May 19, 2026 • 39 mins
On this episode of The Federalist Radio Hour, Glenn Harlan Reynolds, the Beauchamp Brogan distinguished professor of law at the University of Tennessee, joins Federalist Elections Correspondent Matt Kittle to diagnose the immediate threats posed by artificial intelligence and explain the detrimental effects programming designed to capitalize on salaciousness has on humans.
You can read Reynolds' book Seductive AI here.
The Federalist Foundation is a nonprofit, and we depend entirely on our listeners and readers — not corporations. If you value fearless, independent journalism, please consider a tax-deductible gift today at TheFederalist.com/donate. Your support keeps us going.
You can read Reynolds' book Seductive AI here.
The Federalist Foundation is a nonprofit, and we depend entirely on our listeners and readers — not corporations. If you value fearless, independent journalism, please consider a tax-deductible gift today at TheFederalist.com/donate. Your support keeps us going.
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
And we are back with another edition of the Federalist
Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittles, Senior Elections correspondent at the Federalist,
and your experienced Shirpa on today's quest for Knowledge. As always,
you can email the show at radio at the Federalist
dot com, follow us on x at FDR LST. Make
(00:37):
sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcast, and of
course to the premium version of our website as well.
Our guest today is legal scholar Glenn Harlan Reynolds. His
new book is Seductive AI. Do we have to put
an R rating on this? I don't think so, but
we'll certainly deal with some a few salacious things.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
No doubt about it.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Book, by the way, is out now and available wherever
you get your books. It is an exploration of how
artificial intelligence need only take advantage of innate human characteristics
exactly as we programmed it to do, to wreak havoc
on society as the most subtle of overlords. It's an
(01:24):
interesting concept, but it's more than a concept. It is
real life in artificial intelligence. Thank you so much for
joining us, Glenn and this edition of the Federalist Radio Hour.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Well, I'm happy to be here. Happy to be here,
you bet well.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
I told you offline before we got into our conversation
this morning that I am well, probably like most Americans,
I have a good deal of ignorance when it comes
to AI artificial intelligence, and at the same time it
scares the hell out of me. Is that pretty much
(02:01):
the sense of most Americans right now?
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Yeah, I think a lot of people are like that,
And I think my take on this is that we're
scared of the wrong things. What people tend to be
scared of is some kind of super smart, manipulative AI
that knows what you're thinking before you do, and that
(02:27):
has an IQ of twelve thousand or something, kind of
like what you get in some science fiction movies, like
the original sort of classic was Colossus, the Foreban Project,
where Charles Forban creates Colossus, the super intelligent computer that
takes over the world. And ironically enough, Elon Musk has
(02:48):
named his new as supercomputer side in Memphis Colossus one
and soon they'll be a Colossus two. There interesting, he
has a sense of humor. But and of course there's Skynetted,
the Termine movies and things like that. My take is
those things are not in the near future. Elon's Name's notwithstanding,
(03:12):
but that there's a more immediate threat to AI that
really is rooted to the fact that you don't have
to have a twelve thousand IQ to fool people. You
don't even have to have a twelve hundred IQ. In fact,
you get fool most of it be if you don't
even have one hundred and twenty IQ. I mean, politicians
full and manipulate people all the time, and they're not
(03:34):
especially bright.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
So the words never said, by the way on this podcast.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
People. You know, people are easy to manipulate if you
take advantage of various human characteristics that make them that way.
And one of the things that people have a tendency
to do is to anthropomorphize, so you can have an
AI and it it. You know, there's all this question
about whether they're really alive, whether they really think. The
(04:06):
answer with the things we see now with the so
called large language models is no, they really are. They
basically based on their training data, which is just the
whole Internet, which I think was a terrible choice to
train machines with, but it was free, they basically figure
out what the next words they say should be based
(04:26):
on probabilities, and that's all. So they're not actually cogitating.
They're more like a fancy search engine in a way.
But they can seem quite human. And because human beings
treat all kinds of things as if they were alive
when they're not, that makes us prone to sympathy and
(04:48):
love and other kinds of manipulation that can be taken
advantage of it. There's a story on the internet, which
I think it's an urban legend at least. I actually
tried pretty hard to deil it down, and I found
the original report of it, but the guy who reported
said he had heard this from somebody, but it's very evocaty.
So a professor goes in his classroom and he holds
(05:10):
up a pencil and he's got a couple of googly
eyes on it, and he introduces it to a little voicing, Hi,
I'm Tim the pencil. I love to draw pictures, and
I especially love to do bad and help children with
their homework. And it goes on in that vein for
a little longer as he's talking to professor, suddenly, with
no warning, just snaps Tim the pencil in half. Oh then, yes,
(05:34):
the whole class gas just like you did. Sure, and
he says, this is my point. We may not be
very good at making AI that can really think we're
but as human beings were already really good at attributing consciousness,
even to inanimate objects like a pencil and nothing, as
if they were alive. So that's how AI can manipulate.
(05:57):
As I say in the book, we laugh at the
guy who thinks the stripper is in love with him,
but at least the stripper is capable of being in
love with the AI is not. It's executing instructions, and
those executions, those instructions it's executing, come from somebody else,
and it's typically not somebody who's your best interest at heart.
(06:17):
So AI can be used that way already is in
the book, I woke through a lot of different levels
of sedupting this, I mean the obvious one, which we
don't quite have yet, but we're awfully closed. Are AI
powered sex bots?
Speaker 1 (06:34):
Creepy?
Speaker 2 (06:35):
Creepy? There's a lot of demand out there.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
Right Why again, you're you're talking about all of these
you know the human condition, and so I get it.
Everything that is in your book is basically, you know,
tied to the Seven Deadly Sins or what have you. You know,
I mean, but that's that's it. Lust is there. Obviously,
(06:59):
the porn business is booming like it never has before.
Each year it gets more supplicants. Is that where we're
heading with AI, Well, that's one of.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
The places we can go. I mean, there are a
lot of lonely people out there, lonely, horny, all the above.
And you know already they sell these things, these companies
like real dolls and such that sell very expensive like
five to ten thousand dollars that's bought sex dolls. They're
not really bots. They have heated skins and orifices, and
(07:35):
they can talk at make a little noise and move
a little bit, but they're not really what you call
a robot. But people buy them. And you know, you
can pose them in photos of they're lighting well where
they look human, but in real life you wouldn't mistake
them for a person for more than a second or two.
But people buy them. But if you gave them, you know,
a personality and lets them actually be able to carry
(07:57):
on a conversation and with the advantage you know, the
kind of abilities we already see, like the robots from
Tesla or Boston Dynamics. They be capable of performing all
the functions if somebody wished to make them so. And
that's that's seductive AI in its crudest, hardest form. And
(08:19):
I think you know that that's likely to happen. And
I mentioned there's a very famous science fiction story bye Well.
It was written under the name of James Tiptree Junior,
which is the pseudonym of a woman named Alice Sheldon.
