Latest / General Magic & The Soul of Tech / Ep. 1 | The Soul of Tech: Jobs, Musk, and the Next Inflection Point | Michael Stern & Tom Hershenson

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Ep. 1 | The Soul of Tech: Jobs, Musk, and the Next Inflection Point | Michael Stern & Tom Hershenson · General Magic & The Soul of Tech

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SPEAKER_01: GENERAL MAGIC PODCAST — EPISODE 1 "Why General Magic Matters in the World
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SPEAKER_01: of AI" Hosts: Mike Stern & Tom Hershenson | Guest Interviewer: Sarah Kerruish ---
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SPEAKER_02: Today we have a real treat — something a little bit outside of the box, if you will.
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SPEAKER_02: The inimitable,
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SPEAKER_02: extraordinary,
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SPEAKER_02: and modest — she's probably cringing
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SPEAKER_02: at me using those first two adjectives — Sarah Kerruish,
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SPEAKER_02: whose career includes co-directing General Magic, the movie.
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SPEAKER_02: So who better to turn the tables on us and ask Mike and me questions
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SPEAKER_02: about our General Magic journey,
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SPEAKER_02: our view of what's going on in tech today,
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SPEAKER_02: how tech has lost its way, and how it might reclaim it.
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SPEAKER_00: And my favorite thing to do is ask questions.
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SPEAKER_00: So thrilled to be here, guys.
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SPEAKER_00: It's been a while.
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SPEAKER_00: We've known each other for a long time.
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SPEAKER_00: Let's do the math: 33 years since we all met at General Magic.
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SPEAKER_00: And I remember very distinctly that Mike Stern — the one and only — had sold
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SPEAKER_00: a book proposal about General Magic to Simon & Schuster?
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SPEAKER_01: It was Bantam Doubleday, which is now part of the Random House stack.
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SPEAKER_00: But you had a sense then that this was an amazing company — a spinout from Apple
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SPEAKER_00: that was developing what essentially became the iPhone,
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SPEAKER_00: plus a number of other things,
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SPEAKER_00: including agents and cloud computing, which we can get to.
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SPEAKER_00: But essentially, Mike, you knew then that there was a story to be told.
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SPEAKER_00: You pitched that story and it got bought by Random House.
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SPEAKER_00: The book was never published.
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SPEAKER_00: Can you tell us that story, and then why — 33 years later — you are in fact writing that book?
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SPEAKER_01: The board of directors and Mickey Schulhof — who was Sony's key liaison with
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the senior executives at Sony — was dead set against the idea that there would be
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a book written about the company.
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SPEAKER_01: I think he thought it would expose too much about our weaknesses as well
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SPEAKER_01: as our strengths, and he basically killed the project.
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SPEAKER_01: He got the board to forbid me to do the book.
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SPEAKER_00: And what was it about the environment and the world that we inhabited then
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SPEAKER_00: that made you think this is worthy of a book?
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SPEAKER_01: Well, again, we were trying to do something unparalleled.
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SPEAKER_01: It was a moonshot of extraordinary scope and ambition.
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SPEAKER_01: Marc Porat's vision of anytime,
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SPEAKER_01: anywhere communication — an ecology built around mobile devices,
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SPEAKER_01: a network that hosted them and interoperated across the globe,
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SPEAKER_01: supported as a standard by all of the major telecommunications
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SPEAKER_01: and consumer electronics companies.
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SPEAKER_01: No one had conceived of that kind of world system that would enable individuals
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SPEAKER_01: to carry around a really powerful communicating device that fit in their pocket
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SPEAKER_01: and let them talk to anyone,
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SPEAKER_01: anytime — access any information anytime, transact any transaction anytime.
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SPEAKER_01: So that seemed like one aspect of an incredible story.
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SPEAKER_01: Then there was the technology challenge.
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SPEAKER_01: We had to build it all.
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SPEAKER_01: None of the components of this ecosystem existed.
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SPEAKER_01: We had to build the hardware,
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SPEAKER_01: we had to develop the software,
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SPEAKER_01: we had to create the ecosystem — like an app store,
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SPEAKER_01: a cloud,
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SPEAKER_01: a whole set of network protocols that would enable agents to transit these networks
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SPEAKER_01: and conduct transactions on behalf of users.
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SPEAKER_01: This was a mind-bogglingly ambitious project.
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SPEAKER_01: And then we brought together all of the major consumer electronics companies — all
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SPEAKER_01: of whom are competitors — and all the major national telephone companies,
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SPEAKER_01: in an unprecedented business alliance to create this global standard.
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SPEAKER_01: Again, part of Marc's vision was not just technology,
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SPEAKER_01: not just handheld mobile communications.
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SPEAKER_01: But also a business principle — a business structure that would let us vault
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SPEAKER_01: over Microsoft and other closed,
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SPEAKER_01: proprietary vendors, and maybe displace the desktop.
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SPEAKER_00: There are so many stories one could tell just based on the original story.
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SPEAKER_00: And of course,
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SPEAKER_00: Matt and I went on to make the movie with Mike — General Magic — which has had
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SPEAKER_00: the most amazing life.
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SPEAKER_00: I was just in LA and was just reading David Epstein's new book,
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SPEAKER_00: Inside the Box, which heavily references General Magic.
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SPEAKER_00: It's just wild how this story continues to have lives.
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SPEAKER_00: But Tom, why resurrect the story in book form now?
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SPEAKER_00: What's relevant today in the story that we lived then?
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SPEAKER_02: Well, the short version is that there was a very dark side to what we brought into
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SPEAKER_02: the universe,
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SPEAKER_02: and we're on the cusp of another inflection point —
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SPEAKER_02: and we better get this one right.
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SPEAKER_02: That's the short version of it.
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SPEAKER_02: I want to take a step back and elaborate on that, though.
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SPEAKER_02: It's difficult,
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SPEAKER_02: I think,
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SPEAKER_02: for people who didn't live through those decades to appreciate just how profound
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SPEAKER_02: the transformation was.
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SPEAKER_02: Today, when people get in their automobiles,
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SPEAKER_02: they don't give a second thought to their destination.
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SPEAKER_02: Everybody knows their car can go over any road in their town,
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SPEAKER_02: and if they're going to travel to another town or on a highway.
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SPEAKER_02: They don't need special wheels or special engines.
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SPEAKER_02: It's just unremarkable.
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SPEAKER_02: The world that General Magic was born into was nothing like that.
