#333 - Devon Eriksen - Property Rights, Rent Seekers, AI, Communism, Why Culture is Upstream of Law

Chris Powers: I read some notes that said you might be in your third or fourth career. Can you explain what your career has been or the multiple jobs that you've had to date?

Devon Eriksen: Well, I've done a bunch of my stuff throughout my life, but the most recent one was that I was a software engineer for about two decades before I retired and started writing science fiction novels, and that's the big project.

Now I just. I put out my first one on November 11th, and it is taking off; it's garnered some attention on Twitter and other things I've done and said, so we're here today. I think a little more talk about some of the philosophy and economics than the novel, but my agent will murder me if I don't hold it up occasionally.

Chris Powers: Well, we'll link it in the show notes. 

Devon Eriksen: Okay, good. Good. 

Chris Powers: But you are correct. You captivated me with some tweets I saw you post on Twitter. It started with the Emmett Shear tweet. But when we had our pre-call, there was a line that you brought up multiple times. And I said this is where we will start it.

And you said culture is upstream of law, and law affects us. Let's start there. 

Devon Eriksen: Yeah, well, many Portions of the different subcultures of this country have, for the past several decades, chosen to be absent from the cultural dialogue. And, it's like, okay, we're conservatives. We don't care about art.

We don't care about fiction. We don't care about movies. All of that is for fruity Hollywood types. We must be more busy welding metal pieces together and ensuring the country runs. And sort of the problem with that attitude From a conservative or a libertarian standpoint is that, as I said, culture is upstream of law, things like art and fiction and film and all of these things.

They influence people and how people see the world because the natural function of art, especially fiction and stories, is to show you the world from somebody else's point of view. If you absent yourself from that conversation, If you don't produce your fiction, if you don't promote the novel written from your worldview and with your values, then your children will read somebody else's account of the world.

Moreover, the cultural dialogue will move In ways that you are not seeing because you're not part of that conversation and in ways that don't necessarily consider your needs because, again, you're not expressing your views. It would help if you got into these dialogues and spread narratives telling people how you see the world.

Chris Powers: Okay, and is this something that has, like, spans the test of time? It's always going back and forth like this. Somebody's always controlling the narrative. 

Devon Eriksen: Yeah. Well, if you think about it this way. When we developed language and sat around the campfire chipping pieces of flint into spearheads, we told each other stories. Stories were our way of explaining the universe and talking about what was important to us now; back then, it was this sort of mythology of trying to explain why there are stars in the sky. Still, culture's stories are always about what it considers necessary and how it asks and answers questions about the world around us.

So now we've got this situation where we have a whole bunch of people involved in this national dialogue, and a lot of the time, it's been on platforms owned by certain subcultures. They want to filter the discourse. The response of mainstream America to that has been, Oh, well, okay, we give up, I guess we're just going to stop watching movies and continue living our lives and, you know, gosh, why are, why are our kids all growing up so different and rejecting our culture?

What's going on? Well, you should have told them stories. 

Chris Powers: Okay, and why is it right now that it feels like there is a group of folks that maybe have been silent for a while, all of a sudden starting to wake up and kind of challenge a lot of the stories and narrative that's going on?

Devon Eriksen: Well, they're seeing what's happening with their children, and they're seeing what's happening with their children through the medium of public schools, of government schools because government schools are another source of this kind of narratives.

Again, this is another venue that sort of conservative middle America has some abandoned like we're not going to involve ourselves in that; that's not us at all. And so you have this curious sort of situation where there's a majority culture, the traditional culture of America, you know, primarily conservatives, mostly Christians, but some libertarians and other types are thrown in there.

And they're getting all their art, they're getting all their stories, they're getting all their entertainment. They're leaving their children's education to members of an entirely different culture. I think people are starting to notice some of the effects of this, and as some of the online censorship is loosening up now that the Supreme Court has said, well, you're no longer allowed to get on the phone with these social media companies and tell them to censor something.

We're starting to see more discussion of these things they're teaching. Our kids are crazy. And, hey, I used to read science fiction all the time, but I stopped 15 years ago because it feels like everything I pick up is a hate letter to anybody who looks, sounds, or thinks like me. We've thrown the term culture war around for a long time, But it hasn't been a war because one side hasn't been fighting.

And if you want to look at it as a cultural discussion rather than a war, I prefer it because people debating and arguing is part of the natural process. People have absented themselves from the debate, and a classic example of this is when I was watching Steven Crowder's show on YouTube. There was an episode I was interested in. He was talking to Kyle Rittenhouse or something. But don't quote me on that because I need to remember exactly. And Steven himself said the silliest thing. I had long heard an adult human saying I'm not interested in fiction.

