We're back with another edition of The Federalist or Radio Hour. I'm Emil Jashnski,
culture editor here at The Federalist. As always, you can email the
show at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on Twitter at fdr
LST. Make sure to subscribe wherever your download your podcasts, and to the
premium version of our website as well. Today we're joined by a familiar byline.
If you read The Federalist, you will probably recognize it, especially if
you've been following the conversation swirling around transhumanism, and that is Joe Allen,
who is a producer an editor with the War Room and for the purposes of
this conversation, the author of the new book Dark Eon, trans Humanism and
the War Against Manity. Joe, thank you so much for joining us.
Emily, thank you very much, very very good to be here. All
right. Joe's book is out on August twenty nine, and as I've been
skimming it in preparation for this conversation, it's fascinating and I think Joe does
such a good job of giving historical perspective to this issue, bringing it to
this issue. You even go back, Joe to the printing press, which
I would too. I think that's really the right place to start, although
of course the definition of technology is a conversation that could torture us just about
forever. But you, your own personal background is an important part of this
story, and wanted to see if you could just, you know, tell
us, give us a little bit of your biography and tell us how you
came to cover this issue for war Room and in the media. Sure,
and you know, I think a good starting place would be a two and
a half years ago. That's when Steve reached out to me. Steve Bannon
reached out to me having read one of the articles I'd written for The Federalist.
It was on transhumanism and the aspiration or digital immortality. He after going
on the show, which was incidentally maybe the fifth skype call I had ever
had in my life. After going on the show, he offered to take
me on full time, and it was a way for me to voice the
concerns I have about the rapidly encroaching technological system and it's negative effects on human
beings and human society. So that really goes back to my late teens,
and that has continued without really any pause. Or diminishment until now you could
say that I begin that all with a bias, and you would be correct.
But that doesn't mean that these concerns that I'm voicing, and that many
many others are voicing, yourself included, are somehow invalid. I believe that
the human being is being rapidly transformed psychologically, sociologically, and to some extent
biologically. Should the ambitions of these people come to fruition, these people being
futurists, transhumanists, post humanists, the technological overlords who in many ways have
taken control in our organizing our lives, that I think that the rapid transformation
of humanity will proceed apace, perhaps accelerate, and we will have lost everything
that is of value. It will either be augmented beyond recognition or it will
simply disappear. Now I don't really I do not think that any futurist has
predicted what is to come with one hundred percent accuracy or eighty percent accuracy.
But I do think that by looking at the predictions of people half a century
ago, even a century, a century and a half ago, and you
can see that there is a kind of if you take an average so to
speak of those visions, the broad generic contours of their visions, that really
has come to pass. And so if the visions put forward by the likes
of Ray Kurzweil or Been Gertzel or Hugo to Garis or even someone like Elon
Musk or Serge Brand Larry Cage, if these visions are anything like they describe,
and of course they're all contradictory, they're different people with different outlooks.
If it's anything like they describe, we will not be recognizably human. It
doesn't it doesn't have to be a world of robots and cybe words. In
the same way that people complained that TV was making kids dumber in the sixties
and seventies, which it did. In the same way that old codgers like
myself complain that the Internet is making people dumber, which it is. We
could end up not in the matrix but in idiocracy. Both are nightmare worlds,
and both to some approximation of both is possible. Joe, you actually
worked in the music industry. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you you
worked in the in the music industry before coming into the media space. Yeah,
you know. Oftentimes people tease me for saying, yeah, I was
in the music business, which is code for I was a rigor, which
is code for I was a roadie. So it's a little different, but
yeah, and I would say that that experience, while I absolutely loved my
job. My job was to hang various systems, lighting systems, audio systems,
the most interesting being automated system systems where you have robotics moving trust and
various other objects around on stage. That job itself from the most basic labor
of climbing up in the steel. You know, you're walking beams at one
hundred feet in the air, you're climbing on stages or one hundred and twenty
feet up and you know, all that was just fantastic on a physical level.
