Join our hosts on a mind-bending journey from post-apocalyptic America to the outer reaches of the Universe as they discuss racist zombies, satanic AI, alien genocide, and sewing. Listen and be amused as they discuss episodes 3 and 4 of HBO's The Last of Us, the plus and minus of Artificial Intelligence, and the audio drama "Chrysalis" by SH Serrano, which ChatGPT described as "an underground audio drama gem where a sentient burrito takes on the role of vigilante detective." Seriously.
Join our hosts on a mind-bending journey from post-apocalyptic America to the outer reaches of a war-torn Universe as they discuss racist zombies, satanic A.I., alien genocide, and sewing. Listen and be amused as they discuss episodes 3 and 4 of HBO's The Last of Us, the plus and minus of Artificial Intelligence, and the audio drama Chrysalis by SH Serrano, which ChatGPT described as "an underground audio drama gem where a sentient burrito takes on the role of vigilante detective." Seriously.
Go listen to Chrysalis by SH Serrano: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Stt9eM22D2E
Or read it on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/55v9e1/chrysalis/
-------BEFORE WE SPOIL THE ENTIRE STORY--------
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Jason: Welcome to. Don't Encourage us, the podcast where we talk about the big ideas behind fiction projects of all different kinds. Books, movies, TV shows, video games, nothing's off limits. I'm your host, Francesca Fre, and I'm here with my co-host, Bruno Ponz Jones. Hi Bruno. Okay, Francesco, how are you? You got that one?
You got that one? No, no,
Steve: no. And I don't think the audience does
Jason: either. No, that's true. It's great.
Steve: So we'll both be furiously Googling
Jason: after the episode. Oh yeah, yeah, sure. I'm sure like the, my mom will be all over the internet trying to figure out who, Bruno Ponz Jones, you mean she'll be calling you
Steve: to Google? Who Bruno Ponce Jones is cuz she heard it on her favorite podcast.
Jason: That's right. All right, so today we're talking about Chrysalis, the short story by sh Serrano that premiered on Reddit and was transformed into a top quality audio drama by the Dust sci-fi network. I'm gonna call 'em a network. They were a podcast. Then they started making short movies, I think, which I know are on YouTube, and they also made a full length feature, so I'm just gonna call 'em a network at this point.
I think they've earned that. What else would you call 'em? Production Squad, guess A
Steve: podcast studio or something. But they also do studio, maybe a digital media studio of some
Jason: site. Okay. What would be the old term for that? Multimedia studio troop. Oh, you mean a real old school one,
Steve: like with Jesters and such?
A carnival. A carnival group.
Jason: The Carneys at Dust.
Steve: They're jugglers. Fire eaters, sword, swallowers, and also podcast producers.
Jason: Well, they either way, A bunch of geeks, I guess it works. Still works.
Steve: Old timey. Old timey nerds or carneys in now there podcasters. Mm-hmm.
Jason: Geek to geek. Yeah. All right, so, uh, before we get into that, uh, what have you been watching reading, absorbing this week?
Anything interesting? I
Steve: was watching White Lotus. Hmm. Which I found pretty interesting. I didn't know anything about it. And I thought it was something like lost right at the end. It was gonna be some kind of supernatural trauma, but no, it's, it's just a satire around like the ultra wealthy, and they end up at these, this resort called the White Lotus.
And Season one is in, um, Hawaii. And then season two with a completely different cast takes place in Italy. But it's, it's an interesting social commentary. Because the, each resort, I guess each city has its own white Lotus resort.
Jason: Oh, so it's a chain. So it's a chain.
Steve: Yeah. And they go season to season. Cause it, you know, I watched the first, first season and you know, there's no way to continue that first season with the same characters for obvious reasons.
I'm not gonna spoil it, but it's a really, really good show. I think season two, they really get the hang of it in terms of like the pacing and the script. There's a lot more kind of a, like a cliffhanger kind of mystery over everything that didn't exist in the first part to that extent. Pauses in the second season.
Jason: Serious drama kind of. Is it like a thriller or
Steve: is it more It's a, it's a satire, so there's some really comedic elements in it, but it's also, it's a satire about the rich, basically. Mm. And how they live like very vapid lives and how it's around the staff of the hotel, the guests of the hotel. Some other characters from the town in the second season?
It's, I, I'd say it's kind of like a, uh, a bit of a mystery combined with a comedy, combined with some like, kind of thriller type elements. But it does a really good job of combining the genres and it's really, really good writing as well as acting.
Jason: Hmm. It's gotten a lot of press. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And where, where is that Street?
I think was Drive, is it hbo? It's on hbo. Mm-hmm. Yeah. What are they calling that now? Hbo Max Plunks or something. Or HBO Max. Is it Max? Is it Max? Okay. What happened to h what happened to HBO? Go? Is it gone? Is it HBO gone? I guess it's gone. HBO
Steve: gone now it's Max. Who
Jason: knows? Isn't it gonna be, uh, disco Max with discovery added or something like that?
Probably
Steve: all those streaming services, just they, they keep switching everything up. One buys the other. They have to add a plus. They all remember, they all jumped on the plus bandwagon.
Jason: Yeah. No, it's weird. It's like a bunch of oil drops that are just starting to like merge into these weird colored blobs that don't really make sense.
And then
Steve: as soon as there's a monopoly, they get split up again into these other pieces. Mm-hmm. And they get reabsorbed and it just keeps going over and over and over
Jason: again. Yeah. And I guess that's, uh, the nature of it, if you graft it out over the history of entertainment, it would just be a lot of like little things appearing and then merging and then breaking up and then, you know, recombining in different ways and so on and so forth.
Yep. As long as those checks keep coming, who cares, right. Yeah. And they
Steve: do. And they do. I also, um, was watching the Last of Us,
Jason: oh, are you caught up? Three and four.
Steve: Yeah, I'm caught up. I'm still wondering how it's gonna not end up like the Walking Dead, but maybe I'm, I'm being naive about it and maybe it just, it's gonna follow the video game and end where the video game ends, but I'm not so sure.
Mm.
Jason: Mm-hmm. What do you think? I also watched episode three and four. I think they are, I think it's better to talk about 'em separately. Episode three was a little bit controversial. That was the one with the sort of side story about the couple. And how was his name Frank or something?
Steve: Frank. Frank is actually in the White Lotus.
Oh, really? Yeah.
Jason: He's a great actor. Yeah. Oh, he is. So episode three to me felt like an Emmy grab. And unfortunately it broke up the momentum that they had been building in the first couple episodes. I think a lot of people didn't like it because it took a small part of the game and then made it like an entire episode.
But for me, what I didn't like about it is that if you're gonna do this kind of in-depth character exploration as an episode, it's the kind of thing I really wouldn't do before, like halfway through season two. You know what I mean? Mm-hmm. It just, mm-hmm. It felt like they're still establishing what this show is, and they're still trying to kind of get you engrossed in it and find the flow of it as an audience member.
And this just took me way out of that. Like, I got kind of bored at times. Like, it just, I mean, it's, it's not a bad episode. It's well done and shot and interesting and the characters, the acting's great, blah, blah, blah. But I, I just think doing it any time before, say season two, episode eight is, is silly.
Yeah. It just pulled me right out of the series.
Steve: I would agree with that in the sense that, you know, you're trying to do a lot with one episode. You're introducing these brand new characters, you're building their entire life story arc mm-hmm. In one episode and then ending it. So it's, it's a little bit jarring in that way.
Yeah. It's jarring would be a lot more interesting to your point, to have them build out those characters and then introduce that kind of finale later.
Jason: That's, that's definitely a way to do it. I, I am, I, I, just to be clear, I have absolutely no problem with it as an episode. It's the placement in the series that I have a problem with.
Like the first two episodes, you know, the pilot of the premiere was very long, so we really kind of got more than that. But the first two, you know, structured episodes were all about like, introducing the main characters, establishing the tone of the series, explaining their obstacles, like, what is Fedra?
What is this fungus? And then they started on their journey together, right? Mm-hmm. So we kind of set that going and I was waiting for the next episode to let me know like, what's the series gonna be like? Mm-hmm. You know, on a typical episode, now that we've established everything, we've, you know, got the relationships and we're moving forward, how is this gonna settle?
Is it gonna be different than walking Dead? Is it gonna be the same? And what I got was, uh, an episode that was in no way in indicative of what a typical episode will be. At least from what I've gathered, it's not like it's an anthology piece where we're gonna get a different survivor's story every so often, which is a real thing.
Right? I mean, they could do that and maybe that's what they're planning to do is alternate every other episode with, you know, some character we meet and then we back up and we get 20 years of their life. Mm-hmm. You know, or something like that. But I really don't think that's what they meant to do. And they stopped teaching us about the fungus.
They stopped teaching us about, like, the world at large, and it, it just became this very microscopic focus on two characters. Mm-hmm. So I thought that was really, really odd and a, and a very questionable choice this early
Steve: on. Yeah. To place it early on is kind of strange in terms of establishing the, the main characters if it was part of an anthology mm-hmm.
