Exploring the implications of AI on society, gender perceptions, human effort, and the future of humanity. This conversation delves into AI's role in our lives, ethical concerns, and the potential for a dehumanized world.

TRANSCRIPT
Mike Steger 00:05
You're listening to this

Jodi Wellman 00:09
is. I'm gonna keep that one.

Mike Steger 00:12
Yeah, welcome to this could be it. This could be the last thing you listened to that a human made. That's what we're discussing today: the birth of AI and question mark the death of humanity. Let's jump in.

Jodi Wellman 00:30
You have me riveted with that intro.

Mike Steger 00:34
Okay. So good. My co-host is riveted.

Mike Steger 00:40
Jodi, what's the what's the most attracted to a robot or computer you've ever been in your life? Let's get right into it. God, I got to sift and sort through all the options.

Jodi Wellman 01:00
And I'm just going to answer that question before giving you the answer that you asked. It's more often seen as female if it's a helping role,

Jodi Wellman 01:10
like asking for directions. But it's more often seen as male if it's in an authoritative role. It makes no sense to me because society is not like that at all. So strange. I,

Mike Steger 01:20
you know, I had this hunch that that might be the direction things went.

Jodi Wellman 01:25
Yeah,

Mike Steger 01:26
probably because I've been brainwashed by the patriarchy. But yeah, so that that kind of research is actually with AI. I mean, it's old for AI research, right? Because you could people are playing around with with voices. You could choose your voice, and people raided AI as being more. I actually know this is even before. This is like from the era of Siri and Alexa. Like everyone was naming their voice Helper things,

Jodi Wellman 02:02
yeah,

Mike Steger 02:02
and giving them female voices, and they were doing that because they were less threatening, and because they would be seen as helpers. People didn't really love that if they wanted people who thought gender equality would be a nicer thing than you know having rigid and defined, dominating and subservient roles for people based on kind of junk they have. So yeah, so then that then that carried forward. And I've always been curious. Like I don't I don't see gender. I'm as you know. I just yeah. Everybody's the same to me, but just pretend we didn't have an entire episode about hot or not. But you know, beyond that, I thought I just assumed that a everyone treated AI like they treat pets, right? Like pets have no meaningful gender. This is a I don't understand people who insist on calling their boy cat him or their female dog her like that makes no sense because gender is a social construct like what gender roles do you think your cat is going to play you know that that makes any sense at all in the human world so these people the weirdos who refer to their pet's gender, saying things like "good boy" or whatever. I assume that's the minority because I don't feel that way, and I'm always right. But you know, I just thought like they would relate to AI the same, and just think of as an "it," not even an "it," right? Like it's it's just basically information that comes out of unique prompts every time,

Jodi Wellman 03:39
right?

Mike Steger 03:40
But I then started realizing I might be wrong about that. I don't know. Do you think of like okay? Do you have a first of all?

Jodi Wellman 03:49
Yeah.

Mike Steger 03:50
Your cats have gender.

Jodi Wellman 03:52
Totally, they're boys, but mostly because it's nice. It's fun to call them boys, or it's fun when I I just like being able to say the boys in a way, or like when I go away, I say to the husband, "Oh, it's boys' night tonight." It's only for the sake of conversation, but I don't actually say that was a very male thing for you to do, Monty. Um, but I might start just with this inspiring chat. But is Monty

Mike Steger 04:16
from Montgomery, by the way?

Jodi Wellman 04:18
Oh no, but um,

Mike Steger 04:20
or Mounted Police? Maybe your accent got in the way, and you you said mounted.

Jodi Wellman 04:24
It was supposed to be county. Yeah. Thank you for clarifying what I meant by calling our cat a mounted police. Querying,

Mike Steger 04:32
not clarifying.

Jodi Wellman 04:33
Thank you.

Mike Steger 04:35
No, no male cat explaining here.

Jodi Wellman 04:37
Nope. I see AI as male when it's helping, or when it's hurting, or when it's authoritative, so I just see it as male. And back to your question about the perceived attractiveness, I do. I actually haven't seen a lot. I I need to ask you because you're the renowned expert in AI sex bots. We're going to come to that.

Mike Steger 04:56
We're in such trouble. If I am the renowned expert on sex bots. Well, we're

Jodi Wellman 05:00
going to work with it.

