alone. it's not a good situation. But have they

Speaker 1

changed things? Abhi, you've been there. Have they, it seems like, cause I've seen your, after you got, you reported on both the child trafficking thing and the dog thing, I saw those stories,

rehashed in the mainstream press. So presumably there's some amount of pressure on the city, the officials, the people running. Have they, has anything changed?

Speaker 2

Yeah, so I'll say LASA is about To die. Like, the LASA is over, which is a really good... LASA is the homeless services authority that runs through all these nonprofits. They have, they get all the money from the government, and they disperse it with, through these housing facilities. They kind of run the show.

they're done, because they are extremely ineffective. they're bureaucracy galore. and so that, Karen Bass left the, I think there's something happening with Karen Bass, she condemned LASA. Nithya has condemned LASA, and so there's going to be a new commission. I think it's going to be run by the county, I'm not 100% sure. But, that's the biggest thing.

Other than that, there are stories that pop up, nothing's really happening, and it seems, nothing's really happening with the homeless situation, but, and it just seems that they're just trying to shove it under the rug the more it comes up. so yeah, I hope these people get mental health. help, go to site, go to, mental health institutes, go to jail, because this is really, really unsafe, and it's getting actually bigger.

My cousin who used to work near Skid Row, so that he would go to this fish market, which was three blocks away from this, where Skid Row used to be, and now it's surpassed that area by like two more blocks or something like that. So it's getting bigger, and that's a huge problem for those neighboring, streets that have, that are trying to, they're trying to gentrify.

so yeah, that's, there's nothing's really happening. I love the

Speaker 1

idea of trying, trying to gentrify. As a good thing. We're, we're, we're trying our best, folks. We are trying our best, and they keep stopping us.

Speaker 2

Yeah, it is not. There is one street that has a blue bottle. I don't

Speaker 1

want gentrification. Who doesn't want gentrification? Gentrification

Speaker 2

is the best. It is the best thing to happen.

Speaker 1

It is the only way we've ever, ever, ever in the history of America improved blighted neighborhoods. It is like, you want the gentry. That is how you know things are about to get better. Once you start seeing, you know, new paint jobs and flowers out front, that's great. Once you, the real thing, once you see an expensive coffee shop, it's like.

Blue

Speaker 2

bottle.

Speaker 1

Game over.

Speaker 2

For me, it's like really pretty dogs on a, on a leash. And if people are comfortable, like normal people are comfortable walking their dog, then I'm, I know I'm safe.

Speaker 1

Well, we will bring you back in next time you report on the city. We have, our PowerWire's voting guide coming out. Hopefully next week, I got to work on that myself. Today I'm working on it with Nicole. it's been real, Nicole. We'll catch you back here next time. Unless actually, do you want to just hang out for the next segment?

Speaker 2

Yeah. Can I? Yeah, yeah. You,

Speaker 1

you, you, you hang out. we got to talk about aliens. thank you, first of all, Eight Sleep, while I am laying in my new pod six, courtesy of the company. I will be gazing up in the night stars, further contemplating the topic that I, we are about to introduce you to right now. Riley, tee it up for us.

Speaker 4

Thank you, Eight Sleep. Today's white pill is that AI potentially won't be killing all of us, thanks to a possible logical flaw exposed by one Mike Solana in the boss's new piece that he mentioned, Doom Analysis, which everyone should go check out on pyrewires.com. He interrogates the question, if we keep building artificial intelligence, are you and everyone you know and love going to die? By looking at some of the great works of the rationalist Doom canon and their various Doom scenarios where AI completely wipes out humanity.

one such theory popularized by Nick Bostrom is the idea of the, paperclip maximizer, and the gist of that thought experiment is a hypothetical superintelligent AI is tasked with making paperclips, but we forget to tell the AI, hey, please keep humans alive, so the entire world inevitably becomes consumed by paperclips, and humans all die out.

But Solana raises the all-important alien question, a spin on the classic Fermi's paradox, that might Potentially dispel this theory. Solana, I'll go ahead and kick it over to you to let you unpack that theory.

Speaker 1

Okay, so crazy place to conclude an essay on doom, on artificial intelligence. I guess maybe where I begin is

we have this sort of my maze type puzzle before us, the question of, you know, we have all these reasonable seeming assumptions leading to a very doom, crazy, wild conclusion. I've had similar experiences with two other ideas, one was the simulation theory and one was Fermi's paradox, these places that leave me in a headspace of like Disassociation almost.

Something is off, I feel. My intuition is saying all of these data points are insufficient and we're missing something. And that's kind of the feeling that I had always, it has been the feeling I've had with the AI thing. Brought me to Fermi. I thought it was really fascinating that in so much of the doom literature I read, These people would conclude with aliens.

aliens were weirdly a part, extraterrestrials were weirdly a part of, of the canon in both Eliezer's and Nate Sawyer's book. and in, AI 2027, aliens make an appearance at the end. our AI meets them. And

it got me thinking, like, does Fermi's paradox not itself

have an answer for us in the AI question, or at least complicated? Now, what is Fermi's paradox? Okay. Fermi's paradox is the question of if aliens exist, where are they? Now, maybe some of you don't think aliens exist. Fine. This is really not a conversation for you. This is a conversation for people that believe, Life emerges naturally, and if it emerges naturally, even in an enormous, you know, universe, somewhere in that universe, it should be out there, and on a long enough time horizon,

there should have been the emergence of intelligent life and technology. Now,

human life emerged a couple hundred thousand years ago. humans went from not flying to going to the moon in what, like, fifty years or so. our jump, our technological jump from the 18th century, to the 20th century was extreme. Now, imagine what humans will be capable of, not after just 200 years or 300 years or a thousand years, but a million years.

what about a billion years? The universe is really, really old. There's no reason that there shouldn't be life elsewhere that is not only more advanced than us, but more advanced by potentially billions of years. These guys all seem to understand that. They've introduced the idea of artificial superintelligence being created by these aliens, either misaligned, some of them, some of them aligned.

Should we not see evidence of this superintelligence all around us? By which I mean, in our own LEIs or story, we have a crazy misaligned superintelligence that is tearing through the galaxy, swallowing stars and planets. You would see evidence of that if you were a sufficiently advanced, a sufficiently advanced

or sufficiently technologically advanced alien species. We should see evidence of that all around us in the universe. Nate Soares, the co-author of the book, actually responded. He talked about it being really far away. And that's just not convincing to me. Like the superintelligence of the past, of some future distant alien race,

It should be able to travel the stars. It should have traveled to all of the stars on a timeline of a billion years, a timeline of a billion years, and it hasn't made its way around the galaxy. It hasn't figured out the problem of human life. Now, what if it has? what does that say? What, what would it say if a, if a superintelligence actually had found us, actually knows that we're right here and doesn't want to destroy us? Well, that says a lot about superintelligence itself.

That says a lot about alien life itself. That complicates the, that complicates the narrative of what a superintelligence, necessarily is. And I think just maybe high, high, high level here, I think by introducing aliens into the conversation, the rationalists have allowed me to, to ask the question of, well, where are they? and by extension, where is the evidence of their superintelligence? and is it not, is it not, does it not complicate, the narrative somewhat? Did I make that case well, folks?

Speaker 3

Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think that like one of the,

just I think your high level point that you made earlier about how all of these are basically stories that are not, despite their author's insistence to the contrary, statistically, you really can't assign exact probabilities to these, these kinds of things. And like you should have, beginning from a set of assumptions and sort of bearing out those assumptions and seeing what story you get is important.

Because an answer I've heard to Fermi's paradox, which I think Sam Altman years ago said like he found very compelling, was that maybe the reason we don't see evidence of alien life forms, despite the universe being very big and very old and there being a very advanced technological civilization here on Earth,

is that maybe like there are other civilizations that develop superintelligence and the superintelligence killed them all. And that like superintelligence is this kind of like force that just inevitably cannibalizes itself. and so yeah, I think you're, you're, and so that's kind of one... No,

Speaker 1

but let's, that's the great filter. That's the great filter. This, they, I've seen Jeffrey Miller and other people, introduce this, as evidence in their favor. They bring up aliens. But in such a world, as a super, in a world of superintelligence as a great filter, every alien race creates the superintelligence, it destroys them. It then goes on to cannibalize the entire, the entire, all of the, the cosmos that it can get its hands on.

It is trying to rearrange matter in a way that is better for it. It is expanding into the universe. Everyone predicts that this is go, all of the doomsayers predict that this is what it's going to do.

We should see evidence, if not of the aliens, of their superintelligence. And if the superintelligence did act in this way as a great filter for its own race, why has it not destroyed us? Why has it not found, identified and, and destroyed us? It, it does not hold up. They have, it's n-it doesn't sound fair to be like, listen. There's a Fermi's paradox, and therefore there's a singularity paradox, or therefore there's an ASI paradox.

You know, I'm using the potential existence of aliens to disprove your idea about ASI, but they bring up aliens themselves. And so by introducing it, I can say, this doesn't make sense. We should see evidence of the ASI. The ASI should be here. It should see us as a threat, or it should see, it should have already rearranged our atoms if it wants to do that.

We should have been paper clipped. It should be here. at the very least, it should see our potential ASI that we're going to build as a threat, and it doesn't seem to do that. None of those things are true. I, there is no world in which these things happen naturally where we don't see evidence for them already. I just don't think so. There are other things, like maybe Maybe there's a simulation.

Maybe we're in a simulation. Maybe they've simulated most of the world around us and we're quarantined until we reach some kind of like, I don't know, stage of development where they can prove to themselves that we're worth entering, you know, the, the, the future alien Senate or whatever it is, if we trust it not to wage war on them. but those would all imply really good things about intelligence and ASI.

Those would imply that they are not, these unfeeling, unthinking, evil, evil entities.

maybe the way that we meet the aliens actually is by solving alignment. Maybe it is a great filter. Maybe it's a kind of filter, not a great filter. Maybe, maybe some people get it wrong and some people get it right, and we're supposed to get it right. And if we get it right, we can join them. I, I don't know. I do know that it, it's like super, super duper complicates what they're saying about, almost everything.

Speaker 3

Yeah, I mean, I think that, well, I mean, first of all, like you can come up with There's so many ways that you can kind of like contort yourself to, I mean, the reason that these, these are fundamentally like these, these stories, right? You could say, well, the aliens, I mean, maybe the, the super intelligence that is not here is kind of hiding itself and like, or it's like on this plane that we can't really access.

Like there's lots of sort of almost rhetorical tricks that you can, you can use. I do agree with you though, that like in a world where,

like the doom, the absolute doomsday scenario of super intelligence is that like it somehow,

like just turns off the lights, I guess, on the entire universe, right? Like it, it like kills all humans and then it just like boom and everything goes completely dark forever. And to the extent that like in these scenarios where the super intelligence is then going to meet other aliens and there's like this kind of alien consortium,

yeah, that does complicate the Assertion that the superintelligence would be like completely omnipotent and inevitably through some kind of instrumental convergence. Which is how it's

Speaker 1

described, by the way. It's, it's described, it was interesting, Nate Soros commented, as I, as I mentioned, implying all of these really wild physical limitations to this thing. But that's not how he tells the story with Eliezer, of how this AI rapidly takes over the entire planet. They're describing an almost omniscient and omnipotent entity that we cannot, we have no chance against, and we're just immediately wiped out, and then it immediately enters the stars and immediately consumes almost all matter.

It like, very quickly meets aliens. Like, there is a huge disconnect between, the superintelligence that they're describing and then the aliens that they weirdly introduce. I think they maybe have to, there's a question I had, which was like, why not just be like, Maybe there are no aliens. Why is it such an important, why is it so important to them to, or important enough to keep introducing? You know, why introduce aliens into your killer robot story? And I think because it has to do with religion.

I think because if aliens exist elsewhere, that makes you feel good about your decision to be an atheist in some way, perhaps. It seems like life should be naturally emergent if you don't believe that God exists. I feel neutral on the question of aliens. I don't feel emotional about it, and I would have had no problem leaving them out of a story like this.

They feel, I think, it seems, a little more connected to it. Riley, I saw you, by the way, you kind of were nodding along. Do you have some thoughts on Fermi?

Speaker 4

The simulation theory is my favorite, because like, which maybe like speaks to like the religious community maybe being right here, because like what if, okay. Bear with me. We're about to get into some psychedelic talk here. So like, if we're about to deploy ASI and like, say, go ahead, take control of everything, ASI, like AI gives us a big reveal and it's like, no, you've been living in my creation this entire time, which I mean, the parallels of that to like religious stories are like true.

So like, what if, you know, when we're about to give ASI total control, it's like, no, I've, you've already done that. You're living in my creation. Like, I've already taken control. That's my favorite like rebuttal to Fermi's.

Speaker 1

Well, I, I, yeah, I mean, the more I think about this stuff, simulation theory was what got me onto Bostrom so many years ago now.

or I guess maybe I, I think they call it a theory. It's definitely not a theory. It's a maybe hypothesis, thought experiment.

it is a little bit strange, isn't it? That in all recorded time,

we should be right here writing and thinking about About artificial intelligence right at the birth of potentially a new kind of intelligence, it's like a little bit suspicious. It has me being like, this would be a really good story to tell. I wrote a science fiction novel 10 years ago or so, that took place in a simulated reality. My, my idea was, you know, the one kind of simulation you'd really want to run would be historical sims, and I think that's also true of an artificial intelligence.

It would be also true of an artificial intelligence that it would want to run simulations imagining,

its own potential birth. Who were the players involved? Who was in favor? Who was against? what were people worried about? Who were these things that invented me?

but then that makes me feel also better. The idea that this superintelligence potentially is

interested in us enough to want to see what we thought would be evidence that it wouldn't want to exterminate us as well, I think. But I guess there are just no answers to any of these questions.

Nicole, Fermi's paradox, why don't we see evidence of aliens?

Speaker 2

I mean, I'm a religious person and I thank God every single day for it because, I mean, I see similarities in the fact that also you said something, maybe this is something that they can use to kind of,

defend their atheism, but then again, they're creating a religion by saying that there's this entity outside of our own and we don't know anything about them and, and it's, it's religion-esque. It's, and so, I don't know, everyone's drawn to religion.

Speaker 1

So your, your answer is maybe God,

Speaker 2

no aliens. My answer is God. But I respect the, I respect the, the ima-imagination. I would say I don't want to like make it,

I, I don't want to belittle it, but I think it is some form of religion in their own way.

Speaker 1

I think what's interesting also is how quickly simulation theories come up in conversation like this, because it feels linked to Fermi and, and to the AI conundrum in some way. All three are linked. Your mind goes straight to each one. if you have experience, if you have, if you know about each one, they, they, they feel connected. And I don't know, I think there's something there.

I feel maybe very most strongly that, we're in like fringe mind space and we lack language and, are trying to develop new ideas here. These ideas are actually pretty young. And so we keep hitting walls because we haven't been thinking about them for thousands and thousands of years. aliens weren't, to the best of my knowledge, something that people really talked about.

Like in the ancient times, weirdly. You'd think they'd be like looking up, wondering. Well, I guess they didn't know about planets. I mean- I

Speaker 3

guess they were sort of like, they're angel, they were sort of like incorporeal intelligences, but yeah.

Speaker 1

Yeah. Yeah, I guess they, yeah, it would have been maybe harder for them to... Well, Sanj, so wait, but hard answer to Fermi's. So Riley, you're a simulation. Nicole, we've got God. Where are you?

Speaker 3

my, my intuition on Fermi's paradox is it seems plausible that like, I guess it's like the rare earth answer or something, that like earth is, like just happens to be this kind of exceptionally,

favorable combination of, you know, environmental factors and then,

yeah, that the emergence of life was this like rare phenomenon. and so

Speaker 1

I- Well, I agree with that, right? We can all agree it's rare, but is the universe not big enough That no matter how rare, we should have seen some other example of it.

Speaker 3

Yeah, and I, I think, but I think like the rare, the like super, super rare, It's rarer than we think. It's rarer

Speaker 1

than we think. Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 3

I, I... Yeah, I, or, or I'm kind of also like, I sort of think that we can't really fathom if there were like other super intelligences out there or something. I feel like...

I just think we couldn't even fathom their desires or what they would do. I don't know. I'd sort of a cop out. but...

Speaker 1

Well, I mean, unless they've, I really, I really do think that we would see evidence in the stars around us of something. So I'm landing on... That we could interpret? Yeah. Like, I, yeah, I do think so. Even just naturally occur, yeah, I think so. I think there'd be something out there that we would be like, oh, that looks, that looks intelligent.

That looks intelligent, or like, like evidence of something that, that, that had happened that was done.

Speaker 2

Maybe there was, and we just, us citizens don't know about it yet. I don't know. I feel like there's a lot. I mean, I, I'm,

Speaker 1

I'm, I, I mean, I come down to where protected in some way. It's very like maybe Star Trek-ian, which is one of the things I liked about AI 27. It ends in, AI 2027, it ends in, there's a good future, and the good future ends like very much sounding like Star Trek.

which I guess is, is also of, it's like a very happy political dystopia, Star Trek, the next generation world.

but it seems nice, but this idea that maybe you enter the universe when you reach some kind of Some level of technological advance, you make it into the, you make it into the group. but until then, maybe you can't see what's, what's beyond. I think it's either that or just like a version of both, maybe Nicole and Sandra. Like, yeah, there's like a super rarity to life that we don't understand because we don't understand life.

I, which I've heard before, and it would seem like maybe we're less special than we are because we just happen to be the really, really, really, really, really rare, rare case. But just the evolution of what, the cell from lipids or something, that seems, no one understands how that happened. And if it was just a series of random things that happened in such a way as it became animate somehow, and we That, yeah, that would just be one in an unfathomably large number.

And so maybe it just has never happened before, or it happened once before and there was a great filter. There was one filter. you know, they nuked themselves or something, or their star blew up.

Speaker 4

Or maybe they walk among us and we just don't know it. I mean, I saw, I saw Dario at the White House last week. I mean, you can't tell me there aren't aliens on Earth, or Mark Zuckerberg talking about smoked meats. I mean, come on, dude. There might be aliens here.

Speaker 2

Maybe, but maybe like autistic people are the aliens.

Speaker 1

Oh my God, Nicole. Nicole. Unbelievable.

but they seem

Speaker 2

to get things that we just, I mean, I maybe I'm not, but

Speaker 1

they've got an antenna back to the home world. They're just picking shit up.

You know, every once in a while I ask myself, how am I able to step up to the fire hose of insane internet politics, pour myself a nice tall glass, and down it every single day without losing my mind or soul? And the answer is my sleep. That is why we love the brand new Pod 6 by Eight Sleep. The Pod 6 uses a smart mattress cover that goes on top of your existing mattress.

It actively cools or heats each side of the bed independently, tracks your sleep and health overnight with nine times more sensors than the previous version, and adjusts itself automatically based on your body and preferences. Go to eightsleep.com slash piratewirespodcast and use code piratewirespodcast. The Pod 6 starts at $19.99. Eight Sleep, we love you.

Well, thank you. Thank you. Thank you, alien artists. thank you, Nicole, Saja, always lovely to see you. Riley, it's been real, to y'all. you gotta subscribe to this channel. Like, literally click the subscribe button. What are you doing? You're all watching. I see you not subscribing. It's frustrating. I keep asking, do you love me or not? What is going on here? thank you for your support as ever.

rate, review, like I said, subscribe. Do it right now. let us know what your, let us know what your solution to Fermi's paradox is, and Godspeed.