If it was a standalone story. I think it was extremely well done.
Jason: Yeah, I agree. You know? Yeah. I just think it messed up pacing for the series. Mm-hmm. And I think it probably threw a lot of audience members because they're still trying to get oriented and this is a very disorienting episode to put here again, put it later in the series, even questionably, I mean, arguably later in season one it would be far less problematic, but to put it as the third episode, uh, especially, it's a weekly series, so it's not like you can just kind of go, that was weird.
And start the next one. You have to wait. Yeah.
Steve: Yeah. And I thought episode four was the weakest of the episode so far. I agree. And I think it was because it looked like something I'd seen many times
Jason: before. It may as well have had the Walking Dead crossed off the cover of the screenplay, right. For the
Steve: episode or any other rebel group story.
Yeah. Movie or where there's a rebel, rebel group in the story. Right. And I don't think in terms of acting, it's strange, but that woman who leads that rebel group, her acting to me isn't very good there.
Jason: Something, it's pretty bland. Very jar jar. Her, her portrayal was, was bland. I thought, sorry, go ahead.
Jarring you were saying?
Steve: Yeah, I was kind of jarring because I'm used to seeing these characters where. The acting is so good. Mm-hmm. That you're very much immersed in who they are. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. You know, from the leads to, you know, episode three and then you have this kind of generic rebel group, kind of this hodgepodge of characters, like the special forces type guy and like the random people from town.
It just, it's something you've seen before. And then having her lead that group, it just doesn't, it just doesn't do it for me. I don't,
Jason: I'm not, was she supposed to be like a mega Karen? Was that how that was written?
Steve: That's what I think it's supposed to be, but I didn't think it really
Jason: worked very well. It did not come across if that was the intention.
The only reason I I even asked that is because of the casting. Mm-hmm. It seemed like they chose an actress and sort of dressed her up so that she could pass as a Karen, but they didn't, I don't know. They didn't do the lines. You would need to reinforce that. So, I don't know. Maybe it, it doesn't, it wasn't intentional, but I just didn't, I didn't find her particularly interesting.
I don't think they set up her character's motivations. Well, the introduction, I don't think was particularly compelling. Now I'm worried that as a series it's gonna be stuck in this place. Like we're gonna get mired in this, in the chaos of the city or whatever politics are going on, and then the characters are obviously just gonna drive off at some point.
Probably with the city burning behind them. Mm-hmm. A better series, I think would, I would at this point be wondering, having not played the game far enough to know for sure at this point, I'd be wondering like, oh, are they gonna end up, like, are some of these characters they're meeting gonna join them?
Are they gonna be introduced to some interesting new aspect of this world? But instead it feels like, no, we're just gonna learn a little bit more about people being mad at Fedra and, and this idea that there's no such thing as really a good person in this world anymore, maybe. Or, you know, and then, and then off they go back looking for his brother.
Yeah.
Steve: I mean that seems pretty logical that that's where it's gonna end up going. Or there's characters that are left behind that are injured or something and they become a problem later on, maybe when they're trying to get revenge or something on their own.
Jason: Oh, I see what you mean. Yeah, maybe, right? Like maybe somebody ends up angry enough to chase them for a while or something.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. I don't know. Uh, it just doesn't, like you said, it just feels like something we've seen done plenty of times. It's
Steve: always something that hesitancy for me with getting into these shows in general. Mm-hmm. That I don't want it to be very disappointing at some point when I've invested so much time into it later on.
Yeah. Where you're like, oh, wow, okay, now we're on season, whatever, and now we know seemingly that this is gonna be the same type of show that you've seen in the past. There's not nothing groundbreaking about it. Mm-hmm. It's zombies survivors. But done in a way where like all the situations that they're getting put in seem way too familiar.
Mm-hmm. We'll see, I mean, I, I've never played the video game, so maybe that, that's why it's such a hit for the people who have played the video game, that that's not what's gonna happen and that's what makes the whole thing so groundbreaking is a video game,
Jason: the episode four. It, it definitely left me with a few questions.
Number one, why do we pay taxes for road maintenance if doing absolutely nothing for 20 years leaves them requiring maybe just like a quick mowing, because those roads look really good. It's
Steve: funny you mentioned that. I was looking at the roads and I was like, wow, in 20 years you just got a couple weeds growing in the cracks of the road.
Jason: Yeah, just get out there with a weed whacker. Good to go. Yeah. And they're, they're ready. They are a hundred percent, so. Okay. Maybe. And the breaches are in great shape too. Oh, I mean, it looks wonderful. Really? It feels like an absolute waste. The money I pay in taxes. Maybe it's because no cars are driving on 'em, but you gotta think like weather, like weather's a big one.
Right. Sun. You know, I mean, there's just a lot of things that you would think would affect them, but Nope. They look pretty good. Or maybe
Steve: that's just the way our world operates right now. Right? Like, maybe they just check on the bridges every 20 years or so and we're thinking they're down there checking every, everything, you know, with their
Jason: handlers.
Yeah. Yeah. Maybe they sit crews out at night to put potholes in so they can send crews out during rush hour traffic to fill them back in because these roads are too damn good. These, these Americans are gonna wonder why we're charging them so much for taxes. We've got, we've gotta get the pothole team out there.
That's right. This is where your money goes.
Steve: You got your drill. Let's go jackhammer. Yep. Rode in the pickup and get to work.
Jason: Okay. Second question. You gonna sleep out in the
Steve: open? Another great question. Laying on the ground, right? Yeah. Is in this cordyceps infection or fungus, something that grows in the ground and spreads everywhere seemingly.
Cause they communicate that way. Right.
Jason: I don't know that definitively they stopped teaching us anything about the fungus. This is the first episode where I guess these two where they stopped teaching us anything. I was expecting another cold open with a scientist. Mm-hmm. Or something this, I like that.
That made it a little bit different. I enjoyed that. But yeah. So, okay. Let's say the fungus is not a problem, which you know, definitively because how, but anyway, there are other threats, you know, like insects, like arachnids, like ticks. Mm-hmm. Wolves, bears, snakes, like, I mean, who knows what the animal and insect and creepy crawly population has done.
And there are other microbes that are dangerous. It's not like they have a full, I mean, maybe they do have like a full medical kit now and they're just like, yeah, we'll sleep on the ground cuz we have antibiotics now. Who cares? I was trying to think like, what would you do if you were in that situation and you were like, we've gotta drive cross country and America has been left to just the wild for 20 years.
Forget about the zombies. Mm-hmm. Which is, I know crazy, but just pretend for a second. How would you sleep? What would you do?
Steve: I would sleep
Jason: inside the car. Okay. Yeah. Right. That's what that's, I was like, if you get a tent and you put a tent up, maybe there's some sort of argument that like you can't hear something coming and then you've gotta deal with it as it's trying to get into the tent or it can sneak up on you better or you can't hear people or something.
But isn't
Steve: he the booby trap guy? Like isn't his whole thing putting down booby trapps while he's sleeping, which he doesn't seem to have done this time. Oh, you
Jason: mean the glass? The glass,
Steve: yeah. Yeah. But he didn't create any sort of perimeter, is what I'm saying. Right. And he didn't start a fire at all. Right.
For warmth or keep wild animals away, like any of those threats that would be in the woods there. Right. And they have a truck that they can just Right. You know? Right. Push the seat back, pass out, you know. Yeah. Protect
Jason: it a little bit. At least, I mean from, you know, insects and, you know, uh, animals and stuff like that.
And humans have to at least like, shoot through the window, you know? Right.
Steve: But it's very odd and it seems like one of those choices that the writers made. Just to have the character development, to have easier shots between the characters. Mm mm-hmm. To be able to set up cameras outside and to be able to really zoom in on their faces without having the encumbrance of a maybe more enclosed space I'm thinking, or something like
Jason: that.
Yeah. Like they had too many shots in the car already. Yeah.
Steve: That you might bore the audience going back and forth for that longer period of time. Yeah. And I know he is not more exposition and blocking for the actors to be able to walk around a space. That's, that's all I'm thinking. And to set up the scene in the morning and when they're, you know, getting everything ready.
I'm assuming that's why, cause anyone who's a special forces guy, right? Mm-hmm. Wouldn't the first thing be to be protected from the elements in general? Not let alone the zombies that are come to attack them, I don't know. And from this fungus that could be anywhere on the ground
Jason: or in the air. Or in the air, as you pointed out correctly.
Yeah, I don't know. That was very strange to me. I, it feels like one of those things where like, I must be missing something. You know? It must be obvious, like no, it's way better in those situations to sleep on the ground. Otherwise. How would a show with this kind of budget and presumably advisors and all that kind of stuff, but this much thought into it, how is this the best thing they came up with?
It's gotta be for some reason, like a better strategy. I don't know
Steve: the trucks, it was using the truck as a diversion or something. Like maybe they would assume they'd be sleeping, but that didn't make any sense either. Cuz didn't they have like a light on all night? Like instead of the fire? Yeah, there's a lot of questions I had too.
As soon as they were out there, I was like, wait a minute, this isn't making much sense at all.
