[BEST OF] Ghosts in the Machines: Artificial Intelligence, Consciousness, & Capitalism

Revolutionary Left Radio

Breht O'Shea

Communism, Politics, Liberalism, Society & Culture, Philosophy, News, History, Leftwing, Socialism, Marxism

4.8 • 3.4K Ratings

🗓️ 11 April 2025

⏱️ 117 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

ORIGINALLY RELEASED Apr 10, 2024

In this episode, Alyson and Breht wrestle with the possible rise of artificial general intelligence and its implications. Together they discuss the Silicon Valley Techno-Cult and their dark religious search for immortality, their hubristic attempts to "build god" and escape death, their neoliberal subjectivities and how that manifests in their work, how AI might manifest under the capitalist mode of production, the horrors and contradictions of "capitalism without workers", deflationary critiques of AI, humans as transitional creatures, consciousness and its complexities, intelligence without consciousness (philosophical zombies), Nietzchean nihilism, real religion and what it offers, embracing the inevitability of your own death, and much more!

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, everybody and welcome back to Red Menace.
0:18.7	So on today's episode, we are going to have a sort of free-flowing
0:23.0	organic conversation about something that has been in the news a lot lately and has been
0:27.8	in a lot of people's mind lately. And I think is, you know, gaining steam with regards to
0:32.4	the discussions around it. And unfortunately, I think, you know, these discussions we're going
0:36.9	to be talking about related to artificial intelligence, you know, these discussions we're going to be talking about
0:37.6	related to artificial intelligence, you know, are often discussed in very narrow ways that, I mean,
0:43.7	you know, in mainstream discourse, take capitalism for granted and, you know, take this idea that
0:49.4	these things are sort of good in their own right or abstract away from the material conditions
0:54.0	in which they manifest. And I hope, hope this conversation with Allison can be a sort of good in their own right or abstract away from the material conditions in which they
0:54.5	manifest. And I hope this conversation with Allison can be a sort of kind of corrective to some of
0:59.7	that as well as going deeper on the philosophical side of some of the things that artificial
1:05.3	intelligence, artificial general intelligence, et cetera, implies about our possible futures,
1:10.8	about who we are as conscious
1:12.8	beings, about consciousness itself. And so I think we can have a really interesting,
1:18.0	wide-ranging conversation on this that you don't often get in mainstream discourse. So hopefully
1:23.5	we can provide something of insight here. But I think the best way to start this conversation
1:27.6	about artificial intelligence is to let Allison kind of put the main pieces on the table,
1:33.6	explain the basics of what the discourse is about, the basic, you know, technological parameters
1:39.4	that we're operating within, and then we'll let the discussion sort of take a life of its own.
1:43.8	Yeah. So to kind of start very big picture, I think everyone listening to this probably has
1:49.3	some idea of what artificial intelligence is at this point because, you know, kind of with a
	...

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