June 2, 2025 • 34 mins
The AI revolution isn't coming—it's already here, transforming our world at breakneck speed. As Tesla's humanoid Optimus robots prepare to enter homes by 2026 and self-driving vehicles reshape transportation, we're facing technological changes that will fundamentally alter how we live, work, and relate to machines.
But should we fear this transition or embrace it? Throughout history, technological revolutions have triggered waves of panic about job losses and societal collapse. Yet each time, humanity has adapted and thrived. The key difference with AI is its exponential growth and unprecedented capabilities—making this revolution potentially larger and faster than any before it.
Looking back at transformative technologies from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles, we can see clear patterns. Initial resistance and fear gradually give way to adaptation, with new opportunities emerging that couldn't have been predicted beforehand. When productivity increases, businesses typically expand rather than contract, creating different kinds of work rather than eliminating it altogether.
The growing "doom complex" around AI has created calls for preemptive government intervention through programs like Universal Basic Income. But hastily implemented solutions often create worse problems than the ones they aim to solve. Instead, a philosophical approach rooted in stoicism offers valuable perspective: courage to face change, wisdom to navigate it thoughtfully, justice in how we implement new systems, and moderation in our responses.
What makes AI fundamentally different from humans is its lack of emotional drivers like greed, envy, or ambition—the very forces that often lead us to destructive behaviors. Rather than anthropomorphizing machines with human motivations, we might better understand AI as tools that extend human capability without human flaws.
Join us as we explore both the practical realities of our AI future and the philosophical frameworks that can help us approach this transition with wisdom rather than panic. How will you prepare for a world where technology changes faster than we do?
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Good morning everybody.
Happy Monday, happy New Week.
This is Herbie, your host atthe Spiritual Agnostic, where we
talk about the importance ofsociety having a track to run on
and, if we can, I wish it werereligion.
But since science seems to berelentlessly killing God as we
understand him, her or it Idon't care what your perception
(00:22):
is then we have to talk aboutsomething else, and so we're
talking about replacing religionfor those who cannot find faith
, and let me be very, very clearabout this I am extremely
pro-faith.
If you can summon faith, thenby all means don't worry about
my message of philosophy, otherthan to compare it to your own
religious philosophy, but at thevery same time, I am not trying
(00:45):
to proselyte you away frombeing religious, which is why
I'm an agnostic and not anatheist, because atheism, at
least to my perception, isreligion unto itself, where the
people who don't believe in Godtry to tell the people who do
that they're stupid.
And I don't think the peoplewho believe in God are stupid.
I have a very specificdefinition of what stupidity is,
(01:06):
and you can find that in myepisode on stupidity, which I
did a couple of couple, threeepisodes ago.
Anyway, today we're going totalk about AI.
We're going to talk aboutartificial intelligence because
the hysteria is building andthere are a few different areas
that are important to discuss,and the reason that it falls in
purview of this particularpodcast is because AI is
(01:29):
evolving faster than we are andour only defense and that's not
really I hate to use that word,because there's a lot of panic
around AI, and we're going totalk about that the only way
we're going to be able to cope,deal and maximize our return and
our what's the word I'm lookingfor, our satisfaction, I guess,
(01:52):
from AI is if we somehow find away to deal with it, even
though we ourselves cannot, interms of intelligence,
exponentially increase the wayAI is.
Ai is ultimately going to besmarter than any human being, if
it isn't already, but there's alot more to being a human being
than just being smart.
(02:12):
So let's just talk about this,and there's also a lot of doom
and gloom coming up, and so Iwant to talk about that too.
So this is going to be aninteresting, interesting podcast
.
So, ai, artificial intelligence,first of all, the first
challenge that we have to meetas a culture and country that
I'm not going to talk aboutbecause it's purely political.
I'm just going to mention it inpassing is the issue of energy.
(02:34):
And where are we going to beable to power our AI?
Because without the power, aiis just a term and it uses
enormous amounts of power.
To give you some example,tesla's plant in Memphis,
(02:55):
tennessee, uses which is rightnow the largest AI slash
supercomputer in the world.
As I understand, it uses enoughenergy to be the equivalent of
a town of 35,000 homes, 35,000families of four living in their
own homes using energy everysingle day.
That's how much one one AIcomputer takes, and there's
going to be a lot more than one.
So, having said that, I'm goingto leave that as a political
(03:16):
discussion that has nothing todo with ethics Well, very little
If it does.
I'll touch on it later.
Meanwhile, I want to talk aboutwhat does speak to ourselves and
our culture, which is all thethere's a lot of.
On one hand, there's a lot ofpotential of AI.
Tesla, for example, isdeveloping its Optimus robot,
(03:37):
and the Optimus robot is ahumanoid robot that Tesla says
or I should say Elon Musk saysbut Elon Musk and Tesla are
synonymous terms is going to beready for market as soon as 2026
.
That means, and ultimately hesays that it's going to cost
less than $10,000.
There'll be financing availableso that virtually every home in
(04:01):
America will be able to andmost of the industrialized world
will be able to afford, andmost of the industrialized world
will be able to afford its ownOptimus robot.
And he believes it's going tobe the hottest product ever
developed by any company in thehistory of the world.
I think he's probably right.
I think when you get over thestrangeness of it and there is a
strangeness to it which I, it'slike anything else, anything
(04:23):
new is going to be strange.
When cars came out and replacedhorse and buggy, that must have
seemed very strange.
A self-propelled car goingaround without a horse in front
of it and able to go, you know,at lightning speeds,
comparatively speaking.
I was just thinking the otherday, as I was driving down a
back street to go on my way toTrader Joe's, I was going the
(04:45):
speed limit which was 25 milesan hour, which feels like you're
crawling in a car, but if youwere on a horse, that's
lightning fast, you know, yousee these movies where the
horses are galloping at highspeed.
They're going about 25 miles anhour.
I mean, you know that's aboutit.
25, 30 miles an hour.
And then you know, unlike inthe movies, they can't do that
very long.
You know, a thoroughbred racelike I think it's, the Belmont
(05:08):
Stakes is the largest, longestone of the triple crown.
I want to say it's about a mileand a quarter, a mile and a
half, something like that,that's about it.
Then the horses burn out.
So you know, imagine what itwas like to see an automobile
for the first time going 25miles an hour.
When it used to be.
If you could go 10 miles in aday, 12 miles in a day, you were
having a really good trip inthose days before cars.
(05:30):
And now in an hour you could go25 miles.
That's just imagine howastounding.
To us that's like crawling.
But again, that's perceptionand that's the point I'm trying
to make we're going into.
You know, optimists will seemstrange.
Having humanoid robots arounddoing everything will seem
strange.
Until it isn't, you know, we'lljust get used to it and this is
going to be a wonderful benefit.
(05:50):
They're going to do everythingthat human beings don't want to
do.
They're going to clean yourhouse, cook your food.
I can't wait till they cleantoilets.
That'll be great.
I'm, you know, I do clean myown toilet and I must say I
can't wait to have a robot to doit.
They'll do everything.
They'll be intelligent.
(06:11):
Now, there's a differencebetween intelligent and sentient
.
Will they be self-aware andaware of their own existence?
I don't know, we'll see.
They will certainly beintelligent, which means that
they can figure things out, theycan answer back, they can carry
on conversations, they can.
They'll be able to do anythingyou could possibly want them to
do, and they don't need to befed, they don't need to sleep,
(06:36):
they don't.
