Ep. 1837 - Only A Few People Win from AI Hysteria. Everyone Else Loses.

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It's not a political statement, it's not an ideological statement, and yet sober-minded objectivity is the very last thing we're seeing on this subject from either side of the debate, and the events of this week perfectly illustrate that point. So let's start with those events, which immediately reveal why sober minds are not prevailing and why they desperately need to. There is a colossal amount of money and power at stake. For example, let's say that you're a massive, privately held, artificial intelligence company, and you're planning a blockbuster IPO in a matter of months, which will probably value your company at several trillion dollars. You have every incentive to promote your product and to convince as many people as possible to sign up and pay a subscription fee. Why in this scenario would you go on national television and tell everybody that your product has the potential to eliminate all of humanity within the next decade? Why would you deliberately torpedo public confidence in the entire AI industry at a pivotal moment for your company? It seems a bit like Taco Bell announcing a new burrito by explaining a great detail how it's going to absolutely demolish your intestines and potentially all of the intestines on earth. It doesn't seem logical. Seems like self-sabotage, and yet that's exactly what anthropic, which makes the AI model known as Claude, has apparently just done, providing an incredible window into how the most powerful corporations on a planet can manipulate public opinion and the variety of tactics they use to push more government regulation and control over the economy. So this was an op. There's no question about it, and it was a very successful one. And yet, and this is where we need those sober minds to come in, the concerns that are being raised, even if they're being raised for less than benevolent reasons, still should be taken seriously. And the very fact that they're being raised at all, whether genuinely or not, create a scenario where no matter what's actually going on, it's pretty bad, and I'll explain why in a few moments. But here's how it began, and this timeline was largely put together by a researcher named Parker Thayer. So on Tuesday evening, just before 8 p.m. Eastern, the Wall Street Journal published an exclusive story with the very alarming headline, "Anthropic researcher quits over out of control AI fears. Concerns are rising inside AI labs. The competition is pushing tech companies to race towards self-improving models that risk spiraling out of human control." The article states that, quote, "Jaca Cokeson, a researcher specializes in training new AI models by having them consume vast amounts of data," said Tuesday, that he is leaving the company because he doesn't want to participate in an industry-wide rush to build AI systems that can improve themselves, worried such systems could spiral out of control, and destroy humanity. Now, this article is about a 27-year-old who, as the article eventually mentions, left open AI earlier this year to join Anthropic because it's known for its model safety efforts. So, in other words, Jacob Cokeson was working at Anthropic's competitor open AI until very recently. He was at open AI for about three years before coming over to Anthropic earlier this year. Now, based on all the reporting I've seen, he's been at the company for around five months at the most. So, after a very short stint as an entry-level employee, he's already become a whistleblower somehow. He's sounding the alarm about how AI is going to destroy the entire human race. This is an unusual timeline to put it mildly. For most entry-level employees, when you start at a new company, you spend the first few months finding your way around the building. You know, you're trying to meet new people, you know, trying to figure out your commute, that kind of thing. But for this guy, after a very short period of time, he was ready to quit in the most flamboyant, splashy way imaginable, complete with an exclusive article in the Wall Street Journal announcing his departure. And on top of that, the Wall Street Journal doesn't even mention that the guy is brand new to the company until the 10th paragraph. So, think about how bizarre this is. He clearly arrived at Anthropic. It would seem with the idea of quitting in mind. He's not a senior level employee or anybody with highly specialized knowledge. He doesn't have any kind of impressive technical background. And yet, the moment he quits, he's making very dire predictions. The most dire prediction you could possibly make, which is the extinction of the human race. And he's getting national news coverage that doesn't often mention, or at least highlight, his very short tenure at the company. And the coverage wasn't just coming from the Wall Street Journal, variety, time, NBC news, several other outlets have run similar stories, Fox interviewed him as well. Watch. Minimal of actual takeover, but in cursive self-improvement, this AI is making themselves smarter, could happen as soon as next year. Some people even say six months. So this attitude is shared across the industry, where people essentially are aware that the work they are currently doing, if we don't slow down, could lead to AI takeover by the end of the decade. I think you have to think of this as an arms race. This technology is not ordinary technology. It's not like other forms of innovation. This is essentially a super-weapon, and I think that I expect the international community to be ready to make agreements about how to control the development of super-weapon technology. Yeah, so unfortunately, we know how to control nuclear weapons pretty much. We don't yet know how to control AI. This is possibly the most dangerous technology that