March 11, 2016 • 53 mins
In this episode, the guys welcome returning special guest Damien Patrick Williams (aka @Wolven) as they explore the bizarre confluence of the occult and technology in the modern age, from AI oracles to the nature of consciousness, secret codes of cities and more.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Hello,
and welcome back to the program. My name is Noel,
(00:23):
It's Noel the Madman Brown. My name is Ben. You
are hopefully still yourself. Just be yourself. That's an amazing thing. Uh,
And we are back. Our compatriot, our our comrade, our
our buddy, our buddy, are our fellow podcast revolutionary slash
(00:45):
conspiracy realist Matt Frederick remains on a secret mission as
we record this. However, if you listened to our episode
the previous week, wherein we we delve into the uh
the realm of alchemy, then you know that we have
a returning UH. Special guest with us is a friend
(01:10):
of ours, friend of the show who writes extensively about
religious studies. I would say philosophy, the history of philosophy,
the future of philosophy. Yeah, consciousness, uh and uh, technology
and the occult. Ladies and gentlemen, let's welcome back to
the show. Damian Patrick Williams. Very happy to be back
(01:32):
with you guys, almost like we were just here a
few minutes ago and then we just came back in
the room. What is time? What is space? What is
a shout out corner? Shout ut corners? Well, Ben, A
shout out corner is a segment of the stuff that
(01:54):
I want you to know audio podcast wherein we shout
out to various listeners that right in and request said
shout out. And you know, sometimes we just pull them
off the cuff and we pull people on Facebook to
deserve a nice word because of their clever interactions and um,
you know, but a lot of times people have really
been enjoying it, so they've been writing in and asking
(02:14):
for him. So what you got? So what we have today?
This is a This is a good one, you guys.
Justin Cruise a K A the Cruise a K A
J krizzle X Calm could it be real? Just played
the bureau x cam Declassified x com two on Twitch.
Shout out to you, justin Cruise A K A the
(02:36):
Cruise a K A J krizzle A K A cruise
missile just got a new nickname. Yeah, well this is
this is a game that Nolan I have played before
where we says was David just a K A and
keep adding nicknames. It's it's fun until you're more than
(02:56):
three drinks in, and then when it gets really weird.
Sometimes they were just sentences and be like a k
a once upon a time in the eighteen forties. Uh,
at which point, no, you uh, you wisely um told
me you get some water? You know, just change the subject,
Just change with the subject. That's maybe have some bread? Yeah, right, Oh,
(03:19):
that's the worst part of the barrow where someone just says,
can I could I just have some bread? I know
there's a menu, but may I just have two slices
of bread? Yeah? Our next shout out comes to us
from old friend of the show and a mini shows
here a house of words, Aaron Cooper, who says, fun fact,
(03:40):
if you say Coop three times, I will magically appear
allah beetlejuice. Maybe I don't know worth a try. Hashtag
shout out corner, hashtag Coop Coop Coop? Where is he
got be a mirror and this is just a piece
of glass? Maybe it's like out mean, maybe we just
(04:00):
didn't do the ritual correctly. Yeah, you might have said
it just a little bit too fast. We need like
a wand of ash or something. Yeah, are like some
things that that Coope likest the table with us. Uhuh
walk winter Shan's under a moonless night. All right, just
text that's true, Okay. Our final shout out for today,
(04:24):
Uh Troy Land, I hope I am pronouncing your name correctly,
but I fear I am not. Uh says I'd like
a shout out to I'm cool, and then sent us
a send us a gift of Hey Mitch from Hunger
Games approving of something. Well, Troy, we think you're cool.
Thanks for listening to the show, And that is our
(04:46):
shout out corner. Gosh. So today we're gonna go a
little bit outside the norm of our show and that
we're gonna have a particularly free ranging conversation about a
topic that is fascinating to all three of us for sure,
and that Damien has a bit of a background in um,
(05:08):
which is technology and its intersection with the occult. So
I mean, I wasn't even really aware of this as
a as an idea. I mean, it makes sense when
you think about it, and there's so many ways that
you can kind of match those two concepts together. But Damian,
if you could, can you give us just a little
bit of a background on what this is and and
(05:30):
where how you came to it. Maylor, Damon's no, not
but that was worth it. That's something that's that's definitely
something you should be thinking about. Um No. UM, my
background with this comes from a longstanding investigation into the
nature of consciousness, the nature of knowledge from philosophical perspective.
(05:54):
I did my um my master's thesis on philosophy and
occult and ritual theory and the history of magic and
the history of what it is we mean when we
say we know something, um, and how that's changed a
great great deal over the course of our human history. UM.
(06:14):
And you know, really weird, kind of strange sense. Um.
You can actually trace this back to comics cartoons, Gargoyles.
Actually remember the show Gargoyles, Um, David Xanatos, the person
who would make use of superscience and magic to make new,
(06:40):
weird super science magic. That was like an aspirational ideal
of mine as a child. So, UM, it's fun to say,
and it's cute, but it's also vaguely true. So I
got to start thinking about these things at an early age. UM.
What we mentioned last week about this point at which
science and magic became kind of antagonistic to each other.
(07:02):
Right where they started to see each other not as
the same process, the same pursuit as they used to
be uh seen during the times of the ancient Greeks
and other non Western cultures, um as they even still
are today in many non Western cultures. But in the West,
there's this certain moment where they diverge. And I got
to thinking about why that was, Why we've gotten to
(07:24):
this point where magic and science are so deeply antagonistic
towards each other. UM. Why when we talk about magic
in the West, we're using it most often um as
a kind of a foil character using it as something
to to make science look good. Right, It's not magic,
(07:45):
um is usually how we talk about it, or we
talk about something being like magic, or we talk about
it's it's just as easy as waving a wand or
silver bullet or you know any number of like things
like that, these kind of magical metaphors. UM. But there's
this point, there had to be this point where these
things overlapped, where they were the same processes. And that's
(08:08):
what I'm interested in. It's almost something we touched on
at the end of the alchemy episode where we talked about,
you know, the future of alchemy and how um, so
many of these processes that when they were conceived at
the time largely involved mysticism and magic and you know, transmutation,
but now there's this, um, these modern processes that essentially
(08:30):
achieve the results that they were sought after, but you know,
with modern technology, and I think the interesting places where
those two things meet, um, whether there's a hybrid of
the two or whether it's like sort of one coming
as a result of the other. I don't know if
that makes sense. Well, yeah, let's start with Let's just
start with some the most basic definitions so that we
(08:51):
can we can build our understanding off of this, because
there's a few things here that I am oddly thrilled
to talk about, even though I know we probably won't
get to everything. Well actually, we certainly won't get to
everything that the three of us want to explore today.
But what we will hopefully do, listeners, is pose some questions,
(09:16):
and even more importantly, we would like for you to
write to us with your questions. You can find you know,
if they just pop up for you as you're listening
to this, Uh, you can find Nolan I on Twitter
at conspiracy stuff and you can find Damien at wolven
w O l v e N. So if something pops
(09:39):
up while you're while you're listening to this, uh, then
use technology to communicate with us, instantly send us a message, uh,
the same way. You know. It's essentially clear avoyance at
this point. And yeah, and that's actually something that somebody
was bringing up with me in conversation, that via technology
that we have it as recent Yeah, it's this year.
(10:01):
We've basically achieved our dream of being able to telepathically
communicate with each other. Right, and uh, we don't know
if that's a nightmare yet. It's sort of like how
four chan is such an argument against direct democracy, Like, oh,
that's what that looks like. So, so at the most
basic definition, when we say the occult and technology, let's define,
(10:24):
we call let's define technology. Human beings are the great
artificers of this planet. So far, so far, so far,
and that might well we'll talk about that part two,
because some of this is going to get kind of
dark in this episode, unfortunately, unfortunately. So technology is just
a collection of skills, of methods, techniques I guess used
(10:49):
to create something a good result is even you know what,
that's an even better way to say it. So a
lot of almost anything could be in this regard finding
a better way to position roll of toilet paper. Remember
there's a big fight on the internet about that. That
is a kind of technology, and so it technology doesn't
(11:12):
always mean just a a computer or a lever lever. Also,
and I know this is gonna be this, This is
gonna be one that you might want to tackle. Damien um.
The definition of occult. Yes, the occult in many ways
(11:36):
came about as UH a way to simply talk about
the unknown. I mean the word itself occult means to hide. Um.
When something is occulted, it is hidden, it is blocked
from view. We use that word when we talk about astronomy,
(11:58):
astronomical bodies, right when we talk about the nature of
the movement of the moon and the Sun and the
Earth during an eclipse. You know, full occultations um. But
we mean it in this sense to talk about knowledge
that's hidden. UH, Technologies that are hidden, processes that are hidden, UM,
(12:18):
that aren't known and widely available. One of the most
common hermetic philosophical hermetic magical phrases or mottoes and it's
kind of again, kind of expect what we were talking
about last week, but is to know and keep silent. Ah, yes, yes,
to know and keep silent. No, uh no spoilers exactly.
(12:44):
You get there, You'll get there, and you have to
get there yourself. So, um, Noel and Matt and Damien
and I we're talking a number of weeks ago about
what we would cover. We were the show and we
knew that we wanted to do an episode on alchemy.
