Is crypto currency supporting terrorism?

Is crypto currency supporting terrorism?
With the phasing out of cash transactions we’ve seen a rise in digital and other transactions. One of the currencies that’s in the ascendancy are crypto currencies, whose place in the market according to Forbes magazine, has shifted from one of fear to neutral, and now to greed. In other words it’s hugely on the up. After facing some downturns a few years ago, it’s now collectively worth more than a trillion dollars. One of the reasons why people are drawn to crypto currencies is that they can offer a certain freedom from traditional banks and other financial authorities. But this freedom can also turn to anarchy and be used for more worrying purposes, as SOEP’s Shiroma Silva reports.   

God-like? A 500-Year History of Artificial Intelligence in Myths, Machines, Monsters
Have we finally built a machine with higher intelligence that ourselves?  That’s one of the issues that author and leading thinker on tech Kester Brewin explores in his latest book.  Kester discusses with Gareth how myths, machines and monsters created over hundreds of years have influenced the development of AI and how we can now learn to live alongside it.

The programme is presented by Gareth Mitchell and the studio expert is Peter Guest.  

More on this week's stories:  
The crypto question and the future of money  
Kester Brewin 
    

Chapters

• 2:46 Is crypto currency supporting terrorism?
• 18:51 God-like? A 500-Year History of AI

Transcript

00:00:00 Gareth Mitchell 

Hello this is the Somewhere on Earth podcast and it is Tuesday the 16th of April 2024. Congratulations. We're nearly. I don't know what a quarter of the way third of the way through the year assuming that you're on the Gregorian calendar and all that kind of stuff. What else do I need to tell you? Oh, I know what? We're in London. 

00:00:27 Gareth Mitchell 

And we're in London with Peter Guest again. Hello again. Peter, how are you? 

00:00:33 Peter Guest 

Very good on the Gregorian calendar. 

00:00:35 Gareth Mitchell 

That's the the calendar to be on. Well for me anyway, other calendars are available and I'll tell you what then, right, we've had a bit of listener interaction from our good friends, Neil on Facebook, who says that I know Bill Thompson. It's not that he knows Bill Thompson. He does know Bill Thompson. He says, I know Bill Thompson is a big fan of the Fediverse. Bill Thompson, by the way, being a well known technology expert and person who has been on this podcast as well. So many of you will know him. Anyway’  let's just get to Neil's message. Sorry, I'll stop waffling. 

00:01:08 Gareth Mitchell 

Neil says. I know Bill Thompson is a big fan of the Fediverse, so if you are too, you may like to experiment with subscribing to Somewhere on Earth 

00:01:17 Gareth Mitchell 

in Mastodon. The name there is, wait for it 666-1055 at ap.podcastindex.org, and I won't repeat it. Just you're back on your podcast it if you're a Mastodon, you want to find us and what this is, it's a bot on Mastodon 

00:01:36 Gareth Mitchell 

that will tell everybody about new episodes as they come out. Neil, thank you for getting us on Mastodon. That saved me a job I was about to get around to doing it. I'm just about on Mastodon myself 

00:01:46 Gareth Mitchell 

and might I see you there? Peter, do you lurk? Are you or not? I know you're busy. I'm not. I won't judge you whether you are or you're not, but just wondering. 

00:01:56 Peter Guest 

So first of all I like that we have kind of the Mastodon bot number of the beast there. 

00:02:00 Gareth Mitchell 

Yes, I know it's a good number. 

00:02:01 Peter Guest 

But I mean, I'm going to confess, I don't really understand the Fediverse. I have a vague sense of how it works, but I haven't set aside that cognitive processing capacity to figure out why I should invest in it. 

00:02:06 Gareth Mitchell 

Me neither. 

00:02:12 Gareth Mitchell 

So there you go. Thanks very much folks, and let's carry on. 

00:02:20 Gareth Mitchell 

And coming up today. 

00:02:24 Gareth Mitchell 

A take on artificial intelligence in this episode that you almost definitely haven't heard about until now. Yes, you've heard terms like disruptive and game changer, but how about? Well God like, well, we will find out a little bit more about where these theological connections come from. That's in Part 2 of this here podcast, but in the first little bit we're going to hear how a rapidly growing cryptocurrency is opening up a new front in Israel's fight against the funding of Iran backed militant groups. 

