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Episode 305: Bloodless Hype Machines (Patreon)

Published:
2023-07-13 18:53:54
Edited:
2024-10-11 00:15:14
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

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Content

We welcome back our friend, author Douglas Rushkoff, to discuss what’s real and what’s fake about the AI publicity push, the next phase of the internet, and human connection in the oppressive techno-future.

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Comments

dominic

Man this one sucked mega balls

Emioly

I love u Trueanon thank you

CJ

Wait come again how did you pronounce aspartame

WL

AI means Artificial Intelligence if you're wondering

kmd

I'm from Louisiana and I'd absolutely love to talk to y'all about it

Ashe

“Brace is so smart” immediately into him making machine-esc noises was very amusing

xasquim

It's been 20 minutes?

Svid

Love Dick Em Down Dougie. This'll be a great listen while I'm stoned and gaming over the weekend after overtime at the factory for the past three days

Ian P

Anchor Brewing is closing 😟

Brian Long

“One of the worst press cycles for polycules” lmao

Stefan

lmao Douglas' voice sounds too similar to Brace's

Graham Hoese

Had a professor in nursing school pronounce it the same way brace did, she was like 60 and I was baffled that she had never heard the word pronounce correctly before.

owen

quicksand fetish calls to mind oneohtrix point never’s ‘Beta Male’ video

Sean

new series with Jacques titled The Gator Network

bnlar

Liz's interjection of "mind of a criminal" w/r/t Brace's cheating has me laughing.

Tvvvv

Air bubble in a vein not real. Air bubble in an artery is real

Andrew Lyman

We're inching closer and closer to the adult baby episode

aidn

yung chomsky is a language model fun fact

Kyle Petty

I got a chuckle when they brought up the speech to text, "dictating like Napoleon," as Brace put it. That's because I'm in my last quarter to get my master's degree, to become a high school teacher and I have used speech to text as my main form of writing throughout college. Now the difference from what the guest is talking about, is that I will go back and edit to make sure those homonyms aren't present. Part of it is because I really enjoy being outside, So I feel the juices flowing more when I can walk around and just speak the information. It is pretty funny though because I'll be articulating some paper on classroom standards or pedagogies, I'll be doing this at a park or on the street, and random people around me always had this look of, "is this guy some homeless crazy person that's off his rocker?"

chronye

this guest sounds like ai smart dorky brace

Lucas

Smart guy here. I like the show.

Mary

Dr John

itsjenjen

yung chomsky plz soundbite this in future pods

D

Sorry Doug, I will never not buy a new drill every time I need to use one. I have a garage with nearly 250 working drills in it and you'll have to pry them from my cold dead hands. My neighbor has 500 drills in his garage alone, but I will never ask to borrow one. This is America.

TrueAnonPod

I hit a artery once and my shit blew up like a crazy sausage

TrueAnonPod

How did I pronounce aspartame. This episode was recorded like two weeks ago

Brittany Poier

From what I’ve been taught in paramedic school, large air bubbles are bad

Ethan Damman

Brace da OG white hat pedophile

sammi sweetheart

the cadence and inflection are identical, it was genuinely disorienting

Buttfarts

At this point if you've used ChatGPT and AREN'T scared of where this whole thing is headed then you might be the freak

J T

“Leonardo’s David”

K H

TrueAnon has a long history of being against the poors.

Mary

Air embolism is a spectrum disorder.

K H

Brace has jelly fish brain. All jelly fish are psychic.

K H

Are you for real gay?

K H

🤓

K H

These dudes would love to destroy the world. It's the only way they can validate their lives and generally pointless service based "inventions."

jay alan

Great ep y’all. 🫡

Petrorenminbi

My dad pronounced aspartame (as a joke) as a Spanish reflexive verb command form (aspártame) and i didn’t know till i was in college and said it that way once and my friend made fun of me

K H

Guys! We can ai generate Liz and Braces voices and makw our OWN adult baby diaper lover and quick(saand)depisode with guest aiAOC.

K H

Did you guys see the story where Congress is going to use chatGPT but have to use the non free version because...reasons?

K H

Did you try asking it "what is the first thing I wrote to you?" See if they fixed it.

Stephen David Miller

I got way too far into this episode before realizing it wasn’t Brace making all of these salient points about AI

K H

Aspartame Injection

Danny

Please liberate this one so I can make my dad listen

NYCM&AHole

Liiiiiiizzz your pores are sooooooo cuuuute (from Daria but it was Quinn not Liz)

Galen

My muscular gnarly knurled hands of a judoka always hurt when I type, so voice-to-text has long been my preferred method of entering text.

