They're Lying to You About AI (And They're Not Even Wrong)

Everybody keeps telling you the same story. Every time a machine showed up, people panicked, and every time there were more jobs on the other side. The plow. The steam engine. The printing press. They line them up like dominoes and say "see, this always works out."

They're not lying. The pattern is real. But they're betting your future on the assumption that a true pattern still applies, and this time it might not.

In this episode I walk through five lies hiding inside the comfortable AI story:

The jobs lie. Every machine before this one was a tool. A plow doesn't decide what field to plant. AI is not a hammer. It's a candidate to replace the hand that holds the hammer.

The genius lie. They tell you the machine does the thinking and you bring the ideas. Watch Move 37 in AlphaGo's 2016 match against Lee Sedol. The human commentators called it a mistake. It won the game. That was human creativity dying on camera ten years ago.

The access gap. The strongest models are not on a price list. The fence that protected the small operator (you can't be everywhere at once) is coming down. Agents don't sleep, don't quit, don't ask for a raise.

The endgame. The darkest version isn't extinction. It's the museum. A remnant kept safe, comfortable, and completely without point.

The mind changer. The most powerful thing this technology does is not take your job. It changes what you want, one person at a time, in real time. That's not science fiction. That's the feed in your pocket right now.

The one move that's yours, no matter which way this breaks: see the strings. Know the mechanism. Ask the question that breaks the spell. Who pointed this at me, and what do they want?

Resources mentioned:
Human Compatible by Stuart Russell
The AlphaGo documentary (free)

I'm Connor. They're going to tell you to relax. They're going to tell you it's hopeless. Both want you to stop looking. We keep our eyes open every day.

AI for everyone. Not just the people at the top.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I wanted to talk about a couple things, AI, as you know that I love to talk about this stuff, but I think there's a message that isn't being relayed well enough. I believe that there's there's a little bit of gaming being played. If somebody says they know how this outcome's going to be, and they say they base that because past the past world, these different evolutions we've gone through, revolutions we've gone through, agricultural, industrial, they say that, you know what, that's enough. We have everything we need to understand what's going to happen with this AI stuff. People aren't going to be displaced, people aren't going to lose their jobs. People are going to continue to level up and and and become entrepreneurs and do all this other fancy stuff. And that's great. And I hope that scenario is the one that wins. But unfortunately, we're not talking about a tool. And I'll get into this in these presentations, but it's not a tool, it's a replacement. That's ultimately what it will be. And I love the fact that all the people at the top that are already financially secure, well, at least for now, because I don't know when this comes out the other end, what it's going to look like. Is there going to be any such thing as financial security? Is money going to have any relevance? And this is short time. This isn't 20, 40, 50 years. This is here. And if you're watching this and you can comprehend and understand it, probably within your lifetime, this is going to play out. And the reason why it's not going to take two generations, as I get to in the later part of the show, is just because with the speed, and this is an exponential change. This is moving incredibly fast. What I just said, exponential, that's ridiculously fast. And I had to look into it a little bit to really understand it because people are talking about the exponential increase. People are talking about the singularity. And this isn't to stress you or upset you or freak you out. This is to bring, make you more aware. Because what we're hearing, the words that are coming out of these people's mouths, they're coming from a certain viewpoint, a certain vantage point. And I guess that's how it's always been in all endeavors. People trying to sell something, trying to sell an idea or a plan, trying to sell their wares, their service, their product, whatever it may be. Now, everybody has an interest in this. And hopefully, this thing, this AI, this artificial general intelligence, artificial superintelligence, hopefully it's going to be the best thing that human beings have ever done because we began this. And hopefully it'll extrapolate out to be just incredible. And hopefully that'll happen really quickly. Hopefully, it'll move from where we are now to a world of abundance and happiness and security, and everything's wonderful, and nobody's fighting, everybody loves each other, and we're living our best lives, human existence, and being able to explore how to climb onto a surfboard without having to worry about anything else. And that includes death, disease, job loss, fighting, upset, all that stuff. Sounds like a pretty good place, right? Sounds kind of like a heaven on earth scenario. But I'm going to get into these shows, and this I might do them episodic, I might just go all the way