Speaker 1: So picture this. You are driving down a highway, okay,
and it's the highway of human history. For the last oh,
I don't know, maybe three hundred years or so, the
road has been pretty predictable.
Speaker 2: Right, mostly a straight shot, exactly.
Speaker 1: It generally goes uphill, you know. Sometimes it's a steep climb,
like during a major war or a plague, and sometimes
it's a gentle, pleasant slope. But the direction has always
been the same.
Speaker 2: It's progress, better medicine, faster travel.
Speaker 1: Right, more information. We are very used to looking at
a graph that just goes up into the right. It's
it's comfortable, it is.
Speaker 2: It's kind of the narrative we've all been sold, right.
We just assume that tomorrow will be slightly better than today,
just like today is slightly better than yesterday. It's a
linear way of.
Speaker 1: Thinking, yes, exactly. But what if I told you that the.
Speaker 2: Road is ending, well, I'd say you're trying to scare me.
Speaker 1: Right, and not that the world is ending. Don't panic yet,
But the road as we know it is ending. We
are on a slope anymore. We are standing right now,
at this exact moment in history, at a massive, terrifying
three way fork in the road, and we have to
choose which path to take, essentially yesterday, and.
Speaker 2: Just to raise the stakes a little bit more here,
this isn't a metaphorical fork where if we take a
wrong turn we can just pull a U turn and
backtrack right. No reverse gear exactly. This is an inflection point.
Once we commit to one of these paths, the momentum
of the technology, specifically artificial intelligence is going to lock
us in.
Speaker 1: It's like gravity.
Speaker 2: It is once you cross that event horizon, there is
no coming back.
Speaker 1: And that is the premise we are unpacking today. It
is honestly, it's a little hair raising. It's one of
those topics that makes you want to stare at the
ceiling at three am.
Speaker 2: It definitely is, but it's also hopeful if you know
where to look. It's not just doom and gloom.
Speaker 1: Welcome to thrilling Threads. We take a stack of complex
information articles, research talks, we shake it out and we
find the threads that actually matter to your life. Today.
We are looking at the future of humanity the lens
of one specific very high stakes conversation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're looking at a talk given by Alvin W. Graylan.
He's recently interviewed by Manus Soamrodi for the ted YouTube channel,
and the title of this talk is three possible futures
for AI, Which will we choose?
Speaker 1: And let me tell you the options he lays out
They range from absolutely terrifying to a utopian.
Speaker 2: Dream with a very little middle ground.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there is no business's usual options.
Speaker 2: It's the nature of the technology we're dealing with. It's
an amplifier. Yeah. It amplifies our best traits and our
worst ones. It just doesn't do mild.
Speaker 1: So let's set the stage a bit. Who is Alvin Graylan?
Because you know, if my neighbor tells me the world
is ending, I might just not ignore him. But this
guy seems to have the credentials to back up the
doom saying why should we listen to him?
Speaker 2: He certainly does. Graylan isn't just a pundit or you know,
a tech journalist looking for clicks. He has been the
trenches for thirty five years.
Speaker 1: Wow, thirty five years.
Speaker 2: Yeah, He's worked in AI, cybersecurity, virtual reality, semiconductors, the
whole gamut. Currently he's doing work at Stanford. But there
is one thing on his resume that makes his perspective
incredibly rare and arguably more valuable than your typical Silicon
valley CEO. What's that He is bicultural? Okay, he's a
US citizen educated here, but he has spent half of
his career working in China. Specifically, he was the China
president for HTC, dealing with VR and AI at a
very high level.
Speaker 1: Ah. Okay, that is a big deal because usually when
we talk about AI, we're hearing it from a purely
Western Silicon valley bubble exactly, or on the flip side,
we hear the perspective from Beijing. It's usually one or
the other. We don't get the crossover right.
Speaker 2: And Grayland has his feet in both worlds. He understands
the technological landscape of the US, the venture capital, the
fast innovation, and he understands the strategic landscape of China,
the government planning, the massive resource allocation.
