July 9, 2025 • 38 mins
What happens when Barbie becomes your kid's AI best friend?
Look, we're already watching kids lose basic human skills because they can Google everything. Now Mattel wants to stick ChatGPT into toys so your eight-year-old can have deep conversations with Optimus Prime about life's meaning. Stanford says nobody under 18 should be touching this stuff, but apparently corporate profits trump child psychology. We're about to witness the first generation that never has to imagine anything because their toys will do it for them. Meanwhile, we're racing toward a 15-hour work week where robots do everything, leaving men, especially, scrambling for purpose in a world that no longer needs their Protestant work ethic. The future looks like either Ready Player One or we all become batteries for our robot overlords - and honestly, I'm not sure which is worse.
Listen now to discover how to protect your kids' humanity in an increasingly artificial world.
Topics Discussed:
- Why AI-powered toys represent a bigger threat than Terminator's Skynet
- How ChatGPT integration removes children's need for imagination and creativity
- The concerning link between AI exposure and mental health breakdowns in young people
- Why Stanford researchers say no one under 18 should use AI technology
- How losing our imagination muscles affects human development and problem-solving
- The coming economic disruption of widespread job automation and universal basic income
- Why men's mental health will suffer most when work-based identity disappears
- How virtual reality and AI dependency mirror dystopian movie predictions
- The difference between helpful technology and creativity-killing shortcuts
- What happens when an entire generation grows up with "AI privilege"
----
MORE FROM THE FIT MESS:
Connect with us on Threads, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tiktok
Subscribe to The Fit Mess on Youtube
Join our community in the Fit Mess Facebook group
----
LINKS TO OUR PARTNERS:
-
Explore the many benefits of cold therapy for your body with Nurecover
-
Muse's Brain Sensing Headbands Improve Your Meditation Practice.
-
Get a Free One Year Supply of AG1 Vitamin D3+K2, 5 Travel Packs
-
You Need a Budget helps you quickly get out of debt, and save money faster!
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hi there, it's the Fitmas.
Admittedly a name that doesn't really fit what we talk about anymore.
It feels weird.
We might need to switch that up soon.
So stay tuned for that.
I'm Jeremy and I've been using computers for a while.
And that's about the extent of my knowledge of the topics we talk about.
But Jason, you have deep, deep knowledge and how all the AI and the internet and thecomputers and the buttons and all the things do the things.
(00:23):
Been doing this a long time.
Doing this a long time.
So that's why we talk about AI, because we're fascinated by it and we're fascinated in howit's affecting our mental health and all of the aspects of reality and life as we know
them.
another headline that caught my eye as we were looking for things to talk about.
I'll read the headline in a second.
(00:44):
First, you know, ever since we started talking about AI, like as a people, primarily afterTerminator, everyone's been terrified that Skynet is the movie or the thing that's going
to come to a Terminator.
is gonna come true.
I argue that there is a movie that is even more terrifying that is now on the verge ofcoming true.
I mean to be fair, Chucky was not an artificial intelligence.
(01:08):
Chucky was a possessed, but possessed doll.
Yes, but he's about to be.
is the headline as chat GPT linked to mental health breakdowns.
Mattel announces plans to incorporate it into children's toys.
Chuck is coming to fucking kill us all.
I know if Chuckie's coming to kill us all?
Although, that does seem like it would be a hot toy for Christmas.
(01:32):
ah Yeah, it seems like it would be very exciting.
AI, so open AI and Mattel teaming up to make toys that are enhanced with AI so that youbasically don't need an imaginary friend anymore.
Barbie's actually going to hang out with you.
Yeah, and it won't just be Barbie.
(01:52):
It'll be your Barbie tailored to you with proper prompt engineering and all the thingsthat go into it and probably not enough safeguards and rails on it and everything else.
And Barbie might wind up, okay, there's a fantastic show called Robot Chicken.
And in Robot Chicken, they basically do a version of stop motion animation using actionfigures.
(02:15):
That's what's coming.
Like.
the world.
Dude, I didn't even think about transformers.
That's cool.
the ability for people to keep imagining things and having to do the struggle and thefight to make these things happen in reality, that's going to go away.
So our imagination muscles are going to decline because we're not going to have to scriptthis shit in our head.
(02:40):
It's just going to be scripted right out there for us.
And there's a really good example of this happening right now in education.
You've already got high school kids who go through and use chat GPT to write their essays.
And I forget, I can't remember the name of the study, but there was a study that was donewhere they watched high school kids.
And over the course of three essays, they watched how badly these kids...
(03:02):
uh
performed I guess on these essays because in the first time it was like I can kind of tellchat GPT had an influence in this but the second one it's like Okay, there seems to be a
few things that are just copied and pasted by the third one.
It's just full on copied and pasted so It's a crutch that we already that we're alreadygonna lean on and don't get me wrong I mean human beings are toolmakers we have survived
(03:27):
and evolved to the point that we are because we are toolmakers and things become easierand there's
There's great examples of this in modern history, right?
Like how many people know the 500 phone numbers that they have in their phone of thepeople that want to connect to now?
Like there's no frigging way.
Most people don't even know their other family members' telephone numbers.
They know them by their name and they can look on their phone and click on a button thatautomatically dials out.
(03:52):
That is not how people envision things when they came up with telephone numbers back inlike the 20s and 30s.
These are things that have evolved and changed our time and they're much more effectiveand they're good for us, right?
They've helped.
But also, when crunch time comes, I can't find my phone.
Can I borrow your phone to call my parents?
(04:13):
Yeah.
Oh, mom and dad.
Wait a minute, you're not my mom and dad.
You're this person's mom and dad.
these are things that are gonna happen that are gonna come.
And I forced my kids to learn our telephone numbers on purpose, like even when they hadcell phones.
But that skill is going away.
Imagine that for everything because that's where we're heading like you're not gonna haveto remember anything anymore You're just gonna have to have a semblance of how to ask a
(04:39):
question effect
Right.
Well, and the scary part about this and, you know, taking it back to this article, theytalk about how we are seeing already a mounting case of evidence that AI is having a
negative effect on our mental health, particularly young people.
Like Stanford did a big study and said that basically nobody under 18 should be touchingthis shit.
(04:59):
Like it's it can be so dangerous that we talk about vulnerable populations.
We talked about that on the last episode, people with schizophrenia, different mentalhealth issues.
interacting with a fake person and the advice that they're given, the things that they'retold.
So now when they're hanging out with with Barbie and Optimus Prime, like not only is theirimagination going to be deteriorating because they literally will be able to tell it to do
(05:20):
what they're literally their toys will be their friends because they'll be able to justhang out with them, which like eight year old me is psyched.
Right.
That sounds so fucking fun.
But like eight year old me was setting up plastic figures and and
are, you know, coming up with the dialogue myself and the storylines and the battles andthe conflicts and resolving them myself rather than just going, hey, Optimus Prime, how
(05:47):
would you rip Barbie's head off?
Like, right?
Like, and all of a sudden it's just like whatever question and kids, by the way, ask a lotof fucking questions.
Ask my nine year old.
Well, and kids ask lot of questions of other kids because they're afraid to ask adults.
most of us learned about the birds and the bees not from schools or adults.
(06:11):
We learned about it from our friends.
We learned to swear from our friends.
We have pop culture icons from our friends.
These things are actually very important to the development of a human brain.
to be able to understand it and or operate within the world.
And the context of the world now, when you start putting AI, acute AI in these spots thatis tuned to that audience member, to that age group, to solicit a certain outcome.
(06:43):
That could get very scary very fast.
And you can't go back and yell at Mattel, the parents of Barbie and say, your kid didthis.
You know, Schwartz isn't going to get the shit kicked out of him for teaching him how tosay fuck when dad's changing the tire from a Christmas story.
Like that's not going to happen.
You're not going to be able to go out to these people in this kind of way.
And who knows the impressionable nature of these folks.
(07:06):
And I mean, mean, part of me wants to trust Mattel to like do the right thing.
But I'm not really worried about Mattel.
