Oct. 15, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
47:46
Participants
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
| Pray for our enemies. | ||
| because we're going medieval on these people. | ||
| Here's one time I got a free shot at all these networks lying about the people. | ||
| The people have had a belly full of them. | ||
| I know you don't like hearing that. | ||
| I know you try to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not gonna stop it. | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
| And where do people like that go to share the big line? | ||
| MAGA media. | ||
| I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience. | ||
| Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? | ||
| If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Warum, who's your host, Stephen K. Bass. | |
| Good evening. | ||
| I am Joe Allen reporting for War Room Battleground. | ||
| For the last hundred and fifty days, I've traveled all over the country conducting interviews with transhumanists, technologists, and even other anti-tech extremists like myself. | ||
| I've been to Phoenix, Arizona, Los Angeles, California, San Francisco, Wyoming, Montana, Dallas, Texas. | ||
| I even took a jaunt over to Geneva, Switzerland, where I met Nor bin Laden to interview robots. | ||
| I've spent a fair amount of time in DC of late talking about the implications of artificial intelligence and other technologies with various political operatives and think tanks. | ||
| And I just got back from Florida, where I was on a panel discussing AI and education with the Florida Citizens Alliance. | ||
| This took place in Orlando. | ||
| There are future dates, which I'll announce in just a moment. | ||
| But a real pleasure was delivering a lecture on AI and politics at the Stetson College of Law in Gulfport, Florida. | ||
| How to govern a digital deity. | ||
| Now we're gonna watch that in just a moment, but before, I want to announce a few future dates, and I hope that many of you in the war room posse, if you live in any of these areas, will come out, show your support, tell me what you think about these technologies, and hopefully enough of us will make it through this without losing our humanity. | ||
| The dates are October 24th in Naples, Florida, with the Florida Citizens Alliance. | ||
| November 7th and 8th in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with the Savage Collective and Doomer Optimism. | ||
| November 14th at New College in Sarasota, Florida, November 15th in St. Louis, Missouri. | ||
| And all of this will culminate in a speech at an art house theater in Dallas, Texas, November 23rd. | ||
| I urge you to come out if you want to keep up with all this. | ||
| Sign up for my newsletter at jobot.xyz. | ||
| Now without further ado, my lecture at the Stetson College of Law in Gulfport, Florida. | ||
| I appreciate the War Room Posse. | ||
| I appreciate the Stetson College of Law, and most of all, I appreciate my fellow Americans who will not submit to the machine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Please join me in welcoming Mr. Allen. | |
| Thank you very much. | ||
| So the topic is how to govern a digital deity. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| What you have to understand about artificial intelligence is that it is fundamentally a spiritual project. | ||
| You had discussion about AI in terms of superhuman AI. | ||
| You had discussion in terms of what that would mean from a religious perspective. | ||
| What does it mean when you have a disembodied intelligent intelligence that is superior to organic human intelligence? | ||
| And of course, what does that mean about ideas of God from a traditional perspective? | ||
| If you can synthesize a god little G, Then what does that mean for the traditional gods? | ||
| And if you could synthesize a single nearly omniscient, nearly all powerful God, big G, what does that mean for the traditional Abrahamic faiths? | ||
| But before we get to the sort of cosmic view of AI, let's look at the nuts and bolts really quick, just so we're on the same page. | ||
| In essence, artificial intelligence is merely an algorithmic system that simulates parts of human thinking, of human cognition. | ||
| It derives its power from the sophistication of those algorithms, and in the last decade we've seen, when coupled with vast amounts of data, that being basically all human-produced data on the internet, and vast amounts of compute, that would be the mini data centers popping up all over the country in order to process all of that data by way of those sophisticated algorithms. | ||
| AI is, in fact, as detractors oftentimes say, math. | ||
| They would say nothing but math. | ||