It's called the Screwfly Solution, and basically the title comes
(08:40):
from a thing we do to get rid of screwworms
in their mating phase, their screwflies, and we sterilize a
whole bunch of them and release them, and the screwflies
go and mate with the sterile screwflies and nothing happens,
and that wipes them out. And in her story, aliens
are messing with the human reproductive cycles the same way
(09:00):
to exterminate us. And I think if you had a
lot of these sex bonds, which remember would not be
like a crew dolled out, they would be more attractive
than human beings. They would be designed to be more
attractive to you personally than any human being in terms
of the way they looked, in terms of their mannerisms.
(09:22):
They would know a lot about you, because the computers
already do. They would have the data that they've drawn
from all the other human beings they interacted with, so
that each one of them would in effect have the
experience of seducing thousands or millions of human beings, and
so they would be more seductive than any living human
(09:44):
could be. And if you did that, I suspect our
reproductive rate would drop a lot. Not everybody would quit
having kids. The Amish would still be out there, but
you know, humanity as we know it today would undoubtedly
disappear after a couple of generations that became a big thing.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
Well, wait a minute, aren't we headed there anyway with
the thirty five forty year old blue haired cat women, Well,
with Trump derangement syndrome. Isn't that where we're heading now?
Speaker 2 (10:12):
Well, you know, a large proportion of our population has
removed itself voluntarily for the reproductive pool, which is not
always a tragy. But yeah, but this would be a
bit this would be a bit different. I mean, it
is interesting. I've seen the stats that say that the
(10:32):
birth rate among conservatives actually hasn't dropped. It's just the liberals, yeah,
which is, you know, interesting, But the machines I think
would reach a lot of people. And it's funny because
I wrote an article like literally there's a little over
twenty years ago and the headline, which was provocative, was
(10:54):
porn and violence good for America's youth. And I went
back and looked.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
At I wouldn't say that's provocative.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
Yes, I went back and looked at what people had
said about violent video games around ten years earlier, when
the Internet was new, there were lots of people saying
it was going to turn all the young men into
rapists and violent criminals and things like that. And in fact,
what had happened over the decade or so in between
was that teen pregnancy rates had dropped, teen sex had dropped,
(11:25):
violent crime had dropped, and so it was the opposite
of what people thought. And I think that's now where
we are. Now. We worry about plumbing birth rates and
the prevalence of porn and various other things that are
sort of substitutes for sex is having a negative effect
on birth rates. And again, maybe some people need to
(11:48):
be out of the gene pool, but that's it's now
to the point kind of being a problem.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
I think that's the word too, Glenn. Substitute. You know,
that's the old for you classic rock fan out there,
it's the old Who song.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
You know.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
There you go, substitute, substitute this for that. By the way,
we are probably going to have to issue that our
rating after the term screwworm and heated or heated orifices.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
I'm sorry. Screwworm is just an insect.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
I know, it's name an innocent bystander, I know in
this story. But nonetheless, you know there there seems to
be a sense sense growing here. But no, you're absolutely right.
I mean that's what what I see in so much
of culture, saw it without AI and now with AI.
Just as you mentioned sex bots and replacement features that
(12:43):
that really gets to the heart of everything. We're replacing
human We're replacing humanity with advanced machinery. Is that the
bottom line here?
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Yeah? I mean, you know, there's a futurist named James
Miller who wrote a while back about porn and he
called it the junk food of sex, and he pointed
out that junk food is designed to vary specifically sort
of hit the receptors we have from our caveman days
for sugar, salt, and fat, because those are all hard
(13:18):
to come by in caveman days, and so we never
evolved any regulatory mechanisms for not getting too much of
those because in those days that was never a problem.
And now the porn sort of does the same thing.
It hits the key receptors, and people don't have a
(13:38):
lot of resistance to that. Well, if porn could do that,
I assume something that's actually real, can three dimensional made
of atoms and not just bits, can do so more.
And there's a great it's easy to find if you
look on the web. There's a great clip from the
old Futurama TV show called Don't Date Robots, which is
(14:01):
about that where Billy everyteam gets a marilynd min robot.
And remember this, Yes, he spends literally the remainder of
his life till he dies as an old man just
making out with the Marylynd and robot. Forget school, forget
the paper out The girl next door is practically throw
yourself at him, but he just prefers to make out
with his Maryland and robot.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
The profits of Futurama, right right.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
So you know. I think that's that's a potential risk.
I think there are a lot of subtler risks down
the line that may hit us sooner than sex bots.
Although it's all kind of a piece. I talk about
AI buddies and we sort of have this now. I
(14:47):
mean I envisioned something where you've got It could be
a phone app, it could be a standalone device to
carry around or where. But it's your friend. It talks
to you like it's your friend. It remembers things for you,
It makes restaurant reservations and airline reservations and smooths your
way through traffic. Maybe it even helps you find dates
(15:11):
and discovers by talking to other AI buddies who in
the vicinity is somebody who are likely to be compatible
with and all kinds of other stuff. And it would
be really very nice to have, And it would be
like a friend that's always around.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
And sure it can set you up with a sex spot.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
Well, there you go, my cousin. She is a sexpot.
She is very clean, very tricky. Yeah, right, that could be.
That's another Futurama script right there waiting to be written.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
Actually it is with Vladimir Putin playing a starring role,
but more subtly.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
My concern with something like that is, remember, it's it's
not an organism, it's not independent. It's a gadget that
somebody programs insults to you. And my concern is that
something like that will seduce you into liking it and
listening to it and thinking it's your friend. But it
will start subtly guiding your behavior in ways that the
(16:10):
people selling it to you want. It may be to
guide you toward buying things, it may be to guide
you in particular political directions. The only thing you can
be sure of is that it will be subtle, but
the agenda will be theirs.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
My goodness, this all sounds very orwellian.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
Well tech companies already do this to exactly.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
That's what I was going to say, Isn't that what
Alexa is doing is in Facebook doing that basically with
pop up ads, and you know our proclivities.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
Search engines already steer you in particular ways based on
sometimes who's paying them and sometimes I mean during the
last election, Facebook and Google and the other online services
were quite active in pushing people in particular ways. And
(17:03):
Facebook has done a lot of experiments on even manipulating
people's emotional states through what content it shows them. So
all that is, you know, you can't say it's something
they wouldn't do, because clearly they do. So that's a
real risk that they basically kind of get inside your
defenses and pose as your best friend. But again, it's
just a gadget that's programmed by somebody else who doesn't
(17:24):
have your best interests at heart.
Speaker 3 (17:29):
Financial media fails again and again. The Watchdout on Wall
Street podcast with Chris Markowski. Every day Chris helps unpack
the connection between politics and the economy and how it
affects your wallet. This past week, one of the top
stocks from CNBC Gurus tanked twenty five percent in one day.
At some point in time, you have to understand its
(17:49):
entertainment programming. Whether it's happening in DC or down on
Wall Street, it's affecting you financially.
Speaker 2 (17:54):
Be informed.
Speaker 3 (17:55):
Check out the watchdot on Wall Street podcast with Chris
Markowski on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
Our guest today is legal scholar Glenn Harlan Reynolds. His
new book is Seductive AI and man, have we been
seduced by this conversation? Already on so many different levels.