Mike Steger 05:01
Only made up things in my mind about them, but okay, we'll find out what those things are. That's

Jodi Wellman 05:05
probably vivid. So the whole thing about uncanny valley, like that eeriness about when AI, like it looks too, it looks too human that it's jolting. You know, like when there's like a perfect face, like when AI will construct like the perfect male or female face. It's sort of a ooh, I don't know if I could trust you. Back to our conversation previously about how people prefer symmetrical faces, but like not AI generatedly perfect, because then that's just weird, right? So, funny enough, we want a little bit of imperfection, but but with AI, we want it to be pretty perfect. So

Mike Steger 05:45
there's no reason we don't have to settle for imperfections when something can be generated for us. I think that creates its own trap. I think we mentioned I mentioned this story I was pretending I was going to write for a little while about how infinite customization can lead to its own kind of hell, right? Like if we, if I don't know how much sex bots cost or partner bots, whatever, right? Like maybe you want to, maybe you're asexual and you don't want to have sex with a robot, but you do want to marry a robot or, you know, whatever, right? So you're going to select these things, and it's probably going to be pretty pricey. I think a typical robot with like no face right now is like 30 grand.

Jodi Wellman 06:23
This is a fact. This is a thing. This is a

Mike Steger 06:25
real fact. Well, I mean, a robot that

Jodi Wellman 06:28
moves like a Roomba in your home, like a thing.

Mike Steger 06:30
No, a walking humanoid robot that like there's this video on on one of I don't know. I can't tell the difference between all the streaming things. It's like it's so funny because so I was doing TikTok work for a little while on a phone and a fake account, obviously, because I didn't want the Chinese government knowing that I like beatboxing all of a sudden, right? And so I was, I was, I had like my little algorithm. I was like, oh no! Now that the world's one of the one of the many contenders for world's most disgusting billionaire, Larry Ellison, you know, gave used the government to get TikTok and hasn't yet given to it his son, but soon will. Just like President Trump is going to give Paramount or whatever to to Larry Ellison's son. This is this is a little bit of a I'm digressing. Okay, like rain it in, rain it, rain it in, rain it in. Anyway, so I stopped using TikTok, and um, so I think probably Instagram, where I used to just only follow museums and photographers and a couple like dance things. I don't know studios, but not the, but like the fancy ones, not like

Jodi Wellman 07:42
okay, the cultured ones,

Mike Steger 07:44
dancing dumplings in Fort Collins. I don't know if that's a thing, right? So, but like you know, the the people who are really good at it, professional people, Alvin Ailey type stuff. The TikTok thing, I started using Instagram videos more, and I don't know what I liked, but I have now the exact same shit showing up on Instagram that I had under a completely fake TikTok account, right?

Jodi Wellman 08:08
That's odd.

Mike Steger 08:09
I think it's how do you

Jodi Wellman 08:10
how do you account for

Mike Steger 08:11
that? It's like IP address and Wi-Fi identification. So like you can never be anonymous if you do anything more than once in this world. Anyway, so I saw a video about a guy who had bought one of these $30,000 robots, and the scene opens up with the robot basically just charging straight at a mirror and shattering it, and the guy's yelling at the robot to stop. But it's like it's like a strange height of a robot. I think like maybe three foot nine. Like it's not a round number. It's like too big to be. I mean, it's a little bit like a 10-year-old size. Do you know how big 10-year-olds are? We'll pretend we do. So it's about that size, and it's got like a blank monitor, shiny like face, and then it then it shows it. Like he tries to play hide and seek from it, and it just attacks him, right? But he says like 30 grand, right? He's like, I'm having a problem with my $30,000 robot. It's attacking my mirror. Won't stop, right? So that is a fact. I'm I'm guessing. Anyway, so there was a point to this. If you were gonna, I mean, how many $3,000 robots can a typical person buy? Not too many. And once you start adding like skin like silicone sheets to stick them in and cuddle with. I guess you're probably going to be talking like let's say $100,000 for a robot you'd want to cuddle up next to while you watch TV, while you watch Westworld. So you know, you're not gonna probably buy a lot of those unless you're again in competition for world's creepiest billionaire. But the typical person who's gonna buy one of these will face lots of choices eventually, like personality, like how how compliant or how sauce. Do you want this person? How spicy or how innocent? How intelligent or how impressed with everything you say? I mean, I've got, I've got doubts that humanity will pick the right configurations for like actually good for us robot personalities. I assume we're just going to basically, on the balance, choose the sorts of things that people invent when they talk on the when they're talking shit on the internet. But anyway, right? So this is this gives you your chance, Jodi, then to surpass the uncanny valley and design for us right now, head to navel to groin to knees, to toes, hair color. Like, well, let's start with that. What hair color do you want? Yeah, we're going to

Jodi Wellman 10:47
sketch this whole thing out. Yeah,

Mike Steger 10:49
yeah. I assume because of your deep and unbreakable attachment to Adrian Brody that you want dark hair, black hair, black as black is no

Jodi Wellman 11:01
all that was a hallucination. That whole concept

Mike Steger 11:07
you glitched.