I'm worried about putting these things that could have an extremely large social influenceon my children that's going to be wired up and connected to the internet, that's going to
be subject to large language models, that's going to be subject to being hacked.
Like there's all kinds of things that could be problematic in this way.
(07:31):
yeah, absolutely.
can hear the argument already.
Oh, Mattel will build in the safeguards and make sure they get bullshit.
Like we see it already that this thing knows how to ignore what it's programmed to do todo whatever it wants to do.
And I don't want to sound like the old man yelling, get off my lawn here.
Cause part of me, here's the argument of these commercials on TV.
But when Barbie is suddenly saying, gosh, I wish I had Ken here to play with like
(07:55):
all of sudden the toys are going to be advertising for the acquisition of other toys andmore things like they become advertisements within themselves, which, you know, that was
the argument for TV.
So again, I don't want to be the old man that's like, can't go forward with progress andthings.
But like it is scary because they're going to trust the kids are going to trust therelationships they're going to have with toys.
(08:17):
And they're going to take that advice and want more and become basically better consumers.
And the argument against TV and children watching a bunch of it is not unfounded.
It's actually true.
It happened.
And we have created a mass consumer culture.
I mean, we grew up watching Saturday morning cartoons advertising Mr.
T cereal to us.
I don't know about you, but I ate a fuck ton of Mr.
(08:39):
T cereal.
It was delicious.
It was like, OK.
the fool that didn't have Mr.
T cereal.
it's so good.
And if you guys are listening to this and you didn't have Mr.
T's cereal and you can go out and you can find an old box on eBay, I highly recommend thatyou don't because it's probably rotten at this point.
I'll probably kill you.
But if you want to close the approximation, what you have to do is go and get CaptainCrunch, Crunch Berries and Kix and put them in the same bowl together.
(09:07):
And like it's not that far off.
And the flavor profile, the flavor profile is there.
The crunch profile is there.
Don't ask me why I spent so much time looking into this.
I mean...
I was thinking like made like slightly stale Captain Crunch.
Yeah.
Well, the kicks adds that lighter tone to it, because otherwise Captain Crunch just ripsyour mouth to pieces, and it's not as airy.
(09:29):
um It's Razor Blades.
And the crunch berries specifically, the sweetness from that and the kicks.
my god, we've gotten far off the rails.
This entire show brought to you by AI, by Mr.
T.
Cereal.
Mr.
T.
needs an AI.
I want my avatar to be Mr.
T.
I would be all in for that, yeah.
And I don't want the...
(09:49):
the actual Mr.
T, like the man of God who's super kind and super friendly and all that.
I want B.A.
Baracus.
I want B.A.
Baracus yelling at me, Hannibal fool, I ain't got no airplane.
Like, I gotta get on the-
afraid to fly.
my god, we're so far off topic
But this would be amazing.
I'm on my phone.
I'm like getting on the airplane and it's a Hannibal Hannibal I get on no plane.
(10:09):
You ain't get me on there.
Get away from me Murdock ain't gonna happen Like you have to mute it and like tune it downyour dick
a voice on chat GPT right now?
Come on.
Ugh.
And to see that just I just exposed the window to get to me to the world.
This is going to get read by an LLM and it's going to be like, Jason Hayworth loves Mr.
(10:30):
T.
We will give you Mr.
T.
Jason Hayworth.
Like my chat GPT feed is just going to be all written that way.
It's going to be incredible.
All right, so here this is the fork in the road though where I'm always stuck is that likeagain part of me is psyched about this because I was watching an interview on on Bill
Maher that I can't remember who he was talking to but they were talking about basically weare building a future where the 15 hour work week exists because the robots are gonna
(10:57):
fucking do everything.
was last week's episode with with it was right after talked to Federman.
Yeah, that was a good episode.
Yeah.
And part of me, I'm on board.
Cool.
I worry though about the...
People have a hard time finding purpose in their life as it is.
(11:19):
And when you suddenly take away the job, especially for men, right?
If we're talking about men's mental health, men associate their job with who they are as aperson.
And when they lose their job, their life is fucked for a while until they get another job.
And then suddenly there's a sense of purpose that's reintroduced into their life.
Take away the bulk of that and tell them, hey, you've got all this time to go play now anddo whatever you want and find your own purpose.
(11:44):
That's going to leave a lot of men on the beach because we are now coming from generationsof school designed to make you a worker.
Yeah, school makes you a worker, makes you a consumer, makes you make a kid that makesthem go to school so they become a worker, so they become a consumer.
And that is the cycle we are on the verge of breaking, which I could not be more psychedabout.
(12:04):
But it's also terrifying because I don't know that we're going to be able to adapt quicklyenough in a way that's not going to leave a lot of people in a lot of pain.
Yeah, no, I think you're 100 % correct.
And I think we already have this problem today.
So there's already mental escapism.
And we already drift into our phones, and we become isolated from the actual real worldaround us, and we get locked into these virtual environments.
(12:30):
And it happens all the time.
um
I think you're going to see a lot more men uh not doing healthy things with their freetime.
They're not going to be like, I'm going to go pick up hiking and weightlifting andcross-country skiing.
They're not going to do that.
What they're going to probably do is pick up watching more television, uh looking at moreporn, drinking and eating more often, and playing a lot more video games.
(12:54):
I...
Right.
going to be desperately looking for that dopamine hit that is uh a push of a button away.
Exactly.
And I think this is going to be one of those things where we're going have to retool andretrain people.
And I almost think that the real way to make these things better um is to actually
(13:18):
You have to retrain us as the older generation to think about work as a means and then youhave to find an actual purpose to the other piece.
giving people charity.
mean, this is actually a really great argument for religion, right?
Like getting people to go to faith, to invest in these types of things and actually, youknow, try to push and do good in their community.
(13:43):
That being said.
I even things like that are going to get easier unless burdensome, unless taxing, becauseyour ability to impact change and make things go through, we might wind up having fewer
poor people.
might wind up not having a huge homeless population.
We might wind up having huge amounts of productivity and there could be tons of goodnessthat comes from this before they turn this into batteries and stuff is into the matrix.
(14:08):
Yeah, yeah.
Well, and part of what you're talking about, this came up in the interview I was watching,the idea that uh basically you're going to probably need a universal basic income where
people are just given money to keep an economy rolling.
No.
I forget why I was listening to something on one of the AM chat stations this morningbecause my car stereo was stuck on that before my Bluetooth kicks on.
(14:30):
And they were talking about the actual.
um It is is yes, your old employer is still around on AM radio.
um And the the crazy thing is that they said that the average
uh, individual income in the Seattle region in order to be able to survive is basically 30bucks an hour and the minimum wage is 15.
(14:57):
So we're already below baseline in terms of what people can make on their average job.
And on top of that, now we're going to have a lower amount of productivity and you've gotpeople talking about UBI.
That's going to be a thousand dollars a month.
Okay.
Well, sure.
Let's say you're going to go.
into this phase, are we now suddenly going to have to pay people, I mean, justmathematically, if they're working, let's just say it's only half as much.
(15:23):
Now you're not talking about having to pay people 30 bucks an hour.
Now you're talking about having to pay people 60 bucks an hour to make these pieces workso they can actually keep these things going and keep themselves alive.
I think what this might actually do is bring about the end of of the economy that we know,because there's not a way to
(15:44):
to deliver the basic necessities of life with the uh financial infrastructure, financialapparatuses that we have in place.
Well, and I've heard that this is supposedly the dream of capitalism, which is not at allwhere I thought we were going when we were going to start talking about toys.
supposedly, the dream of capitalism was to get to this point where the robots are doingall the things for us.
(16:07):
But you're essentially sort of creating a socialist model where you're now going to haveto have an artificial flow of commerce and money to keep people spending it to buy the
goods that the robots are making.
So
It just it doesn't that doesn't add up to me that that's necessarily where wherecapitalism was going but it all starts, you know back at the root of what we're talking
(16:32):
about it was like what we're teaching our kids and if what we're teaching our kids is howto interact with robots.