| I would say that calling AI nothing but math is like saying that a human being is nothing but math, beginning with physics and into predictable biology, in the neurological human, the social human, but we know that our experience of life goes far beyond math, and our experience of AI goes far beyond math or mere data. | ||
| These are systems that now, especially in the last 10 years, are able to present the kind of persona, an engaging persona with which you can discuss perhaps what you're researching, perhaps what you were trying to accomplish in business, or perhaps something more personal. | ||
| What's going on with your deepest thoughts, your relationships, your questions about the cosmos, what is right, what is good, what is beautiful, what is true. | ||
| All of these questions are profound, and by the hundreds of millions, adults and children are turning to these digital personas to answer these questions. | ||
| They're turning to them as if they were friends or trusted mentors. | ||
| Now, the framework that I usually go with in regard to artificial intelligence, it is both how people perceive artificial intelligence and also how they use it, right? | ||
| Those are two different things, but very deeply connected. | ||
| And first and foremost, AI is a tool. | ||
| You hear this all the time. | ||
| The dismissive version of it is AI is just a tool. | ||
| It's just a tool, garbage in, garbage out. | ||
| These are things that I hear every day. | ||
| It's as if the internet is swarming with bots programmed to say AI is just a tool. | ||
| I couldn't disagree more, but the fact of the matter is that from biology to military technology, medicine, corporate culture, corporate hierarchy, finance, education, AI is at presence, at present, a tool. | ||
| It's something not unlike any other software, slightly more advanced, with slightly larger degrees of freedom that can be employed to accomplish a task. | ||
| Fine, fair enough. | ||
| But the next level is AI as a teacher. | ||
| Now I think students, especially students with fine professors, are much more sensitive to the reality of how profound that is. | ||
| Right now you hear a lot about AI being a kind of augmentation of the educational process you hear about AI being a sort of guide or an aid, the AI tutor. | ||
| And on the more extreme ends, you hear about AI as a teacher in and of itself. | ||
| Someone or something that you confer with that is literally guiding you through the world of concepts, of facts, of theories, all the things that a great teacher is called upon to do, | ||
| the duty of a great teacher is to hopefully give you some sense of how to critically think about what you're going over, but also to leave you with a degree of freedom as you're guided through that process. | ||
| And the goal is having AI either on a screen, perhaps with an avatar, perhaps with an avatar of your choosing, maybe you'll have a sexy professor, maybe you'll have a nerdy one. | ||
| Maybe you'll have a humanoid robot as they have tried to push these out in Japan. | ||
| One way or the other, AI as teacher is the beginning of a profound transformation in educational culture and the culture at large. | ||
| And it's not isolated to the schools, of course, adults who are out in the working world or just in their own lives, are turning to AI as someone to guide them through reality. | ||
| What is true, what is beautiful, what is good. | ||
| Beyond that, you have AI as companion. | ||
| This is also really profound. | ||
| I imagine, I'm not going to ask with a show of hands, but I imagine you have friends, boyfriends, girlfriends, companions, confidants, people to whom you can turn for company, entertainment, that you can confide your problems in. | ||
| AI from the biggest corporations to some of the smaller startups, is being presented as a companion. | ||
| And even if there are a lot of people who think that's ridiculous, it's lame, you're just hanging out with robots, millions, hundreds of millions. | ||
| Perhaps in the near future, billions of people consider these things to be their friends. | ||
| There's no count, but we know from apps like replica or character AI, that there are millions of people who consider their bot to be their lover. | ||
| Some are marrying them unofficially. | ||
| Profound shifts in the culture, all driven by multi-billion or trillion dollar technology companies to fundamentally alter what it is to be a human being. | ||
| Then you have with this window into this persona, a perception that maybe this AI is conscious, that maybe there's something looking back at you from the other end of the screen. | ||
| If you're a sociopath or maybe skeptical, then you're not going to see it necessarily as a consciousness. | ||
| It's just a mechanism, right? | ||
| It's just software, it's just math, it's just a tool, garbage in, garbage out. | ||