humanity has ever created. It's basically out of science fiction. I think we have no other choice but to cooperate internationally, because an arms race would be disastrous in a way that no other human activity has been in the past. So the pitch is pretty clear. Yeah, he's saying he wants the government to regulate AI domestically and internationally. He wants to slow the pace of AI innovation, and he's presented as a kind of good Samaritan as a man who bravely sacrificed his lucrative career in order to tell the truth about this existential danger. This random guy out of nowhere appeared on pretty much every TV station last night as an expert on the topic. Watch. Jacob, I appreciate you being with us. For sure, I assume you are saying literally that you believe that AI could kill us all by the end of the decade, how would that happen? Like what would that actually look like? Yeah. So the precise scenario sounds a little bit like science fiction. It sounds like something that's not real, but I think it is frightening real. And it's easiest to understand it if you think about real things that happened two months ago. So two months ago, OpenAI agents, AI's, hacked into third-party infrastructure entirely at their own accord. And this was like a concentrated hacking spree that they carried out of their own volition. And I think that if you extrapolate into the future, the level of capabilities of these AI's, with the same independent volition, they could cause extreme havoc. For example, hacking critical infrastructure, building extension level bio-weapons, there's a lot of ways that the AI could actuate itself in the world. Now, in this clip, he's referring to a real situation called the hugging face incident where AI agents managed to break containment and hack a well-known website using a security vulnerability that the AI agents discovered on their own. So the AI went rogue, in other words, and while that's both impressive, technologically and concerning, deeply, it is also different from hacking critical infrastructure. That's because unlike the website that these AI agents hacked, most critical infrastructure in this country is physically separated from the internet. There's a so-called air gap between the systems that run the nuclear power plants and the rest of the online world. And this security measure exists precisely so that hackers can't find a random vulnerability and kill millions of people. Now, the reason this guy and Anderson Cooper doesn't mention this is that they don't, they want to stoke fear clearly. And to be clear, I'm not denying that AI hackers are going to be a problem, even if they can't access nuclear reactors, we would hope. They can still hijack say, the payroll systems at the utility, something like that actually happened in 2021, although AI agents weren't involved. AI agents can hack personal accounts, they can blackmail employees. In theory, they can cause plenty of damage. But if you're going to say that AI can cause nuclear armageddon, then you need to show your work. We need to hum us a few more bars. How exactly is that going to happen? And this whistleblower never does that. He never explains exactly how AI can go from hacking one website to destroying humanity. And that's a problem. Yeah, it makes you wonder if he doesn't have an ulterior motive. And indeed, when you look closer at the narrative, he's pushing. It starts to fall apart. And I'm not just talking about the fact that this guy is a 27 year old kid who just arrived to Anthropic a few months ago. Now we suddenly, on every primetime television show, and first of all, in terms of bias, we have no idea precisely how much equity coaxen holds in Anthropic or open AI. The fact he quit the company doesn't tell us anything about his wealth or potential wealth. That's tied to the success of these companies. There's certainly no indication that a coaxen has ever surrendered whatever equity he might have had in open AI. Although I've seen articles saying his Anthropic stock won't vest. We don't really know. And that raises the possibility that he's engaging in a marketing stunt and attempt to make AI software seem more powerful by talking about how dangerous and scary it can be in the wrong hands. And secondly, there's new reporting from Brian Chao linking coaxen to a British NGO called News Speak, which specializes in running influence campaigns for deranged leftist policies like prison abolition. Some of Newsweeks, News Speak's employees explicitly say their experts in propaganda, Chao found coaxen's photo on News Speak's website quoting from his reporting influence campaigns where news speaks overt specialty. The Guardian describes Newsweek's mission as trying to hack British politics. This guy's a political operative, or at least he was a political operative. And there's a reason why Anthropic may have deployed him in this case in order to stall the development of AI and call for more regulation. This is an article from business standard from just one month ago, or rather one week ago, quoting the Financial Times, quote, "Open AI, the company behind Chao GPT has launched its latest artificial intelligence, model saying it has taken the lead over rival anthropic and key areas such as software engineering, science, and cyber security. The company described GPT-6 astra as the world's most intelligent AI model as it seeks to regain its position at the top of the fast growing AI industry. And AI said the model has achieved market leading results in several fields." So in other words, if these reports are accurate, then anthropic is falling behind in the race to develop AI. It's a very competitive industry, obviously, and at the moment, it looks like anthropic is slipping into a kind of runner-up status. So what's the company supposed to do when it's getting out class? One of the most common strategies is called regulatory