Alienation and AI feat. Andrew

Andrew and James talk about how artificial intelligence has created alienation in society

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
All the media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, Hello, helloo, and welcome to it could happen here.
I'm andrews Age otherwise known as Andrewism on YouTube, and
I'm here with James.

Speaker 1 (00:16):
Just James don't have a YouTube.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
More than just James, I mean, I love talking to you,
so in more than just James to me.

Speaker 1 (00:23):
Oh, thank you, Andrew. It's very sweet. I enjoyed these
Two's the phone for me.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
Yeah, so I really I'd like to get into one
of the hotter topics as of late. Not the heat,
so that is a hot topic. But yeah, YEAHI artificial intelligence.

Speaker 1 (00:39):
Oh good, Yeah, my favorite thing.

Speaker 2 (00:41):
Yeah, and more specifically the ways in which AI has
contributed to and accentuated alienation and the capitalism and the
state in the twenty first century. So that's a mouthful,
but it's obviously very important. Okay, Yeah, I like you
so lot in my opinion. Alienation, with all its meanings,
really it's one of those words that you could really

(01:02):
use to describe the current side guys, the experience of
separation from yourself, from your work, from the products your work,
from your community. All these things, both philosophical and material,
get wrapped up into this concept of alienation. Because it's
both an experience, it's something that people like feel internally,

(01:23):
it describes the way that they see their lives, and
it's also just a fact of how people work into society.
You're dispossessed of the products of a labor and you're
disconnected from the process of a labor and the outcomes
of a labor. And this is of course all thanks
to development of capitalism and industrialization and this development of

(01:46):
a mass society quote unquote with all the apathy and
loss of agency and weaken social fabric that generates.

Speaker 1 (01:56):
Yeah, it's I think alienation is like something we don't
talk about enough. It's like the thing that ties together
that despare the loneliness. They like loneliness is is maybe
like it's a way that capitalism has come to talk
about alienation without acknowledging the capitalism is creating alienation. Every

(02:16):
sort of developed state in the colonial core have acknowledged
that loneliness as a problem. Right. I saw Gavin Newsome
was with launching a loneliness campaign. But like the system
is a problem. The alienation is created by the way
that things are, and like we can't fixate without changing
the way that things are.

Speaker 2 (02:37):
Exactly exactly it comes down to. I mean, in particular,
I think we see alienation manifests in most in our relationships,
of course, and in our works. And it's been an
issue for some decades now. And what I'm really intrigued
by is, you know, this has been an issue for

(02:58):
a while, but how was HEI interacting with these issues?
Hall is THEI impacts in the ilination that we already
experience under the system.

Speaker 1 (03:08):
Yeah, that's fascinating. I'm currently teaching a class at the
community college to class about pre sixteen hundred history, and like,
I teach a little bit every year, right, and every
year I've seen what AI use. But this year this
is fully blackpilled me, Like, I don't quite know how

(03:30):
to describe the feelings I'm experiencing, I guess, but it's
class I assigned like David Graeber, I assigned Jim Scott,
I assigned Charles Tilly on state making and war making, right,
Like very basic left libertarian kind of text, right, which
for many people will be the first time they encounter
the concept of like what if no state? What if

(03:52):
state bad? And I think they're all writing in a
way that's very approachable to people who don't, you know,
the dense academic writing is annoying and pretentious, and I
don't like it every time I do this, cause it
used to be the case that, like thirty to forty ten,
the students would be like, holy fuck. Whether they like
it or not, it's a new concept and it's cool,

(04:12):
and they engage with it in like a passionate way,
a human way. Every year it's got worse, and now,
like I can think of two students out of one
hundred who are like engaging with it in any human way,
and I'm sure most of them. I would imagine they
buy the a I summarize the text, or in many
cases they certainly have used AI to just respond. I

(04:35):
let my students respond in ways that they feel appropriate, right,
so that they could do videos or different things if
they wanted to do, like a they wanted to make
a video about doing an essay, that's fine with me.
I don't care. I just want them to read the
shit think about it. But like, there's been no human reaction,
and that's so sad to me. Like the reason they
teach is to get young people to see the world differently.

