#1554 Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Civilization

All of that, and much more on this week's Listening to America.

Hello everyone and welcome to Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson. I have the great pleasure today to be talking with my friend from Virginia, David Horton, who is a futurist, among other things, and an administrator at Radford University in Radford, Virginia. Radford University has a student population of about 5,000. It was founded in 1910. And David, I have been to Radford a number of times not so long ago, and you've hosted what was then the Thomas Jefferson hour?

For example, a flight across the nation can take several hours and generate so much data that that could be very useful for an airline to extrapolate out. When tires need to be changed, when pieces of the plane need to be modified or adjusted. And all of that together can help to really create an environment where time is minimized on downtime for the plane. It provides a better experience and also can save money and can be very predictive, so that's a big piece about this. It's taking data sets, taking information, looking for patterns, developing what can be extrapolated, and then producing something on the end. Whether it is a written piece or a visual or audio piece, or some combination thereof.

When do you change the tires on your Boeing 747?

That's something that you would have had to check with an air pressure gauge in 1970. Now, United Airlines, or Delta, is warned. Hey, when you land that plane, you might want to. Or your fuel efficiency was low because the pilot is grandstanding or not, taking the plane up to the right altitude, and so on. On the whole, I think that this is going to be an incredibly good revolution. Like it or not, it's coming.

Although I did see, maybe you did, too, that. Yuval Harari, the great futurist, the author of Homo Deus, has now written an article saying We'd better outlaw this thing while we still can. I think you would say to that, good luck trying.

And I think one of the challenges is, what are the rules of engagement, what are the rules to use around this, and what can we generally agree on? I liken it a lot to desktop publishing in the 1980s. At one time, if you wanted to create a flyer of a publication, anything along that line, you pretty much could do a few rudimentary things yourself.

But ultimately, you had to go to a print shop or a publisher, or someone that had some level of technical skill and tools to make that happen. Nowadays, on your computer, you can make the Gutenberg Bible. For goodness sake, you could do things that would be revolutionary just a couple of decades ago. And that has provided opportunity, but it's also provided challenges. In that. Many of those print shops that existed at one time, many of those skill sets, many of those jobs no longer exist in the same fashion.

And so I think that's where some of the concern is. The other piece, I want to be careful, how I say this. The other piece is sort of the extrapolation of the human condition and human experience with artificial intelligence. I think one of the reasons we're really afraid of artificial intelligence. And that many futurists, many tech folks are nervous, is because of how people use technology. Much like the atomic energy revolution of the early to mid part of the 20th century. Brought with it the opportunity to power cities with almost nothing, but also brought great destructive power as well, depending on how it was used.

So these are things that I think are interesting to look at. For years, the science fiction trope has been that artificial intelligence and robots are a threat to humanity because we deploy human faults and traits on those things. And thus far, it hasn't really gone that way. I do think there are a number of hypocritical stories that exist about where certain chatbots and things along that line have expressed concerning thoughts. As people have talked with them about, Hey, I want to be real, hey, I don't know why you're doing this to me.

Almost getting caught in infinite loops, a whole host of things. Some of that, I think may be user controlled, and I think some of that may be little pieces. That have been either flaws or put in there by some of the programmers, just to see how people would react. We're at the dawn of the day of artificial intelligence, and I think that is a really crucial component.

The dawn of the day of artificial intelligence. We're going to be seeing changes in every facet of life. That impacts everything from health care to transportation, to finance, to education, to entertainment, to every single component of what we do.

That would shock most of us if we actually could see the full printout. I'm thinking, for example, of my high school yearbook. Remember that era where you would take a picture of the Glee Club? And then you would develop it in a darkroom and print it? And then you would write the caption for it, and then you would put it in a sleeve?

The yearbook company would send you a kind of a template. Where do you want to place the photo on the page? How many photos, how many captions? And you'd put that all in a sleeve?

And then you'd send it physically to Minneapolis or wherever it was being assembled, and then they would take it from there. And their design team would produce your yearbook and you'd get it back. And the picture of the track team would be jumbled up with the cheerleaders for volleyball and so on.

