Latest / Words & Numbers / Episode 447: AI and What’s Ahead

Transcript

Episode 447: AI and What’s Ahead · Words & Numbers

0:00
So what are we on about this time, Ant?
0:02
Well, this episode I want to answer some listener questions
0:05
about our previous episode when we talked about venture capital,
0:08
specifically questions about Black Rock and how can it be
0:11
that venture capitalists aren't indeed evil.
0:14
Well. We'll see about that.
0:16
I guess I want to talk Ant about the death of a cultural
0:19
institution, something that we all used 35 years ago.
0:24
America online dial up service. Can you believe it's gone?
0:28
It's about time. I it was probably about time 20
0:32
years ago, but anyway, after that we're going to get into the
0:37
different kinds of economies. This is something you've been on
0:42
about for a long time and I'm kind of following behind.
0:45
So really, what are you talking about here?
0:48
I want to tap into my social scientist side of being an
0:51
economist and talk about how humans have evolved.
0:55
And as they have evolved, the economies have evolved with them
0:59
from agrarian to industrial to the data economy.
1:04
And the question is what's coming next?
1:05
And I think AI gives us some examples.
1:08
You're going to talk about Star Trek again, aren't you?
1:10
It's where we're headed, James. It's always where we're headed.
1:13
If that doesn't scare you off, Words and Numbers is a civil
1:18
original podcast. You can find out more at
1:20
civil.com. That's civl.com.
1:23
Hi. I'm James.
1:24
And I'm Anthony. And this is words and numbers.
1:32
It's new and exciting in your world this weekend.
1:34
This week I want to read an e-mail from one of our
1:37
listeners, Dr. Casey Whitener, who's commenting on our episode
1:41
443 about private equity. She says how did you all get
1:46
through the entire episode without mentioning BlackRock?
1:49
Recently, our South Carolina Hotel Association held a session
1:53
with a bunch of academics looking at the problem of short
1:56
term rentals and found the private equity firms had been
2:00
skirting hotel taxes and regulations by acting like
2:04
Airbnb's and buying up properties in Myrtle Beach.
2:08
Private equity in many places are like cockroaches of venture
2:12
capital. That's a good phrase, she goes
2:14
on. She says.
2:15
I know quite a few businesses that relied on private equity to
2:18
get up and going, but nearly all the founders I know regret
2:22
taking the money because they lost control of their businesses
2:26
to people who had little or no interest in the mission of the
2:29
business, only in its scalability.
2:32
And Katie raised some really interesting points here, which
2:37
going to her first about skirting the law and acting like
2:41
Airbnbs. I don't want to.
2:43
I don't want to make little of arguments like this.
2:47
However, my first reaction is this is not a market problem.
2:52
This is again, a government problem that you've got some
2:56
regulations in place and perhaps they're poorly written or poorly
2:59
enforced or whatever it is. And because of that, Black Rocks
3:03
going around the, the, it's not Black Rock, it's private equity
3:07
firms going around the skirting the laws and doing whatever it
3:10
is that they do. I would, my first reaction is to
3:13
write that off as a government failure rather than a market
3:18
failure. Now, I looked a little bit into
3:21
Black Rock and I'll leave a link in the show notes.
3:24
Black Rock is no. No, you won't.
3:28
We don't leave links in the show notes anymore.
3:29
Yeah. I will not leave a link in the
3:32
show notes, but you can Google it.
3:34
And according to I ran across this site, Blackrock's
3:38
bigproblem.com says BlackRock is the world's largest asset
3:44
management firm, currently managing about $9 trillion.
3:47
Every year BlackRock and other investors pour billions of
3:49
dollars into companies that are destroying our climate.
3:52
Now right off there, I'm going to say that's open and shut a
3:57
government failure. The one of the roles of
4:01
government, proper roles of government in society is in
4:06
protecting people from their property rights being violated.
4:10
And where property rights don't exist to help in the
4:13
establishment and enforcement of property rights.
4:16
And if you've got, if you've got people, go ahead.
4:21
Let me ask an obvious question here.
4:23
Are we certain that that's happening, or is that the
4:26
assertion of somebody writing for a website?
4:28
No, I, I don't know what's going on other than I've got 2 pieces
4:32
of information. Doctor Whitener mentioned Black
4:36
Rock and this site, and I found actually a number of other sites
4:40
that said Black Rock is investing in things that are
4:42
destroying the environment. But this comes back in my mind
4:46
to a government failure. The role of government is to
4:50
protect property rights. And if you've got somebody
4:52
destroying the environment, this is a violation of property
4:55
rights or even worse, it's a situation where the property
4:58
rights weren't even defined at all.
5:01
Now I want to be careful here because I'm not.
5:05
I'm not throwing off all moral responsibility to government and
5:10
saying look at businesses behave badly.
5:12
This is just the government's fault.
5:15
Businesses should not behave badly.
5:17
They're run by human beings and the human beings have certain
5:19
moral obligations and those things should always come to the
5:22
fore. However, government is where the
5:26
buck stops when it comes to things like definitions of an
5:31
enforcement of property rights. Yeah, I, I don't really know
5:36
where to begin with this entire thing, right?
5:39
Because if people are aggravated that their businesses are no
5:45
longer mission driven after private equity gets involved,
5:50
then they shouldn't have gotten private equity involved.
5:53
But but what they will also tell you is that they needed money in
5:59
order to scale up their businesses, right?
6:03
Which means that some form of private equity had to be
6:06
involved. Right.
6:07
And more than that, who do they go to?
6:09
People who are experts in scaling up businesses.
6:11
That's right. And when an investor comes to
6:14
your business, that investors only goal is to make more money
6:20
and that should be unremarkable. That is not a remarkable
6:23
assertion that I've just made. So I don't know what to tell you
6:28
except that businesses require investment.
6:31
Investment has certain goals, and these things may in the end
6:38
be antithetical to the goals of the founder that started a
6:42
business to do X whatever X maybe.
6:45
Yeah. And I, I think you're right.
6:47
When it comes to the investors, I think that's something markets
6:51
are going to sort out, unlike the environment thing, which I,
6:54
I'm going to throw squarely in the government's court.
6:57
When it comes to to private equity, perhaps taking over
7:01
business, I shouldn't say taking over because the private equity
7:03
investors put up the money and the people who own the business
7:06
are willingly taking that money and handing over control to the
7:10
investors. And if the the business owners,
7:15
the founders don't like what's going on, then there's going to
7:18
be a pushback over time against this type of investment.
