Hi, this is against everyone with Connor Abeeb. This episode's guest is the professor and author

and spiritualism and AI researcher Simone Natale, the author of Supernatural Entertainment's

Victorian Spiritualism and the Rise of Modern Media Culture and also deceitful media, artificial

intelligence, and social life after the Turing test.

I wanted to start this episode by talking about AI a bit, the way it sees the news,

even if we're not talking about AI per se, but chatbots and other content generators.

It's all over the place right now, and recently a bunch of tech bosses and other concerned parties have called for a halt on training AI systems.

The quote is a stepping back from the dangerous race to ever larger, unpredictable black box models with emergent capabilities.

Signatories like Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, they all are expressing concern.

It seems to me to be more of a concern for industry and capitalism than for life and humanity,

but we can imagine what other concerns

might be.

The AI Terra Future we've been dreaming of for years.

Skynet, Terminator, Ex Machina, 2001, a Space Odyssey, whatever.

All those movies and that fear and that letter that's signed by now 5,500 people or more

leads us to the question, why do people want it?

I mean, who cares if we can get computers to do dumb parlor tricks,

like creating images of you on Mars or having a human voice speaking

through a robot head or whatever. If the stakes are as high as Skynet and, you know, Terminator

made out of liquid metal, who wants it? Why? And how is that desire functioning in the first place? I'm not sure,

obviously, that I can answer all those questions, but one of the first things that came to mind,

as I was pondering all of that, was the Kathy McGinty phone sex prank. So if you're unfamiliar,

...