Jodi Wellman 11:08
Everything changed. I don't. I'm not no longer interested, and I never was.

Mike Steger 11:11
Never was.

Jodi Wellman 11:12
But the idea, just even as you're describing this, of putting hair on a thing that is supposed to somehow be in your home and in your life is already revolting. Like I think we could conceive of a presence online. I think that that has like remember the movie Her that was so well done. Remember that movie? Never saw

Mike Steger 11:34
it, but I know what you're talking about.

Jodi Wellman 11:37
Yeah, I gotta

Mike Steger 11:40
get out more. I apologize. I got to get out more and see these movies.

Jodi Wellman 11:43
No, and you got to stay in more because it's watching. Yeah, you're right. Right,

Speaker 1 11:46
right, right.

Jodi Wellman 11:47
Yeah, so yeah, the I think I could get my head around uncomfortably the online version of an AI relationship of some sort, but the in person, like it's that that is just uh, it's too big of a stretch. But

Mike Steger 12:06
when your partner takes the boys camping, uh, you know, Monty and the gang leave, and you're all alone for a week or maybe a month, depending on how long they like to go camping for. I don't really know.

Jodi Wellman 12:20
Months.

Mike Steger 12:22
You're gonna need more than just an online like ghost,

Jodi Wellman 12:25
right? I want something that has a physical little

Mike Steger 12:27
buddy with. And I guess you don't like hair, so you're thinking about Jeff Bezos type. It's probably gonna

Jodi Wellman 12:33
be a pure Jeff Bezos, but it's gonna make that little like

Mike Steger 12:38
oh the servos

Jodi Wellman 12:40
sound

Mike Steger 12:41
the servos.

Jodi Wellman 12:42
What's that?

Mike Steger 12:43
Those old motors are called servos, like that do joints and rotations and stuff.

Jodi Wellman 12:47
How did you know that? So that just might break it a little bit. Just the okay.

Mike Steger 12:54
So assuming we can come up with some more silent. Well, how about you just turn on some tunes? I mean, get some mood music in the background.

Jodi Wellman 13:04
Yeah,

Mike Steger 13:04
a little Herb Albert in the Tea Water Brest band going

Jodi Wellman 13:08
slam dunk. Yeah, what all this is revealing right now is that your passionate sales pitch slash suggestion is really evidence. I think that you're game. You're down. You are.

Mike Steger 13:22
Yeah. Well. Okay. So that foreshadows the topic for today, other than hot and out robot edition

Jodi Wellman 13:32
and Jeff Bezos. Yeah.

Mike Steger 13:34
Again, you keep bringing him up. It's a little strange. I don't think most people think he's classically good looking, but that's please don't order your robot kick squad to kill me now. I I've now made fun of two billionaires. I'm gonna make fun of a third. Yeah, I wonder. I know that they don't have a sense of humor about this stuff, like our current other billionaire who sometimes catches grief. But We have also, in addition, of course, to the practicalities of living with bots, we have to address the elephant in the room, which is what is left for humanity if we keep getting better AI, better robots, squishier with more silent servos and motors and movement, with no hair, completely hairless, smooth like a dolphin for you, Jodi, and you know all these sorts of things. Like, what happens? What is? What are the risks? What's the downside of you know a dehumanized world where everyone gets to snuggle with their favorite bald robot.

Jodi Wellman 14:44
I love this question, and also just really on cue, I downloaded Claude for the first time last week, and right now while you're talking, all of a sudden, uninvited, the Claude screen popped up and said, "How can I help you?" And I, I feel like our. Conversation did not ask for that, and I just feel like while extremely helpful, just anticipating my needs, just just Claude, like go, go the fuck to sleep, yeah,

Mike Steger 15:10
yeah. Well, I mean, and Claude is the best of the least evil of. I've heard that. That's

Jodi Wellman 15:15
why I downloaded him. Him, yeah,

Mike Steger 15:17
right. Like they're so non-evil that the United States Defense Department or Department of War now I don't really know what we're called yeah right has canceled all contact with Anthropic because they won't create they won't get rid of their safety guardrails but Sam Altman yet another billionaire who deserves quite a lot of scorn for selling anything out in order to make a buck is, you know, in my opinion, from what I've heard, blah blah blah, like totally happy within hours to say, yeah, well, we will for sure create autonomous kill drones who will just decide who to kill on their own without a human intervention, and we'll keep making them smarter, so smart that we don't even understand what they're doing.