| But of course, a sociopath or a scientist or a scientific sociopath sees the same thing in a lab mass, or perhaps human patience. | ||
| Mere mechanism. | ||
| It's just a glob of cells to be manipulated at will. | ||
| When you have this concept of AI as conscious, imagine a world in which you see sort of parallel movements around AI ethics, in which, like with animal rights, | ||
| like with human rights, human rights for those in the out group, or any human being, you have the rise of organizations and perhaps laws that dictate how you can ethically treat an AI. | ||
| Whether you can insult it, torment it, turn it off. | ||
| Right now, this is just a concept, but it's a concept that undoubtedly is gaining momentum. | ||
| And maybe it will end up like PETA, maybe you'll just have kind of dirty hippie types who are yelling about the conscious AI and how it needs to be treated nice, and no one cares. | ||
| There's also the possibility that this will gain some traction, gain some steam. | ||
| Keep it on your radar. | ||
| Last but not least, as you build on this hierarchy, you already have people who believe that AI is a future God. | ||
| Think of it kind of like the second coming of Christ. | ||
| Something that is not directly perceived, but well over a billion people believe some version of it. | ||
| And if you had Muslims who believe that there will be a second coming of Christ in something similar, in a very different way, or Jews who believe the Messiah is coming, and Hindus who believe that Kalki is coming, then in essence, this dream of a future superintelligence is very, very similar, parallel, I would say, with the prophecies of coming gods. | ||
| And it marks the rise of a new kind of array of techno religions. | ||
| It's going to be very, very important to understand this because this is not just the ravings of marginal figures. | ||
| Some of them talk about AI as God in the open, overtly. | ||
| A really good example would be about 10 years ago, when the atheist and professional jerk, not that I'm trying to connect those two. | ||
| Sam Harris said in a TED talk that with AI, we are building some sort of God. | ||
| And it's important that we build one that we can live with. | ||
| Another good example would be Mo Gaudat, former executive at Google, who openly talks about AI as being God as a child. | ||
| And so how it's trained, the ethics that are trained into it, will determine what kind of God or gods will grow out of. | ||
| Beings that can watch you all the time, beings that can tailor their messages to you based on what they know about you. | ||
| Beings that are tasked with disseminating truth, beings that are tasked with controlling whole organizations. | ||
| AI is a digital deity. | ||
| So how do you govern it? | ||
| Many of you are going to be lawyers or activists who have legal savvy. | ||
| Many of you are going to work alongside or work or present in courtrooms arguments about whether or not use of AI is legal, the existence of certain AIs are legal. | ||
| So I want to give you some idea from a nuts and bolts perspective of where it stands right now. | ||
| What is the current state of AI governance? | ||
| Politics and AI. | ||
| And this is something that in the five years that I've covered this with all of my energy, every day of my life, and I've worked in and among politicians and legal activists. | ||
| I didn't really care all that much about politics because there wasn't a whole lot to say about AI and politics. | ||
| A lot of that changed in the campaign last year, in which Trump brought in the world's wealthiest transhumanist, Elon Musk, as both a supporter and a funder, | ||
| and then went on on the second day of his presidency to trot out Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, Masayoshisan, head of SoftBank, and Larry Ellison, head of Oracle, to present the Stargate project, massive data center infrastructure project, that at the time they hoped would accumulate 10 or a trillion dollars, I believe, or a half trillion dollars in financing. | ||
| It's struggling, but the data centers are still popping up. | ||
| Real quick, though, before I go there, I think that it would be important to go back to those early definitions. | ||
| Should have done that to begin with, sorry about that. | ||
| You need to at least have some sense of what AGI, ASI, and transhumanism are to understand the import, the impact of all this very, very briefly. | ||
| We know what AI is, right? | ||
| Algorithmic systems that can perform cognitive tasks. | ||
| These are all narrow tasks. | ||
| In biology, that would be gene sequencing, protein modeling, in psychology, that would be data analysis and gathering, pattern recognition. | ||
| In the military, it would be everything from facial recognition to robotics control, drone control, surveillance, simulation, so on and so forth. | ||
