Speaker 1: At the same time that we're all being worked by
this system. And I don't necessarily think of this as
a grand conspiracy. I just think of it as the
way the market moves. But but I, you know, I
really think everybody can feel it, right. You just can
sense this dissatisfaction in people around that stuff. The algorithm
is getting people down, and I feel like there's an
allergic reaction that people are kind of developing to this
stuff that hasn't fantasticized to regulation yet, but I feel
like it's certainly there culturally, and like kids right now
are the term that people are more using. For AI
and for older people who over rely on it is clanker.
Speaker 2: You are listening to Carrie Letz's Financial Survival Network, where
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Speaker 3: Anyway. Welcome to Financial Survival Network. I'm your host, Carrie Lutz.
With us now is Jacob Ward, author of recent book
The Loop, How technology is creating a world without choices.
Little ominous title there, Jacob, Like you've been a reporter,
a journalist your entire life career, many different news organizations.
I thought the whole purpose of technology was to increase
our choices, to make our lives richer, to give us
opportunities that we never had before.
Speaker 1: You know, it's funny carry well, first of all, thanks
so much for having me and I and I yeah,
I you know that there there are these moments and
I haven't I feel like I should coin a phrase
for these moments where there's this there's this intermediary moment
where technology does tend to do that right where it
has in the past. On that I was thinking, you know,
I was around for the early days of the Internet
when it was still migrating from being an entirely academic,
you know, plaything to something that anybody who the dial
up connections could start to play around with. And that's
that was the early days of bloggers and the rest
of it. And suddenly you're in this world where you know,
there really was this promise of like, wow, the information
of the world at your fingertips. And I remember at
that time thinking to myself, Man, when I have kids
they're going to be in this position to just develop
any taste they want in any form of entertainment. They're
going to have, you know, really specific taste in you know,
Kurdish folk music or you know, tango or who knows
what they're going to be into, because they're going to
have the choice any choice they possibly want. Right today.
I just recently took a trip to Portugal, and when
I go, it used to be that when I would
go on trips, I like that I always want to
bring back what kids are wearing for my kids, to
sort of point it out to them, you know. And
and I go to I'm on the subway in Lisbon,
and I'm looking around, and every single one of those
kids is wearing exactly the same thing as my kids
wear back at home. And that's the TikTok effect, right
because the trends are being consolidated and commercialized so quickly
now that it's not cool to be into Kurtish folk music.
You know, there's a there's a I'm sure a corner
of the internet for everything, and I've talked to lots
of people for whom it is a place to curate
your own tastes. But if you go with the flow
of modern technology and where it's pushing us. It doesn't
let kids develop their own taste and stuff. It tries
to shape their taste where wherever it can. And that's
why I ended up writing The Loop. Was this worry
I had that that there's huge behavioral science findings over
the last fifty sixty years that are showing us just
how shapable we are. And then at the same time,
I was you know, this was pre transformer models, pre CHGBT.
I was looking at all these companies who are looking
using early machine learning models to try to spot the
patterns and people's behavior and shape those patterns wherever they could.
And I just thought, oh, there's a real problem coming here.
And so I wrote the book and then and I
published it, and literally nine months later chat gipt came out,
and I've been spending the last few years just watching
my thesis come to life basically, and I'll tell you
carry is it's one thing, you know, you think you
want to be right when you write a book, but
this is an instance in which I wish I had
not been as right.
Speaker 3: So so interesting because I got like a line of
t shirts that I just created using the AI, and
my biggest hit is don't let the algorithm get you down.
Speaker 1: Right, right? I mean, this is the thing is that
at the same time that we're all being worked by
this system. And I don't necessarily think of this as
a grand conspiracy. I just think of it as the
way the market moves. But but I, you know, I
really think everybody can feel it, right. You just can
sense this dissatisfaction in people around that stuff. The algorithm
is getting people down, and I feel like there's an
allergic reaction that people are kind of developing to this
stuff that hasn't fantasticized to regulation yet, but I feel
like it's certainly there culturally. And like kids right now,
are they? The term that people are more more using
for AI and for older people who over rely on
it is clanker. So when when a when a piece
of AI makes something people think is stupid, they're like, stupid, clanker,
don't do that, you know what? Or or fake videos
of somebody the guilty look at this clanker. Oh yeah,
totally right. And so I feel like there's something that's
something great in kids that they're seeing this clearly, you know,
I love it.