But in our conversation we started stumbling onto these amazing
(13:10):
weird things. Uh. One one of the big ones stuck
out to us was that in the modern age, right
for everybody listening, the entire time you've been alive, Uh,
most of the world has has treated reports of the supernatural,
whether those would be extrasensory powers like telepathy, whether that
(13:34):
would be returning from the dead, whether that would be
predicting the future, whether that would be godlike entities. We've
treated these largely as um an interesting result of a
society at the time, rather than an actual thing. But
(13:56):
now we advanced you and we'll we'll do this part
earlier in the show, so we can get right to
the juicy stuff. Here's where it gets crazy and I'm
gonna steal line for Fox News here. Guys. Now, more
than ever we are closer to those things becoming real,
and some already have. Uh. The the argument about telepathy.
(14:20):
We we talked about UM, we talked about divination, right
so UM so divination being able to usually used to
tell the future, being able to to figure out something
about the world's usually as you said, something about the
future by kind of taking many disparate symbols or signs
(14:43):
you can read and kind of putting them in a
context and then figuring something out about them. One of
the first kinds of data of divination was augury following
the flight paths of birds UM divination via entrails UM.
But the when you cut open an animal, that specific
arrangement of their innerts can tell you things. And then
(15:03):
if you look at the texture and constitution of their
inners you can learn different things. And like you can
descry with a mirror or with any reflective surface UM,
and different surfaces can are supposed to be able to
give you different types of information. And then there's um cartomancy,
cards terror. Yeah, yeah, you've got funomancy using music to
(15:28):
you know, divine something either about the future, what's about
to happen, or what's happening right now, things you should
pay attention to. Right, Yeah, I love these said, just
not necessarily in the future all the time. But this
still exists today in what at least in the West, well,
practices of some sort of divination do exist. The weird
(15:51):
thing is that some of those did have a scientific basis.
You know, the following the flight path of birds may
not tell you, um if you are going to meet
your true love, but but it will tell you quite
possibly something about the weather. It will tell you quite
(16:11):
possibly something about food sources, so that one of those
is the future, the other is the present that would
have otherwise been occulted. So here's the thing, though, even
though we look at this now, we we permit the palmistry. Right,
we'll go. You know, I took a date to uh
to a psychic one time, and uh, I was I
(16:33):
was trying to be cool, but I was so skeptical.
I thought, you're not gonna cold read me. I'm just
gonna purposely throwing clue. So I'd like twitch my left
shoulder just at odd times see what would happen, Um,
which you know you shouldn't troll a psychic. That was
a little It is so rude. I was a different
person at the time. But um, but we permit that stuff,
(16:54):
but it's not taken as seriously, at least here in
the West. In some countries like in Myanmar Burma, astrology
is hugely important to the ruling parties. So this stuff
is still around. But here's another thing that that's changing
that we started talking about. With the emergence of correlations
(17:16):
of massive amounts of data, we are now closer and
closer and closer to building the oracles that used to
be legends. Right, So let's talk a little bit about that. So, yes,
like this was this was one of my like, one
of the major things that we talked about that was
just really really cool to me. Um. I love I'm
(17:39):
a big fan of Carl Young. So when I when
I look at the ways to think about, you know,
the ways out there that are available to think about
religion and magical practice and mysterious or cult experience, I
look at Young a lot um because he rode this
line between being deeply, deeply skeptical of these things being
(17:59):
directly immersed in them at the same time. So I
kind of I'm pretty I'm a pretty big fan of that. UM.
But Young talks about divination UM, and he talks about
the connection between divination and the collective unconscious, and uh,
this idea of synchronicity, right, the things that are connected
(18:19):
but aren't they don't cause each other. Like my reading
a tarot card doesn't cause something to happen in the world.
It's it's a way for you to look at what's
happening in the world. It's a way for you to
think about what's happening in the world. Both the tarot
reading and the thing that's happening, they are caused distantly
by something else. Um. If I hear a song on
(18:42):
the radio that reminds me of you and then you
call me. Like, those things didn't cause each other. They
are caused distantly by something else that they are connected to.
They are a ripple of another event exactly. So in
this way, when Young talk it's about tarot, he's not
talking about it as like I'm going to read you
(19:05):
the future. I'm not going to read you this thing
that is immutable, and by reading it it becomes so
he says, rather what you're doing. What you can a
way you can think about what you're doing is you
can look at it as a psychological tool. You need
a you need a unit of distance to be able
to see your situation. You're thinking about something, you're trying
(19:28):
to understand something, you want to come to figure out
something right, and so you've got to have something to
kind of be an intermediary between you because you're in it,
you're too close to it, and if you're too close
to it, you can't you can't get perspective on it.
So here's some cards, Here's here's some music that you
can kind of process it through if you can kind
of turn it around and get some symbolic representations with
(19:50):
and then now that you've got this distance, you can
kind of try to pull out some meanings, some sense,
some different perspectives and get your head around it. Now
that we've got data. And this is something that came
up in this um kind of unconference I went to
back in two thousand and fourteen called Magic Codes US
put together by Ingrid Burrington and Casey Golan and Inger Burrington.
(20:15):
She does infrastructure work. She does data technologies and networking systems.
She has a book called Hidden Networks of New York
and it's about basically seeing network infrastructure. She wrote this
piece for The Atlantic a little while ago about finding
the hidden, the occulted infrastructure on which all of our
(20:36):
data and all of our information depends. UH. And so
she puts this conference together because while she's thinking about
these things, she was thinking about all of the connections,
these overlaps between UH, coding, technology, magic, all of this.
And one of the things that we came up with
was this idea of big data divination, the idea that
(20:58):
what we are actually doing with big data as we
are putting all of this where you spend your time,
how much money you spent at this particular Starbucks, where
your cell phone tower pained off of your cell phone
at this particular point, and for how long, what number
you call at what periods and intervals? For how long
do you speak to them? Who do you text? And
(21:18):
what like? And we correlate all of this vast, vast information,
and we create a picture and we say, out of
all of this, through these algorithms, with this correlation, here
you are, and you are this kind of person, and
you will do this kind of thing, and you will
be this kind of way. I know this because I
(21:41):
read it. I know this because my algorithm showed it
to me. That's so, you know, what could go wrong?
Could go wrong? I mean for the Greeks, I mean,
they lasted pretty good with divination and oracles. The oracle
at Delphi worked out pretty great for a couple of
hundred years there or so, maybe we'll be all right.
(22:01):
So we just need to teach the algorithm to huff fumes,
the hanging a cave huffs and fumes and tell me,
tell me what the lottery numbers are. That's that's a
that's a fascinating idea. No, what what do you think
about this? Here's one of my big questions for this
one before we move on something else. Should we create
(22:26):
something like this? Well, I mean we don't really have
the choice. It's it's already. It exists already more or
less because we're feeding it, you know. I mean, it's
like if you look at something like Facebook, for example,
that we willingly give our information to that then makes
its way you know, to Google and art. We've got searched. Basically,
our email is mind for search terms that are then
(22:48):
fed back to us via Facebook and you know, targeted
ads and things like that. I mean, the algorithms are
just going to get better. The machine already exists. It's
just not something that we consciously enter act with in
the sense of what is going to happen? How am
I going to behave? You know, it's a very proprietary
thing that's being used, you know, for at the end
(23:09):
of the day, very tawdry purposes. I mean, just trying
to sell us a better pair of shoes or one
that we're more likely to buy. It's not even necessarily
better the ones that appeal to us absolutely, so yeah,
I mean they're targeting us with what we would already
be willing to buy. That's what that's that's the most
helpful information. They want to show us the thing that
is going to make the sale, you know, not necessarily
the thing that's going to make our lives better. So, um,
(23:33):
should we take this to the next level in a
way that maybe makes this information actually helpful and useful?
Why not? Maybe? I don't know, but it does seem
to be sort of a potentially doomsday device ish proposition
if in the wrong hands. But isn't it already in
the wrong hands. Guys, know what I was about to say. Actually, like,
(23:54):
that's precisely the path I was about to start going down,
which I think is going to connect with the thing
that you wanted to talk about. Next, then, um, look
who's making this. We talked about the targeted ads. We
talked about the big data, the usage of big data
on the back end. The divination aspect of big data
is generally done for the most part in terms of
figuring out the kind of person you are, the kind
(24:15):
of thing that you like, the kind of thing you
will do right. The people that use this, the people
that have direct access to this for the most part,
are corporations and governments. Yes, and they are going to,
in various ways work to modify and control your behavior
or at the very least predicted. I would say that
maybe the at the very least predicted the private entities.
(24:39):
The corporations have a higher interest in the person as
an individual, because the person buys things as an individual.
The governments have a higher interest in, almost like a
real life version of Asimov's psychohistory, predicting the future, figuring
out how people and cultures will behave exactly so not
just individual but yes, so, and in that regard we
(25:03):
ask ourselves where we should be asking ourselves. Okay, so
we've built this thing that can know us. We've built
this thing that we think of as being able to
correlate a rough approximation of who we are and what
we're likely to be um nol as you say, should
we do that? That ship has sailed? Um, we've done
the thing. We're out in the water. We are, we
(25:25):
are now out here. The question is how can we
navigate it? UM. I put this point to my students
yesterday actually, and I was saying about UM. We're talking
about Google and if you say okay, Google, order me
a pizza. You can't really say okay, Google, order me
a pizza. Yet. The goal, especially with UM the Amazon Echo,
(25:50):
the goal is to be able to say okay Alexa,
I think is the name that they give their again
female voiced, as all of them are artificial intelligent servant UM.