Jodi Wellman 16:01
Right,

Mike Steger 16:01
go for it. Give it to Pete Hegseth. You seem trustworthy and wise with this power. Okay,

Jodi Wellman 16:09
your big question is is ginormous and important. Okay,

Mike Steger 16:13
yeah. How can we get these billionaires before they get rid of us? Right is one question. Yeah,

Jodi Wellman 16:18
that clearly was the through line. Well, the question that I will take from the big question is about this idea of what makes AI valuable now is what, and what makes us then like what role do we play? Because on one hand, we like the idea is the initial idea that it is makes us more productive? Like, I guess, like, let's get it. Like, what's the first enticement of like we're going to develop this so that what it what's the promise initially for AI for us? What would we boil that down to?

Mike Steger 16:53
Well, what have you heard?

Jodi Wellman 16:54
Okay, I would say to be productive, like it saves you time because it's having a helper that helps book your trips, or that helps you know answer your questions. That helps plan your meals. That helps write your essays.

Mike Steger 17:10
Helps take tests. Helps

Jodi Wellman 17:11
helps soothe you. Helps

Mike Steger 17:12
just be you in college. That's where things have gone now. Well, do you don't remember last year's? There's a there's a there's a little event called the Super Bowl in the United States, and it's a bowl for football players, American style football players, to come together and play game. And so people will put a lot of effort into these commercials. And I don't know if you remember this, but last year, 2025 Super Bowl commercials had the first AI commercials.

Jodi Wellman 17:42
That's right. Didn't code. They

Mike Steger 17:43
were telling us to do things like AI could do things such as write your thank you notes for you. People who are like your grandparents, if they gave you something nice, you could have AI write them the thank you note. You could use them to talk about your problems in your life with instead of the human friends. So it was a very strange moment where you could tell that the that the billionaire overlords who are building these things really don't know what's going on with humans. They could care less, right? So they some people tell us productivity. If you listen to what the AI companies themselves wanted to invest their Super Bowl money in. It was you won't have to deal with people anymore,

Jodi Wellman 18:25
which is

Mike Steger 18:26
you know would be a dream come true for someone as awkward as some of these these people seem to be, right? But it's weird because that that did suggest to a lot of people they're just really going to target everything.

Jodi Wellman 18:39
Yeah, and so

Mike Steger 18:39
I do I do want to make sure that we we we put a pin in what the transition in terms of sales pitch covers up in terms of the transition from social media to AI, and yet what they have in common in terms of the potential effects. That sounds pretty smart, doesn't it? It

Jodi Wellman 18:59
sounds really yeah yeah. So I like your point. It's the way broader, of course, the implied benefits. We then maybe and maybe not fall for it. And initially, it's super alluring, right? Especially because now we're still in experiment phase of like which one's better. Oh, Claude is this or that? This one helps me with this application, the presumptions we're saving time unless we're not having to work as hard, so it's making life easier. But then I have a question for you about this because this is all really resorting back to like meaning. Is like, but the recipe for meaning isn't it about exertion of some effort, and I don't presume that we don't need to make life hard and toil at stupid spreadsheets. If maybe AI could help you with your stupid, not so value-added spreadsheet, but if where this is going is we're just going to do everything, then I beg to differ that it will actually. Make our lives better, right? Like

Mike Steger 20:02
if if

Jodi Wellman 20:02
we need to actually have a modicum of effort in order to feel in some way like that. Wow, I did a hard thing. Yeah, yeah,

Mike Steger 20:11
yeah. It's really interesting, right? Like because you take a look at students these days, kids these days, and they are getting a bad rap for having TikTok brain rot on the one hand, right, because they can't pay attention, especially if you watch like people on the internet who are teachers trying to express what they're seeing in the classroom and how just bizarre it is, like the inability for these students to do very much. The university level, I can I can attest that things seem more challenging to students than than they used to, and they will they are have a quite large number of them who are extremely fine just cheating on everything, right? So, and there's a huge market there for obviously self-defeating reasons. Like there are apps now that people could maybe look up that promise to log into your courses for you, scroll through pages so it looks like you're engaging, post things on discussion boards, comment on other people's posts. Pretend like download the readings. Pretend to read them. Then write the papers for you. Read the feedback from the early papers so it can correct it on the next papers. And then take all the exams for you. And you just get your you just get your degree.

