Doomed to Discuss AI  ## Metadata - Author: [[The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source]] - Full Title: Doomed to Discuss AI - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/c778473e-7bbb-4612-b8c3-8107290323f0 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Frankenstein: First AI Doom?** - The first sci-fi novel, Frankenstein, depicted AI doom. - The creature, a form of early AGI, worried characters due to its intelligence and potential to reproduce. Transcript: Jon Evans Do we go here, John? Totally. Jerod Santo I mean, I guess we can start with like, so what does Jalee sort of the very first science fiction novel was actually a novel of AI doom, believe it or not. Really? Yeah. So this goes back to the early 1800s, right? There's a giant volcanic explosion in Indonesia, 1815, 1860. The weather is terrible across their own hemisphere. You know, there's drought crops fail and a bunch of people at this mansion in Switzerland, extremely rich and privileged and weird people have terrible holiday. This includes Lord Byron, who's like the Kanye West of his day. Super controversial. His daughter grew up to be the world's first computer programmer, Ada Percy Shelly, whose poem, Osmondias, he probably read in high school. Anyways, Byron challenges them all. It's a scary story. And the most cultural significant person who gets this challenge is Shelly's 19 year old girlfriend, Mary Godwin, who writes Frankenstein as a result. And everyone knows Frankenstein, right? Like the guy with the next sort of shambling along going, uh, kill. He's in the house. Speaker 4 He's upstairs. Jerod Santo That's not actually how the book works, though. In the book, Frankenstein is this brilliant creature that teaches itself to read, teaches itself languages and then snoot things. It is basically an artificial general intelligence that the other characters are concerned is going to reproduce and take care of the world. So like the early 1800s, we are already worried about AGI. Yeah, I do. And the robot's killing us all. What? Yes, that is correct. ([Time 0:12:41](https://share.snipd.com/snip/be59ca5e-96cc-4e0d-813a-6a43f26b062b)) - **Ultrasound Drug Delivery** - Ultrasound drug delivery allows targeted drug release. - Tiny bubbles containing drugs are injected, then popped with ultrasound at specific locations. Transcript: Adam Stacoviak Have you heard about ultrasound drug delivery? This is kind of a new thing. No, ultra sound drug delivery. Jerod Santo No, it's kind of amazing. So if they want to deliver drugs to your brain, right, like it's hard to get drugs into the brain with the whole brain barrier. Yeah, you can't. Yeah. Right. So their solution is just to inject you with all these tiny, tiny little bubbles that go everywhere in your body. And then if you apply the right pregnancy, ultrasound, then the bubbles break and the drug inside them gets released out. So you can very specifically micro target drug delivery anywhere in the body. Now this is relatively neat. Jon Evans So you put the drug into a bubble and multiple bubbles and you distribute the bubbles to different areas of your body and then you make the bubbles pop. Jerod Santo That's correct. Jon Evans That sounds amazing. Leeward. How do you target which bubbles should pop? I don't have so many questions. You just given the area. You like aim the ultrasound at a particular area. You can. Oh, I see you target with the sound waves directly into that area. Exactly. So the bubbles would spread everywhere, even to your brain. And then you put the sound waves into your brain and it pops right there. Precisely. Adam Stacoviak That's brilliant. That's interesting because I mean, there is an ultrasound that women get when they're pregnant and they have a child, they get an ultrasound to look at the baby. It's kind of the same thing, right? Like it's sending sound or some sort of thing that makes an image based upon, I don't know how ultrasounds work. I'm just like rough in it, based upon what you just described. This is fun. Adam can't please keep guessing. But it is the word ultrasound is in there. So I'm assuming they're connected. Yes. And it's plausible. I assume the bubble popping ultrasound is a higher energy, but I could be wrong. I don't actually know. I mean, I don't have the ability to pull up my personal archive here of what this thing is called and I'm going to like be so upset later, but this sound stuff is legitimate. Like they do some really unique things with sound. Like when you pay attention to that spectrum of people uncovering this knowledge and this experimentation, it's just you cannot. It's like science fiction. It's so wild. What's possible with sound. Jerod Santo So the other thing I've heard about ultrasound is people are speculating. Like, you know, you get an ultrasound image and it's very hazy and you need an expert to interpret it. Right. But they're talking about if you can get an AI to clean that up and turn it into like something, you know, movie quality, everyone could have their own personal ultrasound. And if you're like, Oh, I feel weird today, I think I'll inspect the inside of my body by aiming the ultrasound there, having the AI show me exactly what's going on to see if there's anything Weird going on, which is a little disturbing. Honestly, if you're not in the medical profession, but like within the bounds of possibility, ([Time 0:16:06](https://share.snipd.com/snip/927dd348-b04f-4326-80f0-ba3be461e455)) - **Ancient Pyramids** - Pyramids were already ancient when Herodotus visited them. - Their age and scale highlight the impressive engineering of past civilizations. Transcript: Jon Evans What do you think, John? Jerod Santo Those are crazy old. I was just thinking sort of