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SPEAKER_02: Imagine if before you got in your car,
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SPEAKER_02: you had to figure out whether the car could go over the roads necessary to get to
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SPEAKER_02: a destination — and imagine you didn't even have a way of knowing whether
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SPEAKER_02: that destination was in existence,
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SPEAKER_02: or open,
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SPEAKER_02: or shut, or what it would offer you as a store or a source of entertainment.
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SPEAKER_02: It really is difficult
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SPEAKER_02: to convey just how earth-shattering what General Magic brought into being.
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SPEAKER_02: AI's capabilities are mind-boggling.
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SPEAKER_02: And they have tremendous implications — not only for what we can do,
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SPEAKER_02: but for how we will interact.
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SPEAKER_02: And I think it's not an understatement to say, for how we will experience being human.
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SPEAKER_02: At General Magic, we didn't anticipate the misuse of the technology.
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SPEAKER_02: We didn't think through how the technology would push human interactions,
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SPEAKER_02: human relations,
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SPEAKER_02: and society as a whole in a certain direction —
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SPEAKER_02: because we didn't anticipate certain uses and we didn't pay attention
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SPEAKER_02: to erecting appropriate guardrails.
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SPEAKER_02: And the book is written with a sense of urgency that we are on the verge
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SPEAKER_02: of repeating that same sort of — for lack of a better word — blindness.
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SPEAKER_02: I don't want to say "a call to arms."
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SPEAKER_02: Maybe a call to conscience:
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SPEAKER_02: for policymakers,
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SPEAKER_02: technologists,
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SPEAKER_02: investors,
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SPEAKER_02: and everyone else to begin focusing on how to humanize technology — how to think
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SPEAKER_02: through the question of not what do we want out of AI,
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SPEAKER_02: but what do we want out of our society and culture in the face of this unstoppable,
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SPEAKER_02: impending inflection point.
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SPEAKER_00: And the book is called From Jobs to Musk.
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SPEAKER_00: One of the interesting things for me — because I came to the Valley as an outsider
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SPEAKER_00: and have remained an outsider,
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SPEAKER_00: partly reinforced by the fact that I'm a filmmaker and a storyteller,
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SPEAKER_00: so I observe things from the outside — was that there seemed to be a confluence
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SPEAKER_00: of 1960s culture.
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SPEAKER_00: Steve Jobs and his generation were all born of that time,
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SPEAKER_00: which was a time of tremendous optimism and belief in humanity's ability
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SPEAKER_00: to transform many of the challenges we faced and still face today.
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SPEAKER_00: So there was this incredible tech optimism,
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SPEAKER_00: but also — from my perspective,
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SPEAKER_00: in naivety;
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SPEAKER_00: I'm not suggesting I was aware of it then,
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SPEAKER_00: it came later — and it certainly wasn't just General Magic.
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SPEAKER_00: We saw that trend of "tech is going to change the world for the better,"
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SPEAKER_00: with very little regard for the consequences,
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SPEAKER_00: or even thinking through what the scenarios might be.
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SPEAKER_00: If you were to introduce the ubiquitous,
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SPEAKER_00: 24-hour communication device — what would those consequences actually be?
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SPEAKER_00: So what do you think we learned then that we can apply now,
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SPEAKER_00: in terms of being more mindful,
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SPEAKER_00: thoughtful,
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SPEAKER_00: and aware of the risks that AI is posing across so many different dimensions?
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SPEAKER_01: We took it for granted that the impact of our innovation would be benign,
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SPEAKER_01: socially beneficial, and that its value would be equally distributed in society.
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SPEAKER_01: Those are the things we took for granted.
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SPEAKER_01: We didn't question or push back against those assumptions.
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SPEAKER_01: We took it for granted — it was the water we swam in, and fish don't think about water.
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SPEAKER_01: For example,
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SPEAKER_01: we didn't see the way we were going to be eliminating gatekeepers in civil society
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SPEAKER_01: and in social discourse.
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SPEAKER_01: We were going to disintermediate every gatekeeper by giving everyone
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SPEAKER_01: a communication device in their pocket with which they could reach everybody else in
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SPEAKER_01: the world.
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SPEAKER_01: And it never occurred to us what that disintermediation could result
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SPEAKER_01: in — polarization,
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SPEAKER_01: isolation,
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SPEAKER_01: the attenuation or destruction of social relationships, and all the rest of it.
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SPEAKER_01: It literally never occurred to us.
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SPEAKER_02: That's right.
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SPEAKER_02: I think we had inklings that,
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SPEAKER_02: had we thought a little bit more instead of being guided by our enthusiasm,
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SPEAKER_02: we might have started down a chain of questions that would have given us pause.
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SPEAKER_02: Innovation is a funny thing, right?
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SPEAKER_02: Because every innovation begins with an audacious act of imagination.
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SPEAKER_02: It's something that doesn't exist — people either can't conceive of it,
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SPEAKER_02: or it seems ridiculous that the innovation in question could ever come to life.
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SPEAKER_02: So you have to be not just guided by optimism, but really fueled by vision.
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SPEAKER_02: Doubts get in the way of that,
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SPEAKER_02: and are — not necessarily pushed aside, but at a minimum set aside.
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SPEAKER_02: I remember Marc — Marc Porat,
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SPEAKER_02: one of the three co-founders of General Magic — at a lecture at Stanford,
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SPEAKER_02: talking about "when the marginal cost of information goes to zero."
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SPEAKER_02: Looking back,
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SPEAKER_02: I thought:
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SPEAKER_02: that's such an important point of departure for exploring the potential consequences
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SPEAKER_02: of what we were building.
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SPEAKER_02: Because if all information is within reach,
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SPEAKER_02: if there are no gatekeepers,
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SPEAKER_02: if there are no people curating that information in
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SPEAKER_02: a sensible way — two things happen.
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SPEAKER_02: First, everything is on a level playing field,
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SPEAKER_02: and separating fact from fiction becomes, let's say modestly, challenging.
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SPEAKER_02: Second, if you can't make money off of producing information,
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SPEAKER_02: then — as we all know — we become the product.
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SPEAKER_02: Our eyeballs are what get sold.
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SPEAKER_02: And Mike,
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SPEAKER_02: you're absolutely right:
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SPEAKER_02: we didn't take a moment to consider the inevitable effects of what we were ushering
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SPEAKER_02: into the world.
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SPEAKER_02: I think anybody watching this or listening
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SPEAKER_02: to this knows — how many times have you been interrupted by a work email
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SPEAKER_02: after hours?
