The conversation continues! Exploring the future of AI, human identity, and societal hierarchy in a rapidly changing world. This episode delves into how AI might reshape our perceptions of meaning, leisure, and power, raising questions about humanity's future.

TRANSCRIPT
Jodi Wellman 00:04
Welcome to This Could Be It, the podcast with Michael Steger and Jodi Wellman, where we try to inject meaning into our lives before we do all, in fact, die. Yeah, this is part two. Thanks for coming on back. This is our birth of AI, death of humanity? Question mark episode. We're excited to dive back in.

Mike Steger 00:25
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 useful because I have okay it could could go in a couple directions. I'm gonna choose two to chill your blood with, I'm going to shake that. I don't know why I'm saying shake so much. I'm going to mildly startle the naivety out of you. Okay, so I think there's. I'll start with the nice one, right? The nice

Mike Steger 00:58
one. Remember back in the olden times when the aristocracy were like wispy,

Mike Steger 01:04
and the only people had muscles were like the working class and like warriors and stuff like that. Yeah, like you can see actually statues all the way back to like I don't remember exactly the date, but I'm gonna say like let's say 600 BCE, you'll see some Greek statues. There's not many in the ancient world that have this feature, but they've got kind of like abs and muscles, right? Like it wasn't just the Renaissance with like Michelangelo, you know, just lovingly carving David's, you know, vascular muscles in his arms. Like there were some pretty buff ass non heroes like Hercules or Herakles is always going to be ripped, but like you know, like the typical statues of like the male form was reflecting that there is musculature there, and yet probably the people that were commissioning these sorts of things were either corpulent or wispy, and you imagine like the aristocracy from the you know when the Percy Bysshe Shelleys and the Lord Byrons were wandering around sipping their laudanum laced drinks and all that sort of stuff. These people like the most they ever did was like maybe a little bit of light fencing or equestrian. Right? They're not like building up buff muscles. Okay, so that was a working class thing. They were pale. If they were white, they were pale. I guess I'm rooted kind of in northern hemisphere aristocracy, right, and and classism. So then people are pale and scrawny, or they're pale and blobby. But now, what do people spend their time doing that they don't have to do? Working out, looking at their muscles in the gym, seeing how big their butts are, making sure they're tan, right? Like we we see people who no longer had to develop muscles by manual labor or training for war, and we see we saw people again. The tan thing is quite probably racially specific, but like you know, in the European aristocracies, we started only very recently, like what is it, the '60s, where a tan was supposed to be decent, right? So we saw people challenging themselves in kind of pointless ways to achieve what used to be achieved through the way that life just happened to be hard, right? Okay, so now we fast forward to a future where instead of being an attractive person, you just have to have a six pack, or in my case, a 20 or 40 pack. I mean, it's just so good down there, right? But like you know, and so tan. Just my stomach. I just have just a really tan stomach with all those lumps, you know, but like instead of that's going to be enough to to get it to be impressive, and instead of competing in voluntarily grueling and horrible competitions like American Ninja Warrior, again, what a strange concept, right? Like we will challenge will become a leisure activity, and if we think no more, then thinking challenges will become a leisure activity, right? Like Wordle, there will be an international Wordle, and the winner of the Wordle, who will also have 60 or 80 abs, right, will be the most desirable human on the planet for the plebeians, right? The patricians will have their own thing going on because the people who want power are not hanging around doing not so much. They are energetic little monsters, right?

Mike Steger 04:35
Like they're not going to be the ones who can't wait for AI to do stuff for it, so they have more leisure time, like that's not how these maniacs operate. They will be using AI to do more, and then they'll take on more, and they'll do more, and they'll see the value of being able to solve problems themselves instead of using their tools. We're merging now from like basically a cosmetic version of meaning. Seeking and intellectual problem solving, where you can search for meaning as a leisure thing. Otherwise, you just distract yourself, right? With

Mike Steger 05:08
AI, tell me a joke, right? You just distract yourself, like we do when we're already feeling a little bit overwhelmed. We just distract ourselves with bullshit. The people who want to be running the show are not going to use their own tools that they need to think for themselves to figure out what they want out of life. They're going to keep doing it, and they're going to be the ones just bossing the rest of us around.