(04:58):
It certainly isn't for the fucking money, and that's just
might be in capable of doing that now, or like
I can't get through that alienation that like I can't
get people to engage, and like, think about it. Obviously,
I got to work that shit out, right, Like this
generation of people who went through high school when AI
was the thing and detecting AI use in long form

(05:21):
writing was not very well developed, so they were able
to use it instead of doing long form writing and
maybe even reading long form, And like, I have to
work out how to get those people to engage not
to be so sort of alienated from the concept of
reading and absorbing big ideas. But I haven't fucking worked
it out yet.

Speaker 2 (05:41):
Yeah, it's it's a really big issue, and it's only cruent,
you know, as EI expands, I mean, it's not so
much the focus of this episode, but it is something
that I wanted to touch on. You know, people used
to be doing fine without it, used to be well
to function without A three years ago, and now you
talk to them and they can't live without it. They

(06:02):
have to run everything through AI. You know, people have
offloaded most of their cognitive processes the yeah, yeah, yeah,
you know, and you know we talk about the environmental
impact of that, the way the data centers are damage
in the environment, taking fresh water and taking vast amounts
of energy from the system. So we all rely upon

(06:24):
to live and you know, we could, as we touched on,
talk about called schools and the education systems pretty much
falling apart. Yeah, I mean, I know you're one of those,
you know, genuinely passionate professors. But what I've noticed is
this this whole fast now in many sections of the

(06:44):
education system where you have students AI summarize in material
if even doing that, you know, submitting AI generated essays
or AI generated material, and the professors just AI created.

Speaker 1 (07:00):
Yeah, I heard of this.

Speaker 2 (07:02):
So it's just one one big puppet show, you know,
one one big fast god.

Speaker 1 (07:08):
Yeah, yeah, exactly, one big charade, which you know, to
an extent, education has always just been that, right, one
big fast. But there are things that are redeemable about it.
And I'm just talking about teaching now, and I'll stop
in a minute. There's very little demand for in person
classes compared to online classes anymore, so like that makes
it harder for us to break through that alienation, right,

(07:31):
Like there's something special about sitting in a room and
talking just just find it's just like being like, we're
going to be here for ninety minutes, none of us
in It's a dynamic, yeah, and it's an important dynamic.
Like the function of the university is to fucking turn
out people with stem degrees who can go on and
make shitty apps. We don't need. It's to prepare us

(07:52):
to be citizens in the community, exactly, and we are
failing at that. And yeah, instead I'm just great and
chet GP deal day know.

Speaker 2 (08:01):
Yeah, And that's that's a big piece of the puzzle
that we end up missing, because the way in which
the sort of dynamics and the connections that you would
get from the university class room and beyond just social
connections in general is lacking and alienated world. And it's
wisened by you know, the instruction of the I I

(08:22):
managed to complete most of my education, most of my
bachelor's degree, that is, prior to the pandemic. Right, I
was nearing the end of my third year when lockdown,
you know, came into FOCE, and then it just I
did my entire fourth year online, and honestly, I'm so
glad that I was able to do my classes in Boson,

(08:44):
you know, and I'm so glad that I did my classes,
you know, entirely on my own in a time where
you know, yeah, I was not a thing. You know,
there were times where you know, it probably feels like,
oh my god, it's so stressful, like, but you just
had a buckle had to buckle down and figure out
a way to get it done. And because we could

(09:05):
talk about the perverse incentives of breeding systems and schools
and how that sort of pushes some students who you know,
may have learning difficulties or time management difficulties or whatever
to actually do their stuff, they end up going down
the I route. But yeah, I mean, even just looking
back at my experience because lockdown hits during the semester,

(09:27):
I had a writing class that I was a part of,
and every time we went into class, it was so dynamic,
was so lively, it was so engaging. All the ideas
were just bouncing off for each other. After the lockdown,
that class completely feels a lout. Everything that we were
getting from it was just absent because we were entirely online.
And yeah, it's really a struggle and I think social