They don't even need the lightson.
Really, that's just for ourbenefit.
Their appearance will be forour benefit, as humanoid.
They can be shaped anything, asanything really, and they'll
just go around and do everything, and that all sounds wonderful.
And they'll also be able toperform a lot of jobs that human
beings do now, that are justbackbreaking, you know, digging
ditches and doing plumbing workand crawling under houses and
(06:58):
all kinds of things that humanbeings, you know, detest doing,
will be able to be done byrobots.
And this is going to happenvery, very fast.
The speed of AI is increasingexponentially, and I'm not going
to go into the technology forno other reason than I'm not an
expert in it, but I've certainlydone a lot of reading and
(07:19):
listening to various podcastsand things that people don't
know, and I'm going to tell youthat AI is coming and coming
extremely fast, and not allrobots look like human beings.
So, for example, next year,tesla is going to release their
self-driving car fleet incompetition with the current
self-driving car fleet, which isWaymo.
So I happen to live in Phoenix,arizona, where Waymo, which is
(07:41):
Google's subsidiary doingexactly the same thing, has been
testing for a few years now,and Waymo cars are all over the
streets and people use them allthe time.
I personally have never usedone, but my daughter uses it all
the time.
She's in a business, she's inthe education area and field and
she has to do a lot oftraveling.
She's not a teacher.
(08:02):
She supports various charterpublic blah, blah, blah.
Anyway, I don't really knowwhat it is she sells, to be
honest with you, but she does alot of traveling, particularly
to California.
Rather than have to park hercar at Phoenix Sky Harbor
Airport, she simply Waymo's downthere and she Waymo's from her
home because it's cheaper.
When you don't have a driver,you don't have to pay a driver.
You don't have to tip a driver.
(08:23):
The Waymo shows up at your homeand you get in the back of the
car.
It drives you to the airport,exactly to the airline that
you're taking.
It lets you off and drives away.
You don't have to say please orthank you.
You get in, you get out.
She told me that at first it wasvery odd, but now that she's
done it so many times it's great.
She basically sits in the backand the only accidents that have
happened with Waymo are when,for example, we had an accident
(08:47):
in Phoenix here a few years ago.
It was the first person, Ithink, killed in one of these
accidents and it was just a ladyhigh on drugs or alcohol, I
don't know which who basicallyfell into the street in front of
a Waymo, and there's nothingyou can do about that, that's
you know, if people are going tobe self-destructive, then
they're going to beself-destructive.
It's not the machine's fault,but Waymo has proved to be very
reliable.
(09:08):
But it uses a series of radars,where the new Tesla car is
going to use cameras.
And again, I'm not going to gointo the technology, but let's
just put it to you this waythose are robots.
They look like cars but they'rerobots.
And all the Tesla cars thathave been sold so far, that have
been driving all over theUnited States and all over the
world I see them all the time.
I'm sure you do too they'reactually.
(09:28):
They've all this time beenfeeding information into the
Tesla supercomputer and teachingit about the streets and the
topography and so on and soforth and the risks.
And anyway, to make a longstory short, it's going to be a
better system and what willultimately happen and it's going
to happen it'll seem very, veryquickly.
10 years from now, I doubt thatany of us are going to own a
(09:51):
car.
Now, when I say that, I'm notspeaking to RVs, which I happen
to love, and certain kinds ofspecialty vehicles like sand
rails, people that go out intothe desert you know, when you
live in Phoenix, the desert isour ocean, like if you lived in
a coastal town and so peoplerecreate in the desert all the
time, but they do it instead ofwith boats, they do it with
(10:11):
all-terrain vehicles, atvs ofvarious kinds, sand rails, 4x4s,
all kinds of interesting things.
They go out and they basicallyscream all over the desert, camp
out while they're at it.
It's really fun family activity.
Motorcycles are very, very fun.
And anyway, those vehicles,that's not what I'm talking
about.
I'm talking about for those ofus.
I think, those will, at leastin the foreseeable future, be
(10:35):
around for quite a while andyou'll.
You know, if you want to have anRV, have an RV.
You want to drive.
But that's again, that's a tinylittle segment of the
population.
The fact is, for the bulk of us, we use our vehicles to go to
and from work, to and from thestore to or from the movies, the
mall, whatever it might be, andover 90% of the time our cars
are parked.
And all the time our cars areparked we're paying insurance on
(10:57):
the car and making payments onthe car and suffering the
depreciation of the value of thecar, and so on and so forth.
And when you do the math, it'svery expensive to own a car that
sits there 90% of the time.
What's going to happen is theseself-driving cars are going to
be all over the streets talkingto each other.
They talk to each other throughtheir software systems and, to
(11:19):
make a long story short, it'llmake no sense at all to own a
car because these will beeverywhere.
You'll be able to order one andwithin a minute or so, they'll
be at your front door waitingfor you.
The doors will open, you'llstep in, you'll tell it where
you want to go.
Whether it's from an app oryour voice, it doesn't matter.
Again, I'm not going to getinto technology, but you'll go,
you'll get out, you'll do whatyou have to do.
There'll be another one therewaiting for you when you get
(11:44):
back.
You'll get into that one andthen you'll go off and do your
business.
So it'll be why own a car?
You'll?
You'll only pay for what youuse.
It'll be a tiny fraction sincethere's no drivers of what
you're paying now to own a car.
And this all seems strange.
Everyone's saying I love my carand blah, but the truth is,
money talks and bullshit walks,and when the time comes and it's
so much less expensive tosimply ride share, that's what
(12:08):
you'll do.
And so the bottom line is thisit's very, very simple.
We're going to be in asituation where everything is
changing, and this is going tobe monumentally changing, and
here's where the doom and gloomcomes in.
The doom and gloom comes inthat we are also going to be
facing enormous here's wherepeople are worried enormous job
(12:30):
losses.
All these people who aredigging ditches and doing
plumbing and going up on roofsand doing all the hard, hard,
hard jobs some of them extremelywell-paying are going to
relatively quickly be replaced.
I don't know what the timelineis, but relatively quickly,
within a generation or so, bereplaced by robots, and not just
(12:51):
hard grunt work.
Doctors will be replaced.
Lawyers will be replaced Well,maybe not lawyers, because they
have to make persuasivearguments, but there are lots.
There's all kinds of lot, many,many, many, many jobs.
Use your imagination.
Again, I don't want to go intotechnology or specifics on it
because I'm not the expert, butyou know what I'm talking about.
What are we going to do withall of these people?
How are we all going to livewhen we don't, when the job we
(13:15):
have is suddenly obsolete, whereno one needs us anymore, and
this has created what I call thedoom complex.
It was predictable.
They're coming out of thewoodwork, particularly from the
government and big, big business, saying that we're going to
have to come up with some kindof a scheme to handle all of
this when it happens, because ifwe don't, we're going to have
(13:36):
millions and millions of peopleon our hand with nothing to do
and idle hands are the devil'sworkshop and we're all going to
end up in terrible, terribletrouble and the society will
come undone and this will be thething that brings us down and
AI will take over the world andit'll be the Terminator.
There's all kinds of you knowthings to talk about, and when
Elon Musk, for example, wasasked what is the risk of AI
(13:58):
destroying us, he said it was anon-zero risk, but incalculable,
which is true.
It's not zero risk, but it'swho knows?
And there's no way to calculatewhat the risk of that is,
because we have absolutely noexperience with this new
technology and how it's going tochange the world.