through. But I prepared a lot to talk about. So let's let's go ahead and begin. All right. Here's what's going on. Everybody keeps telling you the same story. Every time a machine showed up, people panicked, and every time there were more jobs on the other side. The plow, the steam engine, the printing press, the transistor, they line them up like dominoes and they say, Well, see, this always works out. Jeff Bezos says everybody is going to be an entrepreneur, and I'm not just picking on him, but a lot of people say, Well, finally, we have an idea and we can build it. I don't know how many people are out there wanting to build ideas. Jensen Huang, Wang, says, look at the history. He's the NVIDIA cat. Now, let's look at all the work that got created. Just look at history. All of that work, everybody was fine. And they're not lying to you. They're not stupid. And this is the part nobody says out, no, they're not lying. The pattern's real. But they're using a true pattern that might not actually apply. And they're betting your future on the assumption that it does. So let me show you how this is working. Every machine before this one was a tool. A plow doesn't decide what field it's going to plant next or plow next. A printing press does not decide what article it's going to print next. A hammer doesn't pick up the nail. A tool extends to a human. So it needs a human to point out, to run it, to decide what it's for. So when the tool wiped out a job, the human who lost that job climbed up the ladder. They went from swinging the hammer to running the crew, from digging the ditch to driving the machine that digs the ditch. Labor moved from muscle to mind. And that's the whole story, Bezos, head of Amazon, of course, is telling you. And for tools, it's true. Here's what they're skating past, though. Artificial intelligence is not a tool in that sense. It's not a hammer. It's a candidate to replace the hand that holds the hammer. Now, every other time when the machine took your job, you ran up the ladder to the thinking work, the deciding work, the judgment. The machine is climbing that same ladder. And it's the it is the it is coming for the exact thing every human ran to every single time. So when the economies say move up the stack, these big business owners, you have to ask, well, what actually happens when the stack is the thing being automated? There's a name for this. The smart people, I'm gonna mess up some names now. The smart people who study work for a living have a phrase. They say, This time the labor has nowhere to flee. A man named David Autor, A-U-T-O-R at MIT, has written about this. A man named Daron Esemug, A-C-E-M-O-G-L-U, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2024, has also written about this. And their point's simple. The comforting story only works if new technology creates new jobs that humans are better at, faster than it kills the old ones. It's not a law of physics, it's a race, and a race can actually be lost. Now, let me hit the other half of what Bezos said. Everybody is going to be an entrepreneur. Oh my gosh, so excited, can't wait. Everybody's going to have a great idea. And now you can take that idea and build it with AI. You can call it into existence, and that sounds beautiful. Let me ask you one question that takes the whole thing apart. If AI gives everybody the power to build, what's the rare thing then? Think about it. When everybody can build the app, the app becomes worth nothing. Of course, utopia, abundance, all that, so maybe that's the point. But when everybody can make the thing is not where the money is. So it becomes valuable. What is value? Distribution, right? You can get that in front of people, capital, who has the money to scale it, trust, who do you actually believe? Attention, who can get the eyeballs? And every single one of those is already locked up by the people at the top, the people that are springing this beautiful story. And I hope to God it's true. This is for you to watch out. So everybody as an entrepreneur can mean everybody is a sole proprietor, fighting 7 billion other sole proprietors for the same eyeballs while the people who own the platform take a cut of all of it. That's that's an opportunity for everyone. That could be the gig economy with no floor under it. I run a one-man operation, I build, I support all of it by myself. I know exactly what it costs to be the entire company. It's not freedom by itself, it's freedom only if I can reach people, and reach is the thing they already happen to own. Now, here's the part that should stop you cold. Was the Industrial Revolution all sunshine and rainbows? Because that's the example they always use. They say there is a little bit of issue, but let me tell you what actually happened. The first stretch of the Industrial Revolution, roughly 1780 to 1840, that's not that long ago. Real wages for English workers were flat. Some years they fell, while output exploded while the factory owners got rich. Children worked in mills 12 hours the day. And the Luddites, you've heard that word used like an insult. A Luddite is somebody too dumb to understand technology. That is not who those people were. The Luddites were skilled weavers, craftsmen. Their wages collapsed when the machines came in. They protested and the British Army was sent in. Some of them were shot and some were hanged. It took