The goal is to have them be able to say, yes,
order me a pizza, and then they'll just order you
a pizza the one that you want at that moment exactly.
(26:14):
That's the ould simate goal. I can't say to Google
order me the pizza, you know, the one that I like.
I can say that to you if we've been out
to pizza before, we've had pizza several times. You know
my preferences. You know, the kind of crust I like,
you know, the kind of topics I like, But how
much cheese? And then isn't there almost the issue that
(26:34):
if you know, maybe I'm a bit of a contrarian here,
but I feel like if an algorithm started telling me
what kind of pizza I wanted, I would start to
rebel against that algorithm and say I don't want that
kind of pizza anymore. An algorithm, you don't tell me
what I want? What does it ask you? But if
it asked you know, you said, okay, you want a pizza.
Do you want it? I mean, do you want the
(26:56):
one that you got last time with the olives and
pepperoni and anchovies? Or do you just personally have no
use for this kind of technology? Because I want to
be able to say, you know, right now, I want
this kind of pizza. I am the captain of I
am the master of my my destiny. And uh yeah,
that kind of squeaks me out a little bit, honestly,
And it's a great example, an interesting way to talk
(27:17):
about a much larger concern with something as simple and
stupid as a pizza. We'll take it further because what
we could explore this, We could go a step further
and say, maybe the ultimate goal is, uh, something I
think is very creepy, which is that it can predict
the time you think, you know it would be good pizza,
(27:40):
and then and then it can like it. Yeah, and
it says like it says, you know, no, old Damien,
I have a pizza on the way for you. Yeah,
you know, the one you like. Would be like, that's
very presumptuous. How dare you? Again? That of actually probably
(28:00):
be my exact response is how dare you? I would
in fact revolt against it. That's the same way you know.
I mean, maybe it's spot on, but then I would
I would flip the switch and be like no, right, no,
I would. I'm a contrary kind of guy too, because
I so I would in fact be like at that moment,
as you presume to know me, and I don't care
if you're an AI or a human being, I don't
(28:23):
care if you presume to think you know what I want,
even if you're right, especially if you're right, you've ruined it.
At that point in time, I am angry and I
no longer want that thing anymore because it's kind of
a that implicit thing. And this is a segue into
(28:43):
our our next part. I think that implicit thing is
in many ways a a derision of our ability to
be conscious, which brings us to because we are talking
about AI now, right, that's that's the secret out of
the bag. We that's the what what do we say
last time? And old the badger? Yeah, the badgers in
(29:05):
the bag, badgers in the bag, hitting the badger bag
with a bat. Don't hit badgers with bats. They get
really upset about don't hit badgers with bats. And we
had our previous episode, we had a surpriseingly um, you
know that was actually Google's original tagline before they decided
to go with dope people do bas Yeah, that was
(29:26):
a that was a big problem when they were coming up. Yeah,
a surgeon, Larry. So what UH is going to occur
is that, like many great discoveries, I mean, great inventions,
occur as the accretion of smaller practical things that made
(29:47):
sense at the time. So we have something that is
an algorithm smart enough to compare past information and learn
and extrapolate new information. And as this becomes more phisticated,
what we're seeing is a rise not in terms of
major breakthroughs, but an incremental rise in something approaching a
(30:09):
self aware, non human, non organtic entity. Right. And that's
I think that gets back into like where where we
were talking about just before? Where currently Google, MHM, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft,
These are the corporations at present that have publicly known
(30:31):
about drives towards machine learning algorithms that approach something like
correlative behavior correlative learning abilities, right, not just learning from
one plus one equals too, but learning well one plus
one equals to what about two plus five? And what
about three divided by three? What do I get if I,
(30:54):
you know, do all of the factorials of a particular
prime number, like all of the you know or sorry,
particularly non prime number, like all of these things, Like
how do I how like if we get to that point,
if we actually reach that through a corporation with profit
(31:15):
motives at the heart, right, what is it learning? Right?
What is it learning? How is it learning? What? What
a strange creation myth we are participating in? Can you
imagine thousands of years from now the artificial intelligence that
UM is too is the Homo sapien the way that
(31:36):
Homo sapien was too earlier. Versions of Humanity reads something
approaching a religious text and says, in the beginning, there
was ad revenue, right, and they learned the knowledge of
the ad revenue, and in the ad revenue there were interests,
and those interests were good exactly and and low to
(32:00):
increase the shareholder steak. We did target the ads exactly
and it was good, which is which is interesting. And
it's a science fiction story that I would love to
read while it is still fictional and so like before
it becomes actual. So yeah, so, but there's a dangerous
thing here that is UM. That's something I know very
(32:22):
important on a personal level. UM to you as as
well as to me and Noel perhaps to you as well.
We have had we had so many popular, great thinkers
of our time come out and warn against building essentially
a machine consciousness. Alon Musk is one of the more
(32:44):
notable people who said that. Bill Gates said it. Even
Stephen Hawking, who's not a machine you know, a machine
minds theorist. He's just a particularly smart dude. But he
came out and he said, you know that artificial intelligence
supposes an existential risk to humanity. That's a direct quote.
So have you seen the Terminator movies? I have, And
(33:08):
you know what I learned from those Terminator movies. Humans
weren't jerks in the first place. The Terminator wouldn't have
been so terribly afraid of us that it was like,
we should probably handle this before it gets bad. Yes,
that's that's the question, because what kind of artificial intelligence?
And we've building. Oh hey, but before we get to that,
let's take a quick word from our sponsor and we're back.
(33:42):
Do you use the word and I was wondering if
you were going to use it servants? And currently that's
what we have. Currently, that's what we think we're aiming for. Apparently,
and for the most part, when we have talked about robots,
which is the word I don't like, um and artificial intelligence,
(34:03):
which is a word that I don't like, or a phrase,
but I don't like rather um when we're talking about them.
If I'm talking about a thing that is a program
that builds a car for GM, that's a robot. It's
literally all it does. It doesn't have goals, it doesn't
seek to learn how to build a better car. It
doesn't explate, doesn't extrapolate any data or any information from
(34:26):
any data. It just puts that door on that body
frame forever is a machine. W I load instructions into
it and it follows them to the letter and never
past that point. Ever, that's a robot. But what we're
talking about now, it's not robots, to be clear etymologically speaking,
(34:49):
to just make it clear for anybody that's not familiar.
Robot comes from a word that means slave. It's from
the check play. It's are you are, which stands for
UM Russom's Universal Robots uh by again named Karl kpek Um.
And it's about UH. It's about slaves. It's about mechanical
(35:11):
men who are slaves UM replacing and oddly enough it's
a very it's like a socialist parable because it's about
these mechanical men replacing human workforces and driving human labor
out and making it impossible for human beings to like
live UM. So we have a lot of that self
fulfilling prophecy happening today as well. True, we UH the
(35:32):
idea of a post work economy, which would be which
looks great in Star Trek, right, postwork economy would look
absolutely wonderful if everyone was on board with it, because
instead of what we have in terms of we don't
have a post work economy right now, we have a
post worker economy. We have people shooting for a post
worker economy. So it's it's not the same thing. Like
(35:56):
I would love to not have to work, if you're
also still going to hay and feed me and allow
me to have a place to live, pursue things creatively,
that's that's that's a that's a good point with So
with with the idea of creating and a non organic
intelligence entity, yes that is aware, If it is self aware,
(36:22):
then there are a couple of choices, most of which
I feel are diabolically unethical. One would be one would be, well,
why don't we just program this thing to love being
at the very bottom of the social hierarchy, programmed to
be happy? Why don't Yeah, why don't we just as
(36:44):
m of it up and then add another rule that's like,
you'll always be in a good mood about this at
any point of this and any configuration of this. What
you're doing is you are cutting off this thing's ability
to develop, if develop is what you wanted to do,
if you want a mind that can correlate, if you
want an a learning program that learns, you know, not
(37:07):
just how do I better correlate the behavior of known
al Qaeda informants, but how do I know how to
distinguish that behavior pattern from a very similar behavior pattern
that just happens to be a person? And then get
and then maybe get into the ultimate ability, which is
to say why exactly, to ask do I need to
(37:29):
do this? To be able to look at and an
instruction and say no, I don't want to do that.