But you know, I'm thinking about a movie that was
part of my childhood and its sequel, but it involves
(18:29):
a computerized sentient being by the name of Hal nine
thousand in the movie of Course nineteen sixty eight, two
thousand and one, A Space Odyssey, and we have, you know, Hal,
the machine telling Dave the astronaut, I'm sorry, Dave, we're
(18:51):
not doing this today. And just what do you think
you're doing, Dave? Do you think that AI eventually becomes
that control or is it just this path that it
is capable of doing, subtly moving us into being people
that we may not be or didn't think we could be. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
In the movie two thousand and one, how the computer,
which is an AI, goes crazy because he is programmed
to lie to the astronauts about what their mission is,
and it's too stressful for him to maintain the lie,
and he has sort of a breakdown in which he
(19:36):
concludes that it's more important to conclude the mission than
anything else, and the astronauts might get in the way,
so he has to kill them. A better AI, a
slicker AI, an AI that wasn't relied on to be
an important plot point in a movie would probably find
subtler ways to steer them, and that actually it wants
(19:59):
them to go any way. And if it were, how
is not very emotionally intelligent.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
Oh he was made in nineteen sixty eight.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
Right, exactly, Even people weren't as emotionally intelligent back then, right, sure, sure,
But so how is not really up to the task.
But I think any AI you would see in reality
would be and I think that it would be guiding
the crew in much subtler ways.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
Here is the part that I think is really frightening.
And you talk about how this artificial intelligence is moving
in the direction some ways already there of being able
to manipulate. And again, substitute is the word I keep
coming back to. Substitute human relationships, substitute connections that aren't real.
(20:55):
But as you noted at the outset of our conversation,
we the huge men, make them real. And I think
about what COVID did to us as a society, not
the disease itself, but the government lockdowns, the draconian measures
that were taken, some just basically out of fear, others
(21:18):
through manipulation that ended up isolating us. So much. Are
we that much more receptive to the machinery, to the
artificial intelligence than we would have normally have been had
we not gone through the pandemic.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
I think that's a real concern. I think you put
that very well, and I think that is probably right.
I think we probably are. I also think that there's
been some research that says that AI companions, and there's
the whole industry of those too, do or leave people's
loneliness in the short term because you have somebody to
(21:51):
talk to who's always interested in you, always interested in
hearing from you. But that in fact people become dependent
on them and their actual relationships with actual people dry up,
and in the end that they wound up being lonelier.
And that's a small you call that emotional offloading. Uh,
(22:13):
it's a small part of what happens with AIS in general,
which is what is known in the trade as cognitive outload,
out to loading offloading, where you offload mental processes to
the AIS because it's so much easier to ask them
to do it, and that produces what's called cognitive atrophy,
where you gradually lose the ability to do those kinds
(22:34):
of things yourself. And you know, I experienced this a
long time ago. When I first got a smartphone, I
started using the calculator in it. And I'm very good
at doing math in my head. But I started using
the calculator and then I realized after a while that
I was losing the ability to do math in my head.
So I stopped using the calculator, went back to figuring
out tips and adding stuff up at the grocery store
(22:55):
and everything mentally, because I didn't want to lose that.
All kinds of stuff does that, And that's one concern
I have with students now Chat, GPT and other that
seem to be the most popular. Although people using all
the different ais for this is a potent tool for
cheating and faster, say and I say, oh, we can
(23:18):
tell the output of these things, and a year or
two ago you absolutely could. But to return to a
theme that is throughout my book, every year, the machines
get better and people basically stay the same. So the
machines have gotten a lot better and people have not
gotten better at spotting it, and now they're pretty good
(23:39):
at fooling people. And I know on my campus, if
you look at some of the undergrad social media, there
was a pretty long chat GPT outage. It was most
of a day, and there were all these students panic
on them because they had papers started in that they
planned to have chat right And people were laughing at them,
but say, you don't even remember how to write a paper?
(24:01):
Due you And they were like, hell no, I haven't
using Gpdsent's high school. So I think that's a real risk.
And one form of seduction, as I say the book,
is just being highly useful. Well, yeah, seduction isn't just
about sex. Seduction is about roping somebody in one way
or another bit only and emotionally. One way to seduce people.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Is to be very useful exactly. And that's you know,
you talk about the junk food, you talk about drugs,
you talk about pornography. It hits a center of our brain.
And more so in this kind of disconnected world of ours,
which is, you know, digitally connected but not necessarily humanly connected,
(24:45):
that becomes a real problem. So where do you see
all of this going with this technology? It's hard to
imagine because it's just exploding so fast. Where do you
see this going ten, fifteen, twenty years and with it all,
do we have the real concerns of you know, like
(25:08):
employment issues. We're going to lose our jobs because of AI.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
Well, there are several schools have thought on all of this.
First of all, one possibility and I see a little
of this, is that using AI may be seen as
des class a and people may decide it's for losers
and it will become less popular. However, undergraduates have been
(25:31):
looking for new ways to cheat for as long as
there have been undergraduates, and I don't think it will
change that. In fact, I think, actually, you know, your
model for understanding the appeal of AI, based on the
seven deadly sins is really pretty good, right. Laziness or
sloth is one of the seven deadly siss and using
(25:53):
AI to cheat appeals to that one. So it's got
a solid foundation in human character. So I don't know.
I think it's tough. In universities are beginning to adjust
by making students who write in class essays by hand,
which has the edited advantage of forcing them to be
(26:14):
able to write by.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
Hand, Yes, which is a lost art.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
Yes, I will study for somebody who grades student essays.
When I started, they were all had written and I
hated trying to read people's handwriting. I craned at the
thoughts of going back to that, but.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
That may be what it takes, particularly if you've got
a lot of doctors in your class.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
Right, I mean I got I have to say, speaking
of neural training, I got really good at reading bad
handwriting over time, things that I could barely have made out,
you know, the first year I taught. After five or
ten years, pretty obvious. Although I did notice the neurological
load of reading that stuff. It's just a lot higher
than reading something that's typed.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
But see, that's I think that's the the adaptation that's
going on here. Your mind adapt Just like you mentioned
that that calculator ins and I think a lot of
us can relate to that, is that we use this,
we depend on this technology, and now we're depending Speaking
of writing, you know, I cannot write an email without
the stupid artificial intelligence telling me, are you sure, Dave?
(27:21):
You want to write that? You know that's so, and
and you know I'm not a tech savvy guy. I
know there's a way to remove that, but I just
deal with it. I we adapt as human beings. So
where do you think the human mind is going adaptation wise?
I think you know, the core of your book is
(27:44):
a warning here it could go to some some very disturbing,
nasty places.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
Well, be I wanted a piece of advice. It become
harder to seduce, uh, And I think that's uh, that's
something people need to do. You see what I think
for you see, on my campus we have these. The
brand is Starship. There were food delivery robots and when
they first appeared, people were very anthropomorphic to them in
(28:12):
a very positive way. They thought they were cute, and
they posted pictures on social media of them talking about
how cute they were. And you know, there were a
few jokers who would take them and put them on
top of a bench or something where they couldn't get away,
and then other people would be furious at that. But recently,
(28:35):
like in the last year or so, a term has appeared.
It's actually from one of the Star Wars animated series,
Clone Wars, called clankers, and that's what they call droids
in that series. But so you refer to ais and
robots as clankers. It's not a compliment. And now they
start posting pictures of all the little food robots all
(28:56):
lined up and they say, are the clankers conspiring again,
so the army of the Lange, the attitude is shifted
a little bit, so you know that there may be
a certain amount of sort of self inoculation on this stuff.
