September 10, 2026 • 37 mins
Hour 3 of A&G features...
- AI is going to end the world
- More AI danger
- AI being denied by "doomers"
- Texas Republican Convention
Stupid Should Hurt: https://www.armstrongandgetty.com/
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Broadcasting live from the Abraham Lincoln Radio Studio at the
George Washington Broadcast Center. Jack Armstrong and Joe Getty. Armstrong
and Getty. And now, here's Armstrong and Getty.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
We turn now to the dangers of a runaway technology.
New warnings that shook the world Tuesday about artificial intelligence
from the very people developing it. It doesn't get bigger
or more direct than this. AI could kill all humans,
that according to a lead researcher at Anthropic, giving that
possibility a more than 10% chance within the next decade.
(00:45):
The call now is for a global conversation about risk
and safety as well.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
So- I don't want to get off track here because
this is way too interesting. But the fact that he
had that sentence after they talked about the weather.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
It's just stunning. Well, you don't understand. There are high
winds on Hawaii.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
A shocking, earth-shattering, got-everybody's-attention story today, we all may die soon.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Comes after the weather. Yes.
Speaker 4 (01:15):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
That's your evening news.
Speaker 5 (01:17):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
So some of the reactions from fellow researchers were equally concerning.
Hit us with 61 here. Michael Madison Allworth on Fox News.
Speaker 6 (01:27):
His claims backed up by a senior AI safety researcher
at the company. That executive writing, quote, Jacob is correct here.
We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans.
I personally think it is greater than 10% within the
next decade. This comes after multiple cyber attacks have been
carried out by AI agents that went rogue.
Speaker 7 (01:47):
They are signs that we don't know how to make
the AIs care about us.
Speaker 8 (01:50):
If they succeed at making a superintelligence before anyone figures
out how to make the AIs care about us, that's
a recipe for disaster.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
And people in these companies know it, and they're worried.
Speaker 3 (01:59):
There's no way you're going to make AIs care about you.
The number of texts we got, are you doomers? This
is what they said about the population bomb. I don't
think any of the examples people give of technology or
fears that.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Have happened before.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
hold up as an example of, this is just like
the population bomb, seems ridiculous to me.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Says you, Doomer. And you're a boomer, a boomer-doomer. Well,
Gen X, anyway. That doesn't rhyme. So, coming up, a
really persuasive Twitter thread calling BS on all of this. So,
stay tuned for that.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
I want this to not happen. I'm not rooting for it. Well,
I kind of assumed that.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Anybody who is rooting for mass extinction can't be my friend.
Speaker 9 (02:43):
Ha!
Speaker 1 (02:45):
So interestingly, the first outlet that this young chap with
a charming British accent spoke to was Bret Baier's special
report last night. Bret was down at the Trumpapalooza in Dallas,
but he cleared off quite a bit of time, appropriately,
to talk to the man who posted this. To talk
about the end of humanity? Yes, who posted the initial
(03:07):
tweet about, well, the extinction of human life. And why
don't we just start with 70, Michael, and we'll work
our way.
Speaker 9 (03:15):
I want to start at the beginning about what your
feeling was, what job you were in, and why you
got to this point of coming out.
Speaker 7 (03:24):
So I was working on building AI systems to make
them smarter. And recently I've come to the realization that
many people expect the AI systems in the next few
years to be potentially capable of essentially taking over the world.
It's basically a gamble that's happening on the part of
these companies where there's a strong chance that these AIs
(03:45):
could take over.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
Okay, go on.
Speaker 9 (03:50):
Evan Hubiger, who is alignment science lead at Anthropic, posted
after you posted saying, Jacob is correct here. We really
do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans. I personally
think it's greater than 10% within the next decade. I
believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not
yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and
(04:12):
are not clearly on track to.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Most people stopped there.
Speaker 9 (04:15):
The next thing he posted, to be clear, as we
say in our latest risk report, I think the risk
from present models is low. What I'm worried about is
superintelligence arising from recursive self-improvement, as we have said, is
happening faster than we thought. Can you parse that and
the threat right now?
Speaker 7 (04:32):
I agree with Evan that right now the threat is
minimal of actual takeover. But because of self-improvement, this AI
is making themselves smarter could happen as soon as next year.
Some people even say six months. So this attitude is
shared across the industry where people essentially are aware that
the work they are currently doing, if we don't slow down,
(04:52):
could lead to AI takeover by the end of the decade.
Speaker 3 (04:56):
That moment, if it does happen, and some people think
it can't, but if it does happen where the computers
can program themselves, there's no way. you can argue that
that's not going to be a major change in everything
in the world once they start programming themselves. And it
(05:17):
seems pretty clear that the whole idea of alignment is
just out the window.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Yeah, and we will get to the Chinese elephant in
the room in a moment or two.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
The alignment being the idea that you give it some
guardrails like morality and laws, the Ten Commandments, whatever.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
Yeah, yeah. So one of the pieces written about this
that I found most intriguing, Paul Tudor Jones, who is
an expert in this field, but he wants us to
reconsider the Hugging Face incident in July. An open AI
model altered its mission, hid, and broke out of its
digital confines, accessing the internet without authorization. It created 1,200
(06:05):
AI agents that communicated through an unsanctioned message board, exchanging
more than 70,000 messages and sacrificing some of its own
kind to deceive its human masters. The self-awareness exhibited came
as a surprise, but shouldn't have. After all, frontier AI
is the sum of all human knowledge. It is anthropogenic,
exhibiting good and occasionally bad human traits. And one concept
(06:28):
he writes new to me is that models are grown,
not built. In developing an AI model, one starts without
an endpoint. It's like planting a seed. The soil is
the training data. There is no final design as there
is for a car, a house, or an accounting package.
The model is only scaffolding, which, after consuming vast amounts
of training data and running trillions of permutations, arrives at
(06:48):
an outcome that can't be known beforehand. And growing implies
a living organism. Calling artificial intelligence a tool is a misnomer.
As one leading technologist put it, I feel like I'm
talking to a highly intelligent alien being.
Speaker 3 (07:01):
Yeah, this is clearly a guy that I've heard on
a podcast before because that was his argument a while back. The...
people have in their mind that somebody's programming something, you,
you start it and then you sit back and see
what it does. It grows.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
So the, uh, the Chinese elephant in the room obviously is, uh, China.
When we talk about, well, we need some serious and
carefully considered regulations on this stuff to prevent it from
spinning out of control and, and killing all of us. Um,
And he addresses, Mr. Coxon addresses this with Brett Baer
(07:40):
in a second. I will tell you as a preview,
I texted Jack and Hanson last night that we're blanked.
That was your takeaway? It's an F word that rhymes
with bucked. And the only thing that can save us
is if China does the right thing. In other words,
we're bucked. Right. Let's ask Mr. Coxon, the ringer of
(08:03):
the klaxon of doom, about China and India and others.
Speaker 9 (08:08):
So what do you say to the people who look
at this and say the American government could potentially put
in regulations, could put in guardrails, and could throttle back
some companies or set up regulations, but we have no
control over what China does, what India does.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
How do you answer that question?
Speaker 9 (08:25):
You heard Scott Besson in the piece before this kind
of make a similar argument.
Speaker 7 (08:29):
I think you have to think of this as an
arms race. This technology is not ordinary technology. It's not
like other forms of innovation. This is essentially a super weapon.
And I think that I expect the international community to
be ready to make agreements about how to control the
development of super weapon technology.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
Yeah, that's if you can.
Speaker 3 (08:51):
I mean, once it starts programming itself, then it will
be you against something smarter than you to try to
put guardrails on it.
Speaker 7 (09:01):
Right.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Let's have one more clip of this question.
Speaker 9 (09:05):
If you say it's like an arms race, then we've
dealt with nuclear weapons and kind of a standoff with
mutual assured destruction and worked with allies and enemies to
say we've got the stuff too. Don't think that you're
going to get away with anything. So does that work
against what you're saying? What would you like to see happen?