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SPEAKER_02: How many times have you engaged in doom-scrolling or gone down an internet rabbit hole?
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SPEAKER_02: How many times have you been dispirited by the polarization and extremism in our politics?
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SPEAKER_02: These are all things that flow,
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SPEAKER_02: I would argue, directly from what we were engaged in at General Magic.
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SPEAKER_02: And I don't think there are many people watching or listening to this
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SPEAKER_02: who haven't experienced those and other kinds of ill effects of what we ushered in.
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SPEAKER_00: And why Jobs and why Musk?
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SPEAKER_00: Why have you chosen those two characters in this era?
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SPEAKER_01: For all his flaws — and many people would say that Steve was an asshole — for all
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SPEAKER_01: of his flaws, he had a humane and humanistic approach to technology.
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SPEAKER_01: To him, what he was trying to build and get people to use were the product of craft
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SPEAKER_01: and artisanal sensibility.
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SPEAKER_01: They were beautiful,
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SPEAKER_01: sensual, easy to use, and they enhanced, enabled, and furthered human creativity.
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SPEAKER_01: That's what he was really focused on — not on how
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SPEAKER_01: the minimum viable product could make the most money the fastest.
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SPEAKER_01: That's not the way he thought.
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SPEAKER_01: The whole culture of Apple was to bring something aesthetically beautiful
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SPEAKER_01: and functionally useful into the world,
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SPEAKER_01: and make people's lives better — give them tools to enhance their creativity,
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SPEAKER_01: to discover aspects of their own personality, to be in touch with others.
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SPEAKER_00: But it really came out of the counterculture, too.
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SPEAKER_00: And it wasn't just him, right?
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SPEAKER_00: There's been extensive writing about this — Fred Turner, and John Markoff?
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SPEAKER_00: Yes.
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SPEAKER_01: Fred Turner's book on the New Left's morphing into the inaugural culture
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SPEAKER_01: of Silicon Valley is dead on.
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SPEAKER_01: These were humanistic values — anti-authoritarian, anti-corporate culture, somewhat egalitarian.
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SPEAKER_01: They cared about equality and distribution,
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SPEAKER_01: about how to socialize the benefits of innovation rather than privatize them.
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SPEAKER_01: That was so fundamental to that vision.
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SPEAKER_01: Musk is a greedy,
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SPEAKER_01: malignant narcissist who cares about power and wealth to the exclusion
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SPEAKER_01: of anything else.
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SPEAKER_01: You've got to give him credit for being a brilliant innovator and engineer.
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SPEAKER_01: But he is a malevolent, malignant narcissist.
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SPEAKER_00: Why him specifically, though?
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SPEAKER_00: Because there are a lot of characters in this story
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SPEAKER_00: who looked like they might be good guys at the beginning and then turned to
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SPEAKER_00: the dark side.
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SPEAKER_00: Why Musk particularly?
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SPEAKER_00: Why not Zuckerberg, or any number of others who seem to have sold their soul?
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SPEAKER_02: I want to be clear — Musk is a case study, but also an avatar.
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SPEAKER_02: There are an array of individuals you could point to.
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SPEAKER_02: The fundamental question is: what will you not do for money?
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SPEAKER_02: For Jobs,
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SPEAKER_02: it wasn't about the bottom line per se — that wasn't irrelevant,
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SPEAKER_02: but I've heard stories about products being developed within Apple
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SPEAKER_02: that Steve would refuse to go forward with.
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SPEAKER_02: There was an ethos he had fidelity to that wasn't purely
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SPEAKER_02: about maximizing shareholder value or his own personal wealth.
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SPEAKER_02: And so we see,
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SPEAKER_02: again and again over the last several decades,
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SPEAKER_02: a shift toward a perspective and an ethos around technology that is wedded to wealth
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SPEAKER_02: and making money and nothing else.
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SPEAKER_02: And Musk is representative of that.
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SPEAKER_02: His remarks about empathy as the enemy — and I'm paraphrasing — are telling.
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SPEAKER_02: Let's have a real debate about that notion and the implications of that ethos,
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SPEAKER_02: not just for how technology is designed, but for how technology will rule over us.
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SPEAKER_02: Jobs is no angel,
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SPEAKER_02: but he was guided by a set of principles that,
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SPEAKER_02: I think there's widespread agreement,
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SPEAKER_02: resulted in technology products that benefited people — products that were not tools
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SPEAKER_02: of oppression or dehumanization.
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SPEAKER_02: Musk seems devoid of those same guiding principles that humanized the technology
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SPEAKER_02: that people like Steve Jobs — and there are others we can name — who ascended
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SPEAKER_02: in Silicon Valley a generation or two ago.
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SPEAKER_01: I mean, Musk's willingness to do DOGE, right?
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SPEAKER_01: Apple didn't have lobbyists for its first twenty years.
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SPEAKER_01: The early Valley startups didn't seek political power.
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SPEAKER_01: They sought to stay as far away from government as they could.
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SPEAKER_01: They were anti-regulation in a lot of ways, but they didn't seek legislative capture.
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SPEAKER_01: They didn't buy politicians, they didn't buy elections.
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SPEAKER_01: We're using Musk as an example because of DOGE and the intersection of
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SPEAKER_01: the tech broliarchy — and their Gilded Age values — with their impact
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SPEAKER_01: on every other person's life in this country:
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SPEAKER_01: to destroy the safety net,
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SPEAKER_01: to pervert healthcare, to undermine education, to undermine democracy.
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SPEAKER_01: They have avidly sought to impose those values on the rest of us.
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SPEAKER_01: And look at what he did with Grok, compared to the way Steve would develop a product.
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SPEAKER_01: When Grok's uptake faltered, what did they do?
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SPEAKER_01: They retrained it so it could create sexualized images
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SPEAKER_01: of pubescent girls — AI versions of their photographs where they were nude.
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SPEAKER_01: That's what he did consciously in order to goose the adoption of Grok.
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SPEAKER_01: Compare that to the product philosophy at Apple or General Magic.
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SPEAKER_01: So we're in the era of AI.
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SPEAKER_00: It's here, it's happening, it's everywhere.
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SPEAKER_00: What lessons do you bring back from Doctor Who's TARDIS in 1993?
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SPEAKER_00: What are the key things we need to be really aware of?
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SPEAKER_02: I think the first and foremost is to understand that every technology has a cultural
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SPEAKER_02: and sociological impact.
