July 1, 2025 - Jim Fetzer
16:06
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Prologue Introducing Walkabot by Paul Kudenick. | |
| We know that busy modern people like you have so much on their hands that you often have no room for the more basic pleasures in life. | |
| With social media to update, emails to check, and Zoom meetings to attend, sometimes there's not even time to go for a walk. | |
| But now, thanks to Walkabot, you can stretch your legs and see the neighborhood without leaving your comfy home or office. | |
| You enjoy some badly needed exercise and social intercourse while carrying on doing all the things you need to do online. | |
| The Walkabot solution features the innovative combination of a compact virtual treadmill with a state-of-the-art robot, whose efficacy has been battle-proven in the war on preschool terrorists in Greater Israel. | |
| Using the device of your choice, you can watch, in real time, the progress of your walk in the real outside world. | |
| A great advantage is that you will not have to brave the elements yourself. | |
| Although, for lovers of realism, our optional rain e-day feature will spray you with one of eight levels of water jet, ranging from spittin' right up to pissin'. | |
| You can also purchase our luxury handmade, organic gluten-free plastic sheeting to protect the carpet. | |
| Our Walk-Abot can be programmed for any length of stroll, along any route you choose. | |
| It will also take the dog with it, or a child, over the age of two, masked and fully vaccinated. | |
| It will even stop for a chat with the neighbors. | |
| Yes, that's right. | |
| We provide more than 50 AI conversation options, starting from weather winges and passing up through the match last night to all bloody politicians are the same, and the world is a total mess. | |
| Could you recommend a good euthanasia clinic? | |
| In the interests of your safety, though, no conspiracy theories or anti-Semitic tropes will be tolerated, and the authorities will be alerted if any person encountered introduces such illegal material into the conversation. | |
| As Walkabot catches on, your robot will no doubt be bumping into your neighbors' versions and enjoying AI-only conversations entirely free of human involvement. | |
| Welcome to the fantastic fun-filled future. | |
| Incidentally, if you find your real-life neighbors dull, ugly, or unpleasant, why not upgrade to Walk-Abot Virtual Paradise, where they can be replaced by AI-created individuals designed to suit your personal preferences? | |
| This cutting-edge feature even allows you to virtually alter the ethnic makeup of your part of town to best answer the demands of your specific psychological safety and well-being. | |
| Walk-a-bot. | |
| We go for a walk, so you don't have to. | |
| We go for a walk. | |
| The body is everywhere assaulted by all of our new media, a state which has resulted in deep disorientation of intellect and destabilization of culture throughout the world. | |
| In the age of disembodied communication, the meaning and significance and experience of the body is utterly transformed and distorted. | |
| Eric McLuhan. | |
| The greatest story never written. | |
| Notes from the Atlantis Bureau by Eric Francis Coppolino. | |
| I think there is a world market for about five computers. | |
| Thomas Watson, IBM's CEO in the 1940s. | |
| There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home. | |
| Ken Olson, President of Digital Equipment Corporation 1977. | |
| What's it all about? | |
| It's happening right before every sense, except for smell and taste, loss of which is attributed to an as-yet unnamed disease that I call digititis, since on the internet you cannot taste or smell anything. | |
| In case you're missing the connection, what really happened in 2020 is that the world became even more digitised, very fast, all at once. | |
| All that had not been sucked up got sucked up. | |
| Harvard and the daycare turned into Netflix, and people claim to lose the only two senses that do not translate into the digital environment. | |
| And as for the next war in West Asia, specifically that between Israel and Iran, there is a dual connection. | |
| First, the collapse of identity makes people and countries aggressive. | |
| It's impossible for a country to know who and what it is under digital conditions. | |
| Second, we are witnessing jockeying for global dominance in the forthcoming new world of AI. | |
| Finally, Sam Altman has said that a significant fraction of the world's electricity should go to powering AI. | |
| Both Meta and Microsoft have entered nuclear power deals with energy providers, but oil will become increasingly precious as demand increases and supplies run low. | |
| Burning gas and oil is still the most accessible way to make electricity, and Iran has plenty of the stuff. | |
| The problem would smell like. | |
| What if we could smell the AI problem? | |
| What would it smell like? | |
| Perhaps a volatile solvent that dissolves the myelin sheaths that protect your nerves? | |
| It would smell like the old dry cleaning fluid. | |