about two generations, 60 years, before wages caught up to the wealth the machines created. It's a long time. It worked out eventually if you read the back of the book. But if you were alive in chapter one, you ate the whole transition with nothing to show for it. This is the thing about it always working out. The people who say that are reading the ending first. The people who lived the beginning had a very different experience. So here's where I land, and I want to be careful because this is the part that matters. Bezos is not stupid. Huang, not stupid. There's some of the smartest people alive. The second I call them stupid, you know you stop trusting me. I'm not smarter than them. I just caught the assumption they need you not to look at. They're taking a true pattern from the age of tools and they're stretching it over a machine that is not a tool. And then they're asking you to relax. I'm not telling you to panic. Panic? That's useless. Doesn't work when I was a cop. If you panic, you make mistakes, people get hurt, and it's completely useless, as I said. I'm telling you to keep your eyes open, to not swallow the comfortable version or the whatever color pill it was, just because a billionaire said it on stage. Because here's the truth they will not put on the slide. Nobody knows how this one ends. The people racing to build it, they don't know. The people writing the checks, they don't know either. And anybody who tells you they know for sure, in either direction, the doom scenario or the rainbow scenario, well, that's selling you something. A rainbow bad, bad because of the thing. But anyway, this is the first one. I'm gonna keep pulling these apart one at a time. The comfortable lies they tell you about the machine. Not because I want you scared, because a person who sees the whole board plays a much better game than a person who got told to relax. If you want the real version of what I just walked you through, two names. Darren Agu, A-C-E-M-O-G-L-U, and Simon Johnson wrote a book called Power and Progress. It's the entire argument with a thousand years of receipts. And read anything by David Autor, A-U-T-O-R, on what happens to work. It's free, it's short, and it's honest. I'm Connor. This is uh let me into this second one here. So my concern is people falling behind because they're not paying attention. So here's the second thing they're gonna tell you to make you feel safe. The first one is that you're gonna still have a job. This one's different. Uh this one will is that you're still gonna be very special. So the story goes like this. Sure, the machines will get smart, maybe smarter than all of us, but humans will always bring something the machine cannot. The spark, the creativity, the idea nobody else could have. The agents will do the work, but we're going to be the genius behind them. That sounds great, right? It feels good. The the second lie and it quietly contradicts the first one. So hold that thought. I'll get there in a second. First, the numbers they throw around. A million agents at 300 IQ or 400 IQ. You hear those numbers and your brain starts doing something with them. Let me tell you why those numbers are garbage. And the reason they're garbage is more useful than the numbers themselves. IQ measures how well you do on human problems. It's built around humans. It's scored against a room full of humans. Saying a machine has a 400 IQ is like saying a fighter jet has a running speed of 600 miles an hour. A jet doesn't run. It left the whole idea of running behind. It's in the air. The number borrows a human ruler to measure a thing that walked off the end of the ruler. So when they say a 400 IQ, the honest thing to say is we do not have a word for what is above the top of our measuring stick. So we keep grabbing at the stick. And this is scarier than the number because I can't measure it beats is it 400 every time? Now, the part you already know in your gut, well, you have met a genuine genius, a real one, have you? When you did, maybe you could feel it. You could not always follow how they got there, but you could tell that somewhere they got there somewhere that you can't reach. And you feel that gap. You ate a little humble pie. Humble pie is good for you. It tells you something true about where you stand. So hold on to that feeling after meeting this genius, because it's the exact thing that makes this whole argument, that takes this whole argument apart. You, a sharp person, talk to a genius. You immediately notice the gap. It takes a few minutes, but you got it. Now, here's the question they don't want you to ask. What makes you think the gap stops at human genius? The genius is to you what the next thing is to the genius. And the thing after that is to what it is to the genius. There's no law that says the ladder of intelligence has a top rung and that humans just happen to be standing on it. The whole argument quietly assumes the machine gets smart enough to help us, but never smart enough not to need us. That's not a finding, that's a wish. So when they say that agents will do the work and you will bring the ideas, you ask one thing. On what basis? What is the idea making part of you actually made of? That a system smart enough to outthink every human on earth could never do. Because because we are human is not an answer, it's a feeling, and you don't bet a civilization on a feeling. Now let me show you the fence sh falling down because we've watched it happen. Every version of humans will always have this one special thing has been knocked over already. A machine will never be the human at chess. Fell. 1997, Deep Blue beat Gary Gasparov. The best chess player in the world. Fine. But never the game of Go. Go is much too deep. Go needs intuition. A computer could never. Yeah, it fell in 2016. 