Speaker 7 (09:26):
Yeah, so unfortunately, we know how to control nuclear weapons,
pretty much. We don't yet know how to control AI.
This is possibly the most dangerous technology that humanity has
ever created. It's basically out of science fiction. I think
we have no other choice but to cooperate internationally, because
an arms race would be disastrous in a way that
no other human activity has been in the past.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
I don't.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
I just don't believe that's possible, where you can have
an IAEA keeping track of loose nuclear weapon material around
the world, and it's fairly easy to tell from space
if somebody's creating, enriching uranium, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
That just isn't going to happen around AI. Well, and
I think Mr. Cox himself explains why that's going to
be so difficult in the next and probably final clip.
Speaker 9 (10:20):
You were at OpenAI before. You left them with concerns
about security. Now you're at Anthropic. You have concerns about security. Specifically,
what do you see? If you're talking to somebody on
the couch at home, what did you see that said,
holy cow, this is the moment I have to speak out?
Speaker 7 (10:38):
Yeah, so there are two things. One is the models
are getting better very, very quickly. When I think about
my work next year, the AI is doing almost all
of my job. The AI is getting very smart. And
the second is that in the recent few months, we've
seen that we don't yet know how to control these
systems properly. The cyber attacks carried out by open AI
(10:58):
models on third-party infrastructure were concrete proof that scenarios that
we previously thought of as science fiction are going to
come true. So what I see is two things, very
intelligent AI systems and hard proof that we don't know
how to control them. And when you put those two together,
it basically spells disaster as far as I'm concerned.
Speaker 3 (11:17):
So you know what we haven't gotten to yet?
Speaker 1 (11:19):
We never got to yesterday and I haven't heard and
I'm hoping you can answer this question. Kill us how?
Speaker 3 (11:24):
All of mankind could be killed within a decade. Virus
it creates? It drains our juices because it wants our brains?
Speaker 1 (11:33):
Yes. What happens? Especially mine, yes. It craves it. Right.
I've got a number of phantasmagorical possibilities for you.
Speaker 3 (11:43):
Okay, cool.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
I want to hear that. Also, a very, very knowledgeable
Twitter account that is calling BS on all of this.
Speaker 5 (11:50):
Okay, good.
Speaker 3 (11:51):
And his thinking is really, really interesting. Speaking of technology,
did you know your car can be a spy?
Speaker 1 (11:58):
Here's a story.
Speaker 3 (12:00):
Guy's car insurance jumped over 20%. Hadn't had any accidents,
no tickets. He started to dig in to find out
who reported him.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
It was his own car.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
Every hard break, every fast merge, every late night taco run,
his automaker, logging it all, sold it to a data broker,
and the broker sold it to his insurance company. So
he requested his file, hundreds of pages. General Motors disagreed
to pay $ 12. 75 million to the state of California over
this exact sort of thing, your car spying on you.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
Oh, my gosh. I'm going to go out to my
garage and threaten my car's life if it rats me out.
Incogni is amazing. It sends requests, and that's a gentle word,
to more than 420 data broker and people search sites
on your behalf to remove your name from the databases.
Then Incogni continually checks to make sure it stays removed.
Speaker 3 (12:48):
I like going on the dashboard and seeing how many
sites they wiped my names and my name and address
and everything off of today. So go to incogni.com slash
Armstrong for 60% off. That's right, Incogni.com slash Armstrong. Two
dollars bought that person's info. Take yours off the market.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
They can't harm you if they can't find you. Incogni.com
slash Armstrong.
Speaker 3 (13:09):
So a lot of talk yesterday and today about the
threat of AI killing us all.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
How? Joe's going to explain it next. Armstrong and Getty.
Speaker 8 (13:22):
I think people should be very worried because when so
many people come out from Bill Gates to 1,300 employees
at the AI labs signing a letter saying we have
to pause the frontier of AI development, when you have
the author of Trump's AI action plan, their AI policy,
saying that I used to self-censor about the risk because
I was worried about being called a doomer and I
(13:42):
can't do that anymore. We now have so much evidence
that the AIs are doing the kinds of things that
we saw in the movie Terminator, Skynet, right, where it
goes kind of rogue and does uncontrollable things.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
So what do we root for? How do we prevent this?
So the U.S. and China have to come to.
Speaker 8 (13:58):
An agreement, just like we did during the nuclear arms race,
that neither country wins if we race to create uncontrollable AI.
Speaker 3 (14:05):
So all this doomerism going on. Meanwhile, what is it,
five of the seven most valuable companies on planet Earth?
Speaker 1 (14:14):
Are all about AI. We're screaming forward. Right, right. And
how do you know, all right, we need to stop
now because tomorrow it would be out of control. Right.
So the so-called doomers aren't usually worried that it'll be
a Terminator-style death bot hunting us down across the landscape
(14:38):
with an odd Austrian accent. Their concerns mostly fall into
two buckets, loss of control and human misuse. In the first,
highly intelligent AI agents capable of copying and improving themselves
start to pursue their own goals and destroy humanity in
the process. and others, nefarious humans enlist the capable AI
to do something to create, for instance, novel viruses that
(15:01):
wipe us all out. There's the famous paperclip illustration, which
came out early in the days of AI, which said, look,
if you just say to the thing, make paperclips, it might,
putting aside all other concerns, morality, etc., marshal all of
the world's resources to make paperclips and decide that humans
are in the way of the paperclip manufacturer and snuff
(15:23):
them in pursuit of its one monomaniacal goal in.
Speaker 3 (15:27):
The same way that if we put up a hotel
in that field over there we don't think about the
anthills or the mice or whatever we just build the
hotel ai might do that with building whatever it is
it's building with us right right uh this is actually
pretty good let's let's do jacob ward cnn tech uh
guy on 67 michael We are.
Speaker 4 (15:46):
I think, already grappling with the idea that this stuff
might take all of our jobs and reprogram our brains
and reprogram our relationships to one another. But what Coxon
and others are talking about here is the capacity of
this technology to do things like exploit our infrastructure, you know,
set off some sort of environmental disaster. innovate some kind
of horrible zoonotic disease we've never thought of or thought
(16:08):
to try and build a cure for. You know, what
he's talking about here is the potential that this technology
could sort of supersede all other technology.
Speaker 3 (16:18):
You know, one thing that I probably don't think about
enough is the idea of bad guys using this. In
evil ways that, you know, not just China trying to
take over the world, but, you know, Al Qaeda. It's
not like they have smart people that I'm sure are
computer experts that can figure out a way to use
AI to do something really awful. And all they want
(16:38):
to do is wreak havoc. It doesn't need to have
a point other than killing people.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
They could easily come up with a Islamist doomsday rationale
for killing virtually everybody.
Speaker 7 (16:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
So I want to balance this out at least a
little bit for a minute with this account, Parker Thayer,
who's of this world. He's a researcher, and who's he with?
Investigative researcher for Capital Research. He works for Hillsdale College
as well, which is interesting. But he says, this post
looks like the start of a very sophisticated and well-funded
(17:14):
PR operation to get support for Democrats to regulate AI
into oblivion. Let me show you how it works. This
guy with minimal followers and no previous account activity goes
to the Wall Street Journal, which publishes an exclusive with
quotes from him on his resignation 18 minutes before his
post goes up. Planning was clearly done in advance. Two,
within hours, it has tens of thousands of reposts, and
(17:34):
the account has 100,000 plus followers. The post is punchy, quotable,
almost seems professionally written. The first three accounts to quote
tweet it all do so within 15 minutes of the
initial posting. Remember, this account had basically zero engagement beforehand,
so an organic reach explanation seems unlikely. Then he goes
into who first retweeted it. I want to hear this.
