This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit radixjournal.substack.comRichard begins talking about why he’s come to respect Ye-ism and why it’s different than other 3rd-party or populist campaigns. The conversation then moves into the territory of Artificial Intelligence. In the free selection, Richard strongly argues that transcendent AI is a Hollywood metaphor and, in fact, imp…
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| We have actually used language for a shorter amount of time than we would imagine. | |
| And, you know, dogs can understand words. | |
| I'm not sure a dog quite has a grammar, but they understand a sound wave as indicating something. | |
| A dog knows its name. | |
| If he hears the word walk or... | |
| Dinner. | |
| And he perks up and is going to look at you and be like, oh, walk. | |
| Yeah, that sounds great. | |
| Yeah, let's do it. | |
| So he understands language to some extent, but there's no actual grammar or logic exactly. | |
| Now, you know, we're homo sapiens. | |
| So, you know, wise man, the rational animal or something like that. | |
| That is actually extremely incorrect. | |
| I actually just saw something about this today. | |
| There was an experiment in Germany in which fish have a sense of numbers. | |
| They have a sense of a larger and a smaller number. | |
| And they can actually engage in a sort of addition to some extent. | |
| And they don't have a frontal brain anywhere close to the extent that we have one. | |
| We might even overestimate the head as the seat of reason or something. | |
| We have reason in our spinal cord. | |
| And I've used this metaphor quite a bit, and so I apologize if people are getting bored of it, but there is literally no time to think if you are standing at a baseball plate and someone is throwing 70, 80, 90, 100 miles per hour. | |
| You cannot think in that split second when you determine what pitch. | |
| Is it a curve? | |
| Is it a fastball? | |
| Is it a changeup? | |
| Is it inside? | |
| Is it outside? | |
| Is this the pitch I want to hit? | |
| You have absolutely no time to think that. | |
| And yet you do. | |
| The idea that some of these baseball players could explain to you how a curveball curves, they can't. | |
| But they just do it and they know it in their bones. | |
| Maybe kind of literally in their bones. | |
| A outfielder, he hears a crack off the bat. | |
| The audible level of the crack gives him information. | |
| He sees the ball, maybe even kind of peripherally to some degree, and he sees it travel like 50 feet, and he estimates exactly where he should run to. | |
| And he hops to the exact spot, opens up his glove, and in a lackadaisical manner catches it. | |
| There is reason, mathematics, rationality in our spinal cord. | |
| And we kind of don't grasp this. | |
| And your thinking consciousness, when you're using language, it is kind of almost like a late stage of this. | |
| And there also have been experiments, I think I've mentioned these to other people, and I'll mention two. | |
| One of which is that... | |
| Your muscles will engage before you think to pick up your coffee. | |
| Now, does that mean that we're all predetermined? | |
| No, it does not mean that at all. | |
| What it means is that you are telling yourself in your mind using language, I want coffee, as a kind of post-facto rationalization of what you are instinctively doing. | |
| Another thing. | |
| So there's an experiment that's done where they're blinded and they tell people to pick up objects and they say, we want you to judge the texture of these objects. | |
| And so you'll pick one up that will be like furry and you'll pick up another one that will be slick. | |
| And then they'll say which object was heavier and people will get it. | |
| What that indicates, that might sound like dumb or obvious. | |
| No, it's not dumb or obvious. | |
| What that means, Is that not only are they engaged in reason, they're engaging in judgment unconsciously. | |
| You are thinking, your language comes kind of, it's like an after effect in a way. | |
| And we developed language, and it's obviously immensely powerful, but we kind of shouldn't overestimate it. | |
| We act in certain ways that are... | |
| Amazing and miraculous long before our language mind even gets its pants on in the morning. | |
| And why I say all of this is that AI is nothing if not language. | |
| I mean, it is computer code. | |
| And ultimately, if you want to just reduce it to like the most basic thing, it is still language. | |
| It is a binary, a one or a zero. | |
| Machine code. | |
| The most basic kind of thing. | |
| It is pure language. | |
| What I am saying is that there's a kind of overestimation of language in these people who worry about like AI transcending itself or taking over the world or something like that. | |
| It kind of can't think on some level. | |
| Now, language matters. | |
| Language affects us. | |
| Language, our internal monologue is our way of rationalizing behavior. | |
| It's also our way of kind of like It's a kind of superego. | |
| You could say it kind of like directs us and so on. | |
| But it also shouldn't be overestimated. | |
| We're biology. | |
| We have instincts. | |
| There were men around before language. | |
| We got on. | |
| We built campfires and hunted shit and had sex and reproduced and raised children and did a lot of stuff. | |
| You know? | |
| None of that is possibly available in the computer. | |
| The computer is pure code. | |
| So this notion that it's anything other than some logical thing and that it's going to be able to think for itself or overcome itself, I just find ridiculous. | |
| And it's just based on a fundamental... |