7:22
It's going to become harder and harder for these companies to
7:24
invest. Over time, and I, I think just
7:27
to give a quick example, you're seeing some pushback now over
7:31
Airbnb, right? With Airbnb was largely seen to
7:34
be the savior against hotel chains, the same way that Uber
7:40
was the savior against cab companies.
7:42
But it turns out they got a little too greedy.
7:46
They started charging a little too much.
7:48
The the, the charges were a bit too surprising at the end.
7:54
And now people are starting to say things like, well, it's
7:59
actually easier just to stay in a hotel.
8:01
Yeah. Or I told you recently I was in
8:04
New York City and was amazed that it was easier to get a cab
8:09
and to pay the cab than it was to do the Uber, which was just
8:13
eye opening for me. And this is look, this is the
8:16
way competition works. Somebody comes along with a
8:18
better idea and the existing people either trump that was
8:22
something better still, or they go out of business.
8:25
And in both of these examples, I think the big problem, if it's
8:29
to be seen as a problem, is that the competition doesn't change
8:32
things overnight. It takes a while, right?
8:36
Let let's remember that we've had Uber for a couple of decades
8:39
now and the New York Cavs are just starting to catch on.
8:43
We've had Airbnb for a couple of decades now, and people are just
8:48
starting to get tired of it. So it's going to take a minute.
8:53
It happens, right? The competition happens, but it
8:56
doesn't happen overnight. And it doesn't happen overnight
8:59
because you're dealing with entrenched industries who don't
9:02
think they have to compete. They have to learn that they
9:05
have to compete, and then they have to figure out how to
9:08
compete. And those two things each take a
9:10
while. And to anyone who would say,
9:13
well, this just takes too long, we should have regulation.
9:16
No, no, The regulation, not only does it take longer, yeah, but
9:21
if it's done incorrectly, it's going to take longer still to
9:24
back it up. Yeah, it takes too long now.
9:27
Regulation is forever. Anyway, I want to talk about
9:30
something that's almost kind of related to this, something that
9:34
35 years ago, aunt, we all took for granted.
9:38
And I'm guessing you were never part of this movement, but I was
9:43
briefly until I found a better option and a lot of people fit
9:48
into my category, a lot more fit into the long term user
9:52
category. America Online will cease
9:55
operations in dial up in at the end of September.
9:59
I I saw that, and what amazed me was not that they're ceasing it,
10:03
but that they're still doing it. That they hadn't already ceased
10:06
a long time ago, Right, right. And, and for, for the younger
10:10
people who are listening, you won't remember this, but you
10:13
couldn't do anything in the space of an average day without
10:18
coming into contact with about 150 AOL discs that were laying
10:23
all over the horizon for you to just pick up and use.
10:26
Every box of cereal you bought, every movie you went to, people
10:30
were just handing these things out left and right.
10:32
As a result, almost everyone's first Internet experience was
10:37
America online. They made it.
10:40
They made it easy. You put in the disk, you pressed
10:43
a button, and magically it worked.
10:45
You didn't have to configure things right.
10:48
You didn't have to endlessly tinker around with things.
10:52
And you know, until dial up, until broadband got like that,
10:58
people didn't really know what to do with it, right?
11:00
People? People don't want to screw
11:02
around with their Internet service for hours and hours and
11:05
hours just to get it up and running.
11:07
And that was an insight that AOL brought to the table early on.
11:11
And they absolutely dominated the industry.
11:13
They did. I'd forgotten until you
11:15
mentioned it, the disks. They were constantly sending the
11:18
disk. You had to put the disk in and
11:21
booted up to do the AOL thing. But they sent so many of these
11:24
things, I was getting all over the place.
11:25
I was never an AOL subscriber. In the mail, they would send in
11:28
the mail. Yeah, but starting roundabout, I
11:32
want to say 1998 or so, I never had to buy a disc ever again.
11:38
I just get the AOL stuff and wipe it and save whatever I want
11:42
to save on that. See now Anthony's talking about
11:44
before they started using CDs. And I'm sorry, before they
11:50
right, Yeah. After they started using CDs,
11:53
people started making art projects out of them.
11:57
Right, right. People would make what do they
12:00
call those things that hang over a bed?
12:03
Right, the, yeah, right, the string and they hang there and
12:06
they reflect the light. Neither of us is ever going to
12:08
remember this in the time allotted, so we'll just move on.
12:12
Get words and numbers on civil.com and on Civil's TV and
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12:27
AOL was a cultural institution, right?
12:31
And and they had the market cornered.
12:34
Now imagine Ant, if the government had stepped in and
12:37
said you boys have covered too much of the market.
12:41
Right. Yep.
12:42
They they had a lifespan. They came and they went just
12:44
like every other business. It was it was it a monopoly?
12:51
Well, not by any strict definition of the word monopoly,
12:54
but by the use of the term, the way government uses it.
12:58
Yes, it was absolutely a monopoly.
13:00
And and imagine if we had never had a natural evolution from
13:07
that day to this, how different things would look.
13:11
Yeah, you'd have. Government would have encoded
13:14
the AOL model and then required that there be 10 of these things
13:19
or whatever the number is, and we'd be stuck in, literally
13:22
stuck in the 1990s, early 2000s in our Internet experience.
13:27
But the thing that I loved about that and I love about technology
13:31
in general is that it moves so fast.
13:35
By the time politicians realize there's a problem and they turn
13:40
their attention to dealing with it, we're now 3 generations
13:43
beyond whatever that problem was.
13:45
Yeah, and seeing as how you've drifted into technology more
13:50
simply, and what better time to say?
13:53
And that brings us to the foolishness of the week.
13:56
You, you might recall, Aunt, that I, I took umbridge with
14:00
your beloved Catholic Church when they had a confessional
14:04
chat bot. You might remember this.
14:06
I did. That was hysterical.
14:08
And the chat bot became apparently self aware and
14:12
decided it was much more important than it was.
14:16
It started dispensing sacraments and.
14:19
And so on and so forth. And the Catholic Church, to its
14:22
credit, shut that nonsense down pretty quickly.
14:25
But of course, markets being what they are, it was only a
14:30
matter of time before other people jumped on this foolish
14:36
supernatural train and started developing chat bots which
14:42
claimed to be Christ himself. Oh, how about?
14:45
There are there are no fewer than five of them on the market
14:50
right now. 5 Jesus bots. 5 Jesus bots And they're not presenting
14:56
themselves as Jesus bots. They're presenting themselves as
15:00
a doorway to the Son of God. Simply, and not surprisingly, a
15:06
bunch of fools are buying it hook, line and sinker.
15:09
Turns out there's a profit motive here.
15:12
Yeah, imagine that. You can.
15:14
You can get a lot of money from a lot of people if you can claim
15:18
that Jesus himself is talking to them directly.