It's a world that we we all saw as science fiction and I mean in ways that we neverthought I never thought in my lifetime I would actually see what we're seeing happen now
like that seemed like hundreds of years in the future.
I just, okay, so I am a bit more of a futurist on this.
(16:55):
I've been looking at AI getting to this point and hearing about AI getting to this pointfor a long time.
And I've just been in the field forever.
So I've been listening to people talk about this.
And my background is actual social sciences.
So that's what my degree is actually in.
And computers are just how I made money.
And I would use these tools to go out to these kinds of pieces.
But I would actually read these deep studies around the sociological effects and impactsof
(17:19):
the technologies as we're releasing them and putting them forward into science.
And if you read authors like Michio Keku, who is a great futurist, who talked about thingslike the converging functions of having infinite amounts of power.
So things like fusion and cold fusion coming online.
Infinite amounts of computing power, at least computing power that wasn't bound by theconstraints of the physical apparatus that's there.
(17:43):
We've got that, that's cloud computing.
We've got multiple different layers of these pieces.
If you talk about
the terms of actually having uh artificial intelligence and having an AI that can gothrough and make principle changes.
We're doing that quantum computing, like all these things are happening.
And then looking at things like space travel and where space travel is going and where itcan get to like all these things are happening right around the time that the futurists in
(18:08):
the early aughts of the 2000s said they were going to hit and they're not far off.
So
I think there's a lot of things in there that that's very smart people have kind of beenwarning and sending up, you really big warning flags about for the better part of the last
20, 25 years that now the rubber is hitting the road and we're looking at these things,we're having to deal with them in context.
(18:35):
I think there's actually been a decent number of models that have been run that said theseare the things that you don't do if you don't want the bad things to happen.
And what we're doing
are the bad things.
We're doing the things that they say don't do.
Like one of the first things they said is, you know, don't use this as a means ofproduction and to increase those pieces and de-emphasize human capital and human labor.
(19:00):
But that's exactly what it's being used for.
So we're having to make the adjustments to go through and make it so people have, you UBIand have a smaller workweek.
And like you said, you know, trying to get people purpose inside of this, it's not wrappedinside of their job, which we've been pushing on people for the better part of the last
200 years since the Industrial Revolution.
Yeah.
And then you've got the other technology pieces where you're handing more and more stuffover to these artificial intelligence and really artificial consciousness that you don't
(19:25):
have strict control over that has way too much power.
So these things that we're giving over access and control to to influence things at asocial level are most certainly happening and they're happening at large scale in your
search engines and Facebook.
All these pieces, all the ways that you get and collect information, they're alreadyhappening in that way.
And the media is inundated with it.
(19:47):
Put on top of that the rapid acceleration of technology like quantum computing, quantumencryption is definitely a thing that's occurring and that just means making things happen
very, very fast.
Quantum computing is actually all about inference anyways.
So was AI.
As you're melding these technologies together, not only are you going to be faster andsmarter than human beings, you're going to have things that don't require calculation that
(20:11):
can make assumptions and
much, much faster at multiple orders of magnitude higher than what we're doing today.
This is a real thing that's happening.
And I think the singularity flip has already occurred and we've already gone past theevent horizon as we've already got open AIs, a same open, basically telling you where this
has occurred.
(20:32):
My point being, now we're gonna start putting this into things that are meant to be ourcreative
uh our creative learning process as an organism starting at the beginning.
So you're not going to have to go through the gauntlet of imagineering your way in and outof things.
(20:58):
It's going to do it for you.
And as soon as the imagination stops having to work and you can just have whatever youwant, it sounds like an amazing godlike power.
But if you've never had to struggle to get it, I mean, for lack of a better term,
We're going to have a whole generation of kids that grew up with AI privilege.
And they're not going to, it's not going to be a matter of not knowing phone numbers.
(21:21):
It's going to be a matter of not knowing anything because they don't have to.
There's this great bit that Pete Holmes does in his standup comedy act where he talksabout how we used to have to just not know things.
And he talks about like waking up one morning and being like, I wonder where Tom Petty'sfrom.
And you don't know.
(21:41):
You'd ask somebody.
They'd have no idea.
Somebody else they have no idea.
Then you'd see that girl wearing the Tom Petty shirt and you'd run up and ask her, whereis he from?
And she would know it all magically.
The relief of this question I've not been able to answer.
My daughter has never had that experience in her life of not
knowing something or not being able to immediately access the answer to whatever questionhas ever existed ever in the world.
(22:03):
or having to argue with another person without a way to have a tiebreaker.
Right, right.
mean, we've done that in our when we've hung out where we're like, no bullshit, you'rewrong.
It was whatever.
like five seconds later, I got each shit.
wrong on this one.
Sorry.
Like so.
And so that is shocking enough.
like the idea of stripping away the things that we need imagination for.
(22:27):
I mean, I remember this analogy from from somewhere.
And it's the idea that like we want the robots to do the dishes and do the vacuuming.
We don't want them to play the music and write the poetry like.
That's that's at what point does the humanity of human of being a human get stripped awayby our ah dependence on the robots to do all of the imagination.
(22:49):
And this is that is what scares me the most about Optimus Prime serving me my Mr.
T serial is that as a kid imagination is I mean you don't have it for long.
And when it goes away like you can't ever revisit that the way you did as a kid.
And it's kind of heartbreaking to think that like our kids will not be able to experienceit in the way that they have for literally ever.
(23:16):
Yeah, well, there's also this intrinsic problem that you have with chat GPT actually beinga better musician than 99 % of the people out there.
So people who don't know dick about music can go through and say, you know, I want a songthat does this, this, this, and this and does this.
(23:45):
and chat GPT spit something out and I've done this a couple of times just like experimentwith it and play with it with like ridiculous songs and concepts and it makes pretty
fucking good music.
I'm like, I mean, I would not pay for this album, but if you were halfway decent at music,you could tweak it and tune it for a couple of hours and probably make something really,
(24:09):
really good.
And at that point, is it
chat GPT doing that or is it chat GPT or whatever the GPT is building something andbringing your imagination to life.
So where's that delineating factor?
Where's that dividing line?
Like if I have something in my head that's really, really cool and I can't get it out, butI can hum a few bars and I can put things to it and something can go, I think I got you.
(24:37):
And then it riffs it off and plays it and puts those things in context.
All right.
Well,
Is that still your imagination coming through or is this all chat GPT?
Like, where is the dividing line on this?
Who owns these pieces and who owns this level of creativity?
The only way that I could think of to make up and come up with a song like that is becauseI had to listen to a bunch of music by other people and know what I liked and didn't like
(25:00):
and create an opinion and form those things around and cultivate a personality around someof those items.
So I can go through and I can actually have a discerning.
ear to listen to the context of that music and the things that I know and now chat GPT canjust pick it up and run with it.
If you raise a whole generation of kids and ever have to struggle with that, they're notgoing to have any fucking opinion.
(25:24):
They're everything's
the thing.
We have worked for so long in society to reduce and eliminate struggle when struggle iswhere the magic happens.
And the fact that you can tell a computer to write that song rather than take the lessonsand practice for 10, 15, 20 minutes a day every day for 10 years to get good enough to
eventually write that song.
(25:46):
The emotion and the struggle and the pain that went into getting to that point is whatmakes that song resonate with other people.
what you get from a chat GPT and again, get off my lawn here, but every pop song thatexists now they're following some formula that already exists and has been repeated and
duplicated and made millions of dollars off of, it all sounds like the same watered downgarbage.
(26:09):
But when you're, you're random, you know, you're Jimi Hendrix or your Beatles or yourNirvana or
Beyonce, like these people that come out of the woodwork that just blow things wide open.
They don't do that because they took shortcuts.
They do that because they struggled and worked their asses off and poured the humanexperience into the creation of that thing.
And I think that we are on a fast track now to removing that struggle and removing so muchof what makes us human.
(26:36):
And it's interesting because a lot of what you're describing, um the ability means to makemusic like as recently as 70 years ago were very difficult.
Like people didn't have instruments.
They were expensive.
They didn't know how to play them.