Now you take the picture, it goes automatically to the editor, the editor does everything she's going to do with it, it's printed within 20 minutes. Revolution after revolution, after revolution.

Here's one. Let's talk about transportation for a minute. I was in Seattle not so long ago and I was about 40 minutes from the airport, had to get there.

Called Uber another revolution because you can see the little icon of the car as it approaches or doesn't approach your spot. No taxi could do that 25 years ago.

The car came and it was a Tesla and the driver, I said, Why are you doing this? Why are you driving Uber? if you can afford a Tesla? I just like to drive.

So we're going in. Then I'm in the back seat and he says, you want it to drive you to the airport? and I said, Okay, so he pushes, send or whatever.

And then he crosses his arms and the car drove me to Seattle International Airport. And okay, that's interesting, but it gets more interesting because we came.

We were going through these back roads and it said, Oh, there's some road construction up ahead, there are some potholes. We're going to reroute you, it'll save you three minutes.

Then there's a little traffic congestion as we get to Federal Way. And we came around this curve, really a tight curve, and the car slowed to a crawl and missed a pothole and so on. And I said, you know, I knew a little bit about this.

But how is this working? He said. Oh, you know, this is networking to departments of transportation, to satellite photographs, to every other car. every car is talking to every other car.

So a car that came in through here 12 minutes ago has alerted us to this pothole. And you just think, whoa, where will this thing end? It was amazing. And that's just as you said, we're in the dawn, we're in what's called the incunabula phase of this thing.

In 25 years, this story will just be dull because everybody will be in self-driving cars, self-driving trucks, self-driving airplanes. So that's just one tiny area of this.

But it's a little bit like eight-track tapes, isn't it? Like taxis are in trouble. Unless they change that, we're going to have more and more innovation.

And one of the pieces with that is you have in a normal year, you have 50 to 70 who leave the field. So that's a lot of churn during the pandemic, and in the following years, it's been 80 to 85. That's where some of the inflation has taken place, and the cost of goods and services.

And also some of the delay in shipment. But what they do is they've actually looked at how we think, how we look, how we observe, how we take in information.

And they have developed extrapolating programs based on the skill sets of the best drivers, how they would look at things and how they process that information. And it's just like you talked about every single thing you talked about that the car was doing. There's a capability for a human to take in some of those elements. Whether you're listening to your GPS or you have on talk radio, and there's a traffic report that comes up.

Or you've driven the back road and so in your mind, you kind of know these elements. This removes the need for the person to have to process all that and deal with all that. And it can also gain so much additional information that it provides an even better outcome for everyone. Now, some would argue, but when you take that person out of the equation, is that a job, is that a livelihood?

Is that something that could be viewed as a negative to some? It could be. With every level of technological improvement, some jobs have gone by the wayside, new jobs have come about. One of the challenges that we face with artificial intelligence is as these things move forward. Might it further that, to the point of where we have to look at other things to be able to find ways to employ people?

But the transportation piece, I think, is particularly fascinating because it's going to see some of the earliest iterations of practical AI in our physical lives.

If he had been in that self-driving Tesla, that would not have happened. Imagine one of the world's greatest athletes being maimed. It's amazing his comeback, but he will never be the same. And if he had not been in a hurry and distracted and not able to process in the same way that these machines and networks can, things might have turned out very differently. We're going to take a short break.

When we come back, I want to talk about Thomas Jefferson, we're listening to listening to America.

Welcome back to this special edition of Listening to America. I'm having a really fascinating conversation with David Horton. You know, when I first met you, we were talking about robots. And I was in Salt Lake City not so long ago, and I went to a Chinese restaurant with my friend Dennis. We ordered our food from an actual human being.

And then when the food came out, it came out with like a robot, kind of straight out of Star Wars. It kind of rolled along in a clumsy way. And it got to our table. The waiter had to come and take it off the tray and hand it to us. And I said, What's the use of this? And he said, Well, look, this is really just the beginning.

Of course, it won't be long before the food is cooked by a robot is delivered by a robot. The quality control will actually rise. The robot works 24 hours a day and never complains, never goes on strike. It has some efficiencies that humans just can't bring to the table, and then you think, Okay, what happens to the waitstaff?