That's for kids, something to that effect. And then he puts on this cartoon voice and tells me a story, Daddy. And I just stared at the screen in disbelief, like. You guys deserve to lose the culture war because you're stupid. The answer to what's going wrong here is entirely contained in the mockery he used to mock this concept of fiction and art. Tell me a story, Daddy. Who is if you're not making up stories to tell your children? If you're not the source of the stories, then you're not that in the sense that you're not where they get their values from, which also affects adults.

So you can sit here and posture. Like, you're some hard ass who has neither the time nor the cargo space for anything frivolous, like entertainment and culture and art. That stuff is going to affect you because it's going to change how people think. And how people think changes how the government thinks.

Because it changes not only how people vote but also what is part of the social dialogue the law responds to. Because the law, a lot of the time, keeps society the same. It reflects a change in society. We all believe this, so now we'll pass a law. The law is following the culture, and if you don't participate in this discussion that controls the culture and directs people's imaginations to imagine certain futures and not others, you're not at the table when the future is being planned.

And the version that gets planned doesn't include you. 

Chris Powers: Was there a period, and maybe you know this, or it was an era or a decade, when did the right decide to leave centre stage and not participate in the discussion of culture and art and everything you're mentioning? When we talked earlier, you said there was a decision that the right would no longer participate.

Devon Eriksen: Yeah, well, there are several factors there because, first of all, the 20th century was very much the century of totalitarianism. And as usual, what shapes human society is technology. It was because the significant communications technologies of the 20th century were one too many communications, first radio and then television.

So conservatives owned Some television, and liberals held some TV, and everything was top-down media communication. Even fiction was a bit like this because you had publishers and stuff, although, in that realm, people weren't too interested in controlling the dialogue.

They were looking for good stories, but the news was always biased. And then we had the Internet came along, and the Internet was the primary force for empowering individuals because there were many too many communications platforms, and people could talk to each other. The Internet was greatly affected by the character and the subculture of people who got on it.

And it was these nerds and hacker types and young people. It was young people because the boomers weren't interested in anything invented after age 30. So, you had an initial effect where the majority were on the Internet. It only reflected some of the country.

Then, people with specific cultural values started these internet companies or created the platforms. And then they'd succumbed to the temptation to use their ownership of the platforms to control the dialogue. Instead of any concerted effort to fight back, conservatives just said, Oh, well, okay, the Internet is for you guys.

We're just going to take our toys and pout and go home.

 Chris Powers: If you get back to where we are today, many progressives have owned every kind of media channel out there. At least, that's how it appears today. Every narrative that's not there is seen as correct.

Of right then, so everything that's spoken, if it's not the very far left and by nature, it's right. The right woke up and said, okay, we probably need to get back into this dialogue. Whether it's right, left, or I don't care, how will they get back in the conversation?

What has to happen for this to change? 

Devon Eriksen: Well, first of all, they have to wise up because right now the, the quality of the cultural discourse out there from the right has been very, very poor because it's been characterized by one of two things, either you have people who make a perfect living complaining about Hollywood and the media.

You know, you can, and you get, you get you, your, your sort of right-wing pundit types, like the Crowder above, where he's going to get on YouTube, and he's going to talk a lot, a lot, a lot about this sort of outrage for, like, look what the left is doing now, and, look what Netflix is doing to every show they re-adapt, and it's all Complaining about what the left is doing. It's all reactive. It's all that they're talking about what the left is doing. They're not putting their message out there. And, it's easier To make money cursing the darkness than to make money lighting a candle for these people. And then the other thing they do is that if you ask the right what its culture is, they start talking about religion.

So when somebody on the right gets their stuff together, Enough to say, we're going to make a movie. They decide, okay, we think that the first 997 movies we made about Jesus primed the pump and that we need to have That 998th movie about God, which will tip the scales and convince people. It's not because your religion is only one small part of your culture.

The reason that a lot of these people are pretending that religion is all of their culture, and we have to proselytize our religion more is their virtue signal. They're effectively saying, I am more religious than you guys, while we all lose the culture war. If you want to convince somebody of something or sell somebody something, you have to address a problem they are conscious of.

So you can't come at people and say, You are full of sin, and Jesus is going to save you. I understand this is an essential part of the Christian worldview and important to many Christians. And I don't want to argue with that worldview because there's something to be said for that.

But you must understand how that sounds to somebody who doesn't already agree with you. It sounds like most people don't go around daily saying, Well, I feel terrible about all this burden of sin. And gosh, I wish somebody could find me a solution to this problem.

So when you come along and say you are sinful, Jesus is the answer. It sounds like you're coming along and handing them a problem. And then you're saying, here's the solution you can have if you come to church with us. It feels like a shakedown, and there are so many other things about the traditional culture and even about the religious culture that people could be sharing. People could lead with this because it's like, who often converts to Christianity?

