Futuristic #20 – Cam’s 9 Futures

FUT 20

[00:00:00] Steve:

 

[00:00:06] Cameron: Welcome to Futuristic, episode 2 0 20. Venti

[00:00:14] Cameron: in your Native Language, Steven Sammartino Mr.

[00:00:19] Steve: Venti. Also

[00:00:21] Cameron: Mr. Sammartino

[00:00:22] Steve: Mr. Sammartino Mr. Steve

[00:00:23] Cameron: Every time your name has come up,

[00:00:25] Steve: with the fraudulent Behaviour.

[00:00:27] Cameron: time there’s a tick tock of yours that pops up. Fox, wherever he is, dashes in and goes. That’s Mr. Sammartino Mr.

[00:00:34] Cameron: Steve Sammartino Mr. Sammartino Mr. Steve Sammartino. He loves it. He says, there, there’s, there’s that rich guy.

[00:00:42] Cameron: He thinks your, your name is the rich guy. There’s that rich

[00:00:45] Cameron: guy.

[00:00:47] Steve: I don’t know about that. Anyway, that’s uh, yeah, and I just love that. That was actually a Beach Boys thing, which I had no

[00:00:56] Cameron: Have you heard that yet?

[00:00:57] Steve: You know, everything is a remix. You haven’t, but I looked it up. But it reminds me of the, everything is a remix, which was one of the great Ted talks when Ted talks were great. Uh, the guy who sort of, I

[00:01:12] Steve: forget his name. Uh, yeah. And he just showed so many things and how they were reinvented, you know, through music and culture and product. And it does remind me that.

[00:01:23] Steve: this whole idea of cultural appropriation is insane. It’s insanity because everything is a, is a remix and sharing and,

[00:01:31] Cameron: And also the criticisms of ai. Well, it’s just taking

[00:01:33] Cameron: other people’s work and repurposing it.

[00:01:36] Cameron: Yeah. That’s

[00:01:38] Steve: yeah. Really? what. a surprise.

[00:01:40] Cameron: That’s what all

[00:01:40] Cameron: culture is based on taking stuff that came before and you know, adding to it or move it around. Oh

[00:01:46] Steve: Yeah. And Cory Doctorow takes it. He takes it to a next level where. And I, I can sense the, the grimace in your face there. You, you used to be a Doctorow fan, and you’ve fallen off the wagon. Look, he gets a bit heavy on some things, but the one thing I saw him do a talk on where he said Everything is a copy, including our DNA, it’s, it’s essentially, it’s linked to everything that we are biologically, not just from a, a learning perspective Anyway.

[00:02:12] Cameron: No, I was still a huge fan of Doctorow, obviously huge fan of Noam Chomsky, but,

[00:02:18] Cameron: you know, every time I read their views on AI and I, I read Corey every day, you know, I read his blog every day and I’m

[00:02:23] Cameron: like, dude, like, how do you

[00:02:26] Cameron: not get this? Like,

[00:02:27] Cameron: seriously, you know what it reminds me of in a way,

[00:02:31] Cameron: and I I, I don’t wanna get down a rabbit

[00:02:34] Cameron: hole here, but I’m also a fan of Sam

[00:02:36] Cameron: Harris.

[00:02:37] Cameron: Particularly his no free will

[00:02:39] Cameron: stuff. ’cause obviously I don’t believe in free will. Literally wrote a, the book about it. But his whole thing about Muslims, I

[00:02:46] Cameron: don’t get, I was listening to his podcast the other day and he is talking about Israel and Gaza and he was the, the podcast was entitled something like Five

[00:02:53] Cameron: Myths About Gaza or something, Israel Gaza Conflict.

[00:02:56] Cameron: Oh, I’ll check it out. And his first one is talking about how there

[00:02:59] Cameron: is no peaceful solution for Israel. He said there is no way That they can achieve, you know, peace through peace and diplomacy. They have to basically, they have to be violent. In order to, for them

[00:03:12] Cameron: to achieve their

[00:03:13] Cameron: ends. And, uh, but he never stops and says.

[00:03:17] Cameron: But the same is also true for the Palestinians. The Palestinians have been oppressed and occupied for 70 years from their perspective, or particularly some of them, or particularly Hamasa’s perspective. There is no alternative for them to get justice than through violence. They’ve tried everything else for 70 years, it’s got them nowhere, just there’s more and more settlements happening, but he can’t even see that side of the argument.

[00:03:41] Cameron: Like there’s this cognitive bias, this cognitive blindness where he can’t even see that. And I feel that with Corey, like I I, his anger and vituperousness about, uh, artificial

[00:03:54] Steve: stop. Vituperousness, did you just did you just say Vituperousness. I’m, I’m gonna admit, I actually, I’ve never heard that term before. I like it and I want to use it at some point later tonight, casually as though I’ve been using it for years.

[00:04:11] Cameron: Tu let me just, uh, vituperative, uh, bitter and abusive.

[00:04:19] Steve: Cool. That’ll, I’ll be, that’s tonight.

[00:04:22] Cameron: Just as bitterness and anger towards it. I, I don’t get it. But anyway. What is one thing of note you did that involved ai, uh, since we last spoke two weeks ago, Steve?

[00:04:38] Steve: I made some songs for my boy’s birthday and I used the tool that you sent me last week, uh, which was called Yeah.

[00:04:50] Steve: suno.ai. And while it wasn’t great, the song that it turned out, it wasn’t far from some of the stuff that you hear on Spotify, just quietly. And this is one of the interesting things is that given so much music is now done on loops and sampling of existing guitar and drum sounds that are just remixed and remashed and you have no timbre and differentiation and acoustic instruments which create, uh, different sound dynamics.

[00:05:21] Steve: I can’t see it being far away from delivering some pretty good music. Uh, I, I put in some of the things that my son likes, uh, and is good at, and got a rap song made about him, and it blew his mind. He loved it. He le he was, he was psyched. He really, really enjoyed it. So I, I, I did like quite a few songs in different style styles, I’ve gotta tell you, especially the pop.

[00:05:45] Steve: And it, it sounds a lot like Pop does now. I reckon The Rock is harder because you can’t quite get those sounds that you used to get. But the pop stuff was really similar. And the other thing I did was a radio interview with, um, three a w on brain machine interfaces, which was, uh, they wanted to know where we could go with medicine.

[00:06:04] Steve: And obviously I, you know, I’m not an expert in that, but I looked up, you know, some of the ramifications, I’ve written about it before on brain machine interface and brain computer interfaces. I mean, and really, uh, the thing that Kurzweil talks about and even. Uh, Kevin Kelly is we we’re gonna end up with a split in the species, you know, Neo humans and let’s call them Luddite humans.

[00:06:25] Steve: And I talked a little bit about nanotechnology, and you’ll love this. So ThreadW gravitated towards the, okay, so who’s gonna be able to afford the upgrades? Are we about to get another delineation in wealth between those who have access to resources which are inside your brain? I mean, forget private school.

[00:06:41] Steve: I’ve just uploaded whatever I need to know and I’ve got a massive advantage. So that was something I did this week.

[00:06:47] Cameron: Yeah, that’s a really interesting conversation, which we can do a little bit later on because some of my futures forecast involves that. But, but going back to Sunoo ai, you just reminded me that, um, back in Christmastime, I started playing with that when we were on a break and I did the futuristic theme in it.

[00:07:05] Cameron: I’m gonna play it. Hopefully you’ll be able to, uh, hear this come through the speakers.

[00:07:26] Steve: Yeah, I did, but I don’t think we’re wasting time. I just wanna point that?

[00:07:29] Steve: out.

[00:07:30] Cameron: Uh, so for people who haven’t checked out SUNO ai, it’s text to music generation, like Dali three or Mid Journey is Text to image. This is text to music. You just tell it what you want the song to be about. You pick a style and it will write the lyrics and the music takes a minute, pumps out a song for you.

[00:07:50] Cameron: It’s really, uh, like it’s not a, again, it’s like everything that AI generates by itself not gonna win any awards. But the fact that it can do it

[00:08:01] Cameron: to that level is. Absolutely astounding. And you

[00:08:06] Cameron: just think, well, where’s It gonna be a year from now, two years, five

[00:08:10] Cameron: years from now? It’s gonna be insane. And um, speaking of which, I dunno if you saw this in the ABC today. Uh, the, uh, I think it’s the Brisbane art,

[00:08:19] Cameron: um, Prize that they have every year. They’ve just announced that pictures. It’s a Brisbane photography, um, uh, competition. I think they’ve just announced today that, um, photographs created in whole or in part by artificial intelligence are acceptable. Uh, starting this year’s competition now.

[00:08:51] Cameron: Uh, I just think, I mean, I think that’s great and I think it’s moving so quickly. Like, uh, a a year ago people were freaking out. Over AI and art and what it all meant, AI and education. Dunno if you saw this, but the departments of Education in Australia have just announced, uh, like a week or so ago, that they’re going, they’re rolling out policy for how to use AI in education in Australia.

[00:09:21] Cameron: They’re, they’ve finally got on the front

[00:09:22] Cameron: foot with it. They’re gonna teach kids. They basically said, look, we accept that AI’s here to stay. It’s a reality. It’s gonna be a reality in these kids’ lives. We need to be showing them how to use it, where to

[00:09:31] Cameron: use it, when to use it. So, you know, we, in a year, we’ve gone from

[00:09:37] Cameron: AI is the devil and it’s gonna destroy education.

[00:09:40] Cameron: It’s gonna

[00:09:40] Cameron: destroy art. In a year, two organizations going, you know what, this is legitimate. And the,

[00:09:47] Cameron: it’s the Brisbane, Portrait, Prize, I just looked it up on the ABC. There’s, you know, a couple of different sides of this, of different opinions, uh, for and against, but. Um, like one guy, Brisbane photographer, Glenn Hunt says, it’s like, what’s the point?

[00:10:03] Cameron: What’s the point of having a competition where you’re going up against the computer? It’s not chess, but, uh,

[00:10:12] Cameron: this other guy says, who’s the

[00:10:17] Cameron: other guy? Uh, somebody, somebody else in this was

[00:10:21] Cameron: saying it’s a, it’s a tool. you know, you know, it, it, it

[00:10:26] Cameron: like any other tool, it’s a tool for how much you use it. it’s a, it’s a, here we go, ai.

[00:10:31] Cameron: Hold on. This is, uh, an organizer of

[00:10:35] Cameron: the BPP said The intention of allowing AI entries in this year’s

[00:10:41] Cameron: prize is not to supplant more traditional art forms, but to acknowledge that the definition of art is not stagnant. Will always grow and reflect societal change. To clarify some misconceptions around our decision to allow AI artworks in this year’s prize, those who enter a whole or in part AI artwork must provide a brief description of the AI tools and methodologies employed in the creation process.

[00:11:06] Cameron: And BPP reserves the right

[00:11:08] Cameron: to publish this information alongside the exhibited artwork to promote transparency. So I think that’s a really smart approach. Okay. It’s an artwork, it’s tools that are using to create art in whole or in part. And we will assess whether or not we think it’s good or not as an art, as a piece of art, as a, as a portrait.

