The very notion of the police having a network of cameras that are all connected to each other and they can do an AI-powered search has just flipped over. We could have had this conversation about the Patriot Act. We could have had this conversation about the Snowden revelations, and we did. To me, it's just cause for investigation and also reflection.
Do you think Sam Altman actually supports universal basic income? Is OpenAI going to fund UBI? I don't know the answer to that, but you know, UBI is one of those things that it's an idea you have because you think no one will have a job. And I think they've all needed to stop talking about that.
Sometimes it feels to me like the audience is mad that I don't arrest the CEOs on Decoder.
Riverside. Yeah, that's a future one day. Well, I was in person with Sundar. We could have cuffed him.
Hello and welcome to Decoder, a show about big ideas and other problems. This is Nick Statat, senior producer, and I'm joined by our brand new supervising producer, Greg.
And hi, Nilay. Nilay is here, too. He is the person who hosts the show, and his name is also in the show, so it makes sense.
It's true. We don't insistently say my name in the show enough. We should do it all the time. Like, I should do it. Welcome to Decoder with Nilay Patel.
You have your name behind you in the video. We could get you a name tag, too, like all those sports announcers who have the CBS logo on their chest and on their shirt breast pocket. Like, not a bad idea.
Not yet at branded polos, but actually, no, even thinking about it for one second, and we never will be, is what I would say.
Like Nick was saying, this is Nilay's show, and we are doing a mailbag episode. This is where we go through all the feedback, as I'm sure you've listened because you listen to the end of every episode. We know you do. We do mention that we go through every single email that we get. Nick, you can verify that we get a ton of email and we do read through all of it. Is that true?
We now get YouTube comments. We get many, many Verge comments. We get Spotify comments, and the Spotify comments I read every one because those are specifically pretty pointed.
Yeah, they're kind of like Uncut Gems because they're trying to build this little community. It's like somebody might read this because it only gets like six comments as opposed to like 600 for a YouTube video. We last did a mailbag episode in April and we said we were going to do more of these. So we're back again. This is September. We've had a few months. We've had a lot of really big interviews. So yeah, let's just get into it.
All right, we're going to kick things off with the Software Brain video you put out. This was one of the biggest things that people have commented on, and it is by far the most talked about episode in the past six months. Hundreds of comments on the Verge website, hundreds of comments on YouTube, single to double digit comments on Spotify, and lots and lots of emails. One thing we wanted to talk about though is something Arita brought up about the idea of the Nilay rant and you, you know, effectively pulling out your inner Dennis Miller and really giving us like your take on something. And for this one, one listener wrote, 'Just listen to the people do not yearn for automation.' And all I can say is the people do yearn for more Nilay rants. So we want to know like what is the origin of this type of rant and then how much of like the show's DNA do you think is built around this idea of you giving us the rant and just like the idea of basically you giving us your hot take on something really, really well thought out as opposed to like the interviews we usually do.
I feel like I should make another riff on the people do not yearn for automation, but as Dennis Miller. Look, the power of AI means Dennis Miller can deliver software right now. Let me tell you something, babe. Sam Altman, the last time he was sitting at a Whataburger, we could just do it. We could just do it. It'd be great. I'm sure we wouldn't get sued for that. They're just essays. Like, I know they're rants and they're delivered on YouTube and they're very pointed in particular ways, but that's just what I would have written as a column 10 years ago before we had podcasts this way. It has just been very obvious to I think everyone that you can't just write a column and expect to have impact. You have to stare at the camera and do it. And then we're very good at like publishing that as a column and having a transcript and polishing it and delivering it all the other ways. So that's the origin of it. For all the podcasting I do and as little writing as I do anymore, in my heart I'm still a writer, and taking all of the reporting and all of the ideas that we hear and all the conversations we have and synthesizing them into ideas that you can grapple with is the point. Like, it is really the point of running a magazine like The Verge. So that's where that comes from.