(09:51):
life that's coming out of the education conversation, social life,
community and connection all ends up lacking because of the
aliens and need of the system the way that things
have been set up. But also AI is playing a
major role too. AI in a sense as a category
is you know, you can have a whole discussion about
that quibbolo for definitions. But in a sense AAI has

(10:14):
already been playing a major role into how people socialize
even before these large language models came to be in
because you have a sort of artificial intelligence in the
algorithms that people interact with on social media. You know,
people have the content they consume being curated by algorithms.
They end up in these sort of echo chambers, these

(10:37):
reinforcement loops and outrage bait and then dopamine loops, and
all those things have lended to people spending more and
more time online because you know, it's hitting that part
of the brain, and everybody is hyper connected and always online,
and more and more of life takes place on the Internet,

(10:58):
and that has left people feel and isolated. I think
loneliness is obviously not entirely the result of social media
and now AI, but the sort of irony is that
loneliness has been a side effect of this digital hyperconnection. Yeah,

(11:20):
when you look at some of the factors that are
contributing to this this already isolated nature of our world, right,
you know, people don't have as much free time. You know,
there's in as much public space as there used to be.
Some people have no public space available to them. Public
spaces that do exist are not open in the times
when people are available to go to them. Libraries are

(11:41):
a famous example. A lot of them are you know,
not open for working people pretty much. And then people
who do want to go out and socialize and stuff,
you know, you're dealing with the higher cost of living,
so there's little resources that you can use to you know,
go and put yourself out there because you have to
spend money to go to places. And then it also
just moons out energy ys because of you know, the

(12:03):
long work week, long work hours, just trying to make
against meet psychological to all of that. Yeah, and so
part of what AI has been doing is pushing these
AI companions on people. And you know, I don't mean
to fair mongo or anything, because I know there a
lot of people who reject AI and who stand against AI,
and of course that could just be the bubble that

(12:23):
I'm in. But yeah, I also know somebody in person,
or rather I knew somebody in person who spoke to
chat reipt like their partner and therapists. Yeah, they listen like, yeah,
that's it's I mean, it's sad. Yeah, it's as you said,

(12:45):
almost kind of black pillar, you know, because these chatbots
they listen in a simulated sense, they respond in a
simulated sense, and they affirm with the certain is dealing with,
is going through, is venting about. They're almost like a
hug box because you don't really see chatbots disagreeing with

(13:11):
the people they're speaking to. Chetbots are very much like
you know, fawning, you know, they try their best to
affume everything that a person is telling them. So you
have this kind of cuddle box for people's egos, which,
in two, it makes it even more difficult for them
to connect to real people because you know, real people
are going to call you out. You know, they're going
to disagree with you, You're going to have friction and conflict,

(13:35):
but there's also a lot of joy becomes for interact
with real people, and unfortunately a lot of people, because
they're not getting that, they're turned into this on demand affection,
this on demand flirtation, this pseudo therapy, and it's it's brutal,
you know, Loneliness is a brutal experience. Relationships are very hard,

(13:55):
and therapy is extremely expensive for a lot of people.
So I understand that, you know, you can only put
so much blame on individuals because the will is not
really set up to support those kind of lasting connections. Yeah,

(14:17):
people live very spread out. They have few and fewer
opportunities to interact with each other. In fact, a lot
of times, the last time a Polson had extended exposure
with other people was in school or in college. And
outside of that, you're just kind of on your own. Yeah,
and places are increasingly not walkable, the more cor eccentric,

(14:41):
the sort of spontaneity and friction and interaction that would
have made relationships blossom naturally and the religious possible, as
messy and inconvenience as they can be, sometimes those things
are lacking now and unfortunately some for action of people.
And I don't know what the actual number would be
because I can imagine a lot of people will not

(15:04):
admit that they turn into a chatbot for companionship. But
it is a frightening woman of what their action we're
going in, and I also worry about the potential outcomes
of you know, egoic behavior that might results from that

(15:24):
sort of continue us interaction with something that is affirming
in every belief and thought and conclusion. What kind of
google are we going to be there? First?