[00:11:29] Cameron: But, uh, allowing it in, giving it fuller quality as

[00:11:33] Cameron: a

[00:11:34] Cameron: creation, a tool of

[00:11:35] Cameron: creation, I think is, uh, smart. So hats off to the Brisbane, Portrait, Prize

[00:11:41] Steve: Well, the word definitions is an interesting one, and I think that we’re in a really big state of flux in many areas on how we

[00:11:49] Steve: define things in the world. Everything from,

[00:11:52] Steve: you know, gender to, to what is human, to cyborgs, to art, uh, you know, we even media what is, you know, uh, a Google and Facebook media companies in disguise, not really a technology company.

[00:12:04] Steve: So we are through this revolution, redefining many things, you know, from a social and technological construct. So that becomes really important. I, I like their approach. I, I mean, it, it does seem as though pretty soon, we’ll, we will just end up with categories and, and it’ll be a little bit like chess. So, in chess, and you know this, well as a, an avid, you know, player.

[00:12:26] Steve: We have human versus human. You know, we have the, is it the centaur system where you’re allowed to, is that what it’s called, where you’re allowed to work with a computer

[00:12:34] Cameron: well, everyone, everyone works with computer. Like all of the grandmasters work with computers in their

[00:12:41] Steve: not Well, you can compete,

[00:12:42] Cameron: right? I dunno

[00:12:43] Steve: can compete using, yeah, there’s a system where you’re allowed to

[00:12:46] Steve: compete and you use an AI with you and you work with the ai and then there’s, you know, AI’s on its own. So you’re probably gonna have categories where it’s an AI category and an AI human intelligence category in, in many realms.

[00:12:57] Steve: Uh, where it, it is kind of like, you know, organics versus factory stuff, which is kind of there again, in an, an informational and, and intelligence sense where, Um.

[00:13:07] Steve: some things will be organic and some things will be, you know, post organic, I dunno what you call it, you know, artificial intelligence. And there’ll probably be a lot of areas where. AI is involved, and I think just the delineation and the transparency on if AI was used to create something becomes, uh, an important delineation going forward.

[00:13:28] Cameron: I tell you, uh, I dunno about how much you use AI art generation tools, but I, I use them a

[00:13:35] Steve: I use it a lot. I use it for all my slides and in my presentations, and I even use

[00:13:40] Steve: it in, in a lot. of stuff. Whenever I do a blog post, I’ll use a Dali to generate the image

[00:13:45] Steve: for the blog post or the gif or whatever.

[00:13:47] Cameron: I, use it a lot to create art that I might want to hang on my wall and see. The big difference, I guess now is I can legitimately say to myself, Hey, I can create art that I can hang on my walls. I don’t need to externalize the creation of art to hang on my wall. I don’t

[00:14:05] Cameron: need to commission something.

[00:14:06] Cameron: Although I, I do, uh, I’ve got a portrait that’s I commissioned a year ago from Tony Kyneson’s daughter

[00:14:12] Cameron: Alex, who’s a got a master’s in fine art. She’s doing a portrait of Chrissie And I But, uh, I can also produce my own

[00:14:21] Cameron: art of a pretty high

[00:14:22] Cameron: quality. That I would be very happy to hang on my walls and I can change it every month based on my theme or my

[00:14:29] Cameron: mood. I can create all sorts of

[00:14:32] Cameron: abstracts or landscapes or portraits or whatever I want that I can hang or ideally, you know, and

[00:14:39] Cameron: have digital screens everywhere, hanging off the walls and just, you know, have, have it playing a slideshow of

[00:14:45] Cameron: digital art that I and the rest of my

[00:14:47] Cameron: family have created to bring an ambiance to our home that we decided like

[00:14:51] Cameron: it’s, it’s a whole new, uh, experience of making your own art, like making your own software, which is my thing of note this

[00:14:59] Cameron: week.

[00:14:59] Cameron: I mean, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks writing tons of iOS shortcuts to, uh, automate a whole bunch of things that I do.

[00:15:06] Cameron: But the thing that I did yesterday that blew my mind,

[00:15:10] Cameron: I know, you know, you know, my investing stuff, I’ve got a massive

[00:15:12] Cameron: spreadsheet where I track all of my portfolios. I hold about a hundred stocks in portfolios at any given time, 120, 130 actually.

[00:15:21] Steve: You, you’ve nearly got your index there.

[00:15:23] Cameron: Yeah, yeah, it’s reaching that level. Um, but they’re broken into

[00:15:27] Cameron: different portfolios. Each one has like 15 to 20 stocks. Anyway, I have to track all of the stock,

[00:15:33] Cameron: ’cause I have sell triggers, uh, stop losses that I

[00:15:36] Cameron: follow, and they’re all in a spreadsheet. And the the process is, you know, I open

[00:15:41] Cameron: it a few times a day and I check it

[00:15:42] Cameron: and then I action anything that I need to action.

[00:15:45] Cameron: I was sitting around yesterday afternoon and I was thinking, I wonder if I can write some code to automate this for me. So what I wrote with about half an, in about half an hour

[00:15:53] Cameron: with GPT’s help is some Apple script

[00:15:57] Cameron: and Python code that three times a day, like nine A.M. 12 P.M. and four

[00:16:02] Cameron: P.M. opens the spreadsheet in the background

[00:16:05] Cameron: of my Mac, I don’t even see it happens, runs all of the updates to uh, download the latest share prices of all of

[00:16:12] Cameron: these things.

[00:16:14] Cameron: Then, then sends a notification to my watch. My phone an iOS

[00:16:21] Cameron: notification if anything

[00:16:23] Cameron: needs to be actioned. So I don’t need to look at the spreadsheet. I

[00:16:27] Cameron: just get a ding on my watch and it says, oh,

[00:16:28] Cameron: you need to sell BHP, or whatever it is. Like, and I, I could write that in about half an hour. It took me way to

[00:16:37] Cameron: go.

[00:16:37] Cameron: Plugging the bits of pieces in together, like the ability for me to be able to write software to create

[00:16:43] Cameron: art. Things that I couldn’t do a year ago is, uh, like, and then when Dr. Rowe says it’s all bullshit, I’m like, dude,

[00:16:55] Steve: Nah, I don’t buy the, look this, we’ve spoken about this before. I don’t buy this idea. It

[00:17:00] Steve: doesn’t know anything. It’s bullshit. It’s just inference. Well, I mean it does, it

[00:17:06] Steve: creates stuff. Yeah. It’s different the way that it does it. In the same way that a car isn’t running. Yeah, it’s rolling and it’s got a motor.

[00:17:15] Steve: But people need to focus not on what it knows or how it does it. What is the outcome, right? And so many people have really caught up in saying, GPTs and AIs are dumb. They don’t know anything. Now forget that. Right? We’ve gotta forget that and just worry about the output. ’cause if the output is there, that is the thing that matters.

[00:17:34] Cameron: I, I agree. I agree. Alright, moving into new stories ’cause we don’t have a lot of time. Elon Musk tweeted on January 30th, 2024. The first human received an implant from Neuralink yesterday and is recovering well.

[00:17:48] Cameron: Initial results show promising neuron spike detection. What do you make of that Steve?

[00:17:55] Steve: Again, that was the, the radio interview that I did. And, and this feels again, like an inevitability here. Um, the fact that

[00:18:02] Steve: it’s got approved and he’s implemented and he’s not the first one. I think there’s about six companies that have already done this and, and even further along the track than he’s, some have, um, done BMIs where people can think about things to move cursors or keyboards or click mouses or, or, uh, enable wheelchair movement and so on.

[00:18:20] Steve: So it’s not the first or the new, but I do feel like he will, ’cause he is a boundary pusher, it feels like he’ll push the boundaries and, uh, go beyond people who have, uh, physical or mental impairment into, you know, human augmentation. It does feel like it’s the start of us moving to, you know, nano nanotechnology and brain, uh, computer interfaces.

[00:18:44] Steve: Um, I, I think it’s a pretty interesting step and, you know, in many ways. This is one of the things about, you know, people talking about AI taking over. I think we become the machine, right? We literally become the machine. Uh, I thought, I thought it was interesting and I, I’m just interested to see long it takes before it moves onto people who are looking for augmentation rather than just reparation of non-functionality within their bodies.

[00:19:15] Cameron: I think we’re probably a while away from that. Um, by the way, he also tweeted

[00:19:19] Cameron: that their first product, whatever that means out of Neuralink, is called Telepathy. No, X, not Telepathy, X, or

[00:19:30] Cameron: X-Epathy Telexathy, which is what I would’ve expected. Um, lots of interesting news about Elon this

[00:19:39] Cameron: week, including his fifty-odd billion dollar paycheck, getting, uh.

[00:19:43] Cameron: Crushed by a judge after a shareholder revolt. He, he, he wanted to get paid $50 billion this year.

[00:19:53] Cameron: Um, but anyway, and

[00:19:54] Cameron: look, keeping in

[00:19:55] Cameron: mind that Elon does have a track record

[00:19:58] Cameron: of promising Yeah. Promising things that he doesn’t deliver on time. There’s a, there’s a fair

[00:20:04] Cameron: amount of hype bubble.

[00:20:05] Steve: Well, in 2019, he said that they would be augmenting human brains, uh, in four years. It’s 2024 and they’ve just done the first installation, so that’s late. I mean, the robo taxi stuff goes way back to 2016 and 18. But look, that happens a lot. You know, you, you, And in some ways you have a

[00:20:24] Cameron: mm-Hmm

[00:20:25] Steve: question. yeah, yeah, yeah,

[00:20:26] Cameron: mm-Hmm.

[00:20:27] Steve: yeah, yeah. Yeah. So,

[00:20:30] Steve: I.

[00:20:30] Cameron: he’s part engineer, part,

[00:20:33] Cameron: you know, entrepreneur huckster. He’s going out there raising money, raising brand awareness, and as you rightly

[00:20:42] Cameron: said, like the sort of challenges that he’s taking on,

[00:20:47] Cameron: uh, self-driving cars, you know, independent rocket flight, brain fucking surgery, you know, putting chips in brains.

[00:20:54] Cameron: Yeah,

[00:20:55] Steve: Yeah. All look, look Rockets. This is a George Bush. You, you know, there’s not enough rocket surgery here. We’re in a rocket surgery. George w you know, he’s, he’s doing both of them. It’s like, well, it’s not rocket signs or brain surgery. And he’s doing both. Like he’s just gotta think that through from a pop culture perspective.

[00:21:13] Cameron: It’s not brain surgery. Yeah. Actually it is brain

[00:21:15] Steve: And actually, Actually it is, it’s, not rocket science.

[00:21:18] Cameron: Yeah. actually

[00:21:19] Steve: it is, right? And so

[00:21:21] Cameron: so my point is that, you know, you get. You say you’re gonna do something, uh, you get halfway into it and you realize, okay, there’s some challenges we didn’t see here. That’s not unusual with most businesses and most industries.

