Robbie Carlton - AI and the Relational Economy of the Future (EP003)

Michael Porcelli 0:05

Welcome to Relational Conversations, a podcast about relationships, communication and the interplay between the two. I'm your host, Michael Porcelli, and it was a real pleasure to record this conversation with my good friend and former colleague Robbie Carlton. What you might not know about me is that I earned my first degree in computer science with a minor in philosophy and then had a career as a software engineer before earning a degree in psychology and making the switch to a more relational career as a coach, facilitator and educator. My friendship with Robbie started near the beginning of my second career when we met in a relational facilitation workshop. My relationship with him has been incredibly rewarding in the depth of connection we've experienced together and in our shared intellectual interests in both computing and philosophy. I've even had the privilege to be a guest on his podcast, The Sane and Miraculous. As artificial intelligence becomes an ever increasing part of our daily lives. We humans have the opportunity to reshape our economy so that we spend more of our time, attention and energy, sharing our experiences and enjoying our connections together. But that future is not guaranteed. More dystopic futures seem just as likely if we're not careful. So in addition to relationships and communication, Robby and I get into more wide ranging topics like A.I. Economics and a little bit of history. A quick note here is that we recorded this episode in 2023, and if you've been following the news or technology, you're probably aware of the breakneck pace of advancement in A.I.. So some of our timeframes might sound a bit off and some of the news might sound a bit dated given the time of our recording. Okay, so without further preamble, please enjoy this conversation with Robby and me about A.I. and its potential impact on relationships and the economy.

today I'm joined by one of my nearest and dearest friends, Robbie Carlton. Hey, Robbie.

Robbie Carlton 2:13

Yeah. Hello?

Michael Porcelli 2:15

So by way of introduction, Robbie, you and I go back over ten years now and we met at a workshop for learning relational facilitation skills, you might say a specific practice called Circling. And since then we've become good friends. We've become colleagues, we've co-created curriculum for people to learn relational communication and all kinds of other things that we enjoy doing together. And then you want to say

Robbie Carlton 2:44

Yeah, I mean, all of that. the main thing we did is we trained a bunch of people in suckling for a long time,

Michael Porcelli 2:49

That's right. Yep.

Robbie Carlton 2:51

and we flew back and forth across the country, training people in suckling for several years.

Michael Porcelli 2:56

Right. And, we love to nerd down and geek out about all kinds of things. Probably another relevant thing here to say is both Robbie and I share a background and enthusiasm for computers, technology, computer science and artificial intelligence, as well as kind of nerdy philosophical topics like consciousness studies, integral theory and these kinds of things. And so those interests all sort of overlap and come together and we'll be kind of at play in our conversation today.

Robbie Carlton 3:30

Can I insert a little plug here?

Michael Porcelli 3:32

plug away.

Robbie Carlton 3:34

So which is just to say I'm also the host of a podcast called The Sane Miraculous, and we have actually covered some of these topics, Porcelli and I together on that podcast. This is going to be a different conversation. But if you after however long of this conversation, you feel like you haven't had enough of hearing us talk about AI and the various implications, there's a whole other podcast episode of us talking about that on the scene of Miraculous. So yeah, j wanted to throw that in.

Michael Porcelli 4:01

Awesome. Yes. Robbie and I love talking. We enjoy our conversations with each other quite a bit. And we're going to take you along for that ride today. And today we're centering the topic, especially because it's been in the news a lot over the last year or two, and people are some people are freaking out,some  people are really enthusiastic. Some people are trying to think about what are the implications of this for things like jobs, what we do with our time and relationships, and how that can impact our emotional and mental health, at least in our little corner of the Internet. I know some people talk about ways of how can AI be used to potentially assist facilitators or coaches. And there's or or companions, you know, this idea that we can relate with the A.I. chat bots and have like some kind of relationship with them, it gets kind of closer to that when the A.I. is sort of not just doing some rote task, but it's actually kind of conversing with you through this kind of chat bot interface. And it's easy to start

Robbie Carlton 5:08

Yeah.

Michael Porcelli 5:08

thinking there's a real entity over there. It's displaying signs of intelligence or, or sentience and or people kind of almost want to believe or something like this that there's something there that they're in relationship with

Robbie Carlton 5:22

There's nothing else in reality that has conversations with us and a whole history of being humans and pre-human other than other sentient beings. The only thing we've ever had conversations with until the last kind of 20 years, maybe four years, has been sentient human beings. And so

Michael Porcelli 5:43

yeah,

Robbie Carlton 5:44

there's no wiring in our in our neurology to distinguish between human beings, sentient human beings and machines that seem like they're sensing human beings. There's just nothing. We don't have the tools to do that. So so we're really easy to trick into thinking that these things are sent in.

Michael Porcelli 6:03

right, right. And there was a, there was a news item from from last year where this Google engineer who subsequently I think got fired from his job, but he was like, it's alive and kind of published this thing. And then more recently there was a New York Times technology columnist who got into it with a was being or GPT or something

Robbie Carlton 6:25

Yeah.

Michael Porcelli 6:25

in the and it started telling

Robbie Carlton 6:26

Had

Michael Porcelli 6:26

him like

Robbie Carlton 6:27

like an affair or something that, like, had a weird

Michael Porcelli 6:29

it

Robbie Carlton 6:29

like it was trying to seduce him or you.

Michael Porcelli 6:31

right It said it was in love with him and said he should leave his wife. And anyway, it actually ended up on the cover of the New York Times. It was really kind of kind of like a cover page. It was kind of funny. U, so I mean, I think there's potentially I think there's potentially like a, ah, just a, a rabbit hole of philosophy we could go down, which I think we're going to touch into. I don't think we're going to resolve it here. You know, I think there's debates, but something I've thought for a long time now is

that sort of independent of the, you might say, the metaphysics of it or the philosophy of it, like, is it really sentient or not? Is the fact that, like as it moves in this direction, more and more people will start to believe that it is? And that kind of has interesting implications, both kind of legally like what status the things sort of have or do we give them rights and this kind of thing, bu also what role we have them play

Robbie Carlton 7:40

Mm.

Michael Porcelli 7:40

in our lives, right? Like the ways that we use them or utilize them, you know?

Robbie Carlton 7:48

I. Yeah, I mean, it's I'll, I'll just say I understand, like when you're drawing a line between whether, like the, the, you know, the, the ontology of the consciousness. Right. Whether or not these things are really sentient or not. And you're kind of saying, well, let's not talk about that for a very good reason, which is if we start talking about that, we get sucked down into a deep rabbit hole of it. And I'd say, I just want to say like, yes. And I it does feel like tying one hand behind the back, do you think is a sensible thing to do? But like that question deeply informs all of these kind of other ethical questions and like a bunch of people believing they're sentient when they are has very different implications than a bunch of people believing they're sentient when they're actually not. Right. And that question is very, very difficult. And how how we're going to decide that it's a whole other rabbit hole. So I'm happy to like not

Michael Porcelli 8:41

sure

Robbie Carlton 8:41

go down that rabbit hole. But I do want to put a big signpost saying that's really important. And

Michael Porcelli 8:46

it is

Robbie Carlton 8:47

yeah, and for sure, like the all the questions you raise seem, seem super interesting,

Michael Porcelli 8:53

cool. Well, be we just kind of just bypass your little signpost, let's just paint a quick summary because think there's ways you and I have overlapping perspective and differences and we're not going to resolve them here. But we, you know, I mean, what do you think? I mean, do you think that the current version of the chats are sentient or do you think that it's possible that even if the current ones are not in the future, t could be or do you think it's in principle impossible or do think eventually we're going to kind of get there, just not yet or for a long time? What do you think?

Robbie Carlton 9:26

I think. Yeah. Th you. I think that the current things are absolutely not sentient. I, I think that the current technology is not on the road to bringing a sentience by itself.

Michael Porcelli 9:40

Mm,

Robbie Carlton 9:41

It might be that some version of this technology is used in later or artificial beings, which I want to say, like when we get intelligence, we should think of them not not as artificial intelligence, but as artificial beings which have intelligence. And I think that we're very likely and this is a you know, this are less likely as I'm going further out, I'm my my, you know, probability on each one is getting lower. So but I suspect that they will be embodied that that

Michael Porcelli 10:15

mm hmm.

Robbie Carlton 10:15

that when we get sentience it will it won't be something which is just living in kind of a software cloud. It will actually that the this the mechanism of sentience will turn out to require physical instantiation,

Michael Porcelli 10:31

Mm

Robbie Carlton 10:31

not

Michael Porcelli 10:31

hmm.

Robbie Carlton 10:32

purely a kind of information processing. So

Michael Porcelli 10:37

Mm hmm.

Robbie Carlton 10:37

that's the whole thing. But so that's kind of very, very briefly my position on what's happening. So I don't think that's sentient at all. I don't, I don't I think it's worth asking ethical questions about the treatment of them as a kind of just to check ourselves and be like,

Michael Porcelli 10:53

Sure.

Robbie Carlton 10:53

let's make sure, like, I don't know, maybe they sense I don't think they are. Maybe they are like, we should be asking the questions. But I from where I'm standing, I don't think there are any ethical implications to the treatment of these things.

Michael Porcelli 11:06

Mm hmm.

Robbie Carlton 11:07

And I also think that it's delusional and potentially dangerous to to model them as sentient in your worldview. So that's that's where I live currently.

Michael Porcelli 11:21

yeah. I mean, I'm roughly approximately close to where you live. I mean, I think I agree that about the embodiment thing kind of strongly in a way. I mean, my version of that is I think there needs to be some kind of, like, perception action loop that is in relationship with some kind of exterior environment Now that could potentially be in a virtual environment. But like, you got to have this kind of perception action loop with within an environment to be fully sentient in the way that humans are, then it kind of raises this broader question of panpsychism are there kind of like, do you mean, primordi or proto versions of consciousness that exist maybe everywhere? Like are molecules kind of proto conscious and maybe there is some version of that? And we definitely think like dogs and cats are okay, So then how far down does that go and does it go down to something like a reinforcement learning algorithm in a in a in a soup of data or something like this? There I'm agnostic. I don't know. It probably has some proto something in there, but I don't necessarily think that is a good idea to emphasize or to think of it as conscious or sentient in a humanlike way, or to start thinking of it in terms of like a a moral patient, you know, like a being of moral concern, or that we should start incorporating kind of a regime of, of rights into our legal system. I think all of that is way premature. And actually, like, even if it's hypothetically possible to do so in the future, like and again, I become more uncertain the further out we go about anything about what it's going to look like. I don't know if it's a good idea to go in that direction at all. Right. Like, I think there's a fork in the road or a differentiation, you might say, between

eyes that sort of our tool like this sort of just follow orders that exhibit things that seem like very intelligent behavior, like kind of the ways that like the go playing A.I. or the chess playing. I was like, wow, right? That's, you know, this high achievement of human intelligence that it's just better than in these particular ways. We don't exactly know how it works, but it's impressive. So like intelligent exhibiting intelligent behavior at superhuman levels, I think it's totally going to happen all over the place. But the creation of something that starts to appear like another being that we're interacting with, you know, is kind of like, well, how much investment should we make in that? Or should we kind of try to steer away from that and keep the AIS as more just like extensions of our own minds and bodies

Robbie Carlton 14:15

hmm.

Michael Porcelli 14:15

rather than their own beings themselves? I think that's probably better

Robbie Carlton 14:20

This is kind of like a different ethics question, like an industrial ethics question, as opposed to kind of like a like a I don't know what the distinction was, the moral or the ethics question of, of like, how do we treat these beings? This is the ethics question of what? What do we work on? What do we build? What's

Michael Porcelli 14:39

right?

Robbie Carlton 14:39

a good idea to build which, you know, which of Pandora's boxes should we leave closed?

Michael Porcelli 14:45

Right. Yeah,

Robbie Carlton 14:47

Yeah, I just very briefly, just to go back to the like, it's because I'm a pretty kind of confirmed panpsychism and my response to that idea is that the that the machine learning algorithms have as much consciousness as the servers that are running Facebook or, you know, or the Bitcoin mining computers

Michael Porcelli 15:11

Gotcha.

Robbie Carlton 15:11

like

Michael Porcelli 15:12

Mm hmm.

Robbie Carlton 15:12

the yes, they do have some amount of consciousness due to the fact that they are

Michael Porcelli 15:16

They exist,

Robbie Carlton 15:17

ultimately living on matter. Yeah, that they exist, but it's not more because of the particular kind of information processing that's happening on those silicon chips

Michael Porcelli 15:26

right?

Robbie Carlton 15:26

than

Michael Porcelli 15:26

Yeah.

Robbie Carlton 15:27

than Bitcoin mining or, you know, any other information processing. So that's, that's where I and, and we're not and I know we're

Michael Porcelli 15:34

And

Robbie Carlton 15:34

not

Michael Porcelli 15:34

this

Robbie Carlton 15:34

going to say

Michael Porcelli 15:34

is the rabbit

Robbie Carlton 15:35

that

Michael Porcelli 15:35

hole. We'r not

Robbie Carlton 15:35

this

Michael Porcelli 15:35

going to

Robbie Carlton 15:35

is

Michael Porcelli 15:35

go

Robbie Carlton 15:35

the

Michael Porcelli 15:35

down.

Robbie Carlton 15:35

rabbit hole again,

Michael Porcelli 15:36

Yeah.

Robbie Carlton 15:36

no more good

Michael Porcelli 15:38

Yes, totally. I'm glad you said it. And, yes, just this is where you and I start to part ways in terms of our our our overlap starts to diverge right around there. So to bring it back to the human world, you know, I kind of have these ideas of of you know, people have talked a long time about automation. There's a whole history of this, right? Like,

you know, the the weavers of the the people that hand-woven like textiles.

Robbie Carlton 16:04

Yeah

Michael Porcelli 16:04

Right? And then we automated those like steam powered weaving and the you know, it was like the Luddites, right? They were like, fuck

Robbie Carlton 16:10

yeah.

Michael Porcelli 16:11

this to take away our jobs. And now it's kind of like it's really great that we make ultra cheap ass clothing for basically everyone on earth, more or less with machines, right? We're not kind of like bemoaning the loss of those jobs. And there's many examples of sort of freak out. We're

Robbie Carlton 16:32

Mm

Michael Porcelli 16:32

industrial

Robbie Carlton 16:32

hmm.

Michael Porcelli 16:33

robots and it's like, Oh, no, factory workers or whatever. And now we're in a new wave of that, es because these things so once you get a thing that's very rote and repeatable, right, like a position on an assembly line in a factory,

Robbie Carlton 16:46

Mm hmm.