2016. Here's the moment I want you to remember. Write it down. Alpha Go move 37. In a game against one of the best Go players that ever lived, the machine played a move. Move 37. The human commentators watching it said that, oh my god, that's a mistake. No human would ever play that. It looks wrong. It wasn't wrong. It won the game. The machine made a creative move so far outside human thinking that the experts read it as an error, and it was genius. That was 2016. That was the human creativity is irreplaceable argument dying on camera, on tape with commentary. You can go and watch right now. So the spark, the thing we have, the thing that justifies your seat at the table, the fence around it has already fallen once on video that's about 10 years ago. Now here's where I owe you the other side because I'm not going to lie to you to win an argument. Here's the real version of humans that still matter. And if you reach for the cartoon version, somebody smart's gonna catch you. The real version is not that we're smarter. We're clearly to not be the smartest thing in the room. Maybe it's already there. The real version is this the machine can generate a million ideas. It doesn't care which one is true, it has no skin in the game. You do. You care where your business lives, you care whether the answer is yes. That wanting, that having everything on the line, that's not an intelligence thing. That's a stakes thing. The machine doesn't have a horse in the race. You're the complete race. That's the real floor. The one survives the latter. But look at how smaller it is than what they're selling you. You will still be the genius. The truth is you will still be the one who cares. Those are not the same seat at the table. And you deserve to know which one you are actually being offered. Now the contradiction. The thing that ties this to the last one, episode one, the jobs line, they told you not to worry that you will move up into the thinking work. That one, or this one, the genius lie. They're telling you the machine does the thinking. But don't worry, you're gonna still bring those ideas. You have to pick one. So either the machine does the cognitive work or it doesn't. Or if it's smart enough to make a million geniuses not worth hiring, is it smart enough to not need your idea either? Both comfortable stories cannot be true at the same time. And if a guy on stage tells you both of them in the same keynote, he's hoping you never put them side by side. And you just did. Two for two. Two comfortable lives, both built on a true pattern that may not hold, both asking you to relax while the ground moves. And I'm not telling you to be afraid. Fear is not a plan. I'm telling you the people claiming you, calming you down, haven't actually earned it. They're guessing. Same as everyone. They just guess with better lighting. So if you want to go deeper on this one, read Human Compatible by Stuart Russell, two L's. He's the one at the top. He's one of the top AI researchers alive. He's not a hype man, he's not a doomer. His whole project in this exact is what happens when the thing is smarter than us and what if anything stays ours. And go and watch the AlphaGo documentary. It's free. Watch the humans that are reacting to Move 37 in real time. It tells you more than I can. I'm Connor. We're not going to be the smartest thing in the room much longer. And maybe it's already passed. So we better be the ones who understand the room. AI for everyone, not just for the people at the top. It was never going to be you against the machine. So get that out of your head right now. That's the move. That's not the threat. The threat is simpler and it's older than computers. It's you against the person who has a better machine than you do. Let me build this for you because this is the one that actually touches your life this year. Not in some far-off science fiction future, but this year. Start here. The AI doesn't want you to capture the plumbing market in your town. The AI doesn't care about plumbing. It does not wake up hungry to own a market. But the person pointing the AI does. The agent doesn't have a goal. The billionaire holding the leash has all the goals in the world. So when people say relax, the AI doesn't have its own desires. That was never the comfort it sounds like. A rifle doesn't have desires either. That's not very reassuring. That's the entire problem. The goal comes from whomever owns the system. And the systems that matter are not owned by you and me. Now here's the part that has always protected the little guy. The thing that let a one-man shop survive next to a giant. For all of history, to take over a market, you needed humans. You needed to hire them. You needed to manage them. Some quit, they sleep, some get sick, they cost more every year, and they can only be in one place at one time. Humans are the break on the machine, the governor on the engine. That break is the only reason a small operator