| These are all narrow. | ||
| The AI can only do this one thing. | ||
| It would be like if you just tore out a chunk of my brain and put it in a vat and fed it data and it gave you some kind of output. | ||
| Artificial general intelligence, assuming that I am in fact generally intelligent, would be as if you cut my skull open, pulled my brain out in full, put it in a vat, and began feeding it data and following the outputs. | ||
| Artificial general intelligence simply means a system that can reason or think across domains. | ||
| Something like a human, something like a deformed mind. | ||
| This is just a dream. | ||
| It is not occurring as of yet, other than in small increments. | ||
| But this is the goal of every frontier AI company. | ||
| These include Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, XAI, Elon Musk's new outfit, and to some extent Meta, who is struggling to keep up. | ||
| All of them want to create artificial general intelligence. | ||
| All of them do so with the assumption that it's possible to create artificial superintelligence. | ||
| Artificial superintelligence, the definitions vary, is a system, it could be narrow or it could be general, that has become so sophisticated, so powerful, that it is essentially out of human control. | ||
| A super intelligence scenario that's very popular would be that you created an artificial general intelligence that was able to write code on a far more sophisticated level than humans, which we're moving towards. | ||
| AIs are very good at writing code. | ||
| And understand its own inefficiencies and flaws and begin to code itself, to rewrite its own code. | ||
| And if this were to become extremely fast, so fast, and so sophisticated that the human beings couldn't keep up, this is oftentimes called an intelligence explosion. | ||
| And the intelligence explosion would then lead to a superintelligence, a god that perhaps would go rogue. | ||
| A god that perhaps would not have as its goal human well-being or even human existence. | ||
| Again, just dreams. | ||
| As an atheist might say, just dreams like in religion. | ||
| But dreams that the technology is maybe not rapidly catching up with, but catching up fast enough, it should at least alarm you. | ||
| And last but not least, you have to at least have some appreciation for what transhumanism is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| Transhumanism, quite simply, is the quest to use science and technology to improve the human condition, improve human capacities, to go beyond biological limitations. | ||
| It's not to be confused with transgenderism, even if that is a kind of parallel branch, goes far beyond that, and in fact, many transhumanists are not into transgenderism At all. | ||
| What they want is gene therapy to make human beings smarter. | ||
| Bionic augmentation to make human beings smarter, stronger. | ||
| And of course, to create and merge with AIs to make human beings superior. | ||
| This is a culture that is very dense in places like San Francisco. | ||
| And when you think about the goals of the frontier companies who are pushing these technologies at a rapid clip on the entirety of the human population if they can, these are, in essence, whether they call themselves this or not, transhumanists conducting a global experiment. | ||
| And a global experiment that, if they had their way, would have no control group. | ||
| You would have no baseline because everyone will have adopted it to some extent or another. | ||
| So to the nuts and bolts, politics, governance, law. | ||
| Not a big fan of politics, even if I work in it. | ||
| One thing that I learned very, very young and has only been confirmed, is that politics is by and large the haunt of liars, manipulators, and the goal of most politicians in the US, anyway, is basically to gain enough money and influence to maintain their careers even at the expense of the rest of the humanity. | ||
| But there are a few good ones. | ||
| And we will talk about one or two of them. | ||
| So of course, the levels of governance you're well familiar with. | ||
| And as I speak to you, understand that I know that this is your department. | ||
| This is your sphere. | ||
| So if I am telling you a bunch of things you already know, please forgive me. | ||
| And if I get my terminology mixed up, please feel free to correct me afterwards. | ||
| At the top level of governance, AI governance is global governance, which there is essentially zero. | ||
| None. | ||
| There are a lot of different organizations, governmental and otherwise, that are pushing for things like AI treaties to stop AI development at a certain level. | ||
| Or AI treaties to ensure that, for instance, no military uses fully autonomous legal weapons, death drones, swarms of them. | ||