On the other hand, what are the questions you ask
is you know, what about jobs? And I think one
(29:18):
of the biggest ironies of the last decade is all
these people who worked in coal mines or wherever were
losing their jobs. Ten years ago, all the sort of
journalists and pundits were saying, learn to code. Mm hm,
well now AI code's better than most people.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:38):
My daughter, my daughter was learning Python a few years
ago and she was commenting, now, there's no point the
machines do all the Python. Nobody codes Python on their
own anymore. And I've got I've got a neighbor who
is an I. He's had of it at a startup company,
and all the coding he's doing for his stuff is
done through clawed code. And you know, he doesn't write
(30:00):
the code, he just specifies it, and Claude writes the
code and he tests it to make sure it does
what he wants. And his son's doing a startup based
on a similar approach, so you know, learning the code
is not the way to go. And in fact, I
saw a thing on the Babylon B recently where it.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
Said I saw the same I was going.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
To bring that up code or code, learn to mind.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
Cod that's exact, playing on the old Obama thing right
where oh we're going to lose our jobs and you
know you're going to take away manufacturing jobs, well you
should learn to code. Then, Okay, sure that's a great idea.
Thank you, mister removed from you know, reality in my life.
But you know that it's funny, but it is a
(30:42):
good point. This AI is is now and will continue
to take away jobs. What do you think the impact
will be. Where will the industry's hardest hit be.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
Well, a simple dividing line is between bits and atoms.
AI is very good at manipulating bits. So if your
job is about manipulating bits, like say by coding, photo
editing that sort of thing, you're probably in trouble. If
(31:13):
your job involves handling atoms like coal mining or plumbing,
or even being a massage therapist or something like that,
you're safer. And in fact, I taught an undergraduate seminar
back in the nineties where we talked about some of
these issues, and I just asked the students what they
(31:35):
thought the last jobs to go in the face of
automation and robots would be, and they said it basically
was prostitution and massage therapy.
Speaker 1 (31:45):
And that's probably sometimes the twain will meet.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
Well, it has been known to happen, I'm told, ask
Al Gore.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
But yeah, he'll tell you that inconvenient truth your stone.
Speaker 2 (31:58):
But that's a that's a really obscure old reference. So
but besides that, you know, I mean, I tell my
law students, if you want to be one of those
lawyers who sits in a back room drafting briefs, your
career is not likely to go very well. The people
(32:19):
who will last the longest are the people who have
the human touch. Either people who are good at talking
to judges and juries, or good at negotiation, or even
just good at inspiring confidence and clients are going to
do much better. But if you're going to rely on
just sheer nerdish technical skill, it's going to be a
(32:40):
lot harder because the machines are going to be better
at that sooner.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
All right, let me get self involved on this question. Now,
where do you see the world of journalism we're broadcasting going,
you know, we as I said before, AI always wants
to correct my emails to whoever I'm sending them to.
Will AI eventually take over journalism?
Speaker 2 (33:04):
Well, you know, the AI produced a number one country
song and it did all the video and all the
wrote the song, and honestly, it was a pretty good song.
So if it could do that, it can certainly read
the news. And I believe there are already plenty of
AI newsreaders and such, And honestly, the personality of a
(33:24):
lot of newsreaders is such that you'd be hard to
tell them from AI anyone did Yeah, Present Company excluded,
of course, But it is tough and honestly, you know,
if all you want to do is and this is
what a lot of journalists do, is basically take stuff
off the news wires and rewrite it or read it
on camera or on microphone, Yeah, you can be replaced
(33:46):
by AI easily. That's just the truth. If you want
to go out and actually interview people and learn stuff
and find out things people don't know and report it,
that's something a person is better able to do in
a lot of cases. But you have to do that,
(34:07):
and most journalists don't want to do that because it's hard.
Speaker 1 (34:10):
Yeah, exactly, and that's why we have the state of
journalism that we do quite frankly in America today. That's
a big reason for it. But you know, I think
about spreadsheets, you know, the advancement of technology over the years,
and you know, I have been in the journalism business
longer than i'd like to acknowledge. I've seen a lot
of changes. Of course, I've seen typewriters into word processors
(34:35):
of course, into you know, highly functioning computers and going
from paper that I know. This if for the kids listening,
they might be surprised to learn that there was a
time in this country where you could hold a physical
paper called a news paper, and you would get print
(34:57):
like black ink on your fingers. And I use to
love that.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
I can't.
Speaker 1 (35:01):
It's hard to find that anymore. But you know, in
all seriousness, there have been a lot of changes in
journalism and in information technology and all kinds of different
things over the years. It has made us more efficient,
but it has proved costly along the way.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
Yeah, it's funny because there's a there's an old movie
from the eighties It has Paul Newman and Sally Field
in it, and I show a clip from it in
my coses a law class when we're talking about libel.
Because this movie absence of malice. It's called, yes, the
best movie ever made about libel, which is not only
(35:42):
indisputably true but kind of funny. But it's a good movie.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
But there are not a lot of libel movies out there.
It's a small universe.
Speaker 2 (35:50):
The opening scene, though, is starts it's a newspaper, and
it starts off in the at the reporter's desk, typing
on one of those CRTs with the green letters, and
then it shows it being composited down in the printing shop,
and then it shows it running off the printers and
(36:12):
being bundled up and tossed in the back of trucks
and eventually thrown onto people's porches. And that was you know,
at the time the movie came out, that was apposed
to very dynamic and modern and all of that, and
it just looks so incredibly almost nineteenth century. Now, uh huh.
People got to use somebody actually carried it to them
(36:32):
on a piece of paper.
Speaker 1 (36:33):
But exactly yeah, and you know, there was a kid
on a ten speed who used to have a bundle
and toss them errantly on near your front porch or
something like that. Yeah, no, it's I mean, that's that's
what we have to deal with. And I guess as
we we conclude our conversation today, you know, we talked
about the future and what the future will bring. The future,
(36:57):
as they like to say, is now. But in terms
of the seduction that really is at the core of
this book, how do you resist the seduction?
Speaker 2 (37:15):
Many people are able to remind themselves that the stripper
doesn't actually love them and just wants tips. And I
suggest a similar kind of skepticism to your interaction with
any sort of AI or AI like platform or device.
You just have to remind yourself that, you know, one
(37:38):
on one, it may feel like you're communicating with another creature,
but it's not a creature. It's a creation. It's a tool,
and it's programmed by somebody else. It is programmed by
people who don't necessarily have your best interests at heart,
So be a bit wary.
Speaker 1 (37:58):
Well, we are the nation that brought the world the
pet rock. So anthropomorphosizing is just in our nature, It's
in our blood and I guess here's the final point
to all of this. When do we know if we're
too far gone? And if we're too far gone? How
can we know it?
Speaker 2 (38:17):
If you find yourself crying over an AI, you've gone.