And the people that I worked with were fantastic, many of them ex
cons and ne'er do wells, some of them dead now, but wonderful people
nonetheless, and maybe wonderful people because of that and the further I got into
it, You know, you learn a lot about roague engineering, You learn
a lot about the technologies that you're hanging. You spend a lot of time
around people who are nerding out on entertainment technology in general. Be it a
light show or a laser show, or video content or automated trust moves.
All of that was fantastic. In the mathematics behind it are fascinating, fairly
simple, but you see the way in which machinery and technology really do mirror
the numbers. Underneath the math is a language, a magical language. But
at the same time, what I also saw was that this complex, this
entertainment complex, which bleeds over into the political, into the religious, into
the corporate, that it also seems to be having a profoundly negative effect on
human human nature. To the extent that you value individuality, to the extending
you value critical thinking, and to the extent that you think you suspect that
the West and maybe the entire developed world is descending into decadence in various forms.
All of that was readily apparent in the concert touring industry, you know,
all over the country and in a lot of different places in the world,
Japan, Europe, Indonesia, Thailand, all over the place, and
you know Abu Dhabi, and you see in all of these places how this
hypnotic machine and the way in which it can just basically take control, sees
control of the mind and sees and people begin to you know, move even
physically in ways that resemble insects or you know, maybe even like cells in
a multicellular organism. And you can say, well, if you put good
content in there, then that's a good thing. But bad content in there,
it's a bad thing. But I would say that, okay, fine,
but you also are creating something new. You're creating something that is limited
in its range. It's creating a type of person in that moment, and
the type of person in that moment, that sort of passive observer who is
hypnotized and having their mind taken over for that short period of time, that
that moment lingers into their lives. And that's one piece of a much larger
system of technological progress that is again, I think, leading us into a
realm in which human beings are profoundly different in our behavior, in our way
of thinking. And maybe people like that, So some people obviously do.
For those who don't, they better figure out really fast how they're going to
avoid it, and especially how they are going to teach their children to avoid
it or at least mitigate it. Thanks for listening to the Federalist. This
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I want to get into some specifics, because that's another part of this
book that I found particularly interesting. You write that humanity two point zero will
be transnational, transcultural, transgender, transracial, trend species, and at its
extreme edge, transhuman, the final merger of man with the machine. You
continue, they want to drill holes in our skulls, insert hairth and wires,
and bring our souls into full communion with artificial intelligence. They want to
reach into our selves and rewrite our DNA. They want to spawn GMO babies
from artificial wounds. They want to mutate our species and guide evolution according to
their will and whim. They want to create entirely new spaces of plants,
animals, and fungi. They want to control the weather itself. They're ready
to create heaven on Earth even it looks like even if it looks like hell
to the to most of us, that last line is really profound. And
some of these specifics do you feel like they're ripped from dystopian Dystopian conspiratorial sci
fi novel, but they are tethered to very real world examples. So,
Joe, what should be what is on the horizon? What should people be
looking at? That is one of those examples of something that is extreme and
dystopian but is actually imminent. What are the ones that people should be paying
attention to that are are sort of most disturbing and most imminent on the horizon.
You know, I think the subtlety of this transformation maybe disturbs me the
most. You know, much of what we think of in regards to transhumanism,
be it artificial intelligence, brain, computer interfaces, robotics, genetic and
nearing. Most of that floods into our conscious by way of media. It's
either through science fiction or more recently, through the news media, which is
arguably one quarter fiction or whatever proportion you want to put on it. And
so it begins with an imagination of the future. But underneath that our actual
viable technologies that are being used as we speak. And artificial intelligence, let's
just take that for one moment. Artificial intelligence has advanced in leaps and bounds
over the last two years, especially the last five. It's possible that we've
reached a cap it won't go any farther. But I don't think at this
point in history it's a very good idea to bank on nothing is going to
change, and I don't think it's a good idea to bank on none of
these changes are going to affect me. So with artificial intelligence, there are
so many different systems. I go into a lot of them, but maybe
the most striking right now because of its the attention being put on it,
and also because of the implications of its normalization. The large Language Model,
the chat bot chat GPT barred from Google and all of the other chat bots,
because what you're talking about is a system that's able to replicate one of
the most vital elements of what it is to be human, and that's the
spoken word or the written word. Language, and that's the root of much
of what we assemble in our minds and our souls as meaning. And you
have a system like GPT that has trained on human output. In essence,
they say that's trained on all of human writing, it's not exactly that.