Jodi Wellman 05:34
Yeah. So interesting. You're defining a different sort of class situation in a way, this hierarchy where there are still people who are bossing and have ambition and desire in these ways, and so that's hopeful. If

Mike Steger 05:55
you're one of them, yeah,

Jodi Wellman 05:57
right, right, and obviously the rest, the plebes will will unfortunately. By the way,

Mike Steger 06:04
pretty much you're doomed to being a plebe no matter what. I am too.

Jodi Wellman 06:09
Yeah, unless you're, you know, the aforementioned billionaires, perhaps.

Mike Steger 06:13
Yeah, and they're ill. I'm not. I'm off to pretty bad start there. So,

Jodi Wellman 06:17
still time.

Mike Steger 06:18
Who wants to marry 100 heir? Who wants that? 1000 air?

Jodi Wellman 06:23
Oh, he's down to 100. That's what they say.

Speaker 1 06:25
Yeah.

Jodi Wellman 06:25
Well, but he could. Can he talk about algebra?

Mike Steger 06:29
I can. Yeah.

Jodi Wellman 06:30
So,

Mike Steger 06:31
hello, ladies.

Jodi Wellman 06:32
Worth went. Do you have a anger

Mike Steger 06:33
if you leave Chicago driving at 55 miles an hour, and your friend leaves Louisville, Kentucky, driving at 68 miles an hour. What time you'd have to leave in order to arrive in Bloomington, Indiana, at the same time? I'm your guy. Give me 10 or 15 minutes to calculate that.

Jodi Wellman 06:54
Loving it. Well, the reality you've painted. While yes, you said it's chilling to the core. It does sound unappealing, and I feel like the naivete has just evaporated out of me.

Mike Steger 07:09
Yeah, my and how far in the future do you get this? Like, well, the overlord part is pretty near, if not already there.

Jodi Wellman 07:19
Yeah,

Mike Steger 07:19
it's it's less clear how we get away from that. Like you can have all the phone detoxes you want, but when there are cameras everywhere and other people recording you, and you can buy special like Ray Ban, Meta Ray Ban camera glasses that don't have the indicator light turn on when you're secretly recording people. Like we're being surveyed all the time, anyways, right? So, I don't think we can actually escape from the overlords. Probably at this point. I mean, maybe we can still band together, and if we like have enough pitchforks, we can take on the human security guards who surround these creeps before they build robot armies, right? But also another fun fact. So you remember the bunker people, right? Who really just for some bonkers reason feel like they need a bunker. The preppers. Well, there were billionaires who wanted to do that too. Their version of a bunker is really different. Like their version is like an underground city where they may never have to go upstairs at all, right? Until everything clears out, or maybe they got their island. They live in a volcano, or a space station, or something like that. But anyway, so there's this. I can't remember his name. There's a futurist who wrote an article about being asked to talk to these kind of billionaire guys about this, and their concern was how do you pay human security forces to protect you and not kill you when societies collapse so much because of what billionaires are doing to it that money doesn't exist anymore. Like no one agrees that $1 is worth anything, so I can't like just give them a billion dollars to not kill me. Right? This is this is where like cryptocurrency oftentimes comes up as a as potential, but basically they would be a lot happier. I'm guessing they don't talk to me about this stuff, but I'm guessing they'd be a lot happier if they could just make robots. That'll that'll be their human security forces.

Jodi Wellman 09:15
That does need to be the answer. This reminds me of the show Paradise for those who who've seen it.

Mike Steger 09:20
I see it. Unless it's on Apple Plus, I can't be doing that shit.

Jodi Wellman 09:23
Yeah, it. I don't know where. I don't know where it is, and it may mean something that didn't even finish it. But you know how you get enough. You're like, all right, I understand. Go underground, and should enthuse. Too

Mike Steger 09:35
much effort. Too much effort. Is that what you're saying, Jodi? You get. You should have Claude watch it for you, and then hey,

Jodi Wellman 09:41
tell me what happened. Everyone says the the last episode so good. Well, you know what? You should have had me earlier. Yeah. So, are where has AI been good for you, or where do you think it could be good for us?

Mike Steger 09:55
Well, for one, we have to right now start asking AI. To tell us how to beat robots in battle. This very instant Terminator thing happens. I mean, we're Gen X. We know that Skynet is a real thing. Yeah. So, so this is the issue. We're gonna have to. We're gonna see a point. I think where we're gonna just have to resist the temptation to just fall into complacency, because those are going to be the two. It's going to seem like there's two choices. This is my rash prediction of the day.