attention, but like we know things are old, but like part of the archive program, thinking in the thousand year sort of stands. I started thinking about just how old things are. So a thousand years is a very long time, right? Like ancient roads, like great Zimbabwe and anchor, what they were had not even been built yet at the thousand years ago. Right. Pyramids are much, much older than that. Like when Herodotus, the ancient Greek went to visit the pyramid, they were as old as to him as he is to us today. They are worth a thousand years old, which is insane. Like how do they do anything on that scale? Four thousand years ago. Jon Evans Maybe they're quite a bit more advanced than we give credit to. I mean, they were smart as us, right? They're a lot of really good engineers. Clearly, maybe even better engineers. If that is to be correct, that we can't even build a not even effect, certainly like the same artifact, different techniques. I don't know. I like to think we could get it done, but who am I? Jerod Santo Except for the. Not in ([Time 0:20:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9d62b431-fe6d-4383-b484-8e7002e618e4)) - **Evolving Physics?** - An astrophysicist suggests the laws of physics might evolve. - Different laws could compete, challenging our understanding of a static universe. Transcript: Jerod Santo So this is not quite the same thing, but in terms of things we don't understand, that blow your mind three days ago in the New York Times, there was this opinion piece by an astrophysicist Saying, you know, like our standard model of physics doesn't work. The more information we get from like the Hubble telescope and so forth, the more it doesn't fit in line with what we have. And there's this amazing quote, one possibility raised by the physicist Lee Smolle in the philosopher Roberto Unger, that the laws of physics can evolve and change over time. Different laws might even compete for effectiveness. So like this is an actual proposal being proposed by an actual astrophysicist in the New York Times three days ago. Jon Evans We live in a very strange universe as well. I'm saying maybe the laws are also changing over time. OK. Jerod Santo Exactly. Yeah. ([Time 0:21:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/785e27d0-2ac8-4101-adc3-0c7613c48c2b)) - **Information Filtering and Misinformation** - Software filters shape individual worldviews, creating a demand for misinformation. - Diverse perspectives are crucial for innovation, but require balancing with shared truths. Transcript: Adam Stacoviak Think we got to this degree of the conversation by saying that so much is changing. Like you mentioned physics and your... Right. Times article. And I think we're kind of in this world right now of change. We're in a world of change around, in particular, our world here in software development, where AI is becoming, you know, a peer programmer and very much becoming like a sidekick to The individual and a sidekick to the corporation building software. And then we're also in a like a turbulent time of like economics, world economics is turbulent right now. There's lots of stuff happening in all parts of the world. There's things trying to, you know, change the power of the dollar, the US dollar as I'm talking about it. There's lots of change around physics and, you know, going back to the moon or have we gone or all these things that are like basically every question imaginable is now in question again. It's like, is the earth flat? Is the earth round? Have we gone to space? Is there space? Is there only a little orth orbit? Like, we're economics, physics. I mean, all these things are essentially what seems to have been hard truths are now like, wow, really? Are they true? Jerod Santo Well, I think this is like a factor of what I'm saying, like the software is like what you're seeing and your exposure to the world is coming through these layers of layers of filters, Like journalists and software and, you know, your feed algorithm deciding what you see in certain places. Everyone's getting like a slightly different view on what used to be a shared comma world, which is an interesting. Not, I don't think that's entirely bad, though. Jon Evans I was going to ask how you combat that, but it sounds like maybe you don't think that we need to. Jerod Santo Well, not necessarily like I think, quote unquote misinformation is more a demand problem and supply problem, right? Like no matter how much is out there, people are going to find it and seek it out. But also like, I think to an extent, a variety of perspectives like genuine the original takes is how we get new stuff. Right. So I actually don't want everyone to be thinking the same way about everything. Adam Stacoviak Right. Yeah. We need different. We need Steve Jobs' original campaign. Think different. Because that's true. I mean, we do need uniqueness. Jon Evans Well, we also need collaboration and camaraderie and connectedness. So there's like, I mean, ultimately, my takes are usually boring because it goes back to things like moderation. Like, I feel like we need both. Like, I feel like we need a physical analog connection to real people in the real world. And we also need the abstract digital morphological demand side misinformation world that we're we've invented. Because there's so much like you said, John, that comes out of that, that are new things. Some are bad, some are good. And then hopefully we gravitate and elevate the good ones or good uses of things and find ways to combat the bad ones. But I feel like both at the individual and maybe more at the societal level, like a healthy grounding in both is probably what's best. Yeah. Jerod Santo I'm with you. Like I call myself a radical moderate. You