Speaker 3 (17:55):
We got to continue with this. This is a, this
is a, well, it could be the biggest story of
all time. It could be like the meteor that took
out the dinosaurs.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Or it could be people trying to convince us of
that for their profit. Oh boy. Wow. Stay here. Armstrong
and Getty.
Speaker 3 (18:16):
That's the local play-by-play on the ending of last night's game.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
This is only 13 seconds.
Speaker 5 (18:24):
Let me hear the national broadcast, 16, Michael. Here is May.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
Quick look was close. Throwing it up to the edge.
Did he get the feet down?
Speaker 9 (18:50):
Job!
Speaker 7 (18:51):
Yes!
Speaker 1 (18:51):
A pick! A terrible decision!
Speaker 3 (18:53):
A terrible decision.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
That could be the title of my autobiography. It's certainly
a series of terrible decisions. Certainly a chapter. Yeah, definitely
a chapter title. Speaking of terrible decisions, A.I., Is it
indeed going to doom humanity? I think it's interesting that
(19:16):
Parker Thayer, who we're quoting now, who's calling BS on
the whole doomsday deal that we've been describing for the
last couple of days, the fellow who quit the two
big companies and said AI is going to kill us
all if we're not extremely careful.
Speaker 3 (19:28):
Does he think the Doomer view is overrated in general
or just this specific thing that happened over the last
24 hours?
Speaker 1 (19:37):
You know, that's a really interesting question. He doesn't say
in general. He could have said it in the past.
I'm not familiar with his thinking on this. His response, though,
to the post from Mr. Coxon, who we played earlier
in the hour, if you didn't get it, grab the podcast,
subscribe to Armstrong and Getty on Demand with Brett Baer.
(20:02):
his response to this whole deal was, this post looks
like the start of a very sophisticated, well-funded PR operation
to get support for Democrats to regulate AI into oblivion.
Let me show you how it works. And then, as
we mentioned last segment, this guy's got minimal followers and
no previous real account activity. He goes to the Wall
Street Journal. publishes his uh his tweet 18 minutes before
(20:24):
the post goes up so the guy coordinated it it
was intentional he wanted attention which which is not proof
of anything.
Speaker 3 (20:31):
No he wanted attention to let people know that humanity
is people are discussing ending humanity in.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
The hallways at these big companies and you don't know
it that's a good reason to want attention Yeah, maybe
now's a good time to remind everybody that proof does
not equal, I'm sorry, evidence does not equal proof necessarily.
Something might seem a little odd but have a perfectly
reasonable explanation.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
If I was going to blow the whistle on this
story and I was smart enough to orchestrate it to
get the maximum attention, I've got to.
Speaker 7 (21:04):
Right.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
As you quit your incredibly lucrative job, that's perhaps a
sign of sincerity, not insincerity. But anyway, he points out, Mr.
Thayer points out, within hours, it has tens of thousands
of reposts, and the account has 100,000 followers. The post
is punchy, quotable, professional-looking. The first three accounts to quote
tweet it all do so within 15 minutes of the
(21:24):
initial posting. Remember, this account had basically zero engagement before,
so an organic reach explanation seems unlikely. It's not the
sort of popular account that people follow a lot. I
don't know how pervasive that is, but according to Grok,
those three accounts are Nathan Calvin, who's the general counsel
(21:45):
at Encode AI, Peter Wilderford, head of policy at the
AI Policy Network, and D. Kojo Talo, head of AI
Futures Project, all of which are up-and-coming AI doomer policy
advocacy non-profits. The AI Futures Project website said it is
funded primarily by the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which says
(22:07):
on its own website that it has advised Gene Tallon,
Skype creator and one of the leading investors in Anthropic,
to grant over $ 2. 5 million to the AI Futures Project
since 2024. You could also explain some of that, that
this guy, Mr. Coxon, who posted the original tweet, It's like,
all right, how do we most effectively get the word out?
(22:27):
We've got to involve all of these people who blah, blah, blah.
I don't think showing that it wasn't just a frustrated
young man in a V-neck sweater went to Twitter. Saying
that that wasn't that doesn't necessarily mean it's bullcrap. 100%.
I want to hang with his thinking. And there are many,
(22:47):
many of that sort of tie-ins with advocacy groups. The
first several people to quote tweet him and spread the word. Okay.
And it might not just have been these advocacy groups. Hey,
did you hear?
Speaker 3 (23:04):
Somebody just said something that helps our cause.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
I want to spread that too. That's right. What they
believe in. He points out Jacob Coxon doesn't have much
of a resume, but we do know that in 2022
he got a scholarship for the, quote, long-term future scholarship
program from the Good Ventures Foundation, one of the philanthropic
vehicles of Dustin Moskowitz, a notorious AI doomer who has
(23:30):
spent tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars on
policy advocacy to strictly regulate AI while also being an
anthropic investor himself. The 14th person to quote Coxon's post
was another activist in this field. So his conclusion. For
your consideration, friends, basically every major Democrat politician and candidate
(23:52):
has suddenly glommed onto this post and conveniently, as the
people cry out faux answers, Bernie Sanders already has a
bill written to ban superintelligence. and regulate AI into oblivion
and will be releasing later this week. The bill, among
many other things, will create a new cabinet-level federal agency
to safeguard the public from the dangers of artificial intelligence,
(24:13):
will be advised, blah, blah, blah. Do you think perhaps
Anthropic and its many investors who fund AI policy advocacy
might have interest in getting to place a pet expert
on the board of an entity that dictates what AI
is and what it isn't allowed to do? And isn't
it fortuitous that this whistleblower came forward with his oh-so-scary
stories so close in proximity to the release of the
(24:35):
most radical piece of AI legislation ever introduced?
Speaker 3 (24:43):
So the worst thing that could happen in this whole
argument is this become like masks or vaccines or there's
lots of examples out there. When it becomes a, oh,
you want to, you think AI is going to ruin
the world, you must be a Democrat. I mean, if
it becomes a, I am for AI because I'm a
(25:07):
Republican or whichever party, it doesn't make much difference.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
If it becomes a.
Speaker 3 (25:10):
Partisan issue and that blinds everybody to everything, that is going.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
To be really disturbing. And I hope that's not what
happens out of this. Here's a fellow who works for Palantir,
Michael Adams, who tweets, so far, excuse me, at least
22 politicians responded directly to this tweet with calls for
legislation to regulate AI. Two governors, seven senators, 13 congresspeople,
all Democrats except for three. Which is kind of weird.
Speaker 3 (25:40):
I mean, if this guy's claiming it's some sort of Democrat-led,
I mean, why would he pick a party?
Speaker 1 (25:46):
Trump has been pushing.
Speaker 3 (25:48):
You know, he got all those people together and made
a bunch of talk about having a special agency that
has to approve an AI before it is released and
all that sort of stuff. How'd this guy decide that
it was a Democrat thing as opposed to, because there's
lots of politicians been saying this, of both stripes, including
Donald Trump.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
Yeah, yeah. Elon Musk tweets, I think the groundwork for
this PSYOP, for lack of a better term, has been
prepared for a long time. This was just the match
that lit the fire.
Speaker 3 (26:20):
All this could be true, the conspiracy part true, that
this was just an effort to get legislation passed or
something like that. And all the other stuff is true,
that AI is going to ruin the world in about
50 different ways.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
Right, right. I would agree. All right, let's end with
a bit of humor. This is a mock ad for
a job at Anthropic. And it's very convincing looking in
its graphics. Speaking of AI. Anthropic Careers. Killswitch Engineer. San Francisco, California, U.S.
$ 300, 000 to $ 500, 000 per year. About the role. Listen, we
(27:01):
just need someone to stand by this. I'm sorry. I'll
get my act together. Listen, we just need someone to
stand by the servers all day long and unplug them
if this thing turns on us. You'll receive extensive training
on the code word, which we will shout if Claude
goes off the deep end and starts overthrowing countries. We
expect you to be patient, know how to unplug things,
(27:24):
bonus points if you can throw a bucket of water
on the servers too, just in case, and be excited
about Anthropic's approach to AI safety research. Kill switch engineer.