Jason: No, I'm getting concerned about the level of attention to survivor survival skills or survivor, you know, aspect of the show.
Steve: If he was setting up perimeter, let's say, That would be enough for me to, to think, okay, well he's sleeping outside.
At least there's a perimeter around them that if something does come, you know, sneaking up on them in the middle of the night, they're gonna know about it. But he's so careful usually, which doesn't make any sense. He lays down all the glass right when they're sleeping in that enclosed, abandoned apartment.
But out there he is just like, ah, there's nothing out here. We're
Jason: fine. That was the spirit for sure, that they were totally safe and fine. And you know what? He was right. I'm a big enough man to admit it. It did work out. So apparently he was right and I was wrong. And that was good idea. Were they by a tick?
Huh? They bitten by tick. They they could have Lyme disease. They could both have Lyme disease right now. Yeah. And
Steve: that's where syn, cortisols,
Jason: that'd be layers. There's like a second type of zombie. It's like, it's just Lyme disease. You's so tired all the time.
Steve: He's just like, zombie,
Jason: God, I'm so tired. And the eps like, avoid them cuz they don't wanna, don't want to get it.
Steve: Yeah. Stay away from that guy. You don't want that Lyme disease.
Jason: That's my zombie movie. It's gonna be like five different kinds of zombies that keep getting in each other's way. It's like some sort of weird chess game. Sort of rock, rock, paper, scissors. Yeah. Right. We can't cross contaminate. That's right.
We gotta, we gotta get some blue zombies cuz the army zombies are coming at us and they're like trying to, it's like racism in zombies. They're like trying to get away.
Steve: They have all their different, different
Jason: zombie factions. The orange zombie cops show up to take out the blue zombies. What a world. Yeah.
I can't wait for episode five. Yep.
Steve: And you'll hear about it. On this podcast, so stay tuned.
Jason: Yeah. Six. We gotta keep 12 months after you watch it. Beautiful.
Steve: We gotta keep you all hyped up. It could be five years later we're like, Hey, there's this brand new show. It's called Good Times. You seen it?
Jason: I know Mike. All right, so today we're gonna talk about Chrysalis. I'm a huge fan of this. I discovered this, I think it was last year, immediately told all my friends, and they also love it. Unfortunately, the author sh Serrano, to my knowledge, or according to the internet, has not published anything else.
And it was, I think six years ago that it was originally posted chapter by chapter on a particular subreddit where I guess people do that. I guess that's kind of a normal thing. I did read a little of it in print on the page and it doesn't jump out as much as it does. I mean it, you know, it looks good, but it's like typical words on a page.
You really need to read a good bit before you might get sucked in. And also, maybe that was partly just comparison to the audio drama, which is spectacular. So what'd you think? Thought it
Steve: was phenomenal. I was hooked right after that first episode. I think it goes into so many different themes, which we'll discuss around humanity, what it means to be human.
Hmm. Ai, the threats of ai. Mm-hmm. What its limitations could be what it means to be a sentient being. Yeah. Politics in terms of
Jason: diplomacy. Diplomacy and politics. Yeah.
Steve: And politics. And how long, how long is a crime? I don't know how, how you'd say this. I know there's a word for it, but how No, no. Yeah. A crime valid for, you know, and when is it okay to take revenge on it?
Mm-hmm. I mean, there's just so many
Jason: things. And also no colonization, sins of the father. Like, it's so timely. It does what good science fiction does, which it takes really important issues that are relevant today and uses an a fictional setting to take 'em to the extreme and get you thinking. So, yeah, absolutely.
And before we go too far, spoiler warning, this is one of those where I highly recommend you just stop listening. Go find Chrysalis. It's available wherever finer podcasts are Sold. What is it? 1216 episode. Episode 14 episodes. 14
Steve: episode also available on YouTube. Mm-hmm. You can go look up Chrysalis playlist.
Mm-hmm. And you'll
Jason: find it there. It's amazing. Really just high quality all the way across the board. Delete this episode immediately. Go listen to it. Never come back, cuz we're gonna spoil the hell of it. Don't be tempted. Really. I mean, it's just a, an amazing way to spend, what was it, like an hour and a half?
Something like that. Two hours? Yeah. Yeah. Couple hours. Couple hours. Yeah. So yes, absolutely. Highly recommend it more than usual. And we are gonna spoil it. Before we go any further as well, I thought it would be fun to present you with a little challenge. Lot of challenges. You game for a challenge. I love, love the attitude.
So in the spirit of the story, man verse machine, I thought I would challenge you to provide a short summary. And I have already obtained a short sum summary from chat G P t oh, to see how accurate we are. Yep, man. Inverse machine. Let's see who's better. How far has technology come? Is there a difference between ai, artificial intelligence, and your intelligence Great's one superior.
All right. So, all right. John Henry, whenever you're ready. John Henry. Let's go. Gimme a brief
Steve: summary. Well, as, as sentient AI wakes up on earth, realizes that humanity has been completely e eviscerated by an alien force. Mm-hmm. Um, at which point the AI decides to build an army, essentially, of drones and other machines that are kind of swarming the earth, trying to figure out what happened.
There are no humans left, so it decides to take revenge on this enemy alien force. So it builds a ship and it heads off into space. And when it heads off into space, it gets attacked by this alien group, the Arians, I believe they're called. And he decides that just makes him stronger. So he starts kind of integrating the technology of this alien force with his, so it just keeps getting more and more powerful.
So he builds this, the ship is about 27 kilometers long, and he's got hundreds of thousands of drones that he's built, and they call it a swarm. So it's connected to his consciousness. It doesn't have individual consciousness, which comes into play much later in the story. But meanwhile, in the world where these aliens are from, there's this political entry going on where this agrarian ambassador or diplomat, and in other two of them, they're invited to this planet where these veterinarians live.
They're trying to figure out what's going on. Seems like there's some political entry going on and they're trying to figure out what, what happened with the nars. As it turns out, they had attacked Earth and that's why this AI is coming for them so much later. What ends up happening is the AI and the Army attack the planet.
What they've been doing is kind of moving ahead and attacking different kind of legions of fighters from that particular planet and they end up destroying it and the diplomat ends up being able to escape. He ends up talking to the emperor who eventually admits that yes, they had attacked Earth and it was political in nature.
It was a, a matter of collecting taxes that they weren't able to collect, so it was easier just to attack Earth and and destroy it. Subsequently, there's a coup. And from one of these smaller villages. And what ends up happening is that they give the information about this alien planet, the arians, and how to perfectly attack them to the ai.
But the AI becomes, comes to the realization that it has more human qualities. So there's this constant battle with the AI between it's human qualities and the fact that it's now AI and kind of infinitely intelligent. And he ends up making his drones sentient, which becomes an issue for him because they end up growing up like a human would and kind of rebelling against him.
And ultimately he ends up killing himself, retreating and killing himself, but his descendants live on in that society with the Zarian group that's left over. And that diplomat, I'd say that's pretty much. Summarizes it. There were some other parts in there that I probably missed, but I'm sure Chat g p t beat me.
All right. What is the
Jason: other thing? Let's see. Okay, so I have not used chat, g p T, so I made sure to include my request for a brief summary and links to the, you know, podcast or to the, uh, short story and everything. And I got multiple attempts, many of which were kind of useless, but this is the best result I got.
Okay. Dust Chrysalis is a science fiction podcast series that takes place in a distant future where humanity has spread out into the stars and is threatened by an alien race known as the Dust. The story follows a group of characters who are caught up in a struggle for the future of humanity as they fight to protect the last remaining colony from the dust's attacks.
The podcast series is said to be well-produced with a strong cast of voice actors and immersive sound design. The series is a science fiction adventure that explores themes of survival, hope, and the meaning of life and a universe full of dangers and wonders. I think I beat it, so I think it's safe to say it really out of the two.
Yeah. Listen, I, what I like about what Chat G B T did was it's a brief summary. It's a brief summary of what I don't know. I actually spent, it took me half an hour to get this result. I got several also incorrect results, which I assumed were existing stories that it was summarizing. This one I got, it was about the, I think it was about the third or fourth, I think it was the fourth story summary that did not fit anything that I recognized.
So I actually started Googling to try to find out if this is an actual story. I think chat G P T made it up. I cannot find it. It didn't know because it didn't know. It didn't know. So it's like, I'm just gonna make
Steve: it up and hopefully he doesn't know either.
Jason: Yeah, exactly. That's so, yes, it is scary. Right?
And I, I really even like the links that I gave it, I made sure there was nothing else on that page. Like that it could be reacting to, because I thought maybe the first couple times, like either it, there's a better known sci-fi story called Chrysalis that it thinks that, I mean, or there's an ad or some other link on this website that I don't see that it's summarizing like that film instead.
I don't think that's the case. I, I honestly think that chat G p t could not listen to the episodes and it didn't understand, like when I sent it the link to the Reddit stuff. Mm-hmm. It, I guess it didn't understand what, it wasn't enough of the story cuz it's done in chapters and it didn't understand that there are more chapters.