It's a lot of human writing, and by way of statistical averages, it's
able to produce novel responses. Two questions, some with GPT four. It's
rated, it's like eighty percent accuracy, and it may not be esthetically pleasing
oftentimes, and the poetry is total crap, but one has to remember that
ninety nine point nine percent of human poetry is crap, so you know,
it doesn't really have a very high bar to get over there. And so
you have this system that is designed for human machine interaction, human machine relationships,
and the proposed uses beyond just the kind of side show that we have
now. The proposed uses are to employ GPT technology and other chatbots in education.
So one on one instruction with students, the students from the earliest of
age, the earliest age would basically learn that artificial intelligence has most of the
answers and oftentimes the best answers. It will become an instructor, it will
become the mentor, it will become trusted companion, and the student's mind will
be in many ways shaped by the production of algorithms. People would say,
oh, well, isn't the printing press like that? Yeah, and the
printing press started all sorts of social conflict, wars, total upheaval, and
this, I think threatens to do much the same, if not worse it
certainly threatens to be a dramatic transition in human thinking, in the ways human
beings think, and how we direct our attention, how we orient ourselves,
our communities, and ultimately how our civilizations are oriented. And that's just one
that one tiny node in this vast system that is really hurtling towards some kind
of dramatically different future. But one thing that I've certainly it has struck me
deeply is how different these various thinkers foresee the future. That it's not like
transhumanism is any one thing. They are very there's a wide variety of transhumanist
visions for the future, and each person tends to focus on a certain set
of technologies as being the next big thing that will change everything. Taken in
the aggregate, and especially when you look at the various tech corporations who are
producing and pushing these technologies. Taken in the aggregate, it is some kind
of dramatic transformission. It is the inflection point that they're claiming whatever direction it
goes. So, yeah, that's one artificial intelligence, the chatbot. But
you know, artificial intelligence is being used in genetic engineering and predicting and modeling
protein and predicting how mutations will play out in genetic engineering. It's being used
for psychological profiling. It's being used for social network analysis. It's being used
to predict social behavior and political behavior and economic behavior. It's being used in
warfare. It's been used for surveillance in warfare, surveillance of the population.
Artificial intelligence has really changed really everything about how intelligence is gathered, and it
also changes the scope how much data can be analyzed. It's not perfect,
and people would argue that, oh, it's not even artificial intelligence, and
it's not by the old meaning of you know, the artificial intelligence originally meaning
a machine that can think like a human in full. But it is,
whether you call it artificial intelligence or simply computer algorithms. It has changed the
way in which people at the upper echelons of our society operate, and it's
changed the way that those of us in the middle or lower socioeconomic realms and
realms of influence at the way our lives play out. Then, my biggest
fear really is that children, as they become enambered these various visions of future
children, will not gain the source of techniques, They will not master the
tools that have kept human civilization afloat for all these millennia, and those will
be gradually lost, and even if they don't need them anymore, that is
a profound tragedy. But the real tragedy would be if we become hyperdependent in
the coming decades on machines for everything from our thinking to our survival skills,
and those systems fail, then you're talking about a real tragedy. Can you
tell us? Actually speaking of artificial intelligence, one good segue from that is
neuralink, the very specific example of neurallink, and obviously Elon Musk is behind
neurallink. He signed the letter of tech industry insiders experts that were calling for
a pause in large language Model AI, the sort of open source LMS,
and he's sort of turned a corner and said, you know, we need
to be more skeptical. But he still sees this as an inevitability, meaning
to develop it, it has to be benevolent. And I think, Joe,
your perspective on that is that it's naive. But I also wanted to
ask you specifically what that means for neuralink, and maybe you could just tell
us the story of neurallink, and the story of Musk's sort of backing of
Neuralink, his plans for neuralink, and maybe tell us a little bit of
what that explains about what's going on behind the scenes in Silicon Valley right now,
well naive at best, in cynical at worst. It should be remembered
that about a month after he signed that open letter, he announced the launch
of x AI, and so he's jumping into the game, however reluctantly.