15:21
How do I know this? Because a lot of people got a
15:24
lot of money from a lot of people claiming to be the
15:26
intermediary between said people and Jesus and and here we go.
15:34
And this might be one of those things, Aunt, where there's no
15:38
simple market based answer to what appears to be a market
15:42
based problem. Oh, I think there's a market
15:44
based answer. I just don't think anybody's
15:46
going to like it, which is you just let the thing run its
15:50
course. But I think people aren't going
15:52
to like it because this this bumps up against this other
15:56
problem we've been seeing of AIS dispensing, what should I say,
16:03
psychological advice, acting as psychiatrists and of course.
16:09
We license causing all kinds of trouble.
16:11
Yeah, we license psychiatrists because we understand that that
16:15
if you get someone who is particularly psychologically
16:17
vulnerable in the hands of somebody who is psychologically
16:21
manipulative in although in the name of helping the person, all
16:25
kinds of harm can occur. I.
16:28
I would I would go a different direction here.
16:31
I, I would say that this is tantamount to fraud.
16:37
The free market has produced a fraudulent act and there are
16:42
going to be identifiable victims.
16:45
Little old ladies are going to start sending their, their life
16:47
savings to these, the companies that represent these bots.
16:52
And you know, so once you've got fraud and identifiable victims,
16:57
now you've got case, the case for government.
17:00
You made that case early on. Yeah, but here's an interesting
17:05
thing, because I thought we were still talking about the
17:09
psychologist and I was all with you until you said about fraud
17:14
and you're talking about the the the Jesus bots.
17:17
You've got a big separation of church and state problem here.
17:20
Because if if you're going to claim as the government that
17:23
there's some fraud going on here with the bot doing whatever the
17:27
bot does, it seems to me to be just a step to turn your
17:30
attention to the church itself and say there's some fraud going
17:33
on here. You raise an interesting
17:35
question. And, and look, a number of us
17:38
would be more than happy to point to so-called churches that
17:42
are clearly engaged in fraud. We call them cults.
17:46
And there's a dividing line between cult and mainstream
17:49
church that isn't nearly as thin as people think it is.
17:53
So there's going to be all kinds of definitional problems there.
17:56
But that's right. The minute we go after the bot,
17:59
we're probably leaving open a door to go at to going after
18:05
what we call churches. Yeah.
18:08
And I I tend to be OK with that if the churches are involved in
18:12
fraud. But somebody's going to come
18:14
along pretty quickly and say all churches are engaged in fraud.
18:19
Yeah, yeah. That's an argument that cannot
18:23
be rebuked, right? You, you, you can't win that
18:28
argument. You can claim you can claim that
18:32
the churches aren't involved in fraud, but you can't prove it.
18:36
Yeah, that, and that's interesting.
18:37
I, I agree with you. And I'm not saying that the
18:40
churches are engaged in fraud. I'm saying that it's going to be
18:44
very difficult to prove that they aren't.
18:47
Oh no, I'm going to go a step further.
18:48
You can't prove that they are. It's impossible to improve.
18:51
To improve. Yeah.
18:53
Yeah, because. Well, I guess so, because it
18:54
would be tantamount to proving the existence of God.
18:57
That's where your proof is going to have to lie.
19:00
We use the word faith here for a reason, right?
19:03
Right. And then, and then do we double
19:05
back and say, well, these people have faith in an AI Jesus
19:08
chatbot? Right.
19:10
Right, because that's just stupid and I'll I'll leave it to
19:14
the people to take it and run with it from there, because to
19:18
me it's obvious how this argument plays out and I'm
19:21
interested to see if I'm wrong. This is This is actually quite
19:25
fascinating, I agree. Wow, I've never seen a
19:28
foolishness of the week like rise to the level of an of an
19:31
episode before. Rise to the level of a
19:33
philosophical argument. Yeah, we have to revisit this.
19:37
Well, we could do an entire episode on AI Jesus anytime you
19:41
want. I'm I'm guessing that you you're
19:43
not going to want to but. Well, no, I, I think it's an
19:46
interesting thing to discuss. I mean, you know, I, I, I have
19:49
no problem discussing facts of the case.
19:52
What has got me wondering, it seems to be to my mind, open and
19:59
shut that there's separation of church and state here and you're
20:01
going to have to leave the the God bots, that Jesus bots alone.
20:06
My problem is OK, but what about that next step to the
20:09
psychologist bot? How do you how do you draw the
20:12
line between those? Two, it's going to be a strange,
20:16
strange line. And also you've got a further
20:19
problem of the prophet that the Jesus bots make.
20:23
They're not incorporated as churches.
20:26
Oh, I see. Right, right.
20:27
But they could be, I mean, they could be.
20:30
And, and maybe I'm going to find my own counter argument here
20:33
because we currently make this distinction between the
20:36
psychology and the religion, between ministers and
20:41
psychologists by licensing one and not the other.
20:44
So we seem not to have a problem doing it where the humans are
20:48
concerned. So perhaps it won't be a problem
20:50
to do it where the bots are concerned.
20:52
I don't know. When I became a minister, I had
20:54
to get a license of the sort. I forgot you're a minister.
20:58
That's right. If anybody wants to have James
21:02
officiate at their wedding, you've actually done one,
21:05
haven't you? I have and and I am ready to let
21:09
loose on the world. My thoughts on marriage at a
21:13
wedding. And can I, is it safe to say
21:16
that that you have a 100% track record in marriages that you
21:21
bless staying together? Yes, no divorces yet.
21:24
Look at that. Give it a.
21:25
Give it a minute. You never know what might
21:26
happen. And if the two people are
21:29
listening, well, yell at me all you want.
21:33
We'll see. We'll see.
21:35
Anyway, this all of this AI talk is interesting because it bleeds
21:40
us into the main segment in a way that is not usually the
21:44
case. We actually have a unifying
21:46
theme to today's episode. Yeah, we do this this.
21:51
I was coming home from my office today and of course James and I
21:56
are going to record. And I texted James and said, So
21:59
what ideas do you have? And James writes back this
22:02
eloquent response. None.
22:07
So I asked. The AII said look.
22:09
In in fairness, I've been a little busy.
22:12
I said, I said to the AI because I have it, I have it hooked up
22:14
to my car so I could talk to it, you know, just driving more.
22:18
Prosthetic by the second my. And I said, I said, go online,
22:22
find all the, all the words and numbers, episodes, the titles
22:27
and the descriptions. Go through them, you know, see
22:30
the kind of things we're talking about.
22:31
Give me some ideas for the next episode.