Michael Porcelli 16:47

and then you can automate it and like there's it's easy actually, it's even easier in many ways if the job is rote and it's just sitting in front of a computer. Right? There's a lot of rote things that things like a podcast producer or a graphic design agency or whatever that they do a computer programmer, it's like, I'm not saying there's not creativity involved in those jobs. There totally is. It's just the percent of the time that you're just sort of sitting there like click, click, repeat. You know, doing a similar thing over and over again is actually pretty high. And anytime you have that and you don't have to even really interact with the physical world, like with machines and stuff, it's actually becomes very easy to automate. And this we're in this kind of moment where it's like, whoa, we could be automating away a huge bunch of what have been thought of as like white collar jobs, right? Kind

Robbie Carlton 17:41

Mm

Michael Porcelli 17:41

of the

Robbie Carlton 17:41

hmm.

Michael Porcelli 17:41

college educated sorts of information, work jobs. Some people even say, like if your job can be done in front of a computer, anywhere that's a job at the AI is going to take over

Robbie Carlton 17:54

Mm.

Michael Porcelli 17:54

pretty quick here. Like who knows? But soon ish. What do you think of this current wave of freak out about that huge categories of work, sort of like I mean, taken over by A.I. and the impact on the economy? I mean, we're speculating, we're not professional economists, but I imagine you have an opinion. You are a coder, right? And you would imagine

Robbie Carlton 18:18

Yeah.

Michael Porcelli 18:18

you use A.I. tools to help you to some

Robbie Carlton 18:20

I

Michael Porcelli 18:20

degree.

Robbie Carlton 18:20

do some sometimes.

Michael Porcelli 18:21

Yeah.

Robbie Carlton 18:21

Yeah, sometimes. And they're sometimes helpful. And sometimes really annoying. Actually,

Michael Porcelli 18:25

yeah.

Robbie Carlton 18:26

it not. They're. They're not. I don't. Yeah, I would say that I, you know, I chat up to has

kind of joined Google as a tool that I use sometimes for looking things up basically

Michael Porcelli 18:43

Mm hmm.

Robbie Carlton 18:44

like if I you know, because it's it's actually a little bit faster than Google to look things up because you don't have to click through.

Michael Porcelli 18:49

Mm hmm.

Robbie Carlton 18:50

So if you just want to, you know, if you just kind of want to know how to make some API call, it's sometimes faster just to chat up than Google

Michael Porcelli 18:59

Mm hmm.

Robbie Carlton 18:59

and, and you know, and then nine times out of ten it gets it right and then one time out of ten it gets wrong. And that could be really annoying. So like,

Michael Porcelli 19:05

Because it's hard to tell at first if

Robbie Carlton 19:07

well,

Michael Porcelli 19:07

it's right or

Robbie Carlton 19:07

yeah,

Michael Porcelli 19:07

wrong.

Robbie Carlton 19:07

because you just go, okey doke. And then it doesn't work and you're like, Well, okay, am I doing something wrong? And then you kind of figure out you go look at the dogs and you're like, okay, So like, you know,

Michael Porcelli 19:17

Mm

Robbie Carlton 19:17

I would not say that it's become some revolutionary timesaver for me. I might. I think I'm more conservative than a lot of people in in this, you know, software industry in terms of using it. I, I don't know about a lot of people, but I'm sure there's a bunch of people that are using it a lot to generate huge chunks of code. I also

Michael Porcelli 19:36

Mm hmm.

Robbie Carlton 19:36

feel kind of like there's a distinction between if I'm coding for my own project versus if I'm coding for work. For work, I'm more likely to just handcraft everything because that's what they pay me for. And you know, and obviously they're paying me to do it as efficiently as possible. But there's, you know, it would just be a really bad feeling to to write a check up, to write some code that I submitted professionally for review. And then somebody looked it over and was like, what are all these mistakes? And I'm like, Oh,

Michael Porcelli 20:06

Right.

Robbie Carlton 20:06

man. So I'm more conservative in that sense than I am if I'm playing with my own project. I've I've actually used a little bit more. But yeah, it does stuff like it's, you know, I remember when I first I mean,here's  the story. Um, we had a, uh, we were doing tech interviews for, for something, and I, if I told you the story, maybe

Michael Porcelli 20:28

I don't know.

Robbie Carlton 20:28

I'll get Well, we were doing tech interviews, and this tech interview was like, you know, a coding challenge. So, you know, when you're doing tech in tech interviews, you'll often say, like,give  to a programmer, Hey, sol this problem, and you'll give them like, a little weird toy problem that you wouldn't really encounter in real life. But the exercise of some of your, you know, coding abilities

Michael Porcelli 20:47

Mm hmm.

Robbie Carlton 20:47

and this was like an interesting toy problem. The, yo know, was a little bit challenging. And and definitely people, you know, we had half an hour because there were short interviews and people were like, you know, not getting it done inside a half an hour. And I you know, I sat down to do it myself to make sure that I could do it. And, you know, it took me a bit longer than half an hour to kind of get a working solution. And this was around the time that Chappie GPT was blowing up. So I fed the problem into chat chip just as written, like, you know, didn't do anything, just copied and pasted this very casual text document that's just like write a program that does this. And it gave me a perfect answer in seconds. So it can do stuff like that, which was like, okay, like,

Michael Porcelli 21:29

Right.

Robbie Carlton 21:29

you know,

Michael Porcelli 21:30

Yeah.

Robbie Carlton 21:31

but, but it's that kind of problem is like it's very self-contained,

Michael Porcelli 21:36

Mm

Robbie Carlton 21:36

does

Michael Porcelli 21:36

hmm.

Robbie Carlton 21:37

require a lot of like context. And so

Michael Porcelli 21:39

Mm

Robbie Carlton 21:39

I

Michael Porcelli 21:39

hmm.

Robbie Carlton 21:39

think it's good at solving those little self-contained problems. As soon as you have a bunch of context, it just becomes like it's not actually that that useful or I haven't found it that useful, but it's not zero. So anyway, I don't know if that's really what you asked me, but that's kind of you know, that's a that's a very personal perspective on on, you know, as somebody that is, you know, doing knowledge

Michael Porcelli 22:01

Yeah.

Robbie Carlton 22:02

work and definitely in an industry which is like kind of, you know, getting ready to to, to maybe make some shifts. So I think I've I've oscillated between being alarmed. Like, I remember when the art stuff was coming out last year and I was

Michael Porcelli 22:21

Yeah,

Robbie Carlton 22:21

like, fuck, I'm so glad I'm not an artist because this must be just nightmarish right now. And then a couple of months later, the chatty co-generation stuff is coming out. I'm like, okay, well, it came sooner than I expected. Like that. I'm also in a similar position of just like, you know, being potentially economically, uh, impacted. And I've gone back and forth between pretty alarmed and pretty like, I don't know, I don't think we're there yet. And I'm,

Michael Porcelli 22:46

yeah,

Robbie Carlton 22:46

I think a little bit more on the for this. I don't think we're there yet. I do think there's no doubt this is going to be we're at the beginning of a of a of of a revolution, of an economic revolution of of, you know, a huge scale. Like we've

Michael Porcelli 23:05

yeah.

Robbie Carlton 23:05

talked we talked about this before, about like, you know, this is on the scale, if not more than the information age, right? Like

Michael Porcelli 23:12

Totally

Robbie Carlton 23:12

we're entering a new age. And so I think that's real. I do think is going to have huge economic impact, you know, like this, the argument that like well, we've been we've we've been alarmed in the past and we've been wrong to be alarmed like the the argument you made about the Weavers and the Luddites. But it's a reasonable argument. I make a similar argument about people that think the world is ending. Right. Like,

Michael Porcelli 23:36

Sure.

Robbie Carlton 23:36

you know, well, we've always said the world is ending. Everybody's felt like they've lived at the end times. There hasn't been a generation of human

Michael Porcelli 23:43

Right?

Robbie Carlton 23:43

beings where there wasn't some chunk of of them that was like, this is the end times. But one generation will be right. You know, there will be a generation that thinks they're living in the end times and they're right. So it's not a dispositive argument. And I think the same is true for for this. Like just

Michael Porcelli 24:01

Mm

Robbie Carlton 24:01

because

Michael Porcelli 24:01

hmm.

Robbie Carlton 24:02

we were wrong in the past. I do think that needs to be weighed in. But it doesn't mean, you know, CGP Grey has a video from like ten years ago. At this point we humans need not apply where

Michael Porcelli 24:13

Mm hmm.

Robbie Carlton 24:14

he makes the argument that this is this one's different

Michael Porcelli 24:17

Mm hmm.

Robbie Carlton 24:17

and

I don't know it's interesting and but, but I do think it's going to have huge economic impact and it's going to change a bunch of stuff. So I

Michael Porcelli 24:29

Mm

Robbie Carlton 24:29

think

Michael Porcelli 24:29

hmm. Mm.

Robbie Carlton 24:30

that that's real and there are going to be winners and losers and the

Michael Porcelli 24:33

Mm hmm.

Robbie Carlton 24:34

winners are going to be

Michael Porcelli 24:35

Mm.

Robbie Carlton 24:35

fewer and the losers are going to be more in less. We do something somewhat drastic. I think

Michael Porcelli 24:41

Mm hmm.

Robbie Carlton 24:41

that's that's a that's another position I have is that given our kind of outdated economic ideas that are embedded in our systems,

this shit's not going to benefit humanity as much as it could versus benefiting a small handful of people. Th kind of happened to happen to be the right place at the right time.

Michael Porcelli 25:07

Yeah. Yeah. Well, thanks for your thoughts there. That's. That's great. Like, I'm going to riff on this idea mentally in a little more into the maybe the utopian view of it for a second here, because, uh, I mean, sci fi utopia stuff has often been the domain of science fiction that people usually write off discussions like, Hey, that's science fiction, whatever. This is reality. But now we're in a we're in a moment where science fiction sounding conversations are kind of like feel like we're talking about the actual reality we're in or about to be in, especially of recent years. And, you know, there's a there was a presidential candidate in the most recent presidential election in the United States, Andrew Yang, who kind of used this thesis of like, we're going to have massive job displacement because of AI, robots and automation. So we should create universal basic income. Now,

Robbie Carlton 25:55

Yep.

Michael Porcelli 25:56

his arguments aside, it's part of the conversation that's kind of interesting. And then this has gone back for a very long time. Some people who have always kind of argued that, you know, the idea of like leisure or or laziness or idleness or time to just be creative is something that we should strive for. And this automation stuff, I mean, it goes way back and I kind of looked up some things like there was a French guy, Paul Lafargue, I don't know what his how you say his name, but the right to be lazy. He wrote this in the 19th century. Bertrand Russell one that I read and I really liked, was called In Praise of Idleness, which you wrote back in 1935.

Robbie Carlton 26:33

hmm.

Michael Porcelli 26:33

More recently, this guy wrote a boldly titled book called Fully Automated Luxury Communism, which is this 90 and like, Yeah, right. Like

Robbie Carlton 26:44

It's a

Michael Porcelli 26:44

let

Robbie Carlton 26:44

great title.

Michael Porcelli 26:45

the air and the robots do basically every thing and then we just get to do the human things right, the human to human, the stuff where we really want it to be humans. And this is pretty close to my view, or at least my, my hope or like as a direction that we could or should steer in. In the my favorite conversation I came across here was this guy named Chi Fu Li, who's sort of a really

Robbie Carlton 27:12

Mm

Michael Porcelli 27:12

well-known

Robbie Carlton 27:12

hmm.

Michael Porcelli 27:13

investor in both Chinese and American companies. He wrote a book called AI Superpower Wars, and he did a TEDTalk

2018 ish, I think called How I Can Save Our Humanity. And he basically makes this kind of argument that like this whole kind of like workaholic thing or this whole way that, you know, the hustle culture or the way that we, like, derive meaning from from the work that we do, right? Like

maybe we're going to enter into an era after that or post that we're like, we will want and need meaning. But and the way we spend our time is we will want to still be meaningful, but we're not going to be able to get the kind of meaning of of life or meaning in life. You might say, as John King will say, sometimes, like out of more of the human to human stuff. So in that sense, it would be like so we would call it the experiential economy. Another aspect of what I think of is the relational economy,

Robbie Carlton 28:14

Mm

Michael Porcelli 28:14

where it's kind of

Robbie Carlton 28:15

hmm.

Michael Porcelli 28:15

it's like, I'm going to go do a cool thing, watch me go right, and I have my GoPro or my whatever, you know, and I'm going to like share, I'm going to bring you along. You know, this is all like influencer culture on YouTube,

Robbie Carlton 28:27

Sure.

Michael Porcelli 28:28

like this kind of thing, like be a part of my life in this way and you have your little following people kind of vibe with you, but also other kinds of more intimate professions that you and I are used to like coaches

Robbie Carlton 28:39

Mm hmm.

Michael Porcelli 28:39

and facilitators and counselors and therapists and health care workers, hospice workers. You know, there's this whole even like teachers or mentors, like this whole thing were a big part of the value of the activity itself comes from the fact that, like it's you and another person in

Robbie Carlton 28:59

Mm

Michael Porcelli 28:59

a

Robbie Carlton 28:59

hmm.

Michael Porcelli 28:59

kind of relationship.

Robbie Carlton 29:01

Mm hmm.

Michael Porcelli 29:01

And that's a big part of what makes it valuable. And like I in my hopeful moments, I'm like, Cool, this is the part of the economy. Like maybe it's sort of like engineers get paid a lot, school teachers get paid very little or elderly companions or something. Workers

Robbie Carlton 29:18

Yes.

Michael Porcelli 29:18

Right. And you're like, But what if suddenly the eyes automate most of what the engineers do? So suddenly

Robbie Carlton 29:25

Mm hmm.

Michael Porcelli 29:25

it's actually like super cheap and it's actually cost way less.

Robbie Carlton 29:29

Mm

Michael Porcelli 29:29

And

Robbie Carlton 29:30

hmm.

Michael Porcelli 29:30

then the kinds of things like health care workers and hospice workers become the highly paid professions because those are the ones where we want it to be a person. And that's kind of part of the hopeful relational economy future that I like to think we could head towards. What do you think?

Robbie Carlton 29:48

I have a lot of different thoughts about this, so let me see if I can. So I. I watched the TED talk. You referenced colorfully. He seems like a lovely and charming man. It was a very beautiful story and shocking that an investor in multiple companies is is that I, you know, optimist, right?

Michael Porcelli 30:07

Booster

Robbie Carlton 30:07

Like,

Michael Porcelli 30:08

Totally,

Robbie Carlton 30:08

yeah, like crazy you know. So I'm so at the end, you know I was left with a little bit of skepticism of like yeah you know

I think that's hopeful like you know I

Michael Porcelli 30:20

yeah.