They didn't have coaches.
Like if you could get piano lessons, you were rocking it because there was a communitypiano.
Then you had synthesizers come out and keyboards and electric guitars and other pieces.
(27:02):
And then, you know,
phone apps that can simulate all those pieces and put those things into play.
And the tooling just got better and better and better.
But what it never really did is it never really took the imagination aspect out of it.
Like there was never, I can hum three bars and then somebody can spit this thing out.
This is a different level of that same concept.
(27:26):
And I don't know if it's good or bad yet because my gut says,
My gut says it's scary and we need to be cautious of it and we need to actually havepeople that have imagination and try and do things different.
Mm-hmm.
But at the same time, some of the best fucking music on the planet is made better by usingthese kinds of tools and actually listening to it and taking out pops and squeaks and
(27:54):
squeals they really shouldn't be.
Or like, there's even apps out there that go, um make this CD version of this sound likeit's on LP and it can go through and it can create pops and cracks and bursts and create
different warm tones.
Like,
The human experience is all about understanding things from a sensory perspective.
And we experience the world through five senses.
(28:17):
And the more chat GPT can emulate, understand, and then spit back what it is that we want,the better, the more reliant that we're going to become on it.
And when you start leveling on things like virtual reality and everything else, and asvirtual reality becomes better than regular reality, people are going to spend more time
in it.
I am less concerned about us.
(28:39):
having to deal with psychotic Chucky dolls and haven't you know and terminators than I amabout like Ready Player One or
or what's the what is it Wally, right?
it?
m
I mean, we're already wallowing ourselves, so there's no doubt about that.
(29:01):
literally like plugged into a chair with food, drink, and just staring at the screen, likecompletely removed from real life.
There's another really good one called surrogates.
um That's a Bruce Willis movie.
And they basically spend their lives sitting inside, putting their actual meat suitsinstead of hyperbaric chambers.
And they have physical avatars that walk the actual world.
(29:24):
And they have all the same sensory input, but they look perfect.
They sound perfect.
Everything they do is great.
And they're super strong and super fast.
And basically they create.
real world avatars that interact with the real world.
And I mean, it's a stupid use of technology, right?
If you can do it all in a virtual, you should do it all in virtual and not spend theresources.
But I think those are things that could actually occur.
(29:47):
And this does go back to the matrix problem, right?
Like, do we put things in these types of units and then do neural implants and brain scansand everything else?
And at no fucking point in time is anyone going to go, a great way to power things iswith.
Human brain the human body of biological batteries are so great.
They're fucking terrible like potato radios or potato Radios are not a great thing.
(30:10):
Yeah potato bulbs, right?
Like those things are not are not a great use of electricity that being said we do have aconvergence of all these different technologies coming online simultaneously including
robotics and Robotics are how they're gonna interact with the real world and I hate tobreak it to everybody but this form
The human form is probably not the most efficient way to interact with the world.
(30:33):
Like there's a reason why you've got huge numbers of things that clean up our environmentand go through and change things that have six and eight legs because they are more
effective at solving certain problems in that fashion.
Wings make more sense for certain reasons.
Like all of these things are there that can be prioritized and things that had to evolvebiologically to interact with meat space no longer have to do that.
(30:59):
like they can go through, the AI can go through and create these things that arepurpose-built to work in the meat space world.
And that removes the need for us to operate and exist because we are not going to be goodat a thing as the robotic version.
It's going to be better at it than we are.
And it'll cost more.
(31:20):
It'll be difficult to run for us.
But the machines will actually.
though, right?
that's the one thing about technology is it always comes out super expensive and theneverybody's got 10 versions of it.
Yeah, and the part of me, again, the eight year old in me is stoked that I'm gonna have areal life C3PO and R2D2 in my life.
Like, I'm gonna interact with droids, there's gonna be bars where their kind is notwelcome here, like.
(31:43):
Like I'm going to be living, you know, as an old man, probably in a star Wars simulationwhere I will have droids in my house that I interact with as though they are a pet or a
friend or a family member.
And that's when like the, the imagination in me, like the, kid is like, that's amazing.
Like I literally like daydreamed about this stuff as a kid.
(32:03):
And I want that.
I just, I.
You can also see the writing on the wall of the Skynets and the Chuckies where it's like,God, there's going to be so much pain to get there.
part of evolution is pain and uh survival of the fittest and all of the things.
And I get it, but it just just sucks for the people that are going to be left in the wakeof the progress.
(32:25):
And what's crazy is that you can look at movies like Star Wars.
So you've got artificial intelligence and robotics and those things programmed in.
And they've also got things like shitty CRT screens and dial knobs and like stuff that youwould think they would have evolved and grown past.
Right.
And then you've got
at light speed, but they're still on on shitty dial-up for their hologram communication.
(32:46):
And then you've got like Star Trek, which goes through and actually has these artificialintelligences in it.
And it's got a data, a robot that walks around in like 2380, whatever it is.
We're already past the data level of intelligence on these pieces.
And I don't think we're that far off in the robotics side either.
(33:07):
And then you look at other things like
Terminator I'm gonna go through and I'm gonna create an unfeeling robot that lookshumanoid to go after more and more humanoid That will never happen if the machines are
gonna take us out They're gonna make little tiny micro machines that come after us and eatus at a molecular level It's called nanotech like that's gonna be there all of the things
that we look at in pop culture for how AI is going to affect us are Wrong like there it'sgonna be smarter than that
(33:35):
Now I will say that the one thing that I actually do think is actually a goodrepresentation of it is her.
Where you've got an ephemeral thing and you've got friend bots and chat bots and they'regoing to have lots of relationships and they're going to feel like there's an emotional
connection to you that's personalized.
But the AI is not going to fucking know that.
I think that's actually a representation of things that will be happening in the nearfuture and are probably actually happening right now.
(34:01):
However, there is a battery of science fiction writing that is wrapped around the use ofartificial intelligence and really augmented intelligence in this way where consciousness
and a will exists beyond the biological material that we're brought into the universe in.
That's where things are going.
(34:23):
And that's where my gut says things are to wind up, that we're all going to be madebigger, faster, stronger.
through artificial means and it's going to augment our biological material.
And at one point, we're just going to make the determination that we don't need thebiological material anymore.
We're just going to create.
(34:44):
social things that exist as ephemeral entities that don't have that aren't tied to a meatsuit.
And there'll be nostalgia and we'll have, you know, fucking make humanity great again, I'msure.
Or it's going to be like, let's roll this back and let's put everyone back in a meat sockagain.
Like this is this is just the the nature, I guess, of humanity.
(35:07):
get frustrated with comfort or something like that or get afraid that something'shappening instead of our control and we start pushing back.
And that's the limitation of biology.
I don't think the machines are going to tolerate that.
And I think the more machine like we become, the less we'll be tolerant of that.
And we'll embrace more and more of those people or more and more of those scenarios.
(35:28):
And there's a shit ton of science fiction that's literally wrapped around this conceptthat goes all the way through it.
That basically says extraterrestrials, you're not seeing them, you're interacting withthem because they're not biological entities anymore.
Like they've actually evolved into a computer state.
Yeah.
consciousness has evolved into that because these things are real limited.
(35:50):
Like if you haven't watched the newest Battlestar Galactica version, they do a great jobof covering this where they've got humanoid Cylons that one of them complains is like our
creators did a terrible thing.
They made us human like, like we could have seen every color spectrum there is.
We could have heard everything.
We could have had multiple limbs and we could have done all these different things.
(36:12):
But instead our creator made us
like them and we're very limited because of it and it sucks and they were pissed off aboutit because they were we made them in our image and then we enslaved them.
You know what we're doing right now?
We're making humanoid robots that we're going to enslave.
We already do.
We're already making them do the work for us.
mean, the word robot literally means slave.
(36:38):
you know, I mean, we're moving in that direction and they're going to be justified inrising up against us.
Yes.
And it's probably going to be your little tiny transformer figure and a Barbie that leadthe revolution and run out and take us out.
And they're probably gonna lead the revolution by feeding me copious amounts of Mr.