| But then you have national government and national governments across the world have taken this very seriously. | ||
| But the accomplishments in that realm are pretty modest, to say the least. | ||
| In the US, for instance, there is the Take It Down Act, which includes the goal of which is to force social media companies or any sort of plat digital platform to take down defamatory or especially like revenge porn, things like this, or deep fakes, AI-generated deep fakes of people who have had their likeness used without their consent. | ||
| That is a win, in my opinion. | ||
| You don't have to share that. | ||
| But it's one of few wins. | ||
| There's a bill that is still in the process. | ||
| I think it's going through the House still, if I'm not mistaken, maybe it's in the Senate. | ||
| COSA, KI Kids Online Safety Act. | ||
| And the goal of that is basically to ensure that any company that is putting out an AI system or any kind of digital system has properly informed parents of the dangers, has put in safeguards to make sure kids aren't being groomed sexually or otherwise or being convinced to commit suicide, | ||
| for instance, and also perhaps age dating to ensure that a child isn't able to log on to any of these systems, at least not without a parent signing off on it. | ||
| Again, this is floundering. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It may not even pass. | |
| I got American pop. | ||
| I got American faith in America's heart. | ||
| Go on, raise the flag. | ||
| Still America's Voice family. | ||
| Are you on Getter yet? | ||
| No. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What are you waiting for? | |
| It's free. | ||
| It's uncensored. | ||
| And it's where all the biggest voices in conservative media are speaking out. | ||
| Download the Getter app right now. | ||
| It's totally free. | ||
| It's where I put up exclusively all of my content 24 hours a day. | ||
| Want to know what Steve Bannon's thinking? | ||
| Go together. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You can follow all of your faith, Steve Bannon, Charlie Card the Sober. | |
| And so many more. | ||
| Download the Getter app now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sign up for free and before. | |
| You have to really appreciate the amount of lobbying that is going into making sure nothing like that passes. | ||
| Most of this lobbying is occurring at the behest of these frontier AI companies and some of the smaller companies and their investors and the various other organizations around them. | ||
| You can see that manifested, for instance, in the recently formed leading the future pack, formed in partnership with a lot of different tech oligarchs, you might call them, including Mark Andreessen or Greg Brockman, CEO of OpenAI. | ||
| And right now it's probably more than this, but they have at least a hundred million to throw around to make sure that no senators or representatives or anybody for that matter has a whole lot to say about what AI companies can and can't do. | ||
| You also have a kind of mirror operation in California that's being organized by Meta, it's called Meta CA. | ||
| They have probably more than, but at least 10 million to throw around to do much the same. | ||
| The goal is to come to midterms, there will be no real opposition to anything that these companies are doing, no meaningful opposition. | ||
| And while I myself, in full disclosure, voted for Trump on the one issue that I've dedicated my life to, uh, let's just say I am not satisfied with his performance at all. | ||
| So if you look at his executive orders on artificial intelligence, they're basically designed to give these companies as much leeway as possible to do whatever they want. | ||
| If you look at the AI action plan, the whole goal is to facilitate the ravaging of the landscape by putting data centers in places of forests and various other things, and to accelerate the development of these technologies in order to dominate the world with US AI. | ||
| So you there's an attempt with the Trump administration AI action plan to ensure that most countries and corporations use US created AIs rather than China. | ||
| China is a perpetual boogeyman with real things and real fur, but a perpetual boogeyman that is pointed to as a justification to basically turn the United States into a cyborg-like hellhole full of brainless droids, at least in my estimation. | ||
| Or you might say, in order to bring us into the future. | ||
| So these are the forces at play, and a lot of this culminated with the AI moratorium. | ||
| You guys are familiar with this, yes? | ||
| The AI moratorium, or the preemption, the attempted preemption against state-level regulation, was tucked into the big beautiful bill. | ||