Now, can I do it as often as I want to do it? I obviously can't. The reason I did Software Brain in that moment is I could see the hype cycle around AI failing to contend with the lack of verifiability in every domain except software. And that's getting a little blurry now, but you know, lots of companies are just databases. Software engineering is verifiable. You can run it through the compiler and see if it works. And AI has obviously gotten really good at making software. And if you believe the world is just software, that means AI has gotten good. It's done. And you can see the labs are talking about how they've achieved AGI or they will very soon. And it is very much connected to the ability of AI to write software. And I'm just not discounting that that's important. I'm just saying once you get outside of software, verifiability gets way harder, right? And so you can see it with just the episode with Robert Hart in math. There's an amount of verifiability in math and you can burn a lot of tokens, we don't know how many, and solve some unsolved math problems. There's probably verifiability in various other science domains. That is really interesting. Is there verifiability in generating novel drugs? No. You got to inject a bunch of people with novel drugs.
That's what are we going to do?
That's why they got so many rats in cages somewhere. It has to be done, right? Like there's just some other thing that's going to happen in the next ten domains that is going to be really, really challenging. And so that's where I just wanted to put the marker down and say I have been swimming in this water for a long time with these people and the power of software is not to be denied. It has remade our world. But if that's the only framework where you think that is a universal framework, you're going to run into these walls. I think there's like lots more of those we can do. But I mean, I want them to hit. I only want to write hit singles. And importantly, they're all born of the reporting and that's always been the dynamic on The Verge. It's certainly the dynamic on Decoder is, you know, the data can get to your head. The episodes where I just talk sometimes outperform the episodes when there are CEOs. That's not good. Like that's a bad incentive loop for me because I want everything to come out of the fact that I've talked to all of the people and you can go check my work and you can go see what those conversations are like and you can see that they are genuine and honest and all the things they should be. And that's where then I feel like I not only have the depth and the foundation to write Software Brain, but I can send it to those people and say, 'This is how I feel about it.' And they come on the show and they talk to me about Google Zero or Software Brain, all that stuff. And that conversation gets really, it gets much bigger than me just ranting.
So, my reaction to that, Nilay, is that you feel like your thesis has kind of borne out over the last few months for Software Brain. We did get feedback from people who kind of, I guess, disagreed with some of the premise. It wasn't that they say that people aren't unhappy with AI, but they think that we're wrong about why they're unhappy with AI. One reader, Josh Vanderberg, he wrote in to say that he thinks people, it's not that they hate AI as a technology, but rather that they don't like their current economic situation, and they're kind of pushing that onto AI as a thing to project on. He's pretty sure that we'll eventually embrace natural language as the superior way of doing things on a computer. His response was this. He said, 'AI modern computer interfaces suck hard. We're forced to map our fluid, non-deterministic, creative selves onto hierarchical menu systems and that no matter how intuitive and discoverable, we constantly fail to find the tools that we need.' He uses Canva's CEO as an example of somebody that deeply understands the problem and they realize that AI can provide the user interface we've all been yearning for. He goes on to say, 'People definitely yearn to just tell Photoshop what they want done in words and forget everything they ever learned about that horrible user interface.' We had a few other similar comments like, 'People do not yearn for automation. They yearn for cheap stuff and when AI gives them cheap stuff, they'll be happy.' A third person wrote, 'Software Brain misses three things regular people actually care about: control, agency, and meaning. We like doing things. The doing is where the meaning comes from.' I'm curious, you know, just from those particular comments and also the other feedback you got from Software Brain, how you kind of respond to those criticisms.