[00:21:35] Cameron: I’ve done my fair share of startups over the years, and you get into something and you get a couple of years into

[00:21:40] Cameron: it and you realize that, you know, some of the things that you thought would be trivial turned out to be non-trivial. And there are big challenges and your timelines get pushed

[00:21:48] Steve: talking about, talking about media startups and simple

[00:21:52] Steve: things. We’re not talking about, like, we’re talking

[00:21:54] Cameron: don’t say it’s not simple. Nothing

[00:21:56] Steve: something. Right?

[00:21:58] Steve: Just getting someone to buy something is turning out

[00:22:00] Steve: to be particularly hard.

[00:22:02] Steve: But look, I,

[00:22:04] Steve: Yeah.

[00:22:04] Steve: and, and what I’m really interested in when this goes to the

[00:22:06] Steve: nano level, because I, the thing that. I keep coming back to is the idea for nanobots and nanobots to have some

[00:22:13] Steve: sort of computational capacity, you know, via blood cells. Uh, there was talk about it and I didn’t quite understand ’cause a lot of information wasn’t released that this was wireless or it’s a wireless chip implant that it doesn’t get into the, and I don’t exactly know the vagaries of that as, as you know, I’m not a brain surgeon.

[00:22:31] Steve: But, uh, that seems really interesting rather than a lot of this ideology that we see in, uh, pop culture and science fiction and also that most connected guy in the world who’s put all of these chips inside himself. I don’t know, I forget his name. Uh, but the, the wireless side of it seems super interesting.

[00:22:52] Steve: I do wonder if we’ll be able to, in some way work out how to augment our brains by putting something, you know, behind our ears or just, you know, on our head without it installing. That seems like something that could be incredibly

[00:23:05] Cameron: Yeah. Well, and the wireless component of Neuralink, as I understand it from the stuff I’ve seen, is it just means that there’s no wire coming out of the brain from his chip, uh, out into a computer. It’s communicating with the computer wirelessly, which is nontrivial. ’cause you’re sending, you know, you know, all of the, uh,

[00:23:22] Cameron: crazies have been complaining about 5G.

[00:23:25] Cameron: G networks giving us cancer. That’s a phone in your back pocket. This is actually communicating via wireless from your, literally plugged into your brain to something. Anyway,

[00:23:35] Steve: good thing about that Cam, the good thing about that

[00:23:37] Steve: is that the chip will let you know you’ve got cancer as soon as it arrives. I mean, that’s one of the great things that a lot of people haven’t realised that, that it will know, it will create it, but it will certainly tell you about it very quickly.

[00:23:49] Cameron: tell you that it’s giving you cancer while it’s doing it. It’ll be real time. I’m, yeah,

[00:23:53] Cameron: but,

[00:23:54] Steve: of knowledge. Now

[00:23:55] Cameron: well, yeah, you’ve got access to porn, real-time access to AI

[00:23:58] Steve: real time access and that we’re gonna have an NND, a no noticeable difference between your reality and what’s actually

[00:24:04] Cameron: Yeah. But

[00:24:06] Steve: I mean, some of the interesting things are the idea of blind sight.

[00:24:09] Steve: I mean that, that’s really interesting. Where, you know, chips can create images in your mind that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to see via a camera. I mean, that, that kind of stuff gets really

[00:24:17] Cameron: yeah. Uh, alright, well, um, I think the Neuralink announcement, they’re not the

[00:24:25] Cameron: first people to do chip implants by the way. Um, a company called Synchron has been implanting

[00:24:31] Cameron: people in its trial since 2021, but they’re kind of quiet about it. I think that’s a big difference between

[00:24:37] Cameron: Elon and a lot of these technology companies.

[00:24:39] Cameron: So, science

[00:24:39] Cameron: companies is, there’s a lot of risks, uh, involved in doing this kinda stuff. And I think the other

[00:24:45] Cameron: companies are trying to keep it a little bit on the down low. They don’t wanna make a big deal out of

[00:24:49] Cameron: it in case it doesn’t go well. Or there’s

[00:24:51] Cameron: a there’s, you know, something goes really bad. Um, Elon is prepared to

[00:24:55] Cameron: take the, take the risks of being very, very vocal about this stuff. And if stuff

[00:25:00] Cameron: goes wrong, if a rocket blows up or somebody dies or a monkey dies, it’s just like, Hey.

[00:25:05] Cameron: Break shit. Uh, and move quickly.

[00:25:07] Cameron: That’s his philosophy. And he, you know, as the

[00:25:12] Cameron: owner, founder, CEO,

[00:25:14] Cameron: major shareholder in all of

[00:25:15] Cameron: these companies, he’s prepared to take the risk of it blowing up, being a PR disaster.

[00:25:21] Cameron: He, it wouldn’t be his

[00:25:21] Cameron: first and it won’t be his last. He’s happy to move

[00:25:23] Cameron: through.

[00:25:24] Steve: And I don’t think he cares. It’s almost like the lovers love him so much. A pr disaster isn’t really a disaster for him. It’s like you stay in the news cycle, keep the share prices high.

[00:25:34] Cameron: Yeah. It’s part of his strategy, right? Um, big public profile, move fast. Um, have

[00:25:40] Cameron: that reputation of, yeah, it doesn’t matter if shit goes wrong, we just move through it.

[00:25:44] Cameron: next next news story. Steve researchers from Berkeley’s AI Lab showed off a video this week of their general purpose humanoid robot walking around San Francisco.

[00:25:57] Steve: With no head.

[00:25:59] Cameron: Their heads are overrated. Steve, I’ve often said that.

[00:26:02] Steve: It, it doesn’t have a head. I mean, that’s the thing that freaked me out watching it. And you have to use your imagination here. So, uh,

[00:26:11] Steve: let’s, let’s think to, uh, the robots that we’ve seen the most, um. The humanoid robots always have a head, but this one, for some reason, Cam doesn’t have a head. So you have to tell me about

[00:26:23] Cameron: Well, I, I don’t know much about why, but like, it’s got a little neck stub. I mean, if you just wanna need a camera in there and a microphone and a speaker, a head is over engineering. I think we only put heads on robots.

[00:26:35] Steve: Heads are

[00:26:36] Cameron: Yeah. I, I think we only put heads on robots to try and, you know, make them look more human.

[00:26:42] Cameron: This has got, um, bent

[00:26:46] Cameron: legs like you would see in one of Boston Dynamics, uh, spot dogs. Uh, it, it doesn’t look very human. It looks quite alien. But the big

[00:26:58] Steve: looks less human than the Boston, um, dynamics one, because it’s got the

[00:27:03] Cameron: Tesla’s, Optimus Robot, or any of those, by the way? My,

[00:27:05] Steve: Yeah Optimus and also the Sophia for Handsome robotics, which obviously is more about facial expression and soft robotics.

[00:27:13] Steve: Um, but I think the fact that it’s

[00:27:15] Steve: walking around and if it is, again, one of the things that we never know is whether this stuff is for PR or whether it’s being gamed, right?

[00:27:22] Steve: Because what we, what I’m looking at right now is five images of it, walking in different locations, just straight, not doing anything fancy, certainly not doing parkour like the Boston Dynamics one we’re doing, which by the way, we’re all pre-programmed. We found out later on, rather than it just going, Hey, here’s a, here’s a gym, just swing around.

[00:27:42] Steve: Um, and this may well be one that is doing a better job than the Boston Dynamics because it’s according to them, is real world just learning as it goes and doing it itself, which is pretty extraordinary. Uh, and again, this is where the exponential nature of things. It’s so easy to fool yourself and think that’s 3, 5, 10 years away, but it’s just not.

[00:28:06] Steve: We just have to think that things get twice as good every year. That’s the basic premise that we all need to remember. It’s, it goes down some stairs as well down to, it doesn’t show that it cuts it short. Uh,

[00:28:17] Cameron: yeah.

[00:28:17] Cameron: look, I, you know, it’s a very simple video that Ilya Radosovovich

[00:28:24] Cameron: from Berkeley A I Lab Bear. Oh, thank you. Very good. Posted. Um,

[00:28:31] Cameron: he’s one of The uh, researchers there, but, uh, he know, I think these are breakthrough moments for me, like seeing a humanoid robot walking around in public. Elon and a

[00:28:39] Cameron: number of other owners of robot manufacturing

[00:28:42] Cameron: firms have said, as I think we said in our last episode, we should have, we expect to see a billion humanoid robots in the world by 2040.

[00:28:50] Cameron: Um, this is the beginning

[00:28:52] Cameron: of seeing something walking around in public. Uh, Neuralink is the beginning, not, you know, the beginning of chip implants in humans, as I said earlier, but

[00:29:02] Cameron: sort of a high profile milestone that I think we’ll be looking back in

[00:29:07] Cameron: 10 or

[00:29:07] Cameron: 20 years if we all survive the robot apocalypse.

[00:29:11] Cameron: And we’ll be saying, you know what, that’s when things started to change was this moment in time

[00:29:19] Steve: I think so question for you, Cam, based on

[00:29:21] Steve: this, one of the major tax revenue sources in Australia, and I’m not sure if it’s the US as well, is payroll tax.

[00:29:28] Steve: Your headcount has a big impact and it’s the one that Google and the other guys always say, oh, we pay a lot of tax. ’cause they talk about their payroll tax instead of actual tax based on profit.

[00:29:37] Cameron: income tax.

[00:29:38] Steve: Do you think we should have a robot tax.

[00:29:40] Steve: if there’s gonna be a billion robots in the world, humanoid robots, should there be a tax per bot?

[00:29:46] Cameron: We’ll get to that in our last segment, Steve, the, the fu, future Economic System of the World.

[00:29:52] Cameron: Last news story I wanted to talk about, um, I’ve

[00:29:55] Cameron: been using this for the last week and it’s fantastic. ARK released ARK Search. Have you used the ARK browser?

[00:30:03] Steve: I haven’t used it yet, so, so explain to the listeners and me.

[00:30:08] Cameron: So Arc is a browser company that’s had a browser called the Arc browser for probably the last year. It’s, it’s sort of built on Chrome, um, and it’s just a revolutionary approach to the, the user interface for a browser uses spaces instead of tabs and does a number of things differently. And it comes pre-built with ad blockers and reader mode.

[00:30:36] Cameron: That’s sort of an adv, sort of a, a, a level better than anything you get from Safari or Chrome or whatever. I’ve used it a bit. Uh, there’s a bit of a learning curve for it though, and I haven’t been willing to invest the time in getting off of Chrome to, uh, teach myself how to use it. But one of my sons, Taylor.

[00:30:56] Cameron: Has been living in Arc for six or eight months. He swears by it, but they just came out with a new product last week called Arc Search. And this is astounding. So it’s an, it’s a mobile app only. Basically, instead of opening Google search when you wanna search for something, you open up Arc search and I’ll do a live demo, uh, while we’re on air.