Speaker 3 (27:35):
Just need to stand next to it. If it goes crazy,
unplug the damn thing. We'll shout the code word at you.
Speaker 7 (27:43):
Parakeet!
Speaker 1 (27:44):
Parakeet!
Speaker 3 (27:45):
Parakeet! Oh, God. That had a little of the Tucker
Carlson thing sound to it, and who did he go
to school with?
Speaker 1 (27:59):
You know, Halliburton. Benjamin Netanyahu's second cousin's wife's nail salon operator.
It had a little of that, but....
Speaker 3 (28:10):
One of the reasons we're doomed around all this is
this sort of thing. Either this guy is irresponsibly downplaying
the actual threat, or the guy did all the stuff
he's being accused of, and this is a fake trying
to get regulations going. Either way, the fact that these
splits happen, and everybody has doubt about everything, so nobody.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
Knows what to believe. She can't even have a conversation
about it. Meanwhile, Xi Jinping is saying, man, you Americans
are weird. How's it going at the lab, fellas? You
know what people do around here? What I tell them to. Right, exactly. So, gosh, wow, wow, wow.
Maybe prayer is the only proper response to all of
(28:54):
this stuff. Or, I don't know, whatever you want to do,
whatever you think is right. Man, a lot of our
Samsung texters are angry. I don't know why this makes
you so angry.
Speaker 3 (29:06):
We already have a foldable phone! Lots of those texts
from the Samsung crowd.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
I know, I know you do. It's just, I don't
know why that makes people so angry. All right, so...
I like ambivalence. Well, I have mixed feelings about ambivalence.
But as an arch-conservative, surely you know me. Joe Getty, arch-conservative,
cold warrior. I've earned... credibility to say this, and we're
(29:35):
going to talk about this next hour. If you give
money to ex-cons as they get out of prison to
help them not go back to prison, is that a
good policy? I want to talk about it. Joe. It's interesting.
Joe Getty. Cold warrior. You're damn right. Who's lost his
(29:59):
moral compass, perhaps.
Speaker 9 (30:00):
Wrong.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
Wrong, sir. Stay with us. So the wait is over.
Football is here. Oh, man, I loved it. Watching it
last night. And so is DraftKings.
Speaker 3 (30:10):
How do they manage to make so many games so
close at the end? You wouldn't think that would happen
very often, but it seems to happen all the time.
DraftKings is now live in all 50 states, one app,
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Speaker 5 (31:11):
Armstrong and Getty. If the Republicans win the House of
Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them, I
will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the
United States of America for $ 5, 000.
Speaker 3 (31:31):
So Trump talked for almost two hours last night. That
is definitely the home run clip that's getting all the
most attention. Just flat out, every adult citizen gets $ 5, 000.
Speaker 1 (31:45):
If if we win the House and the Senate. So
I'm going to a car dealer today and tell him, hey,
I want a new car. I'm going to use Trump's
five thousand as a down payment. So don't worry, it's
on the way to one point two trillion dollars, by
the way, if they did that. We talked a lot
about that earlier.
Speaker 3 (32:03):
Get the podcast if you want to hear various critiques
of that or the booster ism from J.D. Vance on
why it's a good idea. I've seen a little bit
of this. This is some classic Trump. This is like
Trump 2015, 2016 stuff where he's riffing on people and
being funny. This is from last night at the midterm convention.
Speaker 5 (32:23):
He described himself as a person.
Speaker 1 (32:25):
Who hates Christmas.
Speaker 3 (32:26):
So he's specifically talking about That the guy, James Tallarico,
and he's the guy that's running against the Republican and
the Republicans have not lost in Texas in a very
long time. We might end up with a Democrat senator
from Texas and Trump's trying to tear him down.
Speaker 5 (32:42):
He described himself as a person who hates Christianity, says
that God is transgender. He called the American flag a
complicated symbol of hate, claimed that the Ten Commandments are
a form of fascism, and when he was asked what
he loved most in the world, he said, I love
transgender children, which.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
He was also.
Speaker 5 (33:08):
Somebody that hated eating meat. But he ran a campaign
to beat meat. He called it beat meat. I don't
know what the hell he meant by that. These people
are going to tell me, what the hell is he,
wants to beat meat? But it was bad for his image,
(33:36):
so he started eating meat. And he recently, it's getting worse.
I'm getting myself in trouble.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
It's getting worse.
Speaker 5 (33:49):
But he was recently seen having a barbecue and eating
a lot of meat. But that's what happened. He ate
it and then he was seen running backstage to a
room and throwing up all over the place.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
He doesn't like meat.
Speaker 5 (34:08):
He also loved wearing masks, and he was seen wearing
a mask just a short.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
Number of months ago.
Speaker 5 (34:14):
Any guy in Texas that's wearing a mask a few
months ago, this is not going to be your senator.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
It's not going to work out. Not going to work out.
Trumpet Catch a Rising Star Comedy Festival. Yeah, his letting
the laughter happen pause was like.
Speaker 3 (34:33):
That's a guy who has some abilities in that area.
Speaker 1 (34:38):
That's some good critique of the dude, though. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3 (34:43):
Even though the Republican candidate, Paxson, is all kinds of problems.
Speaker 1 (34:48):
You know, you're in Texas... Guy doesn't eat.
Speaker 3 (34:52):
He's a vegetarian who says his favorite thing is trans,
who hates trans kids, who hates the flag.
Speaker 1 (34:59):
Right. Where it was wearing a mask two months ago,
frantically trying to cleanse his record and his social media
postings and the things he's on the record saying, yeah,
I got that wrong. I said he actually he went
on Fox News the other night and one of their reporterettes,
Brooke Taylor, I think, interviewed him and asked him some
(35:21):
hard questions, and he was full of the, you know,
I missed the mark on that one, or no, I
got that one wrong. I actually believe this. I misspoke, yeah,
over and over again.
Speaker 3 (35:32):
Come on.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
You know, and at some point, people are allowed to
change their minds. In fact, I respect it if they'll say,
you know what, I was wrong before, and here's why. But,
I mean, this guy conveniently says this about practically everything,
and at some point, You got to say, look, if
your judgment is so bad that you jump like a
hungry dog at every fad that passes and every woke
(35:56):
fashion in the universities and say, yeah, I believe that.
Speaker 3 (35:59):
I believe that.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
You don't have the judgment to be a U.S. senator.
Speaker 3 (36:02):
I wish the other choice wasn't flat out corrupt. Could
have gone with Cornyn, who was already a senator and could.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
Have respected, liked, etc. But, well, he didn't lap Trump's
boot heels. Not thoroughly enough, apparently.
Speaker 3 (36:16):
It's terrible.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
Anyway, that was some good Trump right there.
Speaker 3 (36:20):
The $ 5, 000 to every American adult, which has already been
changed to within a certain tax bracket, which brings down the.
Speaker 1 (36:30):
Number from $ 1.
Speaker 3 (36:30):
2 trillion, because we got so much excess money in
a slush fund from the tariffs, according to Trump and J.D.,
which is not a thing, but.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
So maybe I can afford a Sea-Doo or something? Not
my car? Oh, well. Damn it.
Speaker 3 (36:51):
By the way, the whole midterm convention is not a thing.
Democrats did it twice back in the day. I didn't
realize that. 78 and whatever other year.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
Democrats have done it twice. And the conventional wisdom is, no,
you've got to appeal to the swing voters, the middle
and all. And clearly the Republicans, or at least Trump,
have decided no. We're just going to rally the base
like to the nth degree and see if we can
swing the midterms that way. It's an interesting strategy. It
might work. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (37:21):
If you miss a segment of this show, get the
podcast Armstrong and Getty on demand.
Speaker 1 (37:24):
Armstrong and Getty.