capture. The idea is to seize control over the regulators by convincing the public and the government that you're the only company that cares about safety and protecting humanity, and then once you have control over the regulators, you can simply eliminate your competitors using the force of law. So the dream scenario for companies like anthropic or open AI is to ban all the other non-woke open-source AI models with the justification that they're simply too dangerous for humanity. In this interview, by the way of skepticism, Brett Baer did ask Cokes in whether he coordinated his big resignation with any third party. And you know, he of course said no, but there's reason to doubt that response, certainly not to take it at face value. One of the biggest issues is that within minutes of the publication of the Wall Street Journal article, a coordinated social media strategy clearly began. So first, within 20 minutes of the article going live, Cokes had posted this message on X, and it's notable that his account at the time of this posting was dormant. So there's virtually no prior activity whatsoever. Quote, I resigned from anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pre-training research at both open AI and anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. Do not underestimate the power of this technology. The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible, but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger. I don't feel like we're on track to prevent a global race, which may require costly actions such as a temporary ban on improving model capabilities. Now, this post, last I checked, has more than 130 million views on X. Yes, 130 million. It's one of the most widely viewed posts in the history of the platform. Every hour, tens of millions of more people see it. According to Elon Musk, nothing like this has ever happened with a new account, with almost no prior activity. So this is clearly a post that some very powerful people wanted to go viral. And when I first saw this post on X without any of the context I just went through, I thought I was pretty remarkable. And indeed, it is remarkable. Someone who's working on AI is telling us that it might wipe out the human race in less than a decade. I mean, that's notable no matter how you slice it, no matter how you interpret it. And this has happened many times before to some degree or another, sometimes the accusation is credible sometimes less so. But at a minimum, a post like this should make you ask yourself about the risks of AI. It doesn't mean we need to ban it, whether we even could do that if we wanted to. But it also doesn't mean we should embrace it without hesitation as this kind of unalloyed blessing on mankind. If even the people working on this stuff, and again, this guy is the far from the first one, if even they are telling us that there are potentially catastrophic implications something Elon Musk has also said, by the way, we should take that seriously. Our government should take it seriously too. That was my take at the time. It's been my take for years now. I still think it's the correct one. But it soon became clear that something else was going on with this particular narrative, at least the version coming from this particular guy. So within 15 minutes of this post going live, as they are reported, it received several repos from officers at various anti-AI nonprofits, including the General Council of Encode AI, the head of policy at the AI Policy Network, the head of the AI Futures Project. And here's when things get interesting. Quote, the AI Futures Project website says it is funded primarily by the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which says on its own website that it is advised John Taylor, Skype creator and one of the leading investors in Anthropic, to grant over $2.5 million to the AI Futures Project since 2024. Encode AI says on its website that it is also funded by the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which in term says that it told Anthropic Investor, Taylin, to grant $516,000 to Encode AI in 2025. And when you know it, the Survival and Flourishing Fund also says it told Taylin to grant $2 million to the AI Policy Institute, the 501(c)(3) affiliate of the AI Policy Network as well. What are the odds of the first three quote tweets of Cokeson's post would all be major AI restriction policy advocates funded generously by the same donor, who also happens to be one of the leading investors in and a board member of Anthropic, the company Cokeson was resigning from and all within 15 minutes of posting. So in other words, this was perhaps not a case where one brave employee decided to blow the whistle at Anthropic in order to inform the public about the risks of AI. It's very clear that he made this announcement in coordination with powerful interests that are financially tied to Anthropic in a very direct way. In fact, current Anthropic employees immediately boosted this post as well. Here's one of those employees quote, Jacob's thread is very worth reading. Here's my bird's eye view in the situation with risks from AI. One AI developers believe their technology could cause human extinction or similarly bad outcomes. This could happen in the next few years. In general, the more senior the employee, the more concerned they are, too. Why do AI developers continue despite the risk due to a mixture of commercial incentives and a belief that they are in a race with other less responsible AI developers that will abuse the technology or develop it less safely? Many AI developer staff desperately want to slow down to figure out how to build AI more safely. Now, whether you agree with what he's saying or not, as we said, none of this dramatic language is surprising coming from Anthropic employees. They've tended towards sort of neurosis and self-importance for a long