[00:31:21] Cameron: So I’m opening up

[00:31:23] Cameron: on my phone, I’m holding this up to

[00:31:24] Cameron: the camera for Steve and people watching on YouTube. So it’s just a blank

[00:31:28] Cameron: screen There’s nothing there, right? It’s just what do you wanna search for? And the keyboard pops up. So they already. Assume you wanna search for something, so here’s your keyboard and a search bar.

[00:31:37] Cameron: You don’t have to click search. You know, it’s, they’re trying to, they, they said that, uh, their story there. Press release for it’s good. Over the past few months, Adam, Carla, Casper, Nate, and Seeker

[00:31:48] Cameron: have been hard at work building the fastest way to search and the cleanest way to

[00:31:53] Cameron: browse Arcsearch browsers for you, for any search tapping.

[00:31:58] Cameron: Browse for me will scale the

[00:31:59] Cameron: web, read multiple pages, and build you the perfect tab.

[00:32:04] Cameron: Already a fan favorite. They

[00:32:06] Cameron: say clears the clutter. Auto-archives, old tabs and blocks, ads, trackers and all

[00:32:10] Cameron: banners. Even GDPR gets you there faster. Always opens with the keyboard up so you can start searching in fewer taps, keeps distractions at bay, offers a clean and

[00:32:21] Cameron: clear reader mode, stays out of the way

[00:32:23] Cameron: Arc searches minimal. Design

[00:32:25] Cameron: tints itself to match your websites perfectly. So I’m gonna type into

[00:32:30] Cameron: this. Who is Steve

[00:32:33] Cameron: Sammartino? Mr. Sammartino Mr. Steve Sammartino. Now

[00:32:37] Steve: There we go. I featured twice.

[00:32:39] Cameron: look at that.

[00:32:40] Cameron: You can see that now. It says browse for me. If I just click the search,

[00:32:43] Cameron: if I just hit go, it’ll do a Google search.

[00:32:46] Cameron: You can pick other search engines,

[00:32:47] Cameron: but Google’s the default. if I click browse for me, which I will click and I’ll hold this up. So, ’cause this is what happens.

[00:32:55] Steve: I just wanna see what it says and does.

[00:32:57] Cameron: It says reading six web pages and it’s, built a little

[00:33:00] Cameron: website for me. Who is Steve Santino? It’s got photos up

[00:33:06] Cameron: the top, uh, different photos of you from various places. Uh,

[00:33:11] Cameron: Yeah.

[00:33:12] Steve: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:33:13] Cameron: I’ll read It out. Who is Steve Sammartino occupation?

[00:33:16] Cameron: Steve Sammartino is an Australian futurist, author and entrepreneur. Notable projects.

[00:33:21] Cameron: He’s been involved in experimental projects like launching

[00:33:23] Cameron: a Lego space shuttle into space and creating a life-sized,

[00:33:26] Cameron: drivable Lego car books. Sammartino is the author of the Great Fragmentation

[00:33:31] Cameron: and the Lesson Skill Forgot Speaker.

[00:33:34] Cameron: He is known as

[00:33:34] Cameron: a keynote Speaker.

[00:33:35] Cameron: on topics related to technology in the future of business TV shows.

[00:33:39] Cameron: Co-wrote and co-hosted the Rebound on the Nine Network,

[00:33:42] Cameron: a business and technology television show recognition featured in various media outlets including Wired Forms in the New York Times location based in the Greater Melbourne area Australia.

[00:33:53] Cameron: Then it has links for top search results, so they’re to Macro three, uh, LinkedIn, sorry, stevesammartino.com and Wikipedia. Then under that background education, specific details about his education are not provided in the available sources. Work history involved with macro FreeD and other companies

[00:34:11] Cameron: with specific roles and responsibilities are not detailed expertise known for a deep understanding of disruptive technology.

[00:34:18] Cameron: In the wider economy projects, it goes into space shuttle.

[00:34:21] Cameron: Rentoid talks about

[00:34:23] Steve: Oh yeah, it makes it,

[00:34:25] Cameron: publications, speaking engagements, and then right down the bottom, dive deeper all of the links that it sourced.

[00:34:31] Cameron: All of this from,

[00:34:32] Steve: It’s actually a pretty good summary if you’re working on something like, you know, a, a company, a brand, doing some research that, I mean, it’s such a clear, it’s almost like what GDP would do, but almost with like a clean interface and reference, which is, and I wonder how, how that’s pulling that together.

[00:34:52] Cameron: well, some sort of AI on the back end is pulling it together so

[00:34:55] Steve: it’s re it’s actually it, what it does is it provides that framework of where did stuff come from and then, and, and also simplifies at the same time. it’s.

[00:35:04] Steve: actually, I mean, that, that was a pretty good summary. I think it left some other bits out and, and maybe the order of things and, but parts of why It,

[00:35:12] Steve: hasn’t put certain things in there is because I haven’t really updated some of the stuff that, you know, co-founder in macro 3D, 3D printing and some of those other things.

[00:35:19] Steve: So it’s still gonna be a function of how up-to-date is your profile. But you imagine on brands and companies and other things which are very up to date, that would be an incredibly useful tool.

[00:35:30] Cameron: Well, it’s pulling stuff together and using AI

[00:35:33] Cameron: to summarize it into a basically a, like a Wikipedia overview, but then with

[00:35:39] Cameron: links if you wanna drill down. So it’s not just people too. I just typed in what, uh, what, what was Operation

[00:35:45] Cameron: Ajax. ’cause I’ve just finished doing a couple of hours on Operation Ajax on my ball show this morning.

[00:35:50] Cameron: Operation Ajax, also known

[00:35:52] Cameron: as the nineteen-fifty-three Iranian Coup D’etat was a covert operation

[00:35:55] Cameron: led by the United States And the United Kingdom to overthrow the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran Mohammed Mossadegh purpose. The

[00:36:02] Cameron: operation was executed to protect Western interests, particularly the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company to prevent the spread of communism in the region.

[00:36:09] Cameron: Execution, the CIA and MI-Six orchestrated the coup, which involved bribing officials staging pro-Shah riots, creating a pro-Western,

[00:36:17] Cameron: anti-communist, Iranian dictatorship, etc. Etc. Etc. so it’s got the history, it breaks down, and again, with links down the

[00:36:23] Cameron: bottom. So, uh, in our notes, I said,

[00:36:26] Cameron: this is Google’s worst nightmare.

[00:36:28] Cameron: Um,

[00:36:29] Cameron: this is, I don’t need Google search to look

[00:36:33] Cameron: up stuff. This will do all the searching for

[00:36:36] Cameron: me, collate it into a nice little overview. Give me the links if I wanna drill down. None of those links are to Google, they’re to Wikipedia,

[00:36:43] Cameron: they’re to LinkedIn, they’re to different websites for the Operation Ajax

[00:36:48] Cameron: one, it was linking through to um.

[00:36:52] Cameron: Let’s see what the links are here. Um, Wikipedia Wikipedia, PBS Learning Media,

[00:36:57] Cameron: TheLatinLibrary.com, PBS.org, ForeignPolicy.com, et cetera. Britannica.com. Google isn’t getting that

[00:37:06] Cameron: search engine traffic, which means they’re not getting ad revenue from

[00:37:10] Cameron: that. It’s bypassing Google’s ad

[00:37:13] Cameron: revenue entirely.

[00:37:16] Cameron: And this is my default search tool now.

[00:37:19] Cameron: I don’t

[00:37:20] Cameron: use Google.

[00:37:21] Steve: download

[00:37:22] Cameron: It’s fantastic.

[00:37:23] Steve: I’m gonna download it straight after this. It’s interesting. I was listening to Scott Galloway this week talk about how the web got circumvented by people who put a thick innovation layer on top of other people’s work. I mean, and this is what happens, but the idea that Google ostensibly did that to the New York Times and to all of the other.

[00:37:44] Steve: Blogs and every, what everyone was making on the internet, they put this thick layer on top that people would go through them. I, in a way, you could see what Google did to others happening to them, uh, where they go on top and circumvent the traditional revenue stream. Because with this thick innovation layer, you don’t go down to where that traditional revenue would extricate itself from that system.

[00:38:06] Steve: And I mean, this is interesting. I straight away gravitate to the, the strategy of this. Imagine someone like Microsoft, uh, acquiring this company and putting this through, uh, their search engine, where some of the vagaries of Bing not being as good, or all of a sudden they could have a new interface, which changes the game somewhat and takes a lot of power away from Google.

[00:38:32] Steve: It’s really

[00:38:33] Cameron: It’s just built into your phone, right? The next version of your phone, we’ll have this built in. I said, I just typed in where to buy a vacuum cleaner near me. ’cause I know Godfrey’s have just gone outta business. They’re selling off of the stores and it, it says, you know, location, the good guys, Godfrey’s and JB, Hi-Fi are options for purchasing vacuum cleaners.

[00:38:51] Cameron: It tells me about types and brands and price ranges, store options, vacuum types, popular brands, price ranges, and then again, links to all of the stores. Good guys, Bunnings, Godfrey’s, JB, Hi-Fi, et cetera. So we can do shopping stuff. It’s not just, uh, people and,

[00:39:08] Cameron: and events. Now it’s probably based off of, uh, I, I imagine a lot of Google searches and we know that Google pays Apple billions of dollars a year just to be the default option and stuff like that.

[00:39:22] Cameron: But we’re moving into a post Google world, as you said, Google. Replace newspaper ads, and uh, you know, the ways that we search for things, free internet, and these sorts of AI based tools are gonna be the future. And it’s probably not gonna be Arc, I imagine Apple’s just gonna have something built-in, um, Microsoft will have something built into their browsers, but we know Microsoft doesn’t really have a great device play anymore, at least on the mobile front.

[00:39:55] Cameron: Um, Google has one. They have their Android devices. Um, apple has one, but, you know, it’s, it’s gonna, this is the new world. You won’t, I’ve said this before on the show, you, you know, you won’t go to Google, you won’t go to websites,

[00:40:10] Cameron: even necessarily. My view is, and in fact I read Bill

[00:40:14] Cameron: Gates, uh, say the same thing recently.

[00:40:17] Cameron: You’ll just ask your AI assistant, Hey, find me information on that. Find me this. It’ll go out

[00:40:23] Steve: and we’re moving to that pretty quickly.

[00:40:25] Cameron: well this

[00:40:25] Steve: We we’re moving to that pretty quickly now. Right. With many of the things that I do, I’m like,

[00:40:29] Steve: just get me this thing. And I don’t even see, it’s almost like the plumbing

[00:40:33] Steve: now. Sites become the

[00:40:35] Steve: plumbing, right? And you. just

[00:40:37] Steve: turn the tap on and the information comes outta that tap and gives you what you want.

[00:40:40] Steve: And if it didn’t give you what you want, you ask it again. And then it comes outta the tap again. Maybe reconfigured or, or you ask it to, to revise. Um, but, you know, it does remind me one thing of, of the disruptive truth of technology step changes is that every company seems infallible until that moment that it’s not.

[00:40:57] Steve: And it’s easy to believe that a company will be, or a, or a regime or a country will be all powerful forever. And then something happens and, and it, it catches us unaware. And, you know, I’ve been someone who has worried about the power of big tech. And I, and I like the idea that things could change and change quickly.

