The way that AI progresses is in these fits and starts and it's going to diffuse into our society quickly, but also, you know, incrementally.

And I don't really want to wait around until like that moment that AGI shows up and we can all agree on it before we start to think about what that actually means for us.

I'm Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where today we're going to talk

about the culture of AI.

Every tech revolution produces its own distinct culture.

And the vibe of Silicon Valley in its really early computing years was actually very

countercultural.

There were government contract that these companies had,

but the builders of that moment were influenced by this DIY ethos and publications like Stuart Brand's

Whole Earth Catalog, which sought to, quote, change the world by establishing new exemplary communities

from which a corrupt mainstream might draw inspiration. Now, the dot-com boom of the late 90s and early 2000s, that was fueled by a different kind of optimism,

an optimism that was much more profit-driven, but also buoyed by the novelty of the commercial internet.

Quote,

Carpet the world with cheap technology and clever hands will put it to work in a thousand ways never before imagined.

That's how Wired wrote back in the time describing the moment.

Quote, Moore's law boiled down to one word, more.

The more you have, the more you use.

While traditional economics are driven by scarcity,

the world created by the microchip is one of abundance.

People saw the internet then and they felt certain it was going to change everything.

And money flowed in aggressively. The big bets of that time were directionally correct,

but it was just too much. It was too fast. It was too greedy. Think about the canonical example

...