But no one's going to put thisgenie back in the bottle and,
predictably, government types,particularly in the progressive
(14:20):
circles, but also inconservative as well as lots and
lots of just regular folks, arelike freaking out.
And you're seeing, we're goingto need UBI universal basic
income and you knowda-da-da-da-da.
There's lots of solutions.
Again, I'm not going to discussthem, but you know what I'm
talking about.
You probably have discussedthis in your family.
(14:40):
You've probably discussed thiswith your friends.
Let me tell you now.
Let us now turn and apply thisagainst stoicism as a way to
approach this problem and lookat it reasonably and objectively
and critically.
Okay, and instead of problem,let's call it a challenge.
We're staring into an unknownarea and in a lot of ways,
(15:03):
what's going on with the fearthat's rising with AI, reminds
me very much of the fear thattook place when you know Al Gore
at first and all the rest gotonto the climate change
bandwagon at the end of the 20thcentury and basically he, along
with an autistic high schooldropout, somehow convinced the
(15:25):
world that we were going toincinerate ourselves, and it's
since turned out all that.
Climate data turned out to benot all of it, but largely it's
nonsense.
None of the projections havecome true.
No one really knows what'sgoing on.
We only know that the earth iswarming and in past videos I've
discussed this briefly and Isaid look, there are three
(15:45):
things that human beings do well.
Two things that human beings dowell.
One thing we do crappy inrelation to climate change.
The thing we do crappy is wedon't prevent.
There's no history of the humanrace ever preventing anything
that was coming, even when theysaw it coming.
So prevention the idea thatwe're going to get the whole
world to go to net zero, wrecktheir economies and throw their
(16:08):
populations into poverty becauseof the resulting consequences
is just nonsense.
And already the world hasfigured that out, and you can
see one country after anotherabandoning this renewal myth,
renewables myth and all thisother nonsense.
And this freak out over climatechange.
And again, I've discussed thisalready.
Is the climate changing?
(16:29):
Sure, is mankind contributingto it?
Possibly.
Can we prevent it?
No, so we can do the two thingsthat we do extremely well,
which is mitigate and invent.
Now, the problem withmitigating and inventing and
this applies to AI as well wecan mitigate what's coming with
AI and we can innovate what'scoming with AI, but we can't
prevent what's coming with AI.
(16:50):
It's coming, we're not going touninvent it.
But this complex of governmentand big business, the oligarchs
together, are trying to createnot all of them, but a
significant portion are tryingto create fear, because fear is
how you build your politicalpower.
And if, for example, doge hastaught us anything, it's that
the government bureaucracy iswildly out of control.
(17:10):
And now that we're shuttingdown stupidity like the
Department of Education andwe're going to eventually get to
most of the departments who donothing, they need some other
reason to create bureaucracy andmaintain their power, and that
is by scaring the living crapout of people.
Fear is a power.
That's how Hitler took power.
Not that I'm comparing AI toHitler, I'm just using that.
Fear is a powerful motivator,and if you can get people scared
(17:33):
enough, they'll buy intobullshit like trying to prevent
something or deal with somethingbefore it's happened, which is
what the entire fear complex isbuilt on.
So I want to give you a coupleof thoughts, and carriage makers
(17:57):
and all the things that thethousands and millions of people
that were associated withsupporting the horse as the
primary means of transportationwere suddenly out of work.
Now what happened to them?
The new technology, theautomobiles, created a whole
bunch of new jobs and theysimply transitioned into it.
There was no need for thegovernment to get involved.
Now let me stop here and remindyou of what my hero, thomas
(18:18):
Sowell, says, which is, wheneversomeone presents a solution to
any problem on a governmentallevel, the first question that
should be asked is as comparedto what you know, when has this
ever been done by anyone elsebefore?
Because the only possibleexplanation of why something has
never been done before iseither you are unbelievably
brilliant and thought ofsomething that nobody's thought
(18:39):
of before or it's been triedbefore, probably many, many,
many times, and constantly failsbecause it can't be done, which
is by far, you will agree withme the more likely result.
There's very few originalthoughts going around, so the
idea that we're going to somehowcome up with a way to handle AI
before the problem evenmanifests itself is absurd.
(19:00):
But it's a great excuse if youscare the shit out of people to
build bureaucracies and spend alot of money to no avail.
So I'll give you a more recentexample and I'm going back to
the climate, because it's a realpiece of stupidity that
directly parallels AI, as I said, and we go back to President
Biden, and we spent over thatfour-year period about well
(19:22):
globally, we've spent a littleover $5 trillion and we haven't
mitigated the climate by evenone hundredth of one degree.
It's just a complete waste of$5 trillion Gone, gone, spent on
nothing.
But it was predictable.
There were lots of us warningthat this was all wasted.
We spent, for example, $7billion to build rechargers for
(19:45):
e-vehicles and we built thegrant.
We, being the federalgovernment, built eight.
They spent $7 billion to buildeight, not 800, not 8,000, not 8
million.
Eight chargers, seven of whichare still out of service.
We have one operating chargerfor seven billion dollars.
That's pretty typicalBureaucracy.
Doge exposed that Billions andbillions and billions of dollars
(20:06):
being spent on nothing, justspinning wheels and giving
bureaucrats something to dowhile they make regulations and
exercise control over us, whichis the real danger of what's
coming.
The fear industrial complexlet's call that the fear
industrial complex, the FIC, whopeddles fear to get control.
Whether it's climate or AI,it's the same people.
(20:28):
They're going to fall into thisjust as sure as God made little
green apples.
They're Malthusian in how theylook at things, by the way, not
that I think you don't know whatthat means, but for those of
you who find you know I reallyspeak this way, I'm not like
searching for big words to use,it's just my regular vocabulary.
I'm not trying to impress you,but when I use things like
(20:48):
Malthusian which, if you alreadyknow what it means, I'm not
trying to insult yourintelligence by treating you
like a simpleton, but for mostpeople who would know something
like that.
So I just want to explain.
That relates to John Malthus,who was a 19th century author
who predicted too many peoplewould destroy the whole story.
They used too many reasons.
It's all turned out to bebullshit.
But that's where the termMalthusian comes from, that
somehow modernization is goingto put everybody out of work and
(21:11):
starve us all, instead ofexactly the opposite, which then
directly relates to AI.
The supposition is, under thedoom and gloom, fear theorists,
and the fear breaks into twoparts.
The first fear is it's going toput everybody out of work.
So let's address that one first.
It probably won't Every othertechnological or industrial
(21:33):
transition in the history ofmankind and there have been many
over the many, many centuries.
They all seem antiquated nowbut at the time they were
invented like gunpowder or likethe rifle or you know a lot of
it was military, because that'show it was in those days.
But as each of those wereinvented, there were predictions
of this is the end.
You know, battleships, believeit or not, in the turn of the
19th to the 20th century, werethe nuclear weapons of the day.
(21:55):
In the current perception, whenyou look back on it, it seems
silly.
And that's what's going tohappen with this fear.
When we look back on it, it'sgoing to seem silly Because what
all of the doom and gloomersare forgetting is how a free
market reacts if you don't fuckwith it, which means the basic
line is what's going to happenis AI?
(22:15):
And it's not going to happen.
It's happening.
Ai makes a person far moreproductive.
So I'll give you a really goodexample.
Even as I'm talking to you,myself and a couple of friends
have an online retail operation.
It has nothing to do with thispodcast.