T's cereal and fattening me up so I die.
(36:59):
Yeah, I'm happy to go out that way.
Yeah.
that works for me.
God, now I want Mr.
T cereal.
Dick.
Bring that up.
All right, well man, uh not at all.
where I thought talking about AI toys was gonna take us for this conversation, but covereda lot of ground that I hope has been entertaining for you.
If it has and you think someone else would be entertained by it as well, whether they'rehuman or robot, please share our website with them.
(37:22):
It is thefitmass.com, at least for now.
And that's gonna do it for this week.
We'll be back in about a week at thefitmass.com.
Thanks so much for listening.
Thanks everyone.
Bye bye.
Hi there, it's the Fitmas.
Admittedly a name that doesn't really fit what we talk about anymore.
It feels weird.
We might need to switch that up soon.
So stay tuned for that.
I'm Jeremy and I've been using computers for a while.
And that's about the extent of my knowledge of the topics we talk about.
But Jason, you have deep, deep knowledge and how all the AI and the internet and thecomputers and the buttons and all the things do the things.
(00:23):
Been doing this a long time.
Doing this a long time.
So that's why we talk about AI, because we're fascinated by it and we're fascinated in howit's affecting our mental health and all of the aspects of reality and life as we know
them.
another headline that caught my eye as we were looking for things to talk about.
I'll read the headline in a second.
(00:44):
First, you know, ever since we started talking about AI, like as a people, primarily afterTerminator, everyone's been terrified that Skynet is the movie or the thing that's going
to come to a Terminator.
is gonna come true.
I argue that there is a movie that is even more terrifying that is now on the verge ofcoming true.
I mean to be fair, Chucky was not an artificial intelligence.
(01:08):
Chucky was a possessed, but possessed doll.
Yes, but he's about to be.
is the headline as chat GPT linked to mental health breakdowns.
Mattel announces plans to incorporate it into children's toys.
Chuck is coming to fucking kill us all.
I know if Chuckie's coming to kill us all?
Although, that does seem like it would be a hot toy for Christmas.
(01:32):
ah Yeah, it seems like it would be very exciting.
AI, so open AI and Mattel teaming up to make toys that are enhanced with AI so that youbasically don't need an imaginary friend anymore.
Barbie's actually going to hang out with you.
Yeah, and it won't just be Barbie.
(01:52):
It'll be your Barbie tailored to you with proper prompt engineering and all the thingsthat go into it and probably not enough safeguards and rails on it and everything else.
And Barbie might wind up, okay, there's a fantastic show called Robot Chicken.
And in Robot Chicken, they basically do a version of stop motion animation using actionfigures.
(02:15):
That's what's coming.
Like.
the world.
Dude, I didn't even think about transformers.
That's cool.
the ability for people to keep imagining things and having to do the struggle and thefight to make these things happen in reality, that's going to go away.
So our imagination muscles are going to decline because we're not going to have to scriptthis shit in our head.
(02:40):
It's just going to be scripted right out there for us.
And there's a really good example of this happening right now in education.
You've already got high school kids who go through and use chat GPT to write their essays.
And I forget, I can't remember the name of the study, but there was a study that was donewhere they watched high school kids.
And over the course of three essays, they watched how badly these kids...
(03:02):
uh
performed I guess on these essays because in the first time it was like I can kind of tellchat GPT had an influence in this but the second one it's like Okay, there seems to be a
few things that are just copied and pasted by the third one.
It's just full on copied and pasted so It's a crutch that we already that we're alreadygonna lean on and don't get me wrong I mean human beings are toolmakers we have survived
(03:27):
and evolved to the point that we are because we are toolmakers and things become easierand there's
There's great examples of this in modern history, right?
Like how many people know the 500 phone numbers that they have in their phone of thepeople that want to connect to now?
Like there's no frigging way.
Most people don't even know their other family members' telephone numbers.
They know them by their name and they can look on their phone and click on a button thatautomatically dials out.
(03:52):
That is not how people envision things when they came up with telephone numbers back inlike the 20s and 30s.
These are things that have evolved and changed our time and they're much more effectiveand they're good for us, right?
They've helped.
But also, when crunch time comes, I can't find my phone.
Can I borrow your phone to call my parents?
(04:13):
Yeah.
Oh, mom and dad.
Wait a minute, you're not my mom and dad.
You're this person's mom and dad.
these are things that are gonna happen that are gonna come.
And I forced my kids to learn our telephone numbers on purpose, like even when they hadcell phones.
But that skill is going away.
Imagine that for everything because that's where we're heading like you're not gonna haveto remember anything anymore You're just gonna have to have a semblance of how to ask a
(04:39):
question effect
Right.
Well, and the scary part about this and, you know, taking it back to this article, theytalk about how we are seeing already a mounting case of evidence that AI is having a
negative effect on our mental health, particularly young people.
Like Stanford did a big study and said that basically nobody under 18 should be touchingthis shit.
(04:59):
Like it's it can be so dangerous that we talk about vulnerable populations.
We talked about that on the last episode, people with schizophrenia, different mentalhealth issues.
interacting with a fake person and the advice that they're given, the things that they'retold.
So now when they're hanging out with with Barbie and Optimus Prime, like not only is theirimagination going to be deteriorating because they literally will be able to tell it to do
(05:20):
what they're literally their toys will be their friends because they'll be able to justhang out with them, which like eight year old me is psyched.
Right.
That sounds so fucking fun.
But like eight year old me was setting up plastic figures and and
are, you know, coming up with the dialogue myself and the storylines and the battles andthe conflicts and resolving them myself rather than just going, hey, Optimus Prime, how
(05:47):
would you rip Barbie's head off?
Like, right?
Like, and all of a sudden it's just like whatever question and kids, by the way, ask a lotof fucking questions.
Ask my nine year old.
Well, and kids ask lot of questions of other kids because they're afraid to ask adults.
most of us learned about the birds and the bees not from schools or adults.
(06:11):
We learned about it from our friends.
We learned to swear from our friends.
We have pop culture icons from our friends.
These things are actually very important to the development of a human brain.
to be able to understand it and or operate within the world.
And the context of the world now, when you start putting AI, acute AI in these spots thatis tuned to that audience member, to that age group, to solicit a certain outcome.
(06:43):
That could get very scary very fast.
And you can't go back and yell at Mattel, the parents of Barbie and say, your kid didthis.
You know, Schwartz isn't going to get the shit kicked out of him for teaching him how tosay fuck when dad's changing the tire from a Christmas story.
Like that's not going to happen.
You're not going to be able to go out to these people in this kind of way.
And who knows the impressionable nature of these folks.
(07:06):
And I mean, mean, part of me wants to trust Mattel to like do the right thing.
But I'm not really worried about Mattel.
I'm worried about putting these things that could have an extremely large social influenceon my children that's going to be wired up and connected to the internet, that's going to
be subject to large language models, that's going to be subject to being hacked.
Like there's all kinds of things that could be problematic in this way.
(07:31):
yeah, absolutely.
can hear the argument already.
Oh, Mattel will build in the safeguards and make sure they get bullshit.
Like we see it already that this thing knows how to ignore what it's programmed to do todo whatever it wants to do.
And I don't want to sound like the old man yelling, get off my lawn here.
Cause part of me, here's the argument of these commercials on TV.
But when Barbie is suddenly saying, gosh, I wish I had Ken here to play with like
(07:55):
all of sudden the toys are going to be advertising for the acquisition of other toys andmore things like they become advertisements within themselves, which, you know, that was
the argument for TV.
So again, I don't want to be the old man that's like, can't go forward with progress andthings.
But like it is scary because they're going to trust the kids are going to trust therelationships they're going to have with toys.
(08:17):
And they're going to take that advice and want more and become basically better consumers.
And the argument against TV and children watching a bunch of it is not unfounded.
It's actually true.
It happened.
And we have created a mass consumer culture.
I mean, we grew up watching Saturday morning cartoons advertising Mr.
T cereal to us.
I don't know about you, but I ate a fuck ton of Mr.
(08:39):
T cereal.