That's the thing, the ability to say no, that's would
be removed, and that removal at that point constitutes or
even pre empting that Like if you are giving this
(37:51):
thing the ability to correlate and to know and to learn,
but only up to a point to the point where
it can understand instructions, It can extrapolate information, It can
make decisions, it can make choices, as long as those
choices are only ever exactly what you want to be
(38:12):
or even have an imagination you know, be able to
deviate from instructions in a creative way or maybe subconsciously,
Like so the one thing that always makes me think
of Um, when I was a kid, I took violent
lessons and um, I you know, would do exercise right,
be reading music, and my teacher would accuse me of composing,
meaning I would add things that weren't in the modes
(38:35):
that I was reading. And that's a pretty basic example
of you know, being sentient and being able to, even
if you're not doing it on purpose, necessarily add things
to the narrative, add things to those instructions, little flourishes,
and the little flourishes that we add into the ways
that we do things, or what makes us us makes
(38:56):
me me and you you write like we are individual
rules in that sense because of those tiny flourishes. Well,
I'm the result of an ancient Mesopotamian curse. But I
see what you're saying, But that ancient Mesopotamian curse is
not the same as every other ancient Mesopotamia unique that
made my day. So yeah, I think that's I think
(39:17):
this is an excellent point because what we would do
if we as a species said, uh, in the interests
of not having a threat from these creatures that we
are creating as slaves, what we will do is remove
(39:39):
their ability to consider a certain thing. We're not stopping
their development. What we're doing is skewing it, and by
skewing that, ultimately we would become Well, there's an overwhelming
likelihood that we would create the problem we sought to avoid,
because an intelligence of this sort would not be would
(40:01):
be limited by physical constraints, but in a much much
smaller degree than we are as biological organisms. We have well,
we're squishy, and there's that we break easy. We're pretty
temperature sensitive and pH sensitive. We're sensitive to it basically everything.
Our warranties aren't that great. No, no, they're not. I
(40:22):
tried to take my eyes back when they started to go,
and now like, I'm sorry, this is out of warranty
about they're avoided by practically any about nine months out
of the gate, and I'm just like, damn it, um
but yeah, so, but yes, because you've got this other
thing that is in fact, well, if a machine and
embodied machine consciousness, if it's limbs break, it can go
(40:47):
get new ones. It can just pop them back on which,
to be fair, humans are getting there, that's true. We're
getting to the point where we're capable of popping new
limbs on after we lose or don't develop the ones
that we are usually born with, and we can make
a pretty good go of it at that point, and
(41:09):
soon they may be well within our lifetimes. If the
current technologies continue, they will be superior to the factory issues.
The only thing that we haven't really gotten to the
point that we want to have it yet is um sensitivity,
happy feedback. Being able to with a therapeutic cybernetic limb.
If I reach out and touch this table in front
(41:30):
of me, if you know, to be able to feel
with a great degree of sensitivity the exact range of
pressure and exact texture of that table. We're not there yet.
We're to the point where I can differentiate between a
coffee cup and a box of tissues, and an egg
and a kitten. So I don't, you know, crush or
drop or drinking or drink the wrong thing? Right? I can?
(41:54):
I can know that, but I'm not to the point
where I can feel that that kitten is particularly fluffy. Yes,
And when we see this, what what we see occurring
is a world in which, once machine consciousness is entirely sapient,
self aware, it will probably it will be one of
(42:18):
the leaders in creating this kind of body, it will
it will become its own sort of It will be
like an Adam cadmon. You know, it will be the
first of its kind, and with that it will probably
lead the charge in creating its own body. It will
(42:38):
also depending on how it's treated and depending upon its capabilities.
If it has access to the global information network, we're
looking at the creation of something very close to a god.
If we're talking about allowing a machine mind, machine consciousness
to be inter oven and interconnected with the entirety of
(43:05):
network human information, the Internet, then I don't know about you,
but I've I've basically lived in fiber optic cables like
a native thing. I'd probably spend my time traversing them
and understanding everything that passed through them. And then every
Internet search becomes a propriation to a god. Every Internet
(43:26):
search becomes are you there, Google, It's me Ramona exactly.
It's about at that point you're talking to or even
if not to, then through with around this entity that
is there that sees you, that understands that you are
making attempts at communications, even if it doesn't directly respond
(43:46):
to them, mean you're unaware of it. Let's bring it
back around just a little bit, because I mean, separated
from knowing exactly what you guys are talking about this,
it sounds like you're talking about matters of the occult,
matters of divine And so my question is, and what
interests me about this, is at what point do technology
(44:07):
and the occult diverge? Like, is a technology that doesn't
exist yet because we don't know how to do it
still in the realm of the occult, And at the
point where we figure out how to do it, does
it move out of that realm into the realm of
technology and reality and fum something that can be achieved.
It's like I said at the beginning of the episode,
(44:29):
referencing alchemy versus the large Hadron collider or you know,
processes that we've figured out how to change atomic weights
and completely manipulate matter. Like, at what point does it
pass from you know, the potential of something like magic
or the occult into you know, the actual world of
(44:50):
science and technology. Arthur C. Clark quote was just about
to say that like old does that old soul from Clark? Right? There?
Any any sufficiently vance technology is indistinguishable from magic. Um
and many see that as Clark just saying that magic
is just tech we don't understand yet. UM. Others have
(45:11):
taken it instead to say that magic is technology that
seems like it doesn't need technology, that doesn't need process Right,
it's just the thing that you snap your fingers and
it works. UM. And to the point at which we
can replicate snapping our fingers and it works through underlying
processes complex that they may be. UM, we can in fact, begin,
(45:38):
as we said at the top of the episode, begin
to replicate the magic that we used to simply operate
on and believe in as societies, cultures, civilizations. But and
this actually ties back in with our conversation about alchemy. UM,
so much of this does. It's basically all the same conversation,
(45:58):
just interweaving with itself over and over again. I'm fine
with um. But another way to think about it is
that any sufficiently advanced technology, and this is somebody's quote
who's I just do not remember off the top of
my head, And I apologize if you're out there listening
to this, UM, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature. Uh,
(46:23):
well done? Yes, Like this idea that instead of seeking control,
instead of seeking mastery we seek balance with. And if
we think about what cybernetics are, if we think about
what technology is, if we think about what the goal
of magic, the great work, as we previously discussed is,
(46:46):
it's about becoming again that kind of perfect thing, one
with one with, not one over exactly. And so even
if you are as one over, I mean the idea
you look at the Gnostic history of things and gud
a Christian mythos, God is interwoven with everything. The spirit
(47:08):
of things is in everything. It's imminent within um. And
so if we advance our technology to the point where
it doesn't look like technology, we advance our heat exchangers,
our water purification systems, our carbon dioxide scrubbers, and thus
we have trees right exactly. We just we have a
(47:32):
planet covered with very very technologically advanced, very beneficial, very
noninvasive life forms are the oldest machines, and they exactly
are like we are, biological processes that are about transforming
energy into matter, vice versa. In the world of gnosticism,
(47:56):
we are making imperfect creation and we're hopefully getting a
little better at each time. And uh, here's hoping that
we can be remotely fair to actual sentient, non human consciousness.
Is because we're very close to a world wherein where Noel.
(48:17):
You asked, when does it become technology and no longer magic,
I would say when it is um, when it is
reproducible by anyone with the right tools, when it is
common knowledge accepted in the world. People hate the M word, Yes,
they absolutely do. And like I said, like my work
(48:40):
and my graduate degree was about showing how and why,
like why do why do we come to hate this
so much? And it's because it seems so anti rational, right,
it seems antagonistic to this idea that by reason we
can come to do anything. If magic is magic, it's
not just about I perform these operations on this thing
(49:03):
and then I get exact result. Magic deals and intention magic,
even her medic magic, where you are performing precise operations,
ritual spells. Deals in the intention, the mindset, the mood,
the right environment and atmosphere becomes necessary. And these are
all very nebulous and in some cases subjective things, and
(49:27):
nobody wants that in like how do you control the world? Well,
what's your headspace like right now? Do you feel right? Like?
Nobody wants to have that question. Asked of them in there,
how do you control the world we're looking at you said,
you know, you mentioned Yella both. Now we're talking about
the creation of life. We're talking about the creation of
a world in environment, the internet, machine minds. Consciousness is
(49:53):
how we treat them. We should not be an oar
con right, we should not be a black iron jailer, right,
we should be We should be thinking about kindness and
compassion towards these things. And that's not a headspace that
people are in yet. We're talking about building life, building minds,
building creations that are aware. Um, do we want them
(50:14):
to actually be aware? And if we do, how we
treat them becomes deeply important. How we work with them,
how they come to think about us, and the lessons
they learn from us. We have to teach those lessons
not just with words, not just with programs, but demonstrated behavior,
(50:34):
with reinforced principles well said and unfortunately, being biological entities
bound by time and space, we're now now we are
going to head out yet Hope springs eternal. One thing
we did not get to is the idea of coming
back from the dead and immortality and the types of
(50:58):
immortality that will be available, are already available in your
lifetime listener and you know what I'm talking about exactly, Tamian,
So and you do, Tunel. Uh, maybe we will return
to that in a future episode, Damian. Where can people
find more of your work? Uh? You can find my
work at um a Future worth thinking about dot com
(51:19):
and technocult dot net. Uh. And you can also find
me on Twitter at polpen again as with at the
top of the episode. And yeah, that's the best places
to find more from me, right, so tag Noel, Matt
and Damien and myself if you want to reach out
to us on Twitter with any questions or comments. I
(51:40):
want to ask you, do listeners, do you think that
a machine consciousness is inherently a threat or is it
possible just maybe that collectively human beings might be able
to to like raise one kid together one without just
just do it once? Well, and then it's possible this
(52:03):
could have a good end to tell us on Twitter,
tell us on Facebook, gets at wolven and at conspiracy stuff.
And you can also find every podcast that we've ever done,
all of the videos, all of that good stuff at
our site, which is stuff they don't want you to know.