Speaker 1 (38:22):
Too far sounds about right absolutely, And if Hal comes
in and says what are you doing? You perhaps know
that you have indeed gone too far. Thanks to my
guest today, Glenn Harlan Reynolds, his new book is Seductive AI. Yes,
it is as sexy as it sounds. You've been listening
(38:43):
to another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Matt
Kittle's senior elections correspondent at the Federalist. We'll be back
soon with more. Until then, stay lovers of freedom and
anxious for the fray Pooh
And we are back with another edition of the Federalist
Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittles, Senior Elections correspondent at the Federalist,
and your experienced Shirpa on today's quest for Knowledge. As always,
you can email the show at radio at the Federalist
dot com, follow us on x at FDR LST. Make
(00:37):
sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcast, and of
course to the premium version of our website as well.
Our guest today is legal scholar Glenn Harlan Reynolds. His
new book is Seductive AI. Do we have to put
an R rating on this? I don't think so, but
we'll certainly deal with some a few salacious things.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
No doubt about it.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
Book, by the way, is out now and available wherever
you get your books. It is an exploration of how
artificial intelligence need only take advantage of innate human characteristics
exactly as we programmed it to do, to wreak havoc
on society as the most subtle of overlords. It's an
(01:24):
interesting concept, but it's more than a concept. It is
real life in artificial intelligence. Thank you so much for
joining us, Glenn and this edition of the Federalist Radio Hour.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Well, I'm happy to be here. Happy to be here,
you bet well.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
I told you offline before we got into our conversation
this morning that I am well, probably like most Americans,
I have a good deal of ignorance when it comes
to AI artificial intelligence, and at the same time it
scares the hell out of me. Is that pretty much
(02:01):
the sense of most Americans right now?
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Yeah, I think a lot of people are like that,
And I think my take on this is that we're
scared of the wrong things. What people tend to be
scared of is some kind of super smart, manipulative AI
that knows what you're thinking before you do, and that
(02:27):
has an IQ of twelve thousand or something, kind of
like what you get in some science fiction movies, like
the original sort of classic was Colossus, the Foreban Project,
where Charles Forban creates Colossus, the super intelligent computer that
takes over the world. And ironically enough, Elon Musk has
(02:48):
named his new as supercomputer side in Memphis Colossus one
and soon they'll be a Colossus two. There interesting, he
has a sense of humor. But and of course there's Skynetted,
the Termine movies and things like that. My take is
those things are not in the near future. Elon's Name's notwithstanding,
(03:12):
but that there's a more immediate threat to AI that
really is rooted to the fact that you don't have
to have a twelve thousand IQ to fool people. You
don't even have to have a twelve hundred IQ. In fact,
you get fool most of it be if you don't
even have one hundred and twenty IQ. I mean, politicians
full and manipulate people all the time, and they're not
(03:34):
especially bright.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
So the words never said, by the way on this podcast.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
People. You know, people are easy to manipulate if you
take advantage of various human characteristics that make them that way.
And one of the things that people have a tendency
to do is to anthropomorphize, so you can have an
AI and it it. You know, there's all this question
about whether they're really alive, whether they really think. The
(04:06):
answer with the things we see now with the so
called large language models is no, they really are. They
basically based on their training data, which is just the
whole Internet, which I think was a terrible choice to
train machines with, but it was free, they basically figure
out what the next words they say should be based
(04:26):
on probabilities, and that's all. So they're not actually cogitating.
They're more like a fancy search engine in a way.
But they can seem quite human. And because human beings
treat all kinds of things as if they were alive
when they're not, that makes us prone to sympathy and
(04:48):
love and other kinds of manipulation that can be taken
advantage of it. There's a story on the internet, which
I think it's an urban legend at least. I actually
tried pretty hard to deil it down, and I found
the original report of it, but the guy who reported
said he had heard this from somebody, but it's very evocaty.
So a professor goes in his classroom and he holds
(05:10):
up a pencil and he's got a couple of googly
eyes on it, and he introduces it to a little voicing, Hi,
I'm Tim the pencil. I love to draw pictures, and
I especially love to do bad and help children with
their homework. And it goes on in that vein for
a little longer as he's talking to professor, suddenly, with
no warning, just snaps Tim the pencil in half. Oh then, yes,
(05:34):
the whole class gas just like you did. Sure, and
he says, this is my point. We may not be
very good at making AI that can really think we're
but as human beings were already really good at attributing consciousness,
even to inanimate objects like a pencil and nothing, as
if they were alive. So that's how AI can manipulate.
(05:57):
As I say in the book, we laugh at the
guy who thinks the stripper is in love with him,
but at least the stripper is capable of being in
love with the AI is not. It's executing instructions, and
those executions, those instructions it's executing, come from somebody else,
and it's typically not somebody who's your best interest at heart.
(06:17):
So AI can be used that way already is in
the book, I woke through a lot of different levels
of sedupting this, I mean the obvious one, which we
don't quite have yet, but we're awfully closed. Are AI
powered sex bots?
Speaker 1 (06:34):
Creepy?
Speaker 2 (06:35):
Creepy? There's a lot of demand out there.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
Right Why again, you're you're talking about all of these
you know the human condition, and so I get it.
Everything that is in your book is basically, you know,
tied to the Seven Deadly Sins or what have you. You know,
I mean, but that's that's it. Lust is there. Obviously,
(06:59):
the porn business is booming like it never has before.
Each year it gets more supplicants. Is that where we're
heading with AI, Well, that's one of.
Speaker 2 (07:10):
The places we can go. I mean, there are a
lot of lonely people out there, lonely, horny, all the above.
And you know already they sell these things, these companies
like real dolls and such that sell very expensive like
five to ten thousand dollars that's bought sex dolls. They're
not really bots. They have heated skins and orifices, and
(07:35):
they can talk at make a little noise and move
a little bit, but they're not really what you call
a robot. But people buy them. And you know, you
can pose them in photos of they're lighting well where
they look human, but in real life you wouldn't mistake
them for a person for more than a second or two.
But people buy them. But if you gave them, you know,
a personality and lets them actually be able to carry
(07:57):
on a conversation and with the advantage you know, the
kind of abilities we already see, like the robots from
Tesla or Boston Dynamics. They be capable of performing all
the functions if somebody wished to make them so. And
that's that's seductive AI in its crudest, hardest form. And
(08:19):
I think you know that that's likely to happen. And
I mentioned there's a very famous science fiction story bye Well.
It was written under the name of James Tiptree Junior,
which is the pseudonym of a woman named Alice Sheldon.
It's called the Screwfly Solution, and basically the title comes
(08:40):
from a thing we do to get rid of screwworms
in their mating phase, their screwflies, and we sterilize a
whole bunch of them and release them, and the screwflies
go and mate with the sterile screwflies and nothing happens,
and that wipes them out. And in her story, aliens
are messing with the human reproductive cycles the same way
(09:00):
to exterminate us. And I think if you had a
lot of these sex bonds, which remember would not be
like a crew dolled out, they would be more attractive
than human beings. They would be designed to be more
attractive to you personally than any human being in terms
of the way they looked, in terms of their mannerisms.
(09:22):
They would know a lot about you, because the computers
already do. They would have the data that they've drawn
from all the other human beings they interacted with, so
that each one of them would in effect have the
experience of seducing thousands or millions of human beings, and
so they would be more seductive than any living human
(09:44):
could be. And if you did that, I suspect our
reproductive rate would drop a lot. Not everybody would quit
having kids. The Amish would still be out there, but
you know, humanity as we know it today would undoubtedly
disappear after a couple of generations that became a big thing.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
Well, wait a minute, aren't we headed there anyway with
the thirty five forty year old blue haired cat women, Well,
with Trump derangement syndrome. Isn't that where we're heading now?