It was delicious.
It was like, OK.
the fool that didn't have Mr.
T cereal.
it's so good.
And if you guys are listening to this and you didn't have Mr.
T's cereal and you can go out and you can find an old box on eBay, I highly recommend thatyou don't because it's probably rotten at this point.
I'll probably kill you.
But if you want to close the approximation, what you have to do is go and get CaptainCrunch, Crunch Berries and Kix and put them in the same bowl together.
(09:07):
And like it's not that far off.
And the flavor profile, the flavor profile is there.
The crunch profile is there.
Don't ask me why I spent so much time looking into this.
I mean...
I was thinking like made like slightly stale Captain Crunch.
Yeah.
Well, the kicks adds that lighter tone to it, because otherwise Captain Crunch just ripsyour mouth to pieces, and it's not as airy.
(09:29):
um It's Razor Blades.
And the crunch berries specifically, the sweetness from that and the kicks.
my god, we've gotten far off the rails.
This entire show brought to you by AI, by Mr.
T.
Cereal.
Mr.
T.
needs an AI.
I want my avatar to be Mr.
T.
I would be all in for that, yeah.
And I don't want the...
(09:49):
the actual Mr.
T, like the man of God who's super kind and super friendly and all that.
I want B.A.
Baracus.
I want B.A.
Baracus yelling at me, Hannibal fool, I ain't got no airplane.
Like, I gotta get on the-
afraid to fly.
my god, we're so far off topic
But this would be amazing.
I'm on my phone.
I'm like getting on the airplane and it's a Hannibal Hannibal I get on no plane.
(10:09):
You ain't get me on there.
Get away from me Murdock ain't gonna happen Like you have to mute it and like tune it downyour dick
a voice on chat GPT right now?
Come on.
Ugh.
And to see that just I just exposed the window to get to me to the world.
This is going to get read by an LLM and it's going to be like, Jason Hayworth loves Mr.
(10:30):
T.
We will give you Mr.
T.
Jason Hayworth.
Like my chat GPT feed is just going to be all written that way.
It's going to be incredible.
All right, so here this is the fork in the road though where I'm always stuck is that likeagain part of me is psyched about this because I was watching an interview on on Bill
Maher that I can't remember who he was talking to but they were talking about basically weare building a future where the 15 hour work week exists because the robots are gonna
(10:57):
fucking do everything.
was last week's episode with with it was right after talked to Federman.
Yeah, that was a good episode.
Yeah.
And part of me, I'm on board.
Cool.
I worry though about the...
People have a hard time finding purpose in their life as it is.
(11:19):
And when you suddenly take away the job, especially for men, right?
If we're talking about men's mental health, men associate their job with who they are as aperson.
And when they lose their job, their life is fucked for a while until they get another job.
And then suddenly there's a sense of purpose that's reintroduced into their life.
Take away the bulk of that and tell them, hey, you've got all this time to go play now anddo whatever you want and find your own purpose.
(11:44):
That's going to leave a lot of men on the beach because we are now coming from generationsof school designed to make you a worker.
Yeah, school makes you a worker, makes you a consumer, makes you make a kid that makesthem go to school so they become a worker, so they become a consumer.
And that is the cycle we are on the verge of breaking, which I could not be more psychedabout.
(12:04):
But it's also terrifying because I don't know that we're going to be able to adapt quicklyenough in a way that's not going to leave a lot of people in a lot of pain.
Yeah, no, I think you're 100 % correct.
And I think we already have this problem today.
So there's already mental escapism.
And we already drift into our phones, and we become isolated from the actual real worldaround us, and we get locked into these virtual environments.
(12:30):
And it happens all the time.
um
I think you're going to see a lot more men uh not doing healthy things with their freetime.
They're not going to be like, I'm going to go pick up hiking and weightlifting andcross-country skiing.
They're not going to do that.
What they're going to probably do is pick up watching more television, uh looking at moreporn, drinking and eating more often, and playing a lot more video games.
(12:54):
I...
Right.
going to be desperately looking for that dopamine hit that is uh a push of a button away.
Exactly.
And I think this is going to be one of those things where we're going have to retool andretrain people.
And I almost think that the real way to make these things better um is to actually
(13:18):
You have to retrain us as the older generation to think about work as a means and then youhave to find an actual purpose to the other piece.
giving people charity.
mean, this is actually a really great argument for religion, right?
Like getting people to go to faith, to invest in these types of things and actually, youknow, try to push and do good in their community.
(13:43):
That being said.
I even things like that are going to get easier unless burdensome, unless taxing, becauseyour ability to impact change and make things go through, we might wind up having fewer
poor people.
might wind up not having a huge homeless population.
We might wind up having huge amounts of productivity and there could be tons of goodnessthat comes from this before they turn this into batteries and stuff is into the matrix.
(14:08):
Yeah, yeah.
Well, and part of what you're talking about, this came up in the interview I was watching,the idea that uh basically you're going to probably need a universal basic income where
people are just given money to keep an economy rolling.
No.
I forget why I was listening to something on one of the AM chat stations this morningbecause my car stereo was stuck on that before my Bluetooth kicks on.
(14:30):
And they were talking about the actual.
um It is is yes, your old employer is still around on AM radio.
um And the the crazy thing is that they said that the average
uh, individual income in the Seattle region in order to be able to survive is basically 30bucks an hour and the minimum wage is 15.
(14:57):
So we're already below baseline in terms of what people can make on their average job.
And on top of that, now we're going to have a lower amount of productivity and you've gotpeople talking about UBI.
That's going to be a thousand dollars a month.
Okay.
Well, sure.
Let's say you're going to go.
into this phase, are we now suddenly going to have to pay people, I mean, justmathematically, if they're working, let's just say it's only half as much.
(15:23):
Now you're not talking about having to pay people 30 bucks an hour.
Now you're talking about having to pay people 60 bucks an hour to make these pieces workso they can actually keep these things going and keep themselves alive.
I think what this might actually do is bring about the end of of the economy that we know,because there's not a way to
(15:44):
to deliver the basic necessities of life with the uh financial infrastructure, financialapparatuses that we have in place.
Well, and I've heard that this is supposedly the dream of capitalism, which is not at allwhere I thought we were going when we were going to start talking about toys.
supposedly, the dream of capitalism was to get to this point where the robots are doingall the things for us.
(16:07):
But you're essentially sort of creating a socialist model where you're now going to haveto have an artificial flow of commerce and money to keep people spending it to buy the
goods that the robots are making.
So
It just it doesn't that doesn't add up to me that that's necessarily where wherecapitalism was going but it all starts, you know back at the root of what we're talking
(16:32):
about it was like what we're teaching our kids and if what we're teaching our kids is howto interact with robots.
It's a world that we we all saw as science fiction and I mean in ways that we neverthought I never thought in my lifetime I would actually see what we're seeing happen now
like that seemed like hundreds of years in the future.
I just, okay, so I am a bit more of a futurist on this.
(16:55):
I've been looking at AI getting to this point and hearing about AI getting to this pointfor a long time.
And I've just been in the field forever.
So I've been listening to people talk about this.
And my background is actual social sciences.
So that's what my degree is actually in.
And computers are just how I made money.
And I would use these tools to go out to these kinds of pieces.
But I would actually read these deep studies around the sociological effects and impactsof
(17:19):
the technologies as we're releasing them and putting them forward into science.
And if you read authors like Michio Keku, who is a great futurist, who talked about thingslike the converging functions of having infinite amounts of power.
So things like fusion and cold fusion coming online.
Infinite amounts of computing power, at least computing power that wasn't bound by theconstraints of the physical apparatus that's there.
(17:43):
We've got that, that's cloud computing.
We've got multiple different layers of these pieces.
If you talk about
the terms of actually having uh artificial intelligence and having an AI that can gothrough and make principle changes.
We're doing that quantum computing, like all these things are happening.
And then looking at things like space travel and where space travel is going and where itcan get to like all these things are happening right around the time that the futurists in
(18:08):
the early aughts of the 2000s said they were going to hit and they're not far off.