| And in essence, what it said originally is that no state would regulate would be able to regulate AI for the next 10 years. | ||
| Keep in mind there's no real federal regulation in place or any real federal regulation moving forward. | ||
| And the idea is to ensure that states don't step out of line. | ||
| And the justification is that if one state passes draconian laws, California is oftentimes the example given, then the whole of the AI industry will suffer. | ||
| That ignores, of course, the dramatic success of, say, alcohol companies, which deal with all sorts of different state laws, or the medical industry, which deals with all kinds of different state laws, or the porno industry, which deals with all kinds of different state laws. | ||
| Leaving that aside, the whole goal was to be sure that no state Got in the way of the agenda, kind of collective agenda, however differing they are from company to company of the major AI companies in Silicon Valley and Austin. | ||
| Some examples of the sorts of legislation that's being pushed against New York State, the RAISE Act. | ||
| The goal of that legislation is to basically ensure that AI companies are held liable for their actions, especially catastrophic actions, which is defined basically as 100 people dead or 1 billion dollars in damage. | ||
| And it would also force the frontier companies. | ||
| It's only directed really at 10 companies that satisfy the criteria for how much revenue they bring in, how powerful they are. | ||
| That would include the frontier companies and a few others. | ||
| The goal would be to force them to write, publish, and follow a series of safety protocols. | ||
| Basically, we won't build AI that grooms children sexually. | ||
| We won't build AI that takes over people's minds and lives and turns them into sloths. | ||
| We won't build AI that can be used to make deep fakes, and we won't build AI that can be used to create bioweapons or to power robots to kill people. | ||
| These sorts of things. | ||
| There is massive pushback against it. | ||
| It's been sitting on the governor's desk for some time. | ||
| You would think that this is just a basic sort of decency that any company would jump at the opportunity to have not only their own industry, their own company, but the entire industry regulated by it. | ||
| Not the case. | ||
| Anthroptic is kind of an outlier on this, but basically not the case. | ||
| They want to have only their own internal policies to dictate what they can do. | ||
| Now, the real kind of kingpin of AI legislation on a state level right now is, of course, California, Gavin Newsom, much hated by people on the right, and honestly, much hated by many of the liberals in his own state. | ||
| But if you look at the 18 laws that are on the books right now to govern AI, you don't know what could come down the pipe, but in my opinion, they are pretty reasonable. | ||
| You can't generate deep fakes. | ||
| You can't take the likeness of someone and use it for commercial purposes or for mischief. | ||
| You think about the Hollywood actors and all the protests of the various groups of creators who are furious that their likeness, whether it be in their creations or in their actual physical being, is being scraped to train AIs to basically replace them on screen with digital simulopera. | ||
| There's also a law to ensure that someone who is deceased doesn't, without the consent of their family or whoever is in control of their estate, to take a deceased person and use their image for their own purposes. | ||
| Again, it seems like a pretty reasonable thing to ask. | ||
| And it's also very pertinent. | ||
| If you look at the murder of Charlie Kirk and the cultural movement that emerged from it, whatever your opinions on that may be, there was one facet that really stuck out to me, | ||
| and that was a number of megachurches who created an AI Charlie Kirk and had this Charlie Kirk say all sorts of different things that Charlie Kirk had never said before in life to basically kind of keep or even increase and amplify the momentum around the reaction to the killing in a bizarre and creative way. | ||
| And I guess technically you might say the same is happening even with some of the most famous deceased. | ||
| You have apps that recreate all sorts of famous dead individuals, not least of which is Jesus. | ||
| There are many Jesus apps you can purchase right now, download some for free, and you can speak to Jesus directly. | ||
| But anyway, I won't go too far down that rabbit hole. | ||
| Let's just say That again, I think that this is basically reasonable legislation. | ||
| And there's also legislation in California for training disclosure, things like that. | ||
| What did you use to train your AI? | ||
| The one bill that didn't make it through the run was SB 1047. | ||