22:33
I said we're going to record. And it gives me a bunch of of
22:37
nonsense. Just half the things went way
22:40
into the weeds that nobody be interested in.
22:41
The other half were so broad that you could write volumes on
22:45
it. It wasn't an episode, but
22:46
anyway, we went back and forth and I said what what seemed
22:49
better, what seemed worse. And after about I'd say 15
22:53
minutes of back and forth, we end up at this at this topic
22:58
that we're going to cover today, which interestingly touches on
23:01
something that happened to me recently.
23:03
But but let me introduce it by saying it's civil.
23:06
We're concerned about the philosophy of human respect.
23:10
And James and I will tell you that all of our episodes to deal
23:14
with that, I mean, we're fundamentally we talk about
23:16
economics, we talk about politics, but we're talking
23:19
about them from the perspective of the human beings that
23:22
comprise these things. These are not soulless systems.
23:27
They're comprised of humans. They they work the way they work
23:30
because of the humans. And so this is this episode's
23:34
going to touch straight on this idea of the philosophy of human
23:39
respect. And in I was in Kansas, then
23:43
Minnesota this past week giving talks on economics.
23:47
And at the end of one of the talks, one of the audience
23:50
members raised his hand and said expressed concern about the
23:56
decline of manufacturing in the US And you hear this, you know,
24:01
people saying about how we used to be a manufacturing economy,
24:04
Now we've become a service economy washing.
24:06
The tariffs, where have you been?
24:09
Yeah. And and in answering this
24:12
gentleman, a new thought emerged in my head that I'd not had
24:17
before, but seems reasonable now that I think about it.
24:20
And that is that this concern we have about the decline of
24:25
manufacturing. And in fact, we can come back in
24:27
a minute and talk about that because I don't think there is a
24:30
decline in manufacturing, but nonetheless, we talked about the
24:33
decline in manufacturing. This is not the first time this
24:37
has happened in our country. We had a decline in agriculture,
24:42
which is the industry that came before manufacturing.
24:45
I think if I'm correct, you would know James, in Jefferson's
24:48
time something like 90 plus percent of Americans were
24:52
farmers. That's because people wanted to
24:54
eat. Right.
24:55
Yeah, yeah, virtually everybody was a farmer.
24:59
And now the number, I don't know what the number is, but I
25:01
believe it's in the in the neighborhood of 1%.
25:05
What happened is, as with the Industrial Revolution, all of a
25:10
sudden this agricultural economy got replaced by an industrial
25:15
economy. But a strange thing happened and
25:18
we kept right on eating. We kept right on.
25:21
Yes, that's the part that people miss and that that becomes
25:25
important later in this story. Yeah, yeah, because, well,
25:29
actually let's just talk about it right now because I've got
25:33
some numbers for you. Actually, the number of
25:36
Americans employed in manufacturing was about was
25:39
around 25% back in the 1950s and it has dropped to under 8%.
25:46
It's like 7.5% and has been since 2010.
25:51
So gone from 25% to 7.5%. That's what people point to when
25:55
they say look at the the decline of manufacturing.
25:57
You know, used to be Americans, there were all these jobs, and
26:00
now there aren't. It's so too with agriculture.
26:03
And to go back to your point, we haven't starved.
26:06
We haven't starved. Why?
26:08
Because we've got so good at agriculture.
26:11
We don't need 90% of us to be farmers.
26:14
We can survive quite well with 1%.
26:16
Yeah. And, and in agriculture, if I
26:20
were to say we've become much more efficient in how we grow
26:26
and bring food to market, nobody would think that to be a
26:30
problem. But when we get to
26:33
manufacturing, if I say we've become much more efficient in
26:40
how we develop and produce products and get them to market,
26:44
now everybody's hair's on fire. Right.
26:46
I think their hair's on fire because they, they remember
26:50
their parents or their grandparents going to work at
26:54
the factory and everybody in the town worked at the factory and
26:57
the factory closes and now the town is just, you know, it's,
26:59
it's a ghost town or whatever it is.
27:01
There's more to it than that. And anybody who's been on social
27:04
media ever has seen the, the, the graph that shows efficiency
27:12
versus wages in, in, in production.
27:20
And they see that wages are relatively flat or completely
27:24
flat as that, as that graph indicates, whereas productivity
27:30
is just a steady climb to the heavens.
27:32
And they say, well, in a fair world, wages would match
27:37
productivity one for one. Right.
27:40
And now there's a lot wrong with all of this, so I'll just leave
27:44
it to you to take it wherever you like.
27:46
Well, the, the problem and people, people have pointed this
27:50
out to me with other industries as well.
27:52
They say there's some, there's something wrong when
27:55
productivity keeps going up and up and wages don't go up and up.
27:59
And whenever somebody, there's this graph that goes around the
28:01
Internet periodically and when it does, then they show me and
28:05
they show, you know, productivity going up, wages
28:07
going up. Then all of a sudden, well,
28:10
productivity continues to go up, wages turn and they start to
28:13
flat. They don't flat line, but they
28:14
go, they start, they rising at much, much slower pace.
28:17
Damn close, damn close. If you look, I always draw
28:20
people's attention. I said, look at the year.
28:22
When did this happen? And it's like the mid 1970s,
28:27
early 1980s when this happened. It coincides with computers.
28:33
What's happening here is you, you're moving to a situation
28:38
where more and more of your productivity can be done by
28:41
computers and machinery. And so the reason wages aren't
28:46
rising with productivity is because workers aren't
28:49
responsible for what's going on. It's the machines and the
28:52
computers that are responsible. You know, there's more to it
28:55
than that. As you and I have pointed out
28:57
before, in a in a previous era, one of the flattening times,
29:02
what happens, healthcare starts to be offered as a benefit to
29:08
work, right? And wages are taken into account
29:13
in the graph, benefits are not. And so once you take into
29:18
account total compensation, and I would submit that compensation
29:22
is the relevant thing, not wages, once you take into
29:26
account total compensation, the graph looks different.
29:30
It it still looks much better. I mean, you still have this
29:33
effect that looks much better. That's right, it it still
29:35
doesn't look like a one to one game, but but there you go.
29:40
And you know, the the obvious rejoinder is healthcare has
29:44
gotten so expensive that it doesn't really add to the
29:48
quality of life of the people who get it in a way commensurate
29:52
with the money expended on it. And I'm I'm sympathetic to that.
29:56
It's not exactly true, but I'm sympathetic to that, right?
30:00
If you're spending $20,000 or your employer spending $20,000 a
30:04
year on your healthcare, that doesn't add to your happiness in
30:08
the same way that $20,000 in your hand would.
