Doomed to discuss AI

Author, journalist, travel writer & software engineer Jon Evans joins us to weigh in on the cultural history (and present-day sentiment) of AI doom. Along the way, we talk plausible Sci-Fi, ultrasound drug delivery, the maybe-evolving laws of physics & even weirder stuff.

Leave us a comment

Changelog++ members get a bonus 8 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!

Sponsors:

• Tailscale – Simple, secure networks for teams of any scale. Built on WireGuard.
• Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
• Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.

Featuring:

• Jon Evans – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
• Jerod Santo – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn
• Adam Stacoviak – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website

Show Notes:

• Exadelic on Amazon
• Inside GitHub’s Arctic Code Vault
• A Study: Ancient Egyptians used sound waves in building pyramids
• Extropia’s Children Redux - by Jon Evans
• The Only Way to Deal With the Threat From AI? Shut It Down | Time
• Nick Jones
• Dennis E. Taylor

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Timestamps:

(00:00) - Let's talk!
(00:38) - Uncorrected bound manuscripts
(01:58) - GitHub Arctic Code Vault
(04:50) - Never gonna have that in my bio
(05:59) - Market for predicting the future
(07:57) - The Simpsons predictions
(12:21) - Cultural history of AI doom
(15:20) - Sounds & the pyramids of Egypt
(16:07) - Ultra sound drug delivery
(19:01) - We can't build the pyramids?
(21:52) - Physics evolving?
(22:36) - Gravity was different
(23:17) - Greg Egan
(23:40) - Where do your ideas come from?
(25:47) - Sponsor: Tailscale
(30:34) - Adam's idea for Jon
(31:18) - Enter the Bobiverse
(34:02) - Fiction for software devs
(35:04) - Nick Jones
(35:22) - The Adolesence of P1
(35:59) - Eliezer Yudkowsky
(36:27) - Humanity & AI
(37:31) - The future is going to be weird
(37:41) - World of change
(38:53) - Your software lenses
(39:40) - Balancing ideas
(41:31) - AI doom scale
(42:46) - What is doom?
(44:07) - Welcoming our AI overlords
(45:41) - Symbiotic AI
(47:47) - AI religion
(49:26) - Jerod thinks AI has plateaued
(53:25) - Adam's use of ChatGPT
(57:44) - The open letter signatories
(59:54) - AI user manuals
(1:00:53) - What are they so afraid of?
(1:01:27) - Calculators for words
(1:03:08) - More of Adam's ChatGPT tips
(1:04:36) - OpenAI just wants to train
(1:04:56) - We're not doomers
(1:05:10) - The ultimate 10x-er
(1:06:20) - One of the last human written books
(1:06:54) - Having an AI editor
(1:09:15) - Not good, but okay
(1:11:27) - Humans are jagged
(1:12:30) - More books?
(1:13:00) - Adam's future book?
(1:13:42) - How many readers is success?
(1:14:53) - Author's commitment
(1:17:28) - How would you use AI?
(1:20:20) - Exadelic 2?
(1:21:00) - Audiobook?
(1:21:33) - The Exadelic hook
(1:22:03) - Bye friends!
(1:22:15) - Coming up next

Episode source