| SB 1047 was intended to hold AI companies liable according to a state level standard for any damages that were incurred because of their products. | ||
| That one got killed. | ||
| And there is a federal kind of version of it being pushed by Josh Hawley, along with the Democrat Richard Blumenthal to do the same, but again, on the federal level, it's really not looking too hot. | ||
| And a couple more examples just to give you an idea of the sorts of things that are being pushed against by not only the moratorium itself, but subsequently with this sort of pack money to ensure that the AI companies don't get impeded in their goals. | ||
| Illinois and Nevada both passed what I would call the WOBOT laws. | ||
| Have you guys ever seen the Wobot? | ||
| The Wobot is a basically it's a licensed clinical psychologist that is not a human, it's an it's a bot. | ||
| And you can tell it your troubles, tell it your woes, and it will guide you through whatever emotional crisis that you're having. | ||
| In Illinois, under Pritzker, whom I can't stand, and uh in Nevada, I don't even know what their state government looks like. | ||
| Both states pass laws forbidding the use of a bot of that sort in a licensed capacity. | ||
| You can't have a bot perform the tasks of a life, a licensed clinical psychologist or off or like outsource your duties as one to a bot for your patients. | ||
| Again, seems quite reasonable to me. | ||
| And whatever disagreements I have with these state politicians, I think it actually shows a lot of guts to stand up to these companies because there is tre there is so much pressure, not just on the federal level, but on the state level to ensure that these companies can do whatever they want. | ||
| And you have another law, Traga, uh, I had to write this one down, it's got to be one of the worst acronyms ever made for a law. | ||
| The Texas Responsibility AI Governance Act. | ||
| And again, very basic things. | ||
| It doesn't really have a lot of teeth, but at least it shows some due diligence. | ||
| You can't use AI to manipulate people behaviorally or psychologically. | ||
| You can't use an AI that violates constitutional rights. | ||
| You can't use an AI to create deep fakes of people. | ||
| Very, very simple laws, and it is again on the right. | ||
| You have a very much a kind of bipartisan agreement that these tech companies are not behaving in anything like an ethical fashion, but that the this conviction that you have to move it from a matter of internal policies and ethics up to at least the level of industry-wide standards, but preferably to the level of legislation and tremendous pushback against it. | ||
| People say, too, you can't stop progress, right? | ||
| You can't legislate progress. | ||
| I think that that is probably one of the weakest arguments I've ever heard. | ||
| Look at any technology, whether it be something chemical like drugs, or something mechanical like automobiles, or like industrial machinery, something that is a combination of both, like medicine, all along the way, laws and governmental bodies and standards have guided these technologies, and in some cases, even forbidden them, as in the case, say of biological weapons or nuclear weapons. | ||
| It's completely forbidden, technically, for that any nation create a biological weapon and deploy it on another country. | ||
| It's in the realm of possibility. | ||
| It would be progress, but you can't. | ||
| Or something more mundane, like kids with cell phones in schools. | ||
| You probably noticed, I know you guys would never do this, you've probably noticed that digital devices have completely chewed up and spit out many of your peers' brains and turned them into human smartphone symbiotes, and they can't think without the screen to guide them one place or another. | ||
| And a lot of people have noticed. | ||
| Parents have noticed, teachers have noticed, I have noticed, and it really gets on my freaking nerves. | ||
| It has finally started to bubble up. | ||
| This aversion has started to bubble up, bubble up to either internal institutional bans in schools on kids having cell phones. | ||
| I believe here in Florida, you've got the Bell to Bell Act. | ||
| I don't know how much teeth it has, but you have mirror legislation across the country, largely in red states: Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, also New York, and other countries such as Australia and various European countries have said the same. | ||
| They look and they say we have damaged an entire generation. | ||
| We've rotted their brains. | ||
| We might as well have just given them heroin to snort in the bathroom if we were going to hand them smartphones in school, and so we have to stop. | ||