Speaker 1 (15:33):
You know? Yeah, it's the world that super rich people
already live in. One of the reasons that the gulf
between the rest of us and the super rich, like
the really you know, incredibly wealthy people. Part of that
is that no one says no to a lot of
those people, and that's why they exclusively end up socializing

(15:54):
with each other, right, Like they're they're surrounded by nothing
of the affirmation.

Speaker 2 (16:00):
Right.

Speaker 1 (16:01):
One of the things we see was Trump, right, is
that like, if there is a reality that he doesn't like,
he manifests his own reality. He just speaks things and
expects them to be accepted as truths. Right. Growing up,
my dad worked for a lot of extremely wealthy people,
and so I've interacted with them, and like, there's a
lot of people who just aren't used to hearing no

(16:22):
or why, but not a lot that there is a
number of them, and like I think when you see
I was just thinking about it. The behavior that you know,
did Trump now asserting with the Epstein thing is like
it is made up, right, and it's a hoax, and
it just when we were talking about AI. It sort
of reminds me of that, right, that like constant affirmation,
because what a I want you to do is to
please you so that you spend more time on it,

(16:43):
I assume. And there's some way that it attempts to
monetize that, I'm sure, and it just wants you to
keep interacting with it so it can get more information
to take into its model. I guess.

Speaker 2 (16:51):
Yeah. The dates are called rush.

Speaker 1 (16:53):
Yeah, right, And and people are doing the same with
with wealthy people, right, They just want to interact with
them so they can siphon off some of the resources
is that those people have accumulated, Like it's not maybe
it's not the same. I think that's still humans interacting
with wealthy people is distinct from an AI interacting with humans,
but it sort of gives us a window into what
the impact of that being most of your human interaction

(17:15):
over time.

Speaker 2 (17:16):
Indeed, Indeed, and as we speak of wealthy people, I
suppose we should look at the other way in which
EI is intersected with alienation, right, because you know, for
the current narrative has been about you know, EI is
taking jobs, and before then it was about automation was
taking jobs. EI is you know, a form of automation,

(17:39):
and before that it was just innovations in general, just
steps in some technological direction would be eliminating jobs. But
always marveled at stepping back and looking at the whole
conversation about this has taking jobs, that has taken jobs
is at the root of it is this dependence on employment,
on jobs for people to have, you know, life, to

(18:02):
be able to have a quality of life. We have
gotten more and more productive, and I mean that productivity
has helped people in some ways, and it's harm to
the environment in a lot of ways. But we have
a certain level of productivity now and we've produced so
much now that in some sectors we have more of
the enough for several decades to come. I think fashion

(18:25):
is one of them where we have like quite the
excess of clothing everybody. And of course you can talk
about how that level of productivity is done damage to
our creativity or craftsmanship, but it's all the worse when
you think about how even with all that productivity, the
work has hardly benefited. You know, more productivity doesn't necessarily

(18:46):
mean more pay. And so even before EI came around,
we were having issues with labor and alienation, right, people
disconnected from their work from whether it be a service job,
a factory job, or delivery job, whatever, any of these
jobs that you look at, it's structured at the end
of the day, not around providing a product or providing
a service, but around profit, around the podynamic between the owner,

(19:11):
the capitalist and the worker. The worker who is not
in control, is alienated from their labor and from the
products of their labor. And this is what Marx famously
spoke about, but he wasn't the only one to speak
about it. This sort of alienated labor that is compelled
rather than creative, that has no control for work, and

(19:33):
where workers are treated as commodities on a labor market Tankfully,
i haven't had to look for a job in a while,
but I've had to see my friends seeking jobs and
it's not a nice experience. And I have to spend weeks,
months sometimes looking for a job. But you will most
likely heed, but you need to survive. You know, and

(19:56):
a lot of these jobs you end up looking for,
end up getting into, and you've unnecessary jobs. There are
a lot of bullshit jobs, and I don't contribute to
a person's you know, development and fulfillment or they could
have humanity in any way. Yeah, and then a lot
of the benefits that people have fought for, even for
these jobs have either been eroded, you know, rolled back