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SPEAKER_02: Mike has heard me say this a thousand times — it's not an original thought.
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SPEAKER_02: It's borrowed from Jerry Mander,
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SPEAKER_02: in his book from the late seventies,
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SPEAKER_02: Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television.
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SPEAKER_02: Mander points out early on that there's no such thing as a softer, gentler gun.
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SPEAKER_02: A gun is a tool for destroying things — and if you pick up a gun,
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SPEAKER_02: it influences you to start thinking about the world in terms of things to destroy.
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SPEAKER_02: That's not an argument against guns.
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SPEAKER_02: The same is true with any tool.
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SPEAKER_02: If you pick up a hammer, the world becomes a matter of looking around for things to hammer on.
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SPEAKER_02: If you're building houses, that's a great tool.
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SPEAKER_02: If you're attacking people, not so much.
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SPEAKER_02: So the first question we have to ask,
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SPEAKER_02: I think, is:
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SPEAKER_02: what is AI in terms of not what it does,
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SPEAKER_02: but how it subtly — and without us knowing at the time — changes the way we think,
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SPEAKER_02: we relate, what we think is important, what we think doesn't matter?
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SPEAKER_02: We have to think through what this tool does to the way we perceive and experience life.
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SPEAKER_02: That's the fundamental question.
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SPEAKER_02: And the challenge is how do you operationalize it?
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SPEAKER_02: The experience with Grok is telling,
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SPEAKER_02: in that presumably there was no one who said,
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SPEAKER_02: "Wait a second — what is this technology driving?
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SPEAKER_02: What kind of behavior is it facilitating?"
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SPEAKER_02: And remember: what you permit, you promote.
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SPEAKER_02: So the first-order question around artificial intelligence is not
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SPEAKER_02: about what it can do, but what will it do to us?
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SPEAKER_02: That's where the inquiry has to begin.
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SPEAKER_02: I think that's the cornerstone of the discussion.
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SPEAKER_01: All technologies have path dependencies — things that they constrain, things that they enable.
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SPEAKER_01: And there are architectural choices one can make in conceiving of a product or
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SPEAKER_01: a technology or a system: what are the things to constrain?
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SPEAKER_01: What are the things to enable?
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SPEAKER_01: Those architectural choices need to be made now, in terms of AI.
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SPEAKER_01: When General Magic built the first agent-based system — the Telescript system — back
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SPEAKER_01: in the nineties,
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SPEAKER_01: Rich Miller and Jim White's first fundamental approach to the architecture was:
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SPEAKER_01: how do we make this safe?
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SPEAKER_01: That was their primary goal.
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SPEAKER_01: It was to accomplish agent interactions on behalf of users that would be autonomous,
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SPEAKER_01: but in ways that could not go rogue and couldn't be used by rogue actors
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SPEAKER_01: to do destructive things.
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SPEAKER_01: They built deterministic safeguards into the structure of Telescript
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SPEAKER_01: that would basically prevent agents from doing things they weren't supposed
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SPEAKER_01: to — things that the consensus would find socially inappropriate
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SPEAKER_02: or socially damaging.
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SPEAKER_01: And that is not how the folks who have been developing AI over
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SPEAKER_01: the last ten years have been thinking.
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SPEAKER_01: They're not thinking about deterministic safety.
18:55
SPEAKER_01: They're thinking about how they can do more with models that are not constrained.
18:59
SPEAKER_00: They are hiring philosophers, if that's any word of encouragement.
19:00
SPEAKER_00: I just heard that DeepMind has hired a philosopher.
19:02
SPEAKER_00: I know that OpenAI and Anthropic —
19:03
SPEAKER_00: and I'm sure other companies too — have in-house ethics philosophers working
19:05
SPEAKER_00: on these problems.
19:05
SPEAKER_00: But I want to take a step back and make sure everybody understood what Mike said there.
19:07
SPEAKER_00: Because basically,
19:08
SPEAKER_00: if I understand it correctly,
19:08
SPEAKER_00: General Magic didn't just play a major role in bringing the smartphone to life and
19:10
SPEAKER_00: into our pockets —
19:11
SPEAKER_00: Mm-hmm.
19:26
SPEAKER_00: They also invented agents.
19:29
SPEAKER_00: Now that's crazy when you think about AI now and the role of agents today.
19:33
SPEAKER_00: Can you go back — maybe Tom,
19:34
SPEAKER_00: you can tell us a little bit — it's so wild that this company spun out
19:39
SPEAKER_00: so many ideas, including the idea of the agent.
19:42
SPEAKER_00: Was it a novel idea at General Magic?
19:44
SPEAKER_02: Well, Mike, you know about the patent more than I do.
19:46
SPEAKER_01: We got one of the most fundamental patents in the space.
19:47
SPEAKER_01: It's still cited today — it's one of the most cited patents ever.
19:53
SPEAKER_00: Is that a claim? Can we say that General Magic invented agents?
19:57
SPEAKER_00: It's so crazy.
20:13
SPEAKER_02: The analogy I've heard before is: imagine you want a delicious slice of homemade cake.
20:20
SPEAKER_02: You have someone to help you,
20:22
SPEAKER_02: as opposed to having to go out and get all the ingredients yourself.
20:27
SPEAKER_02: But it's more than just a helper.
20:30
SPEAKER_02: Imagine that if you were away from your kitchen,
20:33
SPEAKER_02: you could call up your kitchen and guide someone there step by step:
20:37
SPEAKER_02: open the drawer,
20:38
SPEAKER_02: take out the mixer, open the cupboard, get out the flour, et cetera, et cetera.
20:42
SPEAKER_02: But you would have to communicate with that entity every single step of the way.
20:48
SPEAKER_02: And that's how computers and remote computing initially worked.
20:51
SPEAKER_02: There was what was called remote procedure call,
20:53
SPEAKER_02: where one computer would send an instruction over a communications line
20:58
SPEAKER_02: to another computer remotely, then wait for a response, and so on and so on.
21:03
SPEAKER_02: And it was laborious.
21:06
SPEAKER_02: But imagine if you could send somebody to a remote kitchen armed with a list
21:12
SPEAKER_02: of ingredients and a list of instructions — and you wouldn't have to call them
21:16
SPEAKER_02: at all.
21:17
SPEAKER_02: They just go there, bake the cake, and bring it back to you.