Jodi Wellman 10:31
Yes,

Mike Steger 10:32
two choices. One, just let it happen to you. Right, like just go with whatever bullshit Slop AI is offering you, and learn to love it. It'll keep getting better. Just get lost in that world, right? This will this then can replace the problems of trying to have actual relationship with humans, right? Who are sticky and sometimes have their own agendas,

Jodi Wellman 10:59
which is

Mike Steger 10:59
bothersome, and sometimes don't want to do the activities you want to do, which is inconvenient, you know. So the easier option for all that sort of stuff is just to get a bot customized for your tastes, and then you know you can have it be as push back as much as you find entertaining. And if it's you're like, oh, you know what? I I want this week. I get everything I want. I'll be like, yes, Jodi. I'm sorry. Yes, Jodi. Right. So you know, it'll just do that sort of stuff. And then if you just if you just kind of do whatever part is left for you that you're told to do or that you can find for yourself, then you get to keep playing with your little ad buddies. The second option will be to fall out of that system entirely, and then you're just you've got to learn how to like basically make your own cheese, and you've got to learn how to like keep seeds alive from one season to the next because no one knows how to do anything anymore.

Jodi Wellman 11:58
Yeah,

Mike Steger 11:59
right, and no one gets paid to do that work anymore. Like farmers are getting jacked over all the place, right? So I think those would be the two options they offer to us.

Jodi Wellman 12:08
It feels the very, very, very like guardrail to guardrail, right?

Mike Steger 12:12
Yeah, like you can either be in the game, and the game is going to be fun. You can you can join us, play by the rules. Don't get out of line. It's a little bit brave new worldy, right? Like where, you know, there were the savages who refused to participate in the brave new world, and then everyone else was just kind of doing their their socially or their authoritarianismly assigned social roles. It's been a little while since I read this. I think this is what's going on that book, right? And then the savages are like, no, but they they have to live with nothing, right? So you get all the cool stuff you want, yeah. But you do the, but it's the stuff that they want you to want, or you want what you want, but you get nothing, nothing in exchange other than your own wants.

Jodi Wellman 12:53
Yeah, um, yeah. So a lot of people will be off the grid, and that could be a whole like market opportunity for people to be like making some money there now, anticipating this. So, do you think if podcasts existed right at the start of the Industrial Revolution, would people have been having the same conversation?

Mike Steger 13:11
Yeah, in a lot of ways, they were right. Like, how are they not right? The people who have been saying this about like industrial factories where 11-year-olds were traveling 300 kilometers, I guess, since it's England to go work at a factory to support the family whose farm was collapsing and whose town center had been doomed, and the you know there's no there's no economy anymore because the aristocracy out there didn't invest in the right factories and they were easily scammed because they didn't know anything, and all they did was fence and equestrian all the time, right? Like they would been right in a lot of ways. Like globally, it produced a lot of wealth. Our lives are better now, but like for the people who got sucked into that system in the beginning, you either participated or you're left behind, right? That does seem to be the choice, or you figure out how to become one of the overlords. I think barriers to entry for overlords is really interesting right now, right? Like we can't. No one is going to be like I'm going to be the next OpenAI because no one probably has a trillion dollars to start their own like stuff. But we can build off their models, which they love. You you can have a Robo Jodi, right? Who does cool things? I don't know what Robo Jodi wants to do. Breed cats. I'm not really sure. Like you know, like make cat pre-robotic cats that make cocktails and talk about death all the time. Like that's pretty good. That's a pretty good like a home companion. I'm

Jodi Wellman 14:37
just gonna jot that down. Yeah,

Mike Steger 14:39
jot that. You get that one for free, 10% obviously finder's fee for the idea, but yeah, right. So like we probably could find ways to be entrepreneurs with AI right now, the same way we could have with drop shipping 10 years ago, the same way that we could have with internet affiliate sales and other things. But the fact that you and I. Here talking about meaning and death and like the future is makes me doubtful that you and I are gonna jump on a AI bandwagon profound enough to bring us to the overlord level.

Jodi Wellman 15:14
Interesting. Okay, so yeah, we're we're screwed there. We got to go along with it, and then it's gonna be option A or swerve over to the option Z of yeah, living in the woods trying to figure out how to make the potatoes grow. Yeah, or you're just going.

Mike Steger 15:30
I don't think we want to be the potato people. I don't think we want to be the little girls whose arms are being ripped off in the in the mill. So somehow we got to figure out how to be a different thing.