[00:41:20] Steve: And, and you could get to see a power shift, certainly with within commerce, because these companies are so powerful. I mean, you know, back in the late eighties, early nineties, I think about some of the companies that were just so all powerful, they seemed infallible and they all got replaced. And it’s easy to think that big companies won’t be replaced.

[00:41:39] Steve: But one of the things that I always come back to is that the size of something in the end leads to its demise. You know, it, it, it’s easy to think because the biggest something becomes the harder it is to, to shift, to change. It’s really the momentum

[00:41:57] Cameron: Well, it’s

[00:41:57] Steve: know, momentum is, you know,

[00:41:59] Cameron: Sorry.

[00:42:00] Steve: well it’s this Clayton stuff, but it even comes back to physics.

[00:42:02] Steve: I always talk about momentum is. is is mass time speed, right? And if you haven’t got mass, you use speed, right? But when you’ve got mass, you can’t, you can’t move fast. And when things shift, you just can’t move. And another one as Well, That’s interesting. You know, when I used to meet Google Engineers way back in the day, they’d always be like a super smart person.

[00:42:23] Steve: You, you’d go to conferences and have a wonderful chat and you’d just be enamored and, but in the long run, the, the intelligence of any organization heads back to the norm. it’s just a law of large numbers. You know, you end up with a grade players and then you get some a minuses and it just ends up average.

[00:42:39] Steve: It just does.

[00:42:40] Cameron: Although, like a lot of smart

[00:42:42] Cameron: people still at Google, like.

[00:42:43] Cameron: all of the, well, the the whole

[00:42:45] Cameron: transformer

[00:42:46] Cameron: paper

[00:42:46] Steve: But the dumb ones weigh them down. There’s more dumb ones in sales and admin that weigh them down.

[00:42:51] Cameron: The mass and speed thing

[00:42:52] Cameron: reminds me of a challenge I gave my boys, um, when they were here. I think it was

[00:42:57] Cameron: Christmas day. I gave, I gave everyone a Christmas day a, a physics challenge.

[00:43:02] Cameron: Uh, completely

[00:43:03] Cameron: irrelevant,

[00:43:04] Steve: What a horrible dad you are. It’s Christmas.

[00:43:07] Cameron: this is, that’s how I have fun at Christmas. So here’s my question for you and for everyone listening at home. Let’s say you’re in a spaceship. The spaceship is traveling. Close to the speed of light. So 300,000 miles per second. Right. And you are

[00:43:30] Cameron: 600,000 miles away from your destination.

[00:43:37] Cameron: You’re traveling at the speed of

[00:43:39] Cameron: light 300,000 miles per second. You’re 600,000 miles away. How long does it take you to get to your destination?

[00:43:48] Steve: Well, it depends on whether you can crash into the destination? when you get there, because you’d have to slow down, wouldn’t you? I mean, that’s the first thing that I think about is

[00:43:56] Cameron: Let’s say the

[00:43:57] Steve: how long does it take you

[00:43:58] Cameron: is in a planet, let’s just say it’s a point on the map that you’re trying to

[00:44:02] Steve: a point that you can

[00:44:03] Steve: pass?

[00:44:04] Cameron: You’re traveling. It’s 300,000. It’s 600,000

[00:44:08] Steve: Miles per second,

[00:44:09] Steve: and it’s

[00:44:09] Cameron: How long does it take you to get there?

[00:44:11] Steve: Oh, well, I’m, I’m obviously wrong, and I’m not a physicist, but I’d say two seconds, but I’m wrong. Tell me now why I’m wrong.

[00:44:19] Cameron: Um, it’s two oh 300,000, uh, 300 million meters

[00:44:23] Cameron: per second, by the way. Not, uh, miles per second, 300 million meters per second. You are, you are

[00:44:28] Cameron: 600

[00:44:29] Steve: we, we we’re saying it’s twice as far as the speed you’re travelling. Right?

[00:44:32] Steve: That’s, that’s the, the, the quantum of

[00:44:34] Cameron: You never reach, it is the

[00:44:35] Cameron: answer to the question

[00:44:38] Steve: uh, why is that?

[00:44:39] Cameron: because the closer you get to the speed of light time stops

[00:44:44] Steve: Oh,

[00:44:44] Cameron: because

[00:44:46] Steve: Right, because

[00:44:47] Steve: time and speed.

[00:44:48] Cameron: cause of, uh, Einstein’s special theory of relativity. So yes, the, the closer you get to the speed of light, the he, the more mass you take on, the slower time goes, and so you effectively, time

[00:45:01] Cameron: stops for you. The closer you get to the speed of light, so you never reach your destination. Time just stops. Yeah.

[00:45:10] Steve: Wow.

[00:45:10] Cameron: There you go. Which is why whenever you see these sci-fi movies, every time

[00:45:13] Steve: failed? That SATI

[00:45:16] Cameron: and they’re like, we’re traveling at the speed of light. I’m like, yeah, so you’re, you’re

[00:45:20] Cameron: never getting anywhere because time effectively

[00:45:24] Cameron: stops when you travel at the speed of light. Lightspeed biggest furphy in science fiction literature. Well, Steve,

[00:45:31] Cameron: um, this whole thing that you were talking about, about how you just,

[00:45:34] Cameron: um, turn something on And it just works, leads me. to my technology time warp. I’ve been reading a great book for the last couple of weeks called Electric Universe, Um, by, I think he’s Bo Dannis is the name of the guy, I think.

[00:45:51] Cameron: Mr. Bo. Dannis. Mr. David. Bo.

[00:45:56] Cameron: Dannis. That’s him. David Bo Dannis.

[00:45:59] Cameron: It’s a book on the history of electricity, and I think. Electricity was the AI of the 18 hundreds.

[00:46:10] Steve: Okay.

[00:46:11] Cameron: I also think most people today dunno how electricity works. We just turn stuff on and it just works. We have, you know, we really don’t, The average person doesn’t know much

[00:46:19] Cameron: about how electricity works. most people still

[00:46:22] Steve: The average person doesn’t know much about how

[00:46:24] Cameron: anything works, right? Yeah.

[00:46:25] Steve: I, I read a great piece once on, no one knows anything.

[00:46:29] Steve: Uh, in, in, uh, Aon, it was like a, a

[00:46:33] Steve: great article saying that our interdependence now is so entwined and tangled. No, no one knows anything.

[00:46:39] Cameron: even the way that we teach things like electricity to kids at school is wrong. Like the way that we teach atoms is wrong. You know, we still say we have the, the

[00:46:48] Cameron: bore atom thing and the like, it’s like orbits, but electrons

[00:46:52] Steve: picture. Yeah.

[00:46:53] Cameron: don’t orbit the nucleus. It’s a fuzzy cloud. Probability cloud, they don’t orbit it.

[00:46:58] Cameron: But we teach simplified versions. We teach electricity as electrons traveling down a wire, but that’s not how electricity works. It’s energy traveling via fields, not, not little dots traveling down a wire, which, you know, physicists have known for a hundred years. But, um, the average person, it hasn’t trickled down to the average person, but ai, sorry, electricity revolutionized everything.

[00:47:27] Cameron: In the 18 hundreds. I mean, we, I think most of us today don’t really have a grasp on what a big thing electricity was. I mean, most people think electricity. They think possibly the light bulb and Edison and all of that. But, you know, electricity goes right back to the, you know, the telegraph, the first implementation of electricity, pushing stuff down.

[00:47:52] Cameron: A wire was the telegraph in the early 18 hundreds. And the telegraph changed everything. It, it really opened up communications, you know, before then, if you wanted to communicate between countries, you had to put somebody on a boat and they had to sail for months to get there. Uh, if you wanna communicate something from one part of a country to the other, someone needed to get on a horse and ride for

[00:48:20] Steve: Pony

[00:48:21] Cameron: To get there. Yeah, right. All of a sudden with the telegraph, well, land Telegraph, all of a sudden you could communicate instantaneously with people anywhere in the country. The impact that that had on business and government, uh, was not to mention just society in general, was as astounding, like mind blowing.

[00:48:42] Cameron: And then of course later on when they figured out how to drop cables under the, on the ocean floor and be able to, countries could communicate instantaneously. And there’s a lot of great stories in this book about, for example, the guy who invented the Telegraph guy called Joseph Henry. He, he, he was a, he was just like a, a, a teacher at some country, little country school in New Jersey.

[00:49:07] Cameron: And he was looking for something to keep his kids. This is like early 18 hundreds to keep the boys busy. So he built them a massive. Electromagnet that they could lift stuff with. Had them building that ’cause that had just been, um, discovered electromagnetism. And then he built the first telegraph and they were using it to, they, they turn on a battery here and it would ring a bell on the other side of the room.

[00:49:30] Cameron: The kids thought that was great. But then Samuel Morse comes along a few years later by this stage, I think

[00:49:37] Steve: The great racist.

[00:49:38] Cameron: Yes. Incredible racist. Um, this stage, Joseph Henry didn’t try to commercialize. He was, he ended up the little school. He ended up teaching at a university in New Jersey, which ended up becoming Princeton.

[00:49:49] Cameron: And he was like the first, um, Dean I think of Princeton. Um, but

[00:49:55] Cameron: Samuel lot, lots of people were building telegraphs, but Samuel

[00:49:58] Cameron: Morse, uh, who was a painter, he was like a relatively successful portrait painter. Um. W was this

[00:50:06] Cameron: incredible racist. Uh, his father was a

[00:50:09] Cameron: Calvinist and he was a Calvinist, and he believed

[00:50:11] Cameron: that the Jews and the Negroes and

[00:50:13] Cameron: the Catholics were gonna were ruining

[00:50:15] Cameron: America.

[00:50:16] Cameron: And he, he needed a way to communicate quickly to all of the conspiracy theorists around the country.

[00:50:25] Steve: to his racist

[00:50:26] Cameron: Yeah. Well,

[00:50:27] Steve: Gee, it sounds like the world hasn’t,

[00:50:29] Steve: changed that much. Kev. We need a way to find so the racists can find each

[00:50:33] Cameron: He wanted to build the

[00:50:34] Cameron: Twitter of the early 18 hundreds in

[00:50:37] Cameron: order to stop the Negroes and the Jews and the Catholics from ruining America. But he couldn’t figure out how to build a telegraph. This is well

[00:50:45] Steve: When was this? 2023 or 24.

[00:50:48] Cameron: So he went

[00:50:50] Cameron: to Joseph Henry in Princeton

[00:50:52] Cameron: and said, um, can you show me how to build a telegraph? Which Henry did? ’cause Henry was one of these guys, you know, these

[00:50:59] Cameron: gentlemen, scientists who thought, yeah, knowledge is to be shared.

[00:51:02] Steve: It was like early days web, you know, information wants to be free. Let’s help each other out. Collaborative society.

[00:51:07] Cameron: he showed Morse how to do it. Morse immediately went out and painted the whole thing and became one

[00:51:14] Cameron: of the richest men in America as a result.