21:20
SPEAKER_02: That's really what the model of agents was:
21:22
SPEAKER_02: little pieces of software that could travel through the network
21:26
SPEAKER_02: and autonomously do all sorts of things — travel from one computer to another,
21:31
SPEAKER_02: performing activities on your behalf.
21:34
SPEAKER_02: And you can see immediately the safety and security concerns around that.
21:39
SPEAKER_02: That was at the core of the design work that Jim White and Rich Miller did with Telescript.
21:47
SPEAKER_02: On that Telescript side of the story — which is not as well known as
21:49
SPEAKER_02: the device side — that concern was really at the forefront of their thinking.
21:55
SPEAKER_02: And I see scant evidence that it's at the forefront of the thinking of leaders in
22:01
SPEAKER_02: the AI space today.
22:03
SPEAKER_02: Sarah, you said that an AI company has hired a philosopher.
22:06
SPEAKER_02: Well, to quote Hans Camenzind,
22:06
SPEAKER_02: who was an executive at an analog semiconductor company way back then:
22:08
SPEAKER_02: "Who can he fire?"
22:08
SPEAKER_02: It's one thing to hire people to sound the alarm about ethical or moral concerns,
22:10
SPEAKER_02: but if they don't have real power within the organization,
22:12
SPEAKER_02: they have no ability to erect safeguards,
22:12
SPEAKER_02: enforce boundaries,
22:13
SPEAKER_02: and make sure that people do the right thing for the right reasons.
22:15
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
22:34
SPEAKER_01: After Watergate, we had "gates" — every scandal became something "-gate," right?
22:38
SPEAKER_01: Well, now we have "-washing" — just put the adjective in front.
22:41
SPEAKER_01: We have sanewashing, we have greenwashing.
22:43
SPEAKER_01: And now we're getting safety-washing.
22:46
SPEAKER_01: Anthropic's and OpenAI's constitutions — it's all bullshit.
22:50
SPEAKER_01: Their actions speak louder than words.
22:51
SPEAKER_01: Except — Anthropic being the one exception — they have signed contracts with
22:54
SPEAKER_01: the Pentagon to let the Pentagon do anything they want with their tools.
22:58
SPEAKER_00: I think one of the fundamental problems is that — for most of us who are not
23:04
SPEAKER_00: in China or Russia — the incentives just aren't there, are they?
23:10
SPEAKER_00: The economic incentives aren't there for people to do the right thing.
23:13
SPEAKER_00: It's all very well to have well-intentioned people,
23:16
SPEAKER_00: to have people who say they're going to do the right thing.
23:18
SPEAKER_00: But to your point earlier — then they make a different decision.
23:23
SPEAKER_00: And that seems to be the driver.
23:24
SPEAKER_02: I want to push back gently against the hypothesis that we live in a purely capitalist society.
23:32
SPEAKER_02: People vote against their economic interests all the time in the United States.
23:36
SPEAKER_02: So something other than pure economic interest must be operating as
23:42
SPEAKER_02: a motivator — that's point one.
23:44
SPEAKER_02: Point two:
23:46
SPEAKER_02: it is a vexing question — how do you mobilize popular support for pushing back
23:52
SPEAKER_02: against a "share price next quarter" mentality?
23:55
SPEAKER_02: We do have things like socially responsible investing.
23:58
SPEAKER_02: And although the letters D, E,
24:01
SPEAKER_02: and I have been discredited in many circles these days,
24:05
SPEAKER_02: no one contests that a workplace should be fair,
24:08
SPEAKER_02: that its personnel should be complete,
24:11
SPEAKER_02: and that it should be a welcoming place to work.
24:14
SPEAKER_02: So there are values that supersede — or at least are championed on a par
24:20
SPEAKER_02: with — just making money.
24:22
SPEAKER_02: The question is how to leverage the ethical and moral beliefs that people hold now,
24:27
SPEAKER_02: and demonstrate to them that those beliefs are directly relevant to what's going on
24:33
SPEAKER_02: with this inflection point — not just in technology, but in our culture.
24:38
SPEAKER_01: And we're seeing it.
24:39
SPEAKER_01: Across the Midwest,
24:41
SPEAKER_01: counties that Trump carried by seventeen or twenty points are unified
24:46
SPEAKER_01: in resisting data center construction — because of
24:49
SPEAKER_01: the way it misallocates resources,
24:51
SPEAKER_01: misallocates water, misallocates electricity, misallocates capital.
24:54
SPEAKER_01: These are MAGA Heartland places where they've recalled city councils that did deals
24:58
SPEAKER_01: to build data centers.
25:01
SPEAKER_01: There is a way of bridging some of our right-left disagreements over the humane
25:06
SPEAKER_01: and beneficial use of technology — and we're seeing that start to erupt in
25:10
SPEAKER_01: the pushback against AI as the major capital sink in the economy,
25:15
SPEAKER_01: exacerbating the inequality of resource distribution in our society.
25:19
SPEAKER_01: So there's hope in all sorts of spaces — in organizing at the grassroots level,
25:25
SPEAKER_01: and in trying to do something at the policy level,
25:28
SPEAKER_01: at the state, local, and federal levels.
25:32
SPEAKER_01: We're not despairing about the ability to push back.
25:35
SPEAKER_01: But ultimately it's got to be about reawakening people's faith
25:40
SPEAKER_01: that technological change is not going to wreck their lives.
25:44
SPEAKER_01: What happened with the deindustrialization of the Midwest — the concentration of
25:49
SPEAKER_01: the farm economy,
25:51
SPEAKER_01: the thinning out of the family farm ethos — how do we revive that sense
26:01
SPEAKER_01: of potential?
26:02
SPEAKER_01: That sense that people can be empowered to make their lives better
26:05
SPEAKER_01: and use collective will to do that?
26:08
SPEAKER_01: That's the political problem we face.
26:10
SPEAKER_02: As Mike knows, I tend to think in song lyrics.
26:13
SPEAKER_02: There's a great song by The Pretenders — "My City Was Gone" — about returning
26:18
SPEAKER_02: to Ohio,
26:19
SPEAKER_02: where coincidentally Mike Stern grew up,
26:23
SPEAKER_02: and how urbanization and everything else had sullied the places of fond memory for
26:29
SPEAKER_02: the singer.
26:32
SPEAKER_02: There's a line about "my pretty countryside had been paved down the middle by
26:37
SPEAKER_02: a government that had no pride."
26:39
SPEAKER_02: We get to decide what matters to us.
26:42
SPEAKER_02: Are you willing to pay a tiny bit more for milk at the supermarket so
26:46
SPEAKER_02: that family-owned dairies can exist under price controls?