What happens to the cook? You know, my point when people want to talk about this is, like it or not, it's coming. And I think I told you in a note yesterday. Remember when IBM's computer beat Gary Kasparov in chess and people had said that'll never happen? No, I mean, you can do a lot of things with a robot, but they're never, ever, ever going to be able to beat a world chess master. Well, guess what?

1997 Deep Blue won, 2011 Watson won. Jeopardy, which I know it sounds trivial, but it's actually a much harder thing to win jeopardy than to win chess, because chess has rules and jeopardy is just chaos, and now we have chess. GPT as of November 30th, 2022. And I want to talk a little bit about that with you, so here's what I did.

I'm new to this. I went to Chat GPT and signed up for the free service. And I said, I want you to write an essay severely criticizing Jefferson for slavery, and it did, and then I said, in the second round, write an essay defending Jefferson on slavery.

And it did, and I want to tell you that it is really of a very high quality. But here's what it said when it critiqued it, and its title was The Dark Stain of Slavery. Five points.

Number one, this is the paradox of liberty, all that wild talk about all men and yet look at him, he's buying and selling human beings. Number two, economic exploitation and dehumanization, number three, intellectual dishonesty. That he never really would just cop to the fact that he was dependent on slavery and sort of okay with it in many respects.

Number four, political compromise in inaction. When he had chances to do something, he often did less. Number five. His legacy and historical significance as a champion of democracy is now sort of permanently damaged by this. And here's the conclusion Thomas Jefferson's role in the establishment of the United States cannot be denied.

I'm quoting directly. Nor can his contributions to political philosophy and the pursuit of liberty be dismissed. However, his ownership of slaves and his failure to challenge the institution of slavery in a meaningful way expose a deep moral flaw that cannot be overlooked. Jefferson's hypocrisy remains a dark stain on his legacy, serving as a reminder of the enduring struggle for equality and justice. It's essential that we critically examine the actions of our historical figures like Jefferson, recognizing their humanity and flaws and engaging in an honest evaluation of their contributions to our shared history.

That's first rate, don't you think?

But part of that is getting to an existential question for us about what is original thought and how do we learn? Because much of what we might produce is based on what we've read, what we've experienced, what we've learned from others. And that's how they're modeling machine learning and artificial intelligence at this time, the one piece that artificial intelligence hasn't quite gotten to is that leap to original thought.

And that may all occur under quantum computing, which is rather than a binary relationship, many multifaceted, multi-armed relationships. Where things are connecting in different ways all at once and generating what we perceive as original thought. One of the challenges with this, though, and this is the second part, and sort of the flip side of that. There very well could be some inaccurate statements that were part of the chat GPT production that was brought to you. So, from a realistic standpoint, you have to be knowledgeable enough to be able to evaluate what you're getting from an artificial intelligence. To say, is it not only quality, but is it true? I serve as mayor of the city of Radford.

Sorry to hear that and that role. Well, it's very interesting. And so I went to Chat GPT and asked it to write a press release about David Horton, mayor of the city of Radford. And it did a pretty good job through a couple of paragraphs.

But then it went off the rails onto some things that I had never had any involvement with. And it said a hallmark of his administration was the creation of this program and this facility, which were things that happened decades ago. But it could not discern that what had occurred, while it was accurate that it had occurred in Radford. It did not occur during the time that I served, nor did I have a significant role in that process. But that's one of those pieces that I wouldn't be surprised to.

A See someone say, Oh, I see my work in that document, and b. This has got significant problems because it has inaccurate information. It could even say something it can could confuse. Jefferson in Washington, say upon Jefferson's death, he freed all his slaves, or something along that line.

That's kind of where artificial intelligence is now on the positive side. Over time, machine learning will be more and more sophisticated to look at sentiment, that is one of the pieces that's a big part of machine learning. To see how other people have felt about this, or to see how that is viewed. As to a trustworthiness score, that's one of the pieces that people don't do so well. But I think one of the challenges is going to be they're going to be some very sophisticated things that are put out there.