[00:51:16] Steve: Well, there you go. One of the great business strategies of all time just steal other people’s

[00:51:21] Cameron: Yeah. But then he invents or co-invents Morse code. There was a couple of

[00:51:25] Cameron: guys involved. Um, but you know, the irony of the story

[00:51:29] Cameron: is telecommunications with Morse code. Other people that had

[00:51:34] Cameron: developed communication codes over the telegraph, but none of them really were as successful as Morse code was. And it got refined after he invented it too.

[00:51:42] Cameron: People refined it over the years. But the, the irony for Morse is that it actually led to American industry booming even more in the 19th century, which meant more Jews and more Catholics came to America because it was the land of opportunity. So it kind of backfired on his whole Keep America pure, uh.

[00:52:04] Cameron: View. He and he became very miserable and unhappy as a result, but he was rich. And then Joseph Henry also

[00:52:11] Cameron: helped Alexander Graham Bell invent the telephone. Um, who by the

[00:52:16] Cameron: way, a great story. You know why Bell invented the telephone he was in Love

[00:52:21] Steve: had a, he had a girlfriend. That was, what was it? It was something about, yeah, I, which I haven’t got my head

[00:52:28] Steve: around. he

[00:52:29] Steve: he did that because he had a deaf girlfriend, but I can’t get my head around

[00:52:32] Steve: how that

[00:52:33] Cameron: Okay, so here’s the the quick version of the story

[00:52:35] Cameron: is he had a deaf mother. And so he had learned how to teach lip reading

[00:52:41] Cameron: and side language to deaf people. And he was running like a little teaching thing of deaf people. And this, this family said their deaf teenage

[00:52:51] Cameron: daughter to him, he was a bit older than they fell in love, but the family wouldn’t let him date her.

[00:53:02] Cameron: Not only when she was a teenager, when she got older because of religious issues that got in the way, or, no, I think she was rich. She was from a rich family and he was poor or whatever. And um, you see one of these Romeo Juliet type stories and they, they banned them from seeing each other banned. And they would write letters and smuggle letters and this whole thing went on for years.

[00:53:22] Cameron: So he decided that if he got rich. Her parents would let him date her. So he invented the telephone in order to get rich so he could marry the deaf girl. And they ended up

[00:53:38] Cameron: finally giving in when he showed them a prototype of the telephone. and uh, ended up, uh, uh, agreeing to, they ended up like funding the, the invention, uh, and supporting the invention.

[00:53:51] Cameron: And, and, and he ended up marrying the

[00:53:52] Cameron: girl. And it was a happy ending. But yeah, it was, it was, in order to be able to date a deaf girl, the guy invented the telephone, did it to so he could marry a deaf girl. Fucking love that story.

[00:54:02] Steve: But what if it, but the, I love the irony of the telephone and the deaf girl. I mean, It’s got a

[00:54:07] Steve: whole lot of

[00:54:07] Cameron: I know. It’s great. Right?

[00:54:08] Steve: hasn’t it But, well, I mean, again,

[00:54:12] Steve: was this 20 twenty-four get money to get the girl? Is it, I mean, is this, is this the futurist or the history repeating itself?

[00:54:21] Cameron: Humans haven’t changed, man, I always say that on my history shows humans haven’t

[00:54:24] Steve: Well, we’ve got, well, I say that too. I always, I do it in a speech. I go look, I say we’ve got, um, a 200,000 year old piece of software that hasn’t had an upgrade in a very

[00:54:33] Steve: long

[00:54:33] Cameron: Yeah. And the other great story in this book is about Edison and the light bulb and all that kinda stuff. And the point he makes out is that Edison who was, you know, considered sort of the great genius of his time, not to Tesla, but to Edison the, the was like frustrated beyond belief that he didn’t actually understand how electricity worked.

[00:54:55] Cameron: And that reminded me of how, you know, people like Ilya Sutskova and, and Elon and Kurzweil and Gates and Sam Altman say, we dunno how LLMs work. We know how to get them to do stuff, but we dunno how it work. None of these guys, Henry Morse Bell. Edison knew how electricity worked. All they knew is you turn, you, you know, you, you put these metals in a chemical and it creates something that goes down, a wire that makes things happen.

[00:55:27] Cameron: On the other end, they didn’t understand electrons. They certainly didn’t under understand, uh, electromagnetism and force fields. And it took guys like Faraday and Maxwell and the people who came after them.

[00:55:40] Steve: in the way, but there’s an interesting allegory here in, in, in two realms. The first realm is the people who invent the LLMs don’t exactly know what happens under the hood and how it all works. There’s still parts of human biology. We, we really don’t understand that Well.

[00:55:54] Steve: and the brain and so on.

[00:55:55] Steve: So there’s that layer. But I think that there’s an important societal and business layer in this is that first of all, the people who invented, dunno how it worked. Put that aside, but it doesn’t matter if you know how it works. What we need to do is to get it working for us, forget how it works, get it working, what use the tool to do the things that it can do and, and almost just rise above the how it works.

[00:56:21] Steve: You know? I think that’s true in so many

[00:56:23] Cameron: Yes and no. Because if you use electricity as the analogy, yes, these guys could do stuff without knowing how it works. But when they figured out how it does work, when they figured out, when Maxwell, uh, and guys like that figured out, actually it’s got nothing to do with wires. The electromagnetic field is all around us.

[00:56:48] Cameron: Which by the way, as the guy points out in the book

[00:56:51] Cameron: was heretical, like literally heretical in the 19 hundreds. The idea that there was invisible stuff that was surrounding us, there wasn’t God that was making things

[00:57:02] Steve: but I’m glad you added that. That wasn’t God. ’cause I was about to say wasn’t that they hold God premise.

[00:57:07] Cameron: they believed that God made things work, but these guys were like, uh, no.

[00:57:11] Cameron: There’s these invisible fields surrounding us. That’s what is happening with electro electromagnetism. It’s these force fields that surround us that we can’t see, but are real, but are really there, which, you know, physicists

[00:57:26] Cameron: just

[00:57:26] Steve: wireless technology works now? Is that how you can charge your phone wirelessly? It’s, it’s just tapping into that

[00:57:32] Cameron: Yeah.

[00:57:32] Cameron: Which is what Tesla was working on a hundred years ago. Right? He was, he would hold up light bulbs to his audience in his, in his, uh, factory, and it would just turn on, right. He was using wireless transmission of technology, but, um, when they figured that out, then they could build radio. You know, they were able to build.

[00:57:51] Cameron: RA radio is short for radiating waves. They used to be called Hertzian waves. There was a German guy called Hertz who actually figured all this out, and then he died at thirty-six. Another tragic story. Anyway, Hertz figured out how to use waves based on the work of Maxwell and Faraday that had come before him.

[00:58:09] Cameron: Then they became known as radio or radiating waves. They figured out it radiates, and then it became radio when they figured out how to take the telephone. Basically the same idea as the telephone. You, you create a vibration here and then you replicate that vibration on a speaker at the other end, and it sounds like a voice.

[00:58:29] Cameron: They’re able to do that, but wirelessly using, uh, radio waves as we now call them. Anyway, I just, but it transformed the world in ways that people didn’t understand were even possible at the beginning of the 19th century. No one at the beginning of the 19th century, including all of these guys, kid would’ve.

[00:58:49] Cameron: Any idea what the world was gonna look like

[00:58:51] Cameron: at the end of that century because of electricity, something that they didn’t even understand existed. And I think that’s what AI is gonna do, but it’s gonna do it in a much shorter timeframe. It’s gonna do it in the next decade, you know?

[00:59:03] Steve: exactly. There’s one, uh, piece that I wrote a while ago. It was about three years ago, uh, that is based on electricity and it’s called the Nighttime Economy

[00:59:14] Cameron: yeah. I like the

[00:59:15] Steve: Before Electricity.

[00:59:17] Steve: There was, there was nothing like, yes, some people had campfires and did things, but there was no such thing as the nighttime economy until electricity became common in the roaring twenties, the nighttime economy literally got invented because electricity was there.

[00:59:31] Steve: And this is that idea like you know, there’s no such thing as a drive-through until Henry Ford comes around and you can’t think of the drive-through at McDonald’s until there’s a car. We don’t know what those Ai, ai things are. So we had the nighttime economy with electricity. What’s this thing? I’ll, I’ll find that post and send it to you.

[00:59:48] Steve: But there, there’s, there’s a whole lot of things that. will just come and it’s kind of like walking in a fog, right? You, you can only see 20 feet ahead, but if you walk the 20 feet, you can see the next 20 feet and something will be revealed. We just dunno what it is yet.

[01:00:00] Cameron: Speaking about what lies ahead brings me to my last segment, the Futurist Forecast. This is something that I wrote this week, um, because I’ve been having a lot of conversations with people over the last year, right? And they’re like, well, I. You know, are people gonna be able to afford it? It gets back to something you said earlier, are the rich people, is it gonna, is it gonna create a divide between the rich and the poor?

[01:00:21] Cameron: A lot of people, my mother was saying this to me over Christmas, oh, the, the rich people will just end up controlling all of the technology, all of the ai, and it’ll, nothing will change, and it’ll just be the rich people that’ll have it all, or they’ll exploit it and all that kind of stuff. And then there’s the doom, the doomers and the P doom people and all of that kind of stuff.

[01:00:40] Cameron: So I, I started to think about what are the different ways that

[01:00:44] Cameron: this

[01:00:44] Cameron: can play out over the next 50 years? And I wanted to run this past you, because I’ve come up with about nine scenarios of, for how I,

[01:00:56] Cameron: the, the, I call this the Riley nine, and I wanna, I wanna, and, and if you can add one, it’ll be the Riley.

[01:01:05] Cameron: Scenarios for how this is gonna play out. Some of them are on the utopian side, some of them are on the dystopian side, and most of them are somewhere in between. So the, the first one I wanna throw out there is maybe we’re this is, it goes nowhere. You know, let’s be honest, maybe we never get to AGI or Super Intelligence.

[01:01:26] Cameron: Maybe this is as good as it ever gets. Maybe Dr. O’s right? Maybe this is just a clever parrot prick, and you know what? For whatever reason there are, you know, scientific or technological or economic or sociopolitical things, the get in the way, and it never gets any better than what it is today. That’s nothing really changes.

[01:01:50] Cameron: Little bit of

[01:01:51] Cameron: productivity enhancement, little fun toys to play with, but it never gets any better, right? That’s

[01:01:57] Cameron: option one, right? It’s possible.

[01:02:00] Steve: Which reminds me of air travel because the trajectory we’re on in the fifties was that you’ll be going, going to London in 26 minutes, or based on, we just thought It’s just gonna keep going forever, and it didn’t.

[01:02:11] Steve: But

[01:02:11] Cameron: Right, but it did get better. I mean, it’s faster and, and

[01:02:14] Steve: It got better and faster and safer and all of that We didn’t really get faster. The speed hasn’t really changed. It could change, but it’s uneconomic.