Speaker 1: So when he talks about the race between these two powers,
he isn't guessing he knows the.
Speaker 2: P He really does. And minusche Zommarodi, who is interviewing him,
sets this up perfectly in the intro. She points out
that for normal people, you know, the non engineers among
us the people just trying to pay their bills. We
are in this state of total confusion.
Speaker 1: Oh absolutely.
Speaker 2: We don't know if AI is just hype like those
NFTs everyone bought and forgot about, or if it's literally
transforming the fabric of reality.
Speaker 1: And Graylan's response to that ambivalence is basically rake up, yep.
He says, there is a lot of misinformation out there,
and frankly, his assessment is going to scare people. He
warns the audience right off the bat that his view
is very different from the Silicon Valley consensus.
Speaker 2: I love that phrase, Silicon Valley consensus. It sound like
a hive mind, like the borg or something.
Speaker 1: In many ways it operates like one. There is a
very specific narrative that big tech companies push because it
benefits their stock price, it benefits their regulatory environment, and
Graylan is here to disrupt that narrative. He says, we're
currently heading toward two very dark futures, but a third
beautiful future is possible, the Star Trek option, if and
only if we act right now.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's unpack these three futures. Because he uses movie analogies,
which speaks my language perfectly. It really helps to visualize
the abstract economics.
Speaker 1: It's a great shorthand so future number one. He calls
this the Elysium scenario.
Speaker 2: Right, have you seen the movie years.
Speaker 1: Ago Matt Damon, Jody Foster Big space station.
Speaker 2: Yes, that's the one. The premise of Elysium is that
the ultra wealthy have physically left Earth. They live on
this pristine, high tech space station orbiting the planet.
Speaker 1: Sounds nice for them, right, They have machines.
Speaker 2: That cure cancer instantly. They have total abundance, its paradise. Meanwhile,
everyone else, the ninety nine point nine percent, is stuck
on a ruined Earth, fighting for scraps, living in complete squalor.
Speaker 1: And Graylan thinks we are heading there. That seems a
bit dramatic. Are we really going to build a space
station for billionaires?
Speaker 2: Well, let's strip away the sci fi element of the
literal space focus on the economics. Graalan argues that this
is one of the default paths we are on right now.
How so, think about the mechanism here. We have massive
tech labs, the big players we all know, Google, Open Ai, Microsoft, Meta.
They are accumulating resources at an unprecedented rate.
Speaker 1: And when you say resources, you don't just mean cash, no, I.
Speaker 2: Mean the raw materials of intelligence, compute power, massive data centers,
the most talented engineers in the entire world. Is a
compounding advantage, right.
Speaker 1: Because the better your AI is, the more money you make,
which allows you to buy more GPUs, which makes your
AI even better. It's a flywheel exactly.
Speaker 2: And Graalan argues that if this goes unchecked, these entities
essentially take control of the government. Wow, they become more
powerful than nation states. Think about it. If a company
controls the intelligence that runs the grid, the banking system,
and the military logistics, who is really in charge, the
president or the CEO.
Speaker 1: I mean, some would argue, we're already seeing the prequel
to that movie. The law being power is immense.
Speaker 2: We are The result of this path is the creation
of a class of trillionaires, not billionaires, trillionaires millionaires. And
then there's everyone else, a permanent underclass of serfs who
have no economic utility because AI does everything better than
they do.
Speaker 1: That's the key phrase, right there, no economic utility because
in the past, even if the boss was incredibly rich
and terrible, he still needed workers to build the cars
or flip the burgers.
Speaker 2: Maybe labor exactly.
Speaker 1: But in the Elysium scenario, the AI creates all the
value precisely.
Speaker 2: If I have a robot army that can build houses,
cook food, and write software, I don't need you. I
don't need your labor at all. So in the Elysium scenario,
the AI works. It works great. It just doesn't work
for us. It works for the people who own the servers.
Speaker 1: It's a future of extreme inequality cemented by technology. It's
feudalism with Wi Fi.