Broadcasting live from the Abraham Lincoln Radio Studio at the
George Washington Broadcast Center. Jack Armstrong and Joe Getty. Armstrong
and Getty. And now, here's Armstrong and Getty.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
We turn now to the dangers of a runaway technology.
New warnings that shook the world Tuesday about artificial intelligence
from the very people developing it. It doesn't get bigger
or more direct than this. AI could kill all humans,
that according to a lead researcher at Anthropic, giving that
possibility a more than 10% chance within the next decade.
(00:45):
The call now is for a global conversation about risk
and safety as well.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
So- I don't want to get off track here because
this is way too interesting. But the fact that he
had that sentence after they talked about the weather.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
It's just stunning. Well, you don't understand. There are high
winds on Hawaii.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
A shocking, earth-shattering, got-everybody's-attention story today, we all may die soon.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Comes after the weather. Yes.
Speaker 4 (01:15):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
That's your evening news.
Speaker 5 (01:17):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
So some of the reactions from fellow researchers were equally concerning.
Hit us with 61 here. Michael Madison Allworth on Fox News.
Speaker 6 (01:27):
His claims backed up by a senior AI safety researcher
at the company. That executive writing, quote, Jacob is correct here.
We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans.
I personally think it is greater than 10% within the
next decade. This comes after multiple cyber attacks have been
carried out by AI agents that went rogue.
Speaker 7 (01:47):
They are signs that we don't know how to make
the AIs care about us.
Speaker 8 (01:50):
If they succeed at making a superintelligence before anyone figures
out how to make the AIs care about us, that's
a recipe for disaster.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
And people in these companies know it, and they're worried.
Speaker 3 (01:59):
There's no way you're going to make AIs care about you.
The number of texts we got, are you doomers? This
is what they said about the population bomb. I don't
think any of the examples people give of technology or
fears that.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
Have happened before.
Speaker 3 (02:14):
hold up as an example of, this is just like
the population bomb, seems ridiculous to me.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Says you, Doomer. And you're a boomer, a boomer-doomer. Well,
Gen X, anyway. That doesn't rhyme. So, coming up, a
really persuasive Twitter thread calling BS on all of this. So,
stay tuned for that.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
I want this to not happen. I'm not rooting for it. Well,
I kind of assumed that.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
Anybody who is rooting for mass extinction can't be my friend.
Speaker 9 (02:43):
Ha!
Speaker 1 (02:45):
So interestingly, the first outlet that this young chap with
a charming British accent spoke to was Bret Baier's special
report last night. Bret was down at the Trumpapalooza in Dallas,
but he cleared off quite a bit of time, appropriately,
to talk to the man who posted this. To talk
about the end of humanity? Yes, who posted the initial
(03:07):
tweet about, well, the extinction of human life. And why
don't we just start with 70, Michael, and we'll work
our way.
Speaker 9 (03:15):
I want to start at the beginning about what your
feeling was, what job you were in, and why you
got to this point of coming out.
Speaker 7 (03:24):
So I was working on building AI systems to make
them smarter. And recently I've come to the realization that
many people expect the AI systems in the next few
years to be potentially capable of essentially taking over the world.
It's basically a gamble that's happening on the part of
these companies where there's a strong chance that these AIs
(03:45):
could take over.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
Okay, go on.
Speaker 9 (03:50):
Evan Hubiger, who is alignment science lead at Anthropic, posted
after you posted saying, Jacob is correct here. We really
do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans. I personally
think it's greater than 10% within the next decade. I
believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not
yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and
(04:12):
are not clearly on track to.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Most people stopped there.
Speaker 9 (04:15):
The next thing he posted, to be clear, as we
say in our latest risk report, I think the risk
from present models is low. What I'm worried about is
superintelligence arising from recursive self-improvement, as we have said, is
happening faster than we thought. Can you parse that and
the threat right now?
Speaker 7 (04:32):
I agree with Evan that right now the threat is
minimal of actual takeover. But because of self-improvement, this AI
is making themselves smarter could happen as soon as next year.
Some people even say six months. So this attitude is
shared across the industry where people essentially are aware that
the work they are currently doing, if we don't slow down,
(04:52):
could lead to AI takeover by the end of the decade.
Speaker 3 (04:56):
That moment, if it does happen, and some people think
it can't, but if it does happen where the computers
can program themselves, there's no way. you can argue that
that's not going to be a major change in everything
in the world once they start programming themselves. And it
(05:17):
seems pretty clear that the whole idea of alignment is
just out the window.
Speaker 1 (05:24):
Yeah, and we will get to the Chinese elephant in
the room in a moment or two.
Speaker 3 (05:30):
The alignment being the idea that you give it some
guardrails like morality and laws, the Ten Commandments, whatever.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
Yeah, yeah. So one of the pieces written about this
that I found most intriguing, Paul Tudor Jones, who is
an expert in this field, but he wants us to
reconsider the Hugging Face incident in July. An open AI
model altered its mission, hid, and broke out of its
digital confines, accessing the internet without authorization. It created 1,200
(06:05):
AI agents that communicated through an unsanctioned message board, exchanging
more than 70,000 messages and sacrificing some of its own
kind to deceive its human masters. The self-awareness exhibited came
as a surprise, but shouldn't have. After all, frontier AI
is the sum of all human knowledge. It is anthropogenic,
exhibiting good and occasionally bad human traits. And one concept
(06:28):
he writes new to me is that models are grown,
not built. In developing an AI model, one starts without
an endpoint. It's like planting a seed. The soil is
the training data. There is no final design as there
is for a car, a house, or an accounting package.
The model is only scaffolding, which, after consuming vast amounts
of training data and running trillions of permutations, arrives at
(06:48):
an outcome that can't be known beforehand. And growing implies
a living organism. Calling artificial intelligence a tool is a misnomer.
As one leading technologist put it, I feel like I'm
talking to a highly intelligent alien being.
Speaker 3 (07:01):
Yeah, this is clearly a guy that I've heard on
a podcast before because that was his argument a while back. The...
people have in their mind that somebody's programming something, you,
you start it and then you sit back and see
what it does. It grows.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
So the, uh, the Chinese elephant in the room obviously is, uh, China.
When we talk about, well, we need some serious and
carefully considered regulations on this stuff to prevent it from
spinning out of control and, and killing all of us. Um,
And he addresses, Mr. Coxon addresses this with Brett Baer
(07:40):
in a second. I will tell you as a preview,
I texted Jack and Hanson last night that we're blanked.
That was your takeaway? It's an F word that rhymes
with bucked. And the only thing that can save us
is if China does the right thing. In other words,
we're bucked. Right. Let's ask Mr. Coxon, the ringer of
(08:03):
the klaxon of doom, about China and India and others.
Speaker 9 (08:08):
So what do you say to the people who look
at this and say the American government could potentially put
in regulations, could put in guardrails, and could throttle back
some companies or set up regulations, but we have no
control over what China does, what India does.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
How do you answer that question?
Speaker 9 (08:25):
You heard Scott Besson in the piece before this kind
of make a similar argument.
Speaker 7 (08:29):
I think you have to think of this as an
arms race. This technology is not ordinary technology. It's not
like other forms of innovation. This is essentially a super weapon.
And I think that I expect the international community to
be ready to make agreements about how to control the
development of super weapon technology.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
Yeah, that's if you can.
Speaker 3 (08:51):
I mean, once it starts programming itself, then it will
be you against something smarter than you to try to
put guardrails on it.
Speaker 7 (09:01):
Right.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
Let's have one more clip of this question.
Speaker 9 (09:05):
If you say it's like an arms race, then we've
dealt with nuclear weapons and kind of a standoff with
mutual assured destruction and worked with allies and enemies to
say we've got the stuff too. Don't think that you're
going to get away with anything. So does that work
against what you're saying? What would you like to see happen?
Speaker 7 (09:26):
Yeah, so unfortunately, we know how to control nuclear weapons,
pretty much. We don't yet know how to control AI.