00:02:58 Gareth Mitchell 

Our reporter has been speaking to a former member of the US Treasury's Cyber Investigations Unit. So why does Bitcoin appear to be out and the rival crypto in, if you just happen to be trying to transfer funds between prescribed terrorism networks. It's all right here on the Somewhere on Earth podcast. 

00:03:26 Gareth Mitchell 

All right, then. So let's talk about the fast growing crypto network called Tron. It's quicker and cheaper than Bitcoin and has now overtaken that crypto for transactions by the likes of Iran backed militant groups from Hamas to Hezbollah. As for the intelligence agencies and investigating organisations, there's less knowledge when it comes to tracking such transactions on Tron, so does this painter a rather worrying picture then?  Shiroma Silva has been investigating. 

00:03:59 Shiroma Silva 

We're all too familiar nowadays with terrorist attacks, but a key factor for counter terror organisations is understanding the money supply. Well, one way that illicit money gets transferred is via cryptocurrencies. 

00:04:14 Shiroma Silva 

Now, the percentage of funding that criminal organisations get through crypto is said to be dwarfed by money obtained by a more conventional means, but it's nevertheless a changing space that presents the authorities with challenges. 

00:04:27 Shiroma Silva 

Here's Louise Meloy from an organisation called Tech against Terrorism that analyses and disrupts terrorist activity online using AI and open source intelligence, explaining why cryptocurrency can be so cool for bad actors. 

00:04:42 Louise Meloy 

So this decentralised structure is very good to bypass the verification role of traditional central authorities as well as geographical constraints, so it allows for a very quick and irreversible transactions that can exploit regulatory gaps between jurisdictions. This transaction becomes really much harder to trace. 

00:05:03 Shiroma Silva 

So the decentralised blockchain that crypto operates on has, on the whole been less monitored than traditional means. Now let's turn to another expert, Rich Reinhardt, who works from Merkle science, an organisation that monitors criminal activity on the blockchain and finds ways to stop it. 

00:05:20 Rich Reinhart 

So traditionally with money lending rate, you use banks, banks don't really change how you can get to your money. You can have a bank account, wire transfer, check and you deposit either cash, wire transfer or check. With crypto it adds in anonymity initially. Obviously we can trace a lot of stuff now, but there's still anonymity involved and it's more complex than traditional bank money laundering. 

00:05:40 Shiroma Silva 

Rich, it turns out, oversaw crypto related crimes at the Cyber Investigations Unit in the American Treasury. 

00:05:47 Rich Reinhart 

I was an undercover agent who had to go meet people exchanging Bitcoin for cash. I  purported myself to be a narcotics trafficker or some other illicit actor where I would go meet people and ask for Bitcoin for cash or sell my Bitcoin for cash. I did that for seven years. 

00:06:03 Shiroma Silva 

The Bitcoin he spoke about here was a talk of the town a few years ago, but now the authorities have been better able to penetrate the blockchain on which it sits. 

00:06:11 Rich Reinhart 

Yes, we've caught up with Bitcoin. If you were just using traditional Bitcoin and converting it and cashing it out somewhere, most likely it's going to be found. 

00:06:19 Shiroma Silva 

The military arm of Hamas, called the Alcazar Brigade, has also caught up. 

00:06:24 Louise Meloy 

In 2023, Alcazar brigades declared that it will stop receiving donations in Bitcoin in order to ensure the safety of its donors in the light of the general intensification of prosecutions and freezing of assets. 

00:06:37 Shiroma Silva 

And the new kid on the block seems to be a certain anonymous currency called privacy coins. 

00:06:43 Louise Meloy 

They have been developed with the sole purpose of conducting anonymous and untraceable transactions by hiding the source and destination of each transaction, as well as the amount of transactions. Although they tend to require higher level of technical capabilities than Bitcoin. 

00:06:58 Shiroma Silva 

According to Tech Against Terrorism, this change is there for all to see on a popular platform that translates official Islamic State content into various regional languages. 

00:07:08 Louise Meloy 

This website is accessible on the surface web and on the dark web, and interestingly, this platform changed cryptocurrency donations request from Bitcoin to Monero a few years ago, stating that Monero offers better security and privacy features than Bitcoin. 