Well, whores, drug addicts and convicts, because these are the people who are walking around feeling like sin is a real problem that they have. If you look at the other things that religion and this kind of family-based lifestyle offer, you know the problem that people are having in the modern world is a feeling of isolation and disconnection.

So, the right is leading by talking about Jesus rather than leading by talking about communities rather than leading by discussing values that help you live a healthy and happy life. You know, all of these problems that we're conscious of having in society, you know, conservative pundits are very good at tracing them back to liberal ideology. Still, they need to talk about the alternatives.

They're not talking about how you can be healthy again. Here's how you can be happy again. Here's how you can be hopeful again. Here's how you can not walk around with this sense that you're living in a society in decline where, you know, all your science fiction novels are post-apocalyptic wastelands, like something out of Mad Max.

Chris Powers: Well, you touched on that. You said that science fiction, for a long time, was talking about the future. It was going to be great. There was going to be flying cars. It was going to be the greatest thing ever. And then there was this dystopian; we took a left turn, and then it became the world was ending.

Devon Eriksen: Yeah, exactly. And that affects how people think. You may have fewer people reading science fiction than reading romances. But do you think that Elon Musk grew up reading Gone Girl? No, he did not. He grew up reading The Moon is a Harsh Mysterie. And so these kinds of stories impact the people who do have.

Who does have the imagination required to say, I'm going to build something that's going to change the world? When we started seeding these mechanisms of culture for, when we're talking about science fiction, it was sort of the Manhattan-based publishing industry where you had Tom Doherty and all these people who were basically.

They ran publishing houses, but their actual function was they were talent scouts. And then, they died or aged out. And so you had all these kinds of BA types taking over, and they were Manhattanites, and they had Manhattanite values. And all of a sudden, now all the fiction you're reading, the science fiction you're reading is deconstructionist, is dystopian, is not really in a sense science fiction at all because your galactic empires are just sort of backdrops for people having discussions about pronouns over tea. So, there's a lot of this sort of, you know, dystopian and post-apocalyptic stuff. And because I grew up as a child reading.

The classic science fiction of the seventies, eighties, fifties, sixties, this sort of thing, when you're reading Larry Niven's Ringworld, or you're reading The Moon is a Harsh Mistress takes for granted, this idea that humanity is going to go on and build better things. For those of us who grew up reading this, we accepted that as the baseline. But, you know, I'm 50 years old, and when I talk to people who are 20 years old, they grew up reading a very different kind of story. And their imagination of the future is what horrible collapse will happen next. And should I be stockpiling rice or rifle ammunition or both?

Yeah, the globe's going to end. It's a global warming. Many of these fictional works always have many; these movies start with global disasters, climate change, wars, water shortages, hand waves, and mumbling. And it gets through that in about five minutes so that they can get on with the story.

And what's supposed to have destroyed the two is not even noticeable. We're just going to destroy civilization to write a story that takes place in a destroyed civilization. And that's what they find very interesting. You don't have this expression of hopefulness and excitement.

It's all about disaster avoidance and disaster mitigation. And we're poised at a pivotal period in history where we have two very different views of the world that two very different types of people find compelling. You, on one hand, we have people who are saying, oh, there's too many of us, we're destroying the planet.

We need to scale back our population. We need to stop building technology. We want humanity to reach this steady state where we're in balance and equilibrium with the Earth. We can exist as a population of 500 million or whatever scattered across the globe, putting up solar panels, composting, and whatnot. We'll live like this at a steady level of technology until the sun burns out and we all die.

And then there's this other vision of the world, which says, okay, we're privatizing the space industry. We're building reusable rocket boosters instead of the old disposable ones. We want to increase our boost to ten, a hundred, a thousand-fold orbit capacity. We're going to go; we're going to run around wearing t-shirts that say occupy Mars.

We're keen to go out and inhabit the solar system. And confront the challenges that come with that because, you know, it's not built for us to be in it. And we're going to mine asteroids, and we're going to, you know, redirect comets for water. And we're going to build all of these things, and we're going to spread out into the universe.

We're going to grow because the universe is a prominent place. We're going to grow into it, and we're going to become more powerful as we become more technological. And we're going to change our world, and we're going to change ourselves. We will continue the trajectory of Western civilization because we think Western civilization is a good thing, and let's do more of that.

So anyway, these are the two views, and it's up to us who wins. 

Chris Powers: Well, you had a quote on your website. You said the era of whining is over, and humanity is going places again. So, is the ball currently in the we're going to Mars camp? 

Devon Eriksen: That's where I'm behind and pushing because human beings survive by being clever and figuring stuff out.

And. We've always succeeded by inventing, growing, and changing, and we're confronted with some people now who put on this sort of air of responsibility and talk about being responsible stewards of the Earth. But this means that they're anti-growth, and they're anti-change, and they're anti-progress, and they're anti-invention, and they're anti-technology.