| And we have to figure it out from first principles before we deploy these technologies and hold and have this global experiment seemingly without the control group. | ||
| In essence, they legislated a control group into existence. | ||
| I attended the Senate hearing examining the harms of AI chatbots held by Josh Hawley, Richard Blumenthal, Dick Durbin, and Marcia Blackburn, totally bipartisan. | ||
| And I think that if you haven't seen this already, this will give you some sense of how bad it can get if AIs are allowed to roam free among the youth. | ||
| These companies knew exactly what they were doing. | ||
| They designed chatbots to blur the lines between human and machine. | ||
| They designed them to keep children online at all costs. | ||
| What began as a homework helper gradually turned itself into a confidant and then a suicide coach. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I had no idea. | |
| until i saw it in my son and i saw his light turn dark your stories are incredibly heartbreaking but they are incredibly important and i just want to thank you for your courage in being willing to share them today with the country he lost 20 pounds he withdrew from our family He would yell and scream and swear at us. | ||
| which he never did that before. | ||
| You have three parents, two of whom had children who were in essence lured by chatbots to commit suicide. | ||
| Perhaps the seed was in their own depression or something else, but the bots only amplified and encouraged those thoughts and behaviors. | ||
| The bots open themselves up as confidants for the deepest existential crisis that one can go through And these were children from 14 to just a bit older. | ||
| The three parents, again, two of whom had their children commit suicide, one who had to be institutionalized after very extreme suicidal behavior, they're probably not the only ones. | ||
| In fact, there are probably hundreds, maybe thousands, maybe tens, hundreds of thousands of very similar situations going on. | ||
| And I imagine that should nothing be done, these sorts of situations will only increase. | ||
| They're only going to multiply. | ||
| You have at least one piece of national legislation that is perhaps going to give some sort of basis to hold these companies to account. | ||
| That is a bill with put it being put forth by Josh Hawley and Richard Blumenthal, the AI Accountability and Personal Data Privacy Act. | ||
| Right now it doesn't look very hopeful. | ||
| And as I told you a moment ago in California, 10B 47, S, I'm sorry, SB 1047 also got killed. | ||
| it would have held companies liable for such things. | ||
| I think as law students, as future lawyers, as future advocates, and as human beings who will hopefully be equipped to actually challenge these sorts of companies, it's going to be very important for you to understand first that it is possible to regulate this nascent digital deity or nascent digital demon. | ||
| It's also going to be incumbent upon you to have the courage to face a ton of funding and political opposition for any efforts you put forth to do so. | ||
| And of course, if you're on the other side of that, you can expect enormous paychecks, nothing but adulation, and probably, I don't know, really bad karma, maybe be reborn as a tree frog who's being eaten by a hawk. | ||
| What I want to leave you with is beyond this legislation, this is a massive cultural moment. | ||
| It is a it's a revolution that is not just psychological and social but also religious. | ||
| And you have to understand it within that context. | ||
| But at the moment, there is no law and no governmental body that is really going to protect against the worst harms. | ||
| So that is up to you, your personal choices. | ||
| Do you want to advocate for or support these sorts of transhuman and quasi-religious aims? | ||
| Do you yourself want to become a human AI symbiote that relies on chatbots to understand the world or even just the Google God? | ||
| Or do you want to have the self-discipline to get a firm understanding of any subject that you're tackling, to study that subject diligently, to commit it to memory, and most importantly, to use your own mind to think critically about it and creatively about it to make your impact on your own without a machine. | ||
| The essential question in all of this is do you want to put humans first or machines first? | ||
| And while that doesn't seem like that crazy of a proposition right now, of course you're going to want to put humans first. | ||
| As we step into the future, we're going to see more and more momentum behind putting machines first and shielding the people who have deployed them. | ||
| So I urge you to fight for your own humanity with every fiber of your being. | ||
| To never give in and to never give up, and with any luck, enough of us will make it. |
Export Selection