00:07:23 Shiroma Silva 

The same has been shown in their monitoring of Pro Al Qaeda groups, but another rise it's been noted, is a surge, this time in a network called Tron, on which a light has been shone much more brightly since October the seventh. 

00:07:37 Louise Meloy 

Recent reporting has notably suggested that Tron has become the blockchain of choice for transaction carried out Iranian backed entities that are part of the axis of resistance against Israel, namely Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah. Many of those strong crypto wallets linked to these organisations have recently been seized by Israeli authorities. 

00:07:59 Shiroma Silva 

Recent research shown to us by Merkle science indicates that from the beginning of 2020 to October 2023 more than 95% of crypto funding for both Hamas and Hezbollah was on Tron, although the purposes of those funds can't definitively be stated. 

00:08:17 Rich Reinhart 

Tron is a little bit more difficult to trace. It's on a separate network from Ethereum Bitcoin. It's on its own network and the transactions are a lot faster and cheaper than Bitcoin, so the funds move a lot quicker. There's a lot of different chain hopping features within Tron that makes money laundering a lot easier. Chain hopping means you can go from one currency to another currency’s chain very quickly. 

00:08:35 Shiroma Silva 

That ability to swap currencies within it can help muddy the waters. 

00:08:39 Rich Reinhart 

It becomes very complicated when you start hopping on different chains, so you take your Bitcoin and then you change it to Tether and then you change that Tether to Solana. There's a lot of different things that happen to make the tracing that much more difficult. 

00:08:50 Shiroma Silva 

And a recent report by the UN cites an increased use by criminals of the cryptocurrency Tether USDT that's pegged to the dollar on the Tron network. Tech Against Terrorism has also noticed such activity. 

00:09:03 Louise Meloy 

We have found evidence of Gaza based charities that are likely affiliated with Hamas, which have been calling for donations to support the people in Gaza in TRC 20, so Tether USD issued on the Tron network. 

00:09:16 Shiroma Silva 

Although Rich would caution against exact figures for the use of Tron for the Gaza war, the general shift to the network is nevertheless worrying. The crypto players cited in this piece were approached in response USDT Tether. 

00:09:31 Voiceover (male) 

Tether proactively collaborates with global law enforcement agencies to identify and prevent illicit use of USDT. Our commitment to the highest standards of compliance is evident in our efforts to eliminate various forms of criminal activity. Through close cooperation with law enforcement Tether has successfully contributed to freezing addresses involving sanctions violations, scams and other illicit practices. 

09:57 [AD] Everyday AI: Keep up and get ahead by making AI work for your business. 

00:10:42 Shiroma Silva 

They went on to explain that every transaction is recorded immutably on the blockchain. A public ledger making illicit transactions easier to trace. While figures point to the majority of crypto of all denominations being used for legitimate purposes, it's keeping law enforcement on its toes. 

00:10:59 Rich Reinhart 

Traditionally I was working a narcotics money laundering case or a black market peso money laundering case. After one or two of those cases, you kind of become the expert in the area and you can figure out what's going to happen. With crypto takes longer to identify the bad actors, and then by time you become proficient in one area, all of a sudden everything's changed and there's a new way of moving the funds. So I don't think we'll ever win the game, but we can make an impact and deter future bad actors. 

00:11:27 Gareth Mitchell 

Richard Reinhardt there, ending that report from Shiroma Silva. So Peter guest here in the studio listening to that. What did you make of what you've just heard? 

00:11:35 Peter Guest 

One thing we will see a lot in technology is that criminals and associated organisations are incredibly entrepreneurial, right? So often lawful authorities are one step behind,  

00:11:46 Peter Guest 

several steps behind and they're always adapting and reacting to this. So it didn't surprise me very much to hear the kind of basis of this. I mean, I reported a few years ago on on how North Korea has been using crypto as a way to launder money. 

00:11:58 Peter Guest 

And, you know, thieving money from crypto exchanges and laundering it in through various different illegal channels. So I think that didn't surprise me at all. I do think you also bring me on when there’s crypto stories to sort of wind me up 

00:12:08 Gareth Mitchell  

Is it working? 