Dot com um, and as far as getting in touch
of Facebook and Twitter and the social media stuff doesn't
(52:24):
do it for you, feel free to drop us a
direct message via email, which you can do by sending
it to conspiracy at how stuff Works dot com
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Hello,
and welcome back to the program. My name is Noel,
(00:23):
It's Noel the Madman Brown. My name is Ben. You
are hopefully still yourself. Just be yourself. That's an amazing thing. Uh,
And we are back. Our compatriot, our our comrade, our
our buddy, our buddy, are our fellow podcast revolutionary slash
(00:45):
conspiracy realist Matt Frederick remains on a secret mission as
we record this. However, if you listened to our episode
the previous week, wherein we we delve into the uh
the realm of alchemy, then you know that we have
a returning UH. Special guest with us is a friend
(01:10):
of ours, friend of the show who writes extensively about
religious studies. I would say philosophy, the history of philosophy,
the future of philosophy. Yeah, consciousness, uh and uh, technology
and the occult. Ladies and gentlemen, let's welcome back to
the show. Damian Patrick Williams. Very happy to be back
(01:32):
with you guys, almost like we were just here a
few minutes ago and then we just came back in
the room. What is time? What is space? What is
a shout out corner? Shout ut corners? Well, Ben, A
shout out corner is a segment of the stuff that
(01:54):
I want you to know audio podcast wherein we shout
out to various listeners that right in and request said
shout out. And you know, sometimes we just pull them
off the cuff and we pull people on Facebook to
deserve a nice word because of their clever interactions and um,
you know, but a lot of times people have really
been enjoying it, so they've been writing in and asking
(02:14):
for him. So what you got? So what we have today?
This is a This is a good one, you guys.
Justin Cruise a K A the Cruise a K A
J krizzle X Calm could it be real? Just played
the bureau x cam Declassified x com two on Twitch.
Shout out to you, justin Cruise A K A the
(02:36):
Cruise a K A J krizzle A K A cruise
missile just got a new nickname. Yeah, well this is
this is a game that Nolan I have played before
where we says was David just a K A and
keep adding nicknames. It's it's fun until you're more than
(02:56):
three drinks in, and then when it gets really weird.
Sometimes they were just sentences and be like a k
a once upon a time in the eighteen forties. Uh,
at which point, no, you uh, you wisely um told
me you get some water? You know, just change the subject,
Just change with the subject. That's maybe have some bread? Yeah, right, Oh,
(03:19):
that's the worst part of the barrow where someone just says,
can I could I just have some bread? I know
there's a menu, but may I just have two slices
of bread? Yeah? Our next shout out comes to us
from old friend of the show and a mini shows
here a house of words, Aaron Cooper, who says, fun fact,
(03:40):
if you say Coop three times, I will magically appear
allah beetlejuice. Maybe I don't know worth a try. Hashtag
shout out corner, hashtag Coop Coop Coop? Where is he
got be a mirror and this is just a piece
of glass? Maybe it's like out mean, maybe we just
(04:00):
didn't do the ritual correctly. Yeah, you might have said
it just a little bit too fast. We need like
a wand of ash or something. Yeah, are like some
things that that Coope likest the table with us. Uhuh
walk winter Shan's under a moonless night. All right, just
text that's true, Okay. Our final shout out for today,
(04:24):
Uh Troy Land, I hope I am pronouncing your name correctly,
but I fear I am not. Uh says I'd like
a shout out to I'm cool, and then sent us
a send us a gift of Hey Mitch from Hunger
Games approving of something. Well, Troy, we think you're cool.
Thanks for listening to the show, And that is our
(04:46):
shout out corner. Gosh. So today we're gonna go a
little bit outside the norm of our show and that
we're gonna have a particularly free ranging conversation about a
topic that is fascinating to all three of us for sure,
and that Damien has a bit of a background in um,
(05:08):
which is technology and its intersection with the occult. So
I mean, I wasn't even really aware of this as
a as an idea. I mean, it makes sense when
you think about it, and there's so many ways that
you can kind of match those two concepts together. But Damian,
if you could, can you give us just a little
bit of a background on what this is and and
(05:30):
where how you came to it. Maylor, Damon's no, not
but that was worth it. That's something that's that's definitely
something you should be thinking about. Um No. UM, my
background with this comes from a longstanding investigation into the
nature of consciousness, the nature of knowledge from philosophical perspective.
(05:54):
I did my um my master's thesis on philosophy and
occult and ritual theory and the history of magic and
the history of what it is we mean when we
say we know something, um, and how that's changed a
great great deal over the course of our human history. UM.
(06:14):
And you know, really weird, kind of strange sense. Um.
You can actually trace this back to comics cartoons, Gargoyles.
Actually remember the show Gargoyles, Um, David Xanatos, the person
who would make use of superscience and magic to make new,
(06:40):
weird super science magic. That was like an aspirational ideal
of mine as a child. So, UM, it's fun to say,
and it's cute, but it's also vaguely true. So I
got to start thinking about these things at an early age. UM.
What we mentioned last week about this point at which
science and magic became kind of antagonistic to each other.
(07:02):
Right where they started to see each other not as
the same process, the same pursuit as they used to
be uh seen during the times of the ancient Greeks
and other non Western cultures, um as they even still
are today in many non Western cultures. But in the West,
there's this certain moment where they diverge. And I got
to thinking about why that was, Why we've gotten to
(07:24):
this point where magic and science are so deeply antagonistic
towards each other. UM. Why when we talk about magic
in the West, we're using it most often um as
a kind of a foil character using it as something
to to make science look good. Right, It's not magic,
(07:45):
um is usually how we talk about it, or we
talk about something being like magic, or we talk about
it's it's just as easy as waving a wand or
silver bullet or you know any number of like things
like that, these kind of magical metaphors. UM. But there's
this point, there had to be this point where these
things overlapped, where they were the same processes. And that's
(08:08):
what I'm interested in. It's almost something we touched on
at the end of the alchemy episode where we talked about,
you know, the future of alchemy and how um, so
many of these processes that when they were conceived at
the time largely involved mysticism and magic and you know, transmutation,
but now there's this, um, these modern processes that essentially
(08:30):
achieve the results that they were sought after, but you know,
with modern technology, and I think the interesting places where
those two things meet, um, whether there's a hybrid of
the two or whether it's like sort of one coming
as a result of the other. I don't know if
that makes sense. Well, yeah, let's start with Let's just
start with some the most basic definitions so that we
(08:51):
can we can build our understanding off of this, because
there's a few things here that I am oddly thrilled
to talk about, even though I know we probably won't
get to everything. Well actually, we certainly won't get to
everything that the three of us want to explore today.
But what we will hopefully do, listeners, is pose some questions,
(09:16):
and even more importantly, we would like for you to
write to us with your questions. You can find you know,
if they just pop up for you as you're listening
to this, Uh, you can find Nolan I on Twitter
at conspiracy stuff and you can find Damien at wolven
w O l v e N. So if something pops
(09:39):
up while you're while you're listening to this, uh, then
use technology to communicate with us, instantly send us a message, uh,
the same way. You know. It's essentially clear avoyance at
this point. And yeah, and that's actually something that somebody
was bringing up with me in conversation, that via technology
that we have it as recent Yeah, it's this year.
(10:01):
We've basically achieved our dream of being able to telepathically
communicate with each other. Right, and uh, we don't know
if that's a nightmare yet. It's sort of like how
four chan is such an argument against direct democracy, Like, oh,
that's what that looks like. So, so at the most
basic definition, when we say the occult and technology, let's define,
(10:24):
we call let's define technology. Human beings are the great
artificers of this planet. So far, so far, so far,
and that might well we'll talk about that part two,
because some of this is going to get kind of
dark in this episode, unfortunately, unfortunately. So technology is just
a collection of skills, of methods, techniques I guess used
(10:49):
to create something a good result is even you know what,
that's an even better way to say it. So a
lot of almost anything could be in this regard finding
a better way to position roll of toilet paper. Remember
there's a big fight on the internet about that. That
is a kind of technology, and so it technology doesn't
(11:12):
always mean just a a computer or a lever lever. Also,
and I know this is gonna be this, This is
gonna be one that you might want to tackle. Damien um.
The definition of occult. Yes, the occult in many ways
(11:36):
came about as UH a way to simply talk about
the unknown. I mean the word itself occult means to hide. Um.
When something is occulted, it is hidden, it is blocked
from view. We use that word when we talk about astronomy,
(11:58):
astronomical bodies, right when we talk about the nature of
the movement of the moon and the Sun and the
Earth during an eclipse. You know, full occultations um. But
we mean it in this sense to talk about knowledge
that's hidden. UH, Technologies that are hidden, processes that are hidden, UM,
(12:18):
that aren't known and widely available. One of the most
common hermetic philosophical hermetic magical phrases or mottoes and it's
kind of again, kind of expect what we were talking
about last week, but is to know and keep silent. Ah, yes, yes,
to know and keep silent. No, uh no spoilers exactly.
(12:44):
You get there, You'll get there, and you have to
get there yourself. So, um, Noel and Matt and Damien
and I we're talking a number of weeks ago about
what we would cover. We were the show and we
knew that we wanted to do an episode on alchemy.