Will we be sophisticated enough to tell is this accurate or inaccurate?

He had serious ambivalence. We have to credit that. Number three, he was for gradual emancipation, and the record is clear number four. There were limitations to what kind of power one person had in his time.

And there were many, many contributions by Thomas Jefferson that go way beyond or outside of the world of race and slavery. And that is another really outstanding summary now. I also remember when my sister called my father. My father was a great intellectual. My sister called him from college one day, and she said, Hey, I got class in 15 minutes.

Why does hamlet delay one of the great questions of all literature? And my father told her to go jump in a lake. So I put this to Chat GPT and it wrote a really good summary article about theories of why hamlet delays. And I've been an English professor.

Are you your professor? If a student had written that essay, or, let's say, submitted that essay, I would have had a hard time giving it. Anything less than a B. I might have said, You need more instances, I need direct quotations from the text, I need more nuance.

I need to see more of your own thinking process here, but just as a piece of work. If I didn't know that there was artificial intelligence out there, I'd say this is a really good essay. So you are at a university, surely there are conversations going on about the implications of this for higher ed?

You know the way that student communicates.

That becomes a very different kind of essay now. It's not impossible for that to be replicated by an artificial intelligence. But it starts to integrate the person and the experience more into the process. Which I think that's going to be a piece of this as we move forward.

Is this a wonderful tool for the student because it gets you some information from which to think your way through the assignment? Or does it mean I don't actually have to read Hamlet?

You create a toolbox of things that allow you to do other things by skipping over some of those things. You don't know how the hammer works or how the saw works, and while you may have had the nail hammered or had the saw cut the wood, you don't know how it works. So when it comes down to where you have to use those tools to build a house and you don't know how to make that work. So I think that's the other piece that we need to think about.

What are the outcomes we're seeking here? What are the reasons that people participate this way, and what are they taking from it? The actual knowledge about what Hamlet did? Does that matter? A hill of beans, one way or another? Or is it the thought processes, taking the class material, taking the written material and becoming something else through that? And that's the whole piece of think of what we've got to talk about as humans as we go through this evolution.

You want to wrestle with questions of life and death, and sex and jealousy. And their view is, I'm going to Wall Street, I need an A, I've got a scholarship, I don't want to read.

Don quixote, forget it, you can talk all you want, professor, but this is a tool that I love. So here's another question you don't learn how to write by submitting a Chat GPT essay or even paraphrasing one?

I've taught writing all of my life, and freshmen in college can't write. they need to grind out writing in order to become competent prose stylists. All of us, I was that person, I'm guessing you were that person, too.

This cuts that process out because these, whatever else is true, every sentence in these essays that I had Chat GPT produced were grammatical, spelled correctly, et cetera. And so it doesn't give that student a chance to develop one of the most important of all human skills, which is how to write for yourself.

I don't have to know it, I know where to get it, so it's not important that I know it. In some ways, they're not wrong, but also in some ways they're completely misguided, and I think that's part of the evolution of every.

Artificial intelligence is going to provide us with these challenges, but it will also provide us with opportunities on how we can better do that. So, in the New York Times, there's an article that is talking about Khan Academy, one of the great online learning systems, and how they've developed a new chat bot to help personalize education. To help evaluate where someone is, and to help create a path for that person to grow, that's where we may find some of our solutions. So, ironically, the thing that presents the biggest challenge may provide the pathway to that next level. For those students to gain that kind of information. Our process has been write until you can write better.

You know, keep going, write horribly until you get better. Maybe there's a better way.

So I'm just guessing that at every phase. I'm old enough to remember. When the pocket calculator rocked the academy and professors were like, you will not bring your calculator into this class. No one would dare say that today, so let me change the subject just a little. Let's talk about health care, Let's say that I have some issues with my kidneys.

Until recently, there was nothing that could be done. Then we had some pharmaceuticals that were developed by very painstaking research and testing with humans and so on. Isn't this going to be one of the great areas of gain? Aren't we going to be able to micro-analyze and diagnose people's situations? And then create specialty concoctions of treatment for you personally and revolutionary effect on health care delivery?