Speaker 2: That is a terrifyingly accurate way to put it.
Speaker 1: Okay, well, that's depressing. I definitely don't want to be
a serf. Let's see what's behind door number two. Maybe
it's better.
Speaker 2: Door number two is mad Max.
Speaker 1: Oh, fantastic leather jackets, desert wasteland and people strike to
the front of cars.
Speaker 2: And chaos, complete chaos. If Elysium is about control, mad
Max is about collapse. Grayland describes an escalation ladder that
we are currently climbing right now.
Speaker 1: What does that ladder look like?
Speaker 2: It starts with an AI race.
Speaker 1: Which we are definitely in. Every headline is about who
has the fastest model, who has the most parameters.
Speaker 2: Right, But then it moves to an AI war. This
doesn't mean terminators marching down the street yet. It means
cyber warfare, digital conflict.
Speaker 1: Like taking down infrastructure exactly.
Speaker 2: Imagine hacking power grids, scrambling financial data, manipulating stock markets
at the speed of light. If you can use a
super intelligent agent to find zero day vulnerabilities in your
enemy's defense systems, you can cripple them without firing a
single shot.
Speaker 1: Okay, so that's really bad, But how do we get
to mad max from a cyber attack?
Speaker 2: From there, it moves to kinetic war, actual shooting, bombing,
physical drones. If a nation feels this digital infrastructure is
being destroyed, they will respond with physical force, and the
final rung of that ladder, according to Graylan, is potential
nuclear war.
Speaker 1: That seems like a massive jump from chatbots to nukes.
Why would AI trigger a nuclear war?
Speaker 2: It's about the destabilization. It's the Thucidides trap, right. If
nations feel that losing the AI race poses an existential
threat to their sovereignty, that if they come in second,
they've basically become a vassal state to the winner. They
might lash out a cornered animal exactly if you think
your opponent is about to turn on a superintelligence that
will render your military obsolete instantly. You might strike first, Well,
you still have a chance.
Speaker 1: So it's a user or lose it mentality exactly.
Speaker 2: And here's the part that gave me absolute chills. Graylan
mentions that he has talked to people in Washington, DC, policymakers,
real insiders, who view this conflict as.
Speaker 1: Inevitable, inevitable. They think we have to fight this war.
Speaker 2: Yes, they aren't trying to stop the car, they're just
bracing for impact. They believe that conflict with China over
this technology is destiny and that fatalism is incredibly dangerous.
Speaker 1: Because if you believe war is inevitable, you stop looking
for off.
Speaker 2: Ramps, right you start stockpiling ammunition instead of sending diplomats.
Speaker 1: So Graylan says, we are currently heading toward one of
these two Elysium or mad Max.
Speaker 2: Yes, he believes the current trajectory, the momentum of the
system as it stands today, the incentives of capitalism and
the incentives of geopolitics, leads directly to one of these
two outcomes. Either the witch get everything and leave us behind,
or we blow each other up fighting over who gets
the technology.
Speaker 1: Well, I'm thoroughly bummed out, but we have to keep going.
Please tell me about the Star Trek option before I
lose all hope.
Speaker 2: Entirely, there is hope. Graylan is actually an optimist at heart.
He sees a third path. He calls it the Star
Trek option.
Speaker 1: Ee me up? What does this look like?
Speaker 2: He's the Vulcan analogy? So in Star Trek lore, humanity
was kind of a mess until the Vulcans, a peaceful, rational,
highly advanced species, showed up and introduced us to advanced technology.
They basically saved us from ourselves.
Speaker 1: But aliens aren't coming to save us unless Grayland knows
something we don't.
Speaker 2: No, no aliens. In this analogy, AI is the Vulcan.
If we develop it correctly, AI becomes that rational force.
Think about what a superintelligence could actually do if it
wasn't being used for war or ad targeting.
Speaker 1: Okay, what could it do?