It is in fact reluctant. So you know, there's two elements to that.
One is artificial intelligence itself and the mythos surrounding it and it's dangers,
and the other the brain computer interface or human machine symbiosis, the sydeboard,
the dream of connecting human beings two machines in a direct way. So Musk
he provided seed funding for open ai in twenty fifteen. That same year he
bought Neuralink, and that was really its leap forward. Neuralink itself is a
brain computer interface. It's right now. The present design has changed a bit.
This is probably already outdated. It is changing quickly because it's developing quickly.
But basically the way it works, the way it works, and the
the cat and monkeys that they've been planted at. The device into is it's
a quarter sized plug with a processor and Wi Fi connection and one twenty four
hair thin wires that snake down into the gray matter below. Then the plug
of skull is cut out and the processor is put in, the scalp is
sewn up. And what it the way it works is the device itself,
the little wires, the electrodes are detecting brain at neurological activity, brain activity.
And so in the case of Pager, the famous monkey who learned to
play mind pong, to play Pong, the arcade game Pong, with only
his brain, the way it worked it was it was two neural links in
his motor the right and left motor cortex, very called correctly, and he
would play the game with a joystick and he would have a little too with
Banana Smoothie rewarding him when he got it right. So he mastered the game
first with the joystick and lured by Banana Smoothie, and they would record the
correlation between his eye movements and his muscular movements and all that, and they
would once they had it basically a kind of digital twin his brain activity and
how that would translate into the muscular movements with the joystick. They unplugged the
joystick, so he would still be moving the joystick with his hand, and
yet he would just be playing the game with his brain. And he was
doing very well. If you watched the video, you see it's very good
at it. And then eventually they take the joystick away and he just sits
there holding his little smoothie tube, sucking on smoothie and playing mind pong,
and that it was a dramatic proof of concept. They've also done it in
pigs, and they've worked with a lot of different animals mice. They're right
now the FBA's approved neurallyink for human trials. But there are two other major
brain computer interface companies who are already in planting their chips in human brains.
One of them is black Rock Neurotech, backed by Peter Teel, also Bill
Gates and Jeff Bezos, and I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. Black Rock
Neurotech is Peter Teel's baby, among other investors. Syncron is the second company,
and Syncron is backed by an investment organization involving Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.
So these are big players. That are making this happen, and both
of those have been implanted. Black Rock Neurotech just passed the fifty patient mark.
So what it is is an electro to rate lays on the brain does
all the same thing neurolink does, and it allows people who are locked in
to use computers to type to even the most dramatic. I actually wrote about
this for the Federalists. A guy who simply would was able to think words,
they would They found ways to allow him to correlate his brain activity of
certain words to appear on screen as those words, and then syncron. I
believe that's cursor based. But the first tweets in December twenty twenty one,
the first tweet sent with a brain computer interface that was syncron. So the
mechanisms are different, but again it just shows that it can be done.