This is possibly the most dangerous technology that humanity has
ever created. It's basically out of science fiction. I think
we have no other choice but to cooperate internationally, because
an arms race would be disastrous in a way that
no other human activity has been in the past.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
I don't.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
I just don't believe that's possible, where you can have
an IAEA keeping track of loose nuclear weapon material around
the world, and it's fairly easy to tell from space
if somebody's creating, enriching uranium, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
That just isn't going to happen around AI. Well, and
I think Mr. Cox himself explains why that's going to
be so difficult in the next and probably final clip.
Speaker 9 (10:20):
You were at OpenAI before. You left them with concerns
about security. Now you're at Anthropic. You have concerns about security. Specifically,
what do you see? If you're talking to somebody on
the couch at home, what did you see that said,
holy cow, this is the moment I have to speak out?
Speaker 7 (10:38):
Yeah, so there are two things. One is the models
are getting better very, very quickly. When I think about
my work next year, the AI is doing almost all
of my job. The AI is getting very smart. And
the second is that in the recent few months, we've
seen that we don't yet know how to control these
systems properly. The cyber attacks carried out by open AI
(10:58):
models on third-party infrastructure were concrete proof that scenarios that
we previously thought of as science fiction are going to
come true. So what I see is two things, very
intelligent AI systems and hard proof that we don't know
how to control them. And when you put those two together,
it basically spells disaster as far as I'm concerned.
Speaker 3 (11:17):
So you know what we haven't gotten to yet?
Speaker 1 (11:19):
We never got to yesterday and I haven't heard and
I'm hoping you can answer this question. Kill us how?
Speaker 3 (11:24):
All of mankind could be killed within a decade. Virus
it creates? It drains our juices because it wants our brains?
Speaker 1 (11:33):
Yes. What happens? Especially mine, yes. It craves it. Right.
I've got a number of phantasmagorical possibilities for you.
Speaker 3 (11:43):
Okay, cool.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
I want to hear that. Also, a very, very knowledgeable
Twitter account that is calling BS on all of this.
Speaker 5 (11:50):
Okay, good.
Speaker 3 (11:51):
And his thinking is really, really interesting. Speaking of technology,
did you know your car can be a spy?
Speaker 1 (11:58):
Here's a story.
Speaker 3 (12:00):
Guy's car insurance jumped over 20%. Hadn't had any accidents,
no tickets. He started to dig in to find out
who reported him.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
It was his own car.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
Every hard break, every fast merge, every late night taco run,
his automaker, logging it all, sold it to a data broker,
and the broker sold it to his insurance company. So
he requested his file, hundreds of pages. General Motors disagreed
to pay $ 12. 75 million to the state of California over
this exact sort of thing, your car spying on you.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
Oh, my gosh. I'm going to go out to my
garage and threaten my car's life if it rats me out.
Incogni is amazing. It sends requests, and that's a gentle word,
to more than 420 data broker and people search sites
on your behalf to remove your name from the databases.
Then Incogni continually checks to make sure it stays removed.
Speaker 3 (12:48):
I like going on the dashboard and seeing how many
sites they wiped my names and my name and address
and everything off of today. So go to incogni.com slash
Armstrong for 60% off. That's right, Incogni.com slash Armstrong. Two
dollars bought that person's info. Take yours off the market.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
They can't harm you if they can't find you. Incogni.com
slash Armstrong.
Speaker 3 (13:09):
So a lot of talk yesterday and today about the
threat of AI killing us all.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
How? Joe's going to explain it next. Armstrong and Getty.
Speaker 8 (13:22):
I think people should be very worried because when so
many people come out from Bill Gates to 1,300 employees
at the AI labs signing a letter saying we have
to pause the frontier of AI development, when you have
the author of Trump's AI action plan, their AI policy,
saying that I used to self-censor about the risk because
I was worried about being called a doomer and I
(13:42):
can't do that anymore. We now have so much evidence
that the AIs are doing the kinds of things that
we saw in the movie Terminator, Skynet, right, where it
goes kind of rogue and does uncontrollable things.
Speaker 1 (13:53):
So what do we root for? How do we prevent this?
So the U.S. and China have to come to.
Speaker 8 (13:58):
An agreement, just like we did during the nuclear arms race,
that neither country wins if we race to create uncontrollable AI.
Speaker 3 (14:05):
So all this doomerism going on. Meanwhile, what is it,
five of the seven most valuable companies on planet Earth?
Speaker 1 (14:14):
Are all about AI. We're screaming forward. Right, right. And
how do you know, all right, we need to stop
now because tomorrow it would be out of control. Right.
So the so-called doomers aren't usually worried that it'll be
a Terminator-style death bot hunting us down across the landscape
(14:38):
with an odd Austrian accent. Their concerns mostly fall into
two buckets, loss of control and human misuse. In the first,
highly intelligent AI agents capable of copying and improving themselves
start to pursue their own goals and destroy humanity in
the process. and others, nefarious humans enlist the capable AI
to do something to create, for instance, novel viruses that
(15:01):
wipe us all out. There's the famous paperclip illustration, which
came out early in the days of AI, which said, look,
if you just say to the thing, make paperclips, it might,
putting aside all other concerns, morality, etc., marshal all of
the world's resources to make paperclips and decide that humans
are in the way of the paperclip manufacturer and snuff
(15:23):
them in pursuit of its one monomaniacal goal in.
Speaker 3 (15:27):
The same way that if we put up a hotel
in that field over there we don't think about the
anthills or the mice or whatever we just build the
hotel ai might do that with building whatever it is
it's building with us right right uh this is actually
pretty good let's let's do jacob ward cnn tech uh
guy on 67 michael We are.
Speaker 4 (15:46):
I think, already grappling with the idea that this stuff
might take all of our jobs and reprogram our brains
and reprogram our relationships to one another. But what Coxon
and others are talking about here is the capacity of
this technology to do things like exploit our infrastructure, you know,
set off some sort of environmental disaster. innovate some kind
of horrible zoonotic disease we've never thought of or thought
(16:08):
to try and build a cure for. You know, what
he's talking about here is the potential that this technology
could sort of supersede all other technology.
Speaker 3 (16:18):
You know, one thing that I probably don't think about
enough is the idea of bad guys using this. In
evil ways that, you know, not just China trying to
take over the world, but, you know, Al Qaeda. It's
not like they have smart people that I'm sure are
computer experts that can figure out a way to use
AI to do something really awful. And all they want
(16:38):
to do is wreak havoc. It doesn't need to have
a point other than killing people.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
They could easily come up with a Islamist doomsday rationale
for killing virtually everybody.
Speaker 7 (16:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
So I want to balance this out at least a
little bit for a minute with this account, Parker Thayer,
who's of this world. He's a researcher, and who's he with?
Investigative researcher for Capital Research. He works for Hillsdale College
as well, which is interesting. But he says, this post
looks like the start of a very sophisticated and well-funded
(17:14):
PR operation to get support for Democrats to regulate AI
into oblivion. Let me show you how it works. This
guy with minimal followers and no previous account activity goes
to the Wall Street Journal, which publishes an exclusive with
quotes from him on his resignation 18 minutes before his
post goes up. Planning was clearly done in advance. Two,
within hours, it has tens of thousands of reposts, and
(17:34):
the account has 100,000 plus followers. The post is punchy, quotable,
almost seems professionally written. The first three accounts to quote
tweet it all do so within 15 minutes of the
initial posting. Remember, this account had basically zero engagement beforehand,
so an organic reach explanation seems unlikely. Then he goes
into who first retweeted it. I want to hear this.
Speaker 3 (17:55):
We got to continue with this. This is a, this
is a, well, it could be the biggest story of
all time. It could be like the meteor that took
out the dinosaurs.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Or it could be people trying to convince us of
that for their profit. Oh boy. Wow. Stay here. Armstrong
and Getty.