Speaker 2: It could solve the protein folding problem, completely curing cancer
and Alzheimer's. It could optimize fusion reactor designs in seconds,
giving us infinite clean energy. Wow. It could solve logistics
for global food distribution, ending hunger overnight. It unleashes a
century or even millennia of discovery compressed into a decade.
Speaker 1: It sounds utopian, almost too good to be true.
Speaker 2: It is utopian, But the key difference between Star Trek
and Elysium is distribution.
Speaker 1: Distribution.
Speaker 2: Yes, in Star Trek the technology is shared. It is
used for the good of humanity as a species, not
for the profit of a single corporation or the dominance
of a single nation.
Speaker 1: So the technology is exactly the same in Elysium and
Star Trek. The AI is just as powerful in both scenarios.
The difference is simply who owns it.
Speaker 2: That is the crucial insight. It's not a technological problem
we are facing. It's a political and social choice. In Elysium,
the tech is hoarded. In Star Trek, it's a public good.
Speaker 1: Okay, So we know the stakes, we know the destination
we want. We all want Star Trek, nobody wants mad Max.
But Grellan says, there is a massive myth standing in
our way, a narrative that is actively blocking us from
taking the exit ramp to the Star Trek future.
Speaker 2: Yes, and this brings us back to that Silicon Valley consensus.
We mentioned earlier. Minucheto Marati brings up the standard story
told by leaders like Sam Olman. You hear this in
practically every interview.
Speaker 1: How does the story go.
Speaker 2: It goes like this, we have to lock this technology down.
We have to develop it as fast as humanly possible.
We can't pause, we can't regulate, we can't share, because
if we don't do it first, China will I.
Speaker 1: Hear this all the time. It's the ultimate trump card.
You can't regulate us or the bad guys win. It
shuts down every single argument about safety.
Speaker 2: Graylan calls this one of the biggest myths out there.
Speaker 1: Really, but isn't China trying to beat us?
Speaker 2: He calls it one of the scariest myths. And remember
he was in China two days before giving this talk.
He knows what's happening on the ground there. He argues
that the AI industry here in the West is using
a century old playbook, the military industrial complex playbook.
Speaker 1: Oh interesting, how does that work in the context of AI.
Speaker 2: It's a five step process. Step one, create an enemy.
You need a boogeyman to justify what you're about to do.
Speaker 1: And China fits that mold perfectly.
Speaker 2: Right. Step two, use that enemy to get massive government funding.
You go to Congress and say we need billions in
subsidies for chips and data centers to beat China.
Speaker 1: Which is happening.
Speaker 2: Step three, get public support. Make the public afraid so
they cheer for the funding. Step four, get deregulation. You say,
we can't have safety checks, we can't have ethical oversight boards.
We're in a wall.
Speaker 1: Speed is safety, Move fast and break things, but on
a geopolitical scale.
Speaker 2: And step five move fast and make unimaginable amounts of money.
Speaker 1: That sounds disturbingly accurate. It completely frames safety as a weakness.
Speaker 2: Graylan says the labs aren't trying to save the world
or protect democracy. Those are the marketing slogans. They are
trying to create trillions of dollars in value.
Speaker 1: Trillions.
Speaker 2: Yes, And this is where he drops a really heavy
reality check regarding AGI, artificial general intelligence. He cites Sam
Altman's own definition of AGI. Do you know what it is?
Speaker 1: I've heard a few definitions, usually something vague like smarter
than a human at most economic tasks.
Speaker 2: The specific definition grayl in sites is technology that can
replace the average worker.
Speaker 1: When you put it that way, it doesn't sound like
a helpful tool. It sounds like a replacement part exactly.
Speaker 2: Graylan points out that the stated goal, the thing they
are spending billions of dollars to build, is literally technology
that takes jobs. Now he add some nuances, as this
could be amazing if robots do all the tedious work.
We can paint, write poetry, hang out at ted talks
all day. That's the dream.
Speaker 1: That's the Star Trek dream. Work is for machines. Life
is for people.
Speaker 2: But currently there is no plan for the people who
get displaced. The plan is just to build the replacement engine.