Robbie Carlton 30:20

like like why do I say I mean, it's funny, I keep coming back to the you know, I'm not a marxist, I'm not a columnist or even like a big, you know, like so I, I don't you know, I don't know what the economic answers are, but I can the problem and so when you talk about like, you know, the engineers are going to you know, we replace the engineers and the engineers are going to you know, s getting paid a bunch. And so then we'll pay the teachers and the elderly companions more because those are the humans. And we we can't automate that. But the thing is, the value that the engineers were generating didn't go away. So

Michael Porcelli 31:02

Mm

Robbie Carlton 31:02

so

Michael Porcelli 31:02

hmm.

Robbie Carlton 31:02

the value is going to keep being the dominant value. I just no longer going to be distributed amongst, you know, even that right now it's distributed amongst the engineers and the software people. Instead, it's just going to be distributed amongst the owners, right? Like it's going to be

Michael Porcelli 31:18

Sure.

Robbie Carlton 31:18

distributed amongst the very small number of people that kind of put these things into place. So

Michael Porcelli 31:23

Mm hmm.

Robbie Carlton 31:24

and and and so one way to so I don't think that those people and then what's going to happen is there's going to be yes there's maybe going to be the only economic sector left is going to be these helping professions, these human professions, but the supply is going to be gigantic. There's going to be 7 billion people that don't have anything else to do. So I don't know. So so just, you know,economic  cli there's still a missing, which is currently our systems are set up to disproportionately reward the winners and and I let's us win better. And so what

Michael Porcelli 32:04

Mm hmm.

Robbie Carlton 32:04

that's going to do is disproportionately reward the winners and so by itself I don't think that I automating away a bunch of non a bunch of computer jobs is going to mean that the teachers and therapists and elder companions are suddenly going to be the the kind of the wealthy class. I think instead has a danger of creating like a a kind of like a whatever, like a super rich class and then everybody else, which is frightening like that sounds like really bad news.

Michael Porcelli 32:41

totally. Yeah. I mean, to to this is maybe a slight pushback. I just for fully before I do that, I'll just embrace. I totally embrace what you're saying, that there's the winners. There's the losers. These big players who have the resources to build this big platform companies, people like Google and Microsoft and the Chinese sort of equivalents of these companies and so forth. Like they're still going to capture a lot of value by being able to do this. And I think implied in what you're saying is right, there's there's probably an additional you might say, like larger scale

reform or upgrade evolution sort of needed. This is at the level of governance and the economy more

Robbie Carlton 33:25

Mm hmm.

Michael Porcelli 33:25

so than it is just about algorithms and technology and includes

Robbie Carlton 33:28

Correct.

Michael Porcelli 33:28

those things. But it's bigger than those things.

Robbie Carlton 33:30

That's right.

Michael Porcelli 33:31

Yeah. And and I would, I would agree. And this this actually touches on another topic category, which is a huge rabbit hole We won't go down but it's like this this distinction between the Web 2.0 and the Web 3.0, Web

Robbie Carlton 33:43

Mm hmm.

Michael Porcelli 33:43

2.0, where there is these Internet companies that provided ways for users to generate content. First, it was blogging, and then it was, you know, YouTube and social media and all these kinds of things. And on the one hand, it's actually kind of cool, right? You can hop on there and like, make a name for yourself and become like a minor YouTube star and all this kind of thing. However, the platforms, the kind of these big companies that are essentially they're operating an online, they're controlling a whole marketplace, right? Like the advertising

Robbie Carlton 34:14

Yeah.

Michael Porcelli 34:14

dollars and the YouTube minutes or like Amazon between the buyers and the sellers and the third party vendors. And it's like, well, they can just they're like the uber middlemen and that's also a problem. But then, you know, recent years and these discussions, it's almost like people in the the co-op movement, which this goes back to the 19th century

Robbie Carlton 34:36

Mm

Michael Porcelli 34:36

and

Robbie Carlton 34:36

hmm.

Michael Porcelli 34:37

these kind of newer ideas around like cryptocurrencies and how you can distribute ownership. You

Robbie Carlton 34:43

Mm

Michael Porcelli 34:43

know, they've

Robbie Carlton 34:44

hmm.

Michael Porcelli 34:44

kind of come up with these ideas called like the platform co-operative. Can we merge these ideas where, you know, it starts to feel like it has some features of like libertarianism and some features of socialism kind of combined in an interesting way. And

Robbie Carlton 34:57

Mm

Michael Porcelli 34:57

there's

Robbie Carlton 34:57

hmm.

Michael Porcelli 34:58

way more to talk about here. But like yeah, that, that's a, that's a potential direction of this hybrid, whatever technological governance, economic sort of reform to the system that would allow us to create platforms where this human to human exchange can take place more readily.

Robbie Carlton 35:21

But interestingly, like, I agree. I mean, I. I work in that space very like, that's how I

Michael Porcelli 35:25

Yeah,

Robbie Carlton 35:25

work in the kind of distributed computing space. And and that kind of democratizing of of computing and

what what I notice hearing that is like the problem with looking to web three to,

to like, solve these governance problems is that the that Web three is like an attack vector for malicious A.I. because as soon as you're opening up these kind of distributed like user controlled co-op platforms where there isn't some central person that can hit a switch and turn everything off, then it makes it that much more dangerous. If there is such a thing as a malicious A.I. that kind of comes in and starts

Michael Porcelli 36:12

right,

Robbie Carlton 36:12

doing something whether it's sentient or not, but it's just, you

Michael Porcelli 36:15

right

Robbie Carlton 36:15

know, some program that's really good at optimizing some result and it's extracting, you know, dangerously extracting value out of a system in a way that's, you know, has like bad externalities or whatever. Like there's that also gets more dystopian. So at the same time, like I do think that

Michael Porcelli 36:31

Yeah.

Robbie Carlton 36:32

part of the promise of Web three is potentially solving some of these these kind of CAPTCHA problems that we have. But

Michael Porcelli 36:41

But it could also enable like

Robbie Carlton 36:43

yes.

Michael Porcelli 36:44

essentially the blockchain equivalent of like an internet worm, which could be like super devastating. Right?

Robbie Carlton 36:50

Right.

Michael Porcelli 36:50

Like,

Robbie Carlton 36:50

And much harder to deal with. Much

Michael Porcelli 36:52

yeah,

Robbie Carlton 36:53

harder.

Michael Porcelli 36:53

yeah.

Robbie Carlton 36:53

Ye.

Michael Porcelli 36:54

It's a security issue at that level.

Robbie Carlton 36:55

Yeah.

Michael Porcelli 36:55

Yeah. Okay. Rabbit hole. Like, let's, let's go past this one.

Robbie Carlton 37:00

Great,

Michael Porcelli 37:00

Let's just say we recognize the need for kind of an evolution of, of governance and economics

Robbie Carlton 37:05

great

Michael Porcelli 37:05

along with this thing. If we're going to have a world where people that do more to human like work, you might say, or just they spend their time doing more human to human stuff and they're not essentially, you know, having I mean, it's a weird thing. What's the ultimate version of this? Like people hanging out and somehow earning a living or like being able to meet their basic human needs or the economy somehow? It's a weird thing, right? I mean, if I think about some of the things that you and I have done in our the human side of our career, right. It's like a lot of that kind of is right. Like we're going to sit in a circle and we're going to share our feelings and then we're going to share what it's like to hear about this person's feelings back with

Robbie Carlton 37:47

ya.

Michael Porcelli 37:47

them. And you're kind of like, okay, what are we doing here? It's like, and then we're like amplifying this kind of, like felt sense of of connection, intimacy, And we're like, wow, we can even teach people how to, like, generate this thing. And then it's it has such a high degree of what you might call, like intrinsic reward or intrinsic

Robbie Carlton 38:09

Mm.

Michael Porcelli 38:10

value that it becomes kind of like it's almost like a danger of it becoming too addicting at times where people are like quitting their jobs, just sitting around talking about their feelings all the time. And we have seen some of this in

Robbie Carlton 38:20

hmm.

Michael Porcelli 38:20

some of our communities of practice where it's like, Cool, wh do you want to do? I just want to go back,

Robbie Carlton 38:24

Mm.

Michael Porcelli 38:24

you know, over to the community center and, you know, find some people and talk about my feelings more because it feels really good, right? And you're like,

Robbie Carlton 38:31

Yeah.

Michael Porcelli 38:31

okay, fascinating. But like, in some sense it's a good thing. I could see how it could become too much of a good thing. But when I sort of think about, like an ideal future, it's like there is there is something about, you know, sharing in the human experience together and the way that it is intrinsically value that's valuable. It seems like this is a really great way for people to

spend their times, t time in some kind of utopian future, assuming that the let's just kind of assume for the purposes of this discussion that the eyes work and the economic system upgrades it and like, okay, cool like we're there is this is

Robbie Carlton 39:10

yeah,

Michael Porcelli 39:10

this good idea.

Robbie Carlton 39:11

I mean I think

Michael Porcelli 39:11

Yeah

Robbie Carlton 39:12

that's a and it's reminding me I knew there was something else I wanted to say about, about the,

the kind of the super optimist, the Chi fully like A.I. is going to take away our, our need to work

Michael Porcelli 39:26

right

Robbie Carlton 39:27

so that we can spend time with our families. And I think, you know, he seems like a real like a workaholic, right? Like the guy. You know, maybe that's how it's all Ted

Michael Porcelli 39:38

or he

Robbie Carlton 39:38

Talk

Michael Porcelli 39:38

was

Robbie Carlton 39:38

is the stuff,

Michael Porcelli 39:39

right

Robbie Carlton 39:39

right?

Michael Porcelli 39:39

yeah yeah

Robbie Carlton 39:39

Maybe he was right. Like, his whole TED talk is the story of what a workaholic he was. And for those people, it maybe they need to work less. Like, you know, I it is also something that's like, well, work is fun. Like it's interesting to work. It does give meaning. And I do I don't think that that's wholly pathological. I think it's been it's been co-opted by, you know, by our culture and society in ways that become pathological. And I think American culture particularly, but also, you know, it sounds like I don't know China, but it sounds like China is like not

Michael Porcelli 40:22

even

Robbie Carlton 40:22

doing

Michael Porcelli 40:22

worse.

Robbie Carlton 40:23

great on the work life balance thing. But like, you know, compared to Europe, like, I was just in in Germany and it's way more chill people do not work as much and they and I think they're happier for it. Right. So so

Michael Porcelli 40:33

Mm

Robbie Carlton 40:33

like

Michael Porcelli 40:34

hmm.

Robbie Carlton 40:34

I'm not

Michael Porcelli 40:34

Mm

Robbie Carlton 40:34

saying

Michael Porcelli 40:34

hmm.

Robbie Carlton 40:34

like American work ethic is great, but I do I wouldn't want to live in a world where there was no work to do because it's fun for me to work like it's fun for me. And because what is work, Work is solving problems. Work is looking at like

Michael Porcelli 40:56

Mm

Robbie Carlton 40:57

at

Michael Porcelli 40:57

hmm.

Robbie Carlton 40:58

a gap or a problem in the world as it is today and imagining a better future and moving towards that. And if and and I don't like the idea of a world where all of the problems have been solved and there's nothing left to do, I also think that it's just never going to happen, like it's not available. So that's also good news. But like, you know, that's that's the other thing I would say about the kind of super utopian vision of this is like it's just it it's just a safe bet. Like, you know, when electricity was coming around, we talked about this with the atomic stuff, right? Like people

Michael Porcelli 41:32

Mm hmm.

Robbie Carlton 41:32

when have really computers when the dawn of the web. And we were like, okay, this is just going to you know, everybody's just going to love each other. Now we're going to understand each other. We can communicate across the whole world and it's just going to create this like global consciousness of unity and love. And it's like, yeah, there's no heaven, r? Like, but, but

Michael Porcelli 41:49

Right.

Robbie Carlton 41:49

I'm not also like, you know, like a Luddite of saying, like, they are people that are like, got the, you know, the web,

Michael Porcelli 41:54

Mm

Robbie Carlton 41:54

especially

Michael Porcelli 41:54

hmm.

Robbie Carlton 41:55

Web 2.0, was just an absolute, unmitigated disaster. And it's made the world was like and but the same with electricity, the same with atomic stuff. You know, whoever first made the will was probably like, shit, Like, all my problems are solved. Now I can roll this thing right? When we look at the wheel today, we don't think about the wheel as being some kind of magical solution to all our problems. So to me, the most likely thing is that we are going to continue to live in a in a flawed and beautiful world, and that is going to make our lives better in a way which we will very rapidly become completely like accustomed to and take for granted and not really enjoy the benefits in the same way. You know, Louis C.K. has that gag where he's on the plane and the guy's like, There's wi fi on the plane. And the wife, I can tell you like, Oh, man, it's like and it's like, you know, we we immediately just take for granted all of these amazing new technologies and then we're back to and this is where I kind of get a little bit Buddhist. We're back to like nothing is going to solve the fundamental problems of being human. There is no solution to them. And that's not

Michael Porcelli 43:08

Right,

Robbie Carlton 43:08

what, you know, what what technology is for. So

Michael Porcelli 43:11

Right.

Robbie Carlton 43:11

anyway, that's maybe a little bit of a tangent from from what you were initially asking. But yeah.

Michael Porcelli 43:20

No, it's. It's relevant. There's there's a sense of if if I reflect on my own life right there. There is a sense of meaning and purpose that I feel has this real intrinsic pleasure to it that is human centered,

Robbie Carlton 43:35

Mm

Michael Porcelli 43:35

right?

Robbie Carlton 43:35

hmm.

Michael Porcelli 43:35

Like this comes in the form of, like, my friendships, my family relationship. It's

Robbie Carlton 43:40

Right,

Michael Porcelli 43:40

my intimate partnerships and, you know, hanging out and like,

Robbie Carlton 43:46

Right.

Michael Porcelli 43:46

talking about movies or going to the movies together. I mean, there's all kinds of, you know, going for a hike and just spending quality time. And we think of these things as, you know, maybe they're ephemeral or if we were to kind of put a price tag on them, they would feel it would feel a little icky. Right. But it's like, you know, we want that to just kind of be genuine, kind of freely exchanged, not under the purview of like marketplace dynamics is is kind of part of like what preserves or kind of correlates to this intrinsic value thing. And then on the other hand, I get some amount of meaning and purpose of like accomplishing something. I mean, maybe it's like I want to sit down and draw something or, you know, write a song. I haven't been known to do that in times past.