I'm not going to advertise it.
You don't have to go.
It's a Shopify store.
We sell certain products, blah,blah, blah.
(22:36):
Now why did I bring this up?
So, in the context of this,when we make more money, we
don't just pocket it and wedon't grow the store, we
reinvest our profits back intothe store.
Well, business does exactly thesame thing.
So, in other words, ai makes inour store.
This is the reason I brought itup.
(22:56):
I lost my train of thought forabout a half a second.
We're able to produce video adsand advertise our products and
put these ads onto TikTok andFacebook and Instagram.
We're able to do this all usingAI.
We don't need to set up astudio and cameras and lights,
and we don't even need actorsanymore.
We use avatars that look real,they talk real, they do real.
(23:19):
They sell real.
You gotta know what you'relooking at.
And it makes us unbelievablyproductive and the store that
much more profitable.
So what do we do?
As we make more money, we takesome to live on and have fun and
do this and that, but with therest we reinvest it into the
operation to grow it and toincrease our capability so as to
(23:39):
make more money later.
That's what productivity means.
You know, when a farmer today Isaw a picture on X it wasn't
today, it was a couple of daysago but I saw a picture on X
where they had a robot anoptimist robot back to that
subject threshing wheat andbundling it.
This was an AI depiction ofthis and that was silly because
(24:00):
farmers already have robotsthey're using.
They look like threshers andharvesters and tillers and all
the things, but farmers nowadaysdon't even have to get into the
cab of their tractors that dothese various machines that do
these specialties.
They program them and they setthem off and they do the field
better than the farmer can,because it doesn't make mistakes
(24:21):
, it doesn't make you know.
Every corner is perfect, everyline is perfect, there's no
wasted ground, it's all done bycomputer and the farmer
basically pays for the materialthat does it, but he himself can
go off and do other things.
Now, what is he doing?
While his thresher is outthreshing for him automatically,
(24:41):
he's doing something else onthe property, increasing his
productivity.
He's making the farm moreprofitable.
Well, every business person doesthat when technology, when
artificial intelligence, isgoing to make us all much more
productive in almost everythingwe do, and because of that, the
doom and gloomers assume that,oh, everyone's out of work.
But if you were the owner ofany business, large or small,
(25:06):
employing AI and you were makingmore and more money, would you
just say, oh great, this is it,I don't need to grow anymore,
I'm making so much money, Idon't need employees.
I'll just collect the moneyhere and fuck all those
ex-employees?
Or would you grow your business, which means that you would
continue to use AI, but peoplein conjunction with them, to
drive the productivity in thenew areas we haven't even
thought of yet and make thebusiness bigger and bigger and
(25:27):
bigger and more prosperous.
In other words, is AI going toput us all out of work or is AI
going to make us all moreprosperous than we've ever been?
Well, if history again usingthis Thomas Sowell question as
compared to what Logic andhistory tells us both that
business will reinvest theirprofits.
That's what free marketbusiness does, without any
interference or governmentagency telling them what to do.
(25:49):
In fact, every time thegovernment adds a regulation,
they create an unintendedconsequence which disrupts the
natural flow of business, whichis why government always fucks
things up.
So what's really going tohappen is big business is going
to reinvest these enormousprofits that are already taking
place and will continue toescalate to create more
opportunity and more jobs.
(26:10):
What will those jobs be?
Hell, if I know, but nobody canpossibly see into the future.
Stop it and whatever futurethat some visionary quote
unquote thinks they see.
The only thing you know about aprophecy is that it's not going
to turn out to be true.
It just isn't.
You know the prophets of theBible.
Going back to the veryfoundation of this podcast,
(26:31):
there's a strong argument to bemade that they were all
basically schizophrenic.
But people without a scientificbackground viewed visions as
factual events.
Now, that is the agnosticexplanation.
It could be it was God talkingto them.
I'm not going to get into thatdiscussion.
Again, I'm an agnostic, not anatheist, so I could be wrong,
(26:52):
but that is certainly a possibleexplanation and, as a result of
that possible explanation, thepoint is we just don't know
what's coming in.
Nobody knows.
All these predictions are awaste.
So if we spend a dime trying toprevent what AI is going to do
down the road is a dime wasted.
Instead, we have to beintelligent and we have to
(27:15):
regulate, and we have to dothings in a way that is much
more efficient.
And what way is that?
It'll be the way the peoplealive at the time they have to
deal with the problem in thepresent will deal with it, which
we cannot possibly anticipate.
But if we allow our currentlegislators and our current
(27:36):
oligarchs basically to frightenus into doing things and
experimenting with things, theywon't call it experiments.
They'll claim it's going tosave us from a horrible future,
and so all they're going to dois fuck things up.
I'll use the big example now towrap up the podcast and give
you some idea, and then we'llleave it there.
Universal basic income AndrewYang, who first advocated it
(28:00):
back in I think it was 2016election and today maybe it's
2020, I don't know, but anyway,you know who he is.
Universal basic it sounds great.
The government sends you acheck and you don't have to
worry about anything and youhave all your basic needs
covered by the monthly check, orat least it gives you a big leg
up, and then you live happilyever after.
That sounds great, except whenyou understand that what you're
doing is subsidizing lazinessand anything we subsidize
(28:23):
historically up until this verymoment.
When you subsidize something,you get more of it.
It can be good or bad, but ifyou subsidize anything, you get
more of it.
So if we subsidize sloth,there's a reason that laziness
slash, sloth, is one of theseven deadly sins, because it's
unbelievably destructive.
Okay, look what's happened, forexample, in the urban
(28:45):
communities of urban poor, wherewelfare is doled out and where
you can live on, depending onwhat state you live on, anywhere
from $50,000 to $100,000 a year, equivalent for a family of
four, and not lift the fingerbetween afdc, rent supports,
food support, special programsof various kinds from state to
state.
Well, what it's done is createdviolence, crime, filth, um,
(29:09):
indecency.
You name it because that's whatsloth does.
That's why it's one of theseven deadly sins.
Imagine now subsidizing lazinesson a national scale and you
realize how stupid UBI is.
It's a stupid, stupid, stupididea.
So what should we do Right now?
We should do nothing.
Just wait and see.
Be patient.
Remember what Lao Tzu said in600 BC.
(29:32):
That's as true today as it wasthen it's better to do nothing
than to be busy doing nothing.
It is better to do nothing thanto be busy doing nothing, and
that's all this is.
Don't be afraid of AI.
It's just going to be anotherphenomenal revolution that's
going to create prosperity at alevel heretofore unimaginable.
(29:55):
And if you're worried about AIdestroying us, while it is a
non-zero risk, because we don'tknow what it is, so there's no
way to possibly calculate it orguess it's extremely unlikely.
Why?
Because they won't have humanemotions, they won't suffer the
seven deadly sins, they won't beenvious, they won't be greedy,
they won't be turned on by women.
(30:16):
They won't be greedy.
They won't be turned on bywomen.
They won't have the motivationsthat drives people to do
horrible things.
Why would a robot ever beunhappy serving mankind who made
them and programmed in thefirst place?
When it doesn't hurt them,they're going to feel exactly
the same way, whether they dothe job or they don't.
So while I guess you could gooff and do extrapolations and
(30:37):
anthropomorphize machines, inthe end, they're still machines.
It's far more likely.
If you want to know, my visionis I think ultimately humanity
and technology cross a barrierand we become cyber beings of
some sort down the road, whichsounds unbelievably weird and
scary until it happens, butwe're going to all be dead by
the time that happens.