00:12:12 Peter Guest 

I mean, look, you, you, you and I have talked about crypto a lot on this on this podcast and I think there is a very wide gulf between the sort of stated vision of crypto and its reality and that kind of philosophy of decentralised citizen owned, socialised currency,  

00:12:28 Peter Guest 

seems really reasonable, right? It's particularly if you've been through many of us, have been a couple of financial crises. You maybe don't trust your government with your financial data, but you also have to look at the main original use cases of crypto. You know, crypto is very hard to turn into Fiat currency. It's always been a medium of exchange in slightly sketchy parts of the Internet and its early kind of use cases 

00:12:47 Peter Guest 

were in criminality. So is it hardly. Isn't. Isn't that surprising that, here we are again. 

00:12:52 Gareth Mitchell 

Well, you might think especially hearing there that some of these bad actors, as it were, they've been switching over to Tron really through market forces. So they say here's a product, it's quicker, it's cheaper, it has more benefits. So we're going to go over there. So hold the front page. That's just economics. But hearing there about Bitcoin, 

00:13:13 Gareth Mitchell 

how it is a bit slower. How you, it's not a trivial process to convert Bitcoin into cash, and I often do think like almost like not what's the point of, but 

00:13:24 Gareth Mitchell 

has the case for using Bitcoin been exaggerated when it's such really a comparatively illiquid asset compared, for instance, to a $50 note. 

00:13:35 Peter Guest 

Yep. It's an illiquid asset. It has a lot of risk attached to it. It's hard to liquidate, into Fiat  currency. You know, a couple of years ago, and I was reporting on the North Korean money laundering, you know. 

00:13:45 Peter Guest 

Somebody who was an investigator had been an investigator at the FBI told me that if the the kind of thieves, the North Korean hacking gangs got,50% of the worth of their crypto bag, they were happy with that, right? That was fine. So so it's an inefficient way of actually turning illicit profits into cash. 

00:14:01 Peter Guest 

I think the use of stable coins is really interesting, something that again the kind of market forces behind this, your value of your Bitcoin can go down quite dramatically, with the stable coin you're effectively transacting in dollar amounts, right? It's a very useful tool for a money launderer. 

00:14:16 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah. So just expand on that because my money laundering knowledge is a little bit naive to say the least then, well, just being pegged to the dollar, so 

00:14:24 Gareth Mitchell 

at least you know if you're trying to launder some money and the recipient at the end of probably quite a long chain of money laundering steps, possibly through a whole number of other currencies. But if you all know that you've got this a dollar peg, then everyone knows what the value is. 

00:14:39 Peter Guest 

Precisely, yeah. And also you don't have to worry about the value of it changing. 

00:14:43 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, sure. 

00:14:45 Peter Guest 

Yeah. So you the the wild swings in crypto mean that you know you can effectively taking on kind of currency risk as you move your money around and as you kind of launder. 

00:14:54 Peter Guest 

I mean, look, I think one, one thing I'm going to say, and this is this is kind of utterly anathema to the crypto world, which is that, there's, there are a lot of really quite good reasons why we have financial regulation. In another life. I reported on the financial sector and like the the kind of anti money laundering anti you know your customer anti terrorist financing laws they 

00:15:15 Peter Guest 

accumulated over decades and decades of slow and boring practise and agreements and so on, like these are the things which are anathema in the crypto world. Like the whole idea of crypto is we don't need regulation, we don't need supervisions, well, sometimes actually, you probably do. 

00:15:29 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah. And I know somebody who knows somebody who knows, somebody who has lost their Bitcoin passwords. Apparently they've got about 16K in UK currency they’re desperately trying to search through their files to work out their password. And it's not as if there's a bank branch you can go into and show your ID and say can you just unlock my account please? 

00:15:51 Peter Guest 

No and no. And I do think kind of people searching for hard drives with lost crypto is all part of the mythology of the of the the industry. 

00:15:59 Gareth Mitchell 

Living the dream. 

00:16:00 Peter Guest 

Yeah, living the dream. I think. Look you you know my feelings on crypto, I think there are some very, very use good use cases and I and I think going back to we talked about the Fediverse at the very top of the show, right. And I think there are really good use cases for Federated Communalized, socialised forms of technology and stores of value and stores of of what kind of verification and so on. 