So Musk wants that to be a commercial product product. He says it will
be basically like a smart watch for your brain or a smart phone for your
brain. And the reasoning behind it. The reasoning he puts forward is that
as artificial intelligence becomes more and more adept, it will become very dangerous and
there will be very little There will be few ways to communicate with it,
to understand what it's doing, to control it, and so Neuralink is put
forward as a way to harness that technology, to harness artificial intelligence as it
begins to surpass human capabilities. A lot of his ideas come from a gentleman,
Nick Bostrom, an Oxford philosopher, a transhumanist, co founder of the
World Transhumanist Association, and author of the book super Intelligence, which still to
this day stands as probably the best primmer on all the possible ways that artificial
intelligence could go wrong. And must read that around the time that he founded
Neuralink and open Ai, and so in essence, emily what I see musk.
However, however disingenuous he may be, however cynical he may be,
or however genuine he may be in his concerns. Either way, whatever his
motivation, he is at the center of driving these dreams forward. So now
he has the company Xai and xai their goal is to create an artificial general
intelligence as opposed to the narrow systems that can only do a single task.
And the artificial general intelligence that he's creating he hopes will be a foil to
the so called woke systems like chat, GPT or you know any His goal
is stated goal of him and his developers. They want to create an AI
that is curious about the universe and that will want to keep human beings around
because human beings are entertaining, and its curiosity will be satisfied by our endless
novelties and dramas. I don't know what the possibilities of any of this really
are. What I do know is that some approximation of those possibilities are being
realized right now, and the culture is shifting in the direction of focusing attention
on these technologies as ways of alleviating human suffering, of ways of creating joy
in human beings, but maybe most importantly, ways of creating meaning for human
beings. So, even though I think Musk is a really as a characters,
I like him better than any of the other tech oligarchs. He's much
more of an open transhumanist than any of the others, with the exception of
maybe Sam Altman. And he's also he stands a very good chance of creating
some of the viable technologies that take us into a transhuman era where some portion
of humanity. I don't think it's everybody, but some portion of humanity really
does become something very different than we are right now, which is already very
different than our ancestors were one hundred years ago. The Watchdot on Wall Street
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podcasts. You know we've been talking about e La Muski mentioned Peter Teel.
I think it's really important to note, as you do. I have the
quote pulled up right here. But contrary to many right wing critiques, transhumanism
is not purely globalist, leftist, or secularist frame of mind. All the
relevant cutting edge technologies from genetic engineering to advance robotics to artificial intelligence are embraced
by a number of nationalists, libertarians, religious fundamentalists, gender normies, protonatalists,
and proponents of human center technology that's in quotes. After all, cybergs
will vote and spend just as readily as legacy humans. And what I think
that gets at is similar to what you were just talking about, that some
of these technologies are being pitched understandably so as tech that will alleviate human suffering.
If we think about some medical technologies, they're very obvious examples from the
last five hundred years plus of where we have alleviated humans suffering by innovation and
technological advancement. What we consider technological advancement is of course not always progress and
is not, of course literally always advancement. And I think that's where people
get sort of really vulnerable to this because there's truth in some of the arguments
that there will be benefits as there have been benefits in the past, and
you know there there is some stuff to be discovered out there medically, what
have you that that may indeed be helpful. So my question Joe is basically,
as we think through these things for the averaging in Federals radio, our
listener, federal reader, curious person, who's who's in the same boat as
us, concerned about this tech? How do we think about the ethical guidelines
you know, between what is the what's the printing press, and what's you
know? How to deal with the inevitabilities of the potential new printing press of
looking at a looking at a type technology mRNA is something you read a lot
about and saying this crosses the line, this will be used for bad,
this will commodify us. How do we start thinking about where those lines are
drawn. It's a very tough question and one that I, unfortunately I don't
believe that I answer very well in my book, in my coverage, in
my life. It's there's so many unknowns. But one thing I think we
can count on is that most of those decisions in America, assuming that American
freedom is preserved, most of those ethical decisions will be determined by us,
by consumers. The technologies will thrive or fail depending on how we decide to
adopt them and whether we decide to adopt them. Again. None of this,
I don't think will be universal. It's very When people talk about the
future, they oftentimes talk about it is if everything changes for everybody all at
once, and that's not how I see it. I think that these technological
transformations, if you look at Silicon Valley right now, it's very very,
very different than Kansas, and that sort of dynamic will continue going forward.