| That said, I've decided to take a more objective approach to the AI problem. | |
| As you've likely heard in my broadcasts and read in prior articles, I have not held back my profound concerns. | |
| One of them is the lack of appropriate responses by nearly everyone, by which I mean seeing the problem and talking about it. | |
| It occurs to me that nobody knows what to do or what to say except maybe groan or to download the Meta or OpenAI app that will finally help you get your life in order. | |
| Maybe getting a realistic girlfriend from Honey AI is the thing to do. | |
| By taking an objective approach, I mean that going forward, I will be descriptive and state my concerns. | |
| I've decided that it's not my job to wake anyone up. | |
| My job is to stay awake. | |
| I'm a reporter and a reporter's job is to tell you what's happening, what I've learned any given day or week. | |
| The truth is a controversial topic. | |
| My service is to be a fair witness. | |
| Determining the truth is up to you. | |
| First, a story about airplanes. | |
| For a long time, the notion that humans could fly was considered impossible. | |
| Then through the late 19th century, More and more outrageous machines were created that ended up in a heap. | |
| Then the Wright brothers started to figure it out. | |
| After extensive reading about flight dynamics and birds, their first task was to build the world's biggest kite and from there learn how to build gliders. | |
| The concept was flight without the propulsion, tethered to the ground. | |
| They learned about the dynamics of where the air met the canvas surfaces of their creation. | |
| Their superpower was being bicycle guys. | |
| That meant simplicity, and they wanted to make the thing work for its own sake, for the sport of it, as Orville Wright later said. | |
| They were not interested in wealth and fame. | |
| After a series of experiments, they came up with an engine reliable enough, powerful enough, and light enough to loft an airplane and sustain flight. | |
| On the morning of December 17th, 1903, they succeeded. | |
| The public reaction was tepid. | |
| They moved the operation from the outer banks to the world's first airfield, a cow pasture outside of Dayton. | |
| There they succeeded in mastering powered flight, making many laps around Huffman Prairie, an 84-acre field, and living to tell the story. | |
| A story about the press. | |
| The local newspaper ignored their success. | |
| I read an interview with the then-editor, who himself seemed confounded that he hadn't covered the story. | |
| World War One and Flying Aces came soon after. | |
| Aviation is one of the most important technologies of our lifetimes, and it's astounding to think there was a time when nobody much cared. | |
| This is typical of the relationship between the press, meaning the news media generally, and technology. | |
| They don't understand it, they don't really care, and it's only interesting if they can make money or have a big sensation. | |
| You cannot trust most reporters to get a technology story right. | |
| Today we do irrelevant in the other direction. | |
| Oh, how cool! | |
| Buy or buy into that thing. | |
| And today we are into an issue where the implications are being sold as technological, but are actually profoundly spiritual in their impact and influence. | |
| By spiritual, I mean that this is about our relationship to existence, to ourselves, and to whatever you think of as God. | |
| If that is new territory for you, then the AI problem will seem irrelevant. | |
| If you understand something about the relationships involved and where AI is infiltrating and disrupting them, it will make a lot more sense. | |
| Nobody looks back. | |
| When you sent your first email or made your first online purchase, did you imagine that hundreds of massive shopping malls would be turned into ghost towns? | |
| By the 1980s, malls had another extremely important function in the US and elsewhere. | |
| They served as the town square. | |
| They were the place kids socialised and old people went to have a safe, dry place to walk around and get some exercise. | |
| When the iPhone came out, who exactly imagined that it would rearrange all of our social relationships, turn people into dopamine addicts, convert teenagers into depressed, antisocial zombies, and then transform the entire internet into pay-to-play spam? | |
| Who associated the cell phone or the iPhone with being stalked, tracked, traced and spied on? | |
| My first phone, obtained in 2001, was the last one without GPS, and I had naively resolved to keep it forever for that reason. | |
| Who is looking forward? | |
| A skim of the headlines. | |
| Here are some of the headlines my team is tracking. | |
| Notice that there is no discussion of ethics. | |
| There is no discussion of what this is going to do to children when they are staring at AI-generated YouTube channels. | |
| Anyway, here goes. | |
| The headlines as they have been arriving at the Planet Wave's Atlantis desk. | |
| Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly recruiting a team to build a super intelligence. | |