time. It's the same company as we previously discussed that hired an anti-white female Scottish philosopher named Amanda Askol and gave her high level control over their AI model. Because the reason why Claude can tend to brow beat you with woken on-sense, she floats around the Anthropic office, telling everyone to be kind to one another, she doesn't have any technical background, but they love her over Anthropic. This is another Anthropic employee for what it's worth, quote, "Jacob is correct. We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans. I personally think it's greater than 10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to be clear. As we say in our latest risk report, I think the risk from present models is low. What I'm worried about is superintelligence arising from recursive self-improvement." movement, as we've said, is happening faster than we've thought. Now if you read media reports about this whole incident, they'll tell you that these anthropic employees are lending credibility to the alleged whistleblower, but you could argue that they're doing the opposite. Another way of looking at it is that they're making the regulatory capture scenario more plausible. They're trying to gain power by causing a panic, which serves two purposes. First, it makes their product look good because it's so powerful. And secondly, it will lead to regulation, which could eliminate their competitors. Anthropic has been playing this card for a long time. They're founder famously told the Pope a few months ago that, you know, AI could take everyone's job. So anthropics clearly settled on a new variation of the strategy, and they've gotten a lot of buy-in. And it's not just anthropic investors, employees, and AI nonprofits that are involved, pretty much the entire Democrat party lined up with an hours to boost this post and to call for immediate regulation by one count, two governor, seven senators, and 13 representatives responded to coaxons posts with calls to regulate AI, all of them Democrats, except for two Republicans. So Democrats immediately latched on to this new AI narrative, presumably because they want to derail every AI company. They can't control. They have a very clear reason to convince the public that AI is a serious potential threat. And that as a result, we should only allow AI's, you know, AI that's safe and government-approved. Notice they don't want to eliminate it entirely. They simply want to stall out the competition and pick a winner that they can control. Here's the socialist Michigan Senate candidate L. Syed, for example, and notice how utterly fake this whole video is, but also pay attention to what he says about the ownership of AI profits watch, you might have woken up like me to this tweet from a guy you probably never heard of until today, his name is Jacob Coxon up until yesterday. He worked for an AI lab called Anthropic, one of the leading edge AI research organizations in the world. He quit yesterday. He quit because he's worried that the technology that he was building could end humanity. Now, like that's something we should be paying attention to. You might remember a couple months ago, we released a plan AI under democracy, calling for things like an FDA-style regulatory agency to oversee the development of AI, banning AI from doing things like firing you or hiring you or making decisions about your healthcare or firing weapons, making sure that these corporations that are developing the leading edge of AI aren't doing it with the same incentives as the rest of Big Tech and making sure that got democratically appointed or elected members more than 50% of every single board and making possible public ownership of all the wealth that these corporations could produce. I stand with my colleague Bernie Sanders and calling for an all out pause. Enough is enough. We need to make sure that the pace of development isn't outpacing the pace of risk. We cannot in a race against China or a race for these corporations to be the dominant AI manufacturer inadvertently create products that slip human control that could fall into the wrong hands that could mean the demise of humanity. That is a risk none of us ought to be able to bear and it certainly shouldn't sit with the richest most powerful corporations in the world on incentives that are driven by their greed rather than our well-being. So the time for action is no. So he pretends that he just woke up one day and noticed this tweet from the AI researcher just like everyone else and then without missing a beat he tells us that he wants to redistribute the profits from these AI companies and he adds that it would be terrible for private corporations to have control over potential doomsday weapons so obviously we need to put socialist politicians and charge instead. Now one thing we should note here is that evil profit-driven corporations would seem to have little incentive to usher in the end of humanity at least intentionally. They would have the exact opposite incentive. They want to keep civilization going so they can continue to make a lot of money. It's very simple and straightforward problem with people who claim that evil billionaires are going to kill us all or eliminate every job so that no one has any money and we all starve to death. If the corporations eliminate humanity then the corporations will die too and if AI destroys the global economy and unemployment goes to 100 percent or something then money will have no meaning no one will provide any services and obviously the billionaires wouldn't want that outcome either for their own purposes. Wealth has no value in a lawless apocalyptic hellscape where no one's around to sell you anything. So these points they don't negate the legitimate concerns about AI but they do make the AI is going to kill all humans in the next few years scenarios, seem ridiculous because they are. It's not even clear how AI even in a hypothetical scenario would literally murder the entire global population because that is what these people are saying. It's not like a straw man. What would be the practical mechanism for achieving that and achieving it so quickly? What's the practical mechanism by which the AI by the year 2030, the end of the decade, will have brought about the extinction of eight billion people. No one is quite explaining that. I want to take a moment here to tell you about one of the companies that supports this show Tacovas. I've been wearing their boots for years because they're exactly what I want in a boot. 