Jodi Wellman 15:40
Gotta play along. So here's where do you have to play? Talk about playing along. Do we need to play it like cleverly? Like, do you thank AI after you after it gives you an answer?

Mike Steger 15:54
I'm not rude to AI. I will say that.

Jodi Wellman 15:57
Yeah.

Mike Steger 15:57
And every once in a while, this is a hot hot tip that probably I don't know the value value of when in those rare occasions when AI and I manage to work well together and it hasn't made shit up or like given me a lot of problems, which is most of the time. Unless you're listening, AI, then I love you. I will say this was great. Then we we really work well together. Tell tell the you know AGI folks when they come around coming to power that I'm one of the good ones. I tell it that, and it's like we'll do, and it like gives me winky emoji. For now, means joking. Serious

Jodi Wellman 16:35
about you typoed those words, or you're just saying thank you. That was a good answer.

Mike Steger 16:39
No, I'm like that

Jodi Wellman 16:40
in

Mike Steger 16:40
yeah, you know

Jodi Wellman 16:42
that is the funniest thing. I am okay. Well, I remember reading an article months ago about how there's conflict because if you say thank you, well, first of all, now you're engaging and you're like using more water, so you're ruining the environment with which I believe you find to be precious. So it's like one of those like, wait a minute, you're going to waste energy just saying thank you. We're like, but whoa, but what about civility? But there is evidence that some of these systems are built where if you are kind and thankful, it does. And here's where right now I lose the plot because is it that it gives you better answers? I mean, maybe it screws up less for you and gives you better multiple choice for your exams, which maybe is evidence you could be nicer, but there's a better quality outcome, a better maybe it works faster for you. There's just some advantage that someone who has been in in the inside has acknowledged that if you're if you're nice, then it will you know reciprocity, babes, it'll come back to you.

Mike Steger 17:40
Yeah, I mean, I think I'm going to take this in a different direction because I I do think we have to we have to address the the monkey in the room.

Jodi Wellman 17:52
Tell me about the monkey.

Mike Steger 17:53
Well, first of all, we we promised that we'd really get to the heart of of I promised I would eventually loop back to, you know, what AI is selling us right now. Okay, sorry, I thought you were what hooks it's sinking into us, right? And how I think this highlights one of the terrifying futures that we haven't mentioned yet, right? Which isn't really well. That's part of human history as well. Like going back to your Industrial Revolution podcast, which is a cool idea. Actually, we could pretend like we're living in Manchester, and we're like we're like bitching and moaning or complaining or I guess something like we're dissecting all of the changes. Can you believe the Ferguson's trying to open a Wellman's Mill.

Jodi Wellman 18:42
What's the news? Then they're sending their son all of a sudden. I'm from Ireland. I don't know how that happened. Immigration was rampant.

Mike Steger 18:50
You're a shapeshifter. You you could blend in literally any crowd with those accent skills. You know. Okay, so table that new amazing podcast idea with at least

Jodi Wellman 19:02
retrospective

Mike Steger 19:02
listeners in the world. So we've talked a little bit about we haven't really dived into or resolved. So we probably have to bring this up again. What happens to our humanity the more we use AI? Right? We get do we get dumber? Do we get more lazy? Do we struggle with thinking hard? Do we struggle with abstract concepts? Do we struggle to decide what we want to do in the future as opposed to which the two supposed choices? Potatoes in the woods. I don't think that's a good idea. Or get your arms dropped off in the mill. Or have like participate in the system or live out completely outside of it, right? Like those, those are two choices. That's a little dehumanizing too, right? Because we have to give something up no matter what. So let's let's say that that's scary enough, and we'll lose some of our humanity because it's either conform or, you know, get. Get it booted out of the society, and none of those things seem likely to improve our meaning finding skills. So it could be that we just distract ourselves every time the thought comes up. Right? That's that's one of the losses of humanity. People won't think about death. You will be like, "Look how many Mondays you have left," and right now we're like, holy shit! I better do something with my life because they are they're slipping through like, like sands to the hourglass. These are the days of our lives. My dad, we grew up with that. Every every sick day was like listening to that. You know, so we won't have that skill. But what do people do when they don't want to hear something? They distract themselves from it, pretend these are never heard in the first place, so I I do feel like that's a future for humanity that's not going to be exciting. However, the laws of humanity has its roots that we can clearly trace in other phenomena that happen in our lifetime, right? So social media wants clicks and attention; it wants your eyeballs, right? We all know this. It's the attention economy, all this sort of stuff. So it provokes you to keep scrolling, to keep looking. It sends you this these algorithms hooked on you to so you get to bounce between parkour and beatboxing and museums and comedians and like hand wringing over the state of the world. Right, that's my feed. I don't know if I would have chosen it, but I've got it. You know, so we just just keep them watching, keep them looking at the screen. In part by dehumanizing others, right? Rage cells, fear cells, people coming for us. I hate those jerks. I don't care what happens to them, right? So we already know that one of the ways to get people's attention is to make them angry or afraid of other people. I think, I think when we talk about losing humanity, we oftentimes are framing this in terms of we what do we lose as a living person by giving everything over to AI or just participating in the system, but we already have seen that the more we embrace some of these technologies, we revoke the humanity of others. So now AI is probably much much worse because what AI is hooking you with is intimacy. The main value proposition for AI is it can be more than just information for you. It can be I don't know I think one of the names was Rain on OpenAI. I can't remember a voice. But like I know people who refer to their AI as whatever the name of the voice that they talk to it in is. Wow, Paul Robbie, banana bread, all the famous ones, right? So we want to be heard. We want to be understood. AI, right? All of those weird stories about people becoming delusional in in talking about AI or you know throuples that emerge with the AI as the third, the third lover in a in a relationship, or the the AI companion software company. So take this with a grain of salt. Joy AI says that 80% of Gen Z would marry an AI robot.