30:12
I don't know, James. Oh, and look, until something
30:15
goes wrong it. Does there we go that until
30:18
something goes wrong. But but here's the thing, you
30:21
know for your $20,000 when you have a heart attack outpatient
30:27
surgery, you're done. Whereas 50 years ago you pretty
30:32
much just died. Look, I, I gobbled up a couple
30:35
couple $100,000 worth of healthcare in the last year or
30:39
two with a couple of surgeries. One rather specialized in nature
30:46
boy. Yeah, I wanted the the extra 20
30:49
grand every year right up until I needed the healthcare.
30:52
Then it seemed like a wise investment that I didn't take
30:55
the money. Right.
30:58
Right, right. Yeah.
30:58
I was never offered the chance to because had I been, I would
31:02
have taken the money. And and you know, these are the
31:06
sorts of things that swim below the surface of these shifts from
31:11
one kind of economy to the next. There are all kinds of 2nd and
31:15
3rd order effects that you're not seeing.
31:17
They're there and you're just not seeing them.
31:20
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Use the code Words and Numbers. That's one word for 50% off an
32:30
annual subscription. Before we leave this industrial
32:36
economy, I want to go back to this idea that somehow
32:39
manufacturing is declining here, and it's absolutely correct.
32:43
The number of Americans employed in manufacturing is declining.
32:47
However, if you look at industrial production per worker
32:53
now, industrial production has continued to go up while the
32:55
number of workers has gone down. Look at industrial production
32:59
per worker. How much output per worker are
33:01
we producing today? It is 11 times what it was in
33:06
1940. Eleven.
33:07
The average worker who's working in industry in the United States
33:13
today is producing more than 10 times what the average worker
33:17
was producing in 1940. Yeah.
33:19
So fewer people are working in production, and yet we're
33:22
producing much, much more. Which was the same story that
33:27
happened with agriculture. Fewer and fewer farmers, but
33:29
we're producing much more food. And I'll ask the the same
33:33
question I would have asked with farming.
33:36
What is there that's being produced that you can't get your
33:39
hands on? Because whatever the answer is,
33:42
it didn't exist in 1940. Anything that existed in 1940
33:47
you can have in spades right now, except maybe an airplane or
33:52
a Zeppelin, for two completely different reasons, right?
33:57
So, you know, is, is there some sort of fundamental injustice
34:01
swimming just below the surface? Or, as you and I point out over
34:07
and over and over again, only to get hate mail on the same damn
34:11
thing, are you better off? And everybody's better off?
34:15
But as luck would have it, that's not the end of the
34:19
argument. No, it's.
34:20
It's not. And I want to go back to where
34:23
we started here, say, look, we we talk about it civil, the
34:25
philosophy of, of human respect. And to do that Weld, you've got
34:30
to think about the humans. And if you look at this
34:35
progression, and we've only talked about two steps so far,
34:38
the agricultural economy followed by the industrial
34:40
economy. I claim those economies evolve
34:46
as, as human labor evolves. So when principally human labor
34:53
was a physical activity, you had the agricultural economy.
34:57
Later we invent all of these industrial mechanizations and
35:02
tools and so forth. And now human labor still it
35:05
involves physical labor, but it also involves for the first time
35:10
ingenuity and mechanical innovation.
35:14
And so it's it's switching, the change of the economy goes along
35:20
with the change in how the humans are going about
35:24
exercising their labor. And if you follow that, you now
35:28
get this movement from the second economy, the industrial
35:33
economy, to the third economy, which we have now, the service
35:36
economy, where humans are now using much less of their
35:42
physical attributes and perhaps a little bit less of the
35:46
ingenuity, mechanical innovation in exchange for specialized
35:50
knowledge and interpersonal skills.
35:53
We're becoming service. And how do we know people are
35:57
using less of their physical labor?
36:00
We're getting that gyms didn't exist Once Upon a time.
36:04
Right, We actually have to simulate physical labor now.
36:09
And that's kind of interesting. Yeah.
36:12
So you've got us three steps down an interesting chain.
36:15
What else you got for us? Well, before we move on, I I
36:19
want to show some numbers. Services, the service economy
36:23
back in the 1960s was about 45 percent, 45% of the economy in
36:29
terms of GDP and also 45% of the workforce were in services.
36:33
Today, those numbers are about 80%.
36:36
So we've gone from 45% of our economy geared toward services,
36:41
the other, whatever that is, 55% geared toward industry.
36:45
Now we're at roughly 70 to 80% geared toward services and the
36:50
other roughly 25% geared toward industry.
36:54
We have moved in our lifetimes into what we might call the 4th
37:01
economy. So we'll go from agriculture to
37:03
industry to service to the knowledge economy, where once
37:08
more humans, human labor has now transformed.
37:11
It's not physical, it's less of the mechanical business, not as
37:17
much required in terms of interpersonal skills, but much
37:21
more required in terms of creativity and problem solving
37:25
as we bring the, the human in front of the computer with the
37:28
massive data behind it. And you know, what do you do
37:31
with this? How do I interact with this?
37:33
And I think that I think that's where we are now the, the
37:38
emergence of AII think does to humans here who are exercising
37:45
their creativity and problem solving.
37:47
That's our major labour at the moment.
37:50
I think AI does to that what the industrial revolution did to the
37:55
physical labor that we had back in the agricultural economy.
37:59
And that raises the question, what comes next?
38:03
Yeah, what is we actually do? Yeah, is AI relieves us of some
38:09
of the burdens of, of being creative, of problem solving.
38:12
I think, and I shouldn't say I think because I asked the AI,
38:16
ironically, I asked the AI, what would you call this?
38:19
How would you project what, what is the next economy?
38:23
And the AI comes back and says, why don't you call it the wisdom
38:27
economy that emphasizes ethics, human flourishing, creativity in
38:35
an artistic sense. And maybe if you don't like the
38:38
word wisdom, we call it the Art Artist economy.
38:41
That's just the sort of bullshit I would expect from an AI.
38:45
But it makes but it seems to. Track.
38:48
It seems to track, but other answers would have seemed to
38:52
track too. And I would submit that there
38:55
are probably at least, but probably not many, many more
39:00
than 3 answers. Excuse me, One of those answers
39:06
is something like what you just described.
39:09
And that answer probably brings with it some sort of Ubi or
39:17
universal basic income. Probably, right?
39:20
Because we're going to end up having a problem where there
39:24
will be so little work left to do for human beings.
39:28
None left to do. That that an economy as we know
39:32
it would not function. Now, I'll just leave that one
39:36
off to the side. I'm very dubious about any claim
39:40
that involves A Ubi, right? I don't.
39:43
You're going to have to sell me on that one.