Let's take them in turn. Josh, this is a very thoughtful comment, Josh, and I don't disagree that all modern computer interfaces suck hard. I'd use Liquid Glass. I agree with you. I refuse to upgrade this computer to Tahoe. I'm just not doing it. There's some confusing thing happening. User interfaces probably related to how much all of our devices have turned into shopping malls or SaaS products or whatever it is, right? Like there's something broken there and I agree that that's bad. I think I disagree that natural language is a perfect substitute for everything or can become a universal interface. And I say this as somebody who is writing a Decoder book based on all the interviews in a coder and I've used Whisper Flow to just get as much out of my head onto the page as I can. And that is incredibly powerful. And you can see why people like it. And I also have to edit every single word it generates because it insists on formatting my thoughts in ways that I find completely bananas. Like all these systems are like, you think in bullets. And I'm like, I am not thinking in bullets right now. I'm just pausing between sentences. There's something there where you can take the natural language input. And what we as people are reasonably good at doing is taking everything else with it, the context of our body language, the tone of our voice, and creating other meaning out of it. Computers are really bad at that. Maybe they're going to get better at it, but they're currently very, very bad at it. And I'm using my Whisper Flow example. It's just like one you can see how it's bad at it. So, it's not just you're being creative to a computer or talking to a computer, it's going to do what you say and you don't have to push all the buttons. It's lossy. It's lossy in a very important way that using a mouse to click on a button is not lossy at all. It is very, very directed and it will do exactly the thing that you want it to do. Ordering from Grubhub with your finger on a phone screen is 100% accurate unless you're drunk, which I've been. But talking to an agent to have it go do something is lossy. It is error-prone in very specific ways. And I just think these things are going to exist together, right? And that to me is the balance that we're going to have to strike that all of the hype around AI assumes that what I want is another person instead of a specific thing to happen. And you know, you can talk to lots of designers or professionals who use these tools and they will all complain about these tools. We use this app called Riverside to produce the show several times a week. Every single person on this team can issue a PhD thesis in all of the problems with Riverside because it's the tool we use and it sucks in very specific ways. It is also still the tool we use every single week to make this show. If anybody uses Photoshop, anybody uses Pro Tools, the books that can be written about people's feelings about Pro Tools fill a library, but they're the tools because they get the job done in specific ways. Making that lossy or making that non-deterministic is actually going to make people less effective. It will democratize access for a lot of people, I think, and that is a huge opportunity. I don't think that opportunity outweighs the cost of making things more chaotic in like specific ways. The cheap stuff piece. Yeah, I think people like cheap stuff. Like there's a reason TVs are permanent surveillance devices and everyone has one at home because they cost $500 and they're just watching them all the time. But I actually think the industry is coming around to my point of view that the products aren't good enough. And I know this because our friend Alex Heath just interviewed Sam Altman and he asked him why people don't like AI and Altman's response was that he thinks that the way to win hearts and minds is to deliver value. We actually have that clip.
Generally speaking, I think the right way to get people to like something is to deliver them value. Probably if a lot of people use that, which they will over time, and understand that it's not actually like better Google search and that's it, that you know, fusing and destroying huge amounts of water or whatever, then there'll be more excitement.
So, you know, I watched that. I think Alex did a good job talking to Sam. My view of that is, oh, that's a concession that Sam Altman knows ChatGPT is not delivering enough value to consumers, that these free versions are not communicating enough what they could do or they're not doing enough or they're hallucinating too much and that's why consumers dislike them. And I continue to believe that talking about how everything can be turned into a database that can then be automated by agents is not going to win anyone any hearts and minds. Maybe that's the technology that creates products people love, but the technology itself is fundamentally uninspiring. It's the products. It's the experiences you have that change minds. And Software Brain is just inherently alienating in my opinion. And then the last one, Software Brain misses three things people care about: control, agency, and meaning. Yes, I agree with that. I would connect that actually to buttons in cars. We've gone through this horrible period where all of the controls in cars became virtualized onto a screen and there's been furious pushback against it and all the buttons are back. I think people want deterministic actions even from computer-like things. And this is maybe the single best market-driven evidence that you can't just virtualize everything. You actually have to give real experiences to people that do the things that are printed on the label of the button exactly when you push the button. And that is control and agency. I don't know about meaning in changing an HVAC in a car, but it's definitely control and agency. And meaning I think comes from having to struggle through doing the work yourself, not just letting AI do it for you. So, I agree with all these comments in different ways. I just think the industry has gotten completely lost in the sauce on what you can do if you turn everyone into a database, which is what I call Software Brain, and they've missed the human connection. A really good example, I'll give you a little preview of an upcoming episode. We had the CEO of Cloudflare on and he just, you know, fired a bunch of people at his company because he says AI can do a bunch of those jobs. And his whole thing is he can identify rising talent in the company by having the AI look at all the things they're doing and then he thinks that's good because he can make a phone call and say, 'Hey, you're a young superstar.' And that, you know, maybe that is a good thing. In order to accomplish that goal, every single thing that happens at that company needs to happen in a database for an AI to review and then communicate to him. I will not, I will just, that's the preview. We had a whole conversation about that because I think that is one of the more fascinating ideas in all of business right now.
Boy, I hope that doesn't roll out to The Verge. I have to get one of those mouse movers or something. You're going to have to figure out like what I'm doing all day.
We are maybe insistently human. If we can automate Riverside, I think that would be good.