(20:19):
over time, or they've been loopholed out. So you know,
for example, you don't even get enough hours to qualify
for benefits when you work at certain places, or you
are an independent contractor instead of an employee, so they
can get away from you know, giving me your due.
And so then in this environment you have EI coming

(20:42):
in now and taking certain rules varying levels of quality
and writing and in art and coding and administrative work.
And I don't know, I think for one, EI does
a lot of these jobs very poorly. But then there's
also cases where I don't like copyrighting, which is something

(21:02):
I used to do. The Yeah, copyrighting and the sort
of copyrighting that I had to write is back in
the day. It's almost indistinguishable in terms of it feels generic,
quite less. You know slop, Like it's just you're pumping
this out to pollute the airwaves in a sense.

Speaker 1 (21:23):
Yeah, it's very like it has a very formulaic nature
when a human does it. It's funny when I think
about copywriting, right, Like you can see the people have
identified the completely generic nature of it, because occasionally you'll
have like brands who do it in a non formulaic
way and briefly see success from it, like just by

(21:43):
having some element of humanity in it.

Speaker 2 (21:46):
Yeah, like Wendy is when they did that for a
little while, and yeah, then every brand to copy that
method and then it became steel and.

Speaker 1 (21:53):
Yeah, yeah, some almost sometimes like puncturate for a minute,
and then like you say, everyone will run after it
like a viper. Sunglasses, this one, I guess they're very
popular with like right wing bigots. Every time like biggots
are pictured in their sunglasses, they'll like donate money to
LGBTQ affirming causes or like gender affirming care stuff or
whatever depends what the people are being bigoted about. And

(22:15):
like briefly I saw them have success with that just
because like people are so accustomed to brand's being a
political rather than just being like no, fuck you. So
by doing the kind of basics of being a good person,
it appears human and therefore not so generic, and people
you know, briefly fall in love with it or whatever.

Speaker 2 (22:34):
Yeah. But I mean at the end of the day,
of the corporations and our potsons, there are people behind corporations. Yeah,
And I guess I sat that sort of wonder with
these kinds of jobs that are all being build in
at recent part by EI, what is the impact on
our pots self worse? Oh yeah, but they're they're skilled

(22:58):
to be just sort of swapped out for a machine.
You know, a lot of people have already felt that
their work is non essential, and then you have a
sense of being replaceable and unneeded. And in some cases
the difference is negligible because, like I said, the work
they was already being put out was the sort of

(23:19):
generic stuff that it sort of fills people, yeah, and
fill screens. But then you also have more necessary, the
more creative work. It is also just being sort of
funneled out. You know, I'm seeing billboards all over the
place that just have like this nasty, smooth looking like

(23:40):
AI generated pictures. Yeah, just a lot of slop, you know,
slop content, slop ad slop emails, you know, even on
YouTube now Like I like to listen to these sort
of music mixes when I work sometimes, and most of
the channels being recommended for music mixes on YouTube nowadays
is at least in the genres that I would listen to.

(24:03):
It's just like, yeah, I generated jazz chill. The thing
is they were't titlet that way. Yeah, you know, the
titlet some some wood and they probably haven't somewhat AI
generated thumbnail and whenever. And then you just, you know,
if you're unaware of the pattern of how those channels operate,
my click on are thinking, oh, it's just like a
music mix, like every other music mix, and then you

(24:24):
listened to it for a while and listen to a
few of them, and you realize, oh, this is just
like a machine made this. It has no flavor, yeah,
like no soul. There's also a lot of articles that
just fill in the Internet. It's just like slow yeah, yeah,
you know, just AI generated articles that feed into the
AI pool of references, and so the I almost eats itself. Yeah,

(24:46):
and it's sad, but I think it was like we
always going in this direction in a sense, not to
say it was entirely inevitable, but this was the trajectory
that we are pointed at. This actually could have been changed,
but now it hasn't been. So it's how we kind
of got here. I don't know if it's just me,

