Yeah, I was thinking the second

First Amendment day is going to be weird and then the first Second Amendment anyway.

So for those of us who love the Ninth Amendment, we have some waiting to do.

But I have been hungry to make sense of what maybe we all feel is a little bit of a drip, drip, drip of news about things that... approximate AI and to make sense of it rather than how they once called history one damn thing after another and how to make it not be that.

And one way to do that is to make sense of some of the consistent arguments that we've seen in the public sphere now, at least since generative AI first became widely known in the fall of 2022, and the different cultures around those arguments.

So we have here a standard issue triangle.

Here's how I've been thinking about it.

So

Can you remind our younger listeners or perhaps less historically inclined listeners about this flash crash that occurred in twenty ten and why it's so relevant today?

Well, uh, sure.

And thanks so much for having me on.

And yes, let's talk to the youngins and instead of telling them to get off my lawn, gather round, pull up a lawn chair and we'll talk.

And before even talking about flash crash, as long as we're going back in time, it might be worth talking about the nineteen eighty-eight Morris worm when Robert Tappan Morris Jr. or III, I forget his suffix, created something on the internet that it turned out lodged itself in different Unix compatible hosts and then propagated further.

And before he knew it, unintended, it was sort of everywhere.

And that was in nineteen eighty-eight, a kind of wake up call about first unintended consequences, Mickey Mouse and the broomsticks from Fantasia, but now we're going back to like the late forties and early fifties, and about the ways in which you could have set it and forget it systems.

Give us some hope about how do we at least pursue this innovative agenda while also not pursuing a world full of curses and hexes and whatever bad ailments, uh, we can imagine.

Yeah.

That said, of course, life imitates art.

There is such a temptation to try to take all of the writings or speech of somebody, it's trivial to record it now and to accumulate it, and then say, "All right.

We have, quote-unquote, 'trained' an LLM on all that stuff, so now it can be that.

It's your digital doppelganger." And especially given the puzzles of summarization before, and let's be clear, the manifold ways in which I trained it on that text specifically could be realized, some of which involve changing the weights of the model, some of which just involve some fancy footwork and database retrieval at the last second to sound like the person whose words are in that database.

Um, I think it is a time for us to say, "Look, if what I wanna know is the intellectual or cognitive work of a person, great, it's now an interactive database, and I can even treat it as if it's them.

It's Socrates come to life," and, you know, great, whatever it might be.

Mm.