Speaker 3: I love it. Yeah, it's you know, kids don't do
homework anymore.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 3: And like the thing is, when you work with the AI,
it adapts to you and speaks in your voice. There's
virtually no way that it can be tected. And then
you could put it through multiple ais called stacking, and
no one will ever be able to figure it out.
Speaker 1: So that's right, we did. Why you have teachers having
to go back to nineteenth century techniques like having you
write it out in long hand in class? Right, there's
no there. They can't even take advantage of this technology
in any sort of productive way. They have to just
like go back to like lamplight kind of teaching techniques. Yeah.
Speaker 3: And you know, look, they stopped teaching cursive writing in
school like twenty years ago, So what the heck is
the point of all this?
Speaker 1: Right? Right? Right?
Speaker 3: They should have never done that, just like they shouldn't
have allowed calculators into the classroom. But you know they
didn't consultant.
Speaker 1: Me, right, yeah, exactly. I know they didn't call either
of us. I don't know why that was. Yeah, So
I worry a lot about this, this you know, tendency
that we've had. I was just on a I'm here's
what your opinion is about this. This is on this
podcast the other day with a couple of people who
are former Uber and former Google people, and the former
Uber guy god Nam Chris sad very angry at the
whole notion that I was proposing, which is that we
should have been more careful, and that we should in
general be more careful. And you know, this notion for instance,
that you know, before releasing a large language model, you
should have had a large language model detector, right, you
shouldn't have You shouldn't have put it out there until
we could have reliably detected what's AI generated. And it's
the kind of thing that he that made him crazy.
He just was so upset at that notion. He said,
you know, the whole point of innovation is to move fast,
break things, and figure it out later. That's how we
get great ideas, you know. And he's just absolutely you know,
I really he was just fuming about this, this concept,
and and I just kept trying to say, but shouldn't
there be a limit here, shouldn't there be some consideration
ahead of time, you know? And and he did not
seem to feel that way. And I think that his
opinion is not uncommon, and I wonder what you think
about that.
Speaker 3: You know, I used to have that same opinion. But
the problem is every technology can be used for evil.
It's going to be implied.
Speaker 1: And what for you was the turning point when did
you what technology or what moment made you reconsider that?
Do you think?
Speaker 3: You know? I think I think when I look at
modern weaponry and it's got all these chips in it,
and you know, it just really said, we're getting like
too far ahead here. I feel like it's out of control.
And now that the AI is designing the success of
hardware generations, you see it in video. Their AI is
designing those chips. No human can do it. And then Tesla,
that company is completely AI generated. Their products are being generated,
maybe not wholly, but more more by the AI than
by humans. And you know, it's like the AI has
to fake empathy. Oh yeah, humans either have it or
they don't. But you know, it just seemed to me
that but the toothpaste is out of the tube, whereas
I like to say, the junie, the genie is out
of the toothpaste tube and there's no putting it back.
Speaker 1: I don't know, I hear so many people say that,
but I have to say, like Carrie, we're we're really
good at putting toothpaste in tubes, like we're you know,
we as a country we do that pretty well, you know,
like we've You and I would be sitting here smoking
cigarettes together if it weren't for you know, people thinking
it through. And you know, people hate to hear that comparison.
They think, oh, well, cigarettes is they're you know, very different.
I think, I don't know, man, Like, definitely they were
bad for us. They felt really good to use. They
were you know, you you you literally couldn't go anywhere
without smoking. It was in every movie, plant nice, airplanes, everywhere.
And this is the thing that bothers me about how
we think about about AI is is you know what
I keep trying to remind people is like, it's not
going to feel good to make the right choice around
this technology. It's going to feel bad. It's going to
feel like you don't want to do it, you know,
to use this stuff less or any of that thing.
And that's the thing with cigarettes. If you ask somebody
in nineteen fifty seven, hey do you like smoking, they'd say,
I love smoking. It feels great. You know, it's not
until nineteen sixty five that they start to regulate against it,
and you and you had to do it on the
basis of what we could see empirically was happening to
people's bodies. And in this case, I think we're going
to see empirically what's happening to people's brains. And there's
going to have to be a shift. But it's not
going to come from people just saying no, I'm gonna
quit smoking on my own, you know. Yeah, you know.
Speaker 3: It's one of those things where the benefits are so
great though, And I know that.
Speaker 1: Is the argument that I keep hearing, right, the benefit
the democratizing of superpowers is how people describe it, right that. Yeah,
and I get it. I hear that, But I just
feel like, I don't know. I had a piece up
on the ripecurrent dot com about just give it to
scientists for a while, Like, let's give it to people
whose job it is to make good use of it.