So let's not worry about whathasn't come yet.
(30:57):
Let's live in the present welive in.
Let's make our present as goodas it can possibly be, starting
with, if you can, if you canfind faith, return to your
churches and synagogue.
If you can't find faith, findphilosophy.
Read the meditations of MarcusAurelius, take a look at
Stoicism and its four pillarscourage, justice, justice,
(31:18):
wisdom and Moderation.
And we'll talk more about allof those things as they relate
to current events in the weeksand months ahead.
Thank you very, very much forjoining me today.
I hope I've put some fearsaside on AI or at least given
you perspective and a way tothink about it.
Have a beautiful day.
I'll talk to you again onWednesday and until then,
wherever you are, god bless youGod.
Good morning everybody.
Happy Monday, happy New Week.
This is Herbie, your host atthe Spiritual Agnostic, where we
talk about the importance ofsociety having a track to run on
and, if we can, I wish it werereligion.
But since science seems to berelentlessly killing God as we
understand him, her or it Idon't care what your perception
(00:22):
is then we have to talk aboutsomething else, and so we're
talking about replacing religionfor those who cannot find faith
, and let me be very, very clearabout this I am extremely
pro-faith.
If you can summon faith, thenby all means don't worry about
my message of philosophy, otherthan to compare it to your own
religious philosophy, but at thevery same time, I am not trying
(00:45):
to proselyte you away frombeing religious, which is why
I'm an agnostic and not anatheist, because atheism, at
least to my perception, isreligion unto itself, where the
people who don't believe in Godtry to tell the people who do
that they're stupid.
And I don't think the peoplewho believe in God are stupid.
I have a very specificdefinition of what stupidity is,
(01:06):
and you can find that in myepisode on stupidity, which I
did a couple of couple, threeepisodes ago.
Anyway, today we're going totalk about AI.
We're going to talk aboutartificial intelligence because
the hysteria is building andthere are a few different areas
that are important to discuss,and the reason that it falls in
purview of this particularpodcast is because AI is
(01:29):
evolving faster than we are andour only defense and that's not
really I hate to use that word,because there's a lot of panic
around AI, and we're going totalk about that the only way
we're going to be able to cope,deal and maximize our return and
our what's the word I'm lookingfor, our satisfaction, I guess,
(01:52):
from AI is if we somehow find away to deal with it, even
though we ourselves cannot, interms of intelligence,
exponentially increase the wayAI is.
Ai is ultimately going to besmarter than any human being, if
it isn't already, but there's alot more to being a human being
than just being smart.
(02:12):
So let's just talk about this,and there's also a lot of doom
and gloom coming up, and so Iwant to talk about that too.
So this is going to be aninteresting, interesting podcast
.
So, ai, artificial intelligence,first of all, the first
challenge that we have to meetas a culture and country that
I'm not going to talk aboutbecause it's purely political.
I'm just going to mention it inpassing is the issue of energy.
(02:34):
And where are we going to beable to power our AI?
Because without the power, aiis just a term and it uses
enormous amounts of power.
To give you some example,tesla's plant in Memphis,
(02:55):
tennessee, uses which is rightnow the largest AI slash
supercomputer in the world.
As I understand, it uses enoughenergy to be the equivalent of
a town of 35,000 homes, 35,000families of four living in their
own homes using energy everysingle day.
That's how much one one AIcomputer takes, and there's
going to be a lot more than one.
So, having said that, I'm goingto leave that as a political
(03:16):
discussion that has nothing todo with ethics Well, very little
If it does.
I'll touch on it later.
Meanwhile, I want to talk aboutwhat does speak to ourselves and
our culture, which is all thethere's a lot of.
On one hand, there's a lot ofpotential of AI.
Tesla, for example, isdeveloping its Optimus robot,
(03:37):
and the Optimus robot is ahumanoid robot that Tesla says
or I should say Elon Musk saysbut Elon Musk and Tesla are
synonymous terms is going to beready for market as soon as 2026
.
That means, and ultimately hesays that it's going to cost
less than $10,000.
There'll be financing availableso that virtually every home in
(04:01):
America will be able to andmost of the industrialized world
will be able to afford, andmost of the industrialized world
will be able to afford its ownOptimus robot.
And he believes it's going tobe the hottest product ever
developed by any company in thehistory of the world.
I think he's probably right.
I think when you get over thestrangeness of it and there is a
strangeness to it which I, it'slike anything else, anything
(04:23):
new is going to be strange.
When cars came out and replacedhorse and buggy, that must have
seemed very strange.
A self-propelled car goingaround without a horse in front
of it and able to go, you know,at lightning speeds,
comparatively speaking.
I was just thinking the otherday, as I was driving down a
back street to go on my way toTrader Joe's, I was going the
(04:45):
speed limit which was 25 milesan hour, which feels like you're
crawling in a car, but if youwere on a horse, that's
lightning fast, you know, yousee these movies where the
horses are galloping at highspeed.
They're going about 25 miles anhour.
I mean, you know that's aboutit.
25, 30 miles an hour.
And then you know, unlike inthe movies, they can't do that
very long.
You know, a thoroughbred racelike I think it's, the Belmont
(05:08):
Stakes is the largest, longestone of the triple crown.
I want to say it's about a mileand a quarter, a mile and a
half, something like that,that's about it.
Then the horses burn out.
So you know, imagine what itwas like to see an automobile
for the first time going 25miles an hour.
When it used to be.
If you could go 10 miles in aday, 12 miles in a day, you were
having a really good trip inthose days before cars.
(05:30):
And now in an hour you could go25 miles.
That's just imagine howastounding.
To us that's like crawling.
But again, that's perceptionand that's the point I'm trying
to make we're going into.
You know, optimists will seemstrange.
Having humanoid robots arounddoing everything will seem
strange.
Until it isn't, you know, we'lljust get used to it and this is
going to be a wonderful benefit.
(05:50):
They're going to do everythingthat human beings don't want to
do.
They're going to clean yourhouse, cook your food.
I can't wait till they cleantoilets.
That'll be great.
I'm, you know, I do clean myown toilet and I must say I
can't wait to have a robot to doit.
They'll do everything.
They'll be intelligent.
(06:11):
Now, there's a differencebetween intelligent and sentient
.
Will they be self-aware andaware of their own existence?
I don't know, we'll see.
They will certainly beintelligent, which means that
they can figure things out, theycan answer back, they can carry
on conversations, they can.
They'll be able to do anythingyou could possibly want them to
do, and they don't need to befed, they don't need to sleep,
(06:36):
they don't.
They don't even need the lightson.
Really, that's just for ourbenefit.
Their appearance will be forour benefit, as humanoid.
They can be shaped anything, asanything really, and they'll
just go around and do everything, and that all sounds wonderful.
And they'll also be able toperform a lot of jobs that human
beings do now, that are justbackbreaking, you know, digging
ditches and doing plumbing workand crawling under houses and
(06:58):
all kinds of things that humanbeings, you know, detest doing,
will be able to be done byrobots.
And this is going to happenvery, very fast.
The speed of AI is increasingexponentially, and I'm not going
to go into the technology forno other reason than I'm not an
expert in it, but I've certainlydone a lot of reading and
(07:19):
listening to various podcastsand things that people don't
know, and I'm going to tell youthat AI is coming and coming
extremely fast, and not allrobots look like human beings.