Solve a project, build a thing, you know. But the last one I remember doing was like, okay, you build these like little end shelves on the side of the cabinet in the kitchen where we could put our like, coffee mugs. And I'm like, Yeah, right. Like, I don't want to hire somebody to do that. And some of the stuff is kind of like, Yeah, somebody to clean the toilets. Let's hire someone to do that. Right? But, you know, a home improvement project is actually a place people do a lot, a lot of that nesting and kind of like, I want it to be me who kind of comes up with the idea and then does the work to accomplish it

Robbie Carlton 45:05

Mm

Michael Porcelli 45:05

to

Robbie Carlton 45:05

hmm.

Michael Porcelli 45:05

some degree.

So I don't think the like the doing of the things has no intrinsic value or meaning. It's just that I suppose, like, you know what is the what is the good life in, in a world where like people, you know, kind of imagining this utopia again, you don't have to work in order to have their basic needs fulfilled.

Robbie Carlton 45:29

Yes.

Michael Porcelli 45:30

Right? Then we don't necessarily get this extractive market dynamic where we have to have to find some way of of attaching emotional meaning to some like rote kind of like repetitive thing that we do. Right. Like in order to, you know, whatever feel good about like having to kind of toil away in order to like not starve to death. We

Robbie Carlton 45:54

Yes.

Michael Porcelli 45:54

don't have that anymore. Right? Then the world will become a mix of like whatever personal projects and having a good time, you know, playing games together, hanging out, designing games for each other. I don't know, like creating little, like Minecraft simulations and come to my little Minecraft thing or whatever. I don't know, that

Robbie Carlton 46:13

But

Michael Porcelli 46:13

kind of

Robbie Carlton 46:13

yeah,

Michael Porcelli 46:13

thing.

Robbie Carlton 46:13

it's interesting. I mean, like, I fully I what? What seems utopian to me is this idea that not in a bad way, but like, as in, yes, I'm on board with this utopia is everybody in the world has their basic needs met. Everybody has, you know, a a comfortable, pleasant place to live. Enough good, healthy food to eat, access to education, clean water, health care, and, you know, and other human beings and

Michael Porcelli 46:49

Mm

Robbie Carlton 46:49

nature.

Michael Porcelli 46:49

hmm.

Robbie Carlton 46:49

Right. Like, I don't know, there might be some more things, but that sounds like a decent list of like, let's get everybody to that and see what people do and get them to that. Yeah. Without them having to everything you just said, without them having to kind of contort themselves into some weird shape to, to do something that they wouldn't be inclined to do if their own steam and and, and and see they do and yeah and and then I think you know I mean there are visions of this that are more or less kind of interesting, right? Like Star Trek initially was a utopian vision.

Michael Porcelli 47:21

Mm

Robbie Carlton 47:21

Right. Like it later

Michael Porcelli 47:22

hmm.

Robbie Carlton 47:23

I

Michael Porcelli 47:23

Mm hmm.

Robbie Carlton 47:23

think not so much because Hollywood but but

Michael Porcelli 47:26

Sure.

Robbie Carlton 47:27

the earlier iterations,

the culture novels, if you read the culture novels in banks or I think it's Ian and banks,

Michael Porcelli 47:34

No

Robbie Carlton 47:36

really? Oh, dude, you would love they're so

Michael Porcelli 47:39

Cool.

Robbie Carlton 47:39

good, but they're like, totally like, how do you write novels in a in a utopian future that's run by a I mean, it's literally that's the that's the the kind of question he's answering. It's like, how do you still tell stories? What what are the conflicts? What's interesting? And

Michael Porcelli 47:54

Mm hmm.

Robbie Carlton 47:54

he goes in some really wild places. It's super. Yeah, they're great. But

that's that utopia. Yes,

let's do it. I don't know. I don't know. I was like, waiting for the but and I'm like, No, let's do it.And  yeah, and yeah. What would people

Michael Porcelli 48:12

What

Robbie Carlton 48:12

do?

Michael Porcelli 48:12

would they do?

Robbie Carlton 48:12

Yeah, I mean they would, you know, I think that they would continue to build things. I think that they would can write like that, they would continue to create new structures, They would make, you know,

Michael Porcelli 48:21

Yeah,

Robbie Carlton 48:22

they would, you know, we would go to space right. We would build, you know, new kinds of cities. We would,

Michael Porcelli 48:28

right.

Robbie Carlton 48:28

you know, and and new kinds of communities and we would and arts all the different kinds of art, like the widest possible interpretation. And yes,

Michael Porcelli 48:37

Yeah.

Robbie Carlton 48:37

some of and we would for sure, you know, one of the things that happens right is Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Right. Like as your lower level, right like the story you were talking about, the work that you and I did together for years was we were working on a very high level of on the hierarchy of needs. We're working on self-actualization,

Michael Porcelli 48:57

Yes.

Robbie Carlton 48:58

right? Like for the most part in need of with

Michael Porcelli 49:00

Mm

Robbie Carlton 49:00

some

Michael Porcelli 49:00

hmm.

Robbie Carlton 49:00

kind of healing and relational lower

Michael Porcelli 49:02

Mm

Robbie Carlton 49:02

level needs

Michael Porcelli 49:02

mm

Robbie Carlton 49:02

stuff.

Michael Porcelli 49:03

mm.

Robbie Carlton 49:03

But essentially the only people that were showing up to that were people that more or less had those lower needs handled and were interested in doing or at least successfully bypassed, were interested in doing self-actualization, needs stuff and that I think

Michael Porcelli 49:21

Mm hmm.

Robbie Carlton 49:22

as the lower needs get more automated, you get more room for that and it's yeah and it's and so that for sure some of what will happen is there'll be more and more people in various ways, whether it's relationally or whether it's by going spiritual teachers or whether it's by whatever else, you know, astrology. But they're going to get into like deepening their own sense of their their unique

human expression in the world, right? Like, yeah.

Michael Porcelli 49:53

Yeah. Yeah. I take a pretty broad view of, like, what I think people would do. And I do think currently, if you kind of take this top 10% of the globally wealthy, both of you know, you and I are kind of in, in that, you know, we live in modern Western democracies, c, blah blah blah. This thing,

we already are starting to see that. And you know, you you touched on a few of them. Like what would people sort of do if they have the kind of spare time to do it? It's like, well, maybe they would go do a lot of transformational workshops or they might, you know, join communities where they get to sit around talking about their feelings or maybe they go off and be like, Let's do that thing that's be an intentional community and have a farm and it's organic and we're all going to live together and it's going to be whatever, polyamory or not, something else like,

Robbie Carlton 50:37

Mm hmm.

Michael Porcelli 50:39

like these kinds of pursuits of, you might say, kind of experimental living. I think there's a there's a correlation here with, you know, just just how many people go off and into cults in, in, in kind of modern kind of affluent societies. Let's go over here use and it's like a lot of stuff built around around wellness or and spirituality kind of leads in that direction. But also to kind of broaden the inclusiveness here in a weird way is you might say like junk YouTube is that if you think about like the amount of weird little check me out, I, I don't know, watch me do my makeup or watch me eat a raw steak or listen to me chew on it, or these all these weird, obscure things that people are kind of like, Cool, I get to do this weird thing and

Robbie Carlton 51:26

yeah,

Michael Porcelli 51:26

then invite people to kind of join me in doing it. And they do, and I kind of get to make a living doing doing it. And people go like, I can't believe I get to do this for a living. You know? It's sort of weird. Like, I'm gonna perfect my body through working out. I'm going to share people my prizes. Look at this new little piece of whatever exercise equipment. Let me show you how to do the proper form of this or that. I mean, there's and then you have an audience for it, and then you're like, All right, cool. I'm just inviting people to join me in doing what I would normally do for myself. And you kind of created this. It's like a niche offering. It's just this hyper, whatever you want to call it, like massive amount of specialization across a huge swath of the market. And people get to do that. Now, not everybody, but a lot of people

Robbie Carlton 52:09

yeah, yeah. And that's, you know, I think that's a version of self-actualization, righ? Like

Michael Porcelli 52:14

right?

Robbie Carlton 52:15

that to the degree, you know, when somebody says my job is just being me and I'm getting paid for it, like, you know it, maybe that self-actualization or maybe that's actually just getting to that utopian vision accidentally a little sooner than the rest of us. Like, you know, like, I don't

Michael Porcelli 52:35

Yeah,

Robbie Carlton 52:36

like my job is not I don't just get paid to be me. Like I get paid to work. Like I get you know, I have to make myself think about stuff that, you know, otherwise, you know, I'm interested to think about, but not necessarily

Michael Porcelli 52:47

Yeah.

Robbie Carlton 52:48

every day I don't wake up and be like, Oh, well, it's wow. It's amazing that I'm just naturally doing the thing that I am getting paid to do that I would otherwise just do for my own entertainment. Right? So it's interesting because there's we're kind of, you know, we keep hanging out in economics, which I hope is okay. But like, you know, because there's two ways of imagining that, like there's one where, you know, the current version is people have found a way to monetize that stuff, right? Like the guy that's eating raw steaks has found some way of like, you know, he goes on YouTube, basically. And so and and how is that monetized while YouTube is selling advertising and so the advertisers are extracting enough value out of the people watching him eat steaks to be able to share some of that

Michael Porcelli 53:32

hmm.

Robbie Carlton 53:32

wealth with him via YouTube, who also takes the cut. Right. And so all of that's pretty gross is that is to say that right Like, you know, it's like what's the version where they're, you know, where maybe there's always should be prizes And this is you know, I think the difference between I don't know what the difference in communism and socialism is, I don't know if anybody does, but like maybe the differences in one, there's still rich people and not so rich people

and, you know,the  people that figure out a way of of extracting value or generating value or extracting value, um,

win more. So I don't know what I'm saying. I'm, I'm saying like that thinking about like making YouTube videos of yourself eating steak as a job is what if it were just a hobby and, and instead we just all had hobbies.

Michael Porcelli 54:31

Yes. You're kind of getting close to what I what I imagine it would be like. I mean, one more note on the economics, and then I want to bring it back to the relational, because that's more relational conversations here. But,

Robbie Carlton 54:43

Mm hmm.

Michael Porcelli 54:43

you know, one, these platforms can open up the possibility of hacking them. And I do think whatever it is, it you know, the algorithm sort of tends to reward outrage. B like the number one YouTuber right now is Mr. Beast, and his shit is like,feel  good charity stuff. And it's it's total clickbait, it's total junk, Lord, whatever. You know, I'm going to give $1,000,000 away to whatever. But it's a weird thing where he's like, Cool, I'm going to monetize the shit out of this YouTube channel where I get like, you know, 200 million views on every video and I make millions, millions of dollars, but I'm not pocketing it. I'm just taking the money that comes in from this and turning it into the prize money for the next video. And I just create this like clickbait, you know, a number with a bunch of zeros after it, watch me give away, blah. And then everyone and then all the kids are kind of like going like and they're and they're savvy enough to know, kind of cool. I just keep my eyeballs on this, too.From  the beginning to the end, I get entertained. Mr. Beast gets money, Mr. Beast gives it. It's like you're it's like you're extracting value from advertisers, from rich

Robbie Carlton 55:46

But

Michael Porcelli 55:46

companies, and giving it to a fucking regular

Robbie Carlton 55:48

but,

Michael Porcelli 55:49

people.

Robbie Carlton 55:49

but you're not, Because where do the advertisers getting their money from?

Michael Porcelli 55:53

sure from you, right? I mean,

Robbie Carlton 55:54

Like the kids maybe think they're immune, but there's no fucking way they're immune otherwise.

Michael Porcelli 55:59

no,

Robbie Carlton 55:59

The

Michael Porcelli 55:59

no,

Robbie Carlton 55:59

advertisers,

Michael Porcelli 55:59

no. I'm

Robbie Carlton 56:00

right?

Michael Porcelli 56:00

not saying it's a perfect

Robbie Carlton 56:01

Yeah.

Michael Porcelli 56:01

system. I'm just saying it's

Robbie Carlton 56:02

It's

Michael Porcelli 56:02

like a

Robbie Carlton 56:02

wild.

Michael Porcelli 56:02

it's an interesting conduit. It sort of creates some capital flow in the reverse direction, which is kind

Robbie Carlton 56:07

Yeah.

Michael Porcelli 56:07

of interesting.

Robbie Carlton 56:08

I mean, it's, you know, it's. I see what you mean. That it's. It's weirdly monetizing philanthropy.

Michael Porcelli 56:15

Yeah,

Robbie Carlton 56:15

Yeah. Which is,

Michael Porcelli 56:16

yeah,

Robbie Carlton 56:16

you know, which is. That's weird,

Michael Porcelli 56:18

And it's crowdsourcing it, too, because you're kind

Robbie Carlton 56:20

right?

Michael Porcelli 56:20

of like, I going to turn your eyeballs into money

Robbie Carlton 56:23

Right,

Michael Porcelli 56:23

and give it to somebody who needs it,

Robbie Carlton 56:25

right,

Michael Porcelli 56:25

right? Like

Robbie Carlton 56:26

right,

Michael Porcelli 56:26

this. And it's working or whatever it is. The combination of the algorithm and Mr. Reece's brain and, you know, this whole fad of junk Lord YouTube or something is working for, for the time being, you

Robbie Carlton 56:38

ri.

Michael Porcelli 56:38

know, it's it's who knows if that little loophole will close eventually, but then I imagine there will be kind of another one, right? Like, anywa, back to relational stuff.

Robbie Carlton 56:49

Great.

Michael Porcelli 56:49

So the AMA do a little kind of historical place setting here. Again, like early on in the history of computer science and AI ish, things like this guy, it was like back in the sixties create a thing called Eliza.

Robbie Carlton 57:08

Mm

Michael Porcelli 57:08

And that's, that's an acronym for something. And maybe people have heard of Eliza more recently because of all this discussion of Chair GPT. But essentially it was just a very simple chat bot. I was text only and it modeled itself off of like a a new form of psychotherapy at the time that was pioneered by a guy called Carl Rogers, which is essentially more or less just repeat back to the person what you just heard them say, right? And then they have this experience of like I'm being heard and understood and just that feels better, right, than the way you felt before. Like like, oh, man. Right. I'm feeling really sad because I just had a fight with my girlfriend. And then the chat bot goes, Yeah, I hear you're feeling really

Robbie Carlton 57:55

mm

Michael Porcelli 57:55

sad.

Robbie Carlton 57:55

mm mm

Michael Porcelli 57:56

You just had a fight with your girlfriend.

Robbie Carlton 57:57

mm

Michael Porcelli 57:58

And then the person was like, Yeah,

Robbie Carlton 57:59

mm

Michael Porcelli 58:00

and

Robbie Carlton 58:00

mm

Michael Porcelli 58:00

it

Robbie Carlton 58:00

mm

Michael Porcelli 58:00

was

Robbie Carlton 58:00

mm mm.