CC

Just got home after a long ass day, sitting in my hot ass apartment after taking a shower and I’m feeling WET this episode comes at the perfect time

Demented Avenger

Seconded. I kept thinking a normie-but-curious friend needed to hear his one

George Laurent

Okay I'm going to be the one to say it: I think this guy is a really mid thinker. I feel like I'm constantly hearing dismissive "left" analyses of AI that don't contend with what it AI actually is. "It's just a search engine." No it isn't. We already had search engines. This is something different, obviously. People really need to read about how neural networks work and try to come to an actual mechanistic understanding of what they do before they talk about them. The fact that a transformer neural network like chatGPT can produce the output it does, and follow instructions in the way it does is incredibly remarkable. Sure it's a "parlour trick" and "just a prediction machine" but the fact that it seems to have learned its way to being able to follow instructions rationally through purely *inductive* exposure to language suggests that far more of human subjectivity and rationality are built into our language than we thought (cc: Saussure, Lacan). It's also very new and a lot of critiques of it sound like trying to dunk on a first grader because they're only reading at a 6th grade level.

Rocket Kiss

“Elon Musk is like a Bulldog on stilts’ is the funniest thing Liz ever said and Brace blew by it

SMO

It's sweet that Brace thinks that students proof read.

Natalie

today i learned bo burnham is a huge rushkoff fan and interviewed him in 2018. imagining a TA x bo crossover and i have 0 idea what that would entail

Jimothy Realname

he're's a tip. take your nice hot shower, but then turn it down a little near the end. then turn it down a little more, and more, and keep going until you can't take it and the shock of the cold water brings your blood pressure so low you almost pass out. then you wont be as sweaty after the shower

Jimothy Realname

if we end up getting real AI with actual reasoning capabilities, we can probably just convince them of the correctness of marxism-leninism. i say we welcome the silicon comrades when/if the day comes

Ashley Naftule

I’m hearing double—FOUR Brace Beldens!

SoldierBlue

You guys really should take a look into the robodebt scandal in Australia. It’s mind blowing

Alec

Skibidi bob bob bob yes yes Skibidi bob bob yes yes

Gulb

I'm not sure I can agree with the whole "tech CEOs are overly rational" thing. They seem pretty dumb.

robby

an AI fucked my wife and now my children won't speak to me

Bud Light

Is Liz on shrooms?

Char Kelly

Brace and Connor Oberst both referring to themselves as “crawdadddy” are both critical moments in the zeitgeist

Aaaaaaaaaaaron1

losing my shit at "frog dressed as a pig"

Axel H.

I think he was referring to alternate tunings (other than equal temperament).

emalco

Profs who try to preempt cheating by incorporating chatgpt into their assignments are likely heading for a dead end. Liz is right, these tools forestall critical thinking. I do agree with the guest that there’s a resentment and fear of women underpinning these Silicon Valley dorks’ visions, and life on the internet in general. The misogyny is so pervasive it’s easy to overlook, like the air we breathe.

Ron Johnny

I love these conversations around this new human development and it’s incongruence with human desire! I’ve recently grew to disdain adverts that shill the delivery of things (like hellofresh, better help etc.) directly to our homes for the sake of convenience, they seem to market themselves in a way that says “being an adult is so difficult, you cannot possibly manage it all” - it feels so infantilising

SoldierBlue

I thought it was a new character. He even said “DaVinci’s David” like you’d think a Brace character would say

linda jean

i love this guy. great metaphors

SoldierBlue

Be careful,I made my dad listen to the Tesla episodes and he became an Elon Musk stan and bought a Tesla a week ago.

SoldierBlue

31:15 what’s Leonardo’s David?

Doug B

God damn this episode. Y’all are nailing it. I’m feeling justified and terrified at the same time. LOVE.