Imagine 20 or 30 years before current tests might detect the propensity for a cancer or an actual cancer. You're able to detect certain changes in certain cells, and with just a nudge. With just a small treatment, you're able to avoid the entire thing that takes you down to, ultimately, that cancer diagnosis. These are the things that are going to help right now. Chemotherapy is very systemic, it goes throughout your body and it does target the cancerous cells because they're different from your other cells. But it also fatigues you in different ways and impacts your normal cells in many different ways.

Imagine if you had drug delivery systems that were smart enough to be able to analyze the cancer cell and say this is where I need to deploy the medicine. And it's not a systemic thing, it's targeted. You're going to be able to take nanobots, artificial intelligence. Combine those things and create treatments that are microtreatments that are specific that help address things at a more efficient way. But also remove some of the negatives that might have been in place with other treatments as they exist.

A bot can be artificial, it can be virtual. A bot is something that provides an outcome. Basically, it's something that takes in information, that releases information, so it's able to provide an outcome. And so it doesn't have to....

We don't have to think of it as C3PO or R2D2 in our blood system on a microscopic level, but it is a device that is a delivery system ultimately.

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Listening to America?

Welcome back to this special edition of Listening to America, David. I'm so glad to be talking with you about this. Because you actually know something and you live in a university where people are actively working on this sort of thing. Let me give you an example. I edited a journal called We Proceeded On about the Lewis and Clark Expedition. People submit these photographs that they took in 1972 with an instamatic, and they wonder, You know, why can't you use that for a full-page spread?

And I keep telling them, a they're not of high enough quality, but b they pixelate. So I bought a program called Topaz, and Topaz goes in and recreates that photograph. But not just like blurring over everything and making it a little less awful, it goes pixel by pixel and then it creates a very high quality photograph. And this is just again, this is the dawn of this thing, not without some concerns about. I remember back in the Soviet Union when they would take Lenin out one week and put him back in, and Trotsky was in the photograph, and then he disappeared.

The manipulation of photography has been around for a long time, but it's going to get more and more prevalent, right?

The problem is at the dawn of where we are today. They don't do a great job. A lot of times. They'll make eyes look a little wonky because they don't know how eyes exactly should focus in. They'll give you an extra set of teeth, they may give you 15 fingers instead of 10..

And part of that is the evolution process.

That's where we'll see an even more exponential growth with that. But now one of the interesting pieces that has come out of that is. Many of these programs are using the work of other artists, so it may take the photograph from 1970 that you're working to expand and use the work of other artists. That has been similar to say, well, this is how this would extrapolate out. That is particularly controversial right now, because these artists are not being compensated for the machine imitation, machine learning that's taking place, and so that's providing a challenge.

It has been stated by the Russo brothers, who directed many of the Marvel movies, including Infinity War and Endgame here just a few years ago. That there will likely be a fully AI generated movie within the next five to 10 years, maybe even sooner, depending on how this goes. And so you could have Clark Gable and Arnold Schwarzenegger and Marilyn Monroe, and any of the modern stars that you would want to have. Anyone from across the spectrum to appear in this film. Image completely originally generated, voice completely originally generated. And they could be interacting with characters that are an amalgam of many, many different people, that are an entirely new character. This is a revolution.

At that point, I read about a symphony that was created entirely by a robot. And they played it in, I think, in Oregon, in front of a live audience. And they loved it. But they didn't tell them that it was computer generated. And when they announced this, the crowd went nuts with anger and rage and wanted to tear down the building. And they couldn't stand it. Because somehow it offended the notion of the artist, it offended the notion of the creative spirit.

And then they said, Oh, it didn't have passion. In other words, then they had to find a narrative that would allow them to say it wasn't adequate because it didn't really capture what human creativity is. I think that's a really important question.

You no longer require the human to craft this and to create it, and it's no longer their story, their experience, something along that line. The other piece is back to what we were talking about, where artists works are being used to generate this type of thing. Is there a credit, is there a permission?