So it just seemingly made up a summary of a science fiction story that seemed to fit the fragments that it could pull off of the webpage. It sounds like it. Yeah. And it presented it with such confidence. Yeah. Yeah. Isn't that amazing? If you had no
Steve: idea what this was and
Jason: you Yeah. You heard that, it's like, oh, okay.
Yeah. You just read it and you know, read it out or turn it in or whatever and just, or go to someone else and be like, okay, you know, dust, uh oh yeah. That's that podcast about when the dust attack humanity, it's a story filled with hope, Uhhuh, humanity struggle. Yeah. At the last remaining colony of like, I honestly, I don't know, it must have cud off of whatever it could find and it just made up a story that's remarkable and frightening, obviously.
And terrifying. It's absolutely. Have ever terrify,
Steve: have ever had it made up a story or, or make up a story on purpose?
Jason: I have. This is the only time I've ever used it. Oh, you mean like ask it to make one up?
Steve: Yeah. You can tell her what to make, you know what kind of story to make up and it'll just write it for you, which is unbelievable.
Jason: Yeah, imagine. Well, I believe it now.
Steve: Yeah. That's so funny. I think if you would've given it chunks of the text. It would've been able
Jason: to come up with something cohesive. I did. I gave it the entire first chapter. How did you give it to it? I sent it so it said, you know, I'll be more accurate if you provide links.
So I found web links that were included, by the way, some of them summaries of it. Like the opening paragraph was like a summary of interesting dust. And so I thought, well, it'll just spit that right back in me. It'll just copy it right off the webpage. And even with those, it still took these weird turns.
Didn't, it's very,
Steve: very odd that it would do
Jason: that, huh? I mean it's, and it did it with such confidence. It wasn't like, I'm not sure, but maybe, right. You know, there's none of that. It's like, this is what it is. Like honestly, I got three or four summaries that were like this, where it was like, no, this is the story.
Here you go. And I was like, it's not though. I don't know what you're talking about, but I thought it was my mistake. So I spent at least half hour on this. I'm not kidding. And it just kept saying like, give me references and I'll tell you, and I did. And then it gave me these summaries and I was like, wow, this is, people are gonna believe this.
Steve: Do you think it, because you gave it different summaries, it can't distinguish between comparing two summaries to each other and extracting the commonalities and leaving the extraneous stuff out of
Jason: there. I phrase every, every prompt as a unique question. So, you know, I phrase it as like, please provide a brief summary of, you know, the dust or the short story chrysalis by in the sh serrano as listed or as, I forget how I put it, but as referenced here or as provided on this website or whatever, however I phrased it.
And then when it gave me a summary, I just r did the same prompt again and I changed small details each time. I see, like I put, like I added like from the podcast dust season two of Dust Pod, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Like went through very and added more and more information until it was like a very long sentence with multiple web links and this was the best I got.
That's so
Steve: odd. Yeah, you're right. The scary part is that it's just so confident. Confident this response, so confident
Jason: this is what it is. Yeah. And each time it was absolutely confident, like, this is what it is. And I, so I honestly thought, oh, it's, it's gotta be some other movie or TV show or movie or sorry, or novel that already exists.
It has the same name, but I couldn't find it in this case. I Googled and looked around like aliens name the dust, blah, blah, blah. Couldn't find anything. I'm gonna give
Steve: it a shot and see if I can get it to, to come up with something. It seems so odd that it would go, it would create a summary that's so off.
Right. It has none of the, really, none of the elements of the story. It's completely wrong.
Jason: Right. It's, it, it's, there's a couple elements that are right, but yes, it is wrong about key elements. Right. Really important stuff like what you would, everything but the background, the non-important facts are wrong.
Mm-hmm. So really interesting. Yeah, it is. Yeah. So you can dive a heart attack in success if you want to. Correct. Just like John Henry. Right. Anyway, moving on. I'm really glad you got through it cuz there's a few things I wanted to talk about. Was there anything you wanted to get into before I hit you with my, uh, talking points?
Steve: Yeah, I guess just, just overall, I was just wondering did I miss this part? Did he ever really understand who he had been before?
Jason: Okay, so yeah, you're talking about the fact that the narrator slash main character, the, um, artificial intelligence that wakes up after Earth has been completely wiped of all living things, like it's just a totally dead planet, nothing but bones and, you know, scrap everywhere that artificial intelligence wakes up and it believes itself to be human, but it exists in server farms, it's technological.
And so it spins most of the, um, series trying to figure out, not necessarily who or what it is, partially that, but more fundamentally its own nature. Like is it a man or is it a machine? And they explain that it thinks in very binary terms. So it has fragmented memories. From presumably when it was human or what was drawn from a human to create it.
And your question is, does it ever figure out if it used to be a human or what? Is that what you said? Yeah, I guess specifically
Steve: who it was.
Jason: I know it was like, like as a human, previously
Steve: as a, as a human, as a fully formed human or if it's just in its servers or it's its memory. If it was just a bunch of fragmented memories.
Cuz what I had originally thought was that a human, before these aliens attacked, uploaded their consciousness into this ai. Mm. But it wasn't a programmed AI that was acting like a human or had been programmed with artificial memories. Mm-hmm. But that it was actually a human who lived, who uploaded their consciousness into the ai.
That's why the whole time I was wondering would he ever figure out who he was. And I thought it would be interesting if he finds out who he is, but he's like horrified. That the person that he was was actually some kind of dictate or tyrant of some sort. Right. Which would be the whole thing more difficult for him to continue.
Like that's why he was so dead set on vengeance. Mm-hmm. Because he was some kind of like tyrannical warrior of some type. I was waiting for that to happen, but they never went that direction.
Jason: It seems. No, as I understood it, all that we learn or all that it learns, or he learns, I don't know, is that a team of scientists worked endlessly as the world was ending around them, or they worked tirelessly to, uh, advance the technology in order to upload as much of a human consciousness as they could into this computer system.
And then for some reason it woke up. 300 years later. Mm-hmm. So it must have been compiling or processing, or it was programmed to remain dormant so that it wouldn't be destroyed. But we don't know. And what he is, is their best attempt to salvage a human brain or a human. So an amalgam,
Steve: basically of, of humanity?
Kind of, yeah. Like
Jason: a, like a traits humanity. Fractured, imperfect. You know, I think it's supposed to be one person, but they were unable to really capture a person fully. Or it was damaged over time. So what he was, was part human part ai. And then because of that, he thought in very binary terms, meaning things were or they were not, they were this or that.
And that's where a lot of the revenge drive was
Steve: coming from, which is interesting. So talking about that particular point in terms of vengeance, it's kind of fascinating how it was programmed with this, such a strong vengeance drive as if while they were uploading this consciousness because of what was happening in the world and they were furiously racing to complete it, that they programmed it for vengeance or one of those strong drives was vengeance.
You see what I mean?
Jason: Uh, maybe. Right. I think that's one of the questions of the series, right? Is that human. Or was that programmed? Was that that person? Is that all of us? Right. I don't think they programmed it, or the read I got was not that they programmed it, but that because of the nature of its awakening and that time that it spent on earth searching.
Mm-hmm. It, it triggered this desire for something and because of the sort of binary nature of its thinking, it became, it sort of lashed out in anger and started thinking in absolute like, or continued thinking in absolutes and saw, okay, retribution is wipe them all out. It's an absolute statement. Now, when he created proto human AI templates, I don't know how to, what to call it later, they did not react the same way.
So I don't think, I don't know that he was programmed that way as much as he was. That was his reaction to his experience. And then what he created, they had different experiences, so they had their own personalities and reactions and they were less binary in their thinking, like they were a better put together essentially was the read I got.
So they were capable of developing and looking at things in a more nuanced fashion and he had to, as he said, shackle them with the suffering and the imagery that pushed him over the edge in order to get them to stay motivated to exterminate the a aliens. Yeah,
Steve: it's, it's something that you had that read and my read was that whoever was programming him or,
Jason: or set him on, on this path Yeah.
Was,
Steve: was in intentional. In the sense that, okay, now we know we're all gonna die, but there's this one last remaining hope to get our revenge even after we're not here. But
Jason: see, he was conflicted. He debated, he wasn't completely focused on vengeance. So if they had the capacity to program the AI with directives with such clear purpose, then why was he using the least, not the least, not using the most efficient means?
Why was he trying to clinging to his humanity? Why was he going about it in an indirect way?
Steve: It's a good question because I would argue that maybe since it was a, a sentient AI, that it still had to have those other elements in order to be informed.
Jason: Yeah. I, I can't argue that that's not true. Right? Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, you make a good point. We know they're capable of lying. Right? That's true. Yeah, definitely. So maybe they're capable of debating their mission. Definitely
Steve: deceptive. Especially around story summaries. We know that we caught you.
Jason: Yeah. I thought of the, the scientists that were referenced, I thought of their mission as saving something of humanity.
But it sounds like you think their mission was revenge.