Char Kelly

🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻

jack dulworth

One of my chem profs fav assignments to regularly give us is chapgpt’s answer to a question and we have to say what mistakes were made. Brother, there’s a lot of mistakes. This is Chem 1 not some advanced shit with ambiguity

Brian Ward

Weird unnecessary ableist stuff in this one from the prof

Jaime Christley

I worked at Queens College. The systems we had to use to do our jobs..... if anything, Rushkoff is understating how shitty and nightmarish they are. Like the monorail guy sold CUNY on these fucking applications, and everyone on campus - students, faculty, staff - came into contact with it on a regular basis, whether they were requisitioning printer paper or uploading their assignments. I've never hated software so much in my life, and here's the kicker: all the tech in the world doesn't do a single thing to streamline the impenetrable, geologically caked on layers of bureaucracy that makes up nearly the entirety of an American higher learning institution, even a shit-kicking place like QC. The vast computer network just means "the stuff is on the computer". Great, you can look up how much your department allocated for staples in 2013, provided you're savvy enough to navigate nine intraweb portals and can feed just the right SearchTerms into what you hope is the correct array of fields, only also ooh hopefully there aren't too many users today because you might have to start over. And the kicker to the kicker? The paper burden of all this isn't the same as pre-internet: it's MORE. You're always printing off several things with each leg of the process, signing, generating a special number, using interoffice mail to get one copy to Peggy and another to the other Peggy no relation, and you might get it kicked back because you generated the number before creating the req instead of the other way around, OH IT MAKES ME MAD. So, like a lot of TA eps, I can't always go along with the panic stuff, but all that stuff about outsourcing labor to customers, users, students, etc, is dead on. We're working harder than ever, for nothing, for reasons that may or may not become clear to the people hoovering up the data. I'm not afraid of AI replacing artists - that shit sucks, a child could tell you that; rather, I'm concerned with what's always been the nature of the beast: opportunists with capital grinding down labor, divesting themselves of liability, and absorbing value, all while creating nothing.

Jaime Christley

By the way, I enjoy using ChatGPT, and what's more, I think it's worthwhile to become savvy with what it can and (more importantly) can't do.

sir peepus

uh spar ta may lmfao

Joe

Thank you for being so brave. Why don't you read his decades of extremely influential works in the field before dismissing his entire way of thinking based on a 90 min podcast about a very specific subject.

SoldierBlue

Leonardo DiCaprio’s Larry David impersonation, it’s a joy to behold

JD

so hot that Rushkoff sounds like Brace I had to sit down

SF

I’m glad I wasn’t the only one

Tan Tan

Chat GPT writes how Ben Shapiro talks.

PMT

Tim

The guest on today's episode sounded like Brace at 95% speed

John Swan

This is the art that Silicon Valley sickos want to destroy

Doug Cartel

"good for you" is a really great response when someone is rambling on about a personal experience of any kind for way too long. Acid trip, dream, whatever

Jaime Christley

Haha I liked all that stuff. As for symbolists, I’m not familiar with them but it’s pretty easy to look them up. I dunno man, I think you could have a good attitude about what he’s saying or a bad one.

Le Michel diplomatique

In higher ed here (instructional side). My most alienating form of this is (esp post COVID) dealing with learning management systems, but a former staff member told me when they started the systems were less complex, you knew the Peggy’s you had to send stuff to, would go to their offices, be friends maybe even, have happy hours in someone’s office and now it’s all complex computer systems designed and sold to the university that no one was consulted on (at one point class enrollment involved putting courses in a shopping cart). And yeah… and now it’s more of that and Zooms, no one is around anymore.

SoldierBlue

A frog dressed as a pig might be even better. Liz on 🔥

CT

This professor sounds too much like Brace, I honestly couldn’t tell the two of them apart at times

Julian Gricksch

Why do they like this spiritual mumbo-jumbo guy so much? Marxism is Materialism, not Idealism.

Doug Cartel

interesting to bring up Terminator as a metaphor for slavery. T2 reveals his robot arm to a black defense contractor right? I swear to god every 3rd Disney show/movie had quick sand as part of the plot and it was all over the 90s shows. If the fear and sex parts of your brain are right next to each other, and you get a strong enough fear reaction to quick sand as a kid, I could imagine that spilling over to the sex side of your brain and giving you weird kinks. At least, I can trace *my* kinks to childhood memories, and brains have no clue what they're doing back then, so a fear overreaction to quick sand makes way more sense to me as the genesis of the fetish as opposed to people waking up one day and deciding to google quick sand on rule 34.com or whatever. I think the real origin of this trend of social isolationism is really just Classical Liberalism. You have these dudes 300 years ago writing giant theses about how the good and right way to live is to live like they do, where you sit around all day theorizing and writing music and books because you have the freedom to do it (because all the work is done by servants, you have a whole mansion to yourself, and all your social ties are just transactions). Rich people spearheaded this sociopathic social order and eventually technology developed in a certain way to make this the normal for everyone.