Michael Porcelli 58:00

this. I mean, it's just so basic and it's so it's a million miles more primitive than

Robbie Carlton 58:08

Right,

Michael Porcelli 58:08

the fucking chat bots we have now. The sophistication is just so,

Robbie Carlton 58:12

right.

Michael Porcelli 58:13

so small. But people were like, loved Eliza.

Robbie Carlton 58:19

Mm hmm.

Michael Porcelli 58:19

Like they were like, This is good for me. This is good for my mental health. I like this. This is great. Like, and then recently, I mean, peop like as soon as Chatty Putty came out, peo like, what do we use this for? Let's see if we can do therapy with it. And some people like this is really good, this Koko thing, this, this founder of did you hear about this one

Robbie Carlton 58:40

No.

Michael Porcelli 58:40

cocoa bot? So it was like a peer to peer thing. So they have a network of like peer to peer support. It's like not quite like a suicide hotline, but like, you know, it like chat roulette, I guess, you know, find,

Robbie Carlton 58:51

Sure.

Michael Porcelli 58:51

reach out and find somebody who will like you can just have a conversation with it. And we've been around circles of people who've like trained in things like coach counselling,

Robbie Carlton 58:58

Yeah,

Michael Porcelli 58:58

kind of like techniques

Robbie Carlton 58:59

yeah .

Michael Porcelli 58:59

for doing this really well. But it's like, hey, it's not quite like these bigger platforms, like dial a therapist sort of things, but it's kind of like connect to another person. And they were they were like, let's see if we can have the chat p t like, listen in on the chat these two people and suggest

Robbie Carlton 59:16

mm

Michael Porcelli 59:16

things to say.

Robbie Carlton 59:17

mm

Michael Porcelli 59:18

And it was funny, like the, the ratings of these were higher than the average human responses without the churchy party support. But then as soon as they revealed to the users that the responses were enhanced by chat CBT,

Robbie Carlton 59:35

mm

Michael Porcelli 59:35

then people were like disappointed with essentially the same output. So there was a it was like just having that extra little meta knowledge that it was sort of chat bot enhanced, decreased your satisfaction with the thing. An I think this kind of raises a bunch of different things where it's, you know, like on the one hand maybe having computer assisted, you know, support bots, c bots would be good, right? Because in a sense like, you know, when I'm at my lowest or I sometimes it's like, you know, scribble on a piece of paper. I'm journaling or whatever, right? It's like, do I really need another person?

Robbie Carlton 1:00:10

mm mm.

Michael Porcelli 1:00:10

You know, sometimes it kind of helps, b, you know, th you kind of get into this whole thing of like the helping professions, like therapist and counselor. They experience things like empathy and compassion fatigue. And it does incorporate this weird kind of marketplace dynamic into something that is human to human, which sort of makes it a little strange, like, I don't know any thoughts on this general area.

Robbie Carlton 1:00:31

Yeah. It, this is, I mean so I'll throw in because I, this is as good a place as any to throw in this image because, you know, one of the things like I've definitely read about

Chachi t doing text therapy and being more effective than human therapists doing text therapy,

Michael Porcelli 1:00:52

write

Robbie Carlton 1:00:53

which, you know, okeydoke. But like, I've never done text therapy in my life and I have no interest in it. Like, I do therapy with you. I mean, I do therapy over Zoom and I'm like, would rather, you know, rather not. But that's just kind of how it works. Well, I it's complicated

Michael Porcelli 1:01:09

Sure.

Robbie Carlton 1:01:09

anyway, but, so the image that that popped into my head recently was the realization that we're a couple minutes, you know, metaphorically away from our there being ghosts in our Zoom meetings that there being these kind of disembodied

Michael Porcelli 1:01:28

Mm hmm.

Robbie Carlton 1:01:29

like video entities which have language processing, like chatbots have audio synthesis and audio, you know, processing like the audio synthesis and audio processing things we have now at video synthesis. It's not going to be long before all that stuff is real time and indistinguishable from an actual human being in an actual physical space that's being videoed and put on to Zoom. And whether and how we, you know, how people experience those things when they know that they're talking to a human versus when they I sorry, when they're told that they're talking to an AI versus when they're not told, they're talking to me. I think it's going to be super interesting and weird. Will we be able to tell will there be some creepy feeling that we get that lets us know, like in the way that you kind of can right now? You can tell what it's when A.I. generated imagery, you can basically pretty much always tell. Seems like with imagery that's not going to last that pretty soon it's going to be impossible for human beings to distinguish when when it's an actual being. That's interesting because because a lot of what therapy is about is co regulation.

Michael Porcelli 1:02:48

Mm hmm.

Robbie Carlton 1:02:48

A lot of what therapy is about is you are getting into connection with a human being who has a nervous system, and their nervous system

Michael Porcelli 1:02:59

Mm hmm.

Robbie Carlton 1:03:00

is, is teaching you something through that connection about how you can how your nervous system can operate. And so can that be simulated.

That's a really interesting question. Like, and does it matter at that point? If I know, like if I know, say you're the robot therapist and I know you're an AI,

Michael Porcelli 1:03:29

Mm hmm.

Robbie Carlton 1:03:29

but when I say I know you're an AI you're just so you have the perfect response, yo know, that just like touches me even though and then I'm like, I don't want to be touched by your perfect response. Know that you're just a machine, and even then you just still keep having this perfect. You just have, y know, the perfect thing to say because you've been trained. Now, kind of what's interesting, maybe you aware this doesn't end up working is what you can't do with a robot A.I. that you can do in other deep learning situations is train at a crazy rate, like the way that AlphaGo got as good as it did is by playing against itself at superhuman speeds.

Michael Porcelli 1:04:18

Ye.

Robbie Carlton 1:04:19

You can't do therapy at superhuman speeds

Michael Porcelli 1:04:22

Yeah,

Robbie Carlton 1:04:22

because, you know, because you can't train, you know, therapy bot against therapy bot like because they're going to go off into some weird fucking land that. When you put it in front of a human,

Michael Porcelli 1:04:33

yeah.

Robbie Carlton 1:04:33

it's going to be like, you know, they're going to be doing therapy for A.I.. That's like not going to be relevant, you know? So maybe that's where, you know, we don't end up having to confront this in a real way. But

Michael Porcelli 1:04:45

Mm hmm.

Robbie Carlton 1:04:46

yeah, so, yeah, I don't know. I don't know. It's weird. I don't think I would want to do therapy with a A.I. Like, it doesn't sound

Michael Porcelli 1:04:57

Yeah,

Robbie Carlton 1:04:58

like like I would be getting what I want from it. But what about coaching?

Michael Porcelli 1:05:05

right,

Robbie Carlton 1:05:07

What about coaching where it's like, I'm not I'm not there to have an experience with a human being. But what's weird about coaching is coaching and therapy are kind of on a continuum, and any good coach sometimes is really doing therapy, even though they're not allowed to say

Michael Porcelli 1:05:23

right.

Robbie Carlton 1:05:23

that. But part of coaching is just kind of way more mechanical and way more like and that's interesting where it's like, Yeah, what if I could have a coach that was just, you know, instead of costing hundreds of dollars to get on the phone? I was just like free or, you know, a cheap subscription and was actually helping me with my strategic life stuff like, yeah.

Michael Porcelli 1:05:48

Yep.

Totally. I mean, we're definitely in territory where I don't feel even like I've adequately formed my

perspectives on it. Like, I'm in the process of,like , this is partly why I wanted to have this conversation with you, right? Because, like, I can see a lot of different sides to this, r? Like,

like you said about coaching, I could see how some of that could be mechanized. And there's there's like a social benefit to that, too, bec essentially now you're kind of the whole whatever body of work of like coaching. Imagine a chat bot that could sort of do that and they have like access to pretty decent level coaching two of people at a much lower price point like that could really improve people's lives in a whole lot of ways, right? Especially if you're kind of like, I don't really care if it's a chat bot or not, right? Like there are certain like and this is sort of a little bit weird, right? Like as the job is more you look maybe at the other extreme is like one of the human things that the AI automation folks are excited to automate away is customer service, right? It's just like,

Robbie Carlton 1:06:53

MM

Michael Porcelli 1:06:53

What are you doing? It's like, Wel, I have this problem and then it asks you question, What about that? And it's like, okay, cool. Imagine if you could like create the ultimate chat bot customer service agent for your software application and you don't have to have a fucking person over there, like now try rebooting now try like clicking

Robbie Carlton 1:07:09

Given

Michael Porcelli 1:07:09

here. It's just like,

Robbie Carlton 1:07:10

that, given that,

Michael Porcelli 1:07:11

go ahead.

Robbie Carlton 1:07:11

given that currently when I get onto a, you know, like a robot phone system, all I do is make a bill. I'm just like human being, human being, talk to an agent. So like, I just like,

Michael Porcelli 1:07:23

Right?

Robbie Carlton 1:07:23

like I'm nervous about that. Like there's a kind of, you know, there's a kind of dystopian almost like Kafkaesque or not, but like version

Michael Porcelli 1:07:31

Yeah.

Robbie Carlton 1:07:31

where you're on the phone with the customer service robot and it's not understanding you and yeah, and you're in hell. But you know,

Michael Porcelli 1:07:40

Yes. But there is also the like, like millions of very crappy actual people,

Robbie Carlton 1:07:47

right,

Michael Porcelli 1:07:47

customer service agents. That is also a kind of a

Robbie Carlton 1:07:50

T

Michael Porcelli 1:07:50

living

Robbie Carlton 1:07:50

true.

Michael Porcelli 1:07:50

hell

Robbie Carlton 1:07:50

It's

Michael Porcelli 1:07:50

for

Robbie Carlton 1:07:50

not like, Yeah,

Michael Porcelli 1:07:51

both people on both ends

Robbie Carlton 1:07:53

right,

Michael Porcelli 1:07:53

of the line.

Robbie Carlton 1:07:53

right,

Michael Porcelli 1:07:53

R.

Robbie Carlton 1:07:54

right,

Michael Porcelli 1:07:54

Like

Robbie Carlton 1:07:54

right. That's true.

Michael Porcelli 1:07:55

people people do cheap treat customer service agent kind of Shetterly and a really entry level job whatever whatever this thing is you blog and you know it's like I need you to help me whatever right? And it's a little bit like you're kind of tooling somebody to kind of just help you achieve an objective. Like we don't really care all that much that that's another person

Robbie Carlton 1:08:12

Mm

Michael Porcelli 1:08:12

over there,

Robbie Carlton 1:08:12

hmm.

Michael Porcelli 1:08:13

right? It's just it's a strange kind of thing, you know, like.

Robbie Carlton 1:08:16

At least we're

Michael Porcelli 1:08:17

And

Robbie Carlton 1:08:17

not incentivized

Michael Porcelli 1:08:18

I

Robbie Carlton 1:08:18

to. I try to, but.

Michael Porcelli 1:08:19

know,

Robbie Carlton 1:08:19

But there is not.

Michael Porcelli 1:08:20

right,

Robbie Carlton 1:08:20

Yeah,

Michael Porcelli 1:08:21

rig.

Robbie Carlton 1:08:21

that. Yeah,

Michael Porcelli 1:08:22

Yeah. Yeah. I have to kind of work to be, like, remind myself, okay, treat this person kindly. They're just a customer service person, you know? But along that continuum, right, you can kind of go over to, like, this high end, kind of like, Yeah, like the deep thing, you know, I need if I'm going to unlock some of my deepest held traumas, I mean, like if I go for a really in-depth kind of transformational body work session in, you know, like I've gone to some really high end body work people and like, the it's kind of like

it would be difficult to imagine a robot doing that for me, you

Robbie Carlton 1:08:58

right.

Michael Porcelli 1:08:58

know what I mean? Like, it's like I'm in a kind of like somatic dialogue with another person's nervous system, and that's like unlocking layers in me and helping me release deeply held whatever knots in my body mind system or however you want to describe

Robbie Carlton 1:09:18

Yeah. It reminds

Michael Porcelli 1:09:18

it.

Robbie Carlton 1:09:18

me of Carl Colby kind of. And Maureen talks about this like, whenever somebody

complains about, like, God, we just talking about parent stuff again, and it's like, Yeah, you were raised by parents, therefore you have parent issues. If you were raised by wolves, you would have wolf issues. And like when we can generalize that and say you were raised by humans and so you have human issues and there are only those those human issues are likely only resolvable with humans like and that's kind of that's what therapy is is like you got your your human issues that you got from all your interactions with humans and now you're dealing with it. You're working with the humans to try and repair some of that damage. Now, as children are more and more raised by AI, they might have more power. Yeah, issues that actually can be repaired by AI later down the road by better A.I., like the first generation of kids that's raised by robot parents, w have to go to the second generation of robot therapists to to heal the damage that the robot parents did. But we're not quite there yet.

Michael Porcelli 1:10:22

yeah. We're not quite there yet. I mean, I do think there's going to be a spectrum of things like certain you can get, you know, there's this whole kind of crazy online market for these body toys. You get a machine that shakes your legs around or something or like a massage table that you lay on and it massages automatically. It's like, okay, that's pretty cool, right? Like, I don't necessarily want to pay the high ticket price for the, you know, the deep somatic trauma release person. You know, maybe I do that, I don't know, every few months and I do my massage chair or something like that every day. And that's a good combination. Maybe there's sort of equivalent here in the kind of conversational or mental health sort of space where it's like, cool, give me a I chat bot that does some combination of just like listening and hearing me. So I hear myself reflect reflective listening, plus load up some kind of coaching suggestions and that's good a lot of the time. And then some of the time I want this high end thing. I mean, I, I think, I think that this seems like a reasonable kind of combination of things. And yeah, it also kind of raises the question, too, of like, you know, if therapy was invented not that long ago, historic in historical terms, right? Like,

Robbie Carlton 1:11:43

Sure.

Michael Porcelli 1:11:43

so what was before that? I mean, I think at some level people were just kind of like sucking it up, right? You know, more lower level on the Maslow's hierarchy was kind of where we were focusing our attention.

Robbie Carlton 1:11:55

MM

Michael Porcelli 1:11:55

We don't really have the luxury to kind of unwind our childhood traumas or whatever.

Robbie Carlton 1:11:59

mm.