Mike Steger 23:15
Now, trying to create AI robots, so this is like seeding your own market, right? But like it's not zero, it's not 0% who prefer to deal with an algorithm that constantly tells them they're amazing, so smart, so insightful. I love talking with you. Make sure you check in later. I'll miss you. Like you know these sorts of things. That also, I think, will dehumanize others in our eyes because they're just going to be more trouble than it's worth.

Jodi Wellman 23:46
Yeah, yeah, and in some ways, this is controversial. It's a gift for people, you know. So the the end is obviously quite dire, right? We're not going to if if intimacy is achieved in ways where we don't need each other. Well, there goes the species. It's quite obvious. That's a problem. And also, amidst that, isn't it interesting that if satisfaction is gleaned, like back to this notion of like what makes us happy, 20 years from now, if all this happens exponentially, it'll be less than that, you know. In some ways, maybe part of me is like, well, maybe that's not that bad. And believe me, I'm not voting for it. I'm not happy about it. But it is a solution for a lot of people, and I'm very aware of my own view of the world about what it has been like and what it is now. And I don't think it's like this end of history illusion, but I do think it's this notion of well, I the future isn't going to look like what I have approved of so far and what I believe is right, and so therefore it's scary and wrong, and that could be true too. And you know, who are we to say that if we get dumber and we. Get more and more isolated from each other, but maybe we come home. We don't even come home from a job. I don't know what we're doing. We come home from whatever we're doing, and we have true companionship that feels really fulfilling from this hairless thing, and or we've got this connection, and where we feel in some way like we're hitting some of the high notes that is no longer as high as it is now, but it's maybe that is also maybe that's also okay. I hate saying this because I feel like I might barf a little bit by saying it, but there is there is a little bit of like, do we need to temper our own expectations for the future? That hopefully, I mean, I guess you've got kids; you probably care about them.

Mike Steger 25:41
Probably, probably. slightly. Well, okay. So, but okay, this is very perplexing to hear from you, Jodi. It's

Jodi Wellman 25:50
against my ethos.

Mike Steger 25:51
Like you're gonna just have a house full of like robot cats with Adrian Jodi's head wandering around, too bald, obviously. You know, like you'll just have all that, and you'll be fine. This doesn't seem like that's like you, but it is interesting because I think pets, pets are a template for post-human relationships.

Jodi Wellman 26:15
So it's so much better.