Yeah, good luck. They did roll out the option to build an AI twin of you so that the features we've been asking for, not better microphone connections, not better uploading. It's like, no, we need to duplicate the people we're speaking to. Can we turn off the auto level control? No, but AI twins are here.
Hey, there's actually a request for an essay-style thing, a video essay that is a riff on Software Brain titled 'The People Do Not Yearn for Surveillance.' Back to the whole, you know, watching what you're doing at work type thing. Is that something that's kind of in your head right now with especially like all the Flock cameras everywhere, all the controversy around that? Maybe with like a Software Brain framing or just a bigger picture thing. Is this kind of in your mind right now?
It is in my mind. I will candidly admit that some of it has taken me by surprise just how bipartisan it is and some of that I think is just it's an election year and people are angry about cameras so all the politicians are trying to channel that anger maybe the same way they're trying to channel the anger about data centers. There's action in red states to ban surveillance as well. And there's action in more Republican communities to take down the cameras, which I think is fascinating. And it's not just limited to brands like Flock. It's the idea of these cameras watching. And I think that the piece of the puzzle, the reason that it caught me by surprise is that for better or worse, my formative political experiences were like 9/11 and the war in Iraq, right? That's when I was in college. And what do we do? We passed the Patriot Act. We militarized the police. We started doing warrantless wiretaps. We ran our way all the way up to the Snowden revelations and then we did nothing about them, right? And it literally none of that stuff caused this amount of panic. So that's just my framework, right? And so this is a shock to that system. Like it's surprising to me that people care now. And I think it's because the cameras are visible. I think it's because the understanding that there's an AI chatbot that you can talk to that can just go generate an answer and the cops now have it for cameras that are tracking you everywhere and you can literally see the cameras and you can connect it to an experience you've had and there's Flock who we are trying to get on the show and their CEO originally tried to do a bunch of like MAGA-coded messaging around this stuff and he would call his critics terrorists and that didn't work. Like all that is new if you are born of the things that I was born of, right? Like all of these are criticisms of the Patriot Act in 2001 and we just did it anyway. And so I'm curious for the feedback from the audience, like what do you think shifted that made a bunch of stuff that we were happy to do in the past feel like one of the more potent political issues of our time? I tie this to like the Meta glasses right now with the way those cameras are being received, like compare that to like how Google Glass rolled out and if you talk back to like the Patriot Act days in your formative years of like tech is like that's back when like cell phone cameras were kind of seen as a joke. It was like, what, I'm going to take a photo on my phone. Yeah. Right now it's like the only thing I think I would take a photo on is my phone because it's the best camera I will ever have with me. And I find that to be a really interesting evolution, especially tied to the AI of it all when it's like, 'No, no, these cameras now can connect to this network and have all this extra information. It's not just some file living on your thing that you can put somewhere with your discretion.' It's like, 'No, no, it's out of your hands now.' And I wonder if, you know, part of that's the anxiety around things like the cameras on the Flock cameras and the glasses cameras and all that.
Yeah, I definitely think there's some amount of anxiety of I'm being recorded without my consent. I think there's a lot of anxiety around the intent of the people particularly wearing Meta glasses. There's a reason they're called pervert glasses. And some of the biggest influencers in the world have posted videos complaining that they get stalked at the airport and people wearing Meta glasses film them coming off of planes. This is very bad. It was Olivia Dunne, I think, who posted a video like that and she specifically called out Meta glasses, which is not a great rep for those products to have, right? And there's something about that. There's something about how intrusive the phones are and the cameras are and the idea that everything is recorded and meant to be shared. But we've been living in that for a long time. I'm just saying there's something that happened now recently where the very notion of the police having a network of cameras that are all connected to each other and they can do an AI-powered search has just flipped over and we're going to go and cover them up with spray foam or we're going to tear them down or we're, you know, 404 Media, which is excellent, has done so many videos finding clips of people at town hall meetings yelling about cameras and being shouted down by their own elected officials. There's something there that's new. We're obviously going to cover it. I'm not saying it's so surprising we can't engage it. I'm saying from my worldview, like what the dirt that I was raised in, it's just more, the thing is the same as it ever was. And that's why it was surprising to me, like we could have had this conversation about the Patriot Act. We could have had this conversation about the existence of the TSA, any number of things. And we didn't. We could have had this conversation about the Snowden revelations. Something flipped and to me it's just cause for investigation and also reflection.