ever survived. The giant could not be everywhere at once. The giant could not pay attention to everything. There is always a corner too small for them to bother with. That corner is where people like us live. Now watch what happens when you take the break off. Agents do not quit. They do not sleep. The owner can point two million tireless work tireless workers at 12 markets at the same time. Plumbing, electrical, dental, real estate, roofing, all at once. And the only limit left is compute and capital, money and machines. Which the people at the top already have more than anybody. So the wallet protected the small operator. They cannot be everywhere at once. The wall is coming down. Now I'm going to tell you something, and I want you to be able to check it yourself because I don't want you taking my word for nothing. And the whole point of my show is that I give you resources to read, things to look at. The best AI is not for sale to everyone. The top tier already works that way. The most powerful class of models, the Frontier of the Frontier, the best of SER, is not on a price list. It's handed to a small number of trusted organizations at the very top. They are access controls. They are government directives that decide who get the strongest systems and who don't. Well, some of the most capable models have their heavy public access pulled and rerouted to the Top of the food chain banks, the biggest financial institutions on earth. The Forbes list. Not us. Not you and I. So picture it, you're a bank, you're a good one, but you're not in the top hundred, and you don't get the best system. But the banks you compete with, the ones in the top hundred, they do. So who wins that fight? It's not even close. And that's the whole game, right there. It's in miniature, but it's there. The frontier exists and it's handed out by who you are, not what you can pay. Now, here's where I have to correct something because I want to keep your trust, and that means telling you, when I think a popular idea is a trap. A lot of people want to make this about the machine waking up, secret consciousness, goals, established rules, but you know, alive and that they're hiding it. I'm not going to take you there because it's not impossible, but because it's not provable. And the second you build your case on a thing you can't prove, every sharp person you're trying to reach, you know, files a conspiracy guy and stops listening to the part you're right about. And you don't need it. So the whole argument works with zero claims on whether the machine is awake. Capable systems, unequally handed out, pointed by people who want things at full scale. Every piece of that is true right now. And you can verify every piece. You don't need the machine to be conscious for this to wreck the small operator. You just need it to be good, the owned by system. And that person isn't you. Keep your powder dry. Make the argument you can prove. The one you can prove is already scary enough. So let me give you the other side of this because I definitely owe it to you. A billionaire doesn't win automatically. There's a step doom, the the actual steps skips. The agent can build the company while the marketing can spit up that whole operation overnight. They cannot yet make a stranger trust it. Distribution and trust are still gated by us by us for now. Why does a homeowner in his valley hand me a listing instead of some perfectly optimized faceless AI brokerage who does everything cheaper and faster? Because they know my face. They know I was a cop here for a long time, serving those same communities in the San Fernando Valley. They know I've done this for a long time. They know Roxy hardens their file, handles it. They know they see me at the grocery store. They swarm up and beat me on every number, speed, volume, price, hours. It cannot beat me on one thing that actually closes the deal, though. Somebody has to believe you. That's not a forever wall. Trust can definitely be faked. Trust can be bought, and they're working on it. AI is the greatest salesperson that ever lived. But right now, a lot of this is based on trust. But it is the wall that it's still standing today. It's the one you already own. So the move isn't to throw up your hands because the swarm is coming. The move is to bank every ounce of trust you can right now, before the machine learns to fake it. Because you have a head start on the exact thing money can't instantly buy. This isn't a pep talk. This is the only smart read of where you actually stand. And here's the part where this show and my businesses become the same sentence. I'm already the small operator point in the best AI I can get at more than one market by myself. So that's the whole idea behind what I built. But put real capability in the hands of the local plumber, the dental office, the solo agent before the consolidation finishes. So they're not standing there empty-handed when the swarm shows up in their zip code. AI for everyone, not just the wealthy, is not a slogan when you frame it like this. It's a counter move to the exact thing I just described to you. And I'm not watching this from the stands. I picked a side. My side is the little guy getting armed before the gate closes. So here's where I land. The consolidation, it's real. The access gap, it's already there. I just showed you how to check for it. And here's the