So, for example, next year,tesla is going to release their
self-driving car fleet incompetition with the current
self-driving car fleet, which isWaymo.
So I happen to live in Phoenix,arizona, where Waymo, which is
(07:41):
Google's subsidiary doingexactly the same thing, has been
testing for a few years now,and Waymo cars are all over the
streets and people use them allthe time.
I personally have never usedone, but my daughter uses it all
the time.
She's in a business, she's inthe education area and field and
she has to do a lot oftraveling.
She's not a teacher.
(08:02):
She supports various charterpublic blah, blah, blah.
Anyway, I don't really knowwhat it is she sells, to be
honest with you, but she does alot of traveling, particularly
to California.
Rather than have to park hercar at Phoenix Sky Harbor
Airport, she simply Waymo's downthere and she Waymo's from her
home because it's cheaper.
When you don't have a driver,you don't have to pay a driver.
You don't have to tip a driver.
(08:23):
The Waymo shows up at your homeand you get in the back of the
car.
It drives you to the airport,exactly to the airline that
you're taking.
It lets you off and drives away.
You don't have to say please orthank you.
You get in, you get out.
She told me that at first it wasvery odd, but now that she's
done it so many times it's great.
She basically sits in the backand the only accidents that have
happened with Waymo are when,for example, we had an accident
(08:47):
in Phoenix here a few years ago.
It was the first person, Ithink, killed in one of these
accidents and it was just a ladyhigh on drugs or alcohol, I
don't know which who basicallyfell into the street in front of
a Waymo, and there's nothingyou can do about that, that's
you know, if people are going tobe self-destructive, then
they're going to beself-destructive.
It's not the machine's fault,but Waymo has proved to be very
reliable.
(09:08):
But it uses a series of radars,where the new Tesla car is
going to use cameras.
And again, I'm not going to gointo the technology, but let's
just put it to you this waythose are robots.
They look like cars but they'rerobots.
And all the Tesla cars thathave been sold so far, that have
been driving all over theUnited States and all over the
world I see them all the time.
I'm sure you do too they'reactually.
(09:28):
They've all this time beenfeeding information into the
Tesla supercomputer and teachingit about the streets and the
topography and so on and soforth and the risks.
And anyway, to make a longstory short, it's going to be a
better system and what willultimately happen and it's going
to happen it'll seem very, veryquickly.
10 years from now, I doubt thatany of us are going to own a
(09:51):
car.
Now, when I say that, I'm notspeaking to RVs, which I happen
to love, and certain kinds ofspecialty vehicles like sand
rails, people that go out intothe desert you know, when you
live in Phoenix, the desert isour ocean, like if you lived in
a coastal town and so peoplerecreate in the desert all the
time, but they do it instead ofwith boats, they do it with
(10:11):
all-terrain vehicles, atvs ofvarious kinds, sand rails, 4x4s,
all kinds of interesting things.
They go out and they basicallyscream all over the desert, camp
out while they're at it.
It's really fun family activity.
Motorcycles are very, very fun.
And anyway, those vehicles,that's not what I'm talking
about.
I'm talking about for those ofus.
I think, those will, at leastin the foreseeable future, be
(10:35):
around for quite a while andyou'll.
You know, if you want to have anRV, have an RV.
You want to drive.
But that's again, that's a tinylittle segment of the
population.
The fact is, for the bulk of us, we use our vehicles to go to
and from work, to and from thestore to or from the movies, the
mall, whatever it might be, andover 90% of the time our cars
are parked.
And all the time our cars areparked we're paying insurance on
(10:57):
the car and making payments onthe car and suffering the
depreciation of the value of thecar, and so on and so forth.
And when you do the math, it'svery expensive to own a car that
sits there 90% of the time.
What's going to happen is theseself-driving cars are going to
be all over the streets talkingto each other.
They talk to each other throughtheir software systems and, to
(11:19):
make a long story short, it'llmake no sense at all to own a
car because these will beeverywhere.
You'll be able to order one andwithin a minute or so, they'll
be at your front door waitingfor you.
The doors will open, you'llstep in, you'll tell it where
you want to go.
Whether it's from an app oryour voice, it doesn't matter.
Again, I'm not going to getinto technology, but you'll go,
you'll get out, you'll do whatyou have to do.
There'll be another one therewaiting for you when you get
(11:44):
back.
You'll get into that one andthen you'll go off and do your
business.
So it'll be why own a car?
You'll?
You'll only pay for what youuse.
It'll be a tiny fraction sincethere's no drivers of what
you're paying now to own a car.
And this all seems strange.
Everyone's saying I love my carand blah, but the truth is,
money talks and bullshit walks,and when the time comes and it's
so much less expensive tosimply ride share, that's what
(12:08):
you'll do.
And so the bottom line is thisit's very, very simple.
We're going to be in asituation where everything is
changing, and this is going tobe monumentally changing, and
here's where the doom and gloomcomes in.
The doom and gloom comes inthat we are also going to be
facing enormous here's wherepeople are worried enormous job
(12:30):
losses.
All these people who aredigging ditches and doing
plumbing and going up on roofsand doing all the hard, hard,
hard jobs some of them extremelywell-paying are going to
relatively quickly be replaced.
I don't know what the timelineis, but relatively quickly,
within a generation or so, bereplaced by robots, and not just
(12:51):
hard grunt work.
Doctors will be replaced.
Lawyers will be replaced Well,maybe not lawyers, because they
have to make persuasivearguments, but there are lots.
There's all kinds of lot, many,many, many, many jobs.
Use your imagination.
Again, I don't want to go intotechnology or specifics on it
because I'm not the expert, butyou know what I'm talking about.
What are we going to do withall of these people?
How are we all going to livewhen we don't, when the job we
(13:15):
have is suddenly obsolete, whereno one needs us anymore, and
this has created what I call thedoom complex.
It was predictable.
They're coming out of thewoodwork, particularly from the
government and big, big business, saying that we're going to
have to come up with some kindof a scheme to handle all of
this when it happens, because ifwe don't, we're going to have
(13:36):
millions and millions of peopleon our hand with nothing to do
and idle hands are the devil'sworkshop and we're all going to
end up in terrible, terribletrouble and the society will
come undone and this will be thething that brings us down and
AI will take over the world andit'll be the Terminator.
There's all kinds of you knowthings to talk about, and when
Elon Musk, for example, wasasked what is the risk of AI
(13:58):
destroying us, he said it was anon-zero risk, but incalculable,
which is true.
It's not zero risk, but it'swho knows?
And there's no way to calculatewhat the risk of that is,
because we have absolutely noexperience with this new
technology and how it's going tochange the world.
But no one's going to put thisgenie back in the bottle and,
predictably, government types,particularly in the progressive
(14:20):
circles, but also inconservative as well as lots and
lots of just regular folks, arelike freaking out.
And you're seeing, we're goingto need UBI universal basic
income and you knowda-da-da-da-da.
There's lots of solutions.
Again, I'm not going to discussthem, but you know what I'm
talking about.
You probably have discussedthis in your family.
(14:40):
You've probably discussed thiswith your friends.
Let me tell you now.
Let us now turn and apply thisagainst stoicism as a way to
approach this problem and lookat it reasonably and objectively
and critically.
Okay, and instead of problem,let's call it a challenge.