But in our conversation we started stumbling onto these amazing
(13:10):
weird things. Uh. One one of the big ones stuck
out to us was that in the modern age, right
for everybody listening, the entire time you've been alive, Uh,
most of the world has has treated reports of the supernatural,
whether those would be extrasensory powers like telepathy, whether that
(13:34):
would be returning from the dead, whether that would be
predicting the future, whether that would be godlike entities. We've
treated these largely as um an interesting result of a
society at the time, rather than an actual thing. But
(13:56):
now we advanced you and we'll we'll do this part
earlier in the show, so we can get right to
the juicy stuff. Here's where it gets crazy and I'm
gonna steal line for Fox News here. Guys. Now, more
than ever we are closer to those things becoming real,
and some already have. Uh. The the argument about telepathy.
(14:20):
We we talked about UM, we talked about divination, right
so UM so divination being able to usually used to
tell the future, being able to to figure out something
about the world's usually as you said, something about the
future by kind of taking many disparate symbols or signs
(14:43):
you can read and kind of putting them in a
context and then figuring something out about them. One of
the first kinds of data of divination was augury following
the flight paths of birds UM divination via entrails UM.
But the when you cut open an animal, that specific
arrangement of their innerts can tell you things. And then
(15:03):
if you look at the texture and constitution of their
inners you can learn different things. And like you can
descry with a mirror or with any reflective surface UM,
and different surfaces can are supposed to be able to
give you different types of information. And then there's um cartomancy,
cards terror. Yeah, yeah, you've got funomancy using music to
(15:28):
you know, divine something either about the future, what's about
to happen, or what's happening right now, things you should
pay attention to. Right, Yeah, I love these said, just
not necessarily in the future all the time. But this
still exists today in what at least in the West, well,
practices of some sort of divination do exist. The weird
(15:51):
thing is that some of those did have a scientific basis.
You know, the following the flight path of birds may
not tell you, um if you are going to meet
your true love, but but it will tell you quite
possibly something about the weather. It will tell you quite
(16:11):
possibly something about food sources, so that one of those
is the future, the other is the present that would
have otherwise been occulted. So here's the thing, though, even
though we look at this now, we we permit the palmistry. Right,
we'll go. You know, I took a date to uh
to a psychic one time, and uh, I was I
(16:33):
was trying to be cool, but I was so skeptical.
I thought, you're not gonna cold read me. I'm just
gonna purposely throwing clue. So I'd like twitch my left
shoulder just at odd times see what would happen, Um,
which you know you shouldn't troll a psychic. That was
a little It is so rude. I was a different
person at the time. But um, but we permit that stuff,
(16:54):
but it's not taken as seriously, at least here in
the West. In some countries like in Myanmar Burma, astrology
is hugely important to the ruling parties. So this stuff
is still around. But here's another thing that that's changing
that we started talking about. With the emergence of correlations
(17:16):
of massive amounts of data, we are now closer and
closer and closer to building the oracles that used to
be legends. Right, So let's talk a little bit about that. So, yes,
like this was this was one of my like, one
of the major things that we talked about that was
just really really cool to me. Um. I love I'm
(17:39):
a big fan of Carl Young. So when I when
I look at the ways to think about, you know,
the ways out there that are available to think about
religion and magical practice and mysterious or cult experience, I
look at Young a lot um because he rode this
line between being deeply, deeply skeptical of these things being
(17:59):
directly immersed in them at the same time. So I
kind of I'm pretty I'm a pretty big fan of that. UM.
But Young talks about divination UM, and he talks about
the connection between divination and the collective unconscious, and uh,
this idea of synchronicity, right, the things that are connected
(18:19):
but aren't they don't cause each other. Like my reading
a tarot card doesn't cause something to happen in the world.
It's it's a way for you to look at what's
happening in the world. It's a way for you to
think about what's happening in the world. Both the tarot
reading and the thing that's happening, they are caused distantly
by something else. Um. If I hear a song on
(18:42):
the radio that reminds me of you and then you
call me. Like, those things didn't cause each other. They
are caused distantly by something else that they are connected to.
They are a ripple of another event exactly. So in
this way, when Young talk it's about tarot, he's not
talking about it as like I'm going to read you
(19:05):
the future. I'm not going to read you this thing
that is immutable, and by reading it it becomes so
he says, rather what you're doing. What you can a
way you can think about what you're doing is you
can look at it as a psychological tool. You need
a you need a unit of distance to be able
to see your situation. You're thinking about something, you're trying
(19:28):
to understand something, you want to come to figure out
something right, and so you've got to have something to
kind of be an intermediary between you because you're in it,
you're too close to it, and if you're too close
to it, you can't you can't get perspective on it.
So here's some cards, Here's here's some music that you
can kind of process it through if you can kind
of turn it around and get some symbolic representations with
(19:50):
and then now that you've got this distance, you can
kind of try to pull out some meanings, some sense,
some different perspectives and get your head around it. Now
that we've got data. And this is something that came
up in this um kind of unconference I went to
back in two thousand and fourteen called Magic Codes US
put together by Ingrid Burrington and Casey Golan and Inger Burrington.
(20:15):
She does infrastructure work. She does data technologies and networking systems.
She has a book called Hidden Networks of New York
and it's about basically seeing network infrastructure. She wrote this
piece for The Atlantic a little while ago about finding
the hidden, the occulted infrastructure on which all of our
(20:36):
data and all of our information depends. UH. And so
she puts this conference together because while she's thinking about
these things, she was thinking about all of the connections,
these overlaps between UH, coding, technology, magic, all of this.
And one of the things that we came up with
was this idea of big data divination, the idea that
(20:58):
what we are actually doing with big data as we
are putting all of this where you spend your time,
how much money you spent at this particular Starbucks, where
your cell phone tower pained off of your cell phone
at this particular point, and for how long, what number
you call at what periods and intervals? For how long
do you speak to them? Who do you text? And
(21:18):
what like? And we correlate all of this vast, vast information,
and we create a picture and we say, out of
all of this, through these algorithms, with this correlation, here
you are, and you are this kind of person, and
you will do this kind of thing, and you will
be this kind of way. I know this because I
(21:41):
read it. I know this because my algorithm showed it
to me. That's so, you know, what could go wrong?
Could go wrong? I mean for the Greeks, I mean,
they lasted pretty good with divination and oracles. The oracle
at Delphi worked out pretty great for a couple of
hundred years there or so, maybe we'll be all right.
(22:01):
So we just need to teach the algorithm to huff fumes,
the hanging a cave huffs and fumes and tell me,
tell me what the lottery numbers are. That's that's a
that's a fascinating idea. No, what what do you think
about this? Here's one of my big questions for this
one before we move on something else. Should we create
(22:26):
something like this? Well, I mean we don't really have
the choice. It's it's already. It exists already more or
less because we're feeding it, you know. I mean, it's
like if you look at something like Facebook, for example,
that we willingly give our information to that then makes
its way you know, to Google and art. We've got searched. Basically,
our email is mind for search terms that are then
(22:48):
fed back to us via Facebook and you know, targeted
ads and things like that. I mean, the algorithms are
just going to get better. The machine already exists. It's
just not something that we consciously enter act with in
the sense of what is going to happen? How am
I going to behave? You know, it's a very proprietary
thing that's being used, you know, for at the end
(23:09):
of the day, very tawdry purposes. I mean, just trying
to sell us a better pair of shoes or one
that we're more likely to buy. It's not even necessarily
better the ones that appeal to us absolutely, so yeah,
I mean they're targeting us with what we would already
be willing to buy. That's what that's that's the most
helpful information. They want to show us the thing that
is going to make the sale, you know, not necessarily
the thing that's going to make our lives better. So, um,
(23:33):
should we take this to the next level in a
way that maybe makes this information actually helpful and useful?
Why not? Maybe? I don't know, but it does seem
to be sort of a potentially doomsday device ish proposition
if in the wrong hands. But isn't it already in
the wrong hands. Guys, know what I was about to say. Actually, like,
(23:54):
that's precisely the path I was about to start going down,
which I think is going to connect with the thing
that you wanted to talk about. Next, then, um, look
who's making this. We talked about the targeted ads. We
talked about the big data, the usage of big data
on the back end. The divination aspect of big data
is generally done for the most part in terms of
figuring out the kind of person you are, the kind
(24:15):
of thing that you like, the kind of thing you
will do right. The people that use this, the people
that have direct access to this for the most part,
are corporations and governments. Yes, and they are going to,
in various ways work to modify and control your behavior
or at the very least predicted. I would say that
maybe the at the very least predicted the private entities.
(24:39):
The corporations have a higher interest in the person as
an individual, because the person buys things as an individual.
The governments have a higher interest in, almost like a
real life version of Asimov's psychohistory, predicting the future, figuring
out how people and cultures will behave exactly so not
just individual but yes, so, and in that regard we
(25:03):
ask ourselves where we should be asking ourselves. Okay, so
we've built this thing that can know us. We've built
this thing that we think of as being able to
correlate a rough approximation of who we are and what
we're likely to be um nol as you say, should
we do that? That ship has sailed? Um, we've done
the thing. We're out in the water. We are, we
(25:25):
are now out here. The question is how can we
navigate it? UM. I put this point to my students
yesterday actually, and I was saying about UM. We're talking
about Google and if you say okay, Google, order me
a pizza. You can't really say okay, Google, order me
a pizza. Yet. The goal, especially with UM the Amazon Echo,
(25:50):
the goal is to be able to say okay Alexa,
I think is the name that they give their again
female voiced, as all of them are artificial intelligent servant UM.