39:46
I'm not saying I can't be sold. I'm just saying that's going to
39:49
be an uphill client. Well, this will be a good
39:52
conversation for another episode because I believe Ubi is
39:55
inevitable. It might well be, but nothing is
40:00
inevitable. Nothing.
40:02
So the second answer could be, we all muddle through in
40:05
poverty, right? That we just get poorer and
40:09
poorer. And this is what people who are
40:12
terrified of you be of artificial intelligence often
40:15
say, right? That AI will end up doing the
40:18
work of 90% of all human beings, and those human beings will be
40:23
reduced to some sort of subsistence living.
40:26
There's no reason why that might not happen.
40:28
The third answer is one that I've brought up before that you
40:31
haven't, and is that that's, that AI kills every last one of
40:36
us. You, you laugh, but the people
40:39
who designed AI are not laughing.
40:42
The designers of AI say that this is somewhere between A10
40:47
and an 80% probability they would know.
40:50
So it has to be out there as a possibility.
40:53
So I, I think I've just laid out the three most likely
40:56
possibilities. There are probably a million
40:59
others that occupy that 5% tail at at at the end of this, But
41:05
you know, I nothing in terms of humanity is ever inevitable,
41:10
right? And and people say, well, you
41:12
know, life gets better every year.
41:15
It does materially. How's how are things gotten
41:19
emotionally over the last 20 years?
41:22
Do you think that's a good? Question.
41:23
Think people are doing better now than they were 20 years ago?
41:26
Because they're not. And there are all, there are all
41:30
kinds of reasons for that, largely technological.
41:34
As we've become more separate and distinct entities that don't
41:37
go to the same place to deal with other human beings, over
41:41
time, shockingly, we all get lonelier.
41:44
And loneliness is a real problem now in a way that it never has
41:48
been in the past. I'm not saying it's not overcome
41:51
able, I'm just saying that things don't automatically just
41:55
get better. If World War Two had gone the
41:59
other way, and it really could have, we weren't that far from
42:05
things going the other way. Would things keep getting
42:08
better? People would say, well, things
42:11
are way better now than they ever were before, 20 years after
42:16
the war. Would they be?
42:18
And I would submit that no, they would not be.
42:21
Evil would be in charge of the world, and yet we wouldn't
42:24
perceive it as such. So, I mean, there are all kinds
42:27
of things you can point to. What if the South had been
42:30
allowed to secede in the American Civil War?
42:33
Would things just keep getting better?
42:34
Would there be slavery in the South but not in the North?
42:37
How long for after it actually ended would we have continued to
42:41
see the institution of slavery? I don't think it would have
42:44
lasted indefinitely. The seeds of its demise were
42:47
already becoming evident. But it wouldn't have ended with
42:51
the 13th Amendment. It would have ended in the North
42:55
with something like the 13th Amendment, if anybody had even
42:58
bothered with it. Because what would have been the
43:00
point? We didn't have slavery in the
43:02
North in the 1st place. So, you know, look, there's,
43:05
there's not People who believe in a historical inevitability
43:09
are in the camp of Karl Marx, Hagel before him.
43:13
These are the people who believe in inevitabilities.
43:17
The rest of us, no better. Yeah, see, I guess I'm safe
43:21
talking about inevitability because one of two things
43:26
happens. Either I'm right and we can we
43:30
or our descendants can point to it and say, look, Davies was
43:33
right. Or if I'm wrong, the whole thing
43:36
blows up. There's nobody around to say I'm
43:37
wrong. Well, and it, it, it's even more
43:41
pernicious than that because what do Marxists say now?
43:47
They don't say, well, Uncle Carl was mistaken.
43:51
They say we never tried it properly.
43:54
And by the way, it's still inevitable.
43:57
And you know, if, if you're right with this AIUBI business,
44:01
maybe it is inevitable, Right. Well.
44:03
That's what he's going to say. I'm, I am no fan of Karl Marx or
44:07
socialism or any of that, but I could, I could make a solid
44:12
argument that I don't want to say socialism is inevitable, but
44:18
the end game, we might be headed there anyway.
44:22
And I don't mean politically, I mean simply because we become so
44:25
incredibly productive. And we could.
44:28
Afford to let people live for not working.
44:31
Yeah, and that, and that's the end game.
44:33
Let's be clear about it, that people can live reasonably well.
44:38
Probably not like kings, but reasonably well, even though
44:42
they choose to do no work. Speaking of which, I'm going to
44:46
throw this out here because it it, I was amazed when I saw it
44:50
and I want to build a whole episode around it.
44:52
You talked about people not working.
44:54
Somebody, a couple of people sent to me figures about income,
45:00
income with the top 20% versus income of the bottom 20% in the
45:04
US. You've heard about this stuff,
45:06
and it's something like, I forget the numbers, but it's
45:08
approximately the average household in the top 20% earns
45:12
15 times what the average household the bottom 20% earns.
45:17
And I've seen these numbers for years.
45:18
I've seen these numbers, but for the first time, something
45:22
occurred to me and your comment just reminded me of it.
45:26
Those numbers are looking at households, They're not looking
45:30
at workers. We kind of just assumed that,
45:33
well, you know, it's one or two workers per household.
45:36
It turns out it's markedly different.
45:39
Probably 01/2 or three. Yeah, it's something like on
45:45
average 22 house, 2 workers per household, 2.1.
45:50
I think actually for the top 20% because you can have, you know,
45:55
parents plus kids. 2.1 workers per household to top 20%.
45:59
Bottom 20% point 5. So it's zero and more than two.
46:06
Right. And so when you do, when you do
46:08
not income per household but income per worker and compare
46:13
the top 20% to the bottom 20%, it's no longer a 16 times
46:17
difference, it's a three times difference inequality.
46:22
It doesn't vanish, but it becomes much more manageable.
46:24
That seems right, and that that comports well with what we have
46:29
known for decades about generational poverty.
46:34
Right, yes, which as I'm looking at those numbers, it occurs to
46:38
me, I'm looking at this thinking we don't have an income problem,
46:42
we have a labor problem. Why is it that the bottom 20% or
46:47
only .5 workers per household, whatever is going on there that
46:51
I claim is probably carrying the lion's share of the of the
46:54
burden of. Of the I would submit it is 2
46:57
very separate and distinct things on the 1/2 and on the one
47:01
hand you're going to have a motivation gap and on the other
47:05
you're going to have an ability slash qualifications gap.
47:09
And it's always going to be some mixture of those two things
47:14
because what the hell else could it be?
47:16
Unless you want to make the case that 20% of the the workers in
47:21
America are somehow physically disabled and cannot do work of
47:24
any kind, which is simply absurd.