The labs are racing to build the thing that makes
human labor obsolete, using the China threat as a smoke
screen to avoid regulation and garner subsidies.
Speaker 1: It's a classic bait and switch. Look over there at
the scary foreign power while we dismantle the labor market
here at home.
Speaker 2: That is the essence of his argument, and that is
exactly why he believes we are heading toward Elysium or
mad Max, because the current incentives are all wrong. The
incentives are for speed and hoarding, not for saty and sharing.
Speaker 1: But I have to play devil's advocate here. Even if
the US labs are totally cynical, isn't the threat real?
If the US stops, China will keep building? And do
we really want an authoritarian regime to have the superintelligence first?
Speaker 2: That's the prisoner's dilemma, and Grayland addresses this directly. He
says that the labs in China are also competing with
each other. They aren't this unified monolith of evil. They
are fragmented. And more importantly, the Chinese leadership is terrified
the exact same things we are are uncontrollable AI, social instability, chaos.
Speaker 1: So they have an incentive to cooperate on safety because
a rogue AI is bad for the CCP too.
Speaker 2: Exactly. A rogue AI doesn't care about borders or political parties.
It's a threat to everyone equally.
Speaker 1: Okay, So Grayland isn't just throwing rocks at the windows
of open AI. He actually submitted a policy paper to Stanford.
He has a plan, a three part plan to steer
the ship towards star Trek.
Speaker 2: Yes, and this isn't just a let's all be nicer
to each other plea. These are structural, massive changes.
Speaker 1: Let's break them down. Pillar number one, Pillar one the
sern of AI, like the Particle Collider in Europe.
Speaker 2: Exactly, or the International Space Station or EIDER for fusion energy.
Graylan argues that right now we have hundreds of labs competing.
They are hoarding chips, hoarding talent, and duplicating the exact
same work over and over again. It's inefficient and it's dangerous.
Speaker 1: Because if everyone is racing, no one is checking.
Speaker 2: The brakes precisely. His solution is to create a single
global lab, aggregate the top talent from the US, China, Europe, everywhere,
put them in one place.
Speaker 1: But is that realistic? Getting the US and China to
hold hands and build an AI brain together, Google and
Meta giving up their proprietary secrets.
Speaker 2: It sounds impossible, right, but look at the history. We
did it with the Space station, Russian and American astronauts
living together while their countries were at odds. We did
it with nuclear fusion research. We did it with CERN.
We didn't have a US physics team fighting a Chinese
physics team to find the Higgs boson. We work together
because the science was simply too big and too expensive
for one nation.
Speaker 1: And what does that achieve for AI?
Speaker 2: It creates open science. Whenever comes out of that lab
belongs to humanity. It's shared with the world, not hoarded
by single corporation. This democratizes the power. It completely removes
the arms race dynamic because everyone gets the breakthrough at
the exact same time.
Speaker 1: So you commoditize the superintelligence. You make it a public
utility like GPS exactly.
Speaker 2: And then companies can build apps and services on top
of it, but no one controls the core engine.
Speaker 1: Okay, so one giant lab for mankind. What's pillar number two?
Speaker 2: Pillar two is the global Data Commons. This addresses the
issue of bias.
Speaker 1: I've heard a lot about sovereign AI lately, countries saying
they want their own AI trained on their own data.
France wants a French AI, India wants an Indian AI.
Speaker 2: Right, it sounds patriotic, It sounds like a good idea
to preserve culture. But Grayland says, the research actually shows
the opposite. How So, the research shows that less data
equals more bias. If you restrict the data set to
just one culture or one viewpoint, the AI becomes skewed.
It basically becomes a caricature that makes sense.
Speaker 1: It's living in an echo chamber. If you only train
an AI on Western Internet data, it's going to have
extreme Western biases exactly.
Speaker 2: Graylan's solution is to aggregate everyone's data, all history, all languages,
all cultures. Put it all into the pot, the ultimate
melting pot. By doing this, you create an AI that
can find an optimal path for everyone. It balances needs,
It understands the full spectrum of human experience, not just
the Western perspective or the Eastern perspective. It reduces the
US versus them mentality in the machine itself.