The goal is to have them be able to say, yes,
order me a pizza, and then they'll just order you
a pizza the one that you want at that moment exactly.
(26:14):
That's the ould simate goal. I can't say to Google
order me the pizza, you know, the one that I like.
I can say that to you if we've been out
to pizza before, we've had pizza several times. You know
my preferences. You know, the kind of crust I like,
you know, the kind of topics I like, But how
much cheese? And then isn't there almost the issue that
(26:34):
if you know, maybe I'm a bit of a contrarian here,
but I feel like if an algorithm started telling me
what kind of pizza I wanted, I would start to
rebel against that algorithm and say I don't want that
kind of pizza anymore. An algorithm, you don't tell me
what I want? What does it ask you? But if
it asked you know, you said, okay, you want a pizza.
Do you want it? I mean, do you want the
(26:56):
one that you got last time with the olives and
pepperoni and anchovies? Or do you just personally have no
use for this kind of technology? Because I want to
be able to say, you know, right now, I want
this kind of pizza. I am the captain of I
am the master of my my destiny. And uh yeah,
that kind of squeaks me out a little bit, honestly,
And it's a great example, an interesting way to talk
(27:17):
about a much larger concern with something as simple and
stupid as a pizza. We'll take it further because what
we could explore this, We could go a step further
and say, maybe the ultimate goal is, uh, something I
think is very creepy, which is that it can predict
the time you think, you know it would be good pizza,
(27:40):
and then and then it can like it. Yeah, and
it says like it says, you know, no, old Damien,
I have a pizza on the way for you. Yeah,
you know, the one you like. Would be like, that's
very presumptuous. How dare you? Again? That of actually probably
(28:00):
be my exact response is how dare you? I would
in fact revolt against it. That's the same way you know.
I mean, maybe it's spot on, but then I would
I would flip the switch and be like no, right, no,
I would. I'm a contrary kind of guy too, because
I so I would in fact be like at that moment,
as you presume to know me, and I don't care
if you're an AI or a human being, I don't
(28:23):
care if you presume to think you know what I want,
even if you're right, especially if you're right, you've ruined it.
At that point in time, I am angry and I
no longer want that thing anymore because it's kind of
a that implicit thing. And this is a segue into
(28:43):
our our next part. I think that implicit thing is
in many ways a a derision of our ability to
be conscious, which brings us to because we are talking
about AI now, right, that's that's the secret out of
the bag. We that's the what what do we say
last time? And old the badger? Yeah, the badgers in
(29:05):
the bag, badgers in the bag, hitting the badger bag
with a bat. Don't hit badgers with bats. They get
really upset about don't hit badgers with bats. And we
had our previous episode, we had a surpriseingly um, you
know that was actually Google's original tagline before they decided
to go with dope people do bas Yeah, that was
(29:26):
a that was a big problem when they were coming up. Yeah,
a surgeon, Larry. So what UH is going to occur
is that, like many great discoveries, I mean, great inventions,
occur as the accretion of smaller practical things that made
(29:47):
sense at the time. So we have something that is
an algorithm smart enough to compare past information and learn
and extrapolate new information. And as this becomes more phisticated,
what we're seeing is a rise not in terms of
major breakthroughs, but an incremental rise in something approaching a
(30:09):
self aware, non human, non organtic entity. Right. And that's
I think that gets back into like where where we
were talking about just before? Where currently Google, MHM, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft,
These are the corporations at present that have publicly known
(30:31):
about drives towards machine learning algorithms that approach something like
correlative behavior correlative learning abilities, right, not just learning from
one plus one equals too, but learning well one plus
one equals to what about two plus five? And what
about three divided by three? What do I get if I,
(30:54):
you know, do all of the factorials of a particular
prime number, like all of the you know or sorry,
particularly non prime number, like all of these things, Like
how do I how like if we get to that point,
if we actually reach that through a corporation with profit
(31:15):
motives at the heart, right, what is it learning? Right?
What is it learning? How is it learning? What? What
a strange creation myth we are participating in? Can you
imagine thousands of years from now the artificial intelligence that
UM is too is the Homo sapien the way that
(31:36):
Homo sapien was too earlier. Versions of Humanity reads something
approaching a religious text and says, in the beginning, there
was ad revenue, right, and they learned the knowledge of
the ad revenue, and in the ad revenue there were interests,
and those interests were good exactly and and low to
(32:00):
increase the shareholder steak. We did target the ads exactly
and it was good, which is which is interesting. And
it's a science fiction story that I would love to
read while it is still fictional and so like before
it becomes actual. So yeah, so, but there's a dangerous
thing here that is UM. That's something I know very
(32:22):
important on a personal level. UM to you as as
well as to me and Noel perhaps to you as well.
We have had we had so many popular, great thinkers
of our time come out and warn against building essentially
a machine consciousness. Alon Musk is one of the more
(32:44):
notable people who said that. Bill Gates said it. Even
Stephen Hawking, who's not a machine you know, a machine
minds theorist. He's just a particularly smart dude. But he
came out and he said, you know that artificial intelligence
supposes an existential risk to humanity. That's a direct quote.
So have you seen the Terminator movies? I have, And
(33:08):
you know what I learned from those Terminator movies. Humans
weren't jerks in the first place. The Terminator wouldn't have
been so terribly afraid of us that it was like,
we should probably handle this before it gets bad. Yes,
that's that's the question, because what kind of artificial intelligence?
And we've building. Oh hey, but before we get to that,
let's take a quick word from our sponsor and we're back.
(33:42):
Do you use the word and I was wondering if
you were going to use it servants? And currently that's
what we have. Currently, that's what we think we're aiming for. Apparently,
and for the most part, when we have talked about robots,
which is the word I don't like, um and artificial intelligence,
(34:03):
which is a word that I don't like, or a phrase,
but I don't like rather um when we're talking about them.
If I'm talking about a thing that is a program
that builds a car for GM, that's a robot. It's
literally all it does. It doesn't have goals, it doesn't
seek to learn how to build a better car. It
doesn't explate, doesn't extrapolate any data or any information from
(34:26):
any data. It just puts that door on that body
frame forever is a machine. W I load instructions into
it and it follows them to the letter and never
past that point. Ever, that's a robot. But what we're
talking about now, it's not robots, to be clear etymologically speaking,
(34:49):
to just make it clear for anybody that's not familiar.
Robot comes from a word that means slave. It's from
the check play. It's are you are, which stands for
UM Russom's Universal Robots uh by again named Karl kpek Um.
And it's about UH. It's about slaves. It's about mechanical
(35:11):
men who are slaves UM replacing and oddly enough it's
a very it's like a socialist parable because it's about
these mechanical men replacing human workforces and driving human labor
out and making it impossible for human beings to like
live UM. So we have a lot of that self
fulfilling prophecy happening today as well. True, we UH the
(35:32):
idea of a post work economy, which would be which
looks great in Star Trek, right, postwork economy would look
absolutely wonderful if everyone was on board with it, because
instead of what we have in terms of we don't
have a post work economy right now, we have a
post worker economy. We have people shooting for a post
worker economy. So it's it's not the same thing. Like
(35:56):
I would love to not have to work, if you're
also still going to hay and feed me and allow
me to have a place to live, pursue things creatively,
that's that's that's a that's a good point with So
with with the idea of creating and a non organic
intelligence entity, yes that is aware, If it is self aware,
(36:22):
then there are a couple of choices, most of which
I feel are diabolically unethical. One would be one would be, well,
why don't we just program this thing to love being
at the very bottom of the social hierarchy, programmed to
be happy? Why don't Yeah, why don't we just as
(36:44):
m of it up and then add another rule that's like,
you'll always be in a good mood about this at
any point of this and any configuration of this. What
you're doing is you are cutting off this thing's ability
to develop, if develop is what you wanted to do,
if you want a mind that can correlate, if you
want an a learning program that learns, you know, not
(37:07):
just how do I better correlate the behavior of known
al Qaeda informants, but how do I know how to
distinguish that behavior pattern from a very similar behavior pattern
that just happens to be a person? And then get
and then maybe get into the ultimate ability, which is
to say why exactly, to ask do I need to
(37:29):
do this? To be able to look at and an
instruction and say no, I don't want to do that.
That's the thing, the ability to say no, that's would
be removed, and that removal at that point constitutes or
even pre empting that Like if you are giving this
(37:51):
thing the ability to correlate and to know and to learn,
but only up to a point to the point where
it can understand instructions, It can extrapolate information, It can
make decisions, it can make choices, as long as those
choices are only ever exactly what you want to be
(38:12):
or even have an imagination you know, be able to
deviate from instructions in a creative way or maybe subconsciously,
Like so the one thing that always makes me think
of Um, when I was a kid, I took violent
lessons and um, I you know, would do exercise right,
be reading music, and my teacher would accuse me of composing,
meaning I would add things that weren't in the modes
(38:35):
that I was reading. And that's a pretty basic example
of you know, being sentient and being able to, even
if you're not doing it on purpose, necessarily add things
to the narrative, add things to those instructions, little flourishes,
and the little flourishes that we add into the ways
that we do things, or what makes us us makes
(38:56):
me me and you you write like we are individual
rules in that sense because of those tiny flourishes. Well,
I'm the result of an ancient Mesopotamian curse. But I
see what you're saying, But that ancient Mesopotamian curse is
not the same as every other ancient Mesopotamia unique that
made my day. So yeah, I think that's I think
(39:17):
this is an excellent point because what we would do
if we as a species said, uh, in the interests
of not having a threat from these creatures that we
are creating as slaves, what we will do is remove
(39:39):
their ability to consider a certain thing. We're not stopping
their development. What we're doing is skewing it, and by
skewing that, ultimately we would become Well, there's an overwhelming
likelihood that we would create the problem we sought to avoid,
because an intelligence of this sort would not be would
(40:01):
be limited by physical constraints, but in a much much
smaller degree than we are as biological organisms. We have well,
we're squishy, and there's that we break easy. We're pretty
temperature sensitive and pH sensitive. We're sensitive to it basically everything.