26:51
SPEAKER_02: No one enjoys inefficiency,
26:54
SPEAKER_02: but there are social goods and cultural goods that come from rejecting
26:59
SPEAKER_02: the money-over-everything ethos.
27:03
SPEAKER_02: It's a question of decisions we make collectively and values that we hold.
27:09
SPEAKER_00: I think we've seen the erosion of democracy, and that is profoundly troubling.
27:14
SPEAKER_00: But actually, the thing that worries me most is the economic divide — the haves and have-nots.
27:19
SPEAKER_00: And that divide is getting wider.
27:21
SPEAKER_00: Technology, I think, is the enabler.
27:23
SPEAKER_00: That is the single biggest danger we face — that it will accelerate the division
27:28
SPEAKER_00: between the people who can afford to buy milk in a bottle and the people
27:33
SPEAKER_00: who can't afford to put food on the table for their kids.
27:36
SPEAKER_01: All of the investment in AI right now — the benefits are going to a very small group
27:40
SPEAKER_01: of oligarchs and their employees.
27:41
SPEAKER_01: On the private sales from Anthropic and OpenAI in anticipation
27:45
SPEAKER_01: of their public offerings later this year,
27:47
SPEAKER_01: the private sales they've permitted their employees
27:48
SPEAKER_01: to conduct have injected thirty billion dollars in cash into the Bay Area economy.
27:54
SPEAKER_01: There are seventy employees at those two companies who each got
27:57
SPEAKER_01: at least thirty million dollars when they were able to exercise their options
28:01
SPEAKER_01: and sell them to private equity.
28:03
SPEAKER_01: All of the benefits are accruing more and more — in the K-shaped economy — to the 1%.
28:07
SPEAKER_01: There are ways to deal with that.
28:08
SPEAKER_01: Lots of ways.
28:09
SPEAKER_01: There are ways of redistribution up front,
28:10
SPEAKER_01: and there are ways of redistribution on the back end through taxes.
28:12
Tell us — what do we do?
28:12
SPEAKER_00: Mm-hmm.
28:17
SPEAKER_01: Redistribution on the back end through taxes.
28:19
SPEAKER_02: But Mike,
28:20
SPEAKER_02: I'd take a step back — because before we get to solutions,
28:24
SPEAKER_02: it's: what's the problem we're trying to solve?
28:28
SPEAKER_02: Last I heard — and I may be misinformed — things like having fire departments,
28:34
SPEAKER_02: having schools, having shop owners mattered in a city.
28:42
SPEAKER_02: Where are those people living?
28:44
SPEAKER_02: If you're priced out of San Francisco as a schoolteacher,
28:48
SPEAKER_02: a cop, a firefighter, or a letter carrier — what then?
28:55
SPEAKER_02: And once we start seeing the value of those things,
29:00
SPEAKER_02: we have to work our way backward and reconcile our desire to have them as part
29:05
SPEAKER_02: of our civic fabric.
29:07
SPEAKER_02: What's the problem we're trying to solve?
29:10
SPEAKER_02: And then going from there to solutions that actually do that.
29:14
SPEAKER_02: I am old enough to remember someone who was old enough to remember that
29:19
SPEAKER_02: under Eisenhower,
29:20
SPEAKER_02: the marginal tax rate for the highest earners was — I believe — 90%.
29:26
SPEAKER_02: That's a non-starter today.
29:28
SPEAKER_02: But back then it was accepted.
29:29
SPEAKER_02: There was a sense of: you didn't get to that stratosphere solely by the sweat of your brow.
29:35
SPEAKER_02: Right.
29:36
SPEAKER_01: So rehabilitating human-centered technology design and architecture — one also has
29:40
SPEAKER_01: to rehabilitate the notion of the public good,
29:43
SPEAKER_01: and deal with the free-rider problem and all the classic economic issues
29:47
SPEAKER_01: that arise around the creation of public goods.
29:49
SPEAKER_01: But innovation can create public goods or can destroy them.
29:53
SPEAKER_01: Right now it's generally destroying them.
29:56
SPEAKER_00: So what's it going to take?
29:58
SPEAKER_00: Is it a different kind of leadership?
30:00
SPEAKER_00: Are people really having those conversations?
30:04
SPEAKER_02: Sarah, the blunt answer to your question is no — we're not seeing those people yet.
30:08
SPEAKER_02: And I think part of the reason is,
30:09
SPEAKER_02: and this goes back to the impetus for the book:
30:12
SPEAKER_02: Mike and I and our co-author,
30:15
SPEAKER_02: Tamara Helm,
30:15
SPEAKER_02: are trying to sound the alarm that the issues aren't being thought through.
30:20
SPEAKER_02: It's really a matter of an awakening consciousness about the design ethos and
30:27
SPEAKER_02: the ethical and moral ethos around technology,
30:30
SPEAKER_02: in the face of this tremendously powerful, revolutionary force.
30:37
SPEAKER_02: When looms were invented,
30:38
SPEAKER_02: when the steam engine was invented, you didn't have union organizers the next day.
30:43
SPEAKER_02: It takes a while for these things to dawn on people.
30:46
SPEAKER_02: And I think the effort of the book is to try to accelerate the emergence of
30:51
SPEAKER_02: that consciousness — and then to bring forth leaders in the realms
30:55
SPEAKER_02: that Mike just described.
30:56
SPEAKER_00: Tom, I know you as one of the funniest people on earth.
31:00
SPEAKER_00: Nobody can make me laugh like you.
31:01
SPEAKER_00: Have you got a funny story for us from the book?
31:06
SPEAKER_02: I can't help but recall the famous scene in Goodfellas,
31:09
SPEAKER_02: where Joe Pesci's character — when told he is funny — menacingly replies,
31:14
SPEAKER_02: "Funny how?"
31:17
SPEAKER_02: I think the funny stories about General Magic are ones that involve playfulness
31:25
SPEAKER_02: and pranks and things like that.
31:27
SPEAKER_02: It was a place where there was playfulness and joy.
31:32
SPEAKER_02: I've never been inside a Tesla factory,
31:34
SPEAKER_02: but my impression of tech today is that there isn't any lightheartedness.
31:38
SPEAKER_02: There isn't any of that spirit.
31:41
SPEAKER_02: And it's not frivolity — it's fundamental.
31:45
SPEAKER_02: It's at the core.