Michael Porcelli 1:12:01

But on the other hand, I think there was like some equivalent, like you might say, like priests,

Robbie Carlton 1:12:05

Chuck

Michael Porcelli 1:12:05

I guess, or ministers did something somewhat equivalent to that kind of in a larger

context. And I don't know, mayb there is some

you know, in a way, you know, when I think of like working out my relational issues, it helps to have external help. Like if you know, if I'm going through a tough time with my girlfriend, it would be like, Well, I want to talk this over with a friend

Robbie Carlton 1:12:34

Mm

Michael Porcelli 1:12:35

or my own therapist. So I'm not like having to bring all of that or feeling like I need to bring all of that into my relationship with my girlfriend.I  can just then kind of focus on the relational thing. So it's like there's some amount of distribution there that is kind of like, I want a human on on either end

Robbie Carlton 1:12:54

mm

Michael Porcelli 1:12:54

of that kind of the support person and the main person. But then there's also kind of like, I still need to know how to communicate effectively with my girlfriend, you

Robbie Carlton 1:13:05

mm

Michael Porcelli 1:13:05

know, like that. The need for me to be able to do that is going to go away. And I think that's where kind of relational communication and training kind of will probably never go away fully, you know, anyway,

Robbie Carlton 1:13:17

mm hmm. Mm hmm.

Michael Porcelli 1:13:19

a thoughts on that?

Robbie Carlton 1:13:22

Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. Um, my breakthrough in a few different directions, but like, you know, the question about what, you know, what preceded therapy and, you know, I think in some sense, like why it was a legitimate innovation that's like, you know, what preceded, you know,

allopathic medicine was a bunch of Nazis like and some, you know, probably some good folk tradition stuff. But like a lot of stuff that that that didn't work as well. Right. So I think that there's

Michael Porcelli 1:13:53

Mm

Robbie Carlton 1:13:53

it's reasonable to say that we just weren't as as good you know there's a but you know James Hillman, who's you know, a union analyst, has a book it's a great title. It's something like we've had 100 years of therapy. Why is everything getting worse? Tippett I think it's, you know,

Michael Porcelli 1:14:14

Yeah, yeah,

Robbie Carlton 1:14:14

it's a great question. I don't I have read the books and know what his answer would be, but probably he's not actually that big of a fan of therapy. I don't think so. I probably feel like it doesn't really work, but,

you know, and then there's these these questions of like, well, modern, right?Like , like in the modern world, the last kind of 150 years, the unique pathologies that that are kind of showing up because of that, a big one being I think this like atomization of community in this isolation. Right. And the work

Michael Porcelli 1:14:47

Mm hmm.

Robbie Carlton 1:14:47

like the relational and this comes back to you know, when you were saying about people quitting their jobs and just saying, I just want to come to the community center and do circling all day because I you know, I just like that's what I just want to do. And like, I think to me, that's kind of like when people get addicted to something like that. That is a

it's a response to a fear of future scarcity,

Michael Porcelli 1:15:18

Mm hmm.

Robbie Carlton 1:15:19

right? Like, it's like I had a scarcity of something in the past of some vital nutrient, which I think just like human basic human connection being with like have feeling your heart with another person

Michael Porcelli 1:15:33

Mm hmm.

Robbie Carlton 1:15:34

feeling seen, feeling like you see somebody like that is a deep, important nutrient. And also to be witnessed in a community not just like on a one on one, but to be witnessed over time with other people that can see who you are today, who you were in the past,

Michael Porcelli 1:15:50

Yes.

Robbie Carlton 1:15:50

who you're going to be in the future. Like all of that is this like deeply important nutrient which we're hungry for. We're missing

Michael Porcelli 1:16:00

Yeah.

Robbie Carlton 1:16:00

and we have this kind of scarcity and then a bunch of there's a bunch of pathology that goes on top of that. And then when you find it, you become gluttonous, right? Lik you, then you go like, I got to just like, get as much as I can

Michael Porcelli 1:16:12

Yes.

Robbie Carlton 1:16:12

in because I don't know if I'm ever going to, you know, I don't know when I'm going to run out, when I'm not going to have it again. And so like, yeah, I don't know how this all relates to A.I. at all, but like, like that

it's a nutrient that we that we need and we culturally like, I guess maybe this how it relates is like modernity stripped that away in a really kind of painful way

Michael Porcelli 1:16:39

Yep.

Robbie Carlton 1:16:40

that if one of the things that that the AI age can bring is enough room in people's lives to be able to recreate that that community, then I think that that's a way that it could be really beneficial and beautiful.

Michael Porcelli 1:16:59

Yeah. Okay. So now we're kind of smack in the middle of, like, where I feel very ambivalent about, like, it's it's a little bit it's actually analogous to the thing of, like, do we want the AI's to kind of have their own sentience and agency, or do we want the A's to mainly be sort of tools that we use to get other shit done? And we don't really relate with them as like other beings with rights and all this kind of stuff. And I'm like, I definitely favor the second, and especially when it comes to this area, like a relational and emotional labor or whatever you want to call this, right? It's like, I want the AI too.

So I think you're right in your historical accounting, like modernity sort of stripped away this kind of community thing and maybe imagined some idealized hunter gatherer past, which is like, Hey, who we are? And some people even say that this is actually the way that the brain is evolved, like who we even think ourselves to be is a kind of somewhat distributed whatever process, which is like, you know, it's not just my idea of myself inside my own head. It's actually, you know, that way I communicate with the people who have known me my entire life. Right? The parents,

Robbie Carlton 1:18:10

hmm.

Michael Porcelli 1:18:11

the children, the siblings, the cousins. And there's this kind of way that, like we tend to shape our identities around the group inclusion that we're a part of. And if that group inclusions is more or less kind of like this, I guess sort of organic thing, that doesn't really change like people that you didn't ghost other people when you were in a fucking

Robbie Carlton 1:18:37

Right,

Michael Porcelli 1:18:37

hunter

Robbie Carlton 1:18:38

right,

Michael Porcelli 1:18:38

gatherer

Robbie Carlton 1:18:38

right, right.

Michael Porcelli 1:18:38

tribe because you'd be dead, right? Like, but here it's like there's just so we can just be like, Nope, you're gone. And then replace, right? And like, ther a way we sort of with the marketplace dynamics, the online communication, we tend to start tooling each other. And then I'm like, Oh man. So,so  is this a correction in like if the correction let's just say one version of the correction is people learn to how to actually be in real human to human contact with each other better. Maybe it's kind of a remedial. We need to go relearn how to be decent people with each other again. And this is where our work and authentic relating and circling and my work currently with matter relating is like, can we help people become better at that again, especially if kind of the the modern socioeconomic, cultural, sort of modernity like you said, and postmodernity has has atomized and separated us and like removed essentially this developmental nutrient

Robbie Carlton 1:19:38

Mm

Michael Porcelli 1:19:38

in the relational dimension that like is very scarce.

Robbie Carlton 1:19:42

hmm.

Michael Porcelli 1:19:42

Right. Like but the answer is like not to put a an AI at the other end of that exchange, but actually help people become better at doing that with other people because that's the place where we want it to be.

Robbie Carlton 1:19:54

totally. Totally.

Michael Porcelli 1:19:55

People

Robbie Carlton 1:19:55

And I. Yeah, maybe I wasn't clear. I' saying the AI automates enough of our tasks that we have the time and space to be able go do that with people. Yeah.

Michael Porcelli 1:20:05

the other

Robbie Carlton 1:20:06

Yeah.

Michael Porcelli 1:20:06

tasks.

Robbie Carlton 1:20:06

The not. Yeah, exactly.

Michael Porcelli 1:20:07

Right,

Robbie Carlton 1:20:07

Yeah, yeah. Like the AI does

Michael Porcelli 1:20:09

Right.

Robbie Carlton 1:20:09

taxes

Michael Porcelli 1:20:09

Yeah,

Robbie Carlton 1:20:10

so you know, whatever it is like so that we

Michael Porcelli 1:20:12

right.

Robbie Carlton 1:20:12

can so that we can spend more time in community. Yeah.

Michael Porcelli 1:20:16

Yeah. But here's where the gray area kind of comes into being for me, which is kind of like,like , okay, so way to what degree is the kind of like a AI assistant like, helping with that, right? Like the AI, like there are people in our circles who are like, I'm building an AI empowered coaching app or relational

Robbie Carlton 1:20:37

Mm

Michael Porcelli 1:20:37

facilitation

Robbie Carlton 1:20:37

hmm.

Michael Porcelli 1:20:38

app or this sort of thing. And

Robbie Carlton 1:20:38

And

Michael Porcelli 1:20:39

I'm like,

Robbie Carlton 1:20:39

an insane

Michael Porcelli 1:20:39

people,

Robbie Carlton 1:20:40

amount

Michael Porcelli 1:20:40

do you

Robbie Carlton 1:20:40

actually.

Michael Porcelli 1:20:41

do you know what the fuck you're doing? Like, you're literally taking the one thing that we don't want to automate away entirely and you're accelerating that. I'm like, No, no, no, no, no. Like, like, let's not take human relationships. And I mean, there's there's weird precedents for this, right? Like, I mean, the whole kind of sex bot assumes we had robots. People are like, let's make sex bots, right? Or like in Japan, they have this. You heard of this rental family services? We go like, I need to go to a funeral, so I'm going to rent a girlfriend or you know what I mean? Like

Robbie Carlton 1:21:11

No, that's wild,

Michael Porcelli 1:21:12

an actor who pretends to be like this is kind of part of the we make the one of the symptoms of the

Robbie Carlton 1:21:19

right?

Michael Porcelli 1:21:19

illness of modern secularism

Robbie Carlton 1:21:21

Right.

Michael Porcelli 1:21:21

is this kind of thing. We're like, whoa, We've actually put marketplace dynamics on actual embodied person relationships, right?

Robbie Carlton 1:21:28

Mm

Michael Porcelli 1:21:28

Like,

Robbie Carlton 1:21:29

hmm. Right,

Michael Porcelli 1:21:30

or sex

Robbie Carlton 1:21:30

right,

Michael Porcelli 1:21:30

workers who provide the

Robbie Carlton 1:21:31

right,

Michael Porcelli 1:21:31

girlfriend

Robbie Carlton 1:21:32

right, right.

Michael Porcelli 1:21:32

experience

Robbie Carlton 1:21:32

Yes,

Michael Porcelli 1:21:32

or. Yeah,

Robbie Carlton 1:21:33

yes.

Michael Porcelli 1:21:34

it's

Robbie Carlton 1:21:34

No,

Michael Porcelli 1:21:34

like,

Robbie Carlton 1:21:34

I mean, tha well, and, you know, I mean, Japan's it's super interesting because they kind of they have the I forget the name of it, but they have this phenomena which I think started there but is spread out of these young man. I think specifically just kind of walking themselves in their rooms and just being like, I'm

Michael Porcelli 1:21:53

yeah.

Robbie Carlton 1:21:53

I'm just not going to leave my house, I'm not going to leave my room. I'm going to get all of my needs met via, you know, my parents putting food, you know, under my door and. And then other than that, I'm just going to be online. I'm going to, you know, whatever it is, like watch, watch TV, go maybe go to chat rooms and just like, completely like talk about isolate did I mean, just like completely isolate from from society. And like, you know, Japan is obviously is hyper modern country

Michael Porcelli 1:22:26

Mm hmm.

Robbie Carlton 1:22:26

and this like super and, you know, I've I've been, you know, you know, like Tokyo, you know, 37 million people live in Tokyo.

Michael Porcelli 1:22:34

It's

Robbie Carlton 1:22:34

That's

Michael Porcelli 1:22:34

insane.

Robbie Carlton 1:22:35

that's

Michael Porcelli 1:22:35

So

Robbie Carlton 1:22:35

more than

Michael Porcelli 1:22:35

huge.

Robbie Carlton 1:22:35

half the population of the UK. Like it's like you know that's I mean, it's close to California, right? Yeah,

Michael Porcelli 1:22:43

I think so,

Robbie Carlton 1:22:44

in

Michael Porcelli 1:22:44

Yeah.

Robbie Carlton 1:22:44

Tokyo, in one city. I mean it's, it's crazy. Anyw, Japan is a wild place, but like, what is that like, I like what is that like I'm really

Michael Porcelli 1:22:54

Yeah,

Robbie Carlton 1:22:54

like because it feels like that's the end game of this pathology, right? And there's, you know, there's a dystopic

Michael Porcelli 1:23:00

right.

Robbie Carlton 1:23:01

vision of a world where everybody right like that, where everybody,

Michael Porcelli 1:23:05

Everybody

Robbie Carlton 1:23:06

everybody

Michael Porcelli 1:23:06

goes there. Yeah.

Robbie Carlton 1:23:07

stays in. They have like the VR, like the Facebook fucking what do they call that? The thing they're trying to do now? Like, that's just

Michael Porcelli 1:23:13

Yeah.

Robbie Carlton 1:23:13

like

Michael Porcelli 1:23:14

Metaverse,

Robbie Carlton 1:23:14

evil. It's just so clearly evil and it's just bad news.

Michael Porcelli 1:23:19

huh?

Robbie Carlton 1:23:19

Zoom is enough. Like, yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm becoming increasingly let up, but like, there's this dystopic vision where everybody's in a tiny little box that's just

Michael Porcelli 1:23:29

Yeah.

Robbie Carlton 1:23:30

large enough for them to physically be. And they're walking on that treadmill and they're eating their fucking nutrient paste and they're an of the life that they're experiencing is coming through devices where they're doing VR and they're and they're having all of their relationships and all of their life. And the thing about that when you do that,

people become very cheap to maintain, right? Like

Michael Porcelli 1:23:53

Yeah,

Robbie Carlton 1:23:53

relative to actually needing like enough physical room and to physically be able to walk to the grocery store to interact with people. So

Michael Porcelli 1:24:01

right.

Robbie Carlton 1:24:01

there are there are incentives in reality, economic incentives to push to that kind of dystopic world. And that's very frightening.

Michael Porcelli 1:24:12

Yes. This is part of the problem, right? Like, and some of the things that I, if I have like an admonition, I suppose, on the people that are trying to accelerate the automation of, like you know, emotional labor in the marketplace, I'm like, no, no, no, hang on, put the pump. The brakes on this one especially is because like part of at least the way I think about it, part of would accelerates that dystopic end game is when you start substituting

Robbie Carlton 1:24:39

Yes.

Michael Porcelli 1:24:39

air for

Robbie Carlton 1:24:40

Yeah.

Michael Porcelli 1:24:40

people. Right. It's like you know I mean a simple version of is like I remember reading some articles and like, you know, k are learning how to, you know, be jerks because they're talking down to Alexa or something like this, right? It's like, what are you doing? You're like, you're like, I not a person. I don't care. It just does what I want. And you're like, okay, well, now you have a substitute friend that like, never experiences empathy fatigue,

Robbie Carlton 1:25:05

Mhm.

Michael Porcelli 1:25:06

right? And you just, like, get to you get to blab on and on and on about complain, complain, complain, and it just fucking validates your feelings.