Let's not use it to make like porn girlfriends yet,
you know, let's not use it to do this other
crap yet, Let's just give it to like climate scientists,
social scientists, Like, let's let them use it for five years,
then the rest of us can get a license to
do it. But I just think, man, we're moving too fast.
Speaker 3: It seems to me, Yeah, that's the thing. We're going
at such a speed. There isn't a feedback loop built
into this to actually judge the impact on society, And
is it something we should put limits on? And we're
counting on the companies pedaling it actually put the limits
on it. And that's like expecting big pharma to.
Speaker 1: Actually want to cure you as the car companies are
going to do the seat belts on their own. And Ralph, yeah,
never had had to get involved. That's exactly right. I
think that's right. I mean, you mentioned the title of
my book, and it is a dark setup, right, the loop,
how AI screening roll without choices. But the other part
of that is and how to fight back. And I
would argue that there are some things coming that I
do feel like, even though this thing moves really fast,
there is some We've talked already about the cultural allergy
that I think we're seeing. I'm also seeing places in which,
you know, I think one of the big things is
going to be in this country. We're very good at
regulating about death, and we're good at regulating about financial loss.
We're not great at other forms of harm, right, and
even addiction, we don't tend to regulate well, you know,
we do okay, but not great. You know, we are
legalizing gambling across the country on your phone, you know,
like there's all kinds of places in which we really
are happy to let people, you know, burn themselves on
the fire. But I do think that more and more
you're seeing in court places where companies are beginning to recognize, oh,
we actually have some liability here, and at the very
least they're starting to settle. So I've been covering a
lot of these social casino games. These are simulators online
that simulate casino games, blackjack and so forth, and people
are increasingly beginning to sue because huge numbers of people
are losing their life savings to these games. It costs
money to play, but you can win no real money back,
So it's the definition of a loser's game. And it's
typically like elderly folks, a lot of elderly women that
get ensnared by this stuff, right, And initially they would
just get laughed out of court, But now class actions
are starting to go forward that are succeeding at least
in scoring big settlements, like half billion dollar settlements, because
you can tell that these companies don't want to reveal
the mechanism. They don't want to go through discovery.
Speaker 3: And exactly in.
Speaker 1: Early twenty twenty six, we're we're going to see two
big court cases against the social media giants that I
think are also going to show that you're going to
get discovery. You know, this is going to have to
You're gonna Zuckerberg and Massia are going to have to
go on the stand. And I think we're going to
start to see the mechanism by which companies are messing
with our choices. And I like to believe that there
is an era coming when it's life liberty, the pursuit
of have and something about agency. You know that there's
going to be something about being free to make your
own choices. You know, there's a Duke law researcher named
Nita Farahani who calls a cognitive liberty. And I like
to think that we're on a path toward, at the
very least winning legal judgments and some settlements on that basis.
And I hope that can somehow change things.
Speaker 3: And I'm going to take this opportunity to mention what
I was alluding to before. But sovereignty is really what
we're sovereignized south the world over there. That's right, that's right.
And look my channel here on this site that you're
going to be watching this. I don't want to name
the name because then the algorithm will pin it and
further suppress it. I've been suppressed for thirteen years because
some professor once upon a time came up a list
with a list of one hundred and forty sites that
she determined where disinformation or misinformation. And finally I just
said I'm not taking it anymore, and I sent off letters.
Physical you want to get a response, don't send an email.
Send a letter that somebody has to tear open and
actually scan into the thing to read it. And they
let one of my videos go. I guess I had
on for thirteen years, twenty four interviews, never did more
than one to nine thousand views. The one time they
let it go, I got one hundred and fifty thousand views,
twenty six hundred new subscribers, and the over one thousand
dollars in revenue. So that's proof it's smoking gun. Because
it happened within days after my letters. They immediately rolled
back the algorithm, so I never had another one of
those happen again. I got to prove because AI helped
me prove exactly what they're doing. I have six AIS.
So I'm starting an action down here in Florida because,
like you said, put Zuckerberg there, put the Sundar there,
and put to the other people there, because they're all
doing it, even though now they say they're not doing
it by viewpoint, politics, whatever. My big crime is that
I'm into Bostrian economics, free market economics, and believe in
protecting your wealth with gold and silver. That's what their
own AI told me. That's my crime. And I feel
like Kafka GPT because I've been accused of a crime
that I don't know what it was, and I'm being
punished for it without ever having had a trial or
face any allegations.