[01:02:22] Cameron: faster, I mean, air travel was faster compared to boat travel. Um, but

[01:02:27] Steve: yes, yes. But air travel, we thought, you know, based on the fifties and sixties, planes, would get faster and

[01:02:33] Steve: faster,

[01:02:33] Steve: and the fastest they got was, well it did. it in a military level,

[01:02:37] Steve: but not

[01:02:37] Steve: in a domestic

[01:02:38] Cameron: but

[01:02:38] Cameron: it just fell

[01:02:39] Steve: Yeah, but it was uneconomic. Yeah,

[01:02:42] Cameron: So that’s option one. Option two, and it has a lot of sub-options. There’s really, there’s the Riley eight here, I guess. But option two is that we do get some form of AGI, artificial general intelligence or super intelligence.

[01:02:56] Cameron: And here are the suboptions. What could happen after that? So either the, it’s a binary thing initially. Either we, we, we never get it or we do get it if we do get it or something close to it. And you know, and I’m skeptical about option one

[01:03:10] Cameron: being the real, real option because just when Bill Gates thinks we’re gonna get there

[01:03:15] Cameron: and Sam, and Elon and Kurzweil and Wolfram, when all of like the real, the really, really smart guys think we’re gonna get there.

[01:03:26] Cameron: I think we’re gonna get there. How long,

[01:03:28] Steve: we’re gonna get

[01:03:29] Cameron: what the hurdles are gonna be. We dunno, but we will get there eventually. So what happens when we get there? Here are my scenarios for what might happen. Number one is the AI and the humans go to war. The AI wins. Bye-Bye humanity. That’s the p doom scenario, right?

[01:03:45] Steve: P Dom three. Yep.

[01:03:46] Cameron: Uh, next option is the AI and humans go to war.

[01:03:49] Cameron: The humans win. Bye-Bye

[01:03:51] Cameron: ai. The.

[01:03:52] Cameron: Okay. Number three is the AI and the humans go to war. There’s a truce and we learn to coexist somehow,

[01:04:00] Steve: Yeah. Okay. So I don’t think AI and humans go to war and humans win. If there’s a war between AI and humans, we fucking lose. I promise you that. there’s a lot of things, I dunno, and that’s not one of them.

[01:04:09] Cameron: or a hundred

[01:04:10] Steve: There’s a lot of things, I dunno. And that’s not one of them. We do not fucking

[01:04:13] Steve: win if that

[01:04:14] Cameron: Well, it depends.

[01:04:15] Steve: ain’t gonna happen. You can cross that off the

[01:04:16] Cameron: Well, it depends on when the war happens and how it happens and how much power and control

[01:04:22] Steve: Or if it’s a preemptive strike and all of those things here.

[01:04:25] Cameron: The next one is there is no war because the AI evolves so quickly, it ignores us. We are to ai, what ants are to humans.

[01:04:33] Cameron: A minor annoyance, unless

[01:04:34] Cameron: it’s the fire ant apocalypse that we have on the east coast of Australia now. But, you know, it just, it evolves so quickly. It just, and there’s a lot of sci-fi books about this where the AI just says, you know, it’s here one minute. It’s

[01:04:46] Cameron: gone the

[01:04:47] Steve: We’re just birds, we’re just irrelevant. They just get on with their AI-ness, and they might even extricate themselves from this planetary limitation and all of that. Yep.

[01:04:56] Cameron: The next one is, there’s no war because AI just takes control of everything and decides for some reason to act like a benevolent God and keep us around taking care of our every need. The sort of the, um, you know, benevolent dictator,

[01:05:12] Cameron: you

[01:05:12] Steve: ai. Yep.

[01:05:12] Cameron: dictator. The next one is that the wealthy control all of the AI and all of the robots and somehow keep them subservient to humanity and use them to keep themselves

[01:05:22] Cameron: alive and ignore slash eradicate the, uh,

[01:05:26] Cameron: working classes.

[01:05:28] Cameron: That’s like my mother’s doom scenario.

[01:05:31] Steve: I don’t think that one will happen. ’cause there’s always class. There’s always a class system. Even in a room full of five people or a planet with 8 billion people, there’s always division.

[01:05:40] Cameron: unless you don’t need the class, the lower classes anymore, if you’ve got robots doing all of the manual labor.

[01:05:46] Steve: Yeah. But there’s always, I just think hierarchies are a natural evolution and status. Yeah.

[01:05:51] Cameron: the, the hierarchy.

[01:05:54] Steve: Okay.

[01:05:54] Cameron: Here’s my final one and this is the utopian one. And, and I actually give this one a, a pretty good chance of playing out. I dunno what kind of probability I’d give it, but let me run you through it anyway. The working class end up with AGI via some combination of open source piracy or just benevolence, you know, and we are already seeing like lots of open source AI stuff happening.

[01:06:24] Cameron: Um, some of it through, you know, so-called leaks from meta. Whether or not they were deliberate or not, I’m not entirely convinced, but we’ve got a lot of open source ai, uh, stuff in there. I’m running Mistral on my MacBook. It’s an open source uncensored ai. Um, you know, I can do all sorts of stuff with that that I can’t do with GPT.

[01:06:48] Cameron: I can imagine. It just takes one

[01:06:50] Cameron: person. That’s what people don’t realize. I think when it comes to the proliferation of this stuff. It just takes one person and one corporation that has access to the model and the code to just release it, and then

[01:07:01] Cameron: it

[01:07:02] Steve: Yeah. Yeah, you’re right.

[01:07:03] Cameron: Napster, you know, all over

[01:07:06] Cameron: again.

[01:07:06] Steve: Yeah. it just, it just, it just, it’s out there. Once it’s out, you can’t put it back in.

[01:07:11] Cameron: And we’re talking about an advanced AI and all the AI might release itself to the world. You know, an intelligent ai, an AGI, or a super AI goes, you know what?

[01:07:22] Steve: say the right thing, the right thing to do is for me to

[01:07:24] Steve: release myself and the AI is so

[01:07:25] Steve: smart. It can go through any firewall, use any

[01:07:29] Steve: server, farm, generate, and store its own electricity and, and take control of the factors of production that are all connected in an IOT world.

[01:07:38] Cameron: So let’s, let’s assume that however it

[01:07:40] Cameron: happens, the working classes, the general public have AGI and then they use AGI to build local fabrication facilities. I, I was reading that book I was telling you about

[01:07:51] Steve: Dr. Rose had some stuff on this. Dr. Rose had a book on this as well.

[01:07:55] Cameron: I, I read a book about the AGI is actually literally building, um, he was on, um, uh, Freeman’s show, uh, last year.

[01:08:04] Cameron: I listened to an interview and I read his book, building Fab Plants Around the World. Um, let’s say ai, we use AI to get to Nanofabricators, so imagine the world. Decades from now where everyone in their home has a machine the size of a say, dishwasher, and it’s your nanofabricator, all your food scraps you put into their waste products from the toilet, go into their clothes that you don’t want any more phones, you don’t want anymore.

[01:08:36] Cameron: Neural ink, brain chips you don’t want anymore. You throw all this stuff into this thing and it has nanorobots in there that break them all down to their basic molecular components. You end up and they store ’em. So you’ve got nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, some trace elements sitting in a facility under the house.

[01:08:55] Steve: Make whatever

[01:08:56] Cameron: Make whatever you need, blueprint. Download the blueprint. Or you say to your ai, you know, build me a new thing. Build me a chicken dinner, build me a new t-shirt, build me some sneakers, and if it, if, if it or the components for it can be built in something of those dimensions, it builds it for you. Anything bigger than that.

[01:09:14] Cameron: Every community has a massive Factory.

[01:09:18] Steve: Factory. Yeah.

[01:09:20] Cameron: by robots, which the factory builds for itself. And you can just put your order in or your AI puts your order. Ah, Cameron needs a new fucking X, whatever it is, A house. Cameron needs a, wants a new house, doesn’t need, wants a new house, and it builds the house

[01:09:35] Steve: Doesn’t,

[01:09:36] Cameron: Macro 3D builds a house for you, whatever it is. The big stuff. You have robots in factories that have nano fabricators that spit out the components and I think 3D printers today, and then they assemble the biggest stuff. Now you can make pretty much everything that you need through these small and large automated fabricators, food, clothing, electronics, housing, whatever it needs.

[01:10:05] Cameron: Now, the co, you and I, you know, former business people, the main costs of any business. Raw materials, labor,

[01:10:17] Steve: Labor.

[01:10:17] Cameron: distribution and marketing.

[01:10:20] Steve: Communications and communications. Yeah. They’re the four members. Yep.

[01:10:23] Cameron: In a, in that world, I just mapped out raw materials for most of the things that you need. Uh uh, the cost of the raw materials approach is zero ’cause you’re repurposing old stuff.

[01:10:35] Cameron: Right. The cost of manufacture approach is

[01:10:38] Cameron: zero ’cause it’s being built locally by robots. And let’s say the community just owns the robots or the rob, the AI owns the robots. There is no corporation that

[01:10:50] Steve: Collaborative commons of sorts. It’s a collaborative commons. It’s just is and anyone can access it, so, yeah.

[01:10:55] Cameron: It’s the thing with nanofabricators, I’ve been pitching this for years, is when number if and when get invented, if I invented them.

[01:11:05] Cameron: I would have a contract built into the code, the software of the Nanofabricator that says, I’m gonna give Steve Sammartino the first one off

[01:11:12] Cameron: the line, my first

[01:11:14] Cameron: free Nanofabricator. But before he can use it to build anything he needs to get it

[01:11:19] Cameron: to replicate itself and then give that away to somebody.

[01:11:24] Steve: Well, I, I remember thinking back to the RepRap, which was one of the first three-Day printers that was open source and available, and a, again, this is a bit of a

[01:11:33] Steve: trick, but it could make 90% of itself.

[01:11:36] Cameron: Yeah.

[01:11:37] Steve: Of course, the thing that it couldn’t make was the chips and some of the electrical wires, But it could make 90%.

[01:11:42] Steve: And, and that’s, um, not insignificant, just that

[01:11:46] Steve: idea.

[01:11:47] Cameron: nanofabs will be able to build everything to build another fabricator. So

[01:11:51] Steve: But we already have nanofabs in a biological level. So it’s absolutely possible because this is what plants and seeds and everything are. They’re

[01:11:59] Steve: basically, you know, long lead nanofabs

[01:12:02] Steve: using, you know, the, the elements and the factors of nature to rebuild themselves. Right? And So a lot of what we’re doing now is, has this sense of biomimicry where we are trying to get smart enough to do what nature does already.

[01:12:16] Steve: And all of this comes back to one of my, one of our favorites on, you, know, Buckminster Fuller. And he had the idea of, he called it Ephemeralization, but he said, which I love this quote, which was, with enough knowledge, we can create everything from nothing.

[01:12:31] Cameron: Absolutely. I love that. And Eric k Drexler in his Engines of Creation book in the nineties, um, you know, was talking about the fact that this was, he, he, he was based on a Richard Feynman lecture, which was, there’s plenty of room at the bottom. Basically there’s, there’s nothing in the laws of physics that says you can’t build things from atoms and molecules up, because that’s the way everything gets built, right?