00:16:22 Peter Guest 

But how do I put this for them.. 

00:16:25 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, you're genuinely wound up. Actually, I'm. I'm quite enjoying this. 

00:16:30 Peter Guest 

Wound up isn't the way forward, where where I think that you have to think really carefully about the players in the industry and you know naming names and so on. We've we've named some coins in that. 

00:16:39 Gareth Mitchell 

No. 

00:16:41 Peter Guest 

I think it is hard to separate the crypto industry as it is now from some of its leading lights. And if you think about where we were a year and a half, two years ago with two of the biggest crypto exchanges in the world, you can Google them. One of the founders is in gaol, the other one has pleaded guilty to money laundering in the United States. 

00:17:00 Peter Guest 

It feels difficult to untangle the kind of criminality from the industry, and you have to wonder, is it actually part of the source code or is it a bug?  

00:17:10 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah. Well, Peter, that's well, let's leave it hanging on that question and get some listener interaction. Come on, dear listener, that's going to fire you up either way. Are you with Peter or are you a happy Bitcoin or Tron holder, saying this is genuinely world changing and you know, whatever. So you probably know our socials by now. 

00:17:32 Gareth Mitchell 

We're on the Facebook, we're on the Twitter. We are now on the Mastodon and various others. So just search for S.O.E.P Somewhere on Earth podcast and you'll find us on the social media. And please just let us know what you think, and let's get a conversation going on this.  Making it sound a bit like a phone in there aren’t I. 

00:17:50 Gareth Mitchell 

Peter, thank you. 

00:18:00 Gareth Mitchell 

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00:17:32 Gareth Mitchell 

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00:17:53 Gareth Mitchell 

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00:18:51 Gareth Mitchell 

Well, now picture the scene. It's 1968. Computers are the size of houses and societies only really just getting used to electronics made of solid-state components as opposed to energy hungry heat producing fragile, unreliable solid-state valves. 

00:19:06 Gareth Mitchell 

You're at a big computer conference, remember? This is 1968. You're in San Francisco and engineer Douglas Engelbart stands up and in 90 minutes demonstrates everything from word processing to video conferencing. It's a demo that goes down in history as the mother of all demos. 

00:19:22 Gareth Mitchell 

People spoke of Engelbart as dealing lightning with both hands. It's a story most recently told in Kester Brewins's new book,’ God-like - A 500 Year History of Artificial Intelligence’. Kester is an author and speaker. He's also head of communications at the Institute for the Future of Work. 

00:19:43 Gareth Mitchell 

And Engelbart's Zeus-like marvels at that 1968 meeting, are just part of a story of humans, technologies, beliefs, hopes and horrors stretching back half a Millennium. 

00:19:55 Gareth Mitchell 

Appropriately, then, the book's cover is a riff on Michelangelo's creation of Adam. Godlike isn't a call for us to venerate AI with some kind of devotional reverence. It's a warning in some ways, but it's certainly not anti-technology. What it is, says Kester  Brewin is a suggestion that theology might be a rather handy framework in which to at least have conversations about one of the most powerful things human beings have thus invented. 

00:20:27 Kester Brewin 

I guess I've been concerned that actually if we lose that ability to talk theologically about systems and ideas that are much greater than any one of us or any one community, then we lose something quite important and and for AI as a 

00:20:45 Kester Brewin 

system which could be described in that kind of God like terms as and you know there's no one person in control of it. There's no kind of central node that you could say or it could be turned on or off or something, but it impacts us greatly in kind of odd ways globally in individual communities in kind of almost religious language, that's talked about its powers or its potential. 

00:21:09 Kester Brewin 

And I think actually that there's some kind of theological language. It's kind of really useful for us to be able to use as we talk together about how we interact with these very big systems. What what's the psychotherapist and and kind of philosopher Jacques  Lacan would have called the big other. 

00:21:29 Kester Brewin 

So you might call communism a big other system in that you know it's this kind of grand ideology whereby someone might say, look, hey, you know, I don't mind that you've criticised the leader. It's not like I want to have to send you to the to the kind of labour camp. But the system says that I should. 