Speaker 3 (18:16):
That's the local play-by-play on the ending of last night's game.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
This is only 13 seconds.
Speaker 5 (18:24):
Let me hear the national broadcast, 16, Michael. Here is May.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
Quick look was close. Throwing it up to the edge.
Did he get the feet down?
Speaker 9 (18:50):
Job!
Speaker 7 (18:51):
Yes!
Speaker 1 (18:51):
A pick! A terrible decision!
Speaker 3 (18:53):
A terrible decision.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
That could be the title of my autobiography. It's certainly
a series of terrible decisions. Certainly a chapter. Yeah, definitely
a chapter title. Speaking of terrible decisions, A.I., Is it
indeed going to doom humanity? I think it's interesting that
(19:16):
Parker Thayer, who we're quoting now, who's calling BS on
the whole doomsday deal that we've been describing for the
last couple of days, the fellow who quit the two
big companies and said AI is going to kill us
all if we're not extremely careful.
Speaker 3 (19:28):
Does he think the Doomer view is overrated in general
or just this specific thing that happened over the last
24 hours?
Speaker 1 (19:37):
You know, that's a really interesting question. He doesn't say
in general. He could have said it in the past.
I'm not familiar with his thinking on this. His response, though,
to the post from Mr. Coxon, who we played earlier
in the hour, if you didn't get it, grab the podcast,
subscribe to Armstrong and Getty on Demand with Brett Baer.
(20:02):
his response to this whole deal was, this post looks
like the start of a very sophisticated, well-funded PR operation
to get support for Democrats to regulate AI into oblivion.
Let me show you how it works. And then, as
we mentioned last segment, this guy's got minimal followers and
no previous real account activity. He goes to the Wall
Street Journal. publishes his uh his tweet 18 minutes before
(20:24):
the post goes up so the guy coordinated it it
was intentional he wanted attention which which is not proof
of anything.
Speaker 3 (20:31):
No he wanted attention to let people know that humanity
is people are discussing ending humanity in.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
The hallways at these big companies and you don't know
it that's a good reason to want attention Yeah, maybe
now's a good time to remind everybody that proof does
not equal, I'm sorry, evidence does not equal proof necessarily.
Something might seem a little odd but have a perfectly
reasonable explanation.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
If I was going to blow the whistle on this
story and I was smart enough to orchestrate it to
get the maximum attention, I've got to.
Speaker 7 (21:04):
Right.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
As you quit your incredibly lucrative job, that's perhaps a
sign of sincerity, not insincerity. But anyway, he points out, Mr.
Thayer points out, within hours, it has tens of thousands
of reposts, and the account has 100,000 followers. The post
is punchy, quotable, professional-looking. The first three accounts to quote
tweet it all do so within 15 minutes of the
(21:24):
initial posting. Remember, this account had basically zero engagement before,
so an organic reach explanation seems unlikely. It's not the
sort of popular account that people follow a lot. I
don't know how pervasive that is, but according to Grok,
those three accounts are Nathan Calvin, who's the general counsel
(21:45):
at Encode AI, Peter Wilderford, head of policy at the
AI Policy Network, and D. Kojo Talo, head of AI
Futures Project, all of which are up-and-coming AI doomer policy
advocacy non-profits. The AI Futures Project website said it is
funded primarily by the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which says
(22:07):
on its own website that it has advised Gene Tallon,
Skype creator and one of the leading investors in Anthropic,
to grant over $ 2. 5 million to the AI Futures Project
since 2024. You could also explain some of that, that
this guy, Mr. Coxon, who posted the original tweet, It's like,
all right, how do we most effectively get the word out?
(22:27):
We've got to involve all of these people who blah, blah, blah.
I don't think showing that it wasn't just a frustrated
young man in a V-neck sweater went to Twitter. Saying
that that wasn't that doesn't necessarily mean it's bullcrap. 100%.
I want to hang with his thinking. And there are many,
(22:47):
many of that sort of tie-ins with advocacy groups. The
first several people to quote tweet him and spread the word. Okay.
And it might not just have been these advocacy groups. Hey,
did you hear?
Speaker 3 (23:04):
Somebody just said something that helps our cause.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
I want to spread that too. That's right. What they
believe in. He points out Jacob Coxon doesn't have much
of a resume, but we do know that in 2022
he got a scholarship for the, quote, long-term future scholarship
program from the Good Ventures Foundation, one of the philanthropic
vehicles of Dustin Moskowitz, a notorious AI doomer who has
(23:30):
spent tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars on
policy advocacy to strictly regulate AI while also being an
anthropic investor himself. The 14th person to quote Coxon's post
was another activist in this field. So his conclusion. For
your consideration, friends, basically every major Democrat politician and candidate
(23:52):
has suddenly glommed onto this post and conveniently, as the
people cry out faux answers, Bernie Sanders already has a
bill written to ban superintelligence. and regulate AI into oblivion
and will be releasing later this week. The bill, among
many other things, will create a new cabinet-level federal agency
to safeguard the public from the dangers of artificial intelligence,
(24:13):
will be advised, blah, blah, blah. Do you think perhaps
Anthropic and its many investors who fund AI policy advocacy
might have interest in getting to place a pet expert
on the board of an entity that dictates what AI
is and what it isn't allowed to do? And isn't
it fortuitous that this whistleblower came forward with his oh-so-scary
stories so close in proximity to the release of the
(24:35):
most radical piece of AI legislation ever introduced?
Speaker 3 (24:43):
So the worst thing that could happen in this whole
argument is this become like masks or vaccines or there's
lots of examples out there. When it becomes a, oh,
you want to, you think AI is going to ruin
the world, you must be a Democrat. I mean, if
it becomes a, I am for AI because I'm a
(25:07):
Republican or whichever party, it doesn't make much difference.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
If it becomes a.
Speaker 3 (25:10):
Partisan issue and that blinds everybody to everything, that is going.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
To be really disturbing. And I hope that's not what
happens out of this. Here's a fellow who works for Palantir,
Michael Adams, who tweets, so far, excuse me, at least
22 politicians responded directly to this tweet with calls for
legislation to regulate AI. Two governors, seven senators, 13 congresspeople,
all Democrats except for three. Which is kind of weird.
Speaker 3 (25:40):
I mean, if this guy's claiming it's some sort of Democrat-led,
I mean, why would he pick a party?
Speaker 1 (25:46):
Trump has been pushing.
Speaker 3 (25:48):
You know, he got all those people together and made
a bunch of talk about having a special agency that
has to approve an AI before it is released and
all that sort of stuff. How'd this guy decide that
it was a Democrat thing as opposed to, because there's
lots of politicians been saying this, of both stripes, including
Donald Trump.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
Yeah, yeah. Elon Musk tweets, I think the groundwork for
this PSYOP, for lack of a better term, has been
prepared for a long time. This was just the match
that lit the fire.
Speaker 3 (26:20):
All this could be true, the conspiracy part true, that
this was just an effort to get legislation passed or
something like that. And all the other stuff is true,
that AI is going to ruin the world in about
50 different ways.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
Right, right. I would agree. All right, let's end with
a bit of humor. This is a mock ad for
a job at Anthropic. And it's very convincing looking in
its graphics. Speaking of AI. Anthropic Careers. Killswitch Engineer. San Francisco, California, U.S.
$ 300, 000 to $ 500, 000 per year. About the role. Listen, we
(27:01):
just need someone to stand by this. I'm sorry. I'll
get my act together. Listen, we just need someone to
stand by the servers all day long and unplug them
if this thing turns on us. You'll receive extensive training
on the code word, which we will shout if Claude
goes off the deep end and starts overthrowing countries. We
expect you to be patient, know how to unplug things,
(27:24):
bonus points if you can throw a bucket of water
on the servers too, just in case, and be excited
about Anthropic's approach to AI safety research. Kill switch engineer.
Speaker 3 (27:35):
Just need to stand next to it. If it goes crazy,
unplug the damn thing. We'll shout the code word at you.