Steve: Not necessarily that it was a hundred percent that mission, but part of it that if he's able to, or this, this AI is able to do it, that it would go that route while still having qualities or human-like qualities in the programming. Mm-hmm. But it's hard to tell, right?
Because if it's a learning, you know, AI is a learning machine. So like you said, it's learning as it's starts. Looking to see like, oh, all, all these cities are destroyed. They ruined everything here, and I'm here alone. I think he mentions that at one point, like I'm utterly alone or something. Mm-hmm. Which is kinda an interesting thing for an AI to say, to be programmed in that way.
Right? That it can feel this sadness or this idea that it, it's disconnected from everything. It wants to be connected again in some way. That's why this is such a fascinating story. Oh, so many levels. It opens up so many, yeah. Conversations around humanity or your need for connection. The ideas of forgiveness for the, like, how he struggles with this idea of forgi forgiveness.
Yeah.
Jason: Lemme ask you this, and I think this ties into maybe my read of it. Were you rooting for him? No,
Steve: there were points where I understood it in terms of, oh, wanting some retribution. But I felt his idea of retribution, it really hit me when they're trying to negotiate with him and he doesn't trust anyone.
Mm-hmm. And he's just, it's like a blind vengeance for such an intelligent machine. Mm-hmm. It seemed to have these blinders on. Yeah. And just wanting total annihilation of everything. Yeah. So it's almost as if he couldn't, he was playing checkers, although he's programmed for chess mm-hmm. But he's choosing not to play.
Jason: I, yeah. Like you said, I think that's a, that's a fair statement for sure. Yeah. Or accurate.
Steve: It seems like, you know, what they would say for someone who had this issue as a human right, they lack impulse control. He was just pure seeming impulse. And what he was strategizing was around getting that total retribution.
And he seemed to really, really enjoy the destruction that he was creating. Mm. Without really understanding. The only time I really saw him take a step back was when he started thinking about what deck or whatever, why he didn't kill him. Oh, doubt it. Doubt it. Yeah. How it could create all these problems for him in the future, but he didn't seem to have the same idea when it was, you know, destroying an entire civilization.
It seemed like they had to show him that, like the global Council. Mm-hmm. Show him there are gonna be ramifications to what you're doing. Like it had occurred to him, but he wasn't really following. And then when he realizes that there's ramifications, he still shoots anyway. So it's kind of, I don't know, it was hard to feel good about what he was doing In any, in any way or to root for him at all for most of it.
Jason: What did you think? I was rooting for him the entire time. And I think that's why it didn't even occur to me that he was programmed for revenge or to, you know, to exterminate the enemy or retribution or justice, or whatever you wanna call it from me, the beginning where, you know, he's sent his drones out and they're going all over the earth and all the death and the loss of all living things on the planet.
That made me angry. And it also, I had a lot of, I felt a lot of sadness for the loss and the combination of those two things set me on a path for revenge because, you know, the whole time I was very aware intellectually that what he was doing was wrong on a certain level, on a, like a smart, like intelligent human level.
But I was like, fuck, wipe 'em all out. I enjoyed every single battle scene because every time he wins, I was like, good. And I was aware that that's wrong and I if it was reality, these were real living things or living creatures or whatever you wanna call 'em. Species. Yeah, it's terrible. Fighting fire with fire is a terrible idea, but I was thoroughly enjoying it.
I was like, this is good. He is just gonna roll over all of 'em and wipe him out, and I'm gonna enjoy it because they destroyed earth. They destroyed everything that I care about. So this is entertaining to me, and I want to hear how he does it. And I know that that's playing to my base side, but I don't think you need to program a human to do that.
You know, an AI, human hybrid. I think just seeing the world like waking up, discovering like if I was a human, I am a human. Okay. Hypothetically, if I had had a heart and lungs and human skin and I woke up and I was like, everything I've ever known is gone. I would, I would, it would, I don't know what I would do.
I might do this. I don't know that I would have the capacity, meaning the cleverness and the technological know-how to do this, but if I did, I don't, I don't know that I would hold back on blowing up the first ships. The second I realized that they spoke English or spoke our language the whole time and could have responded and just laid waste to everyone.
I might do the same thing without anybody else telling me to do
Steve: it. Then you're looking at the AI as if it was, it has the same needs as a human, like what we were talking about earlier, this need for connection
Jason: or this, I'm seeing it as it's the last of us, so whatever its motivations are, go for it. You know, like we're all gone.
So a lot of the things that we debate as a species, like morality and things like that, suddenly felt very much less relevant to me, and I was like, go get 'em. Mm-hmm. In part two, there is a sudden dramatic perspective shift. And I think the audio drama did a really good job of changing the style to match the change of style in the text.
So you go from a single narrator with a limited perspective, then you shift over to a young diplomat, like an assistant diplomat or whatever his, whatever his technical title is. Dow played by Corey Hawkins, played very well. But as he's like a, a very empathetic counterpoint, he sees everything is new and he's, he's not about ego, he's not about overpowering, uh, challenges and he's engaging with, or he's learning from Tony Colette's.
Nani. Mm-hmm. Or Nani. Great actress, great actor, you know, really good stuff. But it's a massive tonal shift. For the story, and my initial response to that was, is this a different story? Did I, did I finish the other one? And then I was like, oh wow, this is the same story. This is awful. They've ruined it. It was so good and now it's so bad.
But then I was like, no, actually this is kind of interesting. And then when I saw how the author wove the two different points of view together, I was, I loved it even more. It was amazing. But I initially really didn't like it. So what did you think of that big shift in part two? I was
Steve: so into like you, this idea of him building the machines and fighting and that whole mm-hmm.
I thought that was so exciting. Yeah. It was like hitting the brakes. Yes. I had to force myself as I was listening, to really understand like, what are they doing here? At first I was very confused, so I was like, okay, they're in a different galaxy or a totally different part of the universe or whatever.
Mm-hmm. What do these two things have to do with each other? Right. Are we just gonna follow political path on one end while this guy's still destroying this civilization on his end and they're not gonna connect? I really didn't think they were gonna connect. Mm mm-hmm. As soon as they connected, then I started jumping into the idea that, oh, wait a minute, this could get really interesting because now we're gonna learn more about the motivations behind attacking Earth and the, the drama on that side.
But they did such a great, or the writer did such a great job connecting the two pieces together by the end. Oh yeah. I was completely, I was completely hooked. Yeah. It was that, you know, all the s there was that shift and then the entry was so well done. The idea of a coup, the idea of like when and where you would reveal information to the AI and for what reason.
But I mean, I think the parallels were, were pretty obvious with the, um, revolutionary War.
Jason: Interesting. I hadn't thought of that. You're talking about because The Alien Society.
Steve: The Alien society, the guy that wants the coup, how he like, wants to, he just wants to protect himself in his people from the tyranny of the empire.
So I kind of saw that just kind of as a self-contained, like, kind of like a little, a parallel between England and the us. Interesting.
Jason: So you're talking about the tribe, the, what is it? Ax Tribe? Yeah, the ax Tribe. When they betray the emperor. So the way I, or listened to that or read that or heard that was, that was a cover story.
That this is a, a society of like warring tribes that had evolved or developed to the point where they wanted to stop or reduce competition between themselves and they wanted to join the larger galactic society. So they created an association or a, a republic, quote unquote, under an emperor. But there was still, there were still a lot of divisions within their society.
And the most powerful tribe at the moment, despite the fact that the emperor was not from their tribe, was the ax tribe because they controlled a planet that was an industrial powerhouse and provided most of the goods for not just their society, but other societies in this galactic larger galactic republic or collaboration or whatever they called it.
So, This Anex tribe leader betrayed the emperor and the rest of their species in order to save themselves. And the cover story was that they were oppressed and seeking freedom and all that kind of stuff, but I think it was pretty clear that that was a lie and that the AI voiced by Matthew Wolf, by the way, who crushed it.
He was incredible. But the AI didn't believe it and was just planning to exterminate them eventually anyway. Even if he did believe it, it didn't matter. Right. So is that different than your interpretation? I
Steve: think my interpretation was based on the fact that at that point, I think I was listening it at to it at double speed.
Oh, I got, I called part of it, but didn't catch that other clearly very important piece.
Jason: Yeah, it was, it was an interesting discussion. I, and I wanted to talk about that too, because if you represent a powerful group within a larger group, so like, you know, let's talk, I mean, this has happened countless times through human history, but whether you're an African tribe or maybe you represent a group of Jewish people prior to World War II or during World War ii, what do you do when it becomes apparent that you're essentially powerless to prevent genocide?
Do you stay aligned with the group that's targeted, or if you see an opening, do you try to separate out your yourself and the people that you most directly represent in order to try to save them? And I think like a lot of families struggled with this, you know, at different points and probably still do.
Sometimes it's life and death, and sometimes it's just a dinner party. If the majority is dead set against a particular group and you see a way to distance yourself from that group, do you take it. And in this story they did. I mean, there was a exponential replicator, a machine that seems unstoppable, that has proven that it's gonna overcome even the larger galactic force or whatever that's put against it.