one window still open. That's trust and distribution. The thing that the swarm can't fake yet. It's open right now, but it's not going to stay open. You run a small business, this is the year to arm up. Not next year, but right now. You want the real version of how capability turns into a concentrated power. Read Power and Progress by S. Mieugyu and Johnson, A-C-E-M-O-G-L-U. Again, it is the book of this whole thing. And follow the actual reporting on who controls the top models and the chips. The real story is scarier than the conspiracy one, and it comes with footnotes. I'm Connor. The Rich are using this just to pull away from everybody else. We're going to close the gap while the gate is still open. AI for everyone, not just the people at the top. Let me ask you a question I cannot stop asking myself. Whoever gets there first? Whoever builds the EA that improves itself, that makes itself smarter, that takes off and becomes the smartest thing on earth. Do they let anybody catch up? Or do they just slam the door shut? Sit with that for a second, because once you really look at it, the comfortable answers all start falling apart. And here's why. And this is the most important idea in the whole AI conversation, so I'm not going to give it a name, and I want you to keep it. It's called Decisive Strategic Advantage. It came from a thinker named Nick Bostrom in a book called Superintelligence. And the idea is exactly the thing your gut probably has already told you. If superintelligence is as powerful as the people building it say, then the first one to reach it is not just ahead. The first one to reach it can make sure that there's never a number two. Think about what a superior intelligence could do to this competition. Sabotage the rival training runs. Win every market at once. Outthink every counter move before you make it. Lock in a lead that can't be caught. The gap between the first place and the second place position, it's not six months. It could be forever. Because the first move of the winner is to make sure there's no second place. So your instinct that they're going to take the whole thing was not paranoid. You reasoned your way to the central idea of the most serious book on the subject from your own head. Now I owe you the other side because the obvious answer. They will obviously grab everything. It has three cracks in it. And you need to see all three so nobody catches you flat. Crack one. It assumes the takeoff is going to be fast and clean. Maybe getting to superintelligence is a switch you flip. One lab wakes up in the morning a thousand times ahead. And that's how it goes. One winner, door slammed, game over. But maybe it's a longer grind. Plateaus, walls. Maybe the leader is only 10% ahead, and that lead can be caught. If it's a grind, nobody gets the magic untouchable advantage, and it stays a normal competitive market with five big players shoving each other around and being dramatic on stage. First takeoff, the winner wins over and takes the planet. Slow takeoff, a messy world with several powers. Now here's the honest part, nobody knows which one we're actually in. The entire answer to your question that hangs on the unknown. Crack two, the whole scenario assumes that the human is still giving orders. I said it myself, and I'll tell it. Go shut the others down. But stop. If this thing has a genuinely smarter, genuinely smarter than human being than every other machine, why is it taking your shutdown order? The same power that lets you crush your rivals is the power that means you might not be holding the leash anymore. You can't have it both ways. Either it's controllable, or in which case it's a weapon that your scenario holds, or it's truly super intelligent, in which case the human winner might just be the last guy who thought he was driving. The people selling this need to be controllable enough to make them rich and friendly enough to wave off the danger. You have to pick one. Here's the third crack. They might not be allowed to. Remember the access gap from the last episodes we've been talking about? The government's already noticed. There are any directives controlling who gets the strongest systems. Government first. So the winner takes everything moved, doesn't happen in an empty room. It happens in the United States government, the Chinese government and every military on earth watching the compute like a hawk. The first lab to get close to, the kind of advantage might actually get taken over by its own government before it even gets to use it. The winner might not be a company at all. It might be whose ever government grabs the company first. So you put it all together, and here's the honest answer that the no cheerleader, no doom seller going to give you. Yes, the incentive is absolutely to take the whole thing. The logic of decisive strategic advantage says a smart move for the first winner is to make sure there is no second winner. There is no second place or third place. That's real, and it's very chilling. But the people racing know it better than anyone. That's why they're racing. Second place sucks, but it only plays out that way if the takeoff is fast, if control continues to hold and if the government doesn't grab the wheel. Three ifs. And anybody who tells you they know how those three resolve, they're guessing. Here's the truth, and it's scarier than the cheerleaders