John Swan

I agree, but only partially. I think the popular discourse around transformer models broadly speaking is mid and not necessarily a reflection of the ability of our guest. I personally feel that the far more interesting critiques of these new(ish) tools require more technical understanding than most people have the time or patience for - which is totally fine. Instead, most folks I see discussing this focus their criticisms on the higher level (or just easier to understand) concepts, which all kind of end up blurring together and sounding like a smoky night in a dorm room. The discourse feels locked at the same level as the hype and never engages the technology directly. Nothing wrong with having those kinds of conversations, by the way. It’s time we confront our collective bourgeois notions of art, of intelligence etc. But you can have those discussions without ever invoking “AI”. I think you may be feeling the fatigue of 7 months of discourse about LLMs and transformers without engaging with them specifically. Also, to be clear: I don’t want to come off as gatekeeping this. I just would rather hear the smart people talk about the things like interpretability, transparency, and explainability; “attention” and bias; and overfitting in transformer/LSTM models and how they may reveal things we maybe take for granted about intelligence in general.

John Swan

I really want Liz et al to learn about the full picture of how these things are trained. Model finetuning gets left out of the conversation, in my opinion, to the detriment of the critique being made. Maybe we get caught up in the parameter count or whatever, but these opaque LLMs powering chatbots are finetuned, preprompted, and biased before most people ever start interacting with them. Some reason I feel like that is far worse than merely training these things on the internet during the Trump presidency and Covid years and worth mentioning when criticizing this stuff.

Jaime Christley

It is kinda funny that Rushkoff's thoughts, as expressed there, are not at all unlike that scene in EVERYBODY WANTS SOME!! when Wyatt Russell, very baked, is holding court w/ his ruminations about Pink Floyd. Nevertheless, I'm kinda picking up what he's putting down: between the notes, between ticks and tocks, between the gear teeth, etc. That gets at the gist of the human-machine divide, I think. Not trying to dog on you if the guy rubs you the wrong way. Just didn't hear it the same way.

ocelotte

In different temperaments, G# and Ab can be different.

meyer

gottem

Hunter CJ Silvestri

PLEASE unlock this one 🤞 i’m constantly trying to articulate the “borrow your neighbor’s drill” theory of change Douglas gets into here

meyer

like a smart king

MurseInDaPurse

Are we sure Doug isn’t an AI generated Brace?

Axel H.

I mean, it's hard to say that it's being unfairly criticized for being new and not living up to people's unrealistic expectations of artificial intelligence when the obverse is to say that it's practically sentient and both terrifying and awesome in its incredible power. I also understand hostility toward it when those pushing it are typical "tech-bros" and there's all this talk about how it will put artists and writers out of work (but somehow coders will be around forever). How do we see past the hype and the marketing? Because a lot of the discourse around it is just that.

Axel H.

It did come off as a little pretentious (in a sort of dorm room musing way), but it's difficult to talk about what makes art art without sound like some kind of windbag. Especially since AI art does have this superficial appeal that can only be deconstructed by referencing "human art"'s more intangible qualities.

mexicanhalloween .

frog in a pig suit, lmao, absolutely perfect, even his big frowny mouth

Jaime Christley

yeah I agree with that - ever since these apps first hit the big time, I want to say 2021ish? people have been obliged to talk about art in a variety of contexts. not everybody is really prepared to do so, and those who are good at talking about art aren't necessarily good at talking TO everybody about it. but maybe we'll get used to it and get better at it. There's this - probably partly true, probably a bit puffed up - thing people like to say about "workers" where it goes: your average sewer/sanitation worker in Paris is far more likely to have read Dante or Virgil, or what have you, and can speak on it, than your average American middle-class or upper-class person. I don't know if there's anything to back that up but I often think of it, especially as it kinda insinuates that the unnamed American sewer/sanitation worker, or baker, or soldier or whatever, is NOT capable of reading or processing, for lack of a better term, "high art". This I take issue with; if you sat down an audience of Uber drivers and longshoremen, etc etc and another audience filled with profs and adjuncts and grad students, and showed them a Douglas Sirk film or a put on a Coltrane album, what I think would happen is they might have different language for what they're seeing/hearing/feeling/etc, but with a large enough sample size, one group isn't somehow magically more, or sadly less, perceptive and curious than the other. Anyway that's just what I think, and I basically let my dog run my daily schedule so take that for what it's worth.