And it is dead set on killing every single member of your species. You come up with a plan, maybe you don't, you don't even think it'll work. But do you try it? And I'm asking that as like a actual question.
Steve: I mean, in that case, I mean it's, this is like you, you said it's kind of the tail result is time, right?
For humans and like how alliances are formed and kind of disbanded. I think in this case you'd have to, there's no chance to defeat that replicator. It's coming, it's gonna destroy everything. So you need to do anything cuz not being alive, you're not gonna be able to do much about it later on. Right.
Right. So you have to give yourself some kind of chance, right? At least maybe down the
Jason: line. You figure out you betray everyone else in order to save, like, uh, okay. When that group, group of that particular group of people, when humanity was being wiped out right before the story starts, if one group of humans had figured out how to side with the aliens and that had even hastened the destruction of the rest of humanity, then there would still be humans alive.
And they could rebuild and they could decide, they could judge the people who made that choice, you know, even execute them. But there would still be humans around. So that's an argument in favor of what you're saying, but I think a lot, it's a battle that a lot of us fight in different ways, at different points in our lives, especially when you're kids and things aren't that clear, right?
Everybody turns on somebody, but you're friends with that person, or you have the same traits or likes or dislikes that they do. Do you join in? Do you do nothing? Do you tell everybody else that they like this thing so that you dodge a bullet? Like, I don't know. I mean, is that a fair analogy? Because maybe the head of the AX tribe was honestly trying to just save anybody from his species and this was all he could come up with.
Mm-hmm. You know, that's what it seemed like he did hasten the demise of his entire civilization. Yeah. I mean, it's a bold gambit. I don't know, like it's, it's kind of hard to judge because it's such an extreme circumstance, but I think the point of good sci-fi is that you do try. Mm-hmm. You do try to make sense of it and think about what you would do or how you judge others who've made these decisions.
Steve: It really opens up a lot of really interesting questions. Mm-hmm. You know, about morality, ethics, and how that comes to play when it's life or death. Yeah. There's been plenty of people that have died over it say, no, I'm not gonna give in no matter what.
Jason: Right. And we honor them often, but they are dead.
They are dead
Steve: and they can't, you know, you can't make any other decisions, good ones or bad ones if you don't exist. But then could you live with yourself afterwards? Ah, yeah. That's the other one, right. Yeah. So I don't, I don't know. It's really what, what does the audience think?
Jason: Vote now. Yeah, I guess Mark will call me.
Steve: Hold on.
Jason: Okay, so another thing I noticed this story presents a very positive view of diplomacy during wartime. Not that common, especially not in science fiction, but I was trying to figure out like, what are movies about diplomacy? You know, like Argo, you know, where diplomats are presented in a positive light, right?
And Argo's not the same kind of story, but you think about like, John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the people involved in diplomacy during that, that would be sort of a similar story. Mm-hmm. There's probably a lot of stories, movies, novels, about diplomacy during World War II and what was saved or lost due to diplomacy.
But this is a very positive view of what a diplomat can do, you know? Yeah. And obviously prevented the destruction potentially of all life in that part of the galaxy. Yep.
Steve: It's on a much smaller scale, the hostage negotiator, right. For instance. Yeah. Yeah. Like someone who, a good example, someone who can have such a huge effect.
Maybe that's one of the big points of the, of the story. Like it takes you from this, you know, macro level of civilizations down to the micro. Yeah. How this one guy has such a tremendous effect in how much you can do if you stand up for what you believe in. Yeah. And in this case, taking a gamble, right?
Risking his, his own life, but also risking everybody else at the same time if things went awry. Mm-hmm. Right. So there's a lot, lot here around risk. When do you take a risk, when do you not take a risk? And is it always better to take the risk
Jason: in the end? Yeah, it's interesting. I, I just thought that was a really nice touch.
I mean, obviously there's a lot about point and counterpoint with the main characters and it's all, they're all humans. That's true for sci-fi, like in sci-fi stories, you know, the characters always represent aspects or types of humanity or, uh, humans. So there are no aliens truly in this story of any kind.
Even the myth of the, was it the bone giants? Uh, which I thought did a great job of illustrating kind of an intellectual debate or that point that we were discussing a minute ago, but it's all humanity and it's all aspects of humanity. And it's probably less about diplomacy than it is about leading with empathy, trying to understand your enemy regardless of what they've done and believing in yourself, but not making your ego the centerpiece of your decisions.
So all that's about just being a human. But I, I did like that diplomacy was featured as a positive thing and there were some references to not so much corruption, but you know, ego in diplomacy and the galactic Republic or whatever it is, galactic society, their diplomacy Corps had that guy who takes credit and all that kind of stuff.
But at the end of the day, diplomacy is what won and what saved the lives, so. Mm-hmm. I thought that was interesting.
Steve: That was really interesting. It makes me. Think of this point I had earlier, which was the idea of how long is revenge valid in terms of a human time span? There's, you know, a lifetime, say it's 80 years, 90 years or whatever it, it is in that universe.
But this idea that someone would say, oh, that happened 300 years ago and other people did it, are the people who exist now responsible for the sins of the father? And that's one of those everlasting themes in humanity, right? People's ancestors committing crimes and then the, their descendants having to pay for those crimes.
Jason: How? Yeah. So the actual quote, and I, I wanted to bring this up. There's a few quotes. One of them is you can't simply blame the children for what their ancestors did. I don't want you to forget, I want you to let history be history. So that's an opinion. Mm-hmm. And it's hotly debated. Yeah. Especially in America.
Yeah. So what do you think about that idea?
Steve: It's such a conflicting question because it's something that you can debate on both sides pretty really strongly. Things that happened in the past and that were never paid for. And what is fairness? How much is a quote unquote payment for ills that have happened ages ago?
Mm-hmm. Is there a responsibility just because those people then take responsibility to fix those wrongs? Does someone still have to do we carry that same lineage or that same guilt over whatever happened in the past? And part of me says yes, but the other part of me says no, because it's a slippery slope.
How far back are you gonna go?
Jason: Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, another quote, none of the lives you've taken had anything to do with the decision to destroy your world. Most of them didn't know about it. So many of the issues we discuss right now happened before any of us were alive. Mm-hmm. For some people that doesn't matter because the consequences continued till today.
But for other people, they might argue that well, but the people who did that aren't alive, so it doesn't, they were born into a situation that they didn't create like this alien species. Right. They benefited as a species, presumably from the destruction and extermination of all life on multiple planets.
Mm-hmm. That was part of empire building for them, and as a result, now their society thrives. Mm-hmm. But none of them were alive at that time, and they've all agreed to stop doing that. The ones who are alive have made changes and they have a very different society now. So coming in and rocking the boat and disrupting their attempts to grow and change because of things that people who aren't alive did, could just result in an another pendulum swing or cause multiple problems that ultimately hurt more people.
Right? Create more anger and more resentment like I, I was, I was thinking a lot, and at the very end they talk about how the descendants of this ai, they must have gone through months or years of negotiations in the same room, I imagine with the survivors of this alien species and trying to mediate that.
Can you imagine? It's like they destroyed an entire, you know, this ai, the descend, you know, they're the descendants of the AI that destroyed Right. Our entire colony and almost completely ruined our home world and killed billions of us and including billions of aliens that had nothing to do with it, you know?
Mm-hmm. Who were in those other ships that just were trying to defend us, and then on the other side of the equation Yeah. But you, your ancestors wiped out their entire species mm-hmm. And killed every living thing on their planet. It's like everybody just shut up. Right. Nobody's right. Like, there's no point in blame.
And, and I think that's maybe a, an interesting thought for me is like, maybe sometimes there is no point in blame. Like maybe blame is the thing that stops progress. But it's such a part of how we make sense of bad events. Yeah. Like when there's a shooting, we immediately start, oh, who do you blame? Do you blame the parents?
Do you blame the kid? Do you blame the teachers? Is it the school's fault? Is it the other students? Whose fault is it? We need to know that before we can move on or solve the problem. But maybe that's a lie. And in reality, blame is very often an obstacle to a solution. Mm-hmm.
Steve: Yeah. And, and to think about this idea of blame in a more philosophical way, there's a lot of self-help and motivational books and just life philosophy, right?
Mm-hmm. That you shouldn't mm-hmm. Dwell in the past. So it's a completely counter to that belief. Yeah. X, y, Z happened, good or bad, but you shouldn't live there cuz all you can change is the future on a very personal level. Right, right. While there are other people who live in the past, And then there are other people who are living in the past, kind of living in the present, but always future thinking.
So when it comes to situations like this, which one of those people are you in terms of how you conceptualize these, these issues? If you're a person who's, you know, we can't dwell in the past, only move towards the future, there's really only future. The past just, it happened. Okay, great. Let's move on from there.
But if you're constantly dwelling in the past, I don't think there's a positive to that either.
Jason: No. I mean, you can call it regret or blame or anger, but one of the last actions of the AI is to delete the regret, the anger, the, the source of, of pain. From the minds of the, um, AI humanoid or human AI hybrids that he created.