Is there a possibility now? What's ironic with that is, I am quite certain that some of the great symphonies that have been written have been inspired by the music that people have heard from previous authors. And that's part of the challenge of this, I think it's us getting beyond that. There will be things that are generated today that people will read, listen to and watch that they have no idea. Had a degree of artificial intelligence in it, if not fully generated by.

And then this is released on Twitter or on Facebook. Some of that is already happening in a really crude sort of way. And so you can imagine the political possibilities for character assassination and so on, so you can see the possibilities of abuse here and character assassination and so on. On the other hand, the last known speaker of the Mandan language, Mandan Indians in North Dakota, died a few years ago.

His name was Edwin Benson. For the last eight or nine years of his life, they mic'd him up and had him tell stories and do alphabets and so on. Sing. But just followed him through life, ordering food at a restaurant or talking with his friends. And now we have this immense file of Edwin Benson. Speaking Mandan, there's no reason why we couldn't a create a Mandan dictionary, a Mandan grammar, or create Mandan training programs. Based on that, using his actual voice to teach young people how to speak this language. In other words, language restoration might be infinitely more possible now thanks to this, than it was even five years ago.

And those questions could be asked, What do you think? And based on all that massive amount of data that's fed into it, it could potentially help generate answers. Truly, that's not fundamentally different from some of the things that you did over the years. As Thomas Jefferson, where you might say, well, as Mr. Jefferson, this is how I would feel about it.

And this is why now the challenge with all of it is who's going to influence how that output might come about, how it would be processed. Just as we would, our biases, our natural thoughts and things would be a part of that. It has the opportunity to be one of the greatest tools in the history of mankind. It also has the opportunity to be one of the most horrible things that has ever existed in history.

Really, it is up to us as individuals to decide how this will be used, how it will be deployed. How we will address some of the issues, and how we will make this a positive as opposed to a negative. One of the things I don't think we've even considered is the possibilities of things we haven't even begun to think about. That might come about because of it. That's true of almost every technology that has ever existed. You go back hundreds and hundreds of years and you think about a cell phone today. Imagine if the founding fathers of our nation had had access to that type of information in real time, in the ability to craft something even greater than what they did.

Suddenly, we can all become very similar to learned scholars with the information that's available at our fingertips. So I think that's one of the biggest things we'll see as we move forward. I think this U.N. summit is very important as we move in this direction. How do we create rules of engagement? How do we decide on how we're going to develop and deploy these technologies? As we continue to evolve, as it continues to evolve?

Jefferson in 1812, exasperated by the war, said in a private letter that the behavior of Native Americans on the western frontier was such that we might have to drive them beyond the rocky mountains and, in certain situations, exterminate. No, that's not Jefferson, that's Jefferson in a really bad mood, a certain hardening of the arteries as he got older, panicking because of the war. So how do we prevent that from being taken radically out of context and normalized as Jefferson's view of Native Americans? Now you're going to say, Clay, you could just as well do that, too.

I mean, that's what people do. Quote out of context, we don't know. Historians make terrible errors of what weight to give to certain types of evidence. I can see a lot of possibility. In other words, after spending many, many years thinking about Jefferson, if you said Jefferson would be against the space program, I'd say, no, no, that doesn't square with anything that I know about Thomas Jefferson.

If you said Jefferson believed that we should provide homelands for Native Americans, but not in Ohio, I'd say, yeah, that kind of rings true to me. In other words, I have developed and anyone I'm not talking about myself. You develop a matrix of weight giving to evidence and use common sense, you use research. You use what you've read in a secondary and tertiary way. And so you then provide what is usually a reliable evaluation of the material.

The machines are going to have to get really more sophisticated before they can create that kind of weighting, don't you think?

I think that's going to become much more valuable as we move forward where things we already have it right now. Where websites can appear very, very factual and very accurate, but that website of flimmy Flam news is that as accurate as a more well-established website? And I think that's one of the debates we're going through right now. You know, the individuals who bring us the news, who's telling you that, who's sharing that information with you, will matter that much more.

And we will be relying on many times their judgment and their trustworthiness to help us in this process. Critical thinking is going to become even more crucial than it has been and is today. And that's one of the challenges when we see what is predicted or what is portrayed as fake news. I think one of the biggest challenges we run into is, do you believe it when you hear so-and-so passed away?