know, I walked down the street to the side saying reasonable and forum discussion where possible. Jon Evans I like that. A radical moderate. That's good. Jerod Santo But yeah, I think you need both. And you know, you do need some whackness and craziness and willingness to sort of reject what the status quo is as things are. Because sometimes it's as close as wrong. Adam Stacoviak But you can't go embracing everything, every alternative. Right. It's the color they get the same time. Yeah, because there's a lot ([Time 0:37:41](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3d408922-a97d-4ab6-9625-c94f3bd18052)) - **ChatGPT as a Transformation Tool** - Use ChatGPT as a transformation tool, not just Q&A. - It excels at converting information into different formats, like summarizing or expanding text. Transcript: Jerod Santo Actually the short answer. Adam Stacoviak That's what's going to happen. Jerod Santo Yeah. But I also think that raises a really interesting point. Like, all my non tech friends are like, oh, chat GPT, they're just mixed stuff up. It's useless. I don't even we were talking about it. They don't realize that people in the industry, like us, you know, sometimes we ask questions and ask it to write things for us, you know, but we know that it's going to be hallucinating And not everything, you know, if you just ask it, it's going to be great. But what we use it for is what Adam was talking about. Like, it takes, you know, information and it transforms it into another kind. And it's phenomenally good at that. Like, it's so good. Yeah. And it writes like 30% of my code to like co-pilot, right? 30% of my code nowadays. And I think non tech people don't realize that it's a powerful transformation tool. They think it's just a Q and A tool, which is too bad. So I think they've got a lot of use out of it as a transformation tool. Right. The ([Time 1:01:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b103aa24-8d30-46bb-9072-ba2d612af247)) - **AI as a Writing Aid** - AI can help overcome writer's block by creating outlines and generating text. - This enables more people to write books, expanding creative expression. Transcript: Jerod Santo Rather than a transgender or a based architecture. Adam Stacoviak That's even something too, where, you know, people that would have never written a book are able to get out the outline. It's like an editor almost like there's, I thought about this more recently. I was like, you know, a lot in a lot of cases, a real human editor to an author is sometimes all the extra beauty in the words and the forming and the sentences and the structure. I mean, there's a lot of authors who are good at that, but maybe they just have the good idea, but don't know how to manifest that into a well articulated, fun to read sentence that helps Your imagination balloon with picture, which is what a lot of books do. You know, I think about that, like even today, people are writing books that they would have never written before. I think that's a positive sum for for humanity, right? Like, let me get out the outline and maybe chant GPT or whatever this GPT where we live in will become is just the the get over the hurdle, you know, the unblocker, the writer's block, you Know, remover, essentially. Let me get you ([Time 1:06:49](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1bdff7cf-1648-460b-8065-d54ebdf39084)) - **AI for Writers: Use Wisely** - For most authors, AI writing tools can be helpful for generating ideas and refining drafts. - However, Jon Evans prefers a more intuitive writing process without AI assistance. Transcript: Jerod Santo For my weirdness, I don't know. Adam Stacoviak I'm going to make it some homework for myself. Potentially for the show notes, Jared, I'm going to ask chat GPT if I were to write a book about DNS as the villain and, you know, the antagonist to the story or the ending plotline. Like, how would I go about like, give me 50 200-word summaries of the book. Like, you might see on the back of a book, summarize the book in two to 500 words, give me 40 versions of that and see this ending interesting because I'm kind of curious, could DNS be a true Villain? Jerod Santo Other actually, it's one way I might use it. Like, after I've written the first draft, I haven't gone through the first draft and say, so like, what needs work? How would you summarize this? You know, analysis of it after I've done it. Be good for that. Adam Stacoviak Analysis is great because there's lots of, I mean, I said this on podcast before because Jared and I podcast a lot together, but there's times when I want to ask, you know, Jared's my business Partner. And so there's questions I ask people like, you know, the role he serves in our enterprise. Can you hug with this? You know, but he's busy. He doesn't need to answer my dumb questions. And I've got this thing here that's totally willing and potentially with more accuracy and potentially more patience. And so I think that's to be leverage. I think to not leverage that is silly, right? Not a very wise move to not leverage such a willing participant in your adventures. What a shame. Jerod Santo Yeah, it's like everyone has an assistant now. And if you're not getting your assistant jobs, then that's kind of silly because you haven't assisted. Jon Evans Right. Adam Stacoviak Well, let's look forward to Exodelic to. Jon Evans Ooh, there's another good use is continuity, right? So you have it read your first book, and then you tell it, help me make sense in my sequel without contradicting something in my first book. Yeah, yeah. If I write something contradictory, you turn it into red. Exactly. ([Time 1:18:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/180a5150-b651-4baa-910c-ead5c84068a7))