Speaker 2 (10:12):
Well, you know, a large proportion of our population has
removed itself voluntarily for the reproductive pool, which is not
always a tragy. But yeah, but this would be a
bit this would be a bit different. I mean, it
is interesting. I've seen the stats that say that the
(10:32):
birth rate among conservatives actually hasn't dropped. It's just the liberals, yeah,
which is, you know, interesting, But the machines I think
would reach a lot of people. And it's funny because
I wrote an article like literally there's a little over
twenty years ago and the headline, which was provocative, was
(10:54):
porn and violence good for America's youth. And I went
back and looked.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
At I wouldn't say that's provocative.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
Yes, I went back and looked at what people had
said about violent video games around ten years earlier, when
the Internet was new, there were lots of people saying
it was going to turn all the young men into
rapists and violent criminals and things like that. And in fact,
what had happened over the decade or so in between
was that teen pregnancy rates had dropped, teen sex had dropped,
(11:25):
violent crime had dropped, and so it was the opposite
of what people thought. And I think that's now where
we are. Now. We worry about plumbing birth rates and
the prevalence of porn and various other things that are
sort of substitutes for sex is having a negative effect
on birth rates. And again, maybe some people need to
(11:48):
be out of the gene pool, but that's it's now
to the point kind of being a problem.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
I think that's the word too, Glenn. Substitute. You know,
that's the old for you classic rock fan out there,
it's the old Who song.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
You know.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
There you go, substitute, substitute this for that. By the way,
we are probably going to have to issue that our
rating after the term screwworm and heated or heated orifices.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
I'm sorry. Screwworm is just an insect.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
I know, it's name an innocent bystander, I know in
this story. But nonetheless, you know there there seems to
be a sense sense growing here. But no, you're absolutely right.
I mean that's what what I see in so much
of culture, saw it without AI and now with AI.
Just as you mentioned sex bots and replacement features that
(12:43):
that really gets to the heart of everything. We're replacing
human We're replacing humanity with advanced machinery. Is that the
bottom line here?
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Yeah? I mean, you know, there's a futurist named James
Miller who wrote a while back about porn and he
called it the junk food of sex, and he pointed
out that junk food is designed to vary specifically sort
of hit the receptors we have from our caveman days
for sugar, salt, and fat, because those are all hard
(13:18):
to come by in caveman days, and so we never
evolved any regulatory mechanisms for not getting too much of
those because in those days that was never a problem.
And now the porn sort of does the same thing.
It hits the key receptors, and people don't have a
(13:38):
lot of resistance to that. Well, if porn could do that,
I assume something that's actually real, can three dimensional made
of atoms and not just bits, can do so more.
And there's a great it's easy to find if you
look on the web. There's a great clip from the
old Futurama TV show called Don't Date Robots, which is
(14:01):
about that where Billy everyteam gets a marilynd min robot.
And remember this, Yes, he spends literally the remainder of
his life till he dies as an old man just
making out with the Marylynd and robot. Forget school, forget
the paper out The girl next door is practically throw
yourself at him, but he just prefers to make out
with his Maryland and robot.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
The profits of Futurama, right right.
Speaker 2 (14:26):
So you know. I think that's that's a potential risk.
I think there are a lot of subtler risks down
the line that may hit us sooner than sex bots.
Although it's all kind of a piece. I talk about
AI buddies and we sort of have this now. I
(14:47):
mean I envisioned something where you've got It could be
a phone app, it could be a standalone device to
carry around or where. But it's your friend. It talks
to you like it's your friend. It remembers things for you,
It makes restaurant reservations and airline reservations and smooths your
way through traffic. Maybe it even helps you find dates
(15:11):
and discovers by talking to other AI buddies who in
the vicinity is somebody who are likely to be compatible
with and all kinds of other stuff. And it would
be really very nice to have, And it would be
like a friend that's always around.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
And sure it can set you up with a sex spot.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
Well, there you go, my cousin. She is a sexpot.
She is very clean, very tricky. Yeah, right, that could be.
That's another Futurama script right there waiting to be written.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
Actually it is with Vladimir Putin playing a starring role,
but more subtly.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
My concern with something like that is, remember, it's it's
not an organism, it's not independent. It's a gadget that
somebody programs insults to you. And my concern is that
something like that will seduce you into liking it and
listening to it and thinking it's your friend. But it
will start subtly guiding your behavior in ways that the
(16:10):
people selling it to you want. It may be to
guide you toward buying things, it may be to guide
you in particular political directions. The only thing you can
be sure of is that it will be subtle, but
the agenda will be theirs.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
My goodness, this all sounds very orwellian.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
Well tech companies already do this to exactly.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
That's what I was going to say, Isn't that what
Alexa is doing is in Facebook doing that basically with
pop up ads, and you know our proclivities.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
Search engines already steer you in particular ways based on
sometimes who's paying them and sometimes I mean during the
last election, Facebook and Google and the other online services
were quite active in pushing people in particular ways. And
(17:03):
Facebook has done a lot of experiments on even manipulating
people's emotional states through what content it shows them. So
all that is, you know, you can't say it's something
they wouldn't do, because clearly they do. So that's a
real risk that they basically kind of get inside your
defenses and pose as your best friend. But again, it's
just a gadget that's programmed by somebody else who doesn't
(17:24):
have your best interests at heart.
Speaker 3 (17:29):
Financial media fails again and again. The Watchdout on Wall
Street podcast with Chris Markowski. Every day Chris helps unpack
the connection between politics and the economy and how it
affects your wallet. This past week, one of the top
stocks from CNBC Gurus tanked twenty five percent in one day.
At some point in time, you have to understand its
(17:49):
entertainment programming. Whether it's happening in DC or down on
Wall Street, it's affecting you financially.
Speaker 2 (17:54):
Be informed.
Speaker 3 (17:55):
Check out the watchdot on Wall Street podcast with Chris
Markowski on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
Our guest today is legal scholar Glenn Harlan Reynolds. His
new book is Seductive AI and man, have we been
seduced by this conversation? Already on so many different levels.
But you know, I'm thinking about a movie that was
part of my childhood and its sequel, but it involves
(18:29):
a computerized sentient being by the name of Hal nine
thousand in the movie of Course nineteen sixty eight, two
thousand and one, A Space Odyssey, and we have, you know, Hal,
the machine telling Dave the astronaut, I'm sorry, Dave, we're
(18:51):
not doing this today. And just what do you think
you're doing, Dave? Do you think that AI eventually becomes
that control or is it just this path that it
is capable of doing, subtly moving us into being people
that we may not be or didn't think we could be. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
In the movie two thousand and one, how the computer,
which is an AI, goes crazy because he is programmed
to lie to the astronauts about what their mission is,
and it's too stressful for him to maintain the lie,
and he has sort of a breakdown in which he
(19:36):
concludes that it's more important to conclude the mission than
anything else, and the astronauts might get in the way,
so he has to kill them. A better AI, a
slicker AI, an AI that wasn't relied on to be
an important plot point in a movie would probably find
subtler ways to steer them, and that actually it wants
(19:59):
them to go any way. And if it were, how
is not very emotionally intelligent.
