12 Comments

Sheesh, he seemed like kind of a dick.

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Wow, Josh I admire your ability to keep your cool and have a constructive conversation. Great work holding this one up

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I think Jaron took the ‘Uncomfortable’ part of ‘Uncomfortable Conversations’ as a personal challenge.

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Best podcast in ages. Tremendous insight on this topic from an insider in the AI world. I learned loads. And Finally a guest that puts J in his place. I’ve become frustrated recently that Josh presents himself as smarter than he actually is. Josh, please conduct your interviews with a little more humility when delving into areas that you are not an expert. Cheers!

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Classic "smartest guy in the room" syndrome. When he interrupted Josh and told Josh to stop interrupting him, it became very clear he's used to talking but not having a conversation. Probably shouldn't have agreed to an interview

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Boring

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To be perfectly honest, this podcast made me much less confident in humanity's potential to flourish in a world of AI. Jaron's position essentially comes down to what seems to be a blind optimism and idealistic romanticism for technology that bodes poorly for everyone except the wealthiest of us. He claims to advocate for an AI Keynesism, but that's a political question that literally nobody is tangibly addressing. Watch any AI commercial, and it's obvious who the target market is: CEOs, business owners, and so on. Jaron doesn't address that the very people enabling and "Sending him money" for his technology are the very people who have already ransacked our economies, pushed wages down, and trashed the world. Whoever has the gold makes the rules, and the people with gold have a vested interest in using these technologies to further enrich themselves, not humanity. Jaron is either hopelessly naive or purposefully malicious to hand wave this very real problem away.

I'm sure the greediest, most rapacious movers and shakers of our world will totally utilize this technology to benefit regular schlubs like me. Forgive me for my earth shattering eye roll.

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He had a really interesting perspective that was worth listening to but probably didn’t get enough sleep recently. Maybe he should listen to a bit of Andrew Huberman.. I hope Josh took notes on how to frame questions to those who analyse every word…

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Yeah, that one was a bit of a tough listen.

Big brain on Mr Lanier, but I suspect if he typed "whiny little bitch" into his AI, the facsimile produced would be something of a mirror.

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It seems like his ideas are very much influenced by his spiritual beliefs. He kind of skirted around it for the first half making me kind of infer he has a belief in human exceptionalism, and then when he called himself 'a man of faith' it made me understand the underlying drivers of his position more. He believes humans are magic (i think that's what i got out of that statement) - and computers aren't so they can't ever really do what humans do, so they must be amalgamations of humans rather than entities themselves. For those of us who don't believe in magic they're much more easily compared, and the potential problems are on a different level.

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Enjoyed hearing his view from his experience - good conversation especially once he warmed up.

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I couldn't wait that long

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