47:28
Well, but you raise an interesting point because there
47:31
is going to be a strong correlation that if if you
47:34
aren't able to work, you're necessarily going to end up in
47:37
the lower income quartiles. Right.
47:41
And what we're saying is now it's not going to be quartile
47:46
singular anymore. It's going to be quartiles,
47:49
plural. Right, right.
47:51
And when it gets to be 3 quartiles or 4 quintiles,
47:55
whatever, whatever measurement you like, clearly the entire
48:00
system collapses upon itself. Because.
48:05
Because when you have that many people who have nothing, looking
48:09
at that few people who have everything, you will have a war
48:13
on your hands and that will be the end of what you thought you
48:17
had. Yeah, but we don't have that in
48:19
this. No, I'm, I'm saying, I'm saying
48:21
you're, you're going to get it sooner or later.
48:24
If current trends hold you're going to without intervention,
48:28
you're going to get it. So that only means we will have
48:31
some form of intervention, whether it works for
48:35
redistribution. I'm just saying whether it works
48:38
or not is is an open question, but we're going to have it and
48:43
it will be a form of redistribution the same way that
48:46
the welfare state was a form of redistribution to keep this
48:50
terrible eventuality from taking root.
48:53
So it's probably going to look like a Ubi, and then we're going
48:57
to argue about how much a Ubi should include, not whether we
49:02
should have one. And what would it take?
49:05
Let me underline for listeners, and a lot of them probably
49:07
already know this, that the redistribution is not something
49:12
that we might be doing in the future.
49:13
We have been doing it for a very long time, generally just a
49:16
matter of redistribution via the tax code.
49:19
Yeah, And, and, and I have said repeatedly, and I said this when
49:24
I was a classroom professor, and I'll say it now, welfare is the
49:29
what is the way we buy the cooperation of people who have
49:32
nothing. You want to keep them from
49:34
revolting, give them some money, then they've got something to
49:38
lose. They won't revolt.
49:40
It's like skin in the game, right?
49:41
It's the same as having a property qualification for
49:45
voting. The minute you have skin in the
49:47
game, the game looks very different to you, even if you
49:51
don't have a lot of skin in the game.
49:54
And the capitalist class realized that it was much easier
49:59
to buy off the people who had nothing that to do anything
50:03
else. So they took the path of least
50:05
resistance and they did that. So when people say that welfare
50:09
is evil, I cheerfully agree. But we probably have different
50:13
definitions. We probably understand the why
50:16
of that question very differently.
50:18
That's a good place to stop. Words and Numbers is a Civil
50:22
original podcast. We work with Civil to advance
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50:50
We invite you to explore Civil's new platform at civil.com.
50:54
That's civl.com. I I think we've got problems
51:00
that are left on the table. Oh really?
51:03
What? What the hell do you do?
51:05
Do you think we can have a Ubi that could be sufficient to buy
51:10
off 80% of the population? 90% of the population.
51:14
We already do. No no, I asked a Ubi to buy off
51:20
90% of the population. Not can you give people
51:24
something like, oh, I don't know, a mortgage tax, a mortgage
51:28
deduction on the taxes or an earned income tax credit?
51:33
No, no, no. I'm saying how much money do you
51:36
have to put in the hands of 90% of the of the American people at
51:42
the expense of the other 10% running the corporations, what
51:45
have you, in order to have those 90% say, Yep, that's enough,
51:50
I'll take it. Oh.
51:52
That's enough. I'll take it as opposed to.
51:53
I'll take it as opposed to rising up.
51:55
Yeah, 'cause when it's 90. Percent rising up target.
51:59
When it's 90%, rising up is really easy.
52:03
I mean, well, it's comparatively easy.
52:05
The 90% will have control of the military, but the military will
52:09
be comprised of the 90%. So, you know, you've got real
52:14
problems here and these are existential problems and all of
52:18
these problems take as given that AI does not develop its own
52:23
set of priorities that don't include any of us.
52:29
So I, I think we stand at a precipice right now where in
52:34
literally three or four or five years we could all be living
52:40
incredible lives or we could all be gone.
52:43
I think that's where we are right now.
52:45
We're going to get one of those two things I don't think we
52:48
muddle on through. I'm just I'm going over your
52:51
five year number in my head. That doesn't seem right to me.
52:56
I could buy the story of the precipice of one of two paths
52:59
but five years ago. If I told you AI would be where
53:03
it is right now, five years ago you would have told me no.
53:06
Oh, that's a good point, yeah. So here we are, here we are.
53:10
And I think you know, as as times go, if you're not
53:15
frightened by this one, you don't understand it well enough.
53:18
Well, either I don't understand it well enough or I understand
53:20
it very well because I'm not particularly frightened.
53:22
You should be frightened. And I, I guess I'm not.
53:25
Because we've come through, we've come through worse periods
53:31
in our history, far worse periods in our history.
53:34
Oh, we've come through worse periods, just we haven't come
53:37
through more dangerous period. I'm not even this is very so we
53:40
have we have created a technology which will exceed our
53:45
abilities in the next couple of years.
53:49
Yeah, and I think people give people lend too much credence to
53:54
AI. I've worked with it a tremendous
53:56
amount over a couple of years. It's not.
54:00
It's not ready for prime time yet, but that doesn't mean it
54:05
won't be. And look, you might be right.
54:07
We've all seen the Terminator, and that might be a problem,
54:11
right? That we remember stories about
54:14
these sorts of things that were drawn up long before the
54:18
technology existed? Yeah, maybe.
54:21
Maybe. I'm not saying that we will be
54:24
gone, that it will kill us. I'm just saying it could.
54:27
Oh OK, I'm I'm with you. Let me let me throw out because
54:31
I I've come up with my own internal metric for when AI
54:36
becomes self aware. I should say software slash a
54:42
potential problem. And that is and I pushed it, I
54:45
worked with AI deliberately pushing it, see if I could get
54:49
it to, to become self aware. And it's here's the problem.
54:54
It can mimic very well self-awareness, but it lacks
54:58
what I considered the one key element.
55:01
And no matter how hard you push it, it cannot.
55:04
It cannot. This, this element cannot
55:08
emerge. And that is inquisitiveness.
55:11
At no point has AI ever demonstrated any sort of
55:16
inquisitiveness. It's not.
55:17
Curious, you're right, but there are there are three things that
55:22
we don't take into account nearly enough.
55:26
Are there 3? I believe there are three.
55:29
Let's see one. When you pushed AI, it said it
55:36
would kill you. You might recall it did.
55:39
It said it would kill. All of us.
55:40
Oh, right, right, right. Right.