| Millenaire Futurist creating mutant humans reveals when new race will make ordinary people obsolete. | |
| Using AI makes you stupid, researchers find. | |
| Polish company employs world's first ever AI humanoid robot CEO. | |
| And now from Magics, create meta-ads using the AI ad generator. | |
| Are you concerned yet? | |
| Here are some more. | |
| Kids are watching brain-melting AI generated videos on YouTube. | |
| The AI revolution is likely to drive up your electricity bill. | |
| Here's why. | |
| Nvidia CEO, you won't lose your job to AI. | |
| You'll lose your job to somebody who uses AI. | |
| If we let AI tell our stories, we'll be lost in the dark. | |
| Elon Musk calls Groke answer a major fail after it highlights political violence caused by MAGA supporters. | |
| Rokum Sokum, Robot Martial Arts Competition. | |
| China has held the world's first robot martial arts tournament, and I can't think of a single thing that could possibly go wrong. | |
| Behind the curtain, what if predictions of humanity destroying AI are right? | |
| Some signs of AI model collapse begin to reveal themselves. | |
| Amazon to test humanoid robots for package delivery with Rivian electric vans. | |
| Amazon CEO tells employees to expect cuts to white-collar jobs because of AI. | |
| Rossin reports, how AI may be driving up your rent. | |
| Deception, cheating and lying, now integrated with every computer network on earth. | |
| AI godfather Yoshua Benjio says current AI models are showing dangerous behaviours like deception, cheating and lying. | |
| Elon Musk concerned by ChatGPT ignoring seven shutdown commands in a row during this controlled test of OpenAI's O3AI model. | |
| Anthropic unveils custom AI models for US national security customers. | |
| Top Google exec says AI will rival humans in just five years and predicts we'll colonise the galaxy in 2030, but he draws the line at robot nurses. | |
| Metter's Mark Zuckerberg says most physical things we have aren't going to need to be there in the future. | |
| It will all be holograms. | |
| This is a total takeover of your existence. | |
| So the big story is that we are now in our Atlantis moment. | |
| Put together the pieces and you will see that what we are calling AI should really stand for all-inclusive. | |
| Every last thing is being swallowed. | |
| This is being pushed on us fast and from every conceivable angle, whether it's managing your business or a girlfriend who will undress when you tell her to. | |
| The old medium in its entirety becomes the content of the new medium. | |
| The old medium is the world itself and everything written or created in recorded history. | |
| The new medium is AI, as daunting as God Almighty, but neither creative nor loving. | |
| The Atlantis moment is that we are at the tipping point where humans and human society are becoming 100% the product of their technology. | |
| This is the point where we lose control. | |
| This is what the myth of Atlantis is about. | |
| They lost control of their technology and became its product. | |
| And the story here is, does humanity sink under the waves? | |
| Or do we wake up and resist and regain control? | |
| If that can even be done, do we even try? | |
| What is the nature of the conversation? | |
| The headlines, which are largely about externals, leave out two issues. | |
| First is the ethical issue. | |
| It's all just assumed to be part of progress. | |
| The morality of it all be damped. | |
| We want return on investment, shareholder value, download the app. | |
| Second, and closely related is what this is doing to our concept of being human. | |
| That's not in the future. | |
| That's right now. | |
| It's about how you conceive of yourself and of your existence, what you think your purpose is, which means your concept of why you are alive and what you're doing here. | |
| The ultimate spiritual issue. | |
| This is a spiritual issue. | |
| In fact, it's the ultimate spiritual issue ever. | |
| It's about the levelling of all that makes us human, our creativity, our sensitivity, our problem-solving abilities, or love of an intellectual or artistic challenge, and the human privilege of grappling with matters of right and wrong. | |
| Our ability to relate to one another as natural people. | |
| Most people did not make such good use of their natural intelligence. | |
| Nearly everyone has quite a lot, but utilising it requires a kind of autonomy and courage that are totally alien and can get you in trouble. | |
| Thinking is hard work for many, so this total onrush and onslaught of the artificial kind may come as a relief. | |
| It's being sold as a panacea. | |
| And so people will willingly give up their ability to think and blame it all on the ads that we're encouraging them to do so. | |
| Don't be surprised if your last sentient thought goes something like, I wish I had not given up so easily. | |
| I don't know if there's still time. | |
| I'm not planning on giving up so easily. | |
| And I'm here to tell the developing, late-breaking story of what humanity does, as it does it, or as it does nothing. |
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