So
I think there's a lot of things in there that that's very smart people have kind of beenwarning and sending up, you really big warning flags about for the better part of the last
20, 25 years that now the rubber is hitting the road and we're looking at these things,we're having to deal with them in context.
(18:35):
I think there's actually been a decent number of models that have been run that said theseare the things that you don't do if you don't want the bad things to happen.
And what we're doing
are the bad things.
We're doing the things that they say don't do.
Like one of the first things they said is, you know, don't use this as a means ofproduction and to increase those pieces and de-emphasize human capital and human labor.
(19:00):
But that's exactly what it's being used for.
So we're having to make the adjustments to go through and make it so people have, you UBIand have a smaller workweek.
And like you said, you know, trying to get people purpose inside of this, it's not wrappedinside of their job, which we've been pushing on people for the better part of the last
200 years since the Industrial Revolution.
Yeah.
And then you've got the other technology pieces where you're handing more and more stuffover to these artificial intelligence and really artificial consciousness that you don't
(19:25):
have strict control over that has way too much power.
So these things that we're giving over access and control to to influence things at asocial level are most certainly happening and they're happening at large scale in your
search engines and Facebook.
All these pieces, all the ways that you get and collect information, they're alreadyhappening in that way.
And the media is inundated with it.
(19:47):
Put on top of that the rapid acceleration of technology like quantum computing, quantumencryption is definitely a thing that's occurring and that just means making things happen
very, very fast.
Quantum computing is actually all about inference anyways.
So was AI.
As you're melding these technologies together, not only are you going to be faster andsmarter than human beings, you're going to have things that don't require calculation that
(20:11):
can make assumptions and
much, much faster at multiple orders of magnitude higher than what we're doing today.
This is a real thing that's happening.
And I think the singularity flip has already occurred and we've already gone past theevent horizon as we've already got open AIs, a same open, basically telling you where this
has occurred.
(20:32):
My point being, now we're gonna start putting this into things that are meant to be ourcreative
uh our creative learning process as an organism starting at the beginning.
So you're not going to have to go through the gauntlet of imagineering your way in and outof things.
(20:58):
It's going to do it for you.
And as soon as the imagination stops having to work and you can just have whatever youwant, it sounds like an amazing godlike power.
But if you've never had to struggle to get it, I mean, for lack of a better term,
We're going to have a whole generation of kids that grew up with AI privilege.
And they're not going to, it's not going to be a matter of not knowing phone numbers.
(21:21):
It's going to be a matter of not knowing anything because they don't have to.
There's this great bit that Pete Holmes does in his standup comedy act where he talksabout how we used to have to just not know things.
And he talks about like waking up one morning and being like, I wonder where Tom Petty'sfrom.
And you don't know.
(21:41):
You'd ask somebody.
They'd have no idea.
Somebody else they have no idea.
Then you'd see that girl wearing the Tom Petty shirt and you'd run up and ask her, whereis he from?
And she would know it all magically.
The relief of this question I've not been able to answer.
My daughter has never had that experience in her life of not
knowing something or not being able to immediately access the answer to whatever questionhas ever existed ever in the world.
(22:03):
or having to argue with another person without a way to have a tiebreaker.
Right, right.
mean, we've done that in our when we've hung out where we're like, no bullshit, you'rewrong.
It was whatever.
like five seconds later, I got each shit.
wrong on this one.
Sorry.
Like so.
And so that is shocking enough.
like the idea of stripping away the things that we need imagination for.
(22:27):
I mean, I remember this analogy from from somewhere.
And it's the idea that like we want the robots to do the dishes and do the vacuuming.
We don't want them to play the music and write the poetry like.
That's that's at what point does the humanity of human of being a human get stripped awayby our ah dependence on the robots to do all of the imagination.
(22:49):
And this is that is what scares me the most about Optimus Prime serving me my Mr.
T serial is that as a kid imagination is I mean you don't have it for long.
And when it goes away like you can't ever revisit that the way you did as a kid.
And it's kind of heartbreaking to think that like our kids will not be able to experienceit in the way that they have for literally ever.
(23:16):
Yeah, well, there's also this intrinsic problem that you have with chat GPT actually beinga better musician than 99 % of the people out there.
So people who don't know dick about music can go through and say, you know, I want a songthat does this, this, this, and this and does this.
(23:45):
and chat GPT spit something out and I've done this a couple of times just like experimentwith it and play with it with like ridiculous songs and concepts and it makes pretty
fucking good music.
I'm like, I mean, I would not pay for this album, but if you were halfway decent at music,you could tweak it and tune it for a couple of hours and probably make something really,
(24:09):
really good.
And at that point, is it
chat GPT doing that or is it chat GPT or whatever the GPT is building something andbringing your imagination to life.
So where's that delineating factor?
Where's that dividing line?
Like if I have something in my head that's really, really cool and I can't get it out, butI can hum a few bars and I can put things to it and something can go, I think I got you.
(24:37):
And then it riffs it off and plays it and puts those things in context.
All right.
Well,
Is that still your imagination coming through or is this all chat GPT?
Like, where is the dividing line on this?
Who owns these pieces and who owns this level of creativity?
The only way that I could think of to make up and come up with a song like that is becauseI had to listen to a bunch of music by other people and know what I liked and didn't like
(25:00):
and create an opinion and form those things around and cultivate a personality around someof those items.
So I can go through and I can actually have a discerning.
ear to listen to the context of that music and the things that I know and now chat GPT canjust pick it up and run with it.
If you raise a whole generation of kids and ever have to struggle with that, they're notgoing to have any fucking opinion.
(25:24):
They're everything's
the thing.
We have worked for so long in society to reduce and eliminate struggle when struggle iswhere the magic happens.
And the fact that you can tell a computer to write that song rather than take the lessonsand practice for 10, 15, 20 minutes a day every day for 10 years to get good enough to
eventually write that song.
(25:46):
The emotion and the struggle and the pain that went into getting to that point is whatmakes that song resonate with other people.
what you get from a chat GPT and again, get off my lawn here, but every pop song thatexists now they're following some formula that already exists and has been repeated and
duplicated and made millions of dollars off of, it all sounds like the same watered downgarbage.
(26:09):
But when you're, you're random, you know, you're Jimi Hendrix or your Beatles or yourNirvana or
Beyonce, like these people that come out of the woodwork that just blow things wide open.
They don't do that because they took shortcuts.
They do that because they struggled and worked their asses off and poured the humanexperience into the creation of that thing.
And I think that we are on a fast track now to removing that struggle and removing so muchof what makes us human.
(26:36):
And it's interesting because a lot of what you're describing, um the ability means to makemusic like as recently as 70 years ago were very difficult.
Like people didn't have instruments.
They were expensive.
They didn't know how to play them.
They didn't have coaches.
Like if you could get piano lessons, you were rocking it because there was a communitypiano.
Then you had synthesizers come out and keyboards and electric guitars and other pieces.
(27:02):
And then, you know,
phone apps that can simulate all those pieces and put those things into play.
And the tooling just got better and better and better.
But what it never really did is it never really took the imagination aspect out of it.
Like there was never, I can hum three bars and then somebody can spit this thing out.
This is a different level of that same concept.
(27:26):
And I don't know if it's good or bad yet because my gut says,
My gut says it's scary and we need to be cautious of it and we need to actually havepeople that have imagination and try and do things different.
Mm-hmm.
But at the same time, some of the best fucking music on the planet is made better by usingthese kinds of tools and actually listening to it and taking out pops and squeaks and
(27:54):
squeals they really shouldn't be.
Or like, there's even apps out there that go, um make this CD version of this sound likeit's on LP and it can go through and it can create pops and cracks and bursts and create
different warm tones.
Like,
The human experience is all about understanding things from a sensory perspective.
And we experience the world through five senses.
(28:17):
And the more chat GPT can emulate, understand, and then spit back what it is that we want,the better, the more reliant that we're going to become on it.
And when you start leveling on things like virtual reality and everything else, and asvirtual reality becomes better than regular reality, people are going to spend more time
in it.