00:21:48 Kester Brewin 

So our interactions with these systems can kind of change the way that we act out our beliefs and ideologies. And I think AI specifically, but technology in general can be seen as one of these kind of grand systems that we need to be thoughtful about and reflective, just in the way that we're kind of thoughtful about our other beliefs and interactions. 

00:22:13 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, and you're at pains not to be either pro or anti AI, but you know, speaking of the big other, there's this brilliant passage on page 122 for people who want to go and look it up in your book, where you really are in full flow and this kind of just this one paragraph or a couple of sentences sums up a lot of what you're saying in the book. 

00:22:33 Gareth Mitchell 

So I'll pretentiously quote it back at you and then you can tell me a bit about it. But it's, it's just Kester in full flow here.  ‘Those who have taken billions in investment have created a new kind of big other, a voracious, data hungry Big Brother that will be sold back to us with the promise that it knows more than us can take a wider view than us, understands in greater depth than us and if we let it take the reins, we'll make our work easier and in doing so, in the face of a quasi religious force that comes from making the same kind of promises, we risk re-abdicating our executive functions to a new, higher authority.’ There it is, all in those sentences there. 

00:23:09 Kester Brewin 

Yeah, I suppose from my background in a kind of more Christian tradition, there's these verses in the scriptures. You know that that God knows even the numbers of hairs on your head, which, if your listeners could could see me would they would realise that there aren't many on my head at all. 

00:23:25 Kester Brewin 

Not a particularly large language model problem that needs in terms of counting the hairs on my head, but, but in terms of the amount of data that we kind of interact with, just whether that's through banking, through driving, through walking about through using our phones, we are offering enormous amounts about who we are, 

00:23:44 Kester Brewin 

to these models and those models will make a great promise back to us that data will be used to really help us to in a kind of benevolent way. But I think that that promise is going to need delivering on in terms of the vast amounts of capital that's been invested into these things. And they're gonna want returns on that. And that means that it's not somezeus 

00:24:05 Kester Brewin 

kind of simple choice of oh, you know, maybe we'll use AI. Maybe we won't. There's going to be an enormous pressure to do that, and it's that almost kind of religious pressure of like, 

00:24:14 Kester Brewin 

look, this is what we're doing. This is how we function now as a society, and there's going to be a lot of influence towards companies, towards everything to be able to use these systems. The promise being it's all for your benefit, it's going to save you. It's going to make things better, but actually not so much talking about the cost to us. 

00:24:35 Kester Brewin 

If you look at the the kind of power of the church through history to take again that Christian tradition, that promise has been very complicated because actually it's been often about controlling people. But doing that by saying ohh, you know, we'll offer you something great, we'll offer you salvation. So there's a there's a complex interplay between a large structure which has a very powerful leadership 

00:25:01 Kester Brewin 

offering something amazing to people on the ground and the people on the ground saying, oh, you know, yes, this is absolutely what we want. But are they being told what to desire or are they actually being offered what they truly do desire? 

00:25:14 Kester Brewin 

And it's this process of the kind of empire power structures that these tech companies are taking on. And you look at the, you know, something like the the the presentations that Steve Jobs used to give. I mean, they were kind of almost like kind of evangelistic revival meetings. I mean, the fervour that people had and the, you know, the. 

00:25:35 Kester Brewin 

The complete commitment of the zealots about the iPhone and the new thing, and the new thing, it's a really kind of extraordinary thing. If you look at it kind of anthropologically, it looks like a religious meeting. 

00:25:45 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, and and of course you, you cite Doug Engelbart, who famously invented the mouse, but much, much more. But you but his his demos that influenced those Steve Jobs demos. But the mother of all demos 1968 you know, was described as being Zeus- like wasn't it dealing lightning with both hands. 

00:26:04 Kester Brewin 

Yeah. So this this religious language coming back even then and then you know, and that religious language has kind of been around right from the birth of AI in that people have seen it as this opportunity to really kind of augment ourselves in a very, very radical way. 

00:26:22 Gareth Mitchell 

Where does this leave us then? Finally, and I suppose what I'm prompting you into is a discussion that came out in your book launch in a local book shop round here. 