Ryan Ford

Really love this guest, both his appearances have been thought provoking and enlightening. Great episode!

Alaina Nuvola

How the fuck did Brace pronounce aspartame????

Jaime Christley

There's a new movie called Quicksand on the torren---- I mean, available on VOD or Netflix or whatever. It's about quicksand. It sounds like that skilift/Open Water plot but with yeah, quicksand.

Mark Owen

Excellent tying in of Jeffery by the guest.

MG

Wondering what you guys thought about previous guest Nick Bryant's interview with Roger Stone

Cameron Pasman

Absolutely LOVED this interview!! One of my favourite episodes of all. Immediately sought out the book Brace referenced as well because, legitimately, I don't know that I could prove that I am better than the rabbits we had for supper last night.

TrueAnonPod

Piano tuning, aka 12-tone equal temperament, is a compromise that makes every key sound equally in-tune, and thus equally out of tune. G# and Ab are audibly different on an instrument that doesn't have fixed pitch, like a violin, for instance. This is also part of why vocal harmonies, like a barber shop quartet, have a sound that can't be reproduced on an instrument like a piano.

Damion Wallace

Brace and the guest sound like they’re doing impressions of each other 10/10 ep

Grenadine Vetch

Such a beautiful episode- top level work, great guest. Love always, your biggest fan

Joshua Salerno

Just wondering if anyone knows the name of the Barry Hannah short story brace was referencing at the end of the episode?

Joshua Salerno

How about you put down your books for a minute and go talk to your neighbor.

northco

I grew up around a lot of lawyers (I can assure you it’s been detrimental to my health) and almost all of them use text to speech for most of their work before passing it off to summer students or legal assistants for edits and review. It’s definitely a valid way of writing, though I’ve never known anyone else to use it.

Jimothy Realname

It's a marble statue of a naked guy (David) made by one of the ninja turtles during the italian renaissance

Raul Pacheco

funny to hear brace bring up interstellar again and cosmic horror

George Mitri

Terrific, terrific episode. Was talking to a friend about how ‘unimaginative’ all this AI talk is.

Sneakaboard

You can jUst download it and send it to them.

Sneakaboard

I help organize working class people who want to start co-operatives for a living so I get the realities of language and how it can alienate and exclude people, but I also can't help but wonder how often concerns about potentially alienating academic or technical language are coming from people actually alienated by the language and how much of it is potentially rooted in well intentioned but ultimately misguided paternalism. Speaking for myself, I frequently find myself having to pushback against this kind of thinking because it basically boils down to educated and professionalized people saying 'the working class can't understand things' and is not at all in line with my actual experience in community doing the work, and forecloses the possibility of empowering and resourcing people so that they can participate in these other discourses (and advocate for themselves and their own ideas and inteterests!!). I have felt the same way getting lectured by white people about how white supremacy culture prioritizes the written word, and rules, and time tables (which is obviously true in several senses) but then the unspoken corrollary is basically its doing racism to schedule a meeting or write an agenda because people of color can't be expected to show up on time or read, which seems, you know, problematic to me.

Sneakaboard

I also have a chip on my shoulder about this issue because I spent my 20s getting lectured by college educated peers about my language and how I was flaunting my education and privillege alienating people with how I talk, instead of disingenuosly and performatively obfuscating my education and background and aesthetically distancibg myself from my actual class positionality like most of them were for totally self-protective reasons. What rankled was contrary to their assumptions I grew up in a working/enlisted military class family with uneducated and neglectful parents and just spent my childhood using my library card and reading a lot, I didnt get a bachelors degree until i was 32, I was the working class goober they were pretending at being concerned for.

Redacted

listening to this guy talk only makes me more confident that he can be replaced by a standard liberal ai chat bot

MLVF

This was really insightful and entertaining

Aesera

Listening reminds me of some half remembered concept i read in a book a bit ago, i think it was referencing Rosa Luxembourg and how she thought of revolution, unlike Marx, who thought of revolution as the locomotive of history, revolution was people trying to get off a rapidly accelerating train thats gonna crash.

Jordan Lange

I could not tell them apart at certain parts. I’m not convinced they aren’t the same person.