But as as they've become more and more widespread, such as like the smartphone,
the smartphone adoption has been incredible and I think has been incredibly devastating to
so many different elements of human psychology and human society. So going forward,
looking at let's you know again, you know, we talked about an array
of technologies, whether there's artificial intelligence, robotics, brain computer interfaces, or
genetic engineering or any of the others, transportation technologies, communication technologies, any
of the others. The first thing that you want to ask, I believe,
is for who is benefiting from this? I getting more out of it
than they are. So when you use Google, you're getting quick answers to
your questions. Are you getting more out of that interaction than Google is By
beginning to create a dossier on your psychological state and your desires and your behaviors,
are you getting out more out of it than they are? And in
the aggregate, are we getting more out of it than they are? That's
the first question to ask. The second is a long term what does this
look like? So if we replace human beings with robots in any scenario,
whether it's in manufacturing, whether it's an agriculture, which is you know,
it's a role that's lagging, but more and more autonomous vehicles are being used,
or massive vehicles are being used for agriculture, and farming has all but
disappeared as an American cultural norm. Long term? Is that better for us?
Can we count on that to be sustainable? When you get into the
more exotic technologies like brain computer interfaces, you've got multiple levels on that.
The smartphone, I think is the first step. Elon Musk talks about this
all the time. We are already cyborgs. I think he's absolutely correct.
I mean, a cyborg is just a cybernetic organism. It's a it's a
it's a way to blur the lines between the human and the machine, and
that is absolutely happening. Human beings basically create digital twins, as it's been
described as like a snail shell, or if you were to look at the
entire digital environment, it would be like a coral reef. You know,
we are creating these these external realities that there are, our personalities, our
desires, our artistic productions, all of that. It's a kind of another
layer sitting over the top of society and over the planet. What does that
look like in fifty years if we continue on like this, to what extent
will that become the primary focus, the primary reality? To what extent do
we lose what is most valuable in the human being by giving up face to
face interactions, by giving up direct contact with nature, by giving up some
of our worst elements. I mean, one of the arguments that is made
a lot by these the more aggressive technocrats is that racism, sexism, homophobia,
and transphobia will be eliminated through these technologies. There's various paths to that.
Do we give those up? Are those you know? To some extent,
is you know in group preference, or is heteronormativity, or is any
of these things that are now the ultimate sins of the liberal order? Do
we just completely give them up and become gray in our minds? These are
all questions that going forward, and especially people with children going forward, they
will have to ask and answer for themselves, And it's not that the situations
are so various and the technologies there's such a wide array of them. There
is no one size fits all answer. But I really think it's important that
people are realistic about the ups and downsides of these technologies. And there's not
a single technology that I've written about that doesn't have some kind of upside.
If it didn't have an upside, nobody would have thought to make it,
and nobody would ever consider purchasing it, or no one would ever consider imposing
it on their subjects, such in places like China or post COVID America.
But yeah, I think that the big thing is to be very realistic about
the ups and downsides and also do your best just simply imagine what it means
to incorporate some sort of exotic alien being into your life. Now, you
might say that's a paranoid way of looking at it, and that's because you
asked somewhat paranoid person for the answer. But that's that's the answer that I
would give a great point from Joe Allen, who's the author of Dark Eon,
Transhumanism and the War against Humanity. Joe, we really appreciate you coming
on the show and congrats on the book. Thank you very much, Emily.
Of course you have been listening to another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour.
I'm Emily de Shensky, culture editor here at The Federalist. We'll be
back soon with more. Until then, be the lovers of freedom and anxious
for the fray. Heard the fame, the reason, and then it faded away.