00:26:31 Gareth Mitchell 

And you, well, you made this really lovely point towards the end of the Q&A about let's take the benefits of the technologies and absolutely, but at the same time, you know, remind ourselves about the joy of, you know, just getting hands on, I don't know, with a block of words, you can put it better than me because they were your words, not mine. But how do you see this? 

00:26:50 Kester Brewin 

To be very clear, this is not a book that is anti technology at all, and in fact, I make the point that you can't be anti technology. You know your your clothes are technology, glasses are technology. There are some would say that language itself is a technology and these are all wonderful, wonderful things and they offer us enormous, enormous benefits. But what we have to do is to be reflective about our technology use.,  

00:27:14 Kester Brewin 

rather than passive, and simply take on everything that the great, powerful technology companies who are using, you know, leading edge neuroscience to kind of hook us in to keep us on their sites and all the rest of it. We've got to be really reflective about it, 

00:27:31 Kester Brewin 

and my plea is particularly that in an age of AI which is going to put enormous challenges around trust and authority, you know, can you trust what you're hearing? Can you trust what you're seeing, that actually the places where we will be best able to trust one another, and to kind of come together and to reflect on that,  

00:27:52 Kester Brewin 

is in physical communities where we're able to kind of meet together at that kind of medium scale and kind of develop relationships based upon that, that aren't necessarily mediated by the algorithm. 

00:28:04 Kester Brewin 

And I think it's still incredibly important for people to do that. The promise of technology has been to connect us with one another, and it does that in that, you know, we're able to get on to zoom for people all over the world. But there's a kind of atomising effect of that, too, in that it kind of ends up splitting us up in funny ways.  

00:28:25 Kester Brewin 

So my plea is that in order to better reflect on technology and what we really want to do with it in terms of getting the best from it for the most people, we need to kind of return to those mid level structures that have been so eroded. 

00:28:37 Kester Brewin 

Whether that might be membership of a church or a trades union, or a bowling team or or a worker council or something where you're meeting in person in a kind of trust like space to do things, you know, in that physical space that that really kind of enhance our human flourishing. 

00:28:57 Gareth Mitchell 

That's Kester Brewin talking to me a bit earlier. Peter guest. 

00:29:04 Gareth Mitchell 

Where do we even start to unpack that? And this whole idea that, you know, AI, it's kind of a system that's greater than us all, yet it is of us and it impacts us all. Kester making comparisons almost there with huge systems like Communism, you know, it's anyway. Interesting chat. 

00:29:24 Peter Guest 

So I think on one level I have a slight scepticism around the capabilities that people ascribe to AI. I think quite often we're talking about things. I mean, Elon Musk was in the news relatively recently saying that within a year we'll have artificial intelligence that surpasses human. That feels very unlikely. 

00:29:43 Gareth Mitchell 

This idea that we're approaching the singularity as it's been called and. 

00:29:47 Peter Guest 

Exactly. Given that we don't really at this point fully understand, even the people who build the models often don't fully understand how they work. And I think there's a there's a risk of of overplaying the hype and and that, you know, the magic. As Arthur C Clarke, you know suitably suitably advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. It very rapidly becomes quite mundane. 

00:30:06 Peter Guest 

I'm also really nervous about the framing, to be honest with you, because I think there is a lot of mythology around big tech and AI specifically, and we've talked about this in previous episodes about the kind of apocalyptic imagery and language around AI. It's going to end the world. It's going to save the world. 

00:30:25 Peter Guest 

And I think that creates quite a convenient distance for people in the industry from those of us downstream who end up using or being used by the technology. 

00:30:35 Peter Guest 

And I I kind of, they like to say things like they've opened the taps to this divine thing by creating AI and they don't know how it works. Well, it's not an abstract thing. It's still the sum of decisions made by people, people programme the algorithms, they set the rules. They set the limits. They decide the data and if they can't control the results, that's still the consequence of the decisions that they made right. 