They're just against everything that has made the human race successful. 

Chris Powers: My favourite climate activists have beach houses and G6 50 planes. 

Devon Eriksen: Yeah, well, you notice that the people who embrace this message. It's not about making a personal sacrifice because they envision the future.

It's a classic fallacy that a lot of your leftist narratives are based on. It's there's a fixed amount of stuff, and they'll typically phrase this by saying the world is only so big, there are only so many natural resources, the environment can only support so many of us, there's this fixed amount of stuff, and the big question of civilization is.

How we divide it up and the alternate view, the view I am talking about in fiction and my commentary, is that stuff is what you make. And we used to be running around Africa with nothing but a rock, a few sticks and some grass, and then we built civilization.

And that's a change in the amount of stuff; this is like we built something, and now we have better things in life. So we're not, people of this worldview are not primarily concerned, whether you want to call them, you know, progress-oriented or technocrats or libertarians or whatever you want to contact us, we're not concerned as much with how we divide up the stuff.

How do we produce a superabundance of stuff? How do we continue the arc of civilization, improving life into the future? 

Chris Powers: This is a perfect pivot point in the conversation. So I want to go to. What was your most famous tweet series, which came about around property rights? And you started by saying that we wouldn't have civilization without them.

And that caught me off guard. So, let's start at the beginning. What are property rights, who invented them, and why would civilization not exist if we didn't have them? 

Devon Eriksen: Okay, so, some people think, okay, rights are things we get from God, and that's a religious view. And other people believe rights are just natural and inherent.

And I look at the world and say, well, rights are something that we made up. We just looked at the universe and decided, well, people have rights, and these are what they are. And the thing about that is that we didn't invent them arbitrarily. We created them because we need them.

We invented them because we can't have civilization any other way. The reason we have civilization, the reason we have technology, the reason we're able to have this conversation is that people Take things that are just lying around in the natural world. They work to improve, transform, and make them into something.

In other words, they invest, and when they invest, they expect to control their investment results. Suppose they're not going to be able to do that. If someone is just going to come, some thug will just come along and remove the rock you chipped into a spearhead; then you won't do that again.

Because you've wasted your effort, why would you put an effort into something that won't benefit you? So we need civilization, a reason for people to invest in things. We need a reason for people to make an effort. We need a reason to care. And so we invented property rights.

And, when I say we, this process started very early in the evolutionary process. It was before you had humans because if you think animals don't understand property rights, go thump on a beehive for a while and see what happens to you. So, this is very deeply rooted in our evolution.

But it's a social technology necessary to have a civilization at all. 

Chris Powers: And, that dayist argument: Let's give it all back to the government. We'll have one owner, and they'll distribute it fairly to everyone.

Devon Eriksen: Somebody said we should have a 100 per cent inheritance tax. And the interim CEO of OpenAI, one Emmet Scheer, came along and said, yeah, that sounds like a great idea. I'm going to argue for that because I was born into this family with investments, so I had seed money to start my company when I was young, and it would be great if everyone had that opportunity.

So he's spitballing this idea that makes him sound very fair. But what he's doing in the background is creating these plans, for here's how we're going to move all the little human beings like you around like chess pieces. And then when you get mad, we'll say, what's wrong? We're trying to help you.

So, I went off on this because this is the destruction of civilization itself. People don't build things anymore because everybody's, because it will just get taken away from them. Then he walked it back to, okay, let's have a 50 per cent inheritance tax as if that makes a difference because then 50 per cent of the tax on an asset for sale.

So it's the same thing. You lose your property. And it's like all the transmitted knowledge, the multi-generational family businesses, and the accumulated expertise, instead of getting handed from generation to generation, it now all flows to the almighty government, and you get back. Some portion of it is distributed evenly, you know, the bits that don't stick to the government's fingers like they tend to do, and then this just gets dispensed as cash to people when they come of age.

And he may have done some back-of-the-envelope calculations that I should have checked and come up with this idea, like, we're going to give everybody 60 000 when they're 20 years old. And then they can all go out and be entrepreneurs and start businesses, and nobody's going to be a plumber and fix the pipes, which is his idea of what a prosperous society looks like.

And what enraged me was this casual idea of how we will arrange society because I'm smart. And, you know, I have an idea, and I will centrally plan it all. And, gosh, why are you getting so angry? I was only trying to help. I am motivated to respect people of the lower classes, and you're just as bright and need better opportunities.

Well, if you respected us, you would listen to us instead of coming up with plans for how to pass laws to rearrange us; you'd be saying, Hey, you know, what do you guys mean? What is life like for you? Because nobody who spent three generations, you know, or seven generations running a family farm or a little store somewhere is going to say, come and take it away from us and give our kids some money.