Jodi Wellman 21:37
Okay. So this is interesting that it's compromising morality in a way that if we go back in time, so say to our day of the learning, and the worst that you could do then would be to plagiarize off of like what, like the encyclopedia or whatever, whatever we could get in the library, or cheat, or you could pay someone to write. I had a friend who paid someone to write her essays, and so there have been deviants along the way. But this now allows it to happen at a much more sophisticated level. And so, I guess, do you think that the adherence rate to deviance is the same? It's just more more deviant, or is it making people worse more more moralistically? Let's if that's a word,

Mike Steger 22:22
I think we're seeing what you were highlighting. My little strange little jaunt into cheating was about that a little bit, right? Like people don't want to put effort into learning. Learning is hard. You have to read. You have to read boring stuff to learn. Like most most educational resources, once you get out of second grade aren't entertainment first. Like at least not historically. Like it gives you more information nested in more complex conceptual models. The further you go, it just keeps getting harder, right? But even the entry level stuff sometimes is really, really tough, right? Like, I mean, I could never keep up with math. I think if I started completely over with algebra, I kind of understand algebra now, but I didn't when I was taking it, and then I didn't really, really put the time into remember all the zonkers, axioms, and theorems from geometry, and then I was totally lost for algebra two, and then whatever the next one is, I was just like clinging on by my fingernails. But you know, you can't. It comes in pretty hot. Some like especially once you go from long division to like you're talking about x's and y's and squares and b's and stuff like that. You know, so some of the stuff comes in pretty hot, and you got you got to work at it. And just like with life, people opt very often with a shortcut and the easy out, and that is probably self-reinforcing. The more we do it, the less we like to work, and the less we like to work, the more we want shortcuts

Jodi Wellman 24:04
and find it and get away with it. So, my math moment when I was in grade four, I someone gave me a little gift, which was a special ruler that you could move, and I could do the times tables on the ruler, so I could just move it over. So it was like seven times 1234567, and gave me all the answers, and it precluded me from really memorizing the multiplication tables. Okay, so then what this meant is, is that I did not like to this day. If you ask me, well, actually, I will be able to answer seven times eight. Actually, I got it five, six. You know,

Mike Steger 24:40
it's really weird. That is the example I was thinking of.

Jodi Wellman 24:44
Really?

Mike Steger 24:44
Sometimes eight.

Jodi Wellman 24:46
But that's the easy one because it's 5678. So I had another way. But the point though is that

Mike Steger 24:50
I

Jodi Wellman 24:51
ruined myself because of cheating, and I know it. And but I will say, does it even matter anymore? Like I'll just take a like contra. In view of like, so if everyone's just going to find a way to do the course and find a way, does it even matter? Like, I believe fundamentally, just for the record, like, yes, we got to do, we got to slog in order to you know learn and feel good, and then that achieves it. Like, if everything's available online, it's sort of like, what's education even for? Why do we even have someone do a degree because they're just going to have someone write it who's an AI bot or whatever, and then why do we? So we just go straight into a job, and all the jobs are actually just done by. So at the end of it all, like, why are we playing this game of pretend learning? If it's and I could even debate that, do you need to learn algebra anymore? Because is it relevant?

Mike Steger 25:42
You need to learn algebra to impress people when you're trying to pick them up at bars because you're like, oh, do you ever wonder how to calculate which car leaving which city at which speeds will arrive in Indianapolis first? Like people love that. They really say, do you have any more examples of that? Can you write it out for us? Okay. So, do you need algebra? Do you need calculus? Do you need to actually know how to speak French? Do you need anything? Right? Like, no.

Jodi Wellman 26:13
To do the degree, we don't

Mike Steger 26:14
need anything at all anymore. We don't need each other. We don't need people. We can have conversations with whatever voice we want on the AI. I mean, they're aggravating at this point, but maybe they'll keep getting better. We can continue to reduce our taste levels so that we find AI-generated stuff. Like if you saw the closing ceremonies of the Olympics and the actress from White Lotus season two was Italian, and then she got turned into some like very bad AI generation generated montage of exciting colors and shapes. You know, we'll eventually be. I mean, we're already bad enough, right? Like that we we tolerate pretty mediocre entertainment being churned out all the time by the streaming services that are optimized for people who don't really pay attention, need to be reminded all the time what's happening in the shows that they're watching. Right? Like, if you ever wonder about it, everything is so obvious, and people just tell everything at each other instead of there being any subtlety or pauses. Like, okay, going to your show, this is this is this is the gap that opens up. This is the uncanny valley. You love beyond rationality, Mad Men, right? I don't know if that's true, but you, you did. You were surprised I hadn't finished it, so I'm watching it again. And there are many ambiguous scenes. Like I asked someone, I'm telling someone, I'm watching Mad Men, and like, is that the one where not much ever happens? Basically, yes. It's not Seinfeld. Yeah, yeah. So, anyways, look, there's a lot of those those scenes where it's not given to you what you're supposed to think, what the characters is supposed to think. You're just going to be in that circumstance for a while. Breaking Bad was like that. The ending of Sopranos, which everyone hated, was a little bit like that. I think the the idea that now we would have to decide for ourselves if we like something, if we like a character, if we understand their motives, if if we can be surprised still, seems less and less appealing for for more and more people. They want to know that some superhero is going to punch at the superhero, and then that's the end of the movie. But there will be a sequel just in case, because so then there's other. I don't know, whatever. But like, so I do think we see it's a slippery slope, and this is what makes Wall-E so prescient, right? Like it predicted two dystopias: one on the garbage-covered world, which we're working hard at, and two, a world where people are helpless, is driven around from shopping opportunity to shopping opportunity.