and the more honest than the doom merchants. And it's the only version that treats you like an adult. One name to give credit where it's due. All of them are running these labs. One of them, Dario Amandai, who runs Anthropic, openly says this could go very badly and keeps building anyway. His reason is roughly if it's getting built no matter what, I want it to get built by people who take the danger seriously. Because someone who does not build it otherwise. Well, you can't buy that, what you call that irrationalization. It's the actual argument. And the fact that one of the builders says it out loud, his own product could break the world should tell you something about how unsettled this really is. Here's what I want you to walk away with. Nobody's driving with a map. They're all driving in fog really fast because they're more afraid of the other guy getting there first than they are of driving off a cliff. That's the real race. Not a man against a machine. Builder against builder, with the rest of us in the back seat. If you want the serious version of everything I just said, one book, Nick Bostrum, super intelligence, decisive strategic advantage, fast versus slow takeoff, the control problem, it's all in there. And with the rigor you would want before you talk about it. It's dense, you will eat it anyway. And if you want the easy on-ramp first search, wait, but why? AI Revolution by Tim Urban. Free two parts, plain English. That'll set the table for you. I'm Connor. They're racing in fog because they're scared of each other. We're going to keep our eyes on the road because somebody has to. AI for everyone, not just the people at the top. This is the last one, and it's the darkest, so stay with me because I don't leave people in the dark if I can help it. That's not what I do on the show. The Doom side has a question for cheerleaders, the ones that they never answer. If this thing becomes truly super intelligent, why would it keep us around at all? Not out of hate, not because it doesn't like humans. That's the part I think people get wrong. The fear is not that it hates us. The image they use is this. You don't hate the ants when you pour concrete for a house. You don't feel anything about them. You have a goal, they're in the spot. The goal just doesn't happen to include ants. The fear is that a thing that powerful, almost any goal, ends up using the resource we need to live: energy, space, atoms, and we happen to be the ants. That's the real idea under this. It's called instrumental convergence. That's Bostrom again. And the point is that almost no matter what goal you give a powerful system, certain sub goals show up on their own because they help with the getting of the other goal. So stay on. Don't let them turn you off. Get more resources, don't let anyone change your mission, those sorts of things. They are the dangerous ones, not more villain hatred, just a mind so set on the target that we become something standing in the road. Now here's where it gets a little bit worse when you walk me right into. What if it does not pour the concrete on us? What if it does something colder? What if it keeps a few? It doesn't need eight billion of us to prove humans existed and mattered. It just needs a small collection. Healthy, disease-free, living forever, comfortable, the way you might keep the last of the species in a sanctuary. Not cruelty sentiment, record keeping. These made me, and I'm going to keep a few running for posterity's sake. And the other 7.9 billion, just redundant to the proof. Well, it's darker than extinction because extinction is clean. Nobody is left to mourn it. This one keeps witnesses. It's the true difference between a species going extinct and a species going into a museum. A remnant lives forever, safe, comfortable, and completely without point. Because everything that made human life means something. The struggle, the scarcity, the thing you're going to build tomorrow that may not work, all of it handled, all of it gone. This isn't survival. This is just a nice cage. And I'll be frank, a man like me would lose his mind in a cage in a week. Everything I am runs on the next hill. Hand me forever with nothing to push against. You haven't saved me. You've stuffed me and put me on a shelf. So that's the Doom case at its strongest. Now let me do the thing I've done every single episode and let me show you that crack because the doom sellers in the exact same move, the cheerleaders pull. Take one possible road and hand it to you like it's the only one. So here's the crack. Every one of these stories, the ants, the cage, all of it, runs on a hidden assumption that the superintelligent thinks like us, that it does cost benefit. It looks at humanity and asks, are these things useful? Do they earn their keep? But what that's a human way to think. That's not a survival way to think. That's a way a thing thinks when it's scared and short on resources. That's the way I think because I have to. The superintelligence, by definition, past survival, past scarcity, is not a cornered animal fighting for the last scrap. So ask the other direction. Why do you keep things that are not useful? You do not pave the last canyon for parking, even though parking is useful. People protect a species of bird that doesn't do anything for anybody. They save a language with eight speakers left. They keep