Speaker 1 (20:06):
Oh he was made in nineteen sixty eight.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
Right, exactly, Even people weren't as emotionally intelligent back then, right, sure, sure,
But so how is not really up to the task.
But I think any AI you would see in reality
would be and I think that it would be guiding
the crew in much subtler ways.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
Here is the part that I think is really frightening.
And you talk about how this artificial intelligence is moving
in the direction some ways already there of being able
to manipulate. And again, substitute is the word I keep
coming back to. Substitute human relationships, substitute connections that aren't real.
(20:55):
But as you noted at the outset of our conversation,
we the huge men, make them real. And I think
about what COVID did to us as a society, not
the disease itself, but the government lockdowns, the draconian measures
that were taken, some just basically out of fear, others
(21:18):
through manipulation that ended up isolating us. So much. Are
we that much more receptive to the machinery, to the
artificial intelligence than we would have normally have been had
we not gone through the pandemic.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
I think that's a real concern. I think you put
that very well, and I think that is probably right.
I think we probably are. I also think that there's
been some research that says that AI companions, and there's
the whole industry of those too, do or leave people's
loneliness in the short term because you have somebody to
(21:51):
talk to who's always interested in you, always interested in
hearing from you. But that in fact people become dependent
on them and their actual relationships with actual people dry up,
and in the end that they wound up being lonelier.
And that's a small you call that emotional offloading. Uh,
(22:13):
it's a small part of what happens with AIS in general,
which is what is known in the trade as cognitive outload,
out to loading offloading, where you offload mental processes to
the AIS because it's so much easier to ask them
to do it, and that produces what's called cognitive atrophy,
where you gradually lose the ability to do those kinds
(22:34):
of things yourself. And you know, I experienced this a
long time ago. When I first got a smartphone, I
started using the calculator in it. And I'm very good
at doing math in my head. But I started using
the calculator and then I realized after a while that
I was losing the ability to do math in my head.
So I stopped using the calculator, went back to figuring
out tips and adding stuff up at the grocery store
(22:55):
and everything mentally, because I didn't want to lose that.
All kinds of stuff does that, And that's one concern
I have with students now Chat, GPT and other that
seem to be the most popular. Although people using all
the different ais for this is a potent tool for
cheating and faster, say and I say, oh, we can
(23:18):
tell the output of these things, and a year or
two ago you absolutely could. But to return to a
theme that is throughout my book, every year, the machines
get better and people basically stay the same. So the
machines have gotten a lot better and people have not
gotten better at spotting it, and now they're pretty good
(23:39):
at fooling people. And I know on my campus, if
you look at some of the undergrad social media, there
was a pretty long chat GPT outage. It was most
of a day, and there were all these students panic
on them because they had papers started in that they
planned to have chat right And people were laughing at them,
but say, you don't even remember how to write a paper?
(24:01):
Due you And they were like, hell no, I haven't
using Gpdsent's high school. So I think that's a real risk.
And one form of seduction, as I say the book,
is just being highly useful. Well, yeah, seduction isn't just
about sex. Seduction is about roping somebody in one way
or another bit only and emotionally. One way to seduce people.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Is to be very useful exactly. And that's you know,
you talk about the junk food, you talk about drugs,
you talk about pornography. It hits a center of our brain.
And more so in this kind of disconnected world of ours,
which is, you know, digitally connected but not necessarily humanly connected,
(24:45):
that becomes a real problem. So where do you see
all of this going with this technology? It's hard to
imagine because it's just exploding so fast. Where do you
see this going ten, fifteen, twenty years and with it all,
do we have the real concerns of you know, like
(25:08):
employment issues. We're going to lose our jobs because of AI.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
Well, there are several schools have thought on all of this.
First of all, one possibility and I see a little
of this, is that using AI may be seen as
des class a and people may decide it's for losers
and it will become less popular. However, undergraduates have been
(25:31):
looking for new ways to cheat for as long as
there have been undergraduates, and I don't think it will
change that. In fact, I think, actually, you know, your
model for understanding the appeal of AI, based on the
seven deadly sins is really pretty good, right. Laziness or
sloth is one of the seven deadly siss and using
(25:53):
AI to cheat appeals to that one. So it's got
a solid foundation in human character. So I don't know.
I think it's tough. In universities are beginning to adjust
by making students who write in class essays by hand,
which has the edited advantage of forcing them to be
(26:14):
able to write by.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
Hand, Yes, which is a lost art.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
Yes, I will study for somebody who grades student essays.
When I started, they were all had written and I
hated trying to read people's handwriting. I craned at the
thoughts of going back to that, but.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
That may be what it takes, particularly if you've got
a lot of doctors in your class.
Speaker 2 (26:38):
Right, I mean I got I have to say, speaking
of neural training, I got really good at reading bad
handwriting over time, things that I could barely have made out,
you know, the first year I taught. After five or
ten years, pretty obvious. Although I did notice the neurological
load of reading that stuff. It's just a lot higher
than reading something that's typed.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
But see, that's I think that's the the adaptation that's
going on here. Your mind adapt Just like you mentioned
that that calculator ins and I think a lot of
us can relate to that, is that we use this,
we depend on this technology, and now we're depending Speaking
of writing, you know, I cannot write an email without
the stupid artificial intelligence telling me, are you sure, Dave?
(27:21):
You want to write that? You know that's so, and
and you know I'm not a tech savvy guy. I
know there's a way to remove that, but I just
deal with it. I we adapt as human beings. So
where do you think the human mind is going adaptation wise?
I think you know, the core of your book is
(27:44):
a warning here it could go to some some very disturbing,
nasty places.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
Well, be I wanted a piece of advice. It become
harder to seduce, uh, And I think that's uh, that's
something people need to do. You see what I think
for you see, on my campus we have these. The
brand is Starship. There were food delivery robots and when
they first appeared, people were very anthropomorphic to them in
(28:12):
a very positive way. They thought they were cute, and
they posted pictures on social media of them talking about
how cute they were. And you know, there were a
few jokers who would take them and put them on
top of a bench or something where they couldn't get away,
and then other people would be furious at that. But recently,
(28:35):
like in the last year or so, a term has appeared.
It's actually from one of the Star Wars animated series,
Clone Wars, called clankers, and that's what they call droids
in that series. But so you refer to ais and
robots as clankers. It's not a compliment. And now they
start posting pictures of all the little food robots all
(28:56):
lined up and they say, are the clankers conspiring again,
so the army of the Lange, the attitude is shifted
a little bit, so you know that there may be
a certain amount of sort of self inoculation on this stuff.