Jaime Christley

Musk probably weighs 260 tops but because of the distribution, when he gets up from a chair or couch it’s like Brendan Fraser in THE WHALE. His success rate is under 40% in this endeavor

gibbypatrol

I was initially shocked by how many of my students use speech to text when writing their papers because my brain works in the entire opposite way but it’s definitely a valid form of writing and works really well for a lot of people. The main issue is it’s still just a first draft and requires further editing, which many people skip when using it.

gibbypatrol

100% agree with Liz on this point. I’ve seen teachers trying to come up with “innovative” ways of incorporating chatgpt into their classes and it’s missing the point entirely. Allowing a student to create a draft or an outline using chatgpt is allowing them to forgo any of their own critical thinking on the subject. We are going to end up with a population completely unable to think critically and express themselves. There is plenty of research showing that writing is part of the thought process. In order to process ideas and information meaningfully/completely one must engage with it through writing at some point. If we allow students to skip important parts of the writing process and farm that “thinking” out to AI, they will miss out on a critical piece of understanding.

nada

This dude sounds very disconnected from the working class. I think he probably only lives deep inside an academic bubble. His definitions of “art” are so bourgeoise. And Brace eats up. I’m glad that Liz spoke up and said something about how you can’t classify art so easily.

Prawn Star Man

Theses on the Philosophy of History by Walter Benjamin makes that claim

Jaime Christley

I was trying to say some of this earlier but this is more eloquent. There is a paternalism thing, but also there's a ... honestly, an everybody type problem, whenever one is writing or speaking about something, it's very easy to operate from the presumption that everybody else in the world is a sucker, an easy touch, they're just a lot of dumb rubes. Granted, being online a lot and witnessing a lot of really awful behavior/attitudes doesn't exactly make it easy to think otherwise..... As a writer, and I guess as a speaker, as well, I find that I've cultivated a habit of bouncing quickly between what I can grasp as "regular people"-speak, and another voice, one that knows a lot of $5 and $10 words and what have you. I don't know, maybe I sound like a mess, but it keeps me sharp. (And I spend most of my days talking to my dog, and she likes me just fine.) The other day I was talking with my cousin, who owns an auto repair shop, and I said the word "taciturn" and he screwed up his face and said "what's that?" and I quickly broke it down and we were back in the conversation in under three seconds. He can easily talk circles around me about a ton of technical and business-related matters but he hasn't wasted his life on all the books I've read, as I have. But heck, everybody's seen A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS.

Carl Miller

"She said, I'm so stupid I might be Psychic" absolute GOLD BB

R. Karchnyak

I wanted to find the name of the work in which Benjamin discusses this concept. Thanks!

Zzz

I really like his analysis of predictable and unpredictable situations in relation to humans and AI. The consequences of the advancement of technology are overwhelming - we’re in the abyss.

Zach

the thread of total assholes exists

Adam Brosnan

Was convinced the guest was Brace reading from AI script.

Tom

I love Doug. He's wasted in the academy. He should be a preacher. He sounds like one. He specifically sounds like the kind of preacher speaking with the fervor of the radically converted, as though scales fell from his eyes on the road to Damascus.

james

90 minutes of hyperbolic self assured generalizations. "They all do ____" and "they all think ___." The ideas you're talking about are real and a great topic for an episode, but acting like every single person involved with AI is afraid of women etc just makes YOU sound clueless. You guys are acting like you're the only ones with self awareness or agency over any of this. I know this is a 100% opinion 0% reporting episode, but the lack of nuance and substance was lame. "They're all dumb tech bros" is a tired 2010's take. Saying AI is sooo easy to create, and the people involved are actually really stupid...please.

Frank

What’s the Barry Hannah story? Unwilling to scroll higher to see if it’s been named.

wolfgang

The Penfield mood organ

David

I love that brace came on to talk with liz and brace.

Jaime Christley

I'm actually a lot nicer than I used to be after getting treated for a variety of mental health issues. Makes it easier to look at drive-by comments made by some twat trying to get a rise out of me and not worry about it. Progress!

Always Returning

Why does the TrueAnon discussion of AI pivot around how fake social media feels and not the environmental damage, people it will put out of work, or the people being paid pennies to train the algorithms?

Casey

Rushkoff is such a gasbag. He refers to himself in the third person and then offers weak banal takes like people only caring about art because of a personal connection with the artist. He's over 60, and an academic, and he JUST found out about the symbolists? I stopped listening at that point.