What's your first inclination? Do you go out there on social media and say so sorry, rest in peace. This has occurred, or do you verify? Do you spend some time using this to say, let me look at the sources? I struggle with some very good friends about this because I'm a fan of several franchise entertainment pieces. And you hear these stories where someone says, Well, I was almost cast in this role. Or that there's a piece here. And it's repeated in multiple news sources, but it all goes back to a single source.

That's where when you're a journalist, when you're an educator, when you're a historian, an author, an expert, you know, you have to multi-source things, you know, you have to evaluate those pieces. And I think those individuals in our lives are going to become that much more important. In this world where so much information can appear to be factual, that could just be complete hooey. That's where we're going to need people who are at an even higher level of trustworthiness, an even higher level of factualness.

And that is one of the challenges we have moving forward. You know who are those people who can we trust? And that's going to become more and more the case. I do think that one of the biggest pieces that's going to change. While always knowing something is important. Knowing how to know, knowing how to think critically, knowing how to evaluate and deploy the skill sets that we have within our minds is going to be that much more critical.

And then using tools that might be like AI, with every AI that's a generative tool, there'll be an AI investigative tool. And that will help us in this process as we move forward.

Sports I'm not a great sports fan, but I've lost a lot of interest in baseball. For example, because you hear about the algorithms that I take this pitcher out, even though he's doing a splendid job because the algorithms have told me, you know, blah, blah, blah. The hunch, the intuitiveness, the trust that kind of is leaving the sport, and for me, it has damaged the pleasure. Because I don't want robots. Saying this guy strikes out 36 of the time with this pitcher, let's not even put him in the game.

So that's one thing. Finance Why do I want a stockbroker? Surely there are machines that could micromanage my stock portfolio million times better than any stockbroker who lives? First of all, they don't really care about me because I'm a low level investor.

But secondly, the machine knows everything, the machine sees every part of the economy. And can read like, I don't think I'd put your money in gold right now. So isn't this going to rock almost everything that we think about?

We're starting to realize what's going into the mix. Same thing with stockbrokers. I mean, many times they're receiving all of these data sets that are telling them just what you're talking about. They're giving you advice, not based on their personal experience and all that.

That may be a component of it, but ultimately, they're looking at numbers, they're looking at patterns, they're looking at predictions. Based on that. Some of this comes back to individual judgment.

The numbers are right until they're not. Statistics are right until they're not. patterns are right until there's a reason. It doesn't extrapolate fully. Humans still have that capability. I think this is going to be a question we're going to continue to ask ourselves as we move forward.

But I don't think we want to be afraid of it any more than we want to be afraid of that computer. That gives us some information that helps us make a decision as it is now, you still have to make the choice. There's still a manager in baseball who has to say, am I going to go with the numbers or am I going to go with the gut? I don't disagree with you. It takes some of the mystery and the magic out of things.

It takes some of the fun out of it to some degree, because it is less about your personal experience and more about what the numbers tell you.

And as I said, I would not be surprised to see an intelligence, an artificial intelligence, help us figure out how to deal with artificial intelligence. And that's going to be a part as we move forward. People are going to be people, people are going to do what people are going to do, and I think we can do our best. But I don't think there's any one solution.

I'll be interested to see the outcomes of this global summit that the United Nations is putting on and what the rules of engagement begin to look like. I don't think it's going to be impossible to make it go away. For one thing, it has existed far longer than in the consciousness we have. Now it's starting to become more apparent to us, but those things have already been there.

When you start to peel that onion, it has many, many, many, many layers and has been going on for many, many years. So I don't think it is a doomsday scenario automatically, but I think it's a challenge we've got to face.

I think people really like your sensibility and the information you bring to it. And I want to report that. You know, you took me to that great place where I had gumbo. But my friends from North Carolina say, Honey, that ain't gumbo. Unless you're in Carolina, you cannot, they said. There's no chance you can get good gumbo in the state of Virginia.

And I leave it to our listeners on that. We'll see you all next week for another important edition of Listening to America.