Hey friends, it's Anne.

Conversations about technologies seem to veer between hype and paranoia these days.

Generative AI programs are doing amazing things.

They're writing term papers, making art, diagnosing disease.

But their power is also kind of freakish and scary. I mean,

how long before AI steals our jobs or kills us off? Well, this hour we're going to talk with

some folks who are not scared of that digital future and who are asking big, existential questions

about AI and about the nature of its intelligence.

This hour, does AI dream? Keep listening. Wisconsin Public Radio It's to the best of our knowledge.

I'm And Strange Champs.

Walter Schauer was a teenage hacker.

One of those kids who found his way to the shadow side of the internet

and fell in love with its weird culture of fact and myth.

This is like, I guess, when I was in middle school, some friend of mine found some site on the early internet, these text files.

Creative writing produced by hackers, some of it was technical, some of it was purely fictional and really interesting. It was like very underground, cheat codes, video games and things of that nature.

But then it would dive deeper, where it's like, have you ever considered how your operating systems were? You ever heard of this Unix operating system? This is what

businesses and the government use, right? Here's how to use it. Here's how to access it. So then

you get into the creative writing aspect.

It's like, by the way, I was on this Unix system that I accessed through the federal government in the United States, right?

Seeing interesting things I was not supposed to see, UFOs, paranormal activity, stuff that couldn't possibly be true, but it was intriguing enough where you wanted to keep reading.

There's a very famous hacker group, The Cult of the Dead Cow, that love telling reporters that they had this...

I love the name.

...