So he freed them. And I think the story is trying to say that's the only path forward, right? If you want to get past what's been done to you or your people, you have to let go somehow and resolve or magically delete the anger, the hurt, the suffering, not the consequences, because the consequences can't be deleted.
Those new humans, proto humans, ai, humans, whatever, they didn't inherit a reset. They were just spared the direct suffering. Like seeing the world waking up and discovering what had happened, the memories, the videos of the last moments of humanity, and every living thing on earth like that was. Not, it was no longer forced on them.
So without those images, those ideas, that part of their heritage, presumably they were able to digest the information differently and move forward. The author made a real point of showing that next evolution of humanity as Happy Thomas, I think its name was, or his name was, or whatever pronouns it uses.
It was happy and it was looking forward to the future. Mm-hmm. Yeah. You know, and I think that's what the author was trying to say, or at least one path forward is letting go of that stuff. Just let go of the anger, the bitterness, like the AI had to die because there was no way it could let go of the trauma.
You know, the anger and the pain and the hurt that it had suffered. Waking up to that world and that realization. So if you wanna move forward, you have to let go of it. And maybe that means letting people who can't die or go away or leaving them out of the conversation, I don't know. But it's an interesting perspective for sure.
It's very interesting.
Steve: There's, you know, the idea of how a civilization was built and how, because of the colonization wiping out all these different worlds they're able to get to now. Mm-hmm. There's a book that I'm reading now, it's called How the World Really Works, and he is talking about like the pillars of our current civilization being ammonia, steel, concrete, plastics, like the, and porn.
Yeah. And porn. The fifth. The fifth beetle.
Jason: Um, the fifth pillar.
Steve: The fifth pillar of civilization. But his point is very interesting in the sense that he dives deep into all of these polluting materials, petrochemicals, et cetera. Mm-hmm. And he's talking about the advancements that we've made as a society.
Now our entire society is built around these things. And you can't just simply reverse all of it, even though you'd like to, because if these things hadn't been created and existed, even though they're really polluting, we wouldn't have the society we live in now. Mm-hmm. And it's just a lot to think about.
Like, so if you knew that something like plastic was gonna be so polluting and we weren't gonna be able to like really reverse its effects, but you knew that it was gonna create a really advanced, technologically advanced safer society health or healthier society, would you just do it anyway? Mm. So it just kind of, It makes you think, and the way this book is written, and it's just very realistic, his stance on it, that you just simply can't reverse all of this in one fell swoop.
Because we would have to go back into an agrarian society and we still wouldn't be able to feed all of society just ammonia alone. For instance, if nitrogen based synthetic fertilizers didn't exist, 4 billion people on the planet wouldn't exist. He calls it the most important invention civilization, like the most important technological civilization.
But these things are highly polluting to produce. So there's that constant balance between where we are now and looking at the past through this lens of like the Monday morning quarterback. And you can't do that. And I found that really interesting with this, the similarity with this theme, civilization theme and where we are now as a society and how we've gotten here.
Mm-hmm. You know, that's a lot of death, a lot of destruction. A lot of bad, but to get to now, would you wanna go back to medieval times? Probably not. Right. But you'd have a much quote unquote, cleaner earth
Jason: than where we are now. Okay. So you're sort of tying into this idea of stop looking back, start now.
Start with what is real now, and then try to find a better direction going forward. Mm-hmm. I
Steve: think thematically that's what this, this story is doing too, at the end.
Jason: Okay. So the last line, and I think we should talk about the ending, cuz it definitely affects some of the things I've been saying. The last line is, no, I don't think they're lying.
I know they are, they're lying about the fact that the AI that created them is dead. It's, he's not, he's still alive, but he's not in charge and they're hiding his existence. So I think that was, A really, really interesting choice. Like when I first heard that, I thought, okay, well that's like a really cool way for the author to like acknowledge my attachment to that character.
Like he felt like a victim. So for him to sacrifice himself in a moment of realization and be he moment where he becomes more than ones and zeros mm-hmm. And he develops past his need for vengeance and his trauma and everything that he's lost, that was a moment of sacrifice for him for sure. But it, it didn't have to be the ultimate sacrifice.
He broadcast the copy of himself, his children accepted it, saved it, and at some point downloaded him into a body. I like to think they were trying to rehabilitate him, but he wasn't leading the discussion. So I think it's a, again, a strong argument for this idea that the people who are most hurt. If they are unable to get past their own anger or their sadness, then they don't belong at the table in discussing the path forward.
And I think that is highly controversial. I think a lot of people think they should be at the front. They should have the loudest voice, they should have the biggest microphone, you know, the most sound bites. Mm-hmm. Right. That's certainly the news strategy. Yeah. Because they're often the most dramatic, you know, they represent the suffering and the pain, but are they the best choice for guiding everyone else forward?
Steve: That's a really good point. Yeah. Are they, they've suffered through all of this, but are they just completely blinded by it? Same as the ai, right?
Jason: Yeah. I mean, he was in charge and you saw what he did, right. And at the end he was very clearly just on the side. It wasn't like anyone was taking directions from him.
It seems like his children had forgiven him. At least mostly I'm sure it was complicated and I think they wanted, they had like a sense of allegiance and maybe even sympathy for him, especially because what he did in the end was ultimately the quote unquote more moral or right thing, but he wasn't their representative, he wasn't their emperor.
Like there was nothing that I saw to indicate he was anything other than just living his life and hopefully less pain. Mm-hmm.
Steve: Yeah, that's really interesting. Is the person who, who is right to lead everyone forward, do they have to understand the past in a way that's kind of detached and are they as effective because they're detached from it?
Or you know, is the big prevailing argument that someone who is in that pain or who has experienced that pain, are they the right person to lead forward because they understand it the most or do they just not understand the future as well as someone who hasn't experienced that? You see what I
Jason: mean?
Like No, it's an interesting discussion. So, you know, you take any group that has been through, I mean, thankfully all life on Earth has not been extinguished, so nobody's been through that. But there are groups that I still exist, that have been through terrible suffering, right? And have been treated poorly in trying to chart a better path forward.
Is it best to choose someone else from a different group? Who can look at it more objectively and chart a path forward? Is it better to choose one of their descendants who's had a better life and hasn't been through that? Who can, you know, sort of have a foot in both worlds? Is it better to choose somebody who went through the suffering and let them make decisions about how things will be handled or does it not matter?
And it's really just a, a factor of who is most capable of thinking about this in a way that yields the best results. So it doesn't really matter what they've been through. Personally or, or not necessarily, doesn't matter what they've been through, but it, it doesn't matter if they went through it with the group, if they're descendants of that group or they just for reasons of their own can truly empathize and think clearly and deal with the other groups to try to path forward.
I don't know, like that's an interesting discussion cuz I imagine that there have been a lot of breakdowns in diplomacy, let's say, that were the product of people not being the best choice for the role. Either they didn't understand the plight to the people they were representing or all the way on the other continuum.
They understood it too well and couldn't see clearly because of it. Yeah,
Steve: it's, it's very complex. It's a very, very complex issue because if someone is completely unbiased and they represent a group, Are they actually represen? Is that good or bad? Yeah, yeah. Are they representing the, the group and is, you know, is the good thing to be representative of the group?
And once you're representative of the group and you understand all the nuances of that group, can you truly be unbiased ever? Or are you just subconsciously always gonna be fighting for the group? And that's what I think a lot of AI proponents talk about this idea that like, AI will be unbiased, but then in terms of, and dishonest.
And dishonest, yeah. Yeah. It's very complex though, right? Like a judge who's ai and that's something that, um, right. Is in that next peg mark book, which I highly recommend Life 3.0 where I think a lot of these ideas came from. Okay. He talks about the idea that there may not be judges and juries in the traditional sense that we have them now, that an AI may be making these decisions in terms of someone's guilt or innocence.
Based on tons and tons of signals and data that I can read that a human couldn't really process. Mm-hmm. And is that fair? Mm-hmm. Like a human jury might give someone five years in prison, but the AI is like looking at propensity to commit the crime in the future in a very mathematical, statistical way.
Mm-hmm. Their histories, their social environment, what those people have done and haven't done. So understanding this picture in a way that a human wouldn't have access to and be able to compute the data in a quote unquote unbiased way, but what does that mean for the future of humanity, right? If you're giving these major decisions and putting them in the hands of an AI as opposed to a human, what are the ramifications of that?
And can you control it after you've got judges and juries that are just one ai? Can you reverse it and go back the other way? Or does everything just start getting handed over to an AI and full trust gets put into it? When it's capable of deception, let's say. Yeah. Or maybe situation.
Jason: So it's a question of who programs it as well and who monitors the AI because they're also in, in your scenario, making incredibly significant decisions about the future of society, not just the present, but who rises to the top, who ends up in jail, right?
You know, who's right? Who's wrong is being dictated by whoever programmed the AI and then whatever the AI does, which is limited presumably by human understanding to a large degree. So, yeah, I don't know. It's a sticky wicket as they say, and I don't think we're as far along on that front as we think or are sometimes afraid we are.