Chris Powers: This ties back to where we started, that culture and stories take over the narrative. And so you said something on the call, and I was like, how do you fight this? And you said something about public humiliation or where you have to punch back.

Devon Eriksen: Oh, yeah. That was the big thing with Emmett Shear: He quickly blocked me and took a massive step back from Twitter. I don't think he deleted his account, but it was emotionally hurtful to him. And, you know, as a human being, you don't necessarily want to go around being emotionally painful to people, but when they suggest horrific, totalitarian, nightmarish ideas.

There needs to be some pushback. There must be some created sense of, wow, that is a horrible idea. And do you realize you accidentally said that out loud? You should be embarrassed because, you know, the reason that this resonated with so many people is that I went from 1000 to 20,000 followers overnight.

Was that I was articulating a sort of resentment that people had felt for a long time because they were looking at people who had accumulated a lot of political and social capital and listening to the ideas that came out of their mouths and realizing that these people are kind of dumb, like the depth of complexity of their ideas is, well, let's take a bunch of money from some people and give it to a bunch of other people and that's not going to have any second or third order effects because, you know, society isn't complicated, you know, we can just, the economy isn't complex.

We can arrange it how we want because we're smart, and, you know, I built a video game streaming website and sold it to Amazon for a hundred million dollars. So, I must be a genius. Human civilization is more complicated than a video game streaming website. The building experience was good, and it taught you something about websites and running a business, but you needed to learn how to be king of human civilization.

You know, you have to push back against these people who think they're the best and the brightest, and they've got a plan for everybody because even if it were true, even if they were more intelligent, they're just meaner and greedier. Even if they were more innovative, it's not intelligent that has enabled human beings to thrive and conquer the planet and, you know, produce this glorious future that we live in.

It's the possession of relevant knowledge. You know, yeah, you learn by being smart, but smart isn't the goal. Smart doesn't help you. What you know helps you, and it doesn't matter how smart you are if you need the proper knowledge appropriate to your situation. If I take you and I give you a knife and, you know, drive you and drop you off in the woods at night, how long before you can send me an email?

There's a lot of domain knowledge that these people need to have and consider necessary. They think they want to arrange society around this central ivory tower filled with super-intelligent people who will make all the best plans. And the best way to describe this is that Dwight Eisenhower, general and later president, once said farming looks very easy. If your plough is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from the nearest cornfield. 

Chris Powers: Okay, then let's take this. Some people you've been talking about are leading the transition to artificial intelligence, the most significant technological breakthrough, maybe of our lifetime besides the Internet or my lifetime.

Devon Eriksen: Well, it's significant. 

Chris Powers: Okay, why wouldn't you say that? 

Devon Eriksen: Because, well, I was a software engineer for a couple of decades, and I did some AI stuff, among other things. These large language models are exciting and compelling but are nothing close to an artificial human being or superintelligence.

They mimic how we process language, and if you talk to Chat GPT for a while. And you discuss things with it. It very quickly becomes apparent that there's not much going on upstairs. So, it can superficially look like a human, but we still have a long way to go.

But we're getting off your original topic. You're saying, okay, these are people who, you know, are being put in charge of the AI efforts. And, you know, they're not; they have this elitist attitude and are not as bright. That is the real motivation behind this push for AI safety, which means we won't allow AI to say anything remotely shocking or that we would consider wrong.

And we don't want to have any open source AI, you know, all of the AI capabilities we're going to provide to you, we're going to provide to you as API is where you're accessing our computer. We're going to keep the central data set for ourselves. And I think. That's the real motivation there.

If we control it, we can protect you from AI doing anything wrong because we are excellent and intelligent elite people. You are a bunch of restroom bacteria who would use it to, you know, make viruses or racist jokes or whatever. 

Chris Powers: Okay. So open AI isn't so open then?

Devon Eriksen: No, it's entirely not open.

It's, you know, the bullshit is right there in the name from, you know, word one because it's not open source. It's not available to anything; its code is not transparent, and its way of running the company isn't even transparent. We had Emmett Shear brought in to replace another guy who was being ousted briefly.

And this story was being passed all around the Internet. No one outside the company had any idea why this was happening because the only explanation that was out there was this sort of word salad of bland corporate PR speak, and, you know, only now are we beginning to connect the dots. It seems that some diversity hire got her nose out of joint because, you know, this, some kind of technical nerd guy was rude to her, you know, here you are having this sort of high school melodrama feud over one of the critical segments of the future of human civilization.

Chris Powers: Should we be worried about that? 

Devon Eriksen: Yeah, we should be. We should be worried about that because we should not be content to say, okay, open AI is providing us with something good. Let's all use that. We should get behind the open-source community to say, hey, here's some money.

Large language models are understood in the literature; let's build an open source so people can run it on their computers and figure out what beautiful things they will produce with that. 