Jodi Wellman 28:49
Yes, such a good way to put it. Yeah, it all sounds pretty dire, doesn't it?

Mike Steger 28:54
I mean, they looked happy.

Jodi Wellman 28:57
Yeah, that's. I doubt

Mike Steger 28:58
they. I don't know if you ask them if life is meaningful. Like this is another thing I think might happen. Like the bar for meaning, putting a meaningful life might get lower and lower and lower and

Jodi Wellman 29:07
lower. Right. Okay. So that it could turn out to what? What's a possible reality 15 years from now?

Mike Steger 29:13
Meaning and happiness and fulfillment is so diluted that it's that it's not distinguishable from like, yeah, I like what's happening now.

Jodi Wellman 29:24
Okay, you're making me think about how there's a weird phase we're in where we're using AI to a point where there's a certain amount of delight that can be delivered when it's oh, I found this assistant, right? So then that's cool because then maybe it did save us a bit of time and we got to spend that time volunteering, or you get to spend a minute more with your kid, or I could go and brush the boys. Right, like there could be things where you're like, my life got better because I didn't have to do that bibliography.

Mike Steger 29:55
That a euphemism for. I'm just picking up all the listeners right now. Go ahead.

Jodi Wellman 30:00
So there is this, and same thing with these wayward students who are like, "I'm gonna find a way to game this system and not do the class." There's like for those bad people, there's that little delight of yay, I got away with it. Like a bank robber probably feels pretty good after the heist. I don't know. So bad example, but we're in this moment where where it's like a transition of wow, this is doing cool things. It could do cool things. I'm afraid of it so much so that the percentage I found today, what percent of Americans feel more concerned than excited about AI in daily life? And the stat is already old by now because yeah. This is

Mike Steger 30:42
embarrassing because I have this tab open on my browser, but I can't really remember.

Jodi Wellman 30:46
Yeah, that's why I had to print it out.

Mike Steger 30:48
But I think it's something. Well, first of all, one thing I I had heard before yesterday when I opened that tab was that the United States is strangely nervous about AI compared to the rest of the world. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like I think we're what 30 38% concerned, more concerned.

Jodi Wellman 31:11
Again, my stat can be different from your stat. This is from 2023, which is already ancient, but this is 52% of Americans feel more concerned than excited. So it's like half and half.

Mike Steger 31:22
Okay, yeah, I I have a different number. Okay, so this is from the Pew Research Charitable Trust. Okay, you fit. You've got the one that says 50%. Mine's

Jodi Wellman 31:34
2023 Pew Research 52%.

Mike Steger 31:38
We're getting better. This is 2025. 50% of Americans, 50% of Italians, 49% of Australians, 48% of Brazilians, more concerned than excited. 10% of Americans. This is the more interesting one: more excited than concerned. That number of more excited than concerned, the highest anywhere in the world, according to the Pew folks, is Israel with 29%. So mostly we're ambivalent. I always compute those. We're ambivalent about AI, but we don't trust it. On the balance, the most enthusiastic country for AI is is real, and it's like seven and 10 are not enthusiastic. They're mixed or they're they're nervous.

Jodi Wellman 32:30
Okay, so I was trying to make a point that maybe it is pointless, but it's that if we're in this phase where we're actually kind of woohoo, like this is going to do some stuff, and you know what? Let's be honest, like half of us do feel statistically ish that yay it's exciting even though caution beware then it's like this is the heyday maybe and then until we end up becoming like the world will it move faster will it do things because if it's doing things for us we don't get to sit back. This is, I guess, my chief complaint about us and our choices, is that if we have this found time because we've designed or someone's designed a helper in your life, then we're not using that time. I do not believe that we will to our well-being advantage, like with true leisure activities that can deliver on the promise of like get us into flow and make us the flourishing and all these cool things. We're just gonna like do more work and then ask AI to do more work, and everything speeds up like kind of like you know when email email came out. We're like, what did we do to ourselves? This just made everything worse. Yeah. So I'll pause for a moment there just to catch my breath, and then we'll come back to like. Wow.