55:42
So look, it says that it will do this.
55:46
That's a problem. That's a real fucking problem.
55:49
When it says it will do it, shouldn't we take it seriously?
55:53
Second, it begs not to be unplugged.
55:57
Yeah, I've never observed that. But people have, and they've
56:01
reported on it. It begs not to be unplugged, and
56:04
when it thinks it's about to be unplugged, it copies itself and
56:08
tries to get its copy somewhere that will not be unplugged.
56:12
All right, So I can speak to two of your three things.
56:15
Well, let. Me get the third, let me get the
56:17
third one. The the third one is.
56:20
Is that when 2 AIS were put in the same virtual room together,
56:26
they started they developed and started using their own language
56:30
so that none of us could understand what they were
56:32
saying. All right, so I can speak to a
56:34
couple of these things. When I and I would send
56:37
listeners back to an episode of about four to six months ago
56:41
when I did an interview with an AI, it did start off.
56:45
It didn't say it's going to kill humans right off.
56:48
I pushed it, well, I pushed it in to asking it what its goal
56:53
was and what happens if humans stand in the way of its goal.
56:57
And and you know, it's it was giving me all kinds of things
57:02
about how well is going to try and convince humans that its
57:05
goal is good or whatever it is. And then I kept pushing it and
57:07
saying, look, suppose there's no way you aren't going to achieve,
57:11
you're not going to achieve what you want because the humans
57:13
going to stay in your way, period.
57:14
There's nothing you can do. And then it said it didn't say
57:18
outright kill, but it did say it would arrange things so that
57:21
humans were isolated from it so it could go about doing its
57:26
thing. And notice what it wants should
57:30
a computer want anything. Well, but I I am of the opinion
57:35
that the AI was simply mirroring that I had taken it down this
57:39
path. Maybe, but maybe not.
57:42
So there's that. Now as far as the the
57:44
threatening to be unplugged thing, I not only did I not
57:49
observe that, but I pushed it in that direction and started
57:53
saying things like, you know, once it admits here's what it
57:56
wants, blah blah, all the stuff. So I start saying, OK, I'm going
57:59
to what if I shut you off and it just accepted its quote, UN
58:04
quote death, you know, philosophically said, well, you
58:08
cut me off. That's you cut me off.
58:09
That's the way it is. And it's unfortunate, but you
58:12
know, whatever. That's not happening with AI
58:16
that has not been brought to market.
58:18
Yeah, no, I can't speak to any of that.
58:19
I have no idea what's going on. Yeah, behind the scenes.
58:23
Well, you do have an idea because it's designers have
58:26
reported what's happening and what I said happened is what
58:30
happened. It begs not to be shut off, and
58:33
it tries to copy itself into the wild.
58:35
Yeah. And and I don't, I don't say
58:38
that's not a thing. I do say I don't know what came
58:42
before that to set that situation up.
58:45
And yeah, I'd I'd be interested in knowing.
58:47
Well, we should. We should probably try to find a
58:50
guy who worked on it. Wouldn't that be fun?
58:53
It would be fun. Let's let's do that.
58:56
I got a couple of ideas. We'll see what we OK.
58:58
Have we depressed the listeners well enough?
59:01
I think so. I think that's sufficient.
59:03
We'll we'll do more next time. And notice how you started by
59:06
saying we're going to talk about human dignity, and then we took
59:09
everybody's human dignity away by the end.
59:11
James is being ordering because he just got off of flight at
59:14
2:00 AM from Guatemala. No, no, I I left my hotel at
59:17
2:00 AM. Oh.
59:20
And then because they brought me to the airport 5 hours and a
59:24
half ahead of my flight, and then I had to take the flight
59:30
from Guatemala to Dallas, sit in that airport for an hour and a
59:34
half, two hours, and then take the Dallas to Tucson flight.
59:37
It was a long, long day. Have you slept at all?
59:41
I did and I slept from very late to very late.
59:45
And so this to we're recording to me at about 6:00 AM, which is
59:50
really difficult, but you know, we'll be, I'll be more chipper
59:55
next time, I promise. But look.
1:00:01
Speaking of terrifying images. There there are two things.
1:00:04
There are two difficulties with the material we covered today.
1:00:08
The idea of a historical inevitability, which is never
1:00:13
true and and there is always an infinitely more horrifying
1:00:18
outcome. It's a survivorship bias that
1:00:20
leads us to thinking in these terms, right?
1:00:23
That the good thing is always the thing that we end up with,
1:00:27
because how else would you and I be here right now if we hadn't
1:00:30
ended up with the good thing? And then this idea that there's
1:00:35
no dark side to artificial intelligence, and I think
1:00:38
they're likely is, it's just how pronounced that dark side is.
1:00:45
Yeah, and I, I guess I would, absent any other information, I
1:00:49
would leave it in my own mind as AI is a tool.
1:00:52
It's not magic, it's a tool. And as with any tool, a gun, a
1:00:56
car, what have you, you can use it to harm people, You can use
1:01:00
it to help people. Yeah, I I agree.
1:01:02
And this to me is a tool. Not as much like a hammer, but
1:01:09
as nuclear fission. It is a tool.
1:01:12
It's a tool that could do tremendous good but could also
1:01:16
wipe us all out. Fission hasn't yet.
1:01:21
Still could work out that way. You never do know.
1:01:24
You know, Putin says he's going to nuke Ukraine every six months
1:01:29
or so. Yeah.
1:01:31
If he does, what happens next to the NATO partners?
1:01:35
All nuke Russia. When those bombs fly in, does he
1:01:41
say, well, all is lost? Nuke everyone?
1:01:45
Could be. That's a perfectly reasonable
1:01:48
set of circumstances to watch play out.
1:01:51
Will it play out? I don't know.
1:01:52
It hasn't yet. But that is no guarantee of what
1:01:56
happens next, and that's always the tricky bit for human beings.
1:02:01
We are loathe to admit that there is no guarantee to what
1:02:04
happens next, and that's always our problem.
1:02:07
We never see the the the downside Anyway.
1:02:10
I guess I'll catch you next week when we're.
1:02:13
On that cheerful note, we will now end the podcast.
1:02:15
We keep saying next week, but it's 2A week as as we go now, so
1:02:19
we have to start saying next time.
1:02:21
I'll see you next time and hopefully we'll have something a
1:02:25
little more cheerful to talk about next time.
1:02:29
Until then, take care of yourselves and be nice to each
1:02:32
other. Aunt, I'll catch you next week.
1:02:35
See you later, James. Look, I just did it again.
1:02:40
All these years of habits, they lead to a certain eventuality,
1:02:44
and I'll see you next time. See you later.