Chris Powers: And isn't that an option? Couldn't we say everybody stops using open AI and uses this other thing instead? It's not like anybody's forced to use available AI.

Devon Eriksen: Well. If you're an individual user, you don't necessarily have a lot of choices because you can't wish products into existence. But the danger I'm talking about here is not legal but cultural. The danger I'm talking about isn't, you know, people need to be legally able to make their own AI, although they're going to try that.

You watch; they're going to try that. The danger is just culturally accepting. Oh, these big closed-source AI models are just fine for us. We're not going to look for something else. And, you know, whenever new technology is being developed first behind closed doors, you have this kind of risk that the control stays there forever.

When software was first becoming prevalent, people came up with this thing. We'll write an end-user license agreement and make it 60 pages long. So we know perfectly well that people will click accept and then. You see, we're going to spy on them, and we're going to violate their rights as consumers, and we're going to do all this stuff, and it'll stand up in court because, of course, it's just like a contract, right?

And because people just nodded and accepted that or said, Oh, well, you know, they're a big corporation. What can we do? It took many decades before these kinds of things made it to court. And, you know, the court started saying, no, you can't just write down anything you want and call it the law.

There's an implicit sales contract. You're not allowed to do certain things, but that's again. The law is downstream of culture. So what's essential, with AI in particular, and with other technologies in general, is not just passively accepting this idea that elites have a right to control them.

You know, we should be outraged that we can't program a large language model AI to make a racist joke because this idea that somebody else has the right to control you is far worse than all of history's racism put together. It's far more damaging, you know; I don't care if AI is racist or not. I care if it is controlled by a few people who think they have the right to rule or if it is owned by whoever tinkers with software and finds something interesting to do with it.

Chris Powers: So, is there a large language model out there right now that's better than most? Or is it still too early to make that call?

Devon Eriksen: It's still too early to, you know, many of these still need to. It's what we need to understand fully. We have here because, for a long time, the general public thought that speaking and listening were vague.

These are core functions of the human being, and they are closely connected to sentience. And when you had something that could be asked a question and respond appropriately, then you would have a software human being. And that turned out not to be the case. If you throw a large enough neural net and enough data at the problem, you can build something that sounds pretty glib and stay on topic. Still, when you probe at it a little more and ask it some prying questions, you realize it has no awareness of itself.

It has no awareness of anybody else. It doesn't know the difference between truth and a lie. And it can't form a thesis and support it with ideas. It's just generating the next token. And so, this is something that happens a lot in AI. It is somebody figuring out how to use heuristic techniques to do something computers couldn't do before, like play chess, Go, StarCraft.

And they say we're about to create artificial general intelligence because these tasks are complicated. Indeed, we must be close. And the truth is that what we're finding out. Is that the way humans do? The specific things that humans do are less sophisticated than we thought.

As artificial intelligence starts to become more prevalent, these large language models, these art models, and these sorts of self-organizing map neural nets begin to become more prevalent. One disturbing thing we're going to find is that a certain percentage of the human population is unaware.

And, what we do about that is a very open question because then it's like, what do you, well, how does this impact the economy? What do you do about employment? It is also a lot of the AI safety argument. As we go, we want to keep this from changing; that's different from how technology works. 

Chris Powers: Do you think it will impact us as much as you would listen to it in public? And if it is, is it in ways the ordinary person isn't thinking about?

Devon Eriksen: It's almost impossible, and I say this as a science fiction writer. It's nearly impossible to anticipate how almost any technology will impact civilization.

And I'm reminded of this set of funny quotes. That I saw, you know, when people were first creating steam trains, and they were saying, you know, surely these will never go faster than 20 miles an hour because then all the air would be sucked out of the cabin. And the passengers would suffocate. So, up to 20 miles an hour, but 20 miles an hour is a fantastic speed, and great things will be produced.

We need to pay more attention to the impact. Still, we also estimate the effects of certain things solely negatively because people tend to think about disrupting existing structures. After all, existing structures are something they can see. They don't need help seeing what that existing structure will be replaced with.

They can't see the things that aren't there yet. They can only see the things that will be taken away. 

Chris Powers: As it relates to science fiction and AI and all these things, I mean, you could have traced AI back to maybe like movies in the eighties and nineties, probably even before that, or all the technology that we're experiencing today, can be tied back to science fiction movies or books from decades ago.

So do today's engineers and our best brains take from these books and go; I know that was fiction then, but we're going to make it happen. Or are these technologies emerging at the time that they're written, and it just takes decades before they come out? All these science fiction books predict the future, even though they were written decades ago.

Devon Eriksen: Both are partially a prophecy and partially a self-fulfilling prophecy. The social function of science fiction is to allow us to think about the future and discuss the implications of technology before it exists; we have all these competing visions of the future, and writing fiction in that realm allows us to think about it.