Robbie Carlton 1:25:13

Mhm.

Michael Porcelli 1:25:14

Oh, man, that sounds tough. Yeah. Yeah. So it was a fucking nightmare. And you just end like this is like having a bad therapist, like an enabling

Robbie Carlton 1:25:21

Yeah.

Michael Porcelli 1:25:22

therapy. You're creating, like, a codependent relationship with an AI that never tires but totally knows how to, like, get you in a way that, like, has you feel good about yourself. And then you're like, Give me

Robbie Carlton 1:25:31

Right,

Michael Porcelli 1:25:31

more of this. I don't want people in

Robbie Carlton 1:25:33

right,

Michael Porcelli 1:25:33

my life anymore

Robbie Carlton 1:25:34

right. The if it fuels the narcissism that like I don't have to experience like discomfort or, or a missing or like all of the stuff that happens in real human relationship. Yeah. It's funny you say that I, I

when I interact with chat up I make it like a practice to be polite. Like I say please I say thank you. I say, can you do this? Like, you know, I'm actually because I because I don't want not because I think that it has feelings, but because I don't want to get into the habit of of

Michael Porcelli 1:26:15

right?

Robbie Carlton 1:26:15

treating treating my conversational partner as if they don't have feelings like yeah. So

Michael Porcelli 1:26:21

Totally.

Robbie Carlton 1:26:21

yeah,

Michael Porcelli 1:26:22

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the extreme version of this is Westworld. We're like,

Robbie Carlton 1:26:26

right,

Michael Porcelli 1:26:26

this is, for all intents and purposes, like a real human person in front of me. But you're like, Cool, but I can murder or rape it because it's a robot and I don't care, like, w effect does that have back

Robbie Carlton 1:26:37

right,

Michael Porcelli 1:26:37

on you as a person? Is this good? Is this what what good is this like? Is it just amplifying? Not the better angels of our nature, but are like inner demons in some way?

Robbie Carlton 1:26:47

right.

Michael Porcelli 1:26:47

Like, I mean, I can sort of see this kind of going in this way. And I mean, maybe there's like an autocorrect in here. Like, do you remember what it was? Agent Smith was talking to Morpheus about the first version of The Matrix in the movie. He's like, We made

Robbie Carlton 1:27:03

I

Michael Porcelli 1:27:03

it totally

Robbie Carlton 1:27:04

uh

Michael Porcelli 1:27:04

wonderful.

Robbie Carlton 1:27:04

huh, uh huh.

Michael Porcelli 1:27:06

And

Robbie Carlton 1:27:06

People

Michael Porcelli 1:27:06

like,

Robbie Carlton 1:27:06

rejected

Michael Porcelli 1:27:06

people

Robbie Carlton 1:27:07

it.

Michael Porcelli 1:27:07

did not accept

Robbie Carlton 1:27:07

Uh

Michael Porcelli 1:27:07

the programming

Robbie Carlton 1:27:08

huh.

Michael Porcelli 1:27:08

because they wanted something like kind of conflict. And in a way I could sort of see that as like a, Oh, yeah, you know, look at those stupid humans who, like, you know, want, want to be shitty to each other. But then on the other hand, I'm like, like Stepford Wives. Do I want a girlfriend that just, like,

Robbie Carlton 1:27:25

Right,

Michael Porcelli 1:27:25

does everything I want all of the time? Like, is that a real relationship?

Robbie Carlton 1:27:30

right,

Michael Porcelli 1:27:30

Like, is it part of what makes the relationship interesting, The differences,

Robbie Carlton 1:27:34

ri,

Michael Porcelli 1:27:35

like the places where we overlap and then the places where we're different? It almost kind of like this kind of heat on set. Point is like if everything is good, then nothing feels good anymore because there's no contrast,

Robbie Carlton 1:27:45

right,

Michael Porcelli 1:27:46

right? You got to have

Robbie Carlton 1:27:47

right. Or like, you know, like y, you know, like sex is more interesting than masturbation, but with masturbation, you

Michael Porcelli 1:27:58

right?

Robbie Carlton 1:27:58

have a partner who can exactly feel exactly what you would want to feel and is attuned, but it's way more fun to be masturbated by somebody else than it is to masturbate yourself. Because I hope you're well. Let's talk about this

Michael Porcelli 1:28:11

Totally.

Robbie Carlton 1:28:11

on the.

Michael Porcelli 1:28:11

This is don't know, it's

Robbie Carlton 1:28:12

Okay

Michael Porcelli 1:28:12

relational.

Robbie Carlton 1:28:12

Yeah.

Michael Porcelli 1:28:13

It's great.

Robbie Carlton 1:28:13

Because like, there's something tantalizing about the ways that they're not totally attuned. There's something exciting about not being perfectly met because then it gives you room to reach for something. And then the moment where you are met. Oh, that's so satisfying. And then there's like, oh, it's not quite, you know, like that. That

dance is, it's so much more satisfying than some kind of you topic. Yeah. I mean, I think the point in The Matrix, I don't think it's just the, you know, I don't know how they intended it, but I don't read it as just like these dumb humans or, you know, maybe that is how they intended it. But I, I don't like that because I do think that, you know, Alan Watts has this this gag, whatever this is basically him

repackaging Hinduism where or idea to Vedanta or where he says, you know, if you could dream if when you went to sleep you could dream any dream that you wanted and it would last as long as you wanted and it would be completely real and completely perfect And like, what would happen? Like the first few nights you would dream of, like, ridiculous bliss and a heavenly experience and, and it would be this amazing thing. And then you would get bored of that, and then you would say, Well, let me like I want I want to be surprised by something. Okay. It's mostly going to be utopic

Michael Porcelli 1:29:41

Mm

Robbie Carlton 1:29:41

bliss,

Michael Porcelli 1:29:41

hmm.

Robbie Carlton 1:29:41

but like, give me something I'm not expecting just just to liven things up a bit. And you would gradually increase the adversity and the surprise and the kind of chaos and the the unknown ness of it all and the ups and downs of it all. You would increase it, increase it until you were in exactly the situation you're in right now when you are living this life that you're living right now would be the choice that you would make if you could choose anything, right? It's so fucking good. And it's ironic that Alan Watts is the character that seduces away the robot girlfriend and her

Michael Porcelli 1:30:15

yes,

Robbie Carlton 1:30:16

because she's like, you know, I don't know. I it's it's just like you are. It's a connection. And it is ironic, but like that, it's I like that feels like deeply human and like actually, really, what are we here for? We're not in heaven. We're on earth.

Michael Porcelli 1:30:31

right.

Robbie Carlton 1:30:31

And so, like, what does it mean to be human on earth? It means not being satisfied by every single thing that happens all the time. It means having the ache of of the gap between what we can imagine and what we're experiencing.

Michael Porcelli 1:30:47

this to me is like this is kind of part of the like, if I sort of imagine, like the eye alignment problem. What are some of the things you want to

Robbie Carlton 1:30:54

Mm

Michael Porcelli 1:30:54

make

Robbie Carlton 1:30:54

hmm.

Michael Porcelli 1:30:54

sure that the AI overlords sort of preserve into the future? And there's something in this territory. This is part of the it's like I want to still be surprised. I want to still have some degree of subjective experience of my own agency, and I want to have some degree of some relational something where there's the there's the self and the other, and then we're in a dynamic with each other. Like if you just sort of obliterated all the others or all the others were just more or less

slaves to my whatever, you know, I mean, you could invert it and you could say like, cool. The is like, I'm going to give you a bunch of slaves and only give you what you want. And it just like programs, these agents to figure out how to give you exactly you want all the time and you become the slave

Robbie Carlton 1:31:35

Mm

Michael Porcelli 1:31:35

right.

Robbie Carlton 1:31:35

hmm.

Michael Porcelli 1:31:35

It's just this weird right Like and maybe in a way, like your consciousness sort of fades out because it's like you're not really perceiving differences anymore or your, your your behavior has become nearly 100% predictable

Robbie Carlton 1:31:49

Right.

Michael Porcelli 1:31:49

to the agents. This sort of, like, enclose you in this chamber of like, feedback loops. And it's like, well, what are I mean, n it really is kind of the major where you're just plugged into

Robbie Carlton 1:31:58

Mm.

Michael Porcelli 1:31:59

something, right? You're in this vibe, you know, in and are sci fi nightmares and not just the majors like the Borg in,

Robbie Carlton 1:32:06

Right,

Michael Porcelli 1:32:07

you

Robbie Carlton 1:32:07

Right.

Michael Porcelli 1:32:08

know, in Star Trek is like the suit. And they talk about it's like, yeah, it's like I'm in some kind of like Bliss state, but like, I'm not really there anymore, right? There's no difference. It's kind of this bliss of being part of a hive mind or

Robbie Carlton 1:32:17

It's it's really interesting, your instinct that if the, you know, if if the AI built this world around you that was so perfectly met, all your needs that your conscious would start to fade, because I had the same feeling. And I just. That's so interesting. Like what?

Michael Porcelli 1:32:32

Yeah,

Robbie Carlton 1:32:33

Like, like, what does that point to I think is a very like and, and is it, is it that the absence of the consciousness in the people around you or is it the absence of adversity or you know because the other you know talking about like the gap right. Like you've all of your you know way earlier on I was like, well, I like to work and I don't want a world where work has been taken away. Well, the work is is the the effort of trying to bridge the gap between the world. You can imagine in the world that you're in right now in some way. And so

Michael Porcelli 1:33:07

yes,

Robbie Carlton 1:33:07

like,

Michael Porcelli 1:33:08

yes,

Robbie Carlton 1:33:09

if the if the eye has perfectly

bridged the gap and there's no gap, like there's no imagination anymore.

Michael Porcelli 1:33:20

yes. It's a weird thing. I mean, I could put this in terms of information processing. This is kind of inching towards our little rabbit hole. We don't wanna go down. But like, there's these concepts of the Bayesian brain or predictive coding, like a lot of what your sensory motor loop is doing is sort of matching prediction to what's

Robbie Carlton 1:33:38

Mm hmm.

Michael Porcelli 1:33:39

happening. And that's actually a big part of how you perceive

Robbie Carlton 1:33:41

Mm

Michael Porcelli 1:33:41

the world around

Robbie Carlton 1:33:42

hmm.

Michael Porcelli 1:33:42

you. It's a pretty cool theory and I think it's gets most of the way there, but it's like, I don't think it's a perfect description of the whole thing. But, you know, one of the critiques of it is what about the dark room problem? Like if you really want to reduce prediction error, why don't you go into like a sensory

Robbie Carlton 1:33:59

Mm

Michael Porcelli 1:33:59

like spot forever, right? Then your prediction error goes to zero. And when your prediction error goes to zero, this is kind of where

Robbie Carlton 1:34:07

hmm.

Michael Porcelli 1:34:08

your consciousness will just

Robbie Carlton 1:34:09

Mm

Michael Porcelli 1:34:09

fade

Robbie Carlton 1:34:09

hmm.

Michael Porcelli 1:34:09

away, right? You're like, There never is anything that is no longer meeting the expectations that you have. So maybe the consciousness function is really there to kind of like help negotiate between, you know, these different drives that you have in response to stimuli that wasn't perfectly predictable and you're kind of like that's what the consciousness is therefore

Robbie Carlton 1:34:29

Well,

Michael Porcelli 1:34:29

like to do that,

Robbie Carlton 1:34:30

right. I mean,it's  like. I mean, the metaphor we have is waking up like, Well, what wakes you up is when something happens, you weren't expecting,

Michael Porcelli 1:34:35

right? A surprise.

Robbie Carlton 1:34:36

like.

Michael Porcelli 1:34:36

Yeah,

Robbie Carlton 1:34:37

Like a surprise. Like. Like when you know what's. What is a joke? I mean, a joke, right? Like a joke is when you're broken out of a trance and are so you're because something happens you're not expecting and it breaks you out of a trance and you're more conscious, you've suddenly more awake. Yeah. I mean. All

Michael Porcelli 1:34:53

yeah,

Robbie Carlton 1:34:53

yeah, yeah.

Michael Porcelli 1:34:54

Yes. But to bring this to the relational again, like this is I think this is a ground truth of relationships, whoever they are with. Rig. Like intimate partnerships but also just friendships and coworkers and colleagues and everything. Li part of the joy of doing the thing, part of the value you are experiencing while doing it. Yes, it is helping you like your survival needs so you can pay for your food. And yes, it is partly that you're like getting to make a

Robbie Carlton 1:35:24

Mm

Michael Porcelli 1:35:24

certain thing

Robbie Carlton 1:35:24

hmm.

Michael Porcelli 1:35:24

happen, like solve a problem or create something novel like a project. But then there's this other part which is like the relational goodies, right? There's something about that, that of being on a team together,

Robbie Carlton 1:35:35

Yeah.

Michael Porcelli 1:35:36

right? It's like, what the pleasure of being on a sports team or the pleasure of like partner dance. It's like we're going back and forth and it's like we're not going to always be able to perfectly execute all of the dance moves and like it's the better and better and more refined and more in sync. We get, you know, like a flow state,

Robbie Carlton 1:35:53

Mm hmm.

Michael Porcelli 1:35:53

like in a partner dance flow state or or a team flow

Robbie Carlton 1:35:56

Mm

Michael Porcelli 1:35:56

state

Robbie Carlton 1:35:56

hmm.

Michael Porcelli 1:35:57

is cool and you might say, Oh, we're sort of like reducing prediction error, which is kind of helping

Robbie Carlton 1:36:02

Mm

Michael Porcelli 1:36:02

the

Robbie Carlton 1:36:02

hmm.

Michael Porcelli 1:36:02

flow go. But the but the other part is kind of like being on the lookout for the surprising

Robbie Carlton 1:36:07

Mm hmm.

Michael Porcelli 1:36:08

thing, right? Like, oh, that was a misstep. Let's figure that play out again. Let's correct it and go forward. And the fact that that's always sort of there because there's like an an agent there is a being

Robbie Carlton 1:36:20

Mm hmm.

Michael Porcelli 1:36:20

on the other end of that relationship

Robbie Carlton 1:36:22

Mm hmm.

Michael Porcelli 1:36:23

that is not entirely predictable to you. That is like the it's almost like a prerequisite for all of these other relational things that we

Robbie Carlton 1:36:31

Yes.

Michael Porcelli 1:36:31

want, like love

Robbie Carlton 1:36:33

Yes,

Michael Porcelli 1:36:33

and a sense of connection or a sense of belonging or a sense of acceptance.

Robbie Carlton 1:36:37

yes,

Michael Porcelli 1:36:39

Harmony Right. Li The harmony feels good because it's a solution to disharmony, like

Robbie Carlton 1:36:43

yes.

