The End of the World with Michael and Stu
The Apocalypse is Everywhere. The End of the World with Michael and Stu is a (hopefully) insightful and (hopefully) humorous exploration of the rise of apocalyptic news, apocalyptic thinking and apocalyptic culture. Each week, we’ll be looking at a work of art, a piece of media, or an historical event related to the (hopefully not) impending End of the World.
The End of the World with Michael and Stu
108: My Words Fly Up, My Thoughts Remain Below
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This week we are talking about Claude, the AI agent developed by Anthropic. Our window into this world is the recently published piece in The New Yorker by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, who spent a lot of time over the last few years talking to various folks at Anthropic. What we discover is, and this will come as a shock, a lot of discussion regarding AI's "power" and "reasoning" abilities, most of which can be dismissed as yet another iteration of the endless hype-cycle surrounding the project of LLMs more generally.
The second half of the episode is devoted to the utterly forgettable recent film Subservience, starring Megan Fox as, wait for it, an AI powered robot helper who becomes homicidal! Despite the film's overt terribleness, it provides us with a vector for discussing the arrival of algorithmic slop filmmaking, and how this trend in Hollywood does not exactly help the industry in resisting the drive to ever more automated entertainment properties.
Gideon Lewis-Kraus's piece in The New Yorker
This week's episode icon is a drawing of Claude Shannon, the pioneering mathematician and computer scientist for whom "Claude" is named. The title is a quote spoken in Hamlet by, who else, Claudius.
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