(25:12):
but I feel like there was a time when, boy,
it may it may still be true that a still
plus is not always a good thing. There's something to
be said about the value that we impue to things
when they are a bit rarer, you know, when it's
you have to be more attentive and engaging with it.
You know. I was actually thinking about it earlier today

(25:34):
when I was a child and I was watching TV.
You know, if they didn't have anything on the TV
that I wanted to watch, I have to go and
do something else, right, Yeah, And nowadays TV is pretty
much unlimited because at any point in time, you couldn't
have access to anything that an algorithm could see. If
you're up there is perfectly curated to your interests, and

(25:54):
it's ought to play and everything. It's just one hits
after the next. In that excess, I just feel like
we've lost the sort of attentive curation of your tease
curation of and evaluation of things. Of the effort and
energy and craft goes into making things, we just end
up sort of taking things for granted.

Speaker 1 (26:14):
And like I think we kind of lower the standard
that we will accept because it's just so much of it.
There's so much volume of it. Yeah, Like, and you're
not so attentive to it because it's always there that
like slop becomes okay, it just kind of fills the
gaps in this non stop stream of content.

Speaker 2 (26:33):
Yeah, just filling feeling the noise. I have to catch
myself sometimes, yeah, because I mean just like sometimes I
just put something on because it was there, you know,
and just feeling noise, and sometimes I have to remind myself,
you know, falls just be with your thoughts for a bit,
you know.

Speaker 1 (26:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:49):
Yeah, And I try not to put too much blame
on myself even as I try to work on it,
because all of this, once again is probably you know,
these platforms and these algorithms have been set up to perfectly.
They're perfectly honed into their ability to exploit the little

(27:10):
shortcuts and weaknesses in the human mind to engage just
for as long as possible. Yea. So even if you
feel like Oh my gosh, I want to get off
of smedia. I want to quit this, that or the other.
It's hard, you know, even on you when you know
in your mind that it's detrimental, that it's affecting your negatively,

(27:31):
you still end up going back because again it's it's
hacked into your brain in a sense. But so I'm
just really frustrated by the way that AI has contributed
to this sort of disconnect because I also think it
makes the whole breadth of human creativity a lot less valued,
practiced and supported, you know, instead of people actually respecting

(27:58):
and you know ports in the craft and the afthlet
that goes into into things, it's just like, oh, scrolls
the next thing, scrolls to the next thing, or for
some people who seem to love yeah, it's just oh yeah,
you're you're you're obsolete. Now you can be replaced by
this you know, junk of.

Speaker 1 (28:17):
Just thinking about like art, like I see it so
often in like like even in revolutionary spaces, I'll see
it right like there, I guess sometimes is what it
is actually is AI accounts that have no idea what
a revolution is. They're incapable of doing so because they're
not human, but like I just designed to monetize clicks.
You know, you'll see there's a bunch of fucking Israel

(28:39):
stands with Kurtistan ads which will just like AI generate
pictures of yep as women, like the women who fight
for their an es, right, and like it's just I
don't think these are not again, people are actually part
of the revolution, right, there are people who just who
want to in a sense objectify the revolution and the
women who fought in it and continue to fight in

(29:01):
it for financial benefit. But like it's the antithesis of
the beautiful life that people are trying to build there, right,
Like it is the opposite of everything that that revolution
stands for.

Speaker 2 (29:14):
So you see, and people are like AI generates in
these humount iters.

Speaker 1 (29:19):
Yeah, yes, exactly, and then using that for some either
just straight because you get paid per click on x
now right, or for some nefarious propaganda bullshit, but like
it's and then by contrast, right by friends in Memma,
there's a group called Art Strike Collective who do these

(29:40):
cool drawings of various individuals who have fought in the revolution,
and like one is a beautiful thing that shows your
respect for these people. Many of whom have given their
lives for this revolution. And another is just complete fucking
slop that is actively harming the thing it's supposed to
be supporting.