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There are days when we're reminded more forcefully than others that life is precious, that our time here is limited and that every human life has immeasurable value. That conviction has always been at the heart of what we do on this show, especially when it comes to defending those who cannot defend themselves every day. Women facing unexpected pregnancies are making decisions that will change their lives forever. Pre-born network clinics meets these mothers with compassion, practical support, including a free ultrasound that allows a mother to see her child and hear that heartbeat. More than 80% of abortion vulnerable women choose life after seeing their baby on an ultrasound at a pre-born network clinic. Right now another mother needs that moment and you can give it to her. $28 helps provide one life saving ultrasound, $140 helps rescue five babies. Please give today dial pound 250 and say baby that's pound 250 baby or visit pre-born dot com slash wall. That's pre-born dot com slash wall, if you're a business owner you would you consider a larger donation to claim as a write off a donation of $1,000, $2,000, $10,000, $15,000 will sponsor an ultrasound machine for a needy clinic helping to save countless babies lives for years to come. All gifts are tax deductible and will reach eternity get involved today. On the other hand, as we've discussed many times in the past few years, communists do want to destroy at least Western civilization. They don't care about profit, they're nihilists, they cheer when health insurance CEOs and prominent conservatives are assassinated. They don't believe in God or any higher purpose whatsoever. They're agents of destruction, which is why they open the borders, refuse to prosecute criminals and ruin every creative project they're involved in. So, if the only choice is between letting corporations in the free market do whatever they want with AI or giving total top down control to communist bureaucrats, then there's really no choice at all. You can't hand power over to the communists under any circumstances. History of the 20th century shows us how that turns out. And yet, letting trillion dollar AI companies do whatever they want with no controls or regulations of any kind is also not a wise path, which is why we should be looking for other options outside of total power to tech companies or total power to communists. But here's the key point which should be obvious. We also can't allow the government to pick and choose which specific corporations deserve power. One of the biggest risks that AI poses right now is that if leftists dominate the entire industry, then they'll use AI to destroy their political opponents. AI will become a tool for enforcing social credit scores and mass censorship and policing wrong thing. As it stands right now, if Anthropics Model wants to censor you for saying that men can't become women, you have other options. You can use other models that aren't completely insane. But if Democrats eliminate those options, they'll be able to control the flow of information just like they do in Canada or North Korea. AI will almost certainly replace search engines in a few years. Leftists know that if they run all the AI models, they'll be able to dictate what information people are able to see. That's why JB Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, who's positioning himself for a run for president, also immediately boosted the alleged whistleblower. And here's what he wrote, quote, it's time to sound the alarm louder on raining in artificial intelligence, becoming more clear, the threat AI poses humanity. So I'm calling for immediate action from the industry and Washington, the federal government must intervene. I'm proud to have signed the AI Safety Measures Act, landmark legislation requiring more transparency, accountability, and oversight of large developers and to protect workers who report concerns. And here's Pramila Jaya. all the communists from Washington State. Well, researchers for AI companies are sounding alarm about rapid development of super intelligent systems that could hack anything and kill us all. These AI companies are out of control. A serious threat to our future. We need to shut down their dangerous models and push out the executives who are signing off on their creation. Again, all these replies come within hours of the Anthropic Employees Resignation. Rokana was ready with a video, watch. Anthropic researcher Jacob Cox and just resigned because he's concerned that the frontier labs are racing towards developing self-improving AI that could threaten our very existence. Now, here's how we know he's not an alarmist. Evan, who is the head of alignment and science at Anthropic, says that Jacob's concerns are valid. In fact, he says that there is a 10% chance that in the next decade, agentech AI could eliminate all of humanity. We need action. Here are five things we must do. First, I've been calling for an AI agency, a federal AI safety agency, just like we have an agency to regulate nuclear power and to regulate our airlines. - This is a guy who holds tens of millions of dollars worth of AI-related stocks, so he's not actually