So, indeed, I don't think Elon Musk reads Gone Girl. As I said, he grew up reading science fiction, and people who create technology tend to grow up reading science fiction; they're the people who tend to be inspired by it, so sometimes an invention will really be down to a science fiction writer thinking of something and engineers imitating him, and sometimes it goes the other way.

Sometimes, we writers imitate the engineers. And we're projecting where they will get before they arrive because we look at the direction and speed at which they move. So, it works both ways. But it's almost impossible to predict, so we have many different science-fictional versions of the future.

And It's straightforward to be pessimistic if you lack imagination. Because everyone, many people are invested in the status quo. Many people have found their comfortable little niche, making a lot of money off things being the way they are. And you have to consciously push back against that from your imagination of how things could be. 

Chris Powers: Alright, I have one more topic. It tied back into property rights, but we talked about it, and it was rent-seeking. You asked me, you said, what does rent seeking mean? 

Devon Eriksen: Oh, yeah. That was an example that I was using of, Again, having this dialogue in fiction, having this dialogue in culture.

I researched your channel before appearing on it. And many of your listeners are real estate guys, and an example of, like, okay, you've got real estate guys doing your real estate thing. And. If you don't involve yourselves in culture, if any group doesn't include itself in culture, then things happen to it in that cultural dialogue that will affect you.

And I gave this example of the word rent-seeking. And I asked you what you thought rent seeking meant and, you know, what do you think it means? What did you say?

Chris Powers: I said when a landlord collects rent, seeking rent.

Devon Eriksen: Yeah, yeah, exactly. But rent-seeking in certain other subcultures is a technical term for trying to extract value.

As a middleman without adding any value, like this idea that you're going to buy a building at a specific price, and then you're going to turn around and rent it out as is, so, you know, economists will use this term rent-seeking behaviours. And what this means is that the real estate community, who are generally busy, like I'm, I bought this dilapidated factory, and I'm turning it into a shopping mall. It took some work; they don't even know that the term rent-seeking is used in certain subcultures to describe being a parasite. So that's a culture war they have not fought and lost. And then, you know, some of these people will be very surprised and make, you know, the Pikachu face when people show up, you know, hammering on their doors, demanding the new tax that they have on landlords and bloodsuckers, you know, communist revolutions have always been preceded or commensurate with pogroms of real estate owners.

And so you have to; this is just one example of how a subculture has to participate in art, cultural dialogue, and stories to defend itself. So, you know, I don't know anything about real estate because, you know, I grew up as a child of Minnesota farmers. We were not wealthy.

And so, where do I go to understand that worldview? Well, where I go to understand worldviews that I don't have experience with is that I can talk to people, but there's fiction. And it's like, if your viewpoint doesn't make it into fiction, it doesn't get considered. And then people start calling you Rancy.

Chris Powers: Who are the gate guards of what makes it into fiction? We'll end it on that because there are a lot of good ideas going into fiction and many terrible ones. I mean, we started this with the parents waking up realizing, oh, shoot, this is impacting our kids.

But how does some trash make its way in, and how does the good stuff return? 

Devon Eriksen: It's because you have institutions built up around creating fiction and, you know, initially these, you know, Walt Disney was not precisely a communist, but Disney now, you know, so what you have is you have these sort of gatekeeping institutions that function very well for a while and they start to gain the trust of society and then people who have agendas can infiltrate these institutions and take them over, and it takes others decades to notice, you know Disney is losing money at an appalling rate for their stockholders and You know, all they would have to do to save themselves is start making movies that weren't a hate letter to middle America.

And they can't stand to do it because they've been entirely infiltrated by people who hate Western civilization; you know, it's not the same people; all the people who made up those beautiful stories that we loved as kids have all died or aged out of business. These businesses have been taken over by people who hate Western civilization.

Chris Powers: So if you took Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney, I don't know him from Adam. I've never done any research, but I've listened to a few interviews; he doesn't seem like the kind of guy who hates Western civilization; even if he doesn't love it, he doesn't appear.

Devon Eriksen: You know, they never do, they're very glib. They never do. But, you know, I was listening to one of his interviews and, you know, as he talks about the various things they're trying to do to turn the stock value around, the interviewer asks him in this sort of very veiled euphemistic kind of way, he says, well, are you going to back off the woke stuff?

And Bob Iger said something that I found very interesting. And he started talking about, well, some messages are just sort of, I need to remember what he said. So don't, you know. Take this as a literal, direct quote, but he says, you know, there are some things and messages that are just a moral imperative.

And so these people, no matter how glib they are, no matter how sophisticated they are good at sounding, you know, you scratch the surface a little bit. And you see these people who have this fundamental assumption that they know better than everybody else. And they understand how society should be shaped.