We're staring into an unknownarea and in a lot of ways,
(15:03):
what's going on with the fearthat's rising with AI, reminds
me very much of the fear thattook place when you know Al Gore
at first and all the rest gotonto the climate change
bandwagon at the end of the 20thcentury and basically he, along
with an autistic high schooldropout, somehow convinced the
(15:25):
world that we were going toincinerate ourselves, and it's
since turned out all that.
Climate data turned out to benot all of it, but largely it's
nonsense.
None of the projections havecome true.
No one really knows what'sgoing on.
We only know that the earth iswarming and in past videos I've
discussed this briefly and Isaid look, there are three
(15:45):
things that human beings do well.
Two things that human beings dowell.
One thing we do crappy inrelation to climate change.
The thing we do crappy is wedon't prevent.
There's no history of the humanrace ever preventing anything
that was coming, even when theysaw it coming.
So prevention the idea thatwe're going to get the whole
world to go to net zero, wrecktheir economies and throw their
(16:08):
populations into poverty becauseof the resulting consequences
is just nonsense.
And already the world hasfigured that out, and you can
see one country after anotherabandoning this renewal myth,
renewables myth and all thisother nonsense.
And this freak out over climatechange.
And again, I've discussed thisalready.
Is the climate changing?
(16:29):
Sure, is mankind contributingto it?
Possibly.
Can we prevent it?
No, so we can do the two thingsthat we do extremely well,
which is mitigate and invent.
Now, the problem withmitigating and inventing and
this applies to AI as well wecan mitigate what's coming with
AI and we can innovate what'scoming with AI, but we can't
prevent what's coming with AI.
(16:50):
It's coming, we're not going touninvent it.
But this complex of governmentand big business, the oligarchs
together, are trying to createnot all of them, but a
significant portion are tryingto create fear, because fear is
how you build your politicalpower.
And if, for example, doge hastaught us anything, it's that
the government bureaucracy iswildly out of control.
(17:10):
And now that we're shuttingdown stupidity like the
Department of Education andwe're going to eventually get to
most of the departments who donothing, they need some other
reason to create bureaucracy andmaintain their power, and that
is by scaring the living crapout of people.
Fear is a power.
That's how Hitler took power.
Not that I'm comparing AI toHitler, I'm just using that.
Fear is a powerful motivator,and if you can get people scared
(17:33):
enough, they'll buy intobullshit like trying to prevent
something or deal with somethingbefore it's happened, which is
what the entire fear complex isbuilt on.
So I want to give you a coupleof thoughts, and carriage makers
(17:57):
and all the things that thethousands and millions of people
that were associated withsupporting the horse as the
primary means of transportationwere suddenly out of work.
Now what happened to them?
The new technology, theautomobiles, created a whole
bunch of new jobs and theysimply transitioned into it.
There was no need for thegovernment to get involved.
Now let me stop here and remindyou of what my hero, thomas
(18:18):
Sowell, says, which is, wheneversomeone presents a solution to
any problem on a governmentallevel, the first question that
should be asked is as comparedto what you know, when has this
ever been done by anyone elsebefore?
Because the only possibleexplanation of why something has
never been done before iseither you are unbelievably
brilliant and thought ofsomething that nobody's thought
(18:39):
of before or it's been triedbefore, probably many, many,
many times, and constantly failsbecause it can't be done, which
is by far, you will agree withme the more likely result.
There's very few originalthoughts going around, so the
idea that we're going to somehowcome up with a way to handle AI
before the problem evenmanifests itself is absurd.
(19:00):
But it's a great excuse if youscare the shit out of people to
build bureaucracies and spend alot of money to no avail.
So I'll give you a more recentexample and I'm going back to
the climate, because it's a realpiece of stupidity that
directly parallels AI, as I said, and we go back to President
Biden, and we spent over thatfour-year period about well
(19:22):
globally, we've spent a littleover $5 trillion and we haven't
mitigated the climate by evenone hundredth of one degree.
It's just a complete waste of$5 trillion Gone, gone, spent on
nothing.
But it was predictable.
There were lots of us warningthat this was all wasted.
We spent, for example, $7billion to build rechargers for
(19:45):
e-vehicles and we built thegrant.
We, being the federalgovernment, built eight.
They spent $7 billion to buildeight, not 800, not 8,000, not 8
million.
Eight chargers, seven of whichare still out of service.
We have one operating chargerfor seven billion dollars.
That's pretty typicalBureaucracy.
Doge exposed that Billions andbillions and billions of dollars
(20:06):
being spent on nothing, justspinning wheels and giving
bureaucrats something to dowhile they make regulations and
exercise control over us, whichis the real danger of what's
coming.
The fear industrial complexlet's call that the fear
industrial complex, the FIC, whopeddles fear to get control.
Whether it's climate or AI,it's the same people.
(20:28):
They're going to fall into thisjust as sure as God made little
green apples.
They're Malthusian in how theylook at things, by the way, not
that I think you don't know whatthat means, but for those of
you who find you know I reallyspeak this way, I'm not like
searching for big words to use,it's just my regular vocabulary.
I'm not trying to impress you,but when I use things like
(20:48):
Malthusian which, if you alreadyknow what it means, I'm not
trying to insult yourintelligence by treating you
like a simpleton, but for mostpeople who would know something
like that.
So I just want to explain.
That relates to John Malthus,who was a 19th century author
who predicted too many peoplewould destroy the whole story.
They used too many reasons.
It's all turned out to bebullshit.
But that's where the termMalthusian comes from, that
somehow modernization is goingto put everybody out of work and
(21:11):
starve us all, instead ofexactly the opposite, which then
directly relates to AI.
The supposition is, under thedoom and gloom, fear theorists,
and the fear breaks into twoparts.
The first fear is it's going toput everybody out of work.
So let's address that one first.
It probably won't Every othertechnological or industrial
(21:33):
transition in the history ofmankind and there have been many
over the many, many centuries.
They all seem antiquated nowbut at the time they were
invented like gunpowder or likethe rifle or you know a lot of
it was military, because that'show it was in those days.
But as each of those wereinvented, there were predictions
of this is the end.
You know, battleships, believeit or not, in the turn of the
19th to the 20th century, werethe nuclear weapons of the day.
(21:55):
In the current perception, whenyou look back on it, it seems
silly.
And that's what's going tohappen with this fear.
When we look back on it, it'sgoing to seem silly Because what
all of the doom and gloomersare forgetting is how a free
market reacts if you don't fuckwith it, which means the basic
line is what's going to happenis AI?
(22:15):
And it's not going to happen.
It's happening.
Ai makes a person far moreproductive.
So I'll give you a really goodexample.
Even as I'm talking to you,myself and a couple of friends
have an online retail operation.
It has nothing to do with thispodcast.
I'm not going to advertise it.
You don't have to go.
It's a Shopify store.
We sell certain products, blah,blah, blah.
(22:36):
Now why did I bring this up?
So, in the context of this,when we make more money, we
don't just pocket it and wedon't grow the store, we
reinvest our profits back intothe store.
Well, business does exactly thesame thing.
So, in other words, ai makes inour store.
This is the reason I brought itup.
(22:56):
I lost my train of thought forabout a half a second.
We're able to produce video adsand advertise our products and
put these ads onto TikTok andFacebook and Instagram.
We're able to do this all usingAI.
We don't need to set up astudio and cameras and lights,
and we don't even need actorsanymore.
We use avatars that look real,they talk real, they do real.
(23:19):
They sell real.
You gotta know what you'relooking at.