Speaker 1: So Pillar one is shared hardware and talent. Pillar two
is shared data. That leaves Pillar three. And this one
seems like it hits closest to home for the listener.
This is about the money.
Speaker 2: Pillar three is the GI bill for the AI age.
Speaker 1: I love a good historical analogy. Break this down for US.
Speaker 2: So nineteen forty four nineteen forty five, World War II
is ending. You have about fifteen million American service members
coming home and they need jobs, right, and the economy
is terrified. They're expecting a massive depression because suddenly you
have fifteen million unemployed young men flooding the market all
at once. It was an employment shock.
Speaker 1: So the goverment stepped in big time.
Speaker 2: They created the GI Bill, free education, zero interest loans,
free medical care, help buying homes, and it worked. It
didn't just avoid a depression, It created the American middle class.
It sparked the greatest economic boon in history. It turned
a potential massive crisis into a golden age.
Speaker 1: So Graylan is saying we need to do that again,
but on a much.
Speaker 2: Much larger scale. He points out that the shock coming
from AI won't be fifteen million people in the US alone.
It could be one hundred and fifty million globally billions one.
Speaker 1: Hundred and fifty million. That's almost half the population.
Speaker 2: We are talking about displacement on a level we have
never seen in human history. Gral In cites predictions of
one hundred plus million people affected just in the US.
If we don't have a safety net of that magnitude,
free education, reskilling, maybe universal basic income, though he focuses
more on the safety net aspect. If we don't have that.
Speaker 1: We get the mad Max scenario. It's in the streets, we.
Speaker 2: Get social collapse. He puts it very bluntly. If we
don't this world is not going to be a very
good place for us to hang out in. You cannot
have a stable society if fifty percent of the population
has zero income and no hope.
Speaker 1: That is a polite way of saying guillotines.
Speaker 2: It really is. So. The three pillars are centralized open
science to stop the arms race, global data commons to
stop the bias, and a massive social safety net to
stop the revolution.
Speaker 1: It sounds like a solid plan. It sounds entirely rational.
But and there is always a butt. The obstacles seem enormous,
the biggest one being human nature.
Speaker 2: That's the hurdle. Convincing power is to actually cooperate.
Speaker 1: Right, Why would the US share its tech with China?
Why would Google share its secrets with the world. We
are tribal creatures.
Speaker 2: Graylan argues, we need a massive shift in mindset. We
need to understand enlightened self interest.
Speaker 1: Define that for us in this context.
Speaker 2: It means realizing that the world is not zero sum.
That's the old thinking. If I wind, you lose. In
the age of AI, if I win, you don't have
have to lose. In fact, if I help you win,
I might be safer, like the peace dividend exactly. He
asks a haunting question, why send children ten thousand miles
to kill other children over resources, you know, oil, land, water,
when this technology could provide infinite resources locally. If AI
can solve energy with fusion and food production with synthetic biology,
the reason for war completely evaporates.
Speaker 1: That's the star Trek logic. We don't fight over food
because we have replicators. We don't fight over oil because
we have dilyceum crystals.
Speaker 2: Right, but we have to survive the transition, and the
speed of this transition is the other major obstacle.
Speaker 1: How fast are we talking?
Speaker 2: Think about the Industrial revolution steam engines, electricity. That change
took forty sixty eighty years to ripple through society. Generations
had time to adapt. People move from farms to factories,
but it took a lifetime.
Speaker 1: My grandfather was a farmer, My father worked in a factory.
That kind of pace.
Speaker 2: Grayland says, the AI revolution will happen in five to
ten years, maybe shorter five years.
Speaker 1: That's not enough time to retrain.
Speaker 2: Society is simply not equipped to move at that speed
without intervention. We can't just wait and see. By the
time we see it'll be over, the cement will be dry.