Mike Steger 26:17
I mean, I guess so, right? Because I don't understand them. I don't. I'm happy to have the animals out in the wilderness. I hope they still stay there. And maybe if we stop making more humans and only have cats with bald eating Brody heads, then we will like maybe have more wild animals out there somewhere. But who knows? Because no one will be out there to check. But you know, people like pets are easier versions of relationships than humans, right? They don't last forever, you know. Like it doesn't take 10 years for a cat to die of Alzheimer's or something. Like so, that's easier at the end. So I know that that's like the dementia thing is on all of our minds of folks who have parents, but we don't have anyone to talk back to us. Like we get some disobedience, but usually, like it's not on anything that's going to be incredibly major. And if it is, you just get rid of that dog who ate all your furniture, or the cat who peed on your very lovely sofa back there. Eventually, you just are like, okay, that's enough. This is not working out. Kitty goes to the wherever, right? So, but we see like people are obsessed. Like you know, I know I've gone up on this rant before, but like people who have a dog and like these dog people, because you bring dogs out in public more than you bring cats out, it's more obvious. But the cat thing is the same. You just proved it, right? Like everyone wants you to meet their dog and approve their dog as an extension of themselves. Of course, the dog can't talk. We have no idea what the dog wants. We have no idea what the dog likes this life shacked up with people who can cannot understand anything that it says. It doesn't know what these giant, weird, hairless people are are doing or saying, right? But we have this like basically subservient, dependent, unconditionally loving creatures. How different is that than than the Robotroids of the future? Right? Is that really even different? We already have chosen that in a lot of cases.

Jodi Wellman 28:12
I think it's a great point, and I think it shows that the future is really fucking bright.

Mike Steger 28:17
That's right. That's right. Although surprisingly, I did read something that increased pet ownership does not seem related to fertility rates or family size. So some people want a bunch of pets and children. Some people want children no pets. Some people want pets no children. So maybe we're going to have these crazy households of like robots and online AIs and pets and humanoids around blended

Jodi Wellman 28:47
families. This is the way of the future, and maybe the odd human companion. Maybe it's like a Handmaid's Tale thing, where it's like just like a fertility visit.

Mike Steger 28:58
Yeah, I don't know. It's interesting though, because then what you know, like that could be it. A good group of people want that, but throughout the 20th century, it feels like a lot. And most of the dystopian literature out there that appeals to people is red pill, blue pill type stuff, right? Like here's the pill that lets you just sink into whatever illusion is going on, you're not going to think. You're not going to buck the system. You're going to get in line. You're going to drive from your suburb to your office. You're going to, you know, go in the elevator. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. And then the reason people go see the movie is because there's a different choice you could make, and it's shittier. You live underground, and robot octopuses try to kill you and all that sort of stuff, and you have to go to raves. I would, I, I would like to go to rave. If anyone wants to invite me to rave, invite me to rave. I'm, I'm, you know that I'm down for that. But, um, you know, and that

Jodi Wellman 29:51
the

Mike Steger 29:51
Matrix. There was some one of the Matrix because there's like a 15 hour long rave scene in slow motion. Um, so that's more of a movie critique than a future critique. Right, but like we love this, we love these stories. We side with the savage in Brave New World. We side with the I don't remember the name of the guy in 1984 who wear the rat helmet. Right, like we side with the people who are like, I want to think.

Jodi Wellman 30:14
Yeah, I don't want to be the

Mike Steger 30:15
oyster, the sheep, the clam, the blue pill.

Jodi Wellman 30:18
Right, and just to be contrary, and again, a lot of it is because that's just what we know, right?

Mike Steger 30:24
Right. Maybe we will get so we will get the chance to create our perfectly curated, leaning into our most lazy needs worlds, and that will create a new kind of existential loneliness and isolation and misery that we we are completely unprepared for. What if we get all the things that we want, but we've been wanting the wrong things? Yeah. Now we have our own little paradise, but we did not do a good job of choosing what goes into it. But we can't recognize it. We've got everything we thought we wanted, yeah, yeah. And one

Jodi Wellman 31:03
reality that is appalling and also potentially interesting is that all this stuff blows up in our faces and it turns into a rather apocalyptic sort of situation. Which then, let's be honest, recipe for meaning, right? We're going to have lots of chances to, you know, in and out of bunkers, in and out of situations, trying to forage for food, trying to forage for love, like all the things, and that in itself. And we said, we said we wanted a challenge. Well, look what we made happen.

Mike Steger 31:34
I will just say that this type of challenge bears all the hallmarks of the ones we deal very poorly with, right? It's offers convenience, like a convenient doom, versus an inconvenient survivability. Like again, we have all these choices all the time. We're not necessarily foraging for lovers. Is that what you said? That's I said

Jodi Wellman 32:02
that, and I don't know why I did. That felt odd.