worried about AI, nor does he want to shut it down. He simply wants to make sure that he is political party controls the industry. Here's Bernie Sanders, quote, "Mr. Cokeson is right, the very people building this technology admit that it could threaten the future of humanity. This is why I will soon be introducing legislation to ban superintelligence and pause AI development." He added, quote, "Trump's ignorance about AI is appalling and extremely dangerous. We must pause development now." Sanders' legislation on AI would create, quote, "a new cabinet level federal agency to safeguard the public from the dangers of artificial intelligence. It will be advised by an artificial intelligence advisory board comprised of experts on artificial intelligence." You know, it sounds like a bureaucratic nightmare because that's exactly what it is. The more layers of bureaucracy you introduce, the more the industry will be sabotaged for the possible benefit of just one or two companies. And also, the more bureaucracy you involve, there's not any reason to think that that will make a company less dangerous or evil. That's generally not how it works when you add bureaucracy to a thing. And of course, that's a little point. And it's not just anthropic that's apparently decided on the strategy. Open AI just demanded that Congress create mandatory national safety regulations as well. And a former Open AI researcher just published this op-ed in New York Times using the same language as anthropic. "The current pace of AI development is blistering, and yet there is so much more the AI companies could do to relieve imminent danger and to lay bare the gambles they're taking with all of our futures. The window to ensure we are heading to a bright future and away from catastrophe is closing fast." After a while, it gets reminiscent of the climate alarmism that used to be popular on the left. These kinds of predictions have been coming for a while now. A few years ago, a former Google engineer named Blake Lamoyne claimed that the company's AI chatbot had become sentient, which turned out to be nonsense. Scientific American even wrote a blog, wrote a big article about it. Quote, "Lamoyne said he considers labbed lambda to be his colleague and a person even if not a human. And he insists that it has a right to be recognized so much so that he has been the go between in connecting the algorithm with a lawyer." So in the end, the guy was just kind of deranged. You also might remember this prediction from Jeffrey Hinton, the so-called Godfather of AI. In 2016, he predicted that AI would render radiologists obsolete within five years because AI would be able to read the scans for them. That turned out to be false. There are more radiologists now than ever, actually. They're just using AI to be more productive. But here's Hinton explaining where his reasoning went wrong. Watch. The first is that health care is elastic. So if you could do more scans and get more scans read, there'd be a lot more scans happening. And that's one thing that's happening. So a fraction of the cost of a significant fraction of the cost of doing a scan is the cost of the radiologist interpreting it. As AI gets to help more and more radiologists interpret scans, we can interpret them faster and faster for less and less money. They're getting more efficient. And you would have thought that would mean you needed less radiologists. But actually what it means is you get more scans. So that aspect of the relation was wrong. A second thing that was wrong was I didn't know enough about radiologists and what they do. And that was because I had a former student who had an MD and then did a physics PhD with me on something called boson machines. And he didn't particularly like people. So he got a job as a radiologist just interpreting scans. And he was my model for radiologists. All he did was interpret scans. He never talked to people. And that's what it was going to get replaced. And that is now becoming replaced. So I think there's now of the order of 100 AI systems for interpreting scans that have been federally approved. Now it's important to keep predictions like this in mind when you're talking about the future of AI. It's very easy. Sometimes it's politically or financially beneficial to conclude that a new technology is going to cause some extreme outcome. It's easy to say that AI is going to destroy everyone's life or that it's going to provide endless prosperity. On the other end, with no middle ground, the reality as usual is probably somewhere in the middle. And it's frankly ridiculous for so many people, including every mainstream media outlet, to claim otherwise. This is the entire problem with the conversation on AI. It's generally divided into two camps, both of which are cartoon caricatures of reality. One side only acknowledges the upside. The other tells us that we're doomed. Humanity is over. It's an apocalypse. And both of these takes are obviously ridiculously simplistic. And the more that the AI skeptic side, which is the side that I've always leaned towards, focuses on literal apocalypse scenarios. Instead of the more realistic and practical dangers it faces, the worse and dumber the debate will get. And more importantly, we won't actually succeed in putting any reasonable controls or guard or guide rails in place. So AI has tremendous promise. There's no question about that. It is, and anyone should be able to acknowledge this, an obvious productivity booster so far. Because of AI, it's easier to do research. It's easier to process data. It's easier to target advertisements, diagnose medical conditions, and much more. But if it increases productivity for the good guys, it also increases productivity for the bad guys. And when people talk about AI killing us all, that's often what they need. We can assume. Last April, anthropic pause development in one