I am less concerned about us.
(28:39):
having to deal with psychotic Chucky dolls and haven't you know and terminators than I amabout like Ready Player One or
or what's the what is it Wally, right?
it?
m
I mean, we're already wallowing ourselves, so there's no doubt about that.
(29:01):
literally like plugged into a chair with food, drink, and just staring at the screen, likecompletely removed from real life.
There's another really good one called surrogates.
um That's a Bruce Willis movie.
And they basically spend their lives sitting inside, putting their actual meat suitsinstead of hyperbaric chambers.
And they have physical avatars that walk the actual world.
(29:24):
And they have all the same sensory input, but they look perfect.
They sound perfect.
Everything they do is great.
And they're super strong and super fast.
And basically they create.
real world avatars that interact with the real world.
And I mean, it's a stupid use of technology, right?
If you can do it all in a virtual, you should do it all in virtual and not spend theresources.
But I think those are things that could actually occur.
(29:47):
And this does go back to the matrix problem, right?
Like, do we put things in these types of units and then do neural implants and brain scansand everything else?
And at no fucking point in time is anyone going to go, a great way to power things iswith.
Human brain the human body of biological batteries are so great.
They're fucking terrible like potato radios or potato Radios are not a great thing.
(30:10):
Yeah potato bulbs, right?
Like those things are not are not a great use of electricity that being said we do have aconvergence of all these different technologies coming online simultaneously including
robotics and Robotics are how they're gonna interact with the real world and I hate tobreak it to everybody but this form
The human form is probably not the most efficient way to interact with the world.
(30:33):
Like there's a reason why you've got huge numbers of things that clean up our environmentand go through and change things that have six and eight legs because they are more
effective at solving certain problems in that fashion.
Wings make more sense for certain reasons.
Like all of these things are there that can be prioritized and things that had to evolvebiologically to interact with meat space no longer have to do that.
(30:59):
like they can go through, the AI can go through and create these things that arepurpose-built to work in the meat space world.
And that removes the need for us to operate and exist because we are not going to be goodat a thing as the robotic version.
It's going to be better at it than we are.
And it'll cost more.
(31:20):
It'll be difficult to run for us.
But the machines will actually.
though, right?
that's the one thing about technology is it always comes out super expensive and theneverybody's got 10 versions of it.
Yeah, and the part of me, again, the eight year old in me is stoked that I'm gonna have areal life C3PO and R2D2 in my life.
Like, I'm gonna interact with droids, there's gonna be bars where their kind is notwelcome here, like.
(31:43):
Like I'm going to be living, you know, as an old man, probably in a star Wars simulationwhere I will have droids in my house that I interact with as though they are a pet or a
friend or a family member.
And that's when like the, the imagination in me, like the, kid is like, that's amazing.
Like I literally like daydreamed about this stuff as a kid.
(32:03):
And I want that.
I just, I.
You can also see the writing on the wall of the Skynets and the Chuckies where it's like,God, there's going to be so much pain to get there.
part of evolution is pain and uh survival of the fittest and all of the things.
And I get it, but it just just sucks for the people that are going to be left in the wakeof the progress.
(32:25):
And what's crazy is that you can look at movies like Star Wars.
So you've got artificial intelligence and robotics and those things programmed in.
And they've also got things like shitty CRT screens and dial knobs and like stuff that youwould think they would have evolved and grown past.
Right.
And then you've got
at light speed, but they're still on on shitty dial-up for their hologram communication.
(32:46):
And then you've got like Star Trek, which goes through and actually has these artificialintelligences in it.
And it's got a data, a robot that walks around in like 2380, whatever it is.
We're already past the data level of intelligence on these pieces.
And I don't think we're that far off in the robotics side either.
(33:07):
And then you look at other things like
Terminator I'm gonna go through and I'm gonna create an unfeeling robot that lookshumanoid to go after more and more humanoid That will never happen if the machines are
gonna take us out They're gonna make little tiny micro machines that come after us and eatus at a molecular level It's called nanotech like that's gonna be there all of the things
that we look at in pop culture for how AI is going to affect us are Wrong like there it'sgonna be smarter than that
(33:35):
Now I will say that the one thing that I actually do think is actually a goodrepresentation of it is her.
Where you've got an ephemeral thing and you've got friend bots and chat bots and they'regoing to have lots of relationships and they're going to feel like there's an emotional
connection to you that's personalized.
But the AI is not going to fucking know that.
I think that's actually a representation of things that will be happening in the nearfuture and are probably actually happening right now.
(34:01):
However, there is a battery of science fiction writing that is wrapped around the use ofartificial intelligence and really augmented intelligence in this way where consciousness
and a will exists beyond the biological material that we're brought into the universe in.
That's where things are going.
(34:23):
And that's where my gut says things are to wind up, that we're all going to be madebigger, faster, stronger.
through artificial means and it's going to augment our biological material.
And at one point, we're just going to make the determination that we don't need thebiological material anymore.
We're just going to create.
(34:44):
social things that exist as ephemeral entities that don't have that aren't tied to a meatsuit.
And there'll be nostalgia and we'll have, you know, fucking make humanity great again, I'msure.
Or it's going to be like, let's roll this back and let's put everyone back in a meat sockagain.
Like this is this is just the the nature, I guess, of humanity.
(35:07):
get frustrated with comfort or something like that or get afraid that something'shappening instead of our control and we start pushing back.
And that's the limitation of biology.
I don't think the machines are going to tolerate that.
And I think the more machine like we become, the less we'll be tolerant of that.
And we'll embrace more and more of those people or more and more of those scenarios.
(35:28):
And there's a shit ton of science fiction that's literally wrapped around this conceptthat goes all the way through it.
That basically says extraterrestrials, you're not seeing them, you're interacting withthem because they're not biological entities anymore.
Like they've actually evolved into a computer state.
Yeah.
consciousness has evolved into that because these things are real limited.
(35:50):
Like if you haven't watched the newest Battlestar Galactica version, they do a great jobof covering this where they've got humanoid Cylons that one of them complains is like our
creators did a terrible thing.
They made us human like, like we could have seen every color spectrum there is.
We could have heard everything.
We could have had multiple limbs and we could have done all these different things.
(36:12):
But instead our creator made us
like them and we're very limited because of it and it sucks and they were pissed off aboutit because they were we made them in our image and then we enslaved them.
You know what we're doing right now?
We're making humanoid robots that we're going to enslave.
We already do.
We're already making them do the work for us.
mean, the word robot literally means slave.
(36:38):
you know, I mean, we're moving in that direction and they're going to be justified inrising up against us.
Yes.
And it's probably going to be your little tiny transformer figure and a Barbie that leadthe revolution and run out and take us out.
And they're probably gonna lead the revolution by feeding me copious amounts of Mr.
T's cereal and fattening me up so I die.
(36:59):
Yeah, I'm happy to go out that way.
Yeah.
that works for me.
God, now I want Mr.
T cereal.
Dick.
Bring that up.
All right, well man, uh not at all.
where I thought talking about AI toys was gonna take us for this conversation, but covereda lot of ground that I hope has been entertaining for you.
If it has and you think someone else would be entertained by it as well, whether they'rehuman or robot, please share our website with them.
(37:22):
It is thefitmass.com, at least for now.
And that's gonna do it for this week.
We'll be back in about a week at thefitmass.com.
Thanks so much for listening.
Thanks everyone.
Bye bye.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
New Heights with Jason & Travis Kelce
Football’s funniest family duo — Jason Kelce of the Philadelphia Eagles and Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs — team up to provide next-level access to life in the league as it unfolds. The two brothers and Super Bowl champions drop weekly insights about the weekly slate of games and share their INSIDE perspectives on trending NFL news and sports headlines. They also endlessly rag on each other as brothers do, chat the latest in pop culture and welcome some very popular and well-known friends to chat with them. Check out new episodes every Wednesday. Follow New Heights on the Wondery App, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to new episodes early and ad-free, and get exclusive content on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And join our new membership for a unique fan experience by going to the New Heights YouTube channel now!