Speaker 7 (27:43):
Parakeet!
Speaker 1 (27:44):
Parakeet!
Speaker 3 (27:45):
Parakeet! Oh, God. That had a little of the Tucker
Carlson thing sound to it, and who did he go
to school with?
Speaker 1 (27:59):
You know, Halliburton. Benjamin Netanyahu's second cousin's wife's nail salon operator.
It had a little of that, but....
Speaker 3 (28:10):
One of the reasons we're doomed around all this is
this sort of thing. Either this guy is irresponsibly downplaying
the actual threat, or the guy did all the stuff
he's being accused of, and this is a fake trying
to get regulations going. Either way, the fact that these
splits happen, and everybody has doubt about everything, so nobody.
Speaker 1 (28:32):
Knows what to believe. She can't even have a conversation
about it. Meanwhile, Xi Jinping is saying, man, you Americans
are weird. How's it going at the lab, fellas? You
know what people do around here? What I tell them to. Right, exactly. So, gosh, wow, wow, wow.
Maybe prayer is the only proper response to all of
(28:54):
this stuff. Or, I don't know, whatever you want to do,
whatever you think is right. Man, a lot of our
Samsung texters are angry. I don't know why this makes
you so angry.
Speaker 3 (29:06):
We already have a foldable phone! Lots of those texts
from the Samsung crowd.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
I know, I know you do. It's just, I don't
know why that makes people so angry. All right, so...
I like ambivalence. Well, I have mixed feelings about ambivalence.
But as an arch-conservative, surely you know me. Joe Getty, arch-conservative,
cold warrior. I've earned... credibility to say this, and we're
(29:35):
going to talk about this next hour. If you give
money to ex-cons as they get out of prison to
help them not go back to prison, is that a
good policy? I want to talk about it. Joe. It's interesting.
Joe Getty. Cold warrior. You're damn right. Who's lost his
(29:59):
moral compass, perhaps.
Speaker 9 (30:00):
Wrong.
Speaker 1 (30:01):
Wrong, sir. Stay with us. So the wait is over.
Football is here. Oh, man, I loved it. Watching it
last night. And so is DraftKings.
Speaker 3 (30:10):
How do they manage to make so many games so
close at the end? You wouldn't think that would happen
very often, but it seems to happen all the time.
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Speaker 5 (31:11):
Armstrong and Getty. If the Republicans win the House of
Representatives and the United States Senate, both of them, I
will issue a dividend to every adult citizen in the
United States of America for $ 5, 000.
Speaker 3 (31:31):
So Trump talked for almost two hours last night. That
is definitely the home run clip that's getting all the
most attention. Just flat out, every adult citizen gets $ 5, 000.
Speaker 1 (31:45):
If if we win the House and the Senate. So
I'm going to a car dealer today and tell him, hey,
I want a new car. I'm going to use Trump's
five thousand as a down payment. So don't worry, it's
on the way to one point two trillion dollars, by
the way, if they did that. We talked a lot
about that earlier.
Speaker 3 (32:03):
Get the podcast if you want to hear various critiques
of that or the booster ism from J.D. Vance on
why it's a good idea. I've seen a little bit
of this. This is some classic Trump. This is like
Trump 2015, 2016 stuff where he's riffing on people and
being funny. This is from last night at the midterm convention.
Speaker 5 (32:23):
He described himself as a person.
Speaker 1 (32:25):
Who hates Christmas.
Speaker 3 (32:26):
So he's specifically talking about That the guy, James Tallarico,
and he's the guy that's running against the Republican and
the Republicans have not lost in Texas in a very
long time. We might end up with a Democrat senator
from Texas and Trump's trying to tear him down.
Speaker 5 (32:42):
He described himself as a person who hates Christianity, says
that God is transgender. He called the American flag a
complicated symbol of hate, claimed that the Ten Commandments are
a form of fascism, and when he was asked what
he loved most in the world, he said, I love
transgender children, which.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
He was also.
Speaker 5 (33:08):
Somebody that hated eating meat. But he ran a campaign
to beat meat. He called it beat meat. I don't
know what the hell he meant by that. These people
are going to tell me, what the hell is he,
wants to beat meat? But it was bad for his image,
(33:36):
so he started eating meat. And he recently, it's getting worse.
I'm getting myself in trouble.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
It's getting worse.
Speaker 5 (33:49):
But he was recently seen having a barbecue and eating
a lot of meat. But that's what happened. He ate
it and then he was seen running backstage to a
room and throwing up all over the place.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
He doesn't like meat.
Speaker 5 (34:08):
He also loved wearing masks, and he was seen wearing
a mask just a short.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
Number of months ago.
Speaker 5 (34:14):
Any guy in Texas that's wearing a mask a few
months ago, this is not going to be your senator.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
It's not going to work out. Not going to work out.
Trumpet Catch a Rising Star Comedy Festival. Yeah, his letting
the laughter happen pause was like.
Speaker 3 (34:33):
That's a guy who has some abilities in that area.
Speaker 1 (34:38):
That's some good critique of the dude, though. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3 (34:43):
Even though the Republican candidate, Paxson, is all kinds of problems.
Speaker 1 (34:48):
You know, you're in Texas... Guy doesn't eat.
Speaker 3 (34:52):
He's a vegetarian who says his favorite thing is trans,
who hates trans kids, who hates the flag.
Speaker 1 (34:59):
Right. Where it was wearing a mask two months ago,
frantically trying to cleanse his record and his social media
postings and the things he's on the record saying, yeah,
I got that wrong. I said he actually he went
on Fox News the other night and one of their reporterettes,
Brooke Taylor, I think, interviewed him and asked him some
(35:21):
hard questions, and he was full of the, you know,
I missed the mark on that one, or no, I
got that one wrong. I actually believe this. I misspoke, yeah,
over and over again.
Speaker 3 (35:32):
Come on.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
You know, and at some point, people are allowed to
change their minds. In fact, I respect it if they'll say,
you know what, I was wrong before, and here's why. But,
I mean, this guy conveniently says this about practically everything,
and at some point, You got to say, look, if
your judgment is so bad that you jump like a
hungry dog at every fad that passes and every woke
(35:56):
fashion in the universities and say, yeah, I believe that.
Speaker 3 (35:59):
I believe that.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
You don't have the judgment to be a U.S. senator.
Speaker 3 (36:02):
I wish the other choice wasn't flat out corrupt. Could
have gone with Cornyn, who was already a senator and could.
Speaker 1 (36:10):
Have respected, liked, etc. But, well, he didn't lap Trump's
boot heels. Not thoroughly enough, apparently.
Speaker 3 (36:16):
It's terrible.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
Anyway, that was some good Trump right there.
Speaker 3 (36:20):
The $ 5, 000 to every American adult, which has already been
changed to within a certain tax bracket, which brings down the.
Speaker 1 (36:30):
Number from $ 1.
Speaker 3 (36:30):
2 trillion, because we got so much excess money in
a slush fund from the tariffs, according to Trump and J.D.,
which is not a thing, but.
Speaker 1 (36:43):
So maybe I can afford a Sea-Doo or something? Not
my car? Oh, well. Damn it.
Speaker 3 (36:51):
By the way, the whole midterm convention is not a thing.
Democrats did it twice back in the day. I didn't
realize that. 78 and whatever other year.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
Democrats have done it twice. And the conventional wisdom is, no,
you've got to appeal to the swing voters, the middle
and all. And clearly the Republicans, or at least Trump,
have decided no. We're just going to rally the base
like to the nth degree and see if we can
swing the midterms that way. It's an interesting strategy. It
might work. I don't know.
Speaker 3 (37:21):
If you miss a segment of this show, get the
podcast Armstrong and Getty on demand.
Speaker 1 (37:24):
Armstrong and Getty.
Hosts And Creators
Joe Getty
Jack Armstrong
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