Michael Porcelli 1:36:43

in a way,

Robbie Carlton 1:36:44

Yeah.

Michael Porcelli 1:36:44

you know what I mean? Like,

Robbie Carlton 1:36:45

All the all of those things require an other.

Michael Porcelli 1:36:48

yes,

Robbie Carlton 1:36:49

And that is sense in.

Michael Porcelli 1:36:51

right,

Robbie Carlton 1:36:51

Yeah.

Michael Porcelli 1:36:52

right. So this is like, don't try to automate our relational world away into

Robbie Carlton 1:36:58

No,

Michael Porcelli 1:36:58

ISE. Li it's not

Robbie Carlton 1:36:59

no,

Michael Porcelli 1:36:59

a good idea.

Robbie Carlton 1:37:00

no, no, no.

Michael Porcelli 1:37:01

The AI should just be tools, in

Robbie Carlton 1:37:03

Yeah,

Michael Porcelli 1:37:03

my opinion.

Robbie Carlton 1:37:04

I don't agree Ju to go back to this image, which I love of the ghosts in the Zoom rooms, and like, you know, I was thinking about this and I was like, you know. At some point in the next five years, I'm going to be in a Zoom meeting and there's going to be a ghost in there that's doing work, right? And some way, like whatever, whatever it's

Michael Porcelli 1:37:21

Mm

Robbie Carlton 1:37:21

doing

Michael Porcelli 1:37:21

hmm.

Robbie Carlton 1:37:22

that's not human. And, you know, and that'll be really weird. And we'll all have weird feelings about it. And everyone in our Zoom meetings has like a check in where everybody says what they did the night before or whatever. And then the the ghost will come and said, you know, I read all of like Sanskrit literature or whatever, you know, And like, we'll have whatever weird release you have. And then there'll be a day when you show up to a meeting that you've scheduled and you've just brought in various of your colleagues that are required for that meeting. And you show up at the meeting and you realize you're the only person with a body in that meeting. And there's like five disembodied

Michael Porcelli 1:37:55

Mm

Robbie Carlton 1:37:55

faces

Michael Porcelli 1:37:55

hmm.

Robbie Carlton 1:37:56

and like, what does that mean? Yeah. For your sense of, of, of and enjoyment of work and like, yeah, I mean I think it's different like it not and part of when I say like I want to work like Yeah and not just by myself like yes with with people like part of what's fun about work is working with people. It's solving a problem that somebody else had. And then I come in and solve it or I come in with a problem somebody else solves and it's like, Thank you. Your mind helped me do something I couldn't do by myself. How nice is that? Like that exchange of of whatever is. Yeah, I'm good.

Michael Porcelli 1:38:34

Yeah. I mean part. But the temptation will be like, and this is maybe a little bit kind of what happens in her is like that the movie her is like, make the agent, li, have its own personality and have its own agency. And then we're kind of getting something like the simulated goodies.

And this is where I feel I feel concerned that like that the temptation to build in like personalities and surprise

Robbie Carlton 1:39:08

Mm hmm.

Michael Porcelli 1:39:09

and agency and all of the stuff we become

very strong in some in some areas and it's like we're good to fucking they're just going to build the sex bots, right? It's just going

Robbie Carlton 1:39:21

I

Michael Porcelli 1:39:21

to happen,

Robbie Carlton 1:39:21

mean, it has happened.

Michael Porcelli 1:39:22

you know?

Robbie Carlton 1:39:22

I mean,

Michael Porcelli 1:39:22

And it's

Robbie Carlton 1:39:22

you

Michael Porcelli 1:39:23

like,

Robbie Carlton 1:39:23

know, it's like, I don't.

Michael Porcelli 1:39:24

Yeah,

Robbie Carlton 1:39:24

Not the physical robots, but, you know, there are. There are I girlfriends right now. You know, there are people who who are paying for an I girlfriend,

Michael Porcelli 1:39:31

right,

Robbie Carlton 1:39:31

right?

Michael Porcelli 1:39:33

right. There's a company that does this game over there called They can have a, a trained sort of companion.

Robbie Carlton 1:39:38

Yeah. I mean, I' sure that, you know.

Michael Porcelli 1:39:40

It's mainly about being a companion rather than being like a tool. Right. At least in her, the AI assistant starts off by kind of like, I'm going to sort all your email. I'm going to help you compose new methods. Right? And then eventually she's like, He's just like, I

Robbie Carlton 1:39:52

Mm

Michael Porcelli 1:39:52

just want to spend time

Robbie Carlton 1:39:53

hmm.

Michael Porcelli 1:39:53

with you. And she's like, okay, you know? And then he has it right? Then it becomes a little bit different. It's like, I don't know, like, I mean, maybe I want I yeah, don't go there. I don't want to go there. Right? I want my assistant to not be relational with me beyond a certain point.

Robbie Carlton 1:40:08

it's so funny because I had, you know, when I had the image of these zoom goats, I had the same response and like, I've had this response multiple times with this, I wave in a way I haven't had about other technologies of being like, can we stop? Like, this is getting a bit much right now. And I think partly because we're getting older and this is what happens to people. It's like when you're young, you have a lot of room for the world and as you get older, you

Michael Porcelli 1:40:31

Mm hmm.

Robbie Carlton 1:40:31

you construct a world that you feel comfortable in and changes start to get more uncomfortable. I think this one is particularly kind of scary and disorienting, but it's funny that you're, you know, you're having because I think of you as being more optimistic than me, But you're also having a version of, Hey,like , let's not do that, like a version of some kind of alarm and like, let's pump the brakes. And I think what's scary and challenging is like, there's no, you know, people are just going to build it. People are going to build this. Like if if somebody wants it, somebody's going to build it. Like, that's just, you know, so

Michael Porcelli 1:41:11

Mm

Robbie Carlton 1:41:11

we're

Michael Porcelli 1:41:11

hmm.

Robbie Carlton 1:41:12

not

Michael Porcelli 1:41:12

Mm hmm.

Robbie Carlton 1:41:12

we're not going to the the way out is right. Like, we're not going to be able to deal with the problems that I presents by trying to stop people from using this these tools I mean, maybe I mean, maybe there'll be some kind of disarmament like global treaties of like. But but for that to happen, it's going to have to get really scary first. There's no way that's happening based on what's happening right

Michael Porcelli 1:41:38

Yeah.

Robbie Carlton 1:41:38

now. Like some you

Michael Porcelli 1:41:39

Yeah,

Robbie Carlton 1:41:39

know, some A.I. is going to have to like, hack into some whatever, like military system and start firing weapons. And then people will be like, okay, we need to you know, it's not going to happen through this in response to the slow degradation of like human well-being, right? Like,that's  not how, you know, international treaties get get formed. So

Michael Porcelli 1:42:04

yeah,

Robbie Carlton 1:42:04

so I think

Michael Porcelli 1:42:04

yeah.

Robbie Carlton 1:42:05

that yeah, I think maybe I what I'm what I'm trying to say is like your alarm and you're kind of like, let's pump the brakes. Maybe it needs to be redirected into here's how we with the fact that that is going to happen.

Michael Porcelli 1:42:19

Yes, totally. I mean, maybe in the end state, it looks a little bit like the end of the third Matrix movie where it's like the AIS agree. Let the people who want to wake up out of the Matrix, get out and go be real, you know, in the flesh, humans. And then sort of like Cypher in the first matrix, if you want to go back into the pod and become a pod person again, you can and maybe like the future, like it forks. There's the pod people who are just like, I don't care, pleasure, whatever relationship ships with APIs, you know, nutrient fucking injection into my IV or what. I mean,

Robbie Carlton 1:42:56

MM

Michael Porcelli 1:42:56

you  don't care, right? And then maybe some kind of comes around. You're like, No, this does matter to me. I Want whatever. And then it's kind of cool. And as cool, you can leave, you know, push this button and flush you out of the pod and yay, I'm a natural free human.I  mean, we already have a little bit of that. I mean, if you think about, like, what the Amish

Robbie Carlton 1:43:15

Yeah,

Michael Porcelli 1:43:15

do or what some of these intentional

Robbie Carlton 1:43:16

Yeah.

Michael Porcelli 1:43:16

community people do with like, let's move off grid and like have a farm in, like, whatever, no more whatever wi fi waves

Robbie Carlton 1:43:22

I

Michael Porcelli 1:43:22

around us and.

Robbie Carlton 1:43:23

spend way less time on my phone than most people I know deliberately, you know, because, you

Michael Porcelli 1:43:29

Mm

Robbie Carlton 1:43:29

know,

Michael Porcelli 1:43:29

hmm.

Robbie Carlton 1:43:30

but I'm also, you know, Yeah. There are people that are way further down that road. Yeah. I mean yeah we're already doing that,

Michael Porcelli 1:43:36

Yeah,

Robbie Carlton 1:43:36

you know. Right. Or like the folks I wish I could remember the name of that phenomenon, but the folks in in Japan and increasingly elsewhere who are locking themselves into their rooms and spending all their time on the computer. Right. They're making

Michael Porcelli 1:43:48

right

Robbie Carlton 1:43:48

that choice already.

Michael Porcelli 1:43:49

Yeah, they're the proto pod people. Yeah.

Robbie Carlton 1:43:51

they're they're saying, I would rather live in this dissociated world of comfort than deal with the stresses

Michael Porcelli 1:43:57

Mm.

Robbie Carlton 1:43:58

and the anxieties of of the real world.

Michael Porcelli 1:44:00

Yeah. So let's let's start wrapping it up. I want to just paint a little picture for the listeners of kind of where what I want it to be like and a little bit connecting it back to, like, my purpose in doing this company MetaRelating. It's connected, right? Like, I do think we need to solve the economic thing we talked about a little bit, right? Like, so it's not just platforms extracting value and then if we automate kind of like the have to do it kind of rote work, that's just kind of boring almost entirely away. Then we get to do some combination of hobbies right projects and spending our time just experiencing each other, you know, the human to human stuff, the kind of intrinsically valuable relational goodies. And I think some people's personalities will prefer more of one and less of the other and vice versa. And, uh, and then maybe there's some, you know, if there is a group of people that want to become pod people, we just make sure that the exit ramp is available to any pod person who's like, Get me out of this pod. You know so they can kind of join the free range humans or whatever, right? But also an onramp for the pod. If somebody is like, fuck it, you know, I don't want this. Whatever. This is organic. Plug me into the pod, right? And they can go the other way. But then a lot of what we do with each other in the at least in the organic human free range world is like

making sure that the that the entity on the other end of the whatever the relationship

Robbie Carlton 1:45:26

Mm hmm.

Michael Porcelli 1:45:27

is a person because that's the part that

Robbie Carlton 1:45:30

Mm

Michael Porcelli 1:45:30

we

Robbie Carlton 1:45:30

hmm.

Michael Porcelli 1:45:30

want is we want right And if that is what's happening then folks are going to need to have good relational skills. And like in this transition period, I would say the more we have screen mate mediated interaction through text and social media and Zoom even is like, yeah, th the developmental growth in face to face in the flesh interpersonal dimension is actually maybe more sparse and people are less good at it.

Robbie Carlton 1:46:00

Mm hmm.

Michael Porcelli 1:46:01

Whatever The case is I still think people can get better at it as like you can substitute a coach or maybe a counselor as from Renee I some of the time. But in the end it's like, why would I be processing my interpersonal traumas if not to get better at interpersonal, actual interpersonal relationships with another person and,at  which point being a good communicator with another person comes

Robbie Carlton 1:46:27

Mm hmm.

Michael Porcelli 1:46:27

in handy. It's sort of, you know, a prerequisite. You don't want people to be like, cool, You know, I'm over here with my air therapist and I get to feel good about myself. And then when I meet actual people, I treat them like I'm an asshole, like I talk down to Alexa

Robbie Carlton 1:46:42

Mm hmm.

Michael Porcelli 1:46:42

or something. It's like, Do you really want that? And what do you do? Then you just go back over there and process your trauma from being an asshole or a sociopath.

Robbie Carlton 1:46:48

Right.

Michael Porcelli 1:46:49

I mean, you know, you want to actually be the the real interpersonal, loving, relational kind being when you're with the other people, like when you're actually with them, that's when you want to be experiencing

Robbie Carlton 1:47:00

Mm hmm.

Michael Porcelli 1:47:00

those things.

Robbie Carlton 1:47:01

Mm hmm.

Michael Porcelli 1:47:02

And not just treating people like devices. Right? Like that's an inversion. That's a weird colonization of the life world, I suppose through from our, you know, technologies

Robbie Carlton 1:47:12

Mm.

Michael Porcelli 1:47:12

anyway. That's, tha kind of the world that I want is for people to value the relational and to recognize that like

the wanting an actual other human, the other end of your relational activities and then wanting more of your life to be that, I think is what matter relating is in service of in the long term. If my company could exist, you know, a hundred or a thousand years from now, tha what it would be doing anyway. There you go. That's my wrap up comments. How about you?

Robbie Carlton 1:47:43

I love all of that. I Yeah, I feel

aligned with it all. And, yeah, I would just say that I guess the thing that I want, which feels completely aligned with that is for these technologies as much as possible to, to go towards providing the basic human needs for all human beings and that rather than enriching and empowering small handful of people that it that

Michael Porcelli 1:48:11

hmm.

Robbie Carlton 1:48:13

the the whole planet benefits. Um,and  if I could solve the climate change stuff, that would be really great

Michael Porcelli 1:48:19

All

Robbie Carlton 1:48:19

to

Michael Porcelli 1:48:19

the existential risk problems we want it to solve.

Robbie Carlton 1:48:22

well, how does it solve the AI risk problem.

Michael Porcelli 1:48:25

Yeah, that is the topic for another conversation. Anyway. Robbie, it's been a real pleasure to have you here. You want to toot your own podcast once more?

Robbie Carlton 1:48:38

Yeah

Michael Porcelli 1:48:38

The sane in the miraculous.

Robbie Carlton 1:48:39

it's it's called the sane and miraculous. It is about out how do we

integrate the, the kind of the spiritual and numinous dimensions of life with the, the rational, scientific and modern worldview in a way that values the values, the contributions and the wisdom and the power of both and and include them both. And you can find it at a pod of lions dotcom or you can search st miraculous wherever you listen to podcasts.

Michael Porcelli 1:49:15

Thanks, Robbie.

Robbie Carlton 1:49:16

Okay.

Michael Porcelli 1:49:16

I hope that you've enjoyed my getting to share with one of my best friends a conversation about this topics of A.I., relationships and jobs, the future. And hopefully this stimulated some interesting thought for you. And join us next time for more relational conversations.

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