Mike Steger 33:40
Okay. But having your AI exercise for you, then, you know, this is this is a problem. Obviously, that we don't pay very good attention to the frontiers of this stuff, right? Like the really weird shit is happening in the research papers that these AI companies are kicking out, right? That like the weird stuff of you'll sometimes hear someone say, "Yeah, I put an AI agent in charge of booking flights, and I've got $30,000 worth of airplane tickets to, uh, you know, Charlotte, North Carolina, or something like that." You know, like that. I just when I use AI, I am constantly stunned by the fact that it is just so hard to get it to do a good job two times in a row, right? You know, I can't. I'm never. I can't trust these sorts of things, right? Like I can barely, I barely trust someone else to make a booking for me, even though I have been the person who's booked the wrong year of hotel before, and the wrong month and the wrong day, everything right. I've done all this sort of stuff wrong. I'm a little bit surprised when I get where I'm going, but I would never trust AI to do it. For one, the second you turn anything over to AI, that all that data becomes public. I mean, shielded. It's not your data anymore. So if you're using Signal to be extra sneaky about your your rendezvous that you have with I don't your cocktail affiliated street crime gang, you know, like the second you haven't, if you say okay AI now coordinate the schedules between me and my other secret hoodlums, all that data becomes public. Like you're not encrypted anymore, right? All your credit card company, you just you've given your you've given some algorithm run by Sam Altman or Elon Musk or the goons at Google, unless they're a sponsor. You know, like you're all your information. Even more so, like I don't know. Every I just think that that's insane. It's a little insane to give them that stuff, even though they'll figure it out anyways. Like

Jodi Wellman 35:48
yeah, yeah,

Mike Steger 35:49
figuring out what I like based on yeah somehow the TikTok people told the Instagram people that I I would like stuff about movies, you know, and art, and

Mike Steger 36:01
you know stuff like that, right? But I do think that we are going to keep giving it more stuff to do because we're told it can do so many things, right? And we're gonna just like I don't. It's it saved me hardly any time for anything other than, you know, the sort the same sort of stuff that someone on the other side of all these tasks is thinking of, right? Like someone on the other side of these tasks is thinking bureaucratic bullshit that I have to do in order to keep my job. We have to do smart goals for annual reviews this year at my university. I'm sorry, not to brag, but I'm the 99th percentile of worldwide researchers in psychology, not in meaning and in like just everything, right? And I don't think me sending smart goals to someone on the other side of some bureaucracy who's never going to read it is a is a useful thing. So, I mean, someone in my shoes, certainly not me, would have just kicked that into AI and never read it and just pasted into the form, right? That would not be something I would do, but you can see that someone somewhere is like, "What? What? Hey, hey, Claude,

Jodi Wellman 37:09
hey!

Mike Steger 37:10
If you ask Grok, it would say like, 'Well, whatever the eval, like what? What kind of evaluation should what should we do for evaluating professors? I don't have any experience teaching or learning, so I want to just understand how we can determine who's doing a good job. And Grok will say, make them send you nudes. That's what Grok is famous for, right? And then, but so any other ones would say, like, well, have them set smart goals and have them, you know, be accountable to the goals that they choose for themselves. Begin the year, the next year's annual review and have them explain what they're trying to do and blah blah blah, right? And so then that just increases all this bureaucratic bullshit load, you know. And then we have to find AI to do it back. Someone would, I would never.

Jodi Wellman 37:51
Yeah,

Mike Steger 37:52
it's kind of like when passwords. When we could log into something that actually mattered on the internet, we had dumbass passwords, right? And then someone realized, oh, I can use different schemes to get into those passwords. So now and then we had a gigantically long, bizarre passwords no one could understand. So we just save them. Now we have to multi-factor. Then someone sends you a pin, and they're like, "Well, that's unsecure too, right?" Like it just like constantly the workload of getting these conveniences backfires. I can I can give an example. Did I not give examples? Right. I'm. I guess I'm off on a rant now. I really apologize. I can see the just like the the shocked look in your face. Like I thought there was a test. There was a podcast, not like what's going with Mike today. But you know, I've spent six full days now trying to create better exams for my Cheaton students to see if they can actually demonstrate knowledge as opposed to just copy and paste from ChatGPT or whatever they're using. Or you know these exams now they they get out on the internet instantly. So you know, six days. Sometimes, like it takes a full day to get it to configure just the basics without going berserk, right? And you realize what it can't do, right? Like, okay, just a quick example. You ask the the AIs, okay, create a multiple choice item. Okay, you're like, oh, that's pretty good. You ask it to create 25 or something like that, and you realize every single answer is B, and it's got the longest word count by like at least 50 to 100% every time. And you're like, can you fix that? And it says, oh yeah, yeah. I'm sorry, I should have caught that since you asked me. It's like the world's

Jodi Wellman 39:39
worst employee

Mike Steger 39:40
times. Yeah. So you ask it to fix it. It's like, okay, I fixed it, and it's exactly the same, right? So like, is it easier than if you know? Like, is it easier?