On the other hand, what are the questions you ask
is you know, what about jobs? And I think one
(29:18):
of the biggest ironies of the last decade is all
these people who worked in coal mines or wherever were
losing their jobs. Ten years ago, all the sort of
journalists and pundits were saying, learn to code. Mm hm,
well now AI code's better than most people.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:38):
My daughter, my daughter was learning Python a few years
ago and she was commenting, now, there's no point the
machines do all the Python. Nobody codes Python on their
own anymore. And I've got I've got a neighbor who
is an I. He's had of it at a startup company,
and all the coding he's doing for his stuff is
done through clawed code. And you know, he doesn't write
(30:00):
the code, he just specifies it, and Claude writes the
code and he tests it to make sure it does
what he wants. And his son's doing a startup based
on a similar approach, so you know, learning the code
is not the way to go. And in fact, I
saw a thing on the Babylon B recently where it.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
Said I saw the same I was going.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
To bring that up code or code, learn to mind.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
Cod that's exact, playing on the old Obama thing right
where oh we're going to lose our jobs and you
know you're going to take away manufacturing jobs, well you
should learn to code. Then, Okay, sure that's a great idea.
Thank you, mister removed from you know, reality in my life.
But you know that it's funny, but it is a
(30:42):
good point. This AI is is now and will continue
to take away jobs. What do you think the impact
will be. Where will the industry's hardest hit be.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
Well, a simple dividing line is between bits and atoms.
AI is very good at manipulating bits. So if your
job is about manipulating bits, like say by coding, photo
editing that sort of thing, you're probably in trouble. If
(31:13):
your job involves handling atoms like coal mining or plumbing,
or even being a massage therapist or something like that,
you're safer. And in fact, I taught an undergraduate seminar
back in the nineties where we talked about some of
these issues, and I just asked the students what they
(31:35):
thought the last jobs to go in the face of
automation and robots would be, and they said it basically
was prostitution and massage therapy.
Speaker 1 (31:45):
And that's probably sometimes the twain will meet.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
Well, it has been known to happen, I'm told, ask
Al Gore.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
But yeah, he'll tell you that inconvenient truth your stone.
Speaker 2 (31:58):
But that's a that's a really obscure old reference. So
but besides that, you know, I mean, I tell my
law students, if you want to be one of those
lawyers who sits in a back room drafting briefs, your
career is not likely to go very well. The people
(32:19):
who will last the longest are the people who have
the human touch. Either people who are good at talking
to judges and juries, or good at negotiation, or even
just good at inspiring confidence and clients are going to
do much better. But if you're going to rely on
just sheer nerdish technical skill, it's going to be a
(32:40):
lot harder because the machines are going to be better
at that sooner.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
All right, let me get self involved on this question. Now,
where do you see the world of journalism we're broadcasting going,
you know, we as I said before, AI always wants
to correct my emails to whoever I'm sending them to.
Will AI eventually take over journalism?
Speaker 2 (33:04):
Well, you know, the AI produced a number one country
song and it did all the video and all the
wrote the song, and honestly, it was a pretty good song.
So if it could do that, it can certainly read
the news. And I believe there are already plenty of
AI newsreaders and such, And honestly, the personality of a
(33:24):
lot of newsreaders is such that you'd be hard to
tell them from AI anyone did Yeah, Present Company excluded,
of course, But it is tough and honestly, you know,
if all you want to do is and this is
what a lot of journalists do, is basically take stuff
off the news wires and rewrite it or read it
on camera or on microphone, Yeah, you can be replaced
(33:46):
by AI easily. That's just the truth. If you want
to go out and actually interview people and learn stuff
and find out things people don't know and report it,
that's something a person is better able to do in
a lot of cases. But you have to do that,
(34:07):
and most journalists don't want to do that because it's hard.
Speaker 1 (34:10):
Yeah, exactly, and that's why we have the state of
journalism that we do quite frankly in America today. That's
a big reason for it. But you know, I think
about spreadsheets, you know, the advancement of technology over the years,
and you know, I have been in the journalism business
longer than i'd like to acknowledge. I've seen a lot
of changes. Of course, I've seen typewriters into word processors
(34:35):
of course, into you know, highly functioning computers and going
from paper that I know. This if for the kids listening,
they might be surprised to learn that there was a
time in this country where you could hold a physical
paper called a news paper, and you would get print
(34:57):
like black ink on your fingers. And I use to
love that.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
I can't.
Speaker 1 (35:01):
It's hard to find that anymore. But you know, in
all seriousness, there have been a lot of changes in
journalism and in information technology and all kinds of different
things over the years. It has made us more efficient,
but it has proved costly along the way.
Speaker 2 (35:21):
Yeah, it's funny because there's a there's an old movie
from the eighties It has Paul Newman and Sally Field
in it, and I show a clip from it in
my coses a law class when we're talking about libel.
Because this movie absence of malice. It's called, yes, the
best movie ever made about libel, which is not only
(35:42):
indisputably true but kind of funny. But it's a good movie.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
But there are not a lot of libel movies out there.
It's a small universe.
Speaker 2 (35:50):
The opening scene, though, is starts it's a newspaper, and
it starts off in the at the reporter's desk, typing
on one of those CRTs with the green letters, and
then it shows it being composited down in the printing shop,
and then it shows it running off the printers and
(36:12):
being bundled up and tossed in the back of trucks
and eventually thrown onto people's porches. And that was you know,
at the time the movie came out, that was apposed
to very dynamic and modern and all of that, and
it just looks so incredibly almost nineteenth century. Now, uh huh.
People got to use somebody actually carried it to them
(36:32):
on a piece of paper.
Speaker 1 (36:33):
But exactly yeah, and you know, there was a kid
on a ten speed who used to have a bundle
and toss them errantly on near your front porch or
something like that. Yeah, no, it's I mean, that's that's
what we have to deal with. And I guess as
we we conclude our conversation today, you know, we talked
about the future and what the future will bring. The future,
(36:57):
as they like to say, is now. But in terms
of the seduction that really is at the core of
this book, how do you resist the seduction?
Speaker 2 (37:15):
Many people are able to remind themselves that the stripper
doesn't actually love them and just wants tips. And I
suggest a similar kind of skepticism to your interaction with
any sort of AI or AI like platform or device.
You just have to remind yourself that, you know, one
(37:38):
on one, it may feel like you're communicating with another creature,
but it's not a creature. It's a creation. It's a tool,
and it's programmed by somebody else. It is programmed by
people who don't necessarily have your best interests at heart,
So be a bit wary.
Speaker 1 (37:58):
Well, we are the nation that brought the world the
pet rock. So anthropomorphosizing is just in our nature, It's
in our blood and I guess here's the final point
to all of this. When do we know if we're
too far gone? And if we're too far gone? How
can we know it?
Speaker 2 (38:17):
If you find yourself crying over an AI, you've gone.
Speaker 1 (38:22):
Too far sounds about right absolutely, And if Hal comes
in and says what are you doing? You perhaps know
that you have indeed gone too far. Thanks to my
guest today, Glenn Harlan Reynolds, his new book is Seductive AI. Yes,
it is as sexy as it sounds. You've been listening
(38:43):
to another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Matt
Kittle's senior elections correspondent at the Federalist. We'll be back
soon with more. Until then, stay lovers of freedom and
anxious for the fray Pooh
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.
Hey Jonas!
Hey Jonas! The official Jonas Brothers podcast. Hosted by Kevin, Joe, and Nick Jonas. It’s the Jonas Brothers you know... musicians, actors, and well, yes, brothers. Now, they’re sharing another side of themselves in the playful, intimate, and irreverent way only they can. Spend time with the Jonas Brothers here and stay a little bit longer for deep conversations like never before.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by Audiochuck Media Company.