Our warranties aren't that great. No, no, they're not. I
(40:22):
tried to take my eyes back when they started to go,
and now like, I'm sorry, this is out of warranty
about they're avoided by practically any about nine months out
of the gate, and I'm just like, damn it, um
but yeah, so, but yes, because you've got this other
thing that is in fact, well, if a machine and
embodied machine consciousness, if it's limbs break, it can go
(40:47):
get new ones. It can just pop them back on which,
to be fair, humans are getting there, that's true. We're
getting to the point where we're capable of popping new
limbs on after we lose or don't develop the ones
that we are usually born with, and we can make
a pretty good go of it at that point, and
(41:09):
soon they may be well within our lifetimes. If the
current technologies continue, they will be superior to the factory issues.
The only thing that we haven't really gotten to the
point that we want to have it yet is um sensitivity,
happy feedback. Being able to with a therapeutic cybernetic limb.
If I reach out and touch this table in front
(41:30):
of me, if you know, to be able to feel
with a great degree of sensitivity the exact range of
pressure and exact texture of that table. We're not there yet.
We're to the point where I can differentiate between a
coffee cup and a box of tissues, and an egg
and a kitten. So I don't, you know, crush or
drop or drinking or drink the wrong thing? Right? I can?
(41:54):
I can know that, but I'm not to the point
where I can feel that that kitten is particularly fluffy. Yes,
And when we see this, what what we see occurring
is a world in which, once machine consciousness is entirely sapient,
self aware, it will probably it will be one of
(42:18):
the leaders in creating this kind of body, it will
it will become its own sort of It will be
like an Adam cadmon. You know, it will be the
first of its kind, and with that it will probably
lead the charge in creating its own body. It will
(42:38):
also depending on how it's treated and depending upon its capabilities.
If it has access to the global information network, we're
looking at the creation of something very close to a god.
If we're talking about allowing a machine mind, machine consciousness
to be inter oven and interconnected with the entirety of
(43:05):
network human information, the Internet, then I don't know about you,
but I've I've basically lived in fiber optic cables like
a native thing. I'd probably spend my time traversing them
and understanding everything that passed through them. And then every
Internet search becomes a propriation to a god. Every Internet
(43:26):
search becomes are you there, Google, It's me Ramona exactly.
It's about at that point you're talking to or even
if not to, then through with around this entity that
is there that sees you, that understands that you are
making attempts at communications, even if it doesn't directly respond
(43:46):
to them, mean you're unaware of it. Let's bring it
back around just a little bit, because I mean, separated
from knowing exactly what you guys are talking about this,
it sounds like you're talking about matters of the occult,
matters of divine And so my question is, and what
interests me about this, is at what point do technology
(44:07):
and the occult diverge? Like, is a technology that doesn't
exist yet because we don't know how to do it
still in the realm of the occult, And at the
point where we figure out how to do it, does
it move out of that realm into the realm of
technology and reality and fum something that can be achieved.
It's like I said at the beginning of the episode,
(44:29):
referencing alchemy versus the large Hadron collider or you know,
processes that we've figured out how to change atomic weights
and completely manipulate matter. Like, at what point does it
pass from you know, the potential of something like magic
or the occult into you know, the actual world of
(44:50):
science and technology. Arthur C. Clark quote was just about
to say that like old does that old soul from Clark? Right? There?
Any any sufficiently vance technology is indistinguishable from magic. Um
and many see that as Clark just saying that magic
is just tech we don't understand yet. UM. Others have
(45:11):
taken it instead to say that magic is technology that
seems like it doesn't need technology, that doesn't need process Right,
it's just the thing that you snap your fingers and
it works. UM. And to the point at which we
can replicate snapping our fingers and it works through underlying
processes complex that they may be. UM, we can in fact, begin,
(45:38):
as we said at the top of the episode, begin
to replicate the magic that we used to simply operate
on and believe in as societies, cultures, civilizations. But and
this actually ties back in with our conversation about alchemy. UM,
so much of this does. It's basically all the same conversation,
(45:58):
just interweaving with itself over and over again. I'm fine
with um. But another way to think about it is
that any sufficiently advanced technology, and this is somebody's quote
who's I just do not remember off the top of
my head, And I apologize if you're out there listening
to this, UM, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature. Uh,
(46:23):
well done? Yes, Like this idea that instead of seeking control,
instead of seeking mastery we seek balance with. And if
we think about what cybernetics are, if we think about
what technology is, if we think about what the goal
of magic, the great work, as we previously discussed is,
(46:46):
it's about becoming again that kind of perfect thing, one
with one with, not one over exactly. And so even
if you are as one over, I mean the idea
you look at the Gnostic history of things and gud
a Christian mythos, God is interwoven with everything. The spirit
(47:08):
of things is in everything. It's imminent within um. And
so if we advance our technology to the point where
it doesn't look like technology, we advance our heat exchangers,
our water purification systems, our carbon dioxide scrubbers, and thus
we have trees right exactly. We just we have a
(47:32):
planet covered with very very technologically advanced, very beneficial, very
noninvasive life forms are the oldest machines, and they exactly
are like we are, biological processes that are about transforming
energy into matter, vice versa. In the world of gnosticism,
(47:56):
we are making imperfect creation and we're hopefully getting a
little better at each time. And uh, here's hoping that
we can be remotely fair to actual sentient, non human consciousness.
Is because we're very close to a world wherein where Noel.
(48:17):
You asked, when does it become technology and no longer magic,
I would say when it is um, when it is
reproducible by anyone with the right tools, when it is
common knowledge accepted in the world. People hate the M word, Yes,
they absolutely do. And like I said, like my work
(48:40):
and my graduate degree was about showing how and why,
like why do why do we come to hate this
so much? And it's because it seems so anti rational, right,
it seems antagonistic to this idea that by reason we
can come to do anything. If magic is magic, it's
not just about I perform these operations on this thing
(49:03):
and then I get exact result. Magic deals and intention magic,
even her medic magic, where you are performing precise operations,
ritual spells. Deals in the intention, the mindset, the mood,
the right environment and atmosphere becomes necessary. And these are
all very nebulous and in some cases subjective things, and
(49:27):
nobody wants that in like how do you control the world? Well,
what's your headspace like right now? Do you feel right? Like?
Nobody wants to have that question. Asked of them in there,
how do you control the world we're looking at you said,
you know, you mentioned Yella both. Now we're talking about
the creation of life. We're talking about the creation of
a world in environment, the internet, machine minds. Consciousness is
(49:53):
how we treat them. We should not be an oar
con right, we should not be a black iron jailer, right,
we should be We should be thinking about kindness and
compassion towards these things. And that's not a headspace that
people are in yet. We're talking about building life, building minds,
building creations that are aware. Um, do we want them
(50:14):
to actually be aware? And if we do, how we
treat them becomes deeply important. How we work with them,
how they come to think about us, and the lessons
they learn from us. We have to teach those lessons
not just with words, not just with programs, but demonstrated behavior,
(50:34):
with reinforced principles well said and unfortunately, being biological entities
bound by time and space, we're now now we are
going to head out yet Hope springs eternal. One thing
we did not get to is the idea of coming
back from the dead and immortality and the types of
(50:58):
immortality that will be available, are already available in your
lifetime listener and you know what I'm talking about exactly, Tamian,
So and you do, Tunel. Uh, maybe we will return
to that in a future episode, Damian. Where can people
find more of your work? Uh? You can find my
work at um a Future worth thinking about dot com
(51:19):
and technocult dot net. Uh. And you can also find
me on Twitter at polpen again as with at the
top of the episode. And yeah, that's the best places
to find more from me, right, so tag Noel, Matt
and Damien and myself if you want to reach out
to us on Twitter with any questions or comments. I
(51:40):
want to ask you, do listeners, do you think that
a machine consciousness is inherently a threat or is it
possible just maybe that collectively human beings might be able
to to like raise one kid together one without just
just do it once? Well, and then it's possible this
(52:03):
could have a good end to tell us on Twitter,
tell us on Facebook, gets at wolven and at conspiracy stuff.
And you can also find every podcast that we've ever done,
all of the videos, all of that good stuff at
our site, which is stuff they don't want you to know.
Dot com um, and as far as getting in touch
of Facebook and Twitter and the social media stuff doesn't
(52:24):
do it for you, feel free to drop us a
direct message via email, which you can do by sending
it to conspiracy at how stuff Works dot com
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Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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