Speaker 1: This is why he says, we are at the inflection
point right now. The window is closing. Yes, okay, so
we've covered the scary parts, the hopeful parts, and the
massive geopolitical chess game. But I want to bring this
down to the listener.
Speaker 2: Let's do it the.
Speaker 1: Person driving to work right now, or folding laundry or
walking the dog. It's easy to feel helpless when we
talk about trillionaires and nuclear war. But Graylan gives some
specific advice for two groups of people, business leaders and individuals.
Speaker 2: Let's start with the business leaders, because many people listening
might run a team or a company, or even just
manage a department.
Speaker 1: What should they do?
Speaker 2: Stop thinking about replacement, start thinking about efficiency.
Speaker 1: I feel like every CEO is currently thinking about replacement.
The temptation to cut costs is huge.
Speaker 2: Says He's talked to fifty companies in the last two months,
and sadly, many are saying, great, I can fire thirty
percent of my staff and keep the same output. He
strongly warns against this.
Speaker 1: Why apart from it being morally.
Speaker 2: Questionable, because it feeds the elysium and mad Max dynamics, y,
it destabilizes the society. Your business actually relies on. If
nobody has a job, nobody buys your product. Instead, he
suggests using the efficiency games to offer a four day workweek.
Speaker 1: Oh, sign me up for that same pay less.
Speaker 2: Hours exactly, or reskill employees for new roles. Use the
surplus value to make lives better, not just to pad
the bottom line. Reduce the shock to society. That is
the responsibility of leadership right now, and for.
Speaker 1: The individual, a person who isn't the CEO, what can
I do?
Speaker 2: His advice is simple but aggressive. Use the models, don't
ignore them, Do not be an ostrich. Do not listen
to the people who say it's not that scary or
it won't replace humans.
Speaker 1: He's pretty adamant about that. He doesn't sugarcoat the capability
he is.
Speaker 2: He says, you must use them to understand how powerful
they are. If you aren't using these tools daily, you
don't understand the speed of change. You are flying blind.
Speaker 1: If you don't use it, you won't understand it. That's
a powerful takeaway. You can't regulate, manage, or adapt to
something you are treating as a novelty exactly.
Speaker 2: Familiarity is a first step toward agency. You can't advocate
for this star Trek future. If you don't understand the
engine that drives it. If you know what the AI
can do, you can demand better policy. You can demand
the gi bil.
Speaker 1: So here we are standing at the fort. We are
to the left Elysium Trillionaires and space stations are effectively
space stations while we fight for crumbs to the right,
Mad Max. The world burning because we couldn't agree on
how to share and straight ahead. If we have the
courage to build it, Star Trek a world where the
vulcan of AI lifts us all up.
Speaker 2: It's not a technology choice. That's the most important thing.
Graylan wants us to know. The technology will do whatever
we tell it to. The code doesn't care. The choice
is policy, The choice is mindset. The choice is fundamentally human.
Speaker 1: It all comes down to that enlightened self interest. Can
we overcome our biological wiring? We are wired for tribalism,
us versus them, my tribe against your tribe, my country
against your country. Can we override that programming fast enough
to manage a technology that moves at the seat of light?
Speaker 2: That is the ultimate question. Can our wisdom catch up
to our intelligence? Because right now our intelligence, our tech
is Lapping our Wisdom by Miles.
Speaker 1: I want to turn this over to you listening right now,
Graylin laid out three futures Elysium, mad Max, Star Trek.
Be honest, look at the news, look at your workplace.
Which one do you think we are currently most likely
to hit? Not which one you want, but which one
is the car pointed at right now?
Speaker 2: And are you actually using these models yourself or are
you just reading headlines about them, because as we learn today,
there is a very big difference.
Speaker 1: Leave us a comment, let us know. This is a
conversation we need to have, not just in Stanford but everywhere.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. The future isn't written yet, but the ink is
drying fast.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to thrilling threads. We'll see you in
the future, hopefully the Star.
Speaker 2: Trek one live, long and prosper.
Speaker 1: Catch you next time.