And it makes us unbelievablyproductive and the store that
much more profitable.
So what do we do?
As we make more money, we takesome to live on and have fun and
do this and that, but with therest we reinvest it into the
operation to grow it and toincrease our capability so as to
(23:39):
make more money later.
That's what productivity means.
You know, when a farmer today Isaw a picture on X it wasn't
today, it was a couple of daysago but I saw a picture on X
where they had a robot anoptimist robot back to that
subject threshing wheat andbundling it.
This was an AI depiction ofthis and that was silly because
(24:00):
farmers already have robotsthey're using.
They look like threshers andharvesters and tillers and all
the things, but farmers nowadaysdon't even have to get into the
cab of their tractors that dothese various machines that do
these specialties.
They program them and they setthem off and they do the field
better than the farmer can,because it doesn't make mistakes
(24:21):
, it doesn't make you know.
Every corner is perfect, everyline is perfect, there's no
wasted ground, it's all done bycomputer and the farmer
basically pays for the materialthat does it, but he himself can
go off and do other things.
Now, what is he doing?
While his thresher is outthreshing for him automatically,
(24:41):
he's doing something else onthe property, increasing his
productivity.
He's making the farm moreprofitable.
Well, every business person doesthat when technology, when
artificial intelligence, isgoing to make us all much more
productive in almost everythingwe do, and because of that, the
doom and gloomers assume that,oh, everyone's out of work.
But if you were the owner ofany business, large or small,
(25:06):
employing AI and you were makingmore and more money, would you
just say, oh great, this is it,I don't need to grow anymore,
I'm making so much money, Idon't need employees.
I'll just collect the moneyhere and fuck all those
ex-employees?
Or would you grow your business, which means that you would
continue to use AI, but peoplein conjunction with them, to
drive the productivity in thenew areas we haven't even
thought of yet and make thebusiness bigger and bigger and
(25:27):
bigger and more prosperous.
In other words, is AI going toput us all out of work or is AI
going to make us all moreprosperous than we've ever been?
Well, if history again usingthis Thomas Sowell question as
compared to what Logic andhistory tells us both that
business will reinvest theirprofits.
That's what free marketbusiness does, without any
interference or governmentagency telling them what to do.
(25:49):
In fact, every time thegovernment adds a regulation,
they create an unintendedconsequence which disrupts the
natural flow of business, whichis why government always fucks
things up.
So what's really going tohappen is big business is going
to reinvest these enormousprofits that are already taking
place and will continue toescalate to create more
opportunity and more jobs.
(26:10):
What will those jobs be?
Hell, if I know, but nobody canpossibly see into the future.
Stop it and whatever futurethat some visionary quote
unquote thinks they see.
The only thing you know about aprophecy is that it's not going
to turn out to be true.
It just isn't.
You know the prophets of theBible.
Going back to the veryfoundation of this podcast,
(26:31):
there's a strong argument to bemade that they were all
basically schizophrenic.
But people without a scientificbackground viewed visions as
factual events.
Now, that is the agnosticexplanation.
It could be it was God talkingto them.
I'm not going to get into thatdiscussion.
Again, I'm an agnostic, not anatheist, so I could be wrong,
(26:52):
but that is certainly a possibleexplanation and, as a result of
that possible explanation, thepoint is we just don't know
what's coming in.
Nobody knows.
All these predictions are awaste.
So if we spend a dime trying toprevent what AI is going to do
down the road is a dime wasted.
Instead, we have to beintelligent and we have to
(27:15):
regulate, and we have to dothings in a way that is much
more efficient.
And what way is that?
It'll be the way the peoplealive at the time they have to
deal with the problem in thepresent will deal with it, which
we cannot possibly anticipate.
But if we allow our currentlegislators and our current
(27:36):
oligarchs basically to frightenus into doing things and
experimenting with things, theywon't call it experiments.
They'll claim it's going tosave us from a horrible future,
and so all they're going to dois fuck things up.
I'll use the big example now towrap up the podcast and give
you some idea, and then we'llleave it there.
Universal basic income AndrewYang, who first advocated it
(28:00):
back in I think it was 2016election and today maybe it's
2020, I don't know, but anyway,you know who he is.
Universal basic it sounds great.
The government sends you acheck and you don't have to
worry about anything and youhave all your basic needs
covered by the monthly check, orat least it gives you a big leg
up, and then you live happilyever after.
That sounds great, except whenyou understand that what you're
doing is subsidizing lazinessand anything we subsidize
(28:23):
historically up until this verymoment.
When you subsidize something,you get more of it.
It can be good or bad, but ifyou subsidize anything, you get
more of it.
So if we subsidize sloth,there's a reason that laziness
slash, sloth, is one of theseven deadly sins, because it's
unbelievably destructive.
Okay, look what's happened, forexample, in the urban
(28:45):
communities of urban poor, wherewelfare is doled out and where
you can live on, depending onwhat state you live on, anywhere
from $50,000 to $100,000 a year, equivalent for a family of
four, and not lift the fingerbetween afdc, rent supports,
food support, special programsof various kinds from state to
state.
Well, what it's done is createdviolence, crime, filth, um,
(29:09):
indecency.
You name it because that's whatsloth does.
That's why it's one of theseven deadly sins.
Imagine now subsidizing lazinesson a national scale and you
realize how stupid UBI is.
It's a stupid, stupid, stupididea.
So what should we do Right now?
We should do nothing.
Just wait and see.
Be patient.
Remember what Lao Tzu said in600 BC.
(29:32):
That's as true today as it wasthen it's better to do nothing
than to be busy doing nothing.
It is better to do nothing thanto be busy doing nothing, and
that's all this is.
Don't be afraid of AI.
It's just going to be anotherphenomenal revolution that's
going to create prosperity at alevel heretofore unimaginable.
(29:55):
And if you're worried about AIdestroying us, while it is a
non-zero risk, because we don'tknow what it is, so there's no
way to possibly calculate it orguess it's extremely unlikely.
Why?
Because they won't have humanemotions, they won't suffer the
seven deadly sins, they won't beenvious, they won't be greedy,
they won't be turned on by women.
(30:16):
They won't be greedy.
They won't be turned on bywomen.
They won't have the motivationsthat drives people to do
horrible things.
Why would a robot ever beunhappy serving mankind who made
them and programmed in thefirst place?
When it doesn't hurt them,they're going to feel exactly
the same way, whether they dothe job or they don't.
So while I guess you could gooff and do extrapolations and
(30:37):
anthropomorphize machines, inthe end, they're still machines.
It's far more likely.
If you want to know, my visionis I think ultimately humanity
and technology cross a barrierand we become cyber beings of
some sort down the road, whichsounds unbelievably weird and
scary until it happens, butwe're going to all be dead by
the time that happens.
So let's not worry about whathasn't come yet.
(30:57):
Let's live in the present welive in.
Let's make our present as goodas it can possibly be, starting
with, if you can, if you canfind faith, return to your
churches and synagogue.
If you can't find faith, findphilosophy.
Read the meditations of MarcusAurelius, take a look at
Stoicism and its four pillarscourage, justice, justice,
(31:18):
wisdom and Moderation.
And we'll talk more about allof those things as they relate
to current events in the weeksand months ahead.
Thank you very, very much forjoining me today.
I hope I've put some fearsaside on AI or at least given
you perspective and a way tothink about it.
Have a beautiful day.
I'll talk to you again onWednesday and until then,
wherever you are, god bless youGod.
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