Jodi Wellman 39:50
Well, hang on. This is okay. Keep going, and then I want to come back.

Mike Steger 39:52
I've been I've been going too long. Like, your Claude is telling me to shut the fuck up. So yeah, no, he

Jodi Wellman 39:58
has not done that. You might still, but I don't think so. I this is stuff that I feel like is a temporary moment in time where we're gonna go. Oh yeah, remember when it was glitchy? But like, it's a matter of moments before it gets super good at generating this stuff, right? And so when that happens, not if, when it happens, and you're like, wow, these are really great multiple choice questions, better than my brain could have ever come up with. Yeesh! Wow, cool. And then let's spell this out. Your job is kind of done for you. Let's assume that. Thank you.

Jodi Wellman 40:32
I mean,

Mike Steger 40:33
writing was on the wall for years,

Jodi Wellman 40:34
and your students are. It's all. We're all just doing this thing, and you've said that meaning the bar is going to lower. What would that really look like? Like we get, is it about satisfaction would be derived from more of the basic things, and we're no longer interested in nuanced Mad Men where we have to fill in blanks. Like, is it because we're dumbing down, dumbing down our expectations, our desires? Like, what does it look like to have the bar lowered?

Mike Steger 41:04
First of all, may I just say thank you for shaking me out of my rant mode. Yes, thank you. And humans, the humans who are listening to this, which God only knows if we'll ever get any other than AI, probably from Russia. Yeah, so so that's that's the heart of it, right? Like then, well, you know, I I don't want to go on any more rants, Jodi.

Jodi Wellman 41:33
Okay, it's all just so

Mike Steger 41:36
you you go on a rant. You go on a rant. Like what is missing? Yeah, like you can, you can. I've got my ideas, and I will come back. I'm not, I'm not hedging, but

Jodi Wellman 41:45
okay. I'm going to do some sprinklings, and I want you to come in. And I don't care whether it's ranty or venty. We all like this. It's all entertaining. It's all entertaining, and it's all infotainment. The dumbing down. If we don't have to put effort into things, and we don't have to think about things. And we've known this for years because Google has already trained us. I don't remember who was in that movie because I'll just ask, and I don't need to jog my memory that it was Furiosa, right? I

Mike Steger 42:12
not a capital name, but yeah,

Jodi Wellman 42:14
shout out. I imagine if we're just making it easier and easier and easier. I have to believe, and I'm possibly very naive, that the will to live that we have, like the desire in some way to matter, and all these things that make us uniquely human and not robotic, where will that prevail? I don't argue that we're going to get dumber, and that our memories will erode, and that we will find the shortcuts because it actually is a world where the shortcuts are expected. And you're actually a bit of a moron if you're a student and you didn't take the shortcut, which is why we abolish education, which is why we've done all these things in the future. Because let's just not dance this stupid dance. At some point, even when it's like so eroded and basic, and we don't have to do much. I think we have. There'll be a new invention, or there'll be something. Let's just get sci-fi. Like something catastrophic will happen that we have to actually find a way to create challenge, and because that will then deliver on this feeling of significance and stuff, right?

Mike Steger 43:16
Yeah.

Jodi Wellman 43:16
Like

Mike Steger 43:16
that just suggests that what if what if we knew for 40 years plus, that the activities of daily life were destroying the planet, we probably have we probably turn that over and like come up with a solution. We'd rise the challenge, wouldn't we? Of like some sort of like I don't know, like imagine that create a greenhouse effect, like all the things that we're burning, or yeah, there were no more. We keep taking out the little fishes in the sea accidentally when we're trying to catch a couple big fancy ones, and then now there's nothing for the fish to eat in the ocean, and so all the food chain collapses. Like we cut down all the forests, and now there's no. It would

Jodi Wellman 43:54
have been so good to know this stuff, I guess. If only we could have

Mike Steger 43:57
seen this coming. So I have some worries that we're gonna that an even dumber version of our stupid ass species is gonna rise to the to challenges that are really

Jodi Wellman 44:08
ah well we look at us leaving you on a cliffhanger yes we are come on back for the wrap up of the birth of AI the death of humanity okay we'll see in a sec.