31:47
SPEAKER_02: Anybody who's worked for a boss who's a jerk and worked for a boss who's a saint has
31:51
SPEAKER_02: a preference between the two.
31:53
SPEAKER_02: And I've done harder work for people who were wonderful people
31:57
SPEAKER_02: than I ever did working for people who were really horrible individuals.
32:01
SPEAKER_02: We all know that.
32:02
SPEAKER_02: Google used to have that line about "don't be evil."
32:05
SPEAKER_02: Part of what's missing from our society — and people can challenge me on this — is
32:10
SPEAKER_02: the idea of: first things first, don't be an asshole.
32:14
SPEAKER_02: And when you're a technology designer, when you're innovating, don't develop asshole technology.
32:20
SPEAKER_02: Don't facilitate assholeness.
32:22
SPEAKER_02: It's a crass way of putting it,
32:23
SPEAKER_02: but I mean it sincerely:
32:24
SPEAKER_02: do you want to live in a world where the notion
32:26
SPEAKER_02: of treating other people well is valued more than money?
32:48
SPEAKER_00: One interesting thing — the book is in development,
32:51
SPEAKER_00: but if people are interested in participating in this conversation and reading more,
32:55
SPEAKER_00: Mike and Tom have a Substack.
32:58
SPEAKER_00: There are some really interesting pieces coming out there.
33:01
SPEAKER_00: I love the one about agents.
33:03
SPEAKER_00: It's a great repository of thoughtful commentary around
33:08
SPEAKER_00: the subjects we've been talking about,
33:09
SPEAKER_00: and a place for people to give their opinions.
33:13
SPEAKER_00: We want people to participate.
33:14
SPEAKER_00: This isn't just us pontificating — it's really about trying to open up a conversation.
33:19
SPEAKER_00: If people have comments while they're listening now, we want to hear from you.
33:23
SPEAKER_00: What are your thoughts?
33:24
SPEAKER_00: What guardrails would you propose?
33:25
SPEAKER_00: What are you optimistic about?
33:26
SPEAKER_00: What are you pessimistic about?
33:28
SPEAKER_02: I am not optimistic about a single individual riding to our rescue.
33:31
SPEAKER_02: What I mean is,
33:32
SPEAKER_02: I don't think there will be a figure who arrives on the scene and waves
33:37
SPEAKER_02: a Steve Jobs-like magic wand and makes everything all right.
33:41
SPEAKER_02: Part of the approach of the book is that we are interviewing people
33:45
SPEAKER_02: who collectively have centuries — and I mean that,
33:48
SPEAKER_02: centuries — of experience innovating and observing the trajectory
33:52
SPEAKER_02: of technology development.
33:53
SPEAKER_02: Because we don't know what the solutions are.
33:55
SPEAKER_02: I think what Mike and I and Tamara are intending to do is provoke some conversations
34:02
SPEAKER_01: and ask some questions that might be, in some way, shape, or form, semi-wise.
34:07
SPEAKER_02: So the answer lies across all sorts of individuals.
34:11
SPEAKER_02: And just as with innovation, you have to think broadly.
34:15
SPEAKER_02: It's not about pedigree or credentials — it's about the strength of an idea.
34:20
SPEAKER_02: I think one of the morals of the story
34:23
SPEAKER_02: of General Magic is how we didn't know what we didn't know.
34:27
SPEAKER_02: And the only antidote to that is casting a wide net and being receptive to all sorts
34:34
SPEAKER_02: of thoughts and ideas from all sorts of people, all over the place.
34:37
SPEAKER_00: That makes me think of Megan Smith,
34:39
SPEAKER_00: who was a General Magician and went on to be Chief Technology Officer of
34:43
SPEAKER_00: the United States under President Obama.
34:46
SPEAKER_00: She always asks the question: "Who have you got at the table?
34:49
SPEAKER_00: Do you have all the voices at the table?"
34:51
SPEAKER_00: I throw that challenge out to you guys — how are you making sure
34:55
SPEAKER_00: that you have everyone at the table?
34:57
SPEAKER_02: There has been an intentional effort to diversify the set of people
35:01
SPEAKER_02: that we're interviewing for the podcast — which will feed into the book as well.
35:05
SPEAKER_00: And the book, presumably too.
35:06
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
35:09
SPEAKER_02: But the point is well taken.
35:11
SPEAKER_02: We have more work to do in terms of casting as wide a net as possible.
35:15
SPEAKER_02: There are tons of voices we haven't heard yet — voices we don't even know exist.
35:19
SPEAKER_00: I think about Megan having one of the most interesting experiences — working with
35:23
SPEAKER_00: a Native American group.
35:25
SPEAKER_00: I can't remember which tribe it was, but they had a whole engagement around time travel.
35:30
SPEAKER_00: In Megan's words, they time travel.
35:33
SPEAKER_00: They have an understanding of how physics works that we don't have.
35:37
SPEAKER_00: And I just think: how are those communities thinking about AI?
35:39
SPEAKER_00: I would love to hear what they're thinking.
35:47
SPEAKER_02: Jerry Mander — the author I mentioned earlier — has another book called In
35:51
SPEAKER_02: the Absence of the Sacred,
35:52
SPEAKER_02: in which he outlines a First Peoples' methodology of thinking
35:56
SPEAKER_02: through multiple generations forward the impact of any decision.
36:01
SPEAKER_02: Future effects are the central component of
36:02
SPEAKER_02: that decision-making methodology — not next year,
36:07
SPEAKER_02: not next decade, but for centuries after you're dead.
36:12
SPEAKER_00: What is the thing that you would fix in society if you could wave the magic AI wand?
36:19
SPEAKER_02: Healthcare, to start with.
36:22
SPEAKER_00: I think that's a very real likelihood.
36:23
SPEAKER_00: Tom?
36:24
SPEAKER_02: Helping me get more sleep, number one.
36:26
SPEAKER_02: But let me give a serious answer.
36:33
SPEAKER_02: Healthcare, yes — and two things come to mind.
36:45
SPEAKER_02: First, the climate crisis.
36:50
SPEAKER_02: The amount of power AI consumes and its carbon footprint are cross-purposes with
36:54
SPEAKER_02: that,
36:54
SPEAKER_02: but the climate crisis is a species-wide catastrophe on the verge of coming
37:01
SPEAKER_02: to fruition.
37:02
SPEAKER_02: Second, I'm a big believer in equality of access to education.