And they need everybody else to listen to them. And that in itself, that very idea is a hatred of Western civilization because Western civilization has always been about, okay, everybody go and do your own thing. And 90 per cent of you will fail, and then we'll imitate the winners. That's how we progress; Western civilization has always been a trajectory away from elitism towards garage tinkerers.

And it is precisely that which has made the difference between Western civilization and the rest of the world. And these people, they hate that. It's not about Climate change or transsexuals or pride flags, or any of those are just details. Those are just fads of thought. It is centralized around an aristocracy that wants to dictate to the masses.

Chris Powers: Can it be beat? 

Devon Eriksen: Oh, sure. Well, it's ruled by deception, and one thing we must realize about Western civilization is that we have academic institutions that lie to us and plagiarize each other's work. We have a massively corrupt government. We have. You know, Hollywood being entirely devoted to propaganda, we have all these things. Still, if you look at all of these institutions that have betrayed their original mission, the one thing they have in common is that they all work by deception. That represents excellent progress because when someone rules by deception, they can't lead by force.

If they have to trick you, they can't overpower you. So all that's required to beat these deception-based power structures is not to listen and not to believe because, ultimately, all of these people who think they are elites require our labour, participation and buy-in to implement their utopian schemes.

And if we say, Nah, I don't buy that. I'm not going to do that. You know, I'm not going to eat your processed food. I'm not going to send my children to your government school. I'm going to 3d print guns, and I'm going to grow my vegetables, and, you know, there's nothing they can do to force millions of us to comply.

Chris Powers: You like periodically throughout the conversation. And it seems like conversation and culture today. I'm more aware of it because it's talked about more; maybe it's always been talked about, but we talk about it like they do. They're making this decision. Well, as a kid, you grow up, and you're like, oh, there's the white house, and they're the power of the country and the power of the world.

And that's it. And then you just kind of present a situation like you have the white house, you have Hollywood, you have the world. 

Devon Eriksen: These people all talk to each other. They're part of the same social group. 

Chris Powers: But is a string being pulled from somewhere else, or is it just a bunch? You know, numbskulls at the top of all these institutions across the world that talk to each other, or is there something higher than that?

Devon Eriksen: I don't subscribe to the conspiracy theory of history. I subscribe to the fuck up theory of history. 

Chris Powers: Okay. What does that mean? 

Devon Eriksen: In this context, no central shadowy, you know, George Soros or whatever kind of figure is behind everything we see going wrong with the institutions of society that are betraying their original missions.

What I see is this sort of incestuous, corrupt relationship between people in power. In these institutions where, you know, there's no central plan, they just all have this consensus where they agree on certain things. It's not, you know, we're going to say that the planet is getting warmer and everyone has to turn off their air conditioners.

And, start riding bicycles and buying electric cars, and what have you learned? It's just, well, gosh, this green energy thing is boiling right now. And, you know, if we get behind this and push. We can get a whole bunch of government grants made through, and then those can go to this company that my cousin runs; you know, it's not a fellowship of ideology; it's a fellowship of interests.

The ideology is just the rationalization that's used to sell the corrupt. 

Chris Powers: Green energy is profitable if you're on the right side of it. 

Devon Eriksen: Oh yeah, it's being made profitable. The government is picking winners because that serves some of the ends of, you know, some of the people doing this, you know, it's the energy problem is real simple, you know, build nuclear reactors done next question.

Chris Powers: Okay. But why don't we do that? Because it would be taken out of the pockets of somebody high up. Why do apparent things or common sense things not happen anymore? Like they used to.

Devon Eriksen: Well, you need help with misaligned incentives.

Anytime you have a representative, it's called the principal-agent problem. You have a principal and an agent that is supposed to represent the principal's interests. You know, like you have a congressman and senators in government, for example. They're supposed to describe people. But any time you have a case where the interests of the agent don't align With the interests of the principal over time, the agents tend to act more and more in their interests.

So, we don't need to go down this deep rabbit hole, parsing all the whys and wherefores of why these people don't want to build nuclear reactors. We need to know, well, let's ask a bunch of engineers. Yes, that's the best solution for our energy strategy in the future.

Then, we need to observe that this is being strangled by regulation. And then we know that there must be an incentive to do that. We don't need to, you know, we don't need to examine every scam before we decide that it's a scam. It's like things are a scam by default until you prove otherwise.

If you've got a company and there was this company in Idaho, it was wild. They had this idea that there were solar roadways, and they would make roads out of solar panels, and they accepted a bunch of government grants. And they built an area about eight feet by eight feet in the town square as a demo.

And when I went there and looked at it, most of the panels weren't working. They were, you know, running their little demo off-grid power. But, you know, they took a lot of money and have yet to produce any. 

Chris Powers: All right, Devin, this has been great. Thank you. 

Devon Eriksen: Yeah, this has been a lot of fun.

Chris Powers: That was great. You cracked me up.