Speaker 2 (30:00):
Unfortunately, and it's a cliche at this point, but many
such cases. Yeah, yeah, I saw this short lecture on
YouTube by a professor im professors name as Jim. There's
such a short clip from I'm assuming a longer lecture,
he said. The title of the video was really what
captured me. It was something along the lines of consumerism

(30:22):
as the perfection of slavery, and it was really speaking
about how we are able to be so perfectly locked
into our role as workers, as cogs in this machine
to become, you know, so docile because of just how
good the consumeristic system has gotten at keeping us chasing

(30:46):
that next you know, dopamine, hit, that next purchase, that
next thing to consume. You know. So we're still being exploited,
We are still wages slaves in a sense, but we
are either unaware of it or we accept that rule
just to chase after, you know, the next tie of consumption.

Speaker 1 (31:07):
Mm hmmm. Yeah, Like when you think about a brave
new world in nineteen eighty four, right, these two dystopian
novels roughly, I mean briefly what came up before eighty
nineteen eighty four. Right. The difference is one is like
a boot stamping on the human face forever, which is
nineteen eighty four, and hux Leaves Dystopia is based on
people being essentially bought off through pleasure. Right.

Speaker 2 (31:29):
Yeah, it's like unlimited cookie in for everyone.

Speaker 1 (31:32):
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, they call it. It's called sohmer. I think, right,
we're in the unlimited it came for everyone world, right,
like it's it's stuf.

Speaker 2 (31:39):
I mean, I think we're in both. You know, it's
a simultaneously a hux leyerand a well yeah and yeah Dustopia,
you know what's the fourth worlds?

Speaker 1 (31:47):
Yeah, you're right. I'm starting to read Jack London's Dystopia
the Iron Heel. Now I have decided I want to
work out who was best calling the dystopia. But yeah,
we we have a little bit of both. Now we
have the they'll get you at both ends, right, Like
they'll try and give you things to keep you glassid
and then also things to keep you afraid. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (32:08):
So, I mean there's there's a lot of reasons to despair,
you know, people just blindly embrace an EI and they
don't see the problem with you as in the EI
and all these different things. There's also, as I'd like
to end things on reason to hope, right, there are
people who are willing to voidcott it. Who are you know,
maintaining a stigma around it. You know, people are not

(32:30):
taking it lined down. Artists are not taking it lined down.
Writers and are taking it line down designers, We're not
taking it lined down. People are still craving the authenticity,
connection and craft that comes from human people. And although
there's little any individual can do to resist the alienation

(32:52):
of this society, whether be at work or relationships by themselves,
you know, it's very hard, there are things we can
do together in tandem to make things a little bit
easier as we sort of try and strive toward social revolution.
You know, there's the classic you know, touch grass, you know,

(33:12):
log off and try and find where people are. There's
also the individualist solution of reclaiming your agency by finding
some version of digital minimalism that works for you, you know,
taking a break soon and out limiting your screen time
here and there. But really it's going to take system change.

(33:34):
It's going to take collective action. It's gonna take us
boycotting both you know, of course the AI products, there's
a boycott already taking place with those, but then also
just yeah, striking at the pressure points of the system
and prefiguring about the world for everyone. Yeah, and you know,

(33:54):
I hope that everybody is able to do what they
can to take steps in that direction. And yeah, so
please don't use the I.

Speaker 1 (34:03):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think I always like that Superman
Dane Marcos quote where he says, like, it's not necessary
to conquer the world, it's sufficient to build a new one.
I like that approach to this AI stuff. The way
we make it so people in our community don't turn
to AI to talk about things they want to talk
about is to be there for them to talk to, right,

(34:23):
to build community, to build real human interactions with each other,
so people don't have real human conversations with the computer.

Speaker 2 (34:32):
Absolutely agreed. Yeah, and that's all they have for today.
So all part, it's all the people. This has been,
It could happen here. I've been Andrew, this has been
James and Lasst Yeah, thanks, it could happen here is
a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from

(34:54):
cool Zone Media. Visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com,
or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find
sources for it could happen here, listed directly in episode descriptions.

Speaker 1 (35:07):
Thanks for listening.