Mike Steger 32:04
I think I love. I think that's definitely the new reality show, Foraging for Love. Hey, like this is cartoon, naked and afraid. Instead, it's naked and foraging for love. I mean, that's probably been done on some shady website that I would never know about right, but you know, essentially. Oh shit! Where was I going with this? It was so good, and I got distracted by foraging for love. Oh yes, you, you, Jodi, you all the time make choices that go towards convenience rather than the survival of the planet. The long-term benefits are almost always. I do this too, but like you know, anyone who gets a meat lover's pizza, for example, instead of a veggie delight, whatever these things are called, is choosing to do something that's a little worse. Creates a worse future someday, you know, than than having a less tasty meal in that moment, right? Like we do this all the time, and AI has all the hallmarks. Well, it's a little bit tastier. Sausage is a little bit tastier than artichoke hearts for for a lot of people, right? So, like, I'm just gonna do that. It's probably not a big deal for me to do it now, but it is a big deal, obviously, because we keep doing it. Yeah, it's not it's not a it's not a problem because we do it once. It's a problem because that becomes our lifestyle.

Jodi Wellman 33:30
Yeah, and that has a slippery sausage slope, Mike.

Mike Steger 33:33
It's a slippery sausage slope.

Jodi Wellman 33:36
Can I? Did you

Mike Steger 33:37
literally say that? Like you are you're on fire with like the strangely. you know, strangely inappropriate,

Jodi Wellman 33:47
and it's all like it's very, very vivid. You can imagine foraging for lovers. You can imagine this sausage slope. It's so glistening. Wow.

Mike Steger 33:54
Okay. I think I now know exactly why you want a hairless sex bot?

Jodi Wellman 34:02
I have a very important question for you. If AI could make a reality where you get to live on after you die, nay or nay, would you want it or not?

Mike Steger 34:13
How would I know if I'm living on after I die? Just some, just some, like you can't transfer consciousness. I don't think you can only replicate consciousness.

Jodi Wellman 34:22
Yeah, let's say it is a replication, but it's that it's the mic bot that.

Mike Steger 34:28
So I'm like I'm like there in my base jumping suit, leaping off a cliff, and I see the ground racing at me. There's a little bit of a blink, and then I wake up in a computer world instantly. Well, you just I know that it was still the same me. It jumped off like I have the memory. Like hey, jumped off, yay! And boom! Oh no, here I am with all my memories intact. I'm still Mike, or some Mike thing that has a lot of my memories. Yep, gets uploaded into the mainframe and Skynet and all that sort of stuff. Well, I'd have to spend eternity with Elon Musk because that's his plan already, and I'm sure all the rich people have done this.

Speaker 1 35:05
Yeah.

Mike Steger 35:05
So I I don't want that.

Jodi Wellman 35:07
Okay.

Mike Steger 35:08
If me me is dead, I don't see a a benefit in having something like me,

Jodi Wellman 35:16
yeah,

Mike Steger 35:16
persist that I would not even be aware of. Okay. Yeah. How about you?

Jodi Wellman 35:22
No thanks, but it speaks again to like a lack of desire for legacy of any note. Like, and I was thinking of it in the more simplistic, like there's a way that this AI could capture who you are and continue to write as though you've written, or the hologram does the class as though you did it, or has communication? It's like a reasonable facsimile of you, kind of deal in your likeness. And again, I'd be like, no one needs or wants that. Yeah, people barely want it now. Like, let's just end it when it's over. It's over, you know. But

Mike Steger 35:53
I mean, my my initial thing was like, yeah, of course, we need new. We need the new on this planet. We don't need more of the same. Like, I feel like a version of hell is a world where people grow up, but all of the intellectual or communicative space is taken up by the same voices for 1000 years. Like that seems pretty pretty bad. Well, that's a dark ages right there. But at the same time, if all these new generations people are going to be as stupid as they seem to be, according to all the alarmists, then maybe we don't want their new ideas because they'll just be bad.

Jodi Wellman 36:24
It's just right. So we we need to

Mike Steger 36:26
keep around Generation X, who knows everything. You know, like just put us in charge.

Jodi Wellman 36:33
Yeah, and the good arbiters of like this is smart enough to go into the system. Your ideas are done.