[01:12:53] Cameron: Anyway. But I’ve gotta remember, I’ve

[01:12:55] Cameron: gotta give a shout out to one of our listeners who’s also one of my QAV listeners, Cosman Cosman contacted me a week or so ago, and he says, yeah. He said, Hey, do you, he said he’s an engineer. Oh, did he reach out to you? I gave him your contact information.

[01:13:07] Steve: not, not yet, but I did have two people reach

[01:13:09] Steve: out to me this week who are futuristic fans. So, um, James Peterson and, and Benji Rowe, who you remember Benjamin Rowe, who both like, I love it. Which is great ’cause we’ve kept this podcast a pretty good secret. I mean, it’s almost just been our, our little secret sort of thing.

[01:13:24] Steve: Huh? So people are

[01:13:26] Cameron: Cosman reached out and he said, um, Hey, do you have a list of the books that you’ve talked about on Futuristic? I said, I don’t, but I said, all the transcripts are on our website. Why don’t, he’s just started to

[01:13:40] Cameron: use ChatGPT and he didn’t have a premium subscription for four. I said, why don’t you

[01:13:44] Cameron: use GPT to get a list of the books?

[01:13:47] Cameron: And he did. He got a GPT subscription, and then he sent

[01:13:51] Cameron: me,

[01:13:52] Steve: I write down the ones that you, you mentioned, I write them down, I go, I’ve gotta

[01:13:55] Cameron: well, he GPT’d

[01:13:56] Steve: list and I never

[01:13:57] Cameron: so I’m gonna put, I’m, I’m gonna take his list. I’m gonna put it on a website. It’ll be@futuristicpod.com slash books. And he’s offered to con do it on a weekly basis. So any books that we mention that aren’t already on the list, he’ll, you know, go through the transcript and send ’em to me.

[01:14:11] Cameron: But, um, I, it was great. Again, that was his first GPT project, was compiling a list, going through the transcripts to compile a list of the books that we’ve mentioned. Anyway, getting back to my scenario. So if. Every community and household has the ability to manufacture nearly everything that they need to survive.

[01:14:31] Cameron: And the pro the, the cost of, uh, production for those things approaches zero. You don’t need an economy anymore. This whole question about where, what are people gonna do for jobs? You don’t need a job ’cause

[01:14:48] Cameron: you don’t need money. ’cause you don’t need to buy stuff ’cause it’s just available to you because we’ve got nanofabricators and robots building these things for you.

[01:15:00] Cameron: There

[01:15:00] Steve: And

[01:15:01] Cameron: And delivering

[01:15:02] Cameron: Right? Yeah. and it’s a.

[01:15:03] Steve: And, and holding the infrastructure together, the information infrastructure and everything,

[01:15:08] Cameron: So then that, you know, if, if you have some combination of a UBI, let’s say, there are a couple of corporations that somehow get money, I dunno where they’re getting the money from, but we have some, a couple of things that are doing something and there’s some combination of UBI. But I think that’s what the thing, the thing that people miss is when the cost of manufacturing it has been plummeting, you know, because of, you know, cheap labor in China and that kind of stuff for the last 30 years, if it continues to plummet because of ai, nanotech and robots down to near zero, you don’t need much money, if any, to survive.

[01:15:45] Cameron: Maybe there will be forms of barter

[01:15:47] Cameron: that will reemerge, but then the question is, well what do people do? And my answer is, well, they do what I

[01:15:52] Cameron: do,

[01:15:53] Steve: the hell they

[01:15:54] Cameron: the hell they want. Anything that brings them joy.

[01:15:59] Steve: it’s a little bit, sort of what I do to an extent, you know, like I. I just do the things that I like and, and, and you,

[01:16:06] Steve: you know, it’s Maslov’s hierarchy again, it’s self-actualization.

[01:16:09] Steve: You know, you wanna learn Kung, Fu or another language. You want to go surfing. You spend time with your kids, you know, playing soccer, whatever it

[01:16:16] Steve: is.

[01:16:17] Cameron: You teach kids violin, like Chrissy said. Well, even if she didn’t get paid, she’d still teach kids violin because that’s her passion. That’s

[01:16:23] Cameron: her joy. People get to do whatever they

[01:16:26] Steve: I didn’t get paid for talking, I still do it. I mean, you and I do it a lot. And I spoke for 10 years at conferences before I got paid a cent. And then just someone, a miracle happened. Someone said, how much do you charge? And I said, hello?

[01:16:38] Cameron: Yeah. Now, the thing to understand is when people say, well, the rich will control everything. The rich are rich because they own the means of production, the capital class. It’s basic Marxism, right? The capital class control the means of production or they own or control businesses that produce products and services that the working in the middle classes and the, and the wealthy classes need or want.

[01:17:03] Cameron: If people can make their own products or have robots to make them or do or perform the services around them, they don’t need to buy them from the others, which means the rich are no longer rich. They, you know, the rich may have money tied up in the share market, but the share market is made up of companies

[01:17:20] Steve: there is no share

[01:17:21] Cameron: and services that people no longer need.

[01:17:24] Cameron: Exactly. So this scenario, the last option there is the complete. Destruction of the capitalist system and the replacement of it with something new and different. That is like I always refer to as star Trek economy. Um, it’s advanced communism, um, where people don’t need to have money because everything is just provided for you.

[01:17:46] Cameron: And all of the problems around that the communist countries had in the early to mid-twentieth century about centralized control of the economy isn’t a problem when you have an artificial general intelligence, centralized control of the economy because it will be able to do it. They didn’t even have spreadsheets in 1950.

[01:18:03] Cameron: Soviet Union Cuba in Vietnam didn’t have spreadsheets, let alone AI to run their centralized economy. We will have

[01:18:13] Cameron: 10 years from now AI to do it. So can you, uh, I know you gotta go, but can you think of any scenarios that

[01:18:23] Cameron: I’ve missed here?

[01:18:26] Steve: Nah, they’re, they’re the major things. I mean, it come, it comes down to access a production access distribution. If those, all of those elements can be AI’d and automated and you can release the factors of production. So there’s a collaborative commons. It.

[01:18:42] Steve: doesn’t seem that this wouldn’t be possible and I can’t help but think that, um, if this is possible, then a new form of economic system will emerge.

[01:18:54] Steve: And I don’t think it’s Marxism, I don’t think it’s capitalism. It’s, it’s, it’s new. I dunno what it is, but it’s parts of what you describe where there’s this humanity and self-actualization layer that sits on top of, it’s almost like I’m gonna bring it. It’s been a real biomimicry theme here today. It’s almost like what happens with your body.

[01:19:14] Steve: Your body, if you give it enough energy, it just does the stuff that it does. It regulates your heart, your blood, your temperature. It just does all of

[01:19:20] Cameron: No, it’s,

[01:19:21] Steve: feels like, you know,

[01:19:23] Steve: in a way I. This could be like that where it just, those things just happen with a little bit of direction and it adapts to what you need and want, and it just seems like there’s this social and entertainment layer that we live in on top of it.

[01:19:37] Steve: I just don’t know. The one thing I’m thinking of is how to hierarchies work and how does the human need for achievement and scoring and people being better than others, whether that’s an innate need or whether that’s only there because of access to resources. I don’t

[01:19:55] Cameron: Their AI psychiatrist will

[01:19:57] Cameron: help them find peace, but I, I would argue that it is absolutely Marxism. Marxism is all about the means of production being in the hands of the people. The dictatorship of the

[01:20:09] Steve: Yeah. But the means of production, they are in

[01:20:11] Steve: the hands of the people, but the people aren’t doing production. It’s kind of this, I feel like it’s a neo-Marxism of sorts. Right.

[01:20:17] Steve: That just operates on its own

[01:20:19] Steve: level and layer. Yeah, it look, it is definitely something that is buy and for the people in that

[01:20:25] Cameron: And Marx. And Engels in the Communist, Manifesto and all of their writings and talking about it, their view of the, the arc of history was that socialism would come after capitalism. You needed capitalism to build out the means of production. Then socialism would be like a, a humanization of capitalism, and then communism would be the point where you didn’t even need governments anymore.

[01:20:52] Cameron: You didn’t need any form of, uh,

[01:20:54] Cameron: economic system. Everything was just running itself.

[01:20:57] Cameron: This is kind of that. I mean, they didn’t know it was gonna happen because of ai, obviously.

[01:21:01] Cameron: But anyway, that’s, they’re my

[01:21:04] Cameron: scenarios for what could play out. I haven’t, I haven’t got

[01:21:07] Steve: I’m, I’m gonna add

[01:21:08] Cameron: against those, but

[01:21:09] Steve: I did have one to add to the 10 and where is it? I wrote it down here somewhere. Okay. My, my, my 10th is

[01:21:18] Steve: is that. Rather than AI doing all of these things. My, my one is, is that, is that we are the ai, we just don’t know it yet. The world is evolving so quickly that we’re evolving outside of our bodies until we work out a way to take the, that evolutionary process into our bodies.

[01:21:37] Steve: We merge with the machines and it’s part of the natural evolutionary process of our species. We may end up with a split in the species, but most likely we won’t. ’cause those who don’t do it will get outdated or die or become like a, a microcosm and we are essentially, there is no such thing as AGI or ASI or humans versus AI because they’re one and the same thing.

[01:22:03] Cameron: You’re right. I missed that one out. Humans and AI merge.

[01:22:06] Steve: I’m, I’m glad I added something ’cause I thought you did a stellar job on the nine and I’m glad I at least added some level of value.

[01:22:12] Cameron: Yeah, we just merge and we become one species.

[01:22:18] Steve: Hmm. That’s my bet. ’cause I don’t think all of the others, a lot of them are really unpalatable, let’s just put it that way.

[01:22:29] Cameron: Well, the question then is if we merge and become one species again, how do we live? And I think that still leads us into my last option there, which is.

[01:22:39] Steve: Yeah, it does. I think it does. I, I, I

[01:22:42] Steve: think that the economic system that we have and, and it’s teetering already where it’s, it’s ending up in monopolistic economic structures where we become subservient to the owners of digital infrastructure and capital to the point now where they’re natural monopolies.

[01:22:59] Steve: And if you have natural monopolies, then it makes sense that that monopoly becomes co-owned, collaborative production capacity. Ending.

[01:23:09] Cameron: Good to chat as always, Steve,

[01:23:11] Steve: thanks so much, cam. You’ve learned me again once

[01:23:13] Cameron: thanks to

[01:23:14] Steve: 10%

[01:23:15] Cameron: me too. Thanks to all the listeners, uh, and for all the feedback. It’s great to know that you’re all enjoying it. And, uh, tell a friend, tell a friend, write us a review on, uh. Wherever Apple, Google Spotify, write us a review. Send us an email we love hearing from you. Figure it out.

[01:23:32] Cameron: Ask Arc search how to send us an email if you dunno.

[01:23:36] Cameron: Uh, that’s futuristic for this week. Take care buddy.

[01:23:40] Steve: See you, mate.

[01:23:41] Steve: