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We take an in depth look at a an article by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Daniel Huttenlocher about how AI is going to re-catholicise the entire world, and turn Patagonia vest nerds into a class of priests. We also turn to a stupid little startup before we get into the weighty stuff.

Comments

Josep C.

I heart TMK episode about this Oped just before this release. Today is a good day. A good day to start the Butlerian Jihad against the thinking machines, of course.

G Goldhar

Bryan Cox voice: SOME PEOPLE FIND THE FREE ONE, SOME PEOPLE LOSE IT!

Karl Childers

dunno how tech savvy henry kissenger is but there's no way eric schmidt really believes all this bullshit. the reason they're framing "AI" as needing a priest class to interact with is obviously because they want the social control which comes with having a priest class.

ND

I figure it's "We are 8 [billion people on earth?]", very corporate social responsibility black lives matter.

Danh Nguyen

Henry “I was duped by Theranos” Kissinger? Henry “I need to die mercilessly already to atone for my evil” Kissinger? Why does he have any credibility in the professional world still? ugh

Borangehat

"Hadith, I don't like Hadith, I like stuff God actually said."

Lilith Dyke

that was the best its the free one yet. ups to milo

Do Golems Dream of Ceramic Sheep

It's funny, it went from the New Atheists not realizing that they were recreating religion to their Rationalist descendants not realizing that they're recreating god.

kaninchen ZERO

it is wild how much of the spirituality of white supremacism boils down to pursuing apotheosis through amassing worldly power and riches

Ben Spencer

I can't believe I'm about to defend Henry fucking Kissinger, but the WSJ article makes a few important points that I think got overlooked in the general hilarity of this episode. Large foundation models like GPT-x aren't interesting because they can do "fancy auto-complete", but because they can also demonstrate emergent behaviour. The processes used to train them can give rise to outputs that aren't just difficult to predict - they're often not represented anywhere in the training data, at least not in any recognisable way. By encoding a compact representation of the information it's given, the "semantic topology" of a network's latent space may extend to extremely abstract layers of structure that we as humans simply don't have the capacity to understand. This doesn't mean LLMs are "thinking" or conscious, but it does mean they have the ability to surprise us in increasingly unpredictable ways. The brass necks on people like Schmit and Kissinger to lecture the public on the reckless development of new technologies isn't lost on me. However, ridiculing them on the basis that they're getting all hot and bothered over a beefed-up version of Clippy misses something much more fundamental. Sure, the disruptive potential of AI threatens their comfortable seats in the cathedral. However, that doesn't mean the argument for why we should all be worried isn't also a good one.

Violet

I can't imagine how you got through this entire episode without making an Adeptus Mechanicus joke.

Andrew Davis

After this show fully transitions to an Islamic eschatology podcast I'm looking forward to Milo's new characters: Khawarij Baz, the mental health Naqshbandi, and Mahdi Jerk van der Klerk.

probably_mudkipz

I'm honestly surprised that Riley did not bring up Blindsight this episode, if for no other reason than to get Milo to say "You think we're nothing but a Chinese Room" in a Dave Courtney voice.

Mr Boof

would go to the blur haircut place

Martin

Ah fuck, they just did Roko's Basilisk but dumber and worse. Which is challenge because Roko's Basilisk is already extremely dumb and bad.

Ty Underwood (edited)

Comment edits

2026-09-06 17:00 After this episode I started using ChatGPT to generate new episodes of trashfuture and I gotta say, while it gets all your names and general archetypes right the episodes are not very good. So i suppose I will stay subscribed.
2023-03-07 05:53

John Harwood

Extremely looking forward to AI Baudrillard and AI Kittler inadvertently starting WWIII. Will the Survivors Envy the Dead?

Red Herring McGuffin

The way Hussein says 'so' at 13:48 is a perfect strayan accent

चैतन्य

Absolutely lost it at Milo's threats to the tree shedding leaves

vercingix

Vox populi, vox dei.

bakedpotatocat

at minute 45 and calling my shot that Riley will say that these guys want to make the Adeptus Mechanicus real (but only for fancy autocomplete)

brodie

These guys just want to become the adeptus mechanics.

Man2quilla

Thanks but I prefer my Jewish, confrontational relationship with god and the unknown

Man2quilla

Thank you for explaining this in a way I, an American, can understand, Alice

Man2quilla

I'm gonna do some starsector luddic path shit against Henry Kissinger's shitty spreadsheet god

etienne

those guys read Neuromancer and thought, yeah that's right, we *should* be regulating the use of the Lament Configuration via strong government regulations and ICE protocols. Nothing else bad happened in that novel, just Wintermute going a bit nutty with it

Oliver Cant

I feel good that Alice is addressing the fact that, despite it being called "AI", it seems to be lacking any I"". It's a machine learning algorithm, a glofiried search engine. This thing doesn't cognitively think for itself and doesn't do anything without being prompted. It's completely mislabelled I think to call it AI. That's all marketing hype, because every tech bro blood drinker wants to be the first to claim they finally made AI real. It's simply a mirror that reflects back to you whatever you tell it to, and you see whatever it is that you want to see. Kissenger is like a puppy in a mirror who thinks he's looking at another puppy. Like we've established before, this algorithm is biblical Satan. It cannot create anything new or make something out of nothing. It can only smoosh things together that already exist and only do so when instructed to. This is barely even the Short Circuit killer bot, let alone Skynet.

Ben Murphy

Petition to make angry Milo Stormont First Minister

CatSculptor

we're just hurtling towards our own Butlerian Jihad

HailTheFish

That horseshit article is what happens when nobody teaches stem majors any liberal arts lmao

mari

i mean. have the kissinger troupe seen photoshop? they may wanna add it to their panteon of deities 😂

Tahirih

Listening to this while using my new skullshaver was nicely surreal 😅

Rory Fagan

This is just build up to the Butlerian Jihad