Speaker 1: Well, and this is going to be the big quote, Like,
if what I'm describing comes to pass, it's going to
be a huge controversy and a huge point of debate
because there's for every instance in which you know somebody
is clearly being manipulated by let's say, a big casino company.
There's going to be these much squishier places, right, and
there's going to be this gray area that we're going
to have to sort out in which there's your instance,
but then there's I don't know Andrew Tait, right, who
I would argue, is is doing true damage to the
minds of young people, right, young men? And so what like,
how are we going to adjudicate that I don't know, right?
And you look at at China, which has you know,
one of the things that bothers me the most about
the rhetoric that we follow here in this country about
China and needing to compete with them in AI is
that somehow they don't regulate, which is crazy to me.
That's the most regulated. It's crazy how much they regulate.
Like if you are the CEO of an AI company
and the AI is used to make fun of Jijinping,
you the CEBO are personally liable for that. It's not
even you know, not only do they not have a
section two thirty that BBO goes to jail, right, So
to my mind, like the regulation is enormous on the
other and I think so I've every in my weaker moments,
I think, well, maybe that's what kind of the thing
we need, is that kind of liability. But then I
also go well yeah, But then at the same time
they you know, something like deep seek. The AI model
that they made im cheap there has to be has
to conform to communist central authority teachings, right, socialist teachings,
and so what do you I don't know, I don't know.
Speaker 3: How to how to sort of Yeah, that's boomed for
that reason because it AI has to function on truth,
and when you give it these conflicting missions, it starts hallucinating.
And yeah, try looking up Tieneman Square and they'll have
a picture with a May Day parade there. It's not
going to mention anything about the ten one thousand people.
It just slaughtered back whenever that was I don't remember,
so long ago in the eighties, and you know the
revisionist history and all that. So it's definitely problematical. But
on the other hand, so our awareness has been outstripped
by the ability of bad actors to take advantage of
our biomechanical, biochemical makeup. Is what we're talking about, is
the dopamine loop dating apps do you think dating apps
really want you to find your true love, right, No,
they want you to become just like Big Pharma. They
want you to become a lifetime subscriber. And I wrote
a book, let's say you know, under a pseudonym Johnny Depp,
The Complete Guide to Dating App Hacks. And basically it's like,
originally the algorithm, I used to work for the algorithm,
but now the algorithm works for me. I don't pay
for any of them, and it keeps sending me and
sending me and sending me. So you can manipulate it,
but you got to be aware that it's happening. These
people like who become compulsive online gamblers. It's just like drugs, right,
It's just like crack. It's the dopamine loop. And you know,
when we were growing up, we didn't know anything about neurotransmitters,
serotonin and all the others.
Speaker 1: We did know to prosecute drug dealers, yeah, you know,
but we didn't know the mechanism as well as we do.
Speaker 3: Now that's right, we prosecute them, but then we have
three letter agencies that are among the biggest smugglers of
drugs in the world. So it's complicated. So in any event,
when we're moving ahead, you and I have this conversation.
In five years, neither of us are doing any work
anymore because the bots are all doing it in our names.
Where are we going to be here, Jacob?
Speaker 1: I know, well, this is the big question, right, I mean,
we're you know, there's this quote from Dario Amedai, the
found of Anthropic, in which he says that we're going
to you know that he says you should He literally
says out loud, you should be worried about what we
are making. He told Axios, and he said, you know,
we could cure cancer, we could create enormous wealth, and
twenty percent of people could be out of work, and
you know, you know, and I know you think that's
a conservativestment, right, it could be fastly more than that.
I mean. At the same time, you've got Sam Altman
saying on a podcast last year that he and his
tech CEO buddies have a bet going about who's going
to have the first billion dollar one person company, right,
And that that's another one where I just think, well,
who's going to work for? How are we going to
feed our families? If if a single person controls that
percentage of the GDP, And so I really do think
we're in a place where we're gonna have to get
to a We're very quickly gonna have to get to
a place where we're gonna have to reassess the value
of human beings because it used to be that you
assessed them on their productivity, you know, and their contribution
to GDP, And now I really don't know. I think
Andrew Yang turns out to have been kind of ahead
of his time on what he was thinking about.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they say, how we're it's calm, there, it's coming.