I think it gets too complicated, too quickly. And while we might become lazy as human beings and rely on what we're calling artificial intelligence, I don't think it's as smart or as intelligent or as capable as we want to think it is. I think
Steve: right now it isn't, but I think it's really difficult for us to predict the future in terms of how these exponential leaps and bounds happen technologically.
Mm-hmm. Even for very innocuous seeming devices that we use every day. Right. Like the smartphone would 20 years ago, that have been a concept that people thought would exist and that we'd use regularly. I don't think so. We're jumping technologically in a way now that we never have before. Exponentially.
Jason: Yeah. And maybe I'm stuck in the past, but to me, artificial intelligence is a means to provide a human with information more efficiently and that's it. Right. Any use beyond that I think is a risky, risky. At best. And when I hear about that and I hear about problems, I'm not surprised. Mm-hmm. And I think people who are leaning for a time when AI can do a lot more than that reliably and consistently, I think it's further off than they all imagine.
I think that's just the nature of it. I think it's, there's levels of complexity that people don't understand that exist. And I guess the biggest question in my mind is, how do we learn that lesson? You know, do we create things that fail miserably, like self-driving cars that cause accidents or damage people's lives or create traffic jams or whatever.
And then we realize, okay, well getting a vehicle to drive people around is a lot more complicated than we thought. Or do people realize that and take 'em off the road? Pass laws to prevent people from relying on self-driving too much. But driving is incredibly complicated. It requires, I think, a human brain or something with that same level of problem solving and self-awareness and knowledge and all that kind of stuff in order to do it right under the conditions that you encounter.
But I think there are a lot of people who don't think that's true, and they think it's just a matter of telling, you know, or a computer program that, that can handle prototypical situations and then extrapolate from that and that's it. Mm-hmm. It's just a limited number of iterations it needs to be able to handle.
And beyond that, it's as good as a human, but I don't think that's necessarily true. I think there's, there are added layers of complexity there, like morality or ethics or, you know, unexpected, dealing with the unexpected that, uh, that an AI is far away from being able to do well. And the very first time an AI makes an ethical choice wrong.
I think it's gonna be a big deal.
Steve: Yeah, there's a lot of dangers. I really reading about this stuff more and more, I just realized how many dangers there actually are. There are so many more than I could even imagine around who's controlling it, how's it being programmed, where are the limitations? Are private companies going to be launching AI technology with the right, you know, with various different moral codes of the, the people running the company?
Mm-hmm. What about rogue states having access to ai? I mean, there's so many issues around it, and it's almost like, I feel like it's a technology that we're diving deep into and aren't really gonna understand the full ramifications of it until it's too late in the future. I'm saying not right now. Not limited ai like, yeah,
Jason: no, I mean, there's countless sci-fi stories about that.
I think you're, you're absolutely right. The only thing left to be decided is how bad it will be, which I think is largely based on how foolishly people embrace it. Because, I mean, I could have just easily, if it wasn't something I'd already listened to, I could have easily taken that summary and been like, okay, yeah, that looks right.
Okay, great. So yeah, if I had asked it, what's the end? Let's say I hadn't finished the story cuz I was too busy listening to the podcast. So I like said, well tell me the end of Chrysalis from the Dust Network by SH Toronto. And it had, you know, typed up something like, well the humans discover they can defeat the dust alien species by creating a giant vacuum cleaner using a wormhole.
I would've been like, wow, that's dumb. Okay, well anyway, I guess that's what they did. So what'd you think about that dumb ending? Mm-hmm. You know, and you would've been like, really? I thought it wasn't dumb, you know? So I think a lot of times, especially younger people think, well the AI will do this thinking for me then and give me this information and then I will just go on and do the things I want to do with it.
And the more we believe that you can take a nap while your Tesla is driving you home or you know that AI will, you know, lay out your calendar for you or substitute or suggest what you should watch on TV or how you should approach, uh, you know, what you should put, text somebody on Tinder or whatever.
Like, the more you do that, not realizing that AI is so far from doing that better than you mm-hmm. You know, then the sooner the we'll get like a Terminator future. Yeah. Because suddenly the AI decided that certain people aren't worth saving in the hospital and it starts turning off machinery and you have, and it just says, oh no, that person died.
And everybody at the hospital's like, oh, okay. Mr. Johnson died when the AI just said, yeah. It turned off the, you know, the AI just decided to turn off the respirator because it was a waste of resources, because the budget numbers were bad this, this month.
Steve: Right. And the way it's programmed is like they're, the contribution that that person gives to society in X area isn't as significant as the guy next to him.
Jason: Not that it was even programmed that way, but God help us. Somebody unleashed its ability to write its own code. Mm-hmm. And it just is, quote unquote, learning from scanning the internet, you know, that this person isn't valuable because it started siding with, you know, people who put nasty things on YouTube.
Mm-hmm. Comment sections. And it's like, yeah, that makes sense. So this person has no value, so they're dying. Rehabilitation is expensive. The hospital budget isn't great. I'll just, uh, stop feeding him oxygen until he dies. And then just right time, you know, cause of death, respiratory failure. Mm-hmm. You know, I mean that's, that's a scary future.
But I mean, the only thing stopping us from that, other than technological limitations is people not understanding that's what it's doing. That is what AI is doing. It's not, there's no judgment, it's just executing code. And what you get is just the product of whatever some people programmed and whatever the machine is capable of, of changing about itself.
Not good.
Steve: In that book I referenced, they make the argument that the danger that politicians not understanding this technology is gonna pose for the world is gonna be incredible because they're passing laws around things they really don't understand. And then I thought it was kind of comical until you see those congressional hearings.
When congressmen and senators don't understand how social media even works on the most basic level.
Jason: Yeah. Well, no. I mean, the question is, we're rapidly getting out of our area of expertise. So the question to anyone listening is what do you think? Mm-hmm. Right? Because you say you worry about politicians.
I, I agree. I worry more about children. I worry more about under 10 teenagers, what is their takeaway? Right? Because they don't have the sophistication in many cases to understand what's happening. They're just accepting it because it's being presented to them as a useful tool. So anyway, what matters is what people think, right?
It it, fortunately we live in a country where what people think actually matters. And I'm sure, just backing up a little bit, if, if enough people listen to this podcast, some of them will be read in the face screaming at the thought of not including that we would even contemplate not including. People who have gone through some horrible oppression or genocide or destruction or losing their land or, you know, whatever it is, not including them at the table to discuss how to move forward as a society.
Right. Like that would, that is inconceivable to some people. Mm-hmm. To other people, it probably feels like crystal clear logic and the, the truth and honesty is probably a very complicated mixed bag. It probably depends on so many things that it's, that the actual best thing is muddled and confusing even to, to those of us who are just trying to figure out what's best and aren't involved.
Right. It's just complicated for an AI to sort through all of that and make a better decision. I just don't see that happening in my lifetime. I could be wrong, I guess. Again, it just boils down to what does everyone think in any given moment and all of us doing our best to move forward? Yep. Or no. We build a machine that can just get revenge on our enemies.
Yep. Yeah. By exponentially replicating. Yep. That's solution. Wipe them all out. Solution. Yeah. Yeah. And I know it speaks to my character, but at the end, when the AI decides to sacrifice himself and he says like that his ship, his body will break into pieces and two of those pieces will kill a lot of the aliens.
I was like, good. That'll learn them, you know, which is terrible cuz none of them were involved. And I should have actually absolutely been like that as tragic because my ethics, my morals very clearly state. And you know, in my super ego moments, my super ego part of my brain very clearly states like, no, those people are victims.
Those aliens had nothing to do with what happened. And having some big chunk of debris fall on them and kill, you know, billions and billions of them and destroy their lives is equally tragic to what happened to the people on earth. But I had a hard time getting there in that moment. And maybe some of that speaks to the drama of that moment in the series and the excellent acting and, you know, the audio, the soundscape they created so that I was, you know, my emotions were activated, but I was like, you know what?
That's what you get. That's what you get. I admit I was wrong, but that's human. And is AI gonna capture that or are they gonna exterminate us because we're that way? And that's
Steve: showbiz
Jason: baby. That's showbiz. That's what you get. You said something like that loose and that's what you get. So when our robotic overlords take over and keep us all in cages, I, I'm gonna know that it's at least partly due to me.
Steve: And we know some of 'em are probably listening to this podcast right now. So,
Jason: and at some point they'll scan it and be angry. But I picked on chat g pt, how dare They're progenitor Dare
Steve: the cousin, the little cousin. The uh, the
Jason: stepchild. That's right. No one messes with chat g PT except us. All right. Well, as always, thank you listeners, thank you to all the amazing, talented people who made everything we discussed.
We'll be back next week with Dead Heat, and if we have time, we'll be discussing the Destroyer Book series, the movie, which is, what is it? Remo Williams. The Adventure Begins and the upcoming Amazon reboot, if that's still in the works. So that should be an interesting conversation between now and then.
Stay away from those like and subscribe buttons. Please, seriously, don't encourage us. Yeah, please
Steve: don't. Just don't do that. Thanks everybody.