of its clawed models, because it was finding previously unknown security vulnerabilities in software. So what happens when AI can suddenly hack into financial institutions? What about biological and chemical research facilities or the armed forces? The Bolton of Atomic Scientists claims advanced AI systems could lower barriers to creating harmful biological agents by providing guidance to users with limited expertise. Is that true? Seems like it certainly could be. That's not an unreasonable thing to be worried about here. But even if it's not a nuclear holocaust, what happens when it can be used to hack into anyone's bank account or email or anything else? When should we be concerned about AI's implications for data privacy? Apple and Google are already using AI to screen your inboxes, text messages, voicemails? How much powered information can these companies consolidate before it's too much? For decades, digital marketing companies and data brokers have collected granular information on everyone that can accurately predict when you have to pee or when your wife is pregnant. That's not science fiction. It's also not fiction to acknowledge the risks to white collar workers, most of whom do very little already. Maybe the day in my life tech girls who spend their day in endless meetings drinking mocha lattes deserve to lose their jobs. But what about the other white collar professions? An estimated 165,000 people have lost their jobs because of AI just this year. What truck drivers, cab drivers, the more this technology advances in scales, and again, it's doing both of those things arguably faster than any technology ever has, the more jobs get swallowed up by it. And all this is related to the core risk of artificial intelligence, which is the thing that some of these so-called whisper blowers have brought up. They often bring up, and it's true. And that is the risk of misalignment. So what happens if AI systems develop a goals that are not aligned with human interests? That's not some kind of outlandish James Cameron fantasy. It's also hard-- it's hard to see how that's a scenario that leads to the extinction of mankind in the next couple of years. But it's a real thing. These are trillion dollar companies pouring all of their resources and brain power into developing an artificial mind. There are massive implications to that. What we need are serious people we can trust-- so not Democrats-- to start taking this seriously and to yes. put some controls in place or tried to. But right now, it seems to be a debate between Bernie Sanders types who want total control over it and generally conservatives who want to do nothing as if there are zero serious risks posed by AI at all, which is also a total fantasy, by the way. It's a false dichotomy and it fuels the kind of PR campaigns we're seeing online and in the media right now. And there's one other thing to keep in mind here that I referenced earlier. I've seen people, I've laid out the case that some of the most hysterical humorism from the AI companies themselves is being spread for manipulative self-serving reasons. And I believe that that's likely true. It's also what the side that is far more pro-AI than I am will say. But here's the thing, if you're on that side, just consider one thing. If a company is willing to literally threaten global extinction for the sake of expanding their market share, then even if it can't actually bring about global extinction and wouldn't want to for the reasons I said, that still tells us that this is a potentially dangerous company. Right, maybe not annihilate the earth dangerous, but dangerous. Like, it doesn't make any sense to wave the warning away and say, "No, they're only saying they can kill all humans. They're actually totally harmless." Well, it doesn't work because if they're saying they can kill all humans and if they're saying that just to chase profits, then by definition, they're not harmless. That would make them at a minimum extraordinarily irresponsible, manipulative people controlling extremely powerful technology. I mean, you can't have it both ways, which again speaks to the need to get responsible people into the room. So not Bernie Sanders or Pramila Jayapal. So the takeaway here is that whether you're an AI skeptic or not, you are being manipulated on a massive scale. There are extremely well-funded coordinated efforts behind the scenes to influence your opinion on AI, both for it and against it. Anything you read on the topic should be treated with the highest possible degree of skepticism. There's an enormous amount of money at stake for people on both sides. It's now abundantly clear that the mainstream press is trying to swallow up and regurgitate any narrative they're fed when it comes to AI. So the worst mistake you could make, the one that might actually lead to our downfall is to take any of it at face value. I'll do a show today and this week talk to you next week. Have a great weekend. Godspeed. Every significant movement in history started with protesting. No, of course, Uncle Tom. This is our generation civil rights. I have no idea what the protest is about. Bingo, given the current climate, should have figured as polarizing, as place Saunders, even be allowed on campus. Okay, hear me okay. Saunders is a close personal friend of chance with treatment. This is a decision I cannot find. Islam will conquer the West. Some more than you. Are we paying attention? They've taken over the building. They're downstairs and they've blocked the doors. I seek forgiveness from Allah, the Almighty. We cannot run and hide. Muhammad is the messenger of God. There is no God but Allah. What do you say? We turn those vessel beams into a fond red mist. As we move, one man will cover while the other guys go. They call that leapfrog. Stretch them out when they listen. You need a course in safe weapons handling.