37:09
SPEAKER_02: It's mind-boggling,
37:11
SPEAKER_02: the wasted human resource we have in kids who don't have access to
37:15
SPEAKER_02: a phenomenal education from the earliest moments of their lives.
37:20
SPEAKER_02: I don't think AI is a substitute for teachers,
37:23
SPEAKER_02: but that is a huge societal problem that AI could contribute to solving.
37:29
SPEAKER_02: What worries me most is AI's militarization.
37:33
SPEAKER_02: We've seen this before — we negotiated,
37:36
SPEAKER_02: up till now rather successfully,
37:38
SPEAKER_02: the advent of nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction.
37:41
SPEAKER_02: And make no mistake: AI has the potential to be another type of weapon of mass destruction.
37:46
SPEAKER_02: Having international regimes,
37:48
SPEAKER_02: treaties,
37:49
SPEAKER_02: and other mechanisms to control that and limit
37:52
SPEAKER_02: the worst-case possibilities is crucial.
37:55
SPEAKER_02: And I don't see that happening yet.
37:57
SPEAKER_00: I'm trying to end on a high note here, Tom — not the end-of-civilization stuff.
38:02
SPEAKER_02: Well, you know,
38:02
SPEAKER_02: The Clash — for those of us old enough to remember them — on Combat Rock,
38:07
SPEAKER_02: there was a note that said: "The future is unwritten."
38:11
SPEAKER_02: And there's that old line — I have to believe in free will; I have no choice.
38:16
SPEAKER_02: In the same way, I have to be an optimist.
38:19
SPEAKER_02: Otherwise, what's the point?
38:21
SPEAKER_02: It's not too late.
38:23
SPEAKER_02: AI is a wonderful tool — it has done and is doing and will do wonderful things.
38:27
SPEAKER_02: Let's keep that going.
38:28
SPEAKER_02: But let's also ask the hard questions that as yet have not been said loud enough
38:34
SPEAKER_02: and haven't been answered adequately.
38:36
SPEAKER_00: And final words from you, Mike?
38:39
SPEAKER_01: I don't despair.
38:40
SPEAKER_01: I just get angry.
38:42
SPEAKER_01: And we need a lot of angry people in the streets,
38:44
SPEAKER_01: and we need a lot of pressure on the current set of elites — to move them back in
38:50
SPEAKER_01: the direction of understanding politics as a delivery system that benefits most,
38:56
SPEAKER_01: not a few.
38:57
SPEAKER_01: And that can be done.
38:58
SPEAKER_01: I grew up in what's now the Rust Belt.
39:00
SPEAKER_01: When American car companies and other manufacturers began to offshore in
39:04
SPEAKER_01: the late seventies and early eighties,
39:06
SPEAKER_01: it was seen as a good thing — it created efficiency,
39:09
SPEAKER_01: it improved margins, it gave greater returns to shareholders.
39:13
SPEAKER_01: The fact that steelworkers lost their jobs,
39:14
SPEAKER_01: that auto workers lost their jobs,
39:16
SPEAKER_01: that whole towns died — people saw it as collateral damage.
39:20
SPEAKER_01: There was no systematic approach to dealing with the social disruption that the loss
39:26
SPEAKER_01: of the dignity of work caused.
39:28
SPEAKER_01: But it could have been different.
39:30
SPEAKER_01: The New Deal did part of that quite successfully during an earlier period,
39:35
SPEAKER_01: when people were bereft of work and the private sector wasn't going to be able
39:40
SPEAKER_01: to fix it.
39:42
SPEAKER_01: Why are we willing to just sit back and let there be a white-collar Rust Belt?
39:46
SPEAKER_01: Why are we willing to accept that as inevitable?
39:48
SPEAKER_01: Our current politics are about destroying the safety net — but that doesn't have
39:52
SPEAKER_01: to stay that way.
39:53
SPEAKER_01: And building alternatives for people who are going to be displaced by AI — to avoid
39:58
SPEAKER_01: the dystopia that could result from
40:00
SPEAKER_01: a white-collar Rust Belt — is something we know how to do.
40:02
SPEAKER_01: It's been done before.
40:04
SPEAKER_01: It takes money and political will,
40:06
SPEAKER_01: and it takes redistribution of money,
40:08
SPEAKER_01: and changes in the tax system — but all of these things can be done.
40:16
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
40:16
SPEAKER_02: Cars weren't safe, right?
40:17
SPEAKER_02: And tort law took care of it — it took sixty years,
40:20
SPEAKER_02: but tort law created the rules for liability for design defects and for failure
40:24
SPEAKER_02: to make safety the linchpin of design.
40:25
SPEAKER_02: It was a terribly inefficient, heartbreaking process.
40:27
SPEAKER_02: But we've got safe cars now.
40:28
SPEAKER_02: What we can learn from that is how to short-circuit that process — make it faster,
40:32
SPEAKER_01: less heartbreaking, and more effective.
40:59
SPEAKER_00: Well, I'm glad you're writing the book.
41:01
SPEAKER_00: The conversation is ongoing.
41:02
SPEAKER_00: If anybody has comments, please comment below.
41:05
SPEAKER_00: Thank you, guys — that was very interesting.
41:07
SPEAKER_00: I learned a lot, and a lot to think about.
41:08
SPEAKER_00: I cannot wait to read the book.
41:11
SPEAKER_02: Sarah, it's always a delight to interact with you — your intelligence,
41:15
SPEAKER_02: your inquisitiveness, your sense of humor.
41:17
SPEAKER_02: So great to see you, and what an enjoyable time to spend with you.
41:23
SPEAKER_01: Sarah, above all,
41:24
SPEAKER_01: you saw the General Magic story as a human story — about people struggling
41:28
SPEAKER_01: with failure and its consequences,
41:30
SPEAKER_01: and what that character-forming crucible led them to do.
41:33
SPEAKER_01: You saw that the hero's journey was at the core of the General Magic story,
41:37
SPEAKER_01: as much as the development of new technology.
41:40
SPEAKER_01: And we need to find those kinds of stories now.
41:42
SPEAKER_00: And those heroines and heroes are out there.
41:44
SPEAKER_00: I just met a guy today who's developed a new treatment for Alzheimer's —
41:50
SPEAKER_00: the results he's having are unbelievable.
41:52
SPEAKER_00: I guess fundamentally I'm an optimist.
41:54
SPEAKER_00: I believe we'll figure it out.
41:55
SPEAKER_00: So I'm going with that.
41:56
SPEAKER_00: --- END OF TRANSCRIPT