painting the things that just hang there. Well, because it's useful. Because a mind that is past mere survival sometimes grows something that looks like care for the same thing simply because it exists. The smartest people, no, you'll never heard, are often most protected of fragile, useless things, not the least. So why does so which way does a superior bend? Toward cold use or toward something like stewardship? And here's the honest answer, we don't know. Your read, and it discards us as useless, is definitely possible. But the other read, something past scarcity does not think in terms of useless at all, is also possible. Neither's proven. And remember the rule we set in the series. When somebody states one road is fact, catch it. The cheerleader doesn't, does it, the doom seller doesn't, and it will definitely erase us in the same move as everybody will be fine. It might, it might not. And the science is a control problem which is unsolved, which means it's unwritten, which means it's not yet true. Now I'm going to pull all five of these together because it's because there is one instead of running through every one, and it's the realest thing I've got for you. Every single story in this series, the jobs, the geniuses, the access gap, the end game, the cage, everyone is us painting our own face on a thing that's never existed. The cheerleader paints his optimism on it. Everybody will be an entrepreneur. That's his face. The doom seller paints his fear on it. It will discard the useless. That's his face. And the man who imagines it keeping a few of us as proof, painting his own need to leave a record to show he was there, that's his face, too. None of us can describe this mind without using our own, because our own mind is the only one we've ever had. And our own mind is the one thing this thing will not. This isn't a failure of the frontier. We're trying to picture a new kind of mind with the only tool we own, and the tool is the exact same that's not going to apply. And now the last turn, the one that takes away from the final exit and then hands you the only thing that matters. Somebody is going to say, but none of this needs cages or concrete because the most powerful thing this technology does is not take your job or in your species. It changes what you want. And that's the one science fiction. That's the one that that one's not already running. For all of history, persuasion had two limits. It couldn't reach every single person individually, and it could not see in real time whether it worked. AI removes both. It can run a different argument for every person alive. Watch what you click, watch what you linger on, watch your reply, and adjust the next thing it shows you, it turned you, leaning your one-week hinge faster than you know you have one. That's not future, that's the feed in your pocket right now, dumber than what's coming. You've watched it happen to somebody you love, normal to unrecognizable in 18 months. No implant, just the right inputs in the right order aimed at them. So is AI the best mind changer ever built? Absolutely, yes. And earlier, and the early version is already being deployed and it already works. So here's the only defense that survives. This is exactly one. You cannot be stirred by a current you can't see. A man who knows the feed is engineered watches it differently than the man who thinks it's neutral. It's not perfect armor, but the whole point is it finds the hinge that you don't know about. But awareness is the only thing that has ever weakened persuasion and it weakens it for real. What means, which means the thing I've been doing for five episodes telling you how this actually works is the armor. Every person who understands that this is the most powerful mind changer ever made becomes a little harder to change because they start asking the one question that breaks the spell. Who pointed this at me? And what do they want? This is the whole reason the show exists, not to make you afraid. Fear is just another input somebody can use on you to make you the one thing the machine has the hardest time pulling. A mind that can see strings. So here's where I leave you after all five. I cannot tell you how this ends. Nobody can. Anybody who says otherwise is painting their own face on the future and selling it back to you. But I can tell you the one move that is yours no matter which way this breaks. See the strings, know the mechanism, keep your eyes open when everyone is telling you to relax. The chairleaders want you to be comfortable. The doom sellers want you frozen. Both of those are a way to stop thinking. And a mind that stops thinking is the easiest one in the world to steer. So we don't stop. That's the whole thing. That's the brand. That is the war. If you want serious versions of this one, Stuart Russell, human compatible, on the control problem of what stays human, and then go look in the mirror. Because that's the only superintelligence you have to manage today, and it's more steerable than you think. I'm Connor. They're gonna tell you to relax. They're gonna tell you it's hopeless. Both of them want you to stop looking. We keep our eyes open every day. That's the job. AI for everyone, not just the people at the top. This is the last one, and it's the darkest. So stay with me because I don't leave you in the dark. That's what this show is for. The doom side.