There's no choice. They either have to start a ward
to get rid of a bunch of people like eighty percent,
or they're gonna have to pay them. But on the
other hand, Elon Musk warned about it too, like five
six years ago. You don't hear him talking about it anymore.
That AI was the greatest threat to humanity around, and
you know that was really before chat GPT came out
before the others. I think it's a challenge. But on
the other hand, the current economic system has created huge injustices, imbalances,
incorrect valuations between relative work. Who can say that the
guy who's sweeping the airport bathroom is not as valuable
as some performer on stage. It's getting paid tens of millions.
Speaker 1: I mean teachers, right, like a preschool teacher. Why aren't
they making the same as a doctor. It makes no
It is absolutely outrageous, right, and yet you know we're
going to enter this way. You know, for me, I
just worry about the you know, I'm trying to focus
on like one day at a time. I'm one of
the things that I think is coming. For instance, I
had somebody, a very smart thinker about this named Molly
Kinder who's at the Brookings Is Dude. She's been talking
a lot about how she worries that AI is going
to be he's going to do to non college educated
women what offshore were outsourcing offshore did to non college
uscated men in the United States, because she says that,
you know, women with a high school education, if they
needed a secure middle class existence, then they got into
clerical work, bookkeeping admin.
Speaker 3: All of that is eelephone operator.
Speaker 1: Telephone out right exactly, that's all gone. And the wiping
out of those jobs, which is absolutely what these folks
are all on a path to do, is a huge problem.
I mean in some countries, right, India has outlawed self
driving vehicles because a huge percentage of men in that
country make their living as professional drivers. Right, they recognize,
like there is a really you know, even though this
thing could work, we aren't going to let it go
forward because of the destabilizing effect that's going to have
on this country. And we just aren't there yet, I
think as.
Speaker 3: A notion, and you mentioned driving, the largest job category
in the United States is driver over ten million people,
and that's truck drivers, limo drivers.
Speaker 1: I don't think that wow wow, Right, So.
Speaker 3: That's ten million people. And I'm telling you maybe six
months to a year away from it, right, right, maybe
a little more. It's happening.
Speaker 1: And the incredible I mean, as researcher after researcher will
tell you, there is no more dangerous thing than a
young unemployed generation. Like there's you know, seen especially of men, right,
they're just it is an incredibly dangerous and destructive force.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so we're back to like clockwork orange and nineteen
eighty four and uh, I know what was the other one.
I can't even remember, right exactly, I mean, but they are.
Speaker 1: But there are these examples in which people really have
taken a forward looking view and said, Okay, we're going
to change this around. You know, Germany has an incredible
apprenticeship program for young people to get into chips and
the rest of it. You know, they they you know,
there's a reason that. I mean, if you look at
like the soccer leagues in those countries, you know they
the development process, the developmentally, I mean, the reason that
a country of only eighty million people is like a
world conquering dominant force in soccer. One of the reasons
is the every town has a development league, you know,
that is funded by you know, a common pool of money.
And we just I think in this country, this idea
that like bootstraps are going to get us there. We're
about to find out that is not true and we're
going to need a whole other development system. And I
don't know what it's going to be, but if we
don't get back into a world of apprenticeships and residencies
or whatever we want to call it, yeah, I think
we're gonna be in real trouble, real quick.
Speaker 3: Agreed. Agreed. So again, the book is the Loop. How
AI is creating a world without choices and how to
fight back it's on Amazon. I just ordered a copy
of it myself, just to let you know. It's on
sale thirty seven percent off at least on my thing here. Sorry,
you're not going to get your fair royalty.
Speaker 1: I's all right, I'll take you all of sixty one.
I don't even feel like you have to read it.
Just buy it, that's all I care.
Speaker 3: Hey, well that's it. It'll look great on your bookshelf.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there you go, There you go.
Speaker 3: I try to read every book I buy because I
feel like I'm into optimization, being a good steward of assets,
not wasting. Well, it's impossible to keep up with it
every with everything, and of course your website here, we
would be remiss if we didn't mention that is theripcurrent
dot com see all the latest episodes. And if you
got a question for Jacob myself klatcarrieluts dot com our
site Financial Survival Network dot com, Carrie LUTs dot com.
That both take you to my substack, Jacob bet a pleasure.
I'm really happy we connected to this again.
Speaker 1: Cheers, Thanks Garry, take.
Speaker 2: Care, Thanks for listening to Carrie Letz's Financial Survival Network
your solution to today's trying times For the latest, go
to Financial Survivalnetwork dot com. Financial Survival Network now more
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