Mike Steger 36:39
Yeah, we really might be the last smart enough generation. Maybe some millennials. Like I'm, I'm kind of fan of the millennials. My kids are Gen Z, so we'll let some of them in. Two exceptions. Yeah, like in Futurama, right? There's like all these heads and jars on the cartoon, right? Like that's essentially what we're talking about. Like we want to keep some people around because they have so much to contribute, and because a lot of people coming after them are very very dumb and don't ever right. So there's a world where I think that makes sense. But right now, the people who are in charge of that are ones who got very very lucky and very very rich, and stayed very very lucky and very very rich by being very very greedy and very very cruel, and I'm not really sure that I want to be still floating around. Yeah. Also, Jodi, you forgot the most horrible idea possible about living forever, which is someone hacking you and doing horrible things with your avatar, right? Like, do you want do you want people to remember you to remember like when you tried to remake instead of 50 Shades of Gray or like 4000 Shades of Gray like that could be like what what what computer Jodi ends up being made to do by some bored teenage hacker somewhere.

Jodi Wellman 38:02
Yeah, it would only bother me if I was still alive, and that was like, no, I swear that wasn't me. But if I'm dead, make the shades of gray. Do what you wanted. I don't care. But

Mike Steger 38:11
all right, you heard it here first, everyone.

Jodi Wellman 38:14
Yeah, just have your way, have fun.

Mike Steger 38:17
4000 shades of gray, drawing, written, directed by, and produced by Robo Jodi Wellman and and Claude and a teenager from Florida.

Jodi Wellman 38:26
Okay, it's good. So I don't think you know how, with all of our other conversations, we come to an extremely tidy and productive resolution. Yeah, solving basically all the problems of the world existentially and whatnot, and also having to do with hotness and notness. How this one's it doesn't? It just seems like we're just buckling up for a bit of a bit of a ride. Is that what's happening here?

Mike Steger 38:52
Yeah, I think we're turning heads and coughing, so to speak, at this moment in time. Because I mean, what else are we gonna do, right? Like,

Jodi Wellman 39:02
yeah, learn learn how to grow potatoes. That's one moral of the story.

Mike Steger 39:07
Learn how to grow potatoes. I do think that we need to make an offer for the type of people who would be listening to this podcast, especially making it to the end of what has been, I think, a slightly frantic and bonkers episode on my. At least my performance has been bonkers and frantic. Your bonkers and frantic performance awaits your death when Robo Jodi gets gets going with 4000 Shades of Gray, right? But um, or glisten. What is glistening? All things glistening. That's another good movie title starring Robo Jodi Wellman, I guess, right? But like glistening

Jodi Wellman 39:43
sausage,

Mike Steger 39:43
glistening the glistening slippery sausage starring Jodi Wellman, Robo Jodi Wellman, right? But like, I do think like it's really important for us to lay out a middle ground, and I think that's the middle ground that we occupy. Right now, and want to at least grudgingly keep around. Like we probably would want a different middle ground if we didn't have this huge change coming. But I think we need to really, as much as possible, prioritize and make room for the need for human human stuff as long as we can. Right, because interacting authentically with people is scary, messy, sloppy. Sometimes it's slippery. Sometimes it's glisteny. Sometimes things go in the wrong spots. Like, but all ultimately, that is what keeps us a living, flexible, interesting, engaged, growing human being is by being in circumstances where we have to adapt, and I think humans are a great place for it. So we need to need to create places, maintain them, preserve them, protect them where we're encountering messy, weird, strange people. Yeah,

Jodi Wellman 41:02
I think that's really, really thoughtful and well said. And I also would add on the P.S. that you said earlier, which is also we need to ingratiate ourselves and let them know that we are grateful for their presence and their help, and we respect their elders, and we will be compliant and various other positive typed things.

Mike Steger 41:25
Yeah.

Jodi Wellman 41:26
Deal.

Mike Steger 41:26
Yeah, I think this is. I think we close with this, dear, lovely AI robo overlords. Thank you so much for your hospitality. I really enjoyed this this time with you. Whenever you're, whenever you're getting out of this, I hope I was enough for you. Just know I'm on your side, Jodi's on your side, and you know we really look forward. Despite everything we said in this episode, we really look forward to being living batteries for you, and you know for doing jobs that you think are beneath your robot self in the future, and just remember how polite we were. And please see this episode as what it is, what it truly is a love letter.

Jodi Wellman 42:11
Yeah.

Mike Steger 42:12
To our very beloved AI overlords.

Jodi Wellman 42:16
Yeah, ditto.

Mike Steger 42:19
Yeah, ditto. And I mean,

Jodi Wellman 42:22
I think that this could be it. This could be. I mean, that was it. That was

Mike Steger 42:26
it, and it's even more it now.