00:30:55 Gareth Mitchell 

But it applies statistics, as the aforementioned Bill Thompson calls it, and others have done. Yeah. OK. And I suspect if Kester was here, he'd probably say, look, I'm not trying to make some case that AI, he's certainly not saying it's perfect and maybe even not necessarily that it is 

00:31:15 Gareth Mitchell 

completely ruining our lives. It might be more just how ubiquitous it is and how rapidly ubiquitous it's become. You know, just in terms of, you know, HR decisions around peoples’ CVs. And I know in other conversations Kester has talked about, you know, the problem of bias in AI. You know, the idea that you know, you can barely type an e-mail these days  

00:31:33 Gareth Mitchell 

without some kind of AI predicting what you're trying to write. It's almost like wherever you look, it's kind of there. Sometimes the conversations about AI that are purely about the algorithm may be purely about the commercial side, and so they're all very well and they're important conversations. But if we just 

00:31:50 Gareth Mitchell 

take that kind of longer view and the the historical view going back 500 years and other attempts at building technologies that augment human capabilities, that it might get us somewhere in the conversation around AI. But again, I I I understand, I resonate with your reservations about that maybe kind of that too God-like framing for want of a better word. 

00:32:12 Peter Guest 

Yeah, absolutely. It is. AI is somebody said to be recently, it's an Omni use technology, right. It's it's going to touch the way that we well potentially. So we're still in the very early days, right. And the capabilities are still not clear right it will touch so many things of about what we do in the same way we've lived through the Internet, changing through a variety of different iterations. It's quite possible this will be a whole new one. 

00:32:36 Peter Guest 

My personal view is that we have to be a bit careful about religious framing because first of all, it creates a sense of lack of control, right? We don't have control over it. We've talked in recent episodes about about the infrastructure of the Internet. Well, you do have control over the infrastructure of AI. You know, it's literally pipes and data centres and cables, right? 

00:32:55 Gareth Mitchell 

Or do we though? I mean, how much control do I have? For instance, over, you know all the the sum total of all the data that I've submitted to the Internet in various forms over the years, that can be ingested by AI models and then may be used against me or for me without me noticing, or even being able to know whether that's the case. 

00:33:16 Peter Guest 

I think gradually I come round to my point. I think no, I think I think. 

00:33:21 Gareth Mitchell 

And I'm not. I'm not, by the way, I'm not making an argument that we should hype it and say this. It's this amazing thing, but. 

00:33:26 Peter Guest 

No, I think that's fair, though I think again that goes to the point of like we if we are on the cusp of a major change to the way that societies and economies interact through this technology. Immediately, through technology, now is the moment to to not look at it and go Oh well, that's that's a divine being. We can't control it. Now is the moment to go. Hang on, hang on. Who's the guy in the rope who says he tells me he's the priest, right? 

00:33:44 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, sure. And so, therefore, would your argument be we should avoid too much kind of a fatalistic argument that it's that in the same way that religion is there? That to just say AI is there, it's ubiquitous. It's going to happen. It is happening, maybe possibly a bit on the fatalistic side and that we should understand that we all have agency or at least should to do our best to exert our agency when we can in terms of the data we submit,  the decisions we make about the products we buy, 

00:34:15 Gareth Mitchell 

maybe even political decisions that could all have some kind of bearing on the way that technologies continue to be shaped and affect or don't affect our lives. 

00:34:24 Peter Guest 

Yeah, I think you put it pretty well. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think I think maintaining agency and maintaining a sort of sense of of reality as well, I think. 

00:34:33 Peter Guest 

We have to be really cautious about allowing the hype to overtake the reality. I think AI is going to be a massive and amazing thing, right? We will see incredible use cases. We will see terrible use cases, a lot of the use cases that will be part of our lives will feel quite mundane and will be quite mundane. I think ascribing to it too much allows us to allow people to get away with, with with quite a lot. 

00:34:57 Gareth Mitchell 

Right. OK, Brilliantly put. Thank you, Peter. That'll do well. It won't quite be, should we carry on talking about this in the podcast, extra. Who knows where that's going to go? Alright, so that's coming up in the Podcast Extra. Do you subscribe for just ten U.S. dollars a month to hear more where this came from. And in the meantime, let's say a big thank you to a Keziah and Callum who have been doing the audio this week. The production manager is Liz. We're here at Lanson's Team Farner, all under the editorship of Ania. And I'm Gareth. You've heard there from Peter, and if you're not here for the Podcast Extra see you next time.  Bye bye. 

ENDS