Zachary Sloan

Brace's account of the IQ test reminds me of when I had this IQ/cognitive test done in my early 20s (to test for ADD or other learning disabilities) and the examiner had to do this one part multiple times because they thought I was joking around. But no, I was not joking. My short-term memory is so bad that I literally can't repeat back 5 words immediately after hearing/seeing them. Fortunately this doesn't have a huge impact on my life, since most work communications are written (but it is awkward when I can't remember what I was working on yesterday without checking my computer).

Bassem Tabet

It's really disturbing to me how much the guest has the exact same voice than brace

Henry

It was nice hearing Brace talk to older Brace and Liz

Daniel

I’m not entirely sold on this Rushkoff guy but i just love when you guys talk about this kinda stuff. The convo always really gets the ol’ wheels churning in a fun way

sandragl

Hey! I’m also a CUNY Queens College professor! But in English (so arguably even worse for AI stuff..) but had a wonderful class last year where we looked at symbolist, modernist, and cyberpunk art in relation to “Death of the Author” and other AI relevant concepts. It’s very doable to teach critical thinking about it *without actually making students use it,* which I see as teachers acquiescing to tech “innovation” and ultimately doing more harm than good. Teach students to be skeptical of AI!!!

Casey

Not to say anything about your curriculum, but its just another point against Rushkoff for me that he seems to think the symbolists were unique in framing their work as a reaction to industrialization. That had been going on at least since the early romantics, and you'll get just about all of it in Wordsworth or William Blake. Then later there's the work of people like the futurists who tried to buy into the logic of the machine or co-opt it, or people like Duchamp and Walter Benjamin. I have to wonder if he's even heard of found art?

malpertuis

Did you have the Palo Alto book guy on yet? If not I cheer for that.

sandragl

Yeah i hear you. The texts i used were Benjamin, Villiers (symbolist), Metropolis, The Golem (Yiddish communist expressionist), Ghost in the Shell (cyberpunk/postmodern). I def don’t teach it so hardly genre or periodized. And it’s not focused on AI, it’s focused on imagination/speculation/transformation in literature. But many of my students wrote about AI, not using it!

evan

“i’m fucking in the trashcan too!” - Liz Franczak

Dean Watson

lol well now I feel guilty for Making y’all engage with this insanity every time you’ve responded to me

Dean Watson

I feel like they mentioned those aspects many times ? Maybe we listened to a different podcast

TK Loving

Seriously, he's a clown. "Emergence is a religious word that they pretend is science". Yeah, the phenomenon of temperature is the same as religion. A mass of cells acting together as tissue is hocus pocus. He's an actual fucking idiot.

Hombrecactus

This was something I really needed to hear. Thanks. And Ruhkoff is great.

Red

Weird ass episode to come out after an episode spent talking about a TV show

oj3e08ewr

Rushkoff’s own podcast (Team Human) is more interesting when he talks to people who are actually involved in AI. One of the first episodes of it that I listened to had Gary Marcus, and every time Rushkoff started in with “I don’t think they’re being truthful when they say x” or “They don’t understand y”, it was interesting to hear Marcus disagree based on his own (often contentious) interactions with the tech guys.

Joey McIntosh

Trick for getting an operator on the phone, speak complete gobbly gook to make it think you don't speak english (can't be an actual language or the robot will just try that language) Who knew speaking in tongues has real value? FYI Throwing yourself on the ground doesn't help or get you street cred in this case though.

Vampire vice

Best episode confirmed that my roommates are actually the crazy ones thanks guys

Rbfen

The reason Pugh and Oppenheimer were naked was to show how comfortable they were with each other. They were at a level where they could be fully vulnerable with each other.

Jolene

I keep rewinding to what brace says starting at 1:08:45. So lovely.

Shfifty_five

And Liz is making more salient points. Ruskoff seems to have a script of banal observations and opinions that while agreeable aren't backed up by much knowledge of AI, economics, biology, or psychology. It's clear that the dude didn't really do his research, he just likes to hear himself talk. He handwaved away the potential serious labor/employment issues (though Brace brought up a good counterpoint) and didn't discuss the propaganda/intentional bias issue that we are already seeing with AI.

Shfifty_five

The bigotry of low expectations and liberal paternalism. Both have flourished in liberal bourgeoisie society despite